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SEO-sans Greetings – Taking advantage of Xmas through Search Engine Marketing

Kelvin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:28:29 +0000

While I’ve been involved in SEO for a while it still surprises me quite how unfamiliar many people are with the concept of Search Engine Marketing.

My Mum, for example, while she might not have been familiar with SEM she certainly is affected by its outcome. She, like many others will be doing a large proportion of her Christmas shopping online, the BBC reported last year how as much as £7bn will be spent online in the run up to the festive period, while the credit crunch is sure to have an effect the trend definitely is away from the uber busy town centres to shopping from the comfort of your sofa.

But how can search marketers take advantage of this?

Like most people, a lot of where those billions are spent will be decided by what appears on the search engines results pages and the search for the gift for the difficult friend or relative, provides a unique opportunity for websites small or large:

The run up to Christmas and New Year provides the perfect opportunity to create rich content that’s relevant and topical. From the simplest of ideas, like providing a helpful gift guide, to more complex campaigns with a wide variety of valuable editorial, it’s the ideal chance to use the holidays as a springboard for new ideas on your site.

The internet is a linked together place and you should work with those around you. The links between sites help people navigate around the web. These links are double-y useful; firstly someone can click on that link and go straight to your site. Secondly search engines like Google look at the links from other websites you have, so they can determine how popular your site is and how high on results your site should appear.

This works both ways, if there’s a relevant website or company your readers might be interested in you should point them in that direction. You might be a butcher and it might be worth having a link to your local Wine Merchant after a customer has ordered a turkey, these links are useful to you and your customers.

Keep an eye on what everyone else is up to. It’s always good to monitor your competitors online, they might be doing a special seasonal offer that you might be able to match, or they might be stocking some new items that you were not aware of.

If you are not selling gifts it does not have to stop you taking advantage of the festive season. If you’re a travel agent you can focus on special Christmas getaways or hot trips abroad away from a chilly December. It’s worth bearing in mind the affect the time of year can have on your marketing campaign all year round; many websites will see seasonal changes in their visitors. If you’re a recruiter January might be the ideal time to ramp up your online presence in the New Year for those wanting a fresh start in a new job.

When thinking about your sites search engine strategy remember to think like a searcher. It’s unlikely you’ll find a gift for your loved ones by typing only gift into the search box. Gift for sporty teenage girl, is far more likely to yield a suitable present. If you are using pay per click adverts be sure think about these longer more accurate search phrases.

The Christmas period offers plenty of chances to try new things online, its worth having a try if just to get away from the cold and the busy shops!

Also if you enjoyed this post you might also like these posts from last year about SEM during the holiday period…

Tailoring your Link Velocity to coincide with seasonal peaks in demand.
The Ultimate Guide to Adapting your PPC campaign for the Christmas Season

Challenges and Opportunity in Local Advertising

Ed O Keefe — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:00:46 +0000

More national advertisers are using online local advertising to generate leads and drive offline sales. The strategies for successful local online advertising are not the same as general online or search advertising and measuring results can be challenging. That’s why so many national advertisers, agencies and online advertising resellers are reaching out to partners to help them create and optimize their local online advertising strategy.

In conjunction with Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, Marchex recently conducted a study of national advertisers across the United States who sell products and/or services through local outlets, dealers, franchises or branded stores to gain an understanding of their local online advertising strategies and tactics, challenges and best practices, as well as how they are measuring their results and return on investment (ROI).

It wasn’t all that surprising that the majority of these national advertisers – 73%, in fact – were doing digital or online marketing and nearly half of the respondents indicated they were doing some form of local online targeting. But despite the growing demand for local online marketing, geo-targeting by those surveyed rarely dipped below the state level and 45% indicated they did not use different messaging or tactics for different geographic or local markets. What’s more, the data also shows that while more than 50% of marketers are trying a number of different local sources including search engines, directories, local search engines, newspapers and vertical Web sites, managing the campaigns and generating volume are challenges.

Measuring effectiveness

This approach also hints to their difficulty in accurately measuring effectiveness. While 47% reported that at least a quarter of their in-store sales were a result of their online marketing, they cited the difficulty in measuring ROI and difficulty connecting offline sales to online marketing as two of the top challenges they are facing.

With general confusion regarding strategy, tactics and measurement, national advertisers and their agencies need to examine a set of best practices that can make or break their local advertising strategy. Virtually every local advertiser is looking to maximize ROI, increase local leads and sales, and reach a more targeted audience. And especially in our increasingly fractured local advertising market, a sharp strategy is required to accomplish all these goals.

Strategies you should know
If you’re handling your local advertising campaigns internally, a review of the following strategies will help you find an effective mix. And if you’re working with an advertising agency, ask whether they have the capability to execute these strategies for your locally focused campaigns.

Diversify traffic sources beyond paid search. Search accounts for 30% of consumers’ sources of local business information. That’s a lot—but print directories account for even more: 31%. And Internet Yellow Page sites, local search sites and cell phone marketing account also account for 31%. That’s why having an advertising solution that reaches consumers using these additional online sources is essential to maximizing your marketing’s reach.
Utilize localized landing pages for each location or market—and track everything. Each location, market or service area needs to be tracked separately—so you can reach your customers where they live. What’s more, landing pages should use calls-to-action that are tailored to the type of leads desired: i.e., calls, form submissions, coupons. Include local phone numbers, and specifically list the locations/service areas where you offer your products and services. By leveraging call-tracking and tracking everything on your targeted local landing pages, you gain a wealth of information about your current and prospective customers.
Pick the lead types and measurement techniques best suited for your business.Customers are interacting with your Web sites in many different ways: some would rather pick-up the phone while others schedule appointments or use coupons, and some will print maps and visit your store locations. Be sure to track trends by geography or local market. Use call analytics, Form-to-Phone, and other measurements to determine lead quality and ROI.
Tailor paid ads to local markets and use local phone numbers. It may be obvious, but it’s worth saying: use copy that specifies that physical location. We find greater success using messaging that suggests the value of buying nearby, along with location-specific offers and geo-modified keywords. Targeting should occur by state, region, city, and DMA. When creating ads, think about all the locations that local consumers might use to find businesses in their area to avoid missing out on potential customers.

Local online advertising is forecast to grow nearly 48% to $12.6 billion in 2008, according to Borrell Associates. Despite this high growth, the fragmentation and granularity of local advertising creates challenges for national advertisers, resellers and agencies. However, when you have these strategies in your arsenal, you’ll know where to optimize—and how to evaluate solutions that your partners present to you. That’s a strong foundation for seeing real results.

The SEO Failings of Major UK Highstreet Retailers

Tom_C — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:27:21 +0000

Posted by Tom_C

I recently read a couple of posts on e-consultancy about the state of play with major UK retail brands and how they perform online. First was 10 things Asda could do better online, which while I enjoyed didn’t touch on any of the SEO failings of these companies. Kevin’s Supermarkets ignoring SEO for major keywords post touched more on SEO which was nice but I wanted to go into a few more meaty things so here’s my review of the state of play with SEO for major UK highstreet retailers.

While the point of this post is to highlight common mistakes and not to call out individual brands, inevitably I’ve mentioned specific names as examples. This isn’t an attempt to cause offence and I appreciate that even if you know what the right answer is it can be difficult to implement using legacy systems.

Keyphrase Targeting

Who said keyphrases were important? Sometimes you’re just too cool for school. Don’t listen to all those other guys telling you how important keyphrases are – surely it can’t be that important can it?

Ignoring the fact that you can’t find the Boots website on the first page of Google.co.uk for a [boots] search take a look at their make-up page. Their title tag reads, and I quote:

Well I could think of a few improvements there…. The most amusing/crushingly depressing (delete as appropriate) thing about this is that many of these brands are paying a lot of money for PPC campaigns while at the same time ignoring organic traffic. Waterstones for example bid on the term [cookery books]:

And they have a perfect landing page for a cookery books search, the only problem is that their title tag for the page (and in fact every page on their site) is as follows:

Ah. I see. Not interested in the free traffic then, those pesky raggamuffin organic visitors always screwing up my analytics, BUYING THINGS and what not. Such a pain in the neck.

Homepage Redirects

This problem happens an unbelievable amount. Take a look at the following pages:

http://www.halfords.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10151

http://www.missselfridge.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=12554&catalogId=20555

http://www.topshop.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=12556&catalogId=19551

Want a quick and easy way of reaching those URLs? Try clicking on these links:

http://www.halfords.com

http://www.missselfridge.com

http://www.topshop.com

Yep – that’s right, all those nasty URLs are the default URLs you get redirected to when you visit the domain. Sheesh. Sometimes this redirect is a 301 but it’s not uncommon to see redirects through a 302, meta-refresh, or javascript!

Note that a clean, user-friendly homepage URL helps users AND search engines. You can bet that this is causing more than a few indexing issues for some of these sites.

URLs, URLs, URLs

Along the same lines as the above point – nasty URLs abound on these websites. Take a look at a few of these non-semantic, non-keyphrase-rich, un-usable URLs:

http://online.vodafone.co.uk/dispatch/Portal/appmanager/vodafone/wrp?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=templateBlank&pageID=VIRTUAL_HOME (Vodafone homepage)

http://www.burton.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?beginIndex=0&viewAllFlag=&catalogId=20553&storeId=12551&categoryId=113901&parent_category_rn=&productId=720470&langId=-1 (Burton cardigan page – just for you Ciaran)

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/4061423/c_1/1|category_root|Kitchen+and+laundry|10198386/c_2/2|cat_10198386|Vacuum+cleaners|10198408.htm (Argos vacuum cleaner page)

And my personal favourite – the curry’s “washing machines” page:

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0738042494.1222078553@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccekadefejmhgddcflgceggdhhmdgmi.0&page=ProductList&category_oid=-30549&fm=4&sm=0&tm=0&show_all=true

Compare this to Comet’s page for washing machines:

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/category/49/Washing-Machines

Now, take a wild guess as to which one ranks top 5 in Google for a [washing machines] search…. Hint: it’s not Currys (though Currys do pay for PPC on the term washing machines)

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can crop up in many different guises – from URL parameters to having more than one domain resolving to the content. Mostly this won’t hurt you too much unless of course you happen to pass internal link juice to both versions – then you’re in trouble. For example, look at the following two product pages, both of which have internal links pointing to them. It’s the same page (almost) only the breadcrumb is different since the product is contained in multiple categories:

http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10001_10001_64439_428661_-1

http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10001_10001_63165_428661_-1

Information Architecture

If you get the information architecture wrong on a site then there’s often more implications than simply SEO as it often impacts your usability too. Consider the following situation:

http://search.next.co.uk/nav3/cat/02men/sub/ttoshirts/0

Now, ignoring the fact that we’ve somehow ended up on a sub-domain away from the main site, this is far as you can drill down on the site when looking at men’s tshirts. If you wanted to browse the tshirts you can sort by price but that’s it. There’s no option to sort by ‘designer’ or ‘poloshirt’ etc. By leaving these sub-sub-category pages from their site they make it difficult to browse tshirts as well as not having a page which is capable of ranking for ‘polo shirt’ (assuming of course that the rest of their site was well optimised).

Because Sometimes One URL Just Isn’t Enough

Since all of the brands I’m talking about are recognised by any UK citizen they obviously need to own all the different variations of their domain names. Once you own them however, you should always look to redirect them into the site. If you don’t then you can end up with duplicate content issues. For example, www.thecarphonewarehouse.com and www.carphonewarehouse.com both resolve to the same site.

Sometimes however this is taken one step further and there are two separate sites on multiple domains, serving the same content. Check out the difference between these two pages: littlewoods, littlewoods direct. It’s a good bet that if a user isn’t sure which version is more authoritative that the search engines will be struggling too.

And then finally we come to some situations which are presumably just mistakes, though that doesn’t make them any less critical. Try visiting http://www.bodyshop.com. Ideally you’d end up at http://www.thebodyshop.co.uk/ but not so!

While you might think that it’s no big deal, that domain has over 2000 links so you can be sure that they’ll be missing out on search engine rankings and visitors because of it!

Conversion Rate Optimisation

I’m not going to talk in too much depth here as e-consultancy has already done this quite a bit, but seriously guys – what were you thinking? A call to action to abandon my order? Are you insane?!

That’s ignoring the fact that I ended up with 7 pairs of jeans in my basket before I figured out how to actually get to the checkout. Other common mistakes include:

Not taking you straight to the basket when you add a product to your cart. Sure, it gets annoying every now and again but it’s a lot LESS annoying than spending 5 minutes trying to find your basket…

Forcing users to sign-up before they buy. The more forms the better. Fact.

Making the ‘buy-now’ button say something obscure like ‘register’. Because ‘buy-now’ just seemed a little too, oh I don’t know, effective?!

The below is a screenshot which fails both of these criteria – forcing you to sign up AND calling their buy-now button ‘register’:

Adding bright red text to the checkout pages which tells you how much you HAVEN’T saved with this purchase. Gee – thanks guys! These guys even tell you twice in red font that you’ve saved nothing:

Outstanding Award For Lack Of Interest In the Internet

And finally we come to some sites which just seem designed to confuse. There really is no explanation for this. Clarks, a major shoe retailer in the UK has one of the most bizarre and baffling websites I’ve ever come across from such a large brand. Even a list of a 100 or so online high street retailers went so far as to give Clarks the label of “difficult site”.

Entirely in flash, it took me one blocked pop-up, 10 clicks and a good few minutes waiting for various pages of the site to load before I found a shoe page (any shoe page!) which has a picture of a shoe and a price next to it. Great. Except that page has zero call to action. There’s not even a link to find your nearest offline shop, let alone a phone number to use their telephone ordering (which they have btw – there’s a call to action for telephone ordering from their homepage). Why spend so much money on a “nice” flash website which serves absolutely no purpose?

Honourable mention for this award of course goes to Tie Rack who’s website is 5 pages big and they have a call to action to email them to find out where your nearest offline shop is. EMAIL them?! Because sometimes searchable lists just don’t quite cut it:

Conclusion

I’ve learned from this post that huge UK brands are leaving money on the table with their online marketing and SEO efforts. Even though many of these companies will have paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for their site they still won’t be getting much organic traffic. The ones that ARE getting large amounts of organic traffic will be getting it almost entirely from branded search. Instead of going after non-branded organic traffic, many of these companies are allocating serious PPC budgets to drive traffic to their sites.

So where does the organic traffic end up? Well for most category searches such as “washing machines” or “men’s jeans” there’s a combination of brands who do enjoy some organic rankings (e.g. john lewis, tesco, comet) combined with online retailers (e.g. amazon) and online shopping portals (e.g. ciao, pricerunner).

At a conservative estimate I’d say that the UK highstreet is missing out on at least £100 million / year.

While this is obviously UK-focused, I’d love to hear a round-up of the US market – is it more advanced? Do they generallly get it ‘right’ more? Maybe Jane or Rebecca could fill in?

If you are reading this post and work for one of the brands mentioned in this post and are un-sure about your SEO strategy I STRONGLY recommend that you get some SEO advice. SEOmoz’s UK-based global associates or recommended partners would be a good place to start.

Update (after I’d written the post but before it was put live): Ciaran has written about how GAP fails in the UK online which I thought was pretty timely and relevant.

Are Your B2B Paid Search Campaigns Trying To Serve Two Masters?

Todd Miechiels — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:07:18 +0000

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a seasoned Google AdWords mentor was to “not try and serve two masters within a single campaign.” If your campaigns are like most, they have a fixed budget and are ROI driven. In this situation, we are constantly trying to ratchet down the cost per lead while still using up the budget to get as many leads as possible. But beware! At some point you can almost be guaranteed that you’ll be requested to “fill up the pipe” by ramping up volume (and spend) for the short term. Unfortunately, trying to jockey between the two is a recipe for long-term frustration and compromised results.

This may seem trivial to many, especially at the outset of a campaign when everything is new, shiny, and exciting. But as I and my clients have learned, as a campaign matures — and you are looking to improve upon current and past results — that lingering question once again rears its head. ROI or volume? It’s very hard to run disciplined, scientific campaign tests and optimizations if that question isn’t clearly answered and adhered to.

A Practical Example

Case in point, a niche player in the crowded web-based CRM space relies on Google AdWords for a good percentage of their inbound lead flow. The client is primarily interested in volume of leads within a reasonable cost per lead (which fluctuates based on the health of the pipeline). For instance, one month he may get 100 legitimate sales leads at an average cost of $50 per lead.

The person running the search campaign begins implementing tactics necessary to bring the overall cost per lead down (improve ROI). Things like:

Pausing or bidding down on phrases that aren’t converting
Pausing or bidding down on times of day that aren’t converting as well
Changing the days of the week that ads are shown
Restructuring campaigns to improve performance

Methodically, over time, the cost per lead goes down significantly and they can get more leads with the budget. Mission accomplished right? Not so fast.

The phone rings. It’s the VP of Sales. “What the heck happened to my leads? They are way down!” And the search marketer replies, “But we’ve lowered the cost per lead from $50 to $30.” To which the VP quickly snaps back, “Just get us more leads!”

It’s easy to just cave and turn up the dials to satisfy the demand. But that still, quiet voice in us wants to push back and do what we know is the “right” thing for the long term health of the campaign.

As a dear client/mentor of mine once said, “Todd, you need to learn, the ‘right’ thing to do, isn’t always the thing that gets done in a corporate setting.” In other words, even though we would like to believe (and sometimes are even told by the boss) “it’s all about ROI,” often times it’s simply about filling the funnel.

I know for a lot of veteran sales and marketing executives this paradox is nothing new. It isn’t specific to the Internet. But for those readers who may be climbing up the business ladder coming from the search marketing side of things, I wanted you to know you are not alone in facing this issue! So what can we do about it?

The Easy Fix In The Perfect World

The easiest solution of course is to force all stakeholders to agree to stick to one goal or the other. You’ve got to try and be steadfast. Stick to your guns, Kimosabe. When we jump between the two goals we inevitably end up paying a “stupid tax” that more disciplined campaign managers seem to be exempt from.

Meanwhile, In the Real World

Unfortunately, we know that even in ROI driven campaigns, you will probably need to ramp up the volume/spend any way in the short term to appease the boss/client. Still, remember and try and explain to the client:

In a fixed budget environment, a temporary ramp up in spend will undoubtedly cause your total lead volume for the month to decline and the cost per lead to increase.

I’ve provided a link to a spreadsheet that illustrates this concept.

A Call to BtoB Marketers — Integrate Search Now!

Bill Muller — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:03:02 +0000

Regular readers of Strictly Business undoubtedly know that search marketing does not happen in a vacuum. Instead, it both impacts, and is impacted by, other forms of marketing. In fact, search has the inherent ability to both capture the demand created by other marketing channels, as well as to drive prospects who seek products and services online to convert offline. So why then do BtoB marketers make it so damn hard for prospects to connect the dots between their search marketing efforts and their other marketing initiatives?

The problem at hand

An August 2008 JupiterResearch survey of search marketers sponsored by iProspect sheds some light on the reason. The survey revealed that only 55% of search marketers intentionally integrate or coordinate their search marketing efforts with their offline marketing efforts. The study also found that of the 55% who do integrate or coordinate their search and offline campaigns, only 26% of them use the same keywords and messaging in both channels.

Given that lack of integration or coordination, it’s easy to understand why prospects might get confused. For example, a prospect might very well read a print ad running in a trade publication, or view a TV ad, or see signage at an airport, and remember something about the ad, and then perform an online search based on what they remember yet not find the company who ran the ad. Why? Because the offline ad read “enterprise security solutions” while the website and search marketing campaign focused on “large company security systems.”

Guide to Buying Traffic

Kyle Robbins — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:20:19 +0000

While many niches depend on PPC search traffic, there’s a wide group of sites that benifit from bought traffic from individual sites. Often times you can get very high quality traffic that converts very well from niches that tend to deal in a more direct site to site type traffic deal, rather than 3rd party ad networks.

This guide is mostly to be used when buying traffic from forums, from individual websites, and from “plug” type packages, yet there are many things that transfer over to more traditional PPC outlets. Without further ado, on to the guide:

1. Know what they are sending. Get 3rd party tracking software and use it. I use LinkFacts.com. I’m sure there’s TONS more. The great thing is, this tracks in real time and tracks BEFORE ANYTHING LOADS… It also tells me uniques vs. raw and countries that traffic is from.

I use this to track links FROM my sites for most larger campaigns (mostly just to check my system numbers and give a 3rd party view of what happened if there’s problems). Often times you will find that it’s not the traffic, rather it’s the way you track it.

2. Don’t buy out of your means! If you need the profit for paid traffic to buy your next meal, you’re probably going to get burnt. Remember, the return for your traffic isn’t always going to show up right away. As you grow, you also have more opportunities, more places to trade with, better sponsor opportunities, etc. Also, don’t buy HUGE packages from BIG sites just because they are big.

3. Understand that traffic is only worth what you can make on your site. This is where too many sites get in trouble. You don’t have any idea what traffic is worth on your site. You should know exactly how much every visitor on your site makes. You should know exactly how much you can spend to break even.

A Linkbuilding Method So Effective I Can’t Believe It’s Not Blackhat

Tom_C — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:35:33 +0000

Posted by Tom_C

An alternative title for this would be "Tom's headsmacking linkbuilding tip #1" but I'm not sure this will be a whole series so I'm going to play it safe with a title which doesn't force me to come up with these ideas on a regular basis. I know, I'm lazy. Bite me!

Talking of being lazy - I'm always looking for ways to jumpstart linkbuilding campaigns and cut corners and if my knowledge of the human race is accurate then the rest of you are too. This is backed up by Rand's recent post on which parts of SEO everyone finds hardest. The vast majority of you said external link acquisition is the hardest for you.

That's why today I'm presenting a get-rich-quick linkbuilding tactic which actually works across virtually any niche. Sounds too good to be true right? Well it's not. Here's how it's done. Oh, and by the way it's 100% whitehat :-)

The basic principle is this:

Find pages or sites which used to offer a service and no longer do

As soon as I had this idea I did a Google search for no longer available and I spotted ranking 4th the BBC Antiques page which is the pagerank 6 antiques page on the BBC site..... WHICH NO LONGER OFFERS ANY ANTIQUES CONTENT. When I saw this page I knew instantly that this idea was going to be killer and would find me a LOT of quality links.

Before I detail how to find pages like this, let me explain how you use them for linkbuilding (if it isn't immediately obvious!). There are two basic ways you can use these pages for linkbuilding if you have a site which is in the same niche:

Contact the owner of the page/site and request that they add a link to your (still live and active site!) from their page which no longer offers the service. It's a win for the site owner as they provide a useful page to any of their users who find the page and it's a win for you because, well, did you see my comment about the page being PR6?
Do a link analysis on the page to find all those sites who think they're linking to a useful page and contact them saying "Hi, I notice you link to the BBC antiques page. I'm not sure if you're aware but they stopped offering this service. I was wondering if you'd like to link to my antiques site instead as this is a lively and active web 2.0 antiques site with social voting and wardrobes". Wondering how effective this is? Well that BBC page has 1044 links (not to mention the other pages in that folder).

So this is all very well and good but what happens if you don't run an antiques site? In that case you need to start thinking outside the box and constructing some more creative queries. (By the way, if anyone does run an antiques website and gets some use out of this then I'd love to hear from you so please drop me a line or leave a comment down below). Thankfully, here's some I made earlier:

For finding sites which no longer offer a service or have expired:

"service no longer available"
"service no longer available" [keyword]
"service no longer available" inurl:.ac.uk (or inurl:.edu for all you foreigners)
"no longer available [keyphrase]"
"site no longer available"
"site no longer available" [keyphrase]
"site has been taken down"
"site has been taken down" [keyphrase]

For finding sites which no longer sell a specific product:

"no longer offer [keyword]"
"no longer sell [keyword]"
"stopped selling [keyword]"
"stopped offering [keyword]"

The trick to using these effectively is to mine their backlinks for people who link to them looking for that product - this can be more time consuming but very very worthwhile. Remember how hard it is to build links directly to your product page normally!

Anyway - you get the idea. It's not hard to follow this methodology to produce a whole bunch more queries and niches to look in to find your own links.

It's worth noting that there are a lot of similarities between this tactic and the practice of buying sites for SEO. This method is more time consuming but cheaper and doesn't come with the risks associated with buying sites. Still, the methodologies for finding the sites can be quite similar and a lot has already been said on that topic by such luminaries as Shoemoney, Aaron Wall & QuadsZilla so be sure to check out that info. Also - see Tamar's recap of the SMX Advanced session for more solid tips.

By the way - anyone who's a PRO member should head on over and read this pro tip which contains power tips, examples of sites I've found and how to apply this thinking to blogs. If you're not a PRO member, what are you waiting for?

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Google AdWords

NetBee — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:34:07 +0000

A business can only meet success when its products or services on sale meet their necessary marketing or advertisement. Now, when someone talks about advertising their product/service online, nothing can be more appropriate than AdWords.

AdWords was launched by Google in the year 2000 and by 2007 it was their main source of revenue. Initially an advertiser had to pay a monthly amount for advertising their product/service, but later in order to make room for small businesses and advertisers who wanted to manage their own promotion; Google launched the AdWords self-service portal. Google’s AdWords aim has been to provide the most efficient advertising to businesses irrespective of their size.

Over the years AdWords offering to its advertisers has changed for the better. Google has come up with formats like Pay-Per-Click and Site Targeted Advertisement.
Under Pay-Per-Click an advertiser pays on account of the clicks received. The advertisers has the option to bid from a range of 1 cent USD to 100US$ per click. By 2003 Google AdWords brought in the concept of Site Targeted Advertisements.

With Site Targeted Advertisements an advertiser can enter keywords by making use of AdWords control panel to draw attention of users and Google in turn puts the ads on relevant sites. The best thing about Site targeted advertisements is that the advertisers can bid on a Cost Per impression basis placement of their ads.

Leaving apart Pay-Per-Click and Site Targeted Advertisements, AdWords offer advertising facilities like:

Ad scheduling: This is like creating a time table for running one’s ads on web according to his wish.
One or numerous advertisements can be targeted with one or more keywords.
AdWords also generate a 24/7 performance report of your advertisement to your online account.

By 2005, a campaign management service called Jumpstart was launched by Google to help advertisers in setting their own campaigns. Jumpstart was followed by Google Advertising Professional Program or GAP. The whole purpose behind GAP was to train people on AdWords and award them with a certificate on having passed the examination. This was a significant move by Google to help advertisers’ who had problem dealing with the complexities of AdWords and the amount of money being put at stake. Such advertisers now have an option to hire professionals to manage their campaigns.

AdWords Account Management is another impeccable offering from Google. Its aim is to assist its clients who find it difficult to deal with the complications of building and running AdWords accounts search engine marketing. Trained consultants are there to help individuals on account management. The biggest advantage of AdWords Account management is that any organization without proper knowledge on advertising can reach out to a global online audience.

Such facilities from AdWords have eventually made an issue as grave as proper marketing or advertising on the web a Cake Walk for almost everyone.