Don’t Make These Adwords Mistakes

Google AdWords can be an awesome advertising tool to give  your business ginormous exposure if used correctly. If you’ve never tried it, don’t be put off if it seems confusing at first. Because once you’ve mastered the skill of making an AdWords campaign work, you’ll be able to see increased profits. Here are three mistakes to avoid:

When starting out, many simply throw together a campaign without doing much market research, and this is a serious mistake. You shouldn’t start an AdWords campaign until you are confident that you know your market well. For instance, lets say you are in custom labels niche (for industrial purposes, military specification and commercial applications), what keywords could you target? You could target “Custom Labels” or “Custom Label“, but ask yourself – is that going to get you converting traffic? How many times was that keyword searched for last month? Adwords will tell you.  You also want to have a good sense of who your competition is and what they’re up to. You want to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and how much they cost to bid on so you can calculate your own strategy. Fine tune your keyword list with a keyword tool. Taking the time to do your market research allows you to get off on the right foot with your AdWords campaign. Remember to stay relevant and laser-focused with your keywords. If you don’t, this could affect your Quality Score.

Displaying your ads through the content network of Google is another common mistake. This network consists of all those partnering websites that show Google ads through their AdSense program. These ads could prove to be a distraction to people viewing your add, since these sites are not that targeted. In the end you may even achieve a high click through rate, but low conversions. It’s not unheard of  those losing large amounts of money on ads by leaving the content network on, which translates into a poor ROI. So you might consider not using AdSense until you feel comfortable working with AdWords.

When starting out, Test, Test and Test.  Keep learning and not only will you increase your experience but also your profits…

SEO Basics

Is your landing page up yet? How serious are you in making it successful? If your answer is ‘Very!”, then SEO should be part or your marketing plan. But if you know next to nothing about it, then here’s the lowdown on SEO basics. If you can master the basics, then the rest will be much easier for you.

Let’s start with keyword research. How can you optimize your website if you do not know what keywords you should be targeting? Which ones are you going use? For instance, the identity theft niche has been hot for a few years now. Suppose you were marketing the IdentityHawk solution. Well, ask yourself: What keyword or search phrase, when typed into a search engine, should display my website as part of the results? Could you use “identity theft protection“? You could. Which keywords get the most traffic? Which ones are “informational” keywords (which may drive traffic but low conversions), and which ones are  ”buying” keywords (conversion-centric)? What is your competition ranking well for? How many inbound links does their website have? The answers to these questions will help you come up with a good keyword list.

After your keyword list is generated, you’ll need to them for your on-page optimization. What this means is that your keywords should be visible in the web copy of your website. You should put your keywords in the title, the H1 tag, the image alt tag, the meta description and of course, in the body of the text. Don’t overdue it (keyword stuffing), as this could get your site de-indexed.

Next comes Link building. Links are the most important factor in search engine optimization. Your goal should be to get as many quality links as you can. Quality being subjective, think of links that are surrounded by fresh, unique, relevant content on pages with adequate page rank.

These are just some of the SEO basics that you can do for your own website. Practice these and you can see great results within the coming months.

Google AdWords Success

In this marketing strategies article let’s discuss one of the most powerful yet most underused components of Google AdWords campaigns- using negative keywords to block the wrong type of traffic from seeing and clicking on your ad.

Negative keywords are search phrases that aren’t relevant to your offer and therefore should not trigger your ads to be displayed to the searcher. For example, let’s say you have a lead gen website for a U.S.-based  credit card merchant account company. You are bidding on the key phrase “merchant account” with the goal of generating American leads that will fill out a merchant account application. Suppose someone searches for “canadian merchant account” or “UK merchant account” – would that be a good prospect for you? The answer is no. They are looking for something you don’t offer. Therefore, you do not want them seeing your Google Ad, clicking on it, and wasting your money.

So how do you add negative keywords to your Google AdWords campaign? Very simple. Once you have created a campaign, click on the “keywords” tab. Then scroll down toward the bottom of the page and you will see a link to add negative keywords. Click on it and start adding words that would bring the wrong type of traffic to your website such as: free, cheap, glass, wood, bamboo, used… etc.

Once you have added your list of negative keywords, and a person searches for “glass bird cages”, which contains your negative keyword “glass”, your Google ad will NOT be displayed to that person, saving you from a bad click. Conversely, if someone searches for “bird cages” or “metal bird cages”, your ad WILL be displayed because no negative keywords are included in those searches. Adding negative keywords to your campaign allows you to filter out the people you do not want while letting the people you do want see your ad, click on it, come to your website and buy your products. It’s an awesome tool and one that should definitely be used.

Now that you understand what negative keywords are and how they will dramatically improve your success with Google AdWords, the next question is, how do you find negative them? Well you can guess, but it be more efficient to use a FREE tool such as Word Tracker at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. To use this tool, just type in your main search phrase for your ad campaign (in this case your main search phrase for people to see your ad is, “bird cages” (without the quotes) and click the “Hit Me” button. You will then see a list of all searches people are conducting based on your search phrase of “bird cages”. Then review this entire list and add all of the wrong search words to your negative keyword.

Success with Google AdWords comes from driving the most targeted and relevant traffic to your site. Every single click on your Google Ads costs you money. Don’t waste your money by advertising to the wrong people..

How to Achieve High Search Engine Ranking to Your Website

Were you trying to find a simple method to learn high search engine ranking optimization techniques that works? Look no further as I reveal the little secrets of increasing my page ranking on Google within 30 days for virtually all my websites. After you are through with reading this article, it is possible to optimize your web pages with the right keywords with little hassle.

Before your pages can show on Google and other search-able database, you must understand 3 optimization terms. Here they are:

 

Keywords

Internet users are out for specific information and that’s why they come to the search engines to conduct a search. They use keywords to discover your site. If you already own a website and you are therefore struggling to drive manual traffic to it using some of the assumed effective ways, I would suggest you learn high search engine ranking optimization techniques in order to end your traffic worries for life. And this are only able to be achieved when you are getting free organic traffic.

Keyword Density

High Search engine ranking Optimization also banks on the effectiveness of keyword density. This is basically the number of times your chosen keywords appear on the human body of your web pages. If you write articles online, this will play a major role in determining how high your content and site will rank on Google. Since I promised it can be done yourself, when writing your sales copy, start out with the exact keyword, wear them your first paragraph and also twice by the body processes of your contents.

External Backlinks

Please pay attention to this one. Good keywords and well formatted density isn’t enough. What really matters in your ranking is your external back links effect. Back-links refers to other sites who have your website link on them. For example, for those who have an article published on an article directory, then you already have an external back link from it. But Google recommends that you improve your back links to around 20,000 to be able to gain high ranking on the top 10.

The best way to increase your back links to do this result and begin sucking avalanche of traffic is through social media which you’ll achieve manually or better still, using software to submit automatically. This is because search engine loves them and when you have your link there, it gets picked up for indexing fast.

Got to run.  More to come soon…

Selecting The Right Search Engine Keywords

Think of the right keywords as the “Open Sesame!” of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words,consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Fortunately, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.