How Pay Per Click Marketing Works

admin    Pay Per Click     google, Pay Per Click, ppc marketing strategies, search engine marketing

How Pay Per Click Marketing Works

Pay per click marketing, or PPC marketing is an effective form of advertising in the internet world. Serious marketers and those just starting out want to learn PPC marketing strategies. It is not all that complicated to learn but it takes a little time to master the techniques.

What is pay per click marketing?

If you are a business owner who want to drive more traffic to your website then you might be interested in trying pay per click marketing. An example of this is the results that show up in a a Google search . Marketers using this method will have ads displayed in the right hand column of the page. These ads are displayed on the first page of the search results and are paid for by the people using this marketing method. This is successful because they know that prospective buyers will not search too far beyond the first page. The first three pages are usually the farthest they go before looking somewhere else.

These ads are targeted to buyers searching for products or services to solve a problem in their lives. When starting a pay per click marketing campaign you will choose keywords that relate to the products you are selling or marketing. Each of these keywords has a CPC or Cost Per Click price.

How does it work?

You set your own monthly spending amount by determining how much you are willing to spend per click. This means that each time someone clicks on your ad you will be charged the amount you set. If you choose your keywords carefully and use long-tail keyword with less competition you will spend less money. For example you can set your budget amount at $30 dollars a month and pay .05 cents per click. You are free to change this amount to suit your needs.

To have a successful campaign it is necessary to pick good keywords and write a compelling ad. Use the keywords you choose for your ad on your website as well. This will help with natural search results.

You will need to check on your ad to see how well it is converting traffic. Think of this as a testing period. This will tell you where you need to improve. If you are getting clicks but no buyers you may need to work on your ad. Targeting for buyers is very specific. You can tweak your bid, your click amount and your budget any time to make it work better for you.

Anchor Text: Gaining Rank Via Relevance

admin    Search Engine Optimization     anchor text, back link, backlinks, inbound links

The most effective way to get higher search engine rankings is to use an effective anchor text. In order to better understand what an anchor text it, it’s best to give it a definition. An anchor text is the portion of a hyperlink that is viewed by a user on a webpage. In more simple terms, it is the text you can click on.

Now that there is an understanding of exactly what the anchor text is and what is used for, lets dive into how it is used. Because of earlier unethical search engine optimization (SEO) practices such as keyword stuffing, Google had to come up with a more effective way of ranking pages. Google uses over 200 elements to rank a page but a large portion of those rankings are attributed to inbounds links, which are links from other web pages.

The anchor text become important because Google takes links that are similar in content to yours and “groups” them together by relevance. Meaning, you can gain higher search rankings just by having a popular anchor text.

As stated earlier, Google looks at over 200 elements when ranking pages. Another element it looks at in addition to the anchor text is the quantity of relevant content on your page. So lets say you have a website whose content is based on dog leashes. The more anchor texts featuring content about dog leashes, the more Google will think you know about the subject, which in turn gives you higher search rankings.

You may think that it would be smart to use this method with just about any popular link, but in all actuality it isn’t. Think about it this way. Sticking with the dog leash theme, what would a tow truck delivery company know about dog leashes? Probably nothing and Google knows that. If there is no relevant content, you will not gain rank amongst the search engines.

SEO is a very powerful and free method of gaining rankings as oppose to search engine marketing (SEM), which requires money. But, anchor text is even more powerful because with anchor text the need for keyword writing is non existant. The search engines will find the content based off of the anchor texts themselves.

Mozilla To Back Bing

admin    Uncategorized     bing, google, internet privacy, mozilla

Recently the CEO of Google Eric Schmidt told Maria Bartiromo of CNBC in a interview “If you have
something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
All I can say is WOW!!!!! Since Google basically owns the market for online search it should alarm
anybody that the CEO of the company is so lax with people privacy.

Mozilla is not taking this lightly as Asa Dotzler, Mozilla director of community, has suggested that
people use Bing as opposed to Google for their search methods. Since Mozilla has close to a 25% market
share of the browser market so this is a story to watch.

If you happened to watch the show on CNBC “Inside Google” than you will know that Google has had a rapid
rise in the online market and makes most of their revenue through their advertising platform – Adwords.
During the show it was stated that people trust the Google toolbar more than they trust people in their
lives. I feel this is true because if you are looking for information that you might be embarrassed to ask
friends or family than you will go to Google and type it in the search engine to get some answers.

What bothers me and apparently bothers Dotzler as well is that according to their CEO, Google does not understand that people feel safe and secure when they use search engines. If that trust is broken than people will be less likely to search for anything that they think might get them in trouble. But can Bing be that much better than Google and if they happen to gain market share and become the 800 pound gorilla that Google is now will they protect your data?

Only time will tell how much data will be protected with the search engines. I think at some point internet privacy will become a major story and major changes will need to be made to the business model. Until we have a high profile court case or story that brings to light to the general public how this can effect them, it will be business as usual for Google.

Choose Your Keywords Wisely

admin    Search Engine Optimization    

Choosing keywords that you are focusing on, in regards to your website, can be one of the most crucial decisions a webmaster can make. A keyword is basically the word or words that appear on a web page and they are the words that make up the web page. If you take a look at a web page as you are reading it you are unconsciously deciding what the page is about based on the keywords that are on the page. The words that are most prevalent are probably the keywords.

When you are deciding what keywords you want to focus on you have to decide what is important to you and your goals. For example,the keyword “auto insurance” gets 7.4 millions searches per month according to Google, the competition for this term is incredibly high making it difficult to rank for that term. So unless you are extremely patient and have a large seo budget actually getting any traffic for this keyword will take a very long time.

Now lets say you have an insurance company in North Carolina, your close rate for inquiries within the state is
very good. The keyword “auto insurance north carolina” gets 9,900 searches per month within Google which pales in comparison to “auto insurance” but the purchase intent is better because it is a focused keyword. The competition is still relatively high but with the right mixture of on page and off page optimization ranking for this keyword can be achieved in a shorter amount of time. Couple this with your  high conversion rate than this keyword term is worth the effort.

When you decide the keywords that you are focusing on make an effort to include this keyword throughout the page. You do not have to stuff the keywords on the web page but you do want to make sure that if a human took a quick read through the page they would be able to determine the primary keywords that the page is focused on. If a human can make a quick determination about the keyword intent of a web page chances are good that a search engine spider will be able to do the same.

You cannot be everything to everybody so you have to decide who your website is going to cater to and the audience that you are trying to capture.  There is no hard and fast rule about the correct keywords that you need to focus on only how much time and effort you are willing to devote to achieving high rankings in the search engines.