May 23, 2007
By Andy Theekson
The competitor analysis I refer to here is not to be confused with the Competitive Analysis applied to a business to determine a unique selling proposition or a Competitive Advantage.
The competitor analysis to which I refer is that which when applied to a web site makes it possible to determine what improvements are necessary to a web page and web site in order to compete with competitors holding a place in the Top 10 Search Engine Results.
Anyone who has a web site quickly discovers that unless they have a listing on the first page of search results for a particular search term, they stand little chance of getting any significant free traffic from a search engine.
Competitor Analysis when applied to a web page means that you can establish how much to optimize a page in order to compete against the top 10 competitors for the keywords that have been targeted.
It also means not wasting time overly optimizing pages that don’t need to be and avoiding an over optimization penalty that can be applied by a search engine, resulting in a worsening, not an improvement in ranking.
Competitor analysis compares a web page against each of the 10 competitor’s pages in the top search engine rankings for many 10’s of important ranking factors. It can advise what the page doesn’t have, what it has too much of and suggests what can be changed to improve ranking.
Competitor Analysis On-Page Factors
A typical competitor analysis looks at Keyword Quantity, Keyword Density, Keyword Prominence and the Number of Words & Characters in each of the following areas:
Page Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Description, Body Text Overall, Body Text - First Sentence, Page URL, H1 & H2 Headline Texts, On Page Link Texts, Outbound Link Texts, On Page URL’s, Outbound Link URL’s, Image ALT Tags and HTML Comment Tags.
Competitor analysis is also not constrained to just factors on a web page, but can also be used to assess off-page factors.
Competitor Analysis Off-Page Factors
Links to a site are now more important that ever in determining whether a top 10 search engine ranking can be achieved. A typical off-page competitor analysis will therefore consider each of the following:
Total Incoming Page Links Keywords in link URL’s Keywords in Link Texts Other terms used in links .edu links .gov links DMOZ links Yahoo Directory Listings Deep Link Ratio Site Age
From all this analysis it is possible to establish what factors are likely to have placed the analysed web pages in the Top 10 search results and what is required in order to compete with them and gain a top 10 ranking.
The analysis may also include an assessment of the keywords used by a competitor determined from the page content. Keywords in the keyword meta tags are not used because they are unreliable for determining what keywords a competitor is actually using.
Competitive analysis provides a lot of data with which to make a decision on what is required to compete with competitor web pages holding a top 10 ranking.
However, what should not be overlooked is whether the time, resources and knowledge is available to compete with those sites already holding a top 10 ranking.
It may be more cost effective in terms of time, effort and resources to compete initially for a keyword phrase that has less competition and against web sites not so well entrenched in the Top 10 search results.
Andy Theekson is the SEO specialist at the search-engine-optimizer.com providing advice and services to small and medium sized web businesses on web design and search engine marketing. Further details on applying Competitor Analysis and example reports can be found in Competitor Analysis - Beating the Competition.
By Halstatt Pires
Pay-per-click advertising is one of those internet marketing platforms that is both loved and hated. Regardless of your particular position, it is a critical platform for marketing new sites.
Pay-per-click advertising, better known as PPC, is a method of buying traffic off of high quality sites. In most instances, the best traffic is produced through the PPC platforms offered by Google and Yahoo. The process works by creating an advertisement that should appear under keyword phrases you select and then bidding for position among the other advertisers seeking exposure for said keyword phrases.
If you are launching a new site, PPC advertising should be one of the first things you implement when it comes to marketing the site. The common reason given for this is the medium produces immediate traffic to your site whether through Google Adwords, Yahoo Search or whatever platform you want to use. This immediate traffic is valuable since most other online marketing efforts, particularly SEO, take time to start producing results.
There is little dispute that PPC is a great way to produce immediate traffic to your site. That being said, the reason why this is important is often misunderstood. Yes, you want to make sales and immediate traffic from PPC is a way to get them. While sales are important, there is an additional step that you must take to fully grasp why PPC is so important.
When you launch a new site, you probably have a pretty good idea of what you want people to do when they visit your site. You obviously want them to buy something. While you have probably given a lot of thought as to how this will work, you do not have an empirical evidence of whether your site produces the expected results. This is where PPC comes in.
With PPC, you can produce immediate traffic to your site and analyze how that traffic converts to sales. You should be tracking all of your ads. By doing so, you can see which ads and pages convert visitors into customers and which do not. You can then play around with your pages to try different methods. The ultimate goal is to find the approach that converts well and apply it throughout the site. Once you have done this, keep monitoring the site to ascertain whether the new approach works across all pages. Repeat until you have the best conversion rate possible.
Ultimately, PPC is a good way to produce immediate traffic to a site. While sales are obviously the name of the game, PPC also allows you to test different sales strategies and see within a few days whether they work or not. This is critical knowledge to have and will be all the more invaluable when your other marketing efforts come to fruition.
Halstatt Pires provides PPC management services with www.MarketingTitan.com
May 22, 2007
By: Dan Farrell
Adsense Money
To understand why sense is critical for any content web site is to see first how Google’s adsense operates.
The concept is really simple, if you really think about the way adsense works. The publisher or the webmaster inputs a java script into a certain web site. Each time the web page is accessed, the java script will display ads from the adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the page serving the ad.
If a web visitor clicks on an ad, the webmaster displaying the ad earns a portion of the money that the Adwords advertiser is paying the search engine for each click.
Google’s Adsense is the one handling all the tracking and payments, affording a very easy way for publisher or webmaster to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle, get money, monitor the clicks and stats which could be a very time-consuming job in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pulls the adsense ads. Also publisher or webmasters are less concerned by the lack of information the search engines are providing and are increasingly focused in making money from Google.
The first reason why adsense is critical for content web sites is because Adsense has come a long way in meeting the needs of publisher or webmasters. Together with its constant progression is the appearance of more advanced system that permits full ad customization. Webmasterss are given the option to select from several different types of text ad formats to better complement their web page and blend into their page layout.
The different formats enables the web site the possibility of increased click throughs from visitors who may or may not be aware of what advertisement they are clicking on. This way the people behind the adsense will get their content and make a money in the process.
The 2nd reason is the ability of the adsense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing but also the earnings based on the webmaster-defined channels. The latest increased improvements in the search engines gives web site owners the capability to monitor how their ads are doing utilizing customizable reports that have the capacity to show page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. Webmasters can now track individual ad formats, colors and pages within a web page. Trends are as well easily identified.
With real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be evaluated quickly. There would be time to figure out the content that visitors are making the higher number of clicks on. The ever-changing visitor demands would be met while generating cash for the webmasters and publishers. The more flexible tools are as well permitting webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which will provide them some very accurate insight on which web pages, ads and domains are performing best.
The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated with having their ads served on targeted web pages. In essence increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer might have an interest in their product and service. This is because of the content and its constant maintenance of your website. Opposite are publishers who are not using adsense on their web sites, these website owners are given the choice of getting ghost writers do the content, providing them the benefit of having a successful and profitable website
Dan’s latest ebook, “10 Essential Steps To Online Wealth” can be downloaded for free by going to: Google Adsense
May 20, 2007
By Freddy_Escobar
Search engines are a good way to bring free traffic to your website, the problem with this method is that it takes time to rank highly in Google and other search engines…and we all only have a limited amount of time.
The challenge here is to create a money-making machine that attracts prospects, reels them in, converts them into customers and repeats the process all over again.
There exists such a system for bringing in instant traffic: pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Up to now, Google Adwords, is the most effective search engine to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into customers. The bad news is that about 95 percent of PPC advertisers end up throwing several hundred bucks down the hole before they even begin to understand how pay-per-click works. What’s more, there are many business owners who, after being burned to the tune of several thousands of dollars, give up on PPC advertising because they don’t get how it works.
The main feature of pay per click marketing –and an advantage as well- is that you pay only for visitors that come to your site (no upfront costs - every “click” while being an expense is also a chance for you to convert that visitor into a customer). You pay a certain amount “per click” on your ad. If nobody clicks on your ad, you don’t pay a dime… and also get no visitors. The goal is to get many TARGETED visitors, while paying as little as possible per click. Really clever!
Your ads are displayed in the search engines according to what people are searching / looking for. (i.e. If someone search for “newborns care” and you’re bidding on the term “newborns care”, your ad will be displayed when someone searches for that phrase.
There are two major PPC ad engines:
1. Google Adwords 2. Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture)
While they are both very effective in pulling in traffic, I normally use Google Adwords (and I’ll explain why later).
I don’t discourage you from using Yahoo Search Marketing. In certain niche markets the YSM network is still not hyper-saturated (unlike Adwords, where the competition is higher) and you may be able to realize serious short-term gains if you play the PPC game right.
What I would discourage you from is to using a PPC ad network other than Adwords or YSM. Beyond these two, the situation is pretty bleak with poor traffic quality, click fraud and lack of a sizeable user base; all contributing to an abject failure.
Successful PPC campaigns are based on three things:
. Focused Keyword Research · . Compelling Ads . Effective Landing Pages
Each of these subjects will be treated separately in future articles as they require a full explanation.
For now, I would like to cover some basics of Google Adwords Campaigns.
Campaigns
A campaign consists of one or more Ad Groups. The ads in a given campaign share the same daily budget, language setting, location targeting, end dates and syndication preferences. You normally create separate campaigns for separate projects as these are intended to promote different products or sites. For each campaign you create Ad Groups to target sets of related keywords.
You can have most of your questions answered about Google Adwords features at Adwords Help Center
This concept is quite often underused and hence the high percentage of failure in Adwords ppc campaigns. It is VERY important to make good use of this feature.
An Ad Group contains one or more ads which target one set of keywords. This comes in extremely handy when you are targeting focused keywords, as you can set up different Ad Groups for different sets of keywords. This is particularly important in competitive markets. For example, let’s say you start a campaign for the “insurance” term. As this is a extremely untargeted and very expensive term (you could not compete with the “big sharks” bidding on this term) it is preferable to set Ad Groups for targeted terms like Auto Insurance, Affordable Insurance or Health Insurance. Each of this terms will have a separate list of related keywords, separate ads (you can have in Google 2 ads for each Ad Group for split testing of ad performance) and separate landing pages with relevant information targeted for each Ad Group.
This is how you play the Adwords game….
In your campaigns your Ad Groups should ideally be tightly focused around a sub topic, but how you select this sub topic and how you determine if it’s profitable to put that set of keywords into a separate group is a different matter.
This will be discussed in future articles.
If you want to have a blueprint to Keywords Research and Google Adwords Domination, there is available a free download of an excellent 86 page ebook at this link:
http://www.21centuryaffiliate.com/cgi-bin/t/c.cgi/adwords-ad
By Raymond Nesa
PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising and is also known as keyword auction advertising. It is among the fastest and cheapest ways to get more targeted traffic to your website and on the internet more traffic means more money. There are several websites that rely on PPC advertising in order to achieve the desired volume of traffic. Any business can profit through PPC advertising and it is considered the best because it is so effective.
You need to first decide the right place for your advertisement for it to be most effective. You need to advertise on those websites that receive a lot of traffic so that the maximum number of people get to see your advertisement. This is why popular websites like Google and Yahoo have such high rates for auctioned keywords. The busier a website is the more effective is your advertising on it and hence the higher the money you have to pay.
The term Pay Per Click means that you will pay the website that hosts your advertisement only if someone clicks on it. There is no charge for displaying your advertisement. This is what makes PPC such an economical advertising option. The only time you have to pay is when someone actually takes action by clicking on the advertisement and visiting the URL that you specify. Yahoo and Google are among the top choices for PPC advertising because they are also considered to be the top 2 search engines today. They receive huge amounts of traffic and hence result in more traffic for you.
Do you want to learn more about how I do it? Secrets of Article Marketing
Raymond Nesa is an experienced web marketer specializing in article marketing, traffic generation, and list building.
By Mark Fortimer
Lucrative PPC Advertising | 9 Ways to Make a Profit with PPC Advertising
Here are the few strategies to make your PPC advertising more lucrative
1. Keyword Strategy: PPC advertising is highly dependent on keywords; therefore proper planning should be put into, while taking decisions over keywords. PPC campaign should be planned out in such a way that high performer keywords can be improved upon and unproductive keywords can be filtered out.
2. Ad titles: Have your keywords placed in the title to get more visibility and more clicks.
3. Visitor Analytics: Have a sound visitor analytics to enable better decision making. There should be reports available on daily, monthly and yearly basis to take the decisions about the PPC campaign.
4. Right targeting: Your ad should target right searcher or customer at the right time to get your ads clicked regularly.
5. Right Timing: Initiate your ad campaign when your target customer will be searching and remove it when the top prospect will not be searching.
6. Quality writing: The wording of your ad listing is a tricky matter because of the limited space you’re given and the restriction on the wording you can use. Therefore an ad should be written such that it follows all norms and at the same time is good in quality.
7. Self Managed PPC campaign: With solid promotional writing skills, and understanding of consumer psychology and lots of time, self managed campaign can save a lot of money.
8. Avoid bidding wars: Avoid bidding wars by searching for more specific multiword, targeted keyword phrases.
9. Keep it simple: The PPC campaign should be simple and informative to receive better feedback and to have more control on ad campaign.
Want to learn more about it? Download the free ebook, Steps to Article Marketing Success.
By Kathryn Lively
So you have decided to take the plunge and supplement your organic search optimization efforts with a pay per click campaign. You signed up for Google Adwords, set your monthly cap, created your ads…and waited. Daily you checked the performance of your ads, noting the number of clicks compared to impressions in Google search. Your click through ratio, however, is not as high as you would like for it to be, and in return you find little response to your site in the way of calls to action.
What money is being spent on Google Adwords is not yielding a sound return on your investment. It is natural to feel disappointed and worried that you are wasting money. Yet before you decide to give up on PPC altogether, consider giving your Adwords campaigns a makeover, as well as tweaking your site to be more compatible with your advertising. Through continuous experimentation and applying a number of helpful tips, you may just see a turnaround in Adwords that contributes to sales and increased traffic.
Here is one thing to consider when adjusting your Adwords campaigns: Capitalize each line in your ad. Uniformity in your Google ads can make an impression on search users. When you capitalize the beginning of each ad line, too, you are drawing the eye toward the ad and the compelling message within. Consider these two ads:
Brazilian diet secret
lose 20 pounds in 2 months
tastes great, good for you.
Brazilian Diet Secret
Lose 20 pounds in 2 months.
Tastes great, good for you.
The second ad with it staccato lines may appear more attractive to a site visitor than the former, which gives the impression of a run-on sentence.
So if you are feeling unsure of an ad placed in Google, try tweaking the words to a bolder, more direct line. You just may find this technique is a capital idea!
Kathryn Lively works for CINIVA Systems, an award-winning Virginia Beach website design company. She specializes in assisting clients with search engine optimization and pay per click management.
By Anthony Pace
I am going to show you how you can have a personal adwords consultant that you can afford. Everybody and their grandmother wants to get into the Google Adwords affiliate business. There are scores of books on the internet that describe how simple it is to “Make Enormous Sums of Money with 15 Minutes of Work Each Day and From Then on Your Business is on Auto-Pilot”. Nothing could be further from the truth! Many people try adwords affiliate advertising and have one failed campaign after another. They burn a hole in their advertising pockets and give up. What should they do?
One alternative is to contact a professional Google AdWords Consultant. This may be an effective strategy for an existing business that is making a profit but most professional adwords consultants charge $100 to $250 an hour for a consultation on existing campaigns. To set up a new account prices can range between $1000 to $2500 plus ongoing monthly fees. This can be a good investment in the long run for someone who is more concerned with his or her core business than learning the adwords business. But if you are interested in learning the adwords affiliate business this simply won’t due. Some of the consultants will give Pay Per Click coaching but at $100 to $250 an hour the fees are outrageous.
In the brick and mortar world a businessperson can get involved with local organizations of retired businesspersons and get one on one advice. Many of these programs can be found through the better business bureau in your local area. A person can often find a mentor to help them through the process of setting up their business and monitoring the ongoing success or failure. The businessperson benefits from the years of experience accumulated by its members and advice is offered freely and without hesitation because there is no competition between the parties.
In the online world, someone interested in learning the adwords affiliate business has basically two options: 1) Read all the books available on the subject and learn by trial and error alone. Again, this can be a very daunting task and very costly. Most people usually give up after a couple months, 2) Read and learn as much as you can on your own but also try to emulate the offline brick and mortar model where one tries to find an adwords consultant as a mentor. The question then is where can you find an online mentor? The most similar online organization to the offline brick and mortar organization, is a forum of individuals who are trying to succeed in the Pay Per Click affiliate business. You can do a Google search using the following phrases and get a whole list of forums: affiliate marketing forums, affiliate marketing forum, forums affiliate marketing, forum affiliate marketing.
Most of the forums are free but you will find a few that will charge a nominal monthly fee to join. The fee-based forums usually are moderated and owned by someone who has expertise in the affiliate marketing business and is probably working it full time. The members are generally more helpful to newbies as the fee-based forums tend to be a more tightly knit group. If you want to find an adwords consultant to act as your mentor you’re more likely to find someone in the fee based forum. Regardless of which forum you join, at some point you need to participate in the forum in order to get to know the other members. It is only after trust is gained will someone be willing to help you. If you can find the right forum with an individual you click with, you may just find your adwords consultant and mentor. And the fee relative to $100 to $250 an hour is peanuts.
Anthony Pace is an affiliate marketer working to make online marketing a full time job within the next year. If you would like to learn more about what was discussed in this article, check out onsultant Adwords Consultant
Halstatt Pires
There is no better way to generate immediate traffic for your site then to use PPC advertising. You need to focus on return on investment to evaluate if this is a good marketing medium for you.
Known as PPC, pay-per-click advertising is a rather revolutionary concept. While each PPC system differs a bit, the basic idea is you can bid for placement on a search engine or other sites and get immediate placement. Instead of sweating out and waiting for search engine optimization to result in rankings, you can just buy your way to the first page of various search results.
PPC has evolved over time. Overture was one of the first big PPC platforms. The launching of Adwords by Google ratcheted up the competition. Yahoo eventually purchased Overture. MSN then finally got around to launching its own PPC platform. There are other small PPC search engines these days, but these represent the big three.
Most new sites jump into PPC without really thinking through the process. Inevitably, a vast majority of these sites lose their ass…ets! The problem is they don’t pay attention to their return on investment. Return on investment is another way of asking what you are getting for your money. Many new sites will spend $10,000 on PPC only to realize they made only $5,000 on sales. Yikes!
Before launching a PPC campaign, it helps to objectively evaluate what you are selling. The profit in each transaction is critical. If you are selling products that produce a $10 profit, then you really need to watch the bottom line. If you bid 90 cents to have your ad appear when a certain keyword is searched, you need to convert one in every ten clicks into a sale to be profitable. Even then, you are only making $1 per sale.
In my opinion, there are certain types of sites that should almost always use PPC marketing unless they are just dominating the organic rankings. These sites are professional service sites. Why should they use PPC? Well, their profit per client tends to be so high their return on investment on a PPC campaign should be excellent. A physician, consultant, lawyer or whatever is looking at thousands of dollars in revenue for each client, so bidding $2 a click shouldn’t be a problem. Even if it takes 200 clicks to produce a client, the professional should make a profit well above the $400 cost.
Ultimately, the first step in running a PPC campaign is to understand the finances involved in what you are selling. Figure out how many clicks to make a sale, the average profit per sale and then make sure your bids are positioned to produce profits.
Get professional PPC management services at MarketingTitan.com.
By James Krawder
On the internet, the survival of all the websites depends on the marketing tools and techniques they use. You need to market your website properly as there is a huge competition in the online world. Not all of the websites get noticed by the general public or the customers and many of the websites and companies on the internet fail just because they do not get the number of responses from the internet which are required to break even. To avoid this situation pay per click advertising can be used to get more web traffic and in this way you can increase the profitability of your business.
Pay per click advertising is one of the tools which are used by the marketers today to market the websites. The online marketers have to look for newer ways of marketing their products after every passing day. The competition has become so intense that there is no other way to survive it. Pay per click advertising helps the websites by providing them with more visits. As the number of visits to your website increase, the chances of getting more business also increase. This is the reason that people like to opt pay per click advertising.
There are times when none of the other marketing efforts you are putting in can work. At that point in time only PPC can work. It comes to save your day when nothing else is there to save your business. This kind of marketing may be very intense but it helps in increasing the volume of the business by increasing the number of visits on your website.
Want to learn more about it? Download the free ebook, Steps to Article Marketing Success.
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