Advantages: Once high rankings are achieved (if done correctly – within the search engine guidelines) your listings tend to remain high for a long period of time. And with ongoing maintenance will remain indefinitely.
Disadvantages: Takes time to get to the first two pages, especially on the higher profile engines. These days, three major players and one promising runner-up dominate almost the entire search engine industry. The major players are – in order of market share are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Nipping at their heels is AskJeeves, or now known as just “Ask”.
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| Number 1 on Google | Number 2 on yahoo Search |
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| Number 1 and 2 on MSN Search | Number 3 and 4 on ASK Search |
Pay-Per-Click & Pay-Per-Impression is akin to leasing a billboard. You have the potential to attract a large number of prospects, but as soon as you cease payments, it’s gone.
Here's how to maximize your success with Google AdWords. With proper preparation and execution, starting Google AdWords can be like planting a money tree that will provide your business with a steady stream of revenue.
Advantages: You can achieve first page listings instantly. You can test your messages and make adjustments in real-time. You can place your ads on portal sites as well as content related sites across the Web or in targeted local markets – your choice. Ads have built-in relevancy. You can get immediate results. You can boost your sales volume literally overnight. You can set your own bid amounts and monthly budget. There are no contracts. No prepayments. No deadlines.
Disadvantages: You can blow your entire monthly budget in one day – or less if you don’t closely monitor activity and results. To reach those first page listings for competitive keywords, it can get expensive. ($.01 - $100 per click – Google’s price range). Campaign management is very labor intensive. Many companies have teams of people to manage their PPC project.
- Define your Web Marketing strategy – what is the purpose of your Web site? Who specifically is your target market? What do you hope to accomplish? What specific results do you desire?
- Build a great site that’s easy for search engines to find and process. Create a site map that links all of your pages together.
- Identify the search words/keywords that prospects and customers will be using to find the pages of your site, and incorporate those words into the pages of your Web site.
- Get important Web sites similar in topic to your own to link to you so that search engines know your site is also an important destination. Make this an ongoing effort.
- Monitor your results at least monthly.
- listDefine your Web Sales strategy – what is the purpose of your advertising campaign? Who is your target customer? What do you hope to accomplish? What specific results do you desire?
- Identify the search words/keywords that prospects and customers will be using to find product or service you are selling.
- Design landing pages that use a direct selling approach – consider employing the services of a professional Web copywriter.
- Monitor your results at least daily, if not hourly and adjust your message accordingly.
Building a search engine-friendly site won’t propel you to the top of the search engines. It’s actually more about avoiding the mistakes that will damage your search engine ranking.
To achieve top ranking you need to understand the critical role keywords that keywords and inbound links play. To put it simply –
- Keywords tell search engines what your page is about.
- Inbound Links tell search engines that your page is important.
As you can see, since links identify your site as important, they are the key factor in determining exactly where your pages will rank in the search engines. However, although keywords are a critical part of search engine optimization, their direct effect on ranking is obscured by the fact that inbound links – and the keywords found within those links – actually have a far greater effect on ranking than the keywords found on the actual web page.
In fact, we’ve even seen pages that are well-linked for a particular keyword rank highly without even using that keyword anywhere on the actual page. In every case, the page had inbound links that contained the keyword in the visible text of the link.
This is the source code of that page above in the Yahoo Search graphic that ranked Number 1 for the keyword “strategic internet consulting”. That keyword does not even appear on this poorly written page. Where it obviously gets its high ranking is from the number of quality incoming links that use the keyword “strategic internet consulting” in the visible text of the link.
Building quality incoming links to your site is the most challenging, but also the most rewarding effort you can make in terms of ranking well over the long run
Want the ultimate secret to building high-quality links? Are you ready for the one all-powerful, incredibly effective link-building secret that professional are using to build huge numbers of incoming links that search engines love? Perhaps this is even the single most powerful tool you can use to dominate the search engines. Hire a professional copywriter who understands the Web.
It may seem a little anti-climatic, doesn’t it? But it’s true. A good writer is perhaps the most effective part of a search engine optimization campaign. Every online business should have at least one.
In fact… a link to your page from an important site that uses your keywords in the visible text of the link will likely produce a more positive ranking effect than all of your other ranking efforts COMBINED.
Getting to the top of the search engine listings for worthwhile keywords is a gradual process. Chances are, some of your competitors may already have a fairly robust SEO program going for them. They also may have the advantage of having been on the web for a long time and, these days, time is a search engine optimizer’s greatest friend, or worst enemy – depending on your perspective.
If a search engine has already determined that your competitor is the most relevant site for a particular keyword, then you should expect that it will take some time and effort to make that search engine change its position.
Achieving top listings for a top keyword will often take six months to a year of dedicated effort. The typical scenario is that you’ll continue to gradually improve your site’s optimization, you’ll gather more and more relevant links, you’ll continue to improve the overall quality of your site, and before you know it, boom – you’re suddenly at the top of the search engines. Then sooner or later one or more of the search engines will implement a new algorithm and everyone’s position will be shaken up.
For competitive keywords, that is the only way it can be done (a fact that can make life difficult for professional SEO’s, since so many clients unrealistically expect immediate results).
In the meantime your CAN get immediate results via Pay-Per-Click advertising. Unlike SEO, Pay-Per-Click is Internet advertising. Through PPC programs, you design an ad and choose a list of keywords you want to bid on. Then whenever someone types one of those keywords into the search engine, your ad will appear alongside (or above) the search engine’s organic results.
Whenever someone clicks your ad, you pay the search engine a pre-determined bid amount for sending a potential customer to your site. The higher you bid, the more prominently you ad will be displayed and the greater the chance of a prospect clicking your ad. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) can be an extremely valuable tool for driving targeted traffic to your web site quickly.
Of course this advantage comes with a price. Competitive keywords can have you paying several dollars for EVERY click.
To learn more about Google Resources check out this chart:
| Google Resources Chart |
| Google Content-Targeted Advertising – allows you to opt-in or opt-out for additional AdWords that show up on specialty sites such as blogger.com, weatherunderground.com and howstufwords.com, as well as other sites involved in Google’s AdSense program, depending on your keyword selection. For details see:https://adwords.google.com/select/ct.html |
| While other PPC engines award top positioning to the highest bidder, Google uses a formula that mixes relevancy, based on clicks, into the brew. The higher your maximum bid combined with the higher your ad’s click-through-rate (CTR), the higher your ad’s position. For more details see: https://adwords.google.com/select/faq/optimization.html |
| Improving your ranking on AdWords – there are two ways to improve your ranking: You can either increase your cost-per-click bid or write a better ad and improve your click-through-rate (CTR). For details see: http://www.strategic-internet.com/strategic_internet_interactive_marketing.shtml |
| Read the AdWords Editorial Guidelines at: https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html |
Given what I said earlier about keywords and links, every Web site-for-profit revolves delicately around carefully chosen and strategically placed keywords. Behind the scenes of every top-ranking sales page lies a company’s systematic campaign to win dominance in an escalating battle over specifically targeted keywords – Money Keywords to be precise. The stakes can be high. Billions have already been earned and billions more are in the queue waiting to be tapped.
Clearly, keywords are big business. There’s much to be gained by getting them right. Go slowly! Select carefully! While the effort required can be great, the rewards for mastering the trade are substantial. Keywords may very well be the “key” to the greatest financial opportunities of our time.
Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. But one thing is for sure: your success online is directly related to your complete understanding of keywords.
- What they are
- How to use them
- And what to do with them once you have them.
Keywords are the words and phrases people use in their online searches for information. Be aware that sometimes the searcher’s intentions are purely academic. Other times it’s research in preparation for making a purchase decision at a later time (maybe 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days or 5 months?) But, a money-transaction ensues only when a searcher becomes a buyer and uses specific keywords to locate the product or service they know they want to purchase.
Of course, a site may use keywords tempered for all three instances, but realize that it’s only the latter case – when a searcher becomes a buyer – that there’s any statistically significant chance for an online company to make a sale in an unbroken… keyword > search result > click through to Web site > add to cart > complete sale …buying process.
So, while all three instances involve keywords, only one type (statistically speaking) consistently leads to making sales. That’s why today’s SEMs (search engine marketers), stress and strain to identify the keywords prospects are using when they are ready to BUY their products or services.
Sure, their secondary focus is to work keywords into their information pages that funnel (re)searchers to sales pages as they’re preparing themselves to buy. But professionals know the difference. They know to focus their efforts on determining exactly which keywords people use to buy and which ones they use to research. They then reverse-engineer the process by building their buy-keyword pages first before broadening their focus toward crafting their information-pages that’ll capture the (researchers as well.
If a consumer is looking to buy a cell phone online, they might do (re)search on Google for ‘cell phones’. Obviously, they’ll get results that offer a wide variety of brands with an almost endless selection of features. At this stage they are researching.
Soon they may learn about Bluetooth and GPS technology and perhaps also include those keywords in their searches. At some point they learn the Motorola i605 has all of these features. Let’s suppose it becomes their cell phone of choice.
That’s when the savvy online shopper enters a highly specific keyword phrase like ‘Motorola i605 best price’…lo and behold what comes up:
It doesn’t take a behavioral scientist major to figure out that this top site is likely to get that consumer’s purchase as soon as the (re)searcher turns into a buyer.
Ironically, those informational “funnel pages’ – the pages that scored well for keywords like cell phone, Bluetooth, GPS cell phone, and so forth are what primed the pump for this sale. But, ultimately, they were left out in the cold like the nice guy on a blind date with a hot babe who’s still pining away over her last boyfriend.
While cell phone, Bluetooth, GPS cell phone were important keywords, the page that got the girl …uh, sale, was the page with the specific cell phone model coupled with the keyword phrase best price. THAT’s how buyers behave in the cell phone market (selfish bastards).
So, your job is to also reverse engineer the keyword buying process for your market making sure your pages score well in the keyword searches your prospects are using to buy. Once you’ve covered that base, then you can build your informational funnel pages to help snag more of them.
- Nine Keys to Finding All the Right Keywords
- e specific
- Put yourself in your prospect’s or customer’s shoes
- Glean keywords from your Web site’s referral logs
- Checkout your competition
- over all your keyword variations
- Don’t forget misspellings
- Plurals and synonyms
- Merged and hyphenated words
- Be descriptive
- Use action words
- Target local markets
- Use online keyword tools to complete your selection
Once you’ve assembled your basic list, you’ll need to determine relative keyword popularities and learn how competitive your keywords are while, at the same time, enhancing your list by adding keyword terms that you’ve overlooked. That’s where the various online keyword suggestion tools become absolutely indispensable resources.
You should take note, however, that the keyword tools provided by the search engines are typically skewed to enhance pay-per-click ad revenues. Therefore, we recommend you use them only with caution. We have an excellent article on our Web site that explains in detail why there are such tremendous discrepancies and variations between the (search engine) keyword suggestion tools and Wordtracker
- Be certain to use the keyword(s) you are targeting in your title tag
- Link to all of your pages via a site map that is linked from your homepage
- Be sure your incoming text links are keyword rich – but don’t overdo it
- The more pages you have on your site the better, and the more diverse the content, yet related to your business, the better. Search engines love content.
- Use a good, reliable web hosting service.
- Balance your marketing strategy. Best sales results come from creating pages that rank well based on their content, popularity and reputation. You should include at least a conservative ad buy with the Pay-Per-Click services.
There are hundreds of search engines and directories out there on the Web, but if you focus your efforts on the one’s we have mentioned here, you’ll find yourself prominently placed front and center to the overwhelming majority of the people looking for information on the Internet.
You’re likely to find that the information I have shared with you today will give you a tremendous strategic advantage over your competitors. Use this information to focus your efforts where you’ll get the biggest return. Clearly stated, you should work smart, and hard. Your competition may already have a leg up on you, but with the knowledge you now hold in your hands, you are well-equipped to challenge their position.
Good luck.Of course if you would like to talk to us about your current or future SEO/SEM plans, we’d be thrilled to consult on your next project.
Shea Ellison
President & CEO
Strategic Internet LLC
770-454-1190
shea@strategic-internet.com
