A Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay Per Click or PPC is among the most popular of all web-marketing tools. It is nothing but a small two or three line text advertisement which contains keywords and phrases. These small advertisements are usually found on the right side of search pages on leading search engines. Quite often one or two links are also highlighted on search pages. These links are termed ‘sponsored links’ and can be seen in leading search engines such as Google, MSN Live and Yahoo. These sponsored links are nothing but PPC advertisements.
The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.
Linked, Tagged, Tweeted, and Feeded – Three Real Time Link Trackers
As link builders, one challenge we all have is showing our clients evidence that our work is having the effect we said it would. What would make this part of the process easier is if there was one single universal tool that could identify every single instance when a site is mentioned, linked, tagged, tweeted, or feeded. The sheer size of the web and the volume of new content every day make such a tool impossible, but a few weeks ago Delicious unveiled a relaunch, and what was once really a pain is now a breeze.
Delicious will show the which users are linking to (bookmarking) which URLs, sorted by most recently bookmarked. Go here:
http://delicious.com/url/
Enter your company URL, or whatever URL you want. Click the arrow to get your results.
Here’s where it gets fun. Delicious feedifies that results page, so you can subscribe to a feed for any URL, and by doing so, whenever someone bookmarks your site at delicious, your feed will have that new link at the top of your feed.
The Quality of SEO Matters
The quality of SEO matters now more than ever. With constant revisions to dated algorithms, search engines are savvier than ever in discovering sites that lack the proper quality to rank competitively.
In the not so distant past, obsession with the home page, tons of off-topic links bullied their way past search engine algorithms, now, those days are drawing to a close.
Search engines, like people have become fussy readers with a preference of what they consider as a top caliber website that offers educational or beneficial information based on co-citation and engagement.
No amount of SEO is going to pull the wool over the eyes of advanced artificial intelligence like search engine algorithms that look at link clusters (the time stamp and proximity or link velocity of inbound links), search volume click-through data as well as the quality of the sites referencing your own. To be clear and direct, quality is the cornerstone of a successful online presence.
We have known all along that relevant content strategically organized in a way that fundamentally supports information retrieval such as (theming and siloing), has strong internal links and has persuasive and compelling content and usability was the objective.
How To Walk A Mile In A Search Engine’s Shoes
Small business owners are often curious, and sometimes desperate, to understand why their web sites are doing well -- or doing poorly -- when it comes to search engine visibility. Online forums and message boards are filled with questions like "Why is my competitor outranking me?", "Why doesn't my new product page bring me any search traffic?", or "How come my site hasn't been crawled in a month?"
If you live and breathe search marketing, these questions are often pretty easy to answer. But when you're busy running a small business, these questions may as well be rocket science. One way to get answers is to analyze what the search engines think of your web site, and walk a mile in the search engines' shoes, as the saying goes. When you learn to do that, it's easier to solve those questions that you've been curious (or desperate) to answer.
Three ways to see what search engines think of your site
1. Use the search engines' webmaster tools.
Keyword Exercises for SEO
Don’t be fooled by people trying to tell you that tracking SEO metrics based on keywords and keyword performance is obsolete. Keywords and the traffic they produce are alive and well and depending on the position (above the fold or below the fold) and the percentage of traffic they receive is tangible to assess conversion and performance benchmarks.
Over 80% of consumers hot on the trail of a product or service have a higher propensity of clicking the top 3 search results when presented with the top 10 websites for their query. If a user has to scroll below the fold the click through numbers taper down to the remaining percentages.
However, depending on factors such as:
1) the competition for the phrase
2) the relevance to the searchers intent and
3) the emotional click-triggers from the snippet/description in the search result (and how sticky it is) impact who gets the click.
Obviously, the more keywords that encroach on a topic, the higher percentage for conversion you have from those topics, when each of the pages becomes buoyant after gaining some authority in search engines (typically 2-4 months).
The SEO Failings of Major UK Highstreet Retailers
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?
Blog Marketing & Pay Per Post: They’re Not The Same
The vitamin supplement company Berocca has been engaged in a vaguely interesting piece of blog marketing over here in the UK recently. Taking their cue from the recent NY Times article suggesting that blogging can be highly stressful, they have put together a blogger relief pack which consists of a number of ‘stress-busting’ desk toys and, of course, a pack of Berocca. In a nice nod to the community-lead nature of blogging, the mini-site always has a link to one of the blogs that is taking part in the campaign.
This campaign, which is hardly revolutionary in its nature, probably wouldn’t deserve a mention on these hallowed pages were it not for a post written by Michael Gray recently. In this post, Michael asked whether Guy Kawasaki, who frequently reviews products he is sent and links to the manufacturers’ sites, should be the subject of a penalty in the same way that sites which operated ‘pay per post’ systems were*.
