Pay Per Click in Downturn Economy

The pinch of economic slowdown has slowly reached the world of internet marketing. There is drop in spends, advertisers are cutting down their PPC budgets. But don’t you think that when your business is not generating new business, it’s important to take a risk of PPC advertising, simply because you can reach a large number of target audiences quickly and who knows you can bag a million dollar deal.

What is Effective PPC

Effective PPC consist of landing pages and ad copy that speaks to your customer’s need. you need to continue testing your offers regardless of the economy to learn when your customer’s are purchasing your product for different benefits. Or, more importantly, when they stop engaging your product completely and it’s time to invent the new version. This is also very important because research has shown that last year has seen a 10% increase in people who research online before buying in the store.

Conversion Optimization

In every other article or blog related to PPC it is said that “Always test your ad copy, landing pages, and keywords to maximize your business goals” and this statement hold all the essence of PPC marketing. The main reason behind this is it will help you to understand your customers and better you understand them more chances of higher conversions and steep increase in ROI

Restrictions

When nothing is going right you should be more careful when you want to show your ads. The Negative keywords come for rescue in this situation. For eg If you do not offering any discounts or free shipping then use discounts, free as a negative keyword, this will help you in reducing cost and incurring irrelevant clicks.

Motivate visitors to take action

When you are dealing with B2B clients, ensure that you are providing them all the relevant information at one place. Provide them assets like articles, white papers, demo and so on. This will help your visitors to take informed decision. But do not confuse your visitors by providing all assets or multiple conversions actions in a single page. Test it carefully and regularly which action is working for you.

This is certainly not a guide who will help you to end the economic downtime but definitely by providing relevant information, optimizing your conversion funnel and motivating your visitors will help you to fight this gloomy situation. And finally respect your visitors because finally they are the people who will determine your success

Is this End of “SEO”

San Francisco: If Google delivers useless search results, just erase them and you won’t see them again.

That’s possible under a new system Google Inc. unveiled Thursday. Hoping to give its search engine a more personal touch, Google now lets users reshuffle results so their favorite Web sites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request.

It marks the first time that the Internet’s most popular search engine has allowed its audience to alter the order of search results.

Although the revisions won’t affect Google’s closely guarded formulas for ranking Web sites, the Mountain View-based company isn’t ruling out eventually tapping into collective wisdom of the crowds to tweak its Internet-searching algorithms.

For now, Google simply wants to make specific sets of results more useful to each individual that comes to its search engine, said Marissa Mayer, who oversees the company’s search products. Users will have to have a personal login to take advantage of the editing feature.

“It should make the search results more dynamic,” she said.

The decision to let people tinker with their results is a tacit acknowledgment that not even Google’s seemingly omniscient search engine can possibly divine which Web sites will appeal to specific users. It also underscores how frequently people use Google to search for the same thing, such as “San Francisco hotels,” over and over again.

Google’s search recipe relies so heavily on automated ingredients that a variety of startup rivals such as Mahalo, Hakia and ChaCha have tried to carve out a new niche by relying on humans to vet and point to results.

But none of those have made a dent in a market that is increasingly controlled by Google, which processes more than 60 per cent of the search requests made around the world.

Here’s how the new system, called SearchWiki, works. If you’re logged into Google when doing a search, you’ll get results with a series of buttons below the links. Clicking on arrow pointing upward moves a result higher on the results page. That link will come back in that new spot the next time you search on the same term. Clicking on an “X” will delete the link so it doesn’t appear the next time you make the same search.

Users will also be able to open a box to make notes about different sites so they can be read again in the future. The comments also will be shared with others who are logged in, if they click on a link for “See all notes for this SearchWiki.”

Some Guidelines for Smart Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing, whether it’s paid or organic, is a science.While it is true that you can put together an ad on Google or Yahoo!, pick a few keywords that describe your business, then bid on them and be up and running with a Pay Per Click campaign in a few minutes, the actual process requires considerably more thought. Here are a few key points to consider:

What is the goal of your ad? If you are an e-commerce merchant selling mainline products, you probably want to generate a sale. If you are operating a decorating business, your goal more likely is to generate a lead for follow-up. That goal will shape how you structure your campaign.

What kind of landing page do you want the user to click through to? Is it a specific product page with all the information necessary to complete the order or do you want your customer to land on your home page in order to get more information about your company? You may want your ad to be product specific or have a more general message.

Is there a special “deal” that you can offer in your ad? Phrases like “free shipping”, “save 10% now” or “sale ends tomorrow” create a sense of immediacy that can increase the likelihood someone will click on your ad.

You don’t have to have the top ad listing in order to be successful. While being #1 likely will bring you more clicks, you don’t want to overpay for them. Typically, as long as your ad appears in the first five positions, and has a compelling offer, you will get your share of clicks.

The keywords you select for your ad are critical. In fact, the difference between a cost-effective campaign and one that just costs you money often are the keywords you select.

Try to avoid buying general terms, unless your site has a very, very broad selection of product. The keyword “cars” might bring anyone who is looking for anything having to do with a car – that probably doesn’t do you much good if you are selling radiator hoses.

Stick to words and phrases that relate as specifically as possible to what you are selling. A good rule of thumb is that the more general a keyword is, the more expensive it is.

The page customers land on when they click on your ad should contain similar words to those used in the ad. Reinforcing the ad message is important for two reasons: first, it tells people they are “at the right place” and second it will help your Quality Score on Google and Quality Index on Yahoo!.

Google in particular attaches great importance to the relevance of your landing page and you may be able to secure a higher ad position with a lower bid than other advertisers.

Monitor your campaign regularly. This is particularly important at the outset when you are establishing what works and what doesn’t. Pay per click advertising isn’t day trading – you don’t have to be glued to the monitor but you don’t want hours to go by without seeing if your clicks are converting into your desired result of sales or leads.

A large search agency might suggest that you need 1,000 or more clicks to determine if your campaign is working. As a start-up or small business, you (or your agency) should be able to draw conclusion with far less clicks than that.

This article is written by Richard Teich

Tips for Effective and Eye-Catching Locations for Testimonials

Testimonials will not only improve your business, but will also improve your company’s image as one that values customer satisfaction. So make the effort to get some strong testimonials.

Four Tips for Effective and Eye-Catching Locations

1. Once you have the testimonials, you need to figure out where to put them on your site. Placement is key, particularly when using flash. You want your testimonials to give maximum impact. The most common place on a website is for them to have their own navigation button titled either “Testimonials” or “Rave Reviews”. This way more testimonials can be viewed on their own page.

2. Another option is to use flash testimonials on a sidebar on the homepage along with the customer’s name, job title and company or logo. If you are using the testimonials in the masthead, they should rotate every 7-10 seconds then stop after all testimonials are shown. You don’t want a testimonial to be so distracting that it takes the emphasis off of the content and what you are selling or offering. By having the flash cycle stop, you are allowing viewers to see the testimonials and then freely look at the content without the excess flash.

3. An alternative way to present testimonials is to sprinkle them throughout the site, highlighting them within the content using graphics, such as a color block background, upper and lower bar, etc. These visual stops are equally effective in reinforcing your credibility and can act as an additional selling point for specific products or services.

4. If you have the option for audio or video testimonials, this can be very effective in boosting your company’s credibility. Audio is easy to record using Audio Acrobat. Video, on the other hand, requires more thought to positioning and angles. If you are at a trade show or with a client, you may want to pre-plan these testimonials for more impact.

Remember that in order for a testimonial to be effective, it needs to be specific, believable and placed in a credible location. With these three tips in mind, your testimonials will build customer confidence and web success.

How to Improve your Search Engine Position

Your search engine ranking depends on a number of factors: assuming you get listed in the first place. If you have managed to get that listing then you can improve your search engine position by means of links back to your website and also by improving your content.

Significant improvements, however, will likely involve radical restructuring of your website, and would have been better thought out before building your site.

Many so-called SEO experts will attempt to make sure that all your meta tags are in place, even though they have little bearing any more on your search engine rank, be that on Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.

They might even have a look at your internal linking, but once you have built your website it is too late for that. Your internal linking strategy should have been formulated prior to constructing your website. There are ways to design a site to be search engine friendly, and I use them all the time.

The very first two websites I tried these techniques on each reached page #1 on Google for their main keyword within less than a month. They were listed within two days due to other techniques I use, but their high listings were due to the site design. I then designed a third, and true to form, it reached page #1.

You want that success as well, and it is not difficult to achieve. However, it involves starting from the bottom up, although there is a lot that you can do with your existing website apart from just playing around with meta tags. I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t make sure that you have meta descriptions and a title tag in your html, but they are nothing like as significant as the changes I make to my websites to improve their search engine ranking. Not even close!

There are a number of changes you can make to improve your search engine position, ranging from your internal linking to the way you lead the spiders around your site.

Just ask yourself one simple question: what determines your search engine rank on Google? How does Google calculate your search engine position? That’s the first thing you have to learn if you want to improve yours. You have to know your enemy to beat him.

It’s not only links, as many would have you believe, or I would never have achieved a Page 1 position so quickly. In fact of my two main websites, one is at ~1 and the other at #2 for their main keyword: the titles of their first page. I achieved that by using a silo structure in my website design, but not only that. Many people use silos without achieving high search engine ranking.

Ensure that the search engine spiders moved from one section of your home page to another, exactly as you wanted them to, before leaving for the next page at exactly the point you wanted it to.

It’s not difficult, and you can do it too. In fact anybody can get a top search engine ranking, or improve their search engine position (everybody can’t be top!), with just a little thought, and by using a couple of simple rules when designing their web pages.

One of these is by using a silo structure, and the other is by careful use of their html, and of their internal links.

Author: Peter Nisbet

Ten SEO Mistakes Made on Database Driven Websites

1. Pages with duplicate content – not enough differential areas within the pages, so that only small areas of the page change from page to page. It is essential that enough of the page text changes for the search engines to see an appreciable difference between one page and the next.

2. Pages with duplicate page titles – the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Whilst this is often unique on sites such as e-commerce websites, it is often overlooked in other sites, particularly where small areas of the site are generated from a database, such as news pages.

3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions – again, this is easy to overlook and set a global or category level meta description. These give the search engines a reason to penalise your site for not giving them enough information, and again, creating a unique meta description for every page is an essential SEO task.

4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Databases are fantastic ways of storing information, but you still need to put the work in to fill them with content. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.

5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links – potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.

6. Too many query strings – this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but don’t do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs!

7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places – this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.

8. Not using user language to generate automated pages – if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings (or better in rewritten URLs) make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO – if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= – keyword research can assist with this.

9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hardcode the generation of meta information into a database that doesn’t allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.

10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Once upon a time, search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase “blue widgets”.

These are just 10 of the most common potential optimisation pitfalls when creating dynamic websites. There are many more facets to producing a great database driven site, including user friendliness, speed, performance and security, but they all add together to make the best solution to your needs.

Source: Entireweb Newsletter

Website Optimisation Techniques

As well as link building and on-page optimisation, there are some other very important SEO factors which can help your website index and rank in search engine listings. The following techniques are grouped into the category named ‘website optimisation’ and should not be overlooked when preparing an SEO campaign.

Domain Age and Expiration Date

Google and other search engines include many factors within their ranking system. One of these factors is trust rank. Owning a domain that has history improves the trust rank as does registering the domain for a long period of time.

Website History

Again trust rank comes into play here. If your website has been archived in the search engine results for a long period then it will help improve rankings and indexing of webpages created in comparison with a fairly new website with no history.

Structured Navigation

When creating a website, it is important to provide a well structured navigation, not just for users but also to allow search engine bots to follow links and index webpages within your website. Structuring your navigation correctly can help all you webpages be indexed and should help the flow of Google’s PageRank spread through out the website.

Valid HTML

As with structured navigation, the importance of valid HTML to search engine bots is to allow all webpages within your website to be indexed within the search engine listings. Validating your HTML will ensure that the bots do not hit any ‘brick walls’ within the code that prevent them from reading the rest of the webpage.

Contextual Linking

To further help the indexing of your webpages and to even out the flow of Google’s PageRank, it is useful to include links within the content text of your webpages. Wikipedia is a perfect example of how this should be done.

URL Structure Including keywords in your website’s URLs will help you rank for those terms. If your website uses dynamic URLs created through variables then think about rewriting them. Separate keywords using a minus character (eg. search-phrase.html) and try and keep the important keywords as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.

Regional Targeting

If you wish to target a certain region then there are a few steps you can take to help this process. Firstly you can choose a relevant domain such as a .co.uk (UK) or .de (Germany) rather than a generic .com domain. Then look at your hosting IP location, search engines can access this information and will use it to decide your target audience. Finally, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target which is useful if you have a .com domain.

Site Maps

Search engine bots look for site maps when they visit your website. Providing a standard HTML site map will help improve the indexing of your webpages and allow bots to find webpages that they might otherwise have missed. You can now also provide and submit an XML site map which all the major search engines have took on as a standard. Use your robots.txt to tell bots where to find your XML site map and also submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer.

Domain Name

If you are purchasing a domain name for a new website then think about including your main targeted keywords within that domain name. For example if you are building an online store that sells low price Cricket bats in India and you buy the domain cheapcricketbats.co.in then you are definitely going to have a lot more of a chance for quickly ranking well for the search term ‘cheap cricket bats’ in India search engines than you would with a more generic domain name. You would also do well for long tail search terms such as ‘cheap cricket bats in India’ and have more chance of ranking for ‘cricket bats’ in the long term.

How to Test Greater Conversions and Internet Success

Testing your website pages, especially landing pages, squeeze pages and sales pages is one of the most profitable things you can do to tweak your pages and gain higher conversions. On top of that, you can learn more about copywriting though split tests and other means of testing your web pages than any other way

Back in the days of mail order marketing, testing sales letters and catalogs gathered more real information about new concepts and ideas than through most other methods of research at that time. In these days of the internet, the bell even rings louder.

You can test whole concepts of your pages to find out what emotional triggers and core desires your market truly respond to. Simply test two or three versions of your sales page that each focus on a separate theme or slant on the product or service. The page that pulls the most conversions will give you the answers you are looking for.

In this day of fierce online competition, testing is something you should, no MUST do to gain the highest conversions from your website and pages. If you’re not actively testing your pages, your competition will soon pass you by.

What Exactly Should You Be Testing?

The simple answer is: Everything! Everything on your pages and in your sales message is a contributing factor to your conversion rate. This includes your headline, opening paragraphs, body copy, your offer, post scripts, background color, font, font colors, images and every imaginable component of your page in between.

Volumes of information have been written about what to test and how to test your web pages. This work is extensive, so when you begin to test, I suggest you concentrate your first efforts on the three areas that have been shown to have the most impact on your sales page, the headline, the first three (or four) opening paragraphs, and your offer.

In this article, I will focus on Headlines as they are the critical element of your page.

Testing Headlines

Headline changes can have the most impact on your conversion rate and response of these three components. 75 – 80% of your visitors will never read past the headline. It doesn’t matter how wonderful you have written your sales page, if the headline doesn’t work correctly and do its job of getting people to read on, your page will be a failure.

In order for your headline to be effective, you have to discover the biggest core desires within your market to feed. The best headline test are based around the different core desires and motivating reasons why people would be interested in your product or service.

Testing different headlines around different concepts will tell you which one is more appealing to your market audience. Once you have the key concepts and desires tested and you have discovered which one works best, you then go to work tweaking your headline in more alluring and persuasive ways.

Split testing is generally used to test headlines. In the beginning, you will probably want to use simple A/B split testing but if you are dealing with high volume traffic and high price sales, you may want to consider speeding up the process with multi-variate testing. You can find out more about these tests by going to: What Is Split Testing?.

What Type of Headline Format Do You Test?

There are some classic headline formats that have been shown to be effective over time that you can begin with. There’s the “If/Then” headline, “Amazing Secrets of …” headline, the “Who Else Wants to …” headline, and of course the classic “How to …” headline.

Test as many headlines as you can think up for your web page. In fact, you should never stop testing different headlines on your page. A simple 10% increase in your conversions could result in hundreds to tens of thousands of dollar or more. Testing your headlines could bring an increase of 50%, 100%, or even 200% or more in the response your web page brings.

The next time that you feel that your landing page, sales page or squeeze page should be converting better, think about testing the component of your page to increase the effectiveness and response that it should be eliciting

Source: Entireweb Newsletter

How to get best out of your landing page

1. Get top-level buy-in for strategic projects; not all projects produce immediate sales, but have more strategic implications for the business.

2. Create urgency, such as a deadline to increase CTR and conversion

3. Sepertate CSS and data points for ease of use

4. Make sure landing pages deliver on a promise that drove the shopper to the site with consistent products, benefits, offers and branding

5. Split test different paid search landing pages

6. Split test different email landing pages. Don’t throw consumers to a category page, but a specifically designed page using the email messaging, creative and extended product offering

7. Track key performance on all pages

8. With landing pages – think like a consumer

9. Test, test, test

10. Have a platform that enables marketing staff to market.

11. Be prepared to make changes fast

12. Optimize landing pages for natural search with readable URLS (no special characters), included on site maps, no Flash, no duplicate content

13. Keep landing pages up longer than you think. If you are working with outside agency to host, require minimum of 3-6 months hosting

14. Look at competitors’ landing pages. Your customers are likely searching multiple sites for a product. See what they are seeing.

Beware of Adwords Credit card Fraud

IDG News reports shows that the AdWords credit card phishing attempts continue to be a problem.

Emails disguised as official Google AdWords emails are being sent to advertisers asking them to update their billing information. When advertisers go through the link and update their billing information, their credit card information is being sent to hackers across the globe.

If you look at the link, embedded in those phishing emails, it might appear that you are taken to Google.com, but in reality, you are taken to a URL that looks something like this: http://adwords.google.com.fr4ck.cn/select/Login.

IDG News says the URL is associated with IPs in Germany, Romania, and the Czech Republic.

Phishing attempts are nothing new to Google or the Internet. Any email that asks you to update your billing information should be carefully analyzed. In fact, if you get an email like that, it is best to avoid clicking on any of those URLs or links in the email itself. Instead, go directly to the site by typing in the real address and see if you are prompted with the same message from the real site. Or better yet, call customer service and tell them you got this email.

So be careful and Happy Adwording

Source: searchengineland