Keyword Research - Homework to be done before starting a Google AdWords campaignKeywords or key phrases are terms that a possible client would use to find your product or service. It is important to have a large number of keywords yes - but it is equally important that these keywords be relevant to your website. Keyword research is a generally a continuous never-ending process that can help increase traffic and reduce costs. This is the most important aspect of any Google AdWords campaign.How does one select keywords for PPC campaigns? Let's assume that we are promoting MasteringAdWords.com. Step No.1 - Get hold of all the possible keywords relevant to your business and list them in separate columns of an excel sheet. Ideally enter “key phrases” since these work better than only words. For our example, I would choose Google AdWords as the main keyword. Step No.2 - Head for the Overture keyword suggestion tool and type the main keyword. In this case the keyword is 'Google AdWords' and the displayed terms are - google
adwords This particular site has nothing to do with 'stats'. Also note that Google keeps singulars and plurals as individual keywords. So our keyword list should look like - google
adwords Adding -keyword will make sure that the ad will not be displayed for non-relevant keywords. Great - now we have one set of keywords for an AdGroup. Step No.3 - We need to now find keywords 'related' to the main keyword. Head right for the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool and type in the main keyword. On the right hand side, note down the relevant keywords under 'Here are similar keywords you may want to add' and make new columns in the excel Step
No. 4 - Go back to step No.2. That is, insert these new keywords
into Overture and repeat the procedure till you have a significant list
of relevant keywords. Make Your Traffic Pay With Google AdSenseBy Shelley LoweryIf you've been
looking for an easy and effective way to AdSense
is a powerful new advertising revenue program
that's taking the online world by storm. It was created by Google to enable sites that are rich in content to increase their advertising revenue simply by displaying Google AdWords pay-per-click ads. Google AdSense really makes selling advertising space very easy since they handle everything for you. With access to a database of over 100,000 advertisers, you'll never have to worry about finding reliable advertisers for your site again. The concept is really very simple. If you have a high-quality site that provides text-based content (such as articles) you may qualify to display Google AdWords text ads on your web pages. Once your site is approved, you'll receive a portion of the pay-per-click charge for each click-through. The great thing about Google's amazing AdSense advertising system is that it displays ads on your web pages that are relevant to the content on the page. Adsense's Mediabot first scans the page to determine the theme of the content. Google then displays text ads that match the page's theme. This increases click-through rates considerably because relevant text ads displayed in proximity with quality content are highly effective. Although it's free to apply to the AdSense program, Google will review your site and approve or reject it for participation. Since there has been a great many sites that were rejected, you should make sure that your site meets Google's criteria before you apply. You can find the guidelines here: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies Google is basically looking for high-quality sites that offer lots of text-based content. The key words to keep in mind here are "quality" and "content." If your site is loaded with advertising, under construction, or has broken images and links, you probably won't be accepted. But if you have a quality site and provide your visitors with plenty of relevant content you should easily get in. The more content-rich pages that are on your site, the more advertising revenue you can earn. It's really that simple. If you don't have content of your own, there's a wealth of free content available on the internet! Just subscribe to any of the following article announcement groups to receive new article submissions each and every day: Article Announce - Articles on all types of topics AABusiness - Articles that are business oriented, including: Business, Networking, E-commerce, Sales, Business Communication, Promotion, Internet Marketing, etc. AAInternet - Internet/web oriented articles, including: Web Design, Web Development, Ebooks, Ezines, Web Sites, Search Engines, etc. AAHome - Home, Garden, and Family oriented articles, including: Home, Parenting, Gardening, Relationships, Cooking, Crafts, Recipes, etc. AAHealth - Health & Fitness related articles, including physical and emotional health topics. AAGeneral - General Interest types of articles. With your subscription to any of these groups, you'll not only receive new article submissions delivered to your email, but you'll also have access to the archives which already contain thousands of top-quality articles. Visit this URL for more information: http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm Once you've found a few articles that are relevant to your website, simply create a new page for each one. For example, if you find five relevant articles, you can create five brand new content pages on which you can display your Google AdWords ads. Not only will you be adding valuable content for your visitors to use, but you'll also increase your site's traffic and revenue potential. It's very much a win-win proposition no matter how you look at it. Once Google has approved your site, you simply choose the style of ads you'd like to use and paste the AdSense code into your web pages where you want the ads to display. Although all of the ads are text ads, there are currently four layout options to select from: · Standard 468 x 60 banner format (displays up to 2 ads) · Vertical 120 x 600 skyscraper ad (displays up to 4 ads) · Horizontal 728 x 90 Leaderboard (displays up to 4 ads) · 300 x 250 Inline rectangle (displays up to 4 ads) Although all four ad styles can be effective, the "skyscraper" ads placed toward the top right side of your page or the "Leaderboard" ads placed at the top of the page generally will provide a higher click-through rate than the other two styles. But each page is different so your results may vary. You should test the different formats on your pages and use the style that is most effective for the content. Once you begin to display the ads on your site, you can visit AdSense and log in to your account. You'll be able to see how your ad campaign is performing. You can view the number of clicks, impressions, click-through rate and your accrued revenue. If some of the ads compete with your own products or services, you can log in to your account and "filter out" the unwanted ads. Also, you can display other ads as long as they ads don't mimic AdWords ads. Google AdSense is quite simply the best advertising revenue program available right now. Why not take the plunge and start earning some revenue from your website? You can get all the details on the AdSense website. Shelley
Lowery is the publisher of Etips -- Web Design, Google Adsense This is a relatively new advertising program which Google introduced to the market in 2002-3. Like everything Google does it the simplicity of it hides it's sleek design, high level of automation and the very powerful business opportunity that it presents for website owners. Adsense is a very clever extension of the very popular Adwords system. Now as well as being able to create and place ads for products or services you can now host the very same ads on your own website and collect advertising revenue. Just in case you are not sure what they look like an example of Google Adsense ads is shown to the right on this page. This is what is called the vertical skyscraper and consists of 4 ads in a vertical column in a 60x120 pixel format, and is one of the most popular formats. There are now a number of different formats so that you are almost sure to find one that fits in with the style and layout of your website. The standard Adwords ads appear in the right hand column of the page when you do a search on Google, if no ads appear then it's because the terms you are searching for have very little commercial value and so far no one has placed any ads for those words or phases. The ads have a very specific format, just 4 lines of text and specified number of characters per line. Because of this simple well defined format Google has been able to develop a very simple system for extending the reach or coverage of the ads. It's really quite brilliant, why limit the ads to just Google search pages?. The system enables a website owner to host ads automatically just by just cutting and pasting a html code snippet into a web page. Everything else is taken care of by Google including:
Adsense maybe the perfect vehicle to get your business into a positive cash flow position before trying develop your own or to sell other peoples products. To generate cash from Adsense you need a content website, maybe you already have a website which gets traffic but produces no sales or revenue. By adding Adsense to the your site you can make immediate cash. Alternatively you could decide to design a new site from scratch on a specific theme with the intention of running Adsense. Google has very specific requirements for eligible websites so if you intend to go down this route make sure that you read the guidelines carefully before starting. The perfect combination is of course to develop a content based website, add Adsense and also add a selection of appropriate affiliate links as well. The amount of revenue you can make from Google Adsense is going to be determined by the following:
Needless to say there is a whole lot more on the subject of Adsense and we have only scraped the surface here. The starting point for further information is of course to read everything provided by Google (http://www.google.com/adsense) . What is Froogle? by SearchEngineGenie.com Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase. It is located at http://www.froogle.com and http://froogle.google.com . Though it is not currently listed on the Google home page tabs, it can be accessed from Google’s advanced search page http://www.google.com/advanced_search. The Froogle Engine itself is organized into Categories. There are 14 categories. Shoppers can either drill-down on any of them or search directly by keyword. Shoppers can also limit your search to a specific category. Search results are limited to one product per store. Each result displays a thumbnail image of the product to the left, with the product's name, price and description listed to the right of the thumbnail. The store where the product is available is also listed, along with a link to see all results related to your keyword that are available at that particular merchant. Froogle's emphasis is on helping users find products, rather than providing product information, reviews, and other associated information found on other shopping search services. What does it mean to you? As an extension of the Google search engine that millions of people around the globe use daily to research products before they purchase, listing your product in Froogle is a free way to extend the reach of your marketing efforts to millions of customers. There are two ways you can get included in Froogle: 1. The first, though not the most effective is to let Google or Froogle crawl your site and pick up the information for itself. This is likely to result in inaccuracies in your product listing. 2. The second, and more effective way is to submit a data feed directly to Froogle. Create An Account With Froogle To be eligible to submit a feed, you must sell products via your website and ship them to the buyer. If you sell services or custom products that do not have fixed prices, use your website only to promote an offline business, or are an affiliate marketing site, your site content may be crawled by and included in Google's web search, but it will not be included in Froogle. Nor will Froogle accept a data feed under these conditions. Merchants who meet Froogle's criteria and want to submit a data feed must allow Google to crawl their websites by removing any robots.txt files that disallow Googlebot spider. To get an account you will need to send Froogle the following details about your company and you: 1. Your contact information 2. Store Information a. Name b. URL 3. Product information a. Numbers of products b. Product Categories 4. Affiliate Information You can either use this form http://services.google.com/froogle/merchant_email Or send them an email at feeds-support@google.com Google say it takes anywhere between 5 to 10 business days to respond. My experience and from what I’ve heard from other merchants is that it takes about a week. You will receive an email from them asking you to read and agree to a legal agreement. Once you do this, you will receive another email with your account information: login ID and password. This last email will also contain FTP instructions. The Data Feed Format The basic File Format has the following required parameters: ? Tab-delimited text file ? First line of the file is the header - must contain field names, all lower-case ? Use the field names from the table below, and in the same column order ? One line per item(use a newline or carriage return to terminate the line) ? File Encoding is LATIN1(ASCII is fine as its is a subset of LATIN1) The following field elements are forbidden as part of the basic format.If you want to include them as part of the basic format, products that contain errors will be dropped from the feed. ? Tabs, Carriage Returns , or newline characters may not be included in any fields, including the description ? Exactly one tab must seperate each field, If there are extra tabs inserted between fields in a line, or at the end of a line, that product will be dropped. ? HTML Tags, comments and escpe sequences may not be included- description must be plain text. Basic Fields The basic data feed format consists of your product information in the following order: Field Name Description product_url This is the URL of your product page - where you display the product for sale. name Name of the product – should be about 80 characters description Full descriptive text about the product from your web site, up to 5KB. price The current selling price of the product image_url URL of the image, for eg. http://www.mysite.com/images/golfball.gif category Category to which the product belongs offer_id Unique identifier There are more fields called Extended fields that you can use to further specify your product information, such as color, size, shipping cost and more. Optional extended headers may be used to flag special features of your file. You must use these header parameters if you use HTML escape characters, or include book, music or video products or use quotes in your product descriptions or names. If you have many items in your feed, only some of which change daily, you can provide updates-only files as a more efficient way for you to delete, add, or change offers for items. You can upload a full file later if a large percentage of your inventory changes. Rules to be followed when creating the data feed format Quotes, Tabs & Newslines When quotes, tabs or newlines are present in your name, description or other fields, you must wrap the entire field (that contains the quotes or tabs) in quotes. You must also set the quoted extended format header value to “YES”. Submission frequency Data feeds for your online store must be submitted at least once a month. You can however submit your data feed file once a day. Currently the FTP server does not accept more frequent updates and returns the FTP code *****. Currency, Availability Right now, Froogle accepts only prices in US dollars. All your products must be available. Removing products To remove certain products from the data feed you could either • Set the expiry date of the offer to some predefined date or • Create and send an update file with the products marked for delete. • Or when you send in the next feed remove those products completely. Upload Your Data Feed You can upload new feeds daily, weekly, or monthly. You must upload a new feed at least once a month, because Froogle will automatically expire your old data after a month. The content in your feed must be the same as the content visible to users on your web site. The description and price you provide in the feed must be the ones on your product URL page. The image URL should be that of the actual product image on the product page. After you upload your feed for the first time, notify via email at feeds-support@google.com so that Froogle can confirm receipt and verify the accuracy of the format. Be sure to include your name, title, phone number and username in the email. Is it Worth It? If you spend just a little time surfing around Froogle, you'll see very quickly that some products have clear and enticing descriptions, while others seem to be random snippets from the product page. It's not enough to show up in the search, if the searcher doesn't click through to your site. Those with clear descriptions are from the sites that have taken the time to give Froogle their data feed. And those are the merchants who are winning on Froogle. Would you like to submit to Froogle in an easy, efficient way? Try FroogleFeeder to create, verify and submit your data feed files easily. http://www.siteall.com Google is Top of the Game and Page for Searching by John Agsalud One of the most frequent questions I get from friends and clients is, "What's the best search engine?" My hands-down favorite (and, near as I can tell, most other professionals') is Google (www.google.com). The quality I like is its amazing ability to locate what you're looking for quickly and proficiently. Google is so popular among the tech-savvy that the verb "google" (to do a Web search using Google) has become part of American lexicon. Nowadays it's obligatory to "google" a prospective business partner, vendor or even dinner date and see what's out there on the Net. One of its newer developments is the Google Toolbar, which is a plug-in to Internet Explorer. What's so cool about it? The toolbar appears at the top of your browser, and that makes it incredibly handy by allowing you to conduct a search on Google without surfing to the Google home page. The toolbar has other great functions, the best being a pop-up ad blocker. Ad blockers have been around almost as long as pop-up ads but must be downloaded separately and often cost money. Furthermore, these ad blockers are not necessarily reliable. Google Toolbar's pop-up blocker works well, and because it's free, it's worth a try. It operates in two modes - it will block pop-up ads you don't want and allow you to see the pop-ups you want, such as those that you open manually. In my estimation it's worth getting Toolbar just for this function. There are other cool features such as a news site and an "autofill" button that automatically fills out online forms with your name, address, phone number, e-mail address and even a credit card number, which can (and should) be password-protected. According to Google, this info is kept on your box, not on the Net. Autofill is an optional feature and can be turned off. There's also a feature for those who use Google's Blogger.com site that automates the procedure of adding a link to your blog. I can't figure out the attraction to blogs, but I said the same thing about text messaging on cell phones, so maybe I'm just turning into an old fogie. Naturally, there also is a wireless search function that can be accessed from any number of devices, such as mobile phones, Palm handhelds and the like. To try a Google Search on your PDA, visit www.google.com/palm. Despite (or perhaps because of) the technical sophistication, Google is easy to use. The home page is essentially blank except for the field where you type in what you're looking for and two buttons below titled "Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky." Hit the first button and you get a page of URLs in order of relevance. Click "I'm Feeling Lucky" and Google's first choice opens. Although Google is by far the most popular search engine on the Net, there are worthy competitors. Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) is still very popular. Interestingly, for a while, all of Yahoo's searches were conducted by Google. Another good bet is Teoma (www.teoma.com), which adroitly ranks the "communities" around a particular subject. The end user then goes to that community and picks from the chosen Web sites. For example, a search on Hawaii comes up with popular Web sites such as the University of Hawaii, the eHawaiigov Web site and others. Teoma also generates "community" topics such as Weddings in Hawaii, Hawaii Vacations, Hawaiian Music, etc. The advantages of this method allow you to find a theme or relevant topic without having to wade through 50 links. This provides you with a real short cut when it comes to figuring out what's important. John Agsalud is the President of ISDI Technologies, Inc., a Honolulu-based IT Consultancy, specializing in software development, systems integration, and outsourcing. He can be reached at jagsalud@isdi-hi.com or by calling 944 8742 Google Synonyms and AdSense Targeting by Henrik Flensborg http://www.keyword-optimization-tools.com I was sitting here dabbling with new ways to get Google to help you create better themed pages and sites, and once again my brain honed in on Google Synonyms. Let's say that you did proper keyword research and came up with a keyphrase that you wanted to target. You created your page, linked to it from well-suited and frequently spidered pages so Google would pick it up fast. The page is on a site that is supported by contextual advertising through Google AdSense, but for some reason the shown ads are not related to the general theme of your site or the specific theme of the page. You thought that the theme of your page was "PPC" - as in "Pay Per Click", but ads for "Linux" and "Mac" kept showing up. So where did you go wrong? Well maybe there's help to get from Google Synonyms, which I still believe relies on the AdSense ontology from Applied Semantics. You search for Google synonyms by placing a "~" in front of the keywords you are searching for. Try searching Google for [~PPC] (without the brackets) Notice that some of the returned results have certain words highlighted. These are the keywords that Google consider synonyms for "PPC". Within the first 20 results you will notice the following highlighted words Linux Mac mac's PowerPC Notice how the last word explains why Google is making a connection between PPC and Linux (since PowerPC is a popular platform for Linux). Now wouldn't it be nice to know what other keywords Google consider to be synonyms for "PPC"? You might be in luck and find a keyword to support the theme of your page. What if you could add just one keyword to your page so Google would "detect" your theme properly and serve ads that would make sense to your target audience. One way would be to go through page after page of search results and look for highlighted words, but isn't life just too short for that? A much quicker way is to use the "-" modifier from Google which let you exclude words from a query. Try searching for [~PPC -PPC -Linux -Mac -PowerPC] - Google doesn't like searching for apostrophes, so no need to search for [mac's] New highlighted words will appear: CE Windows CE Pocket PC If you try to eliminate these new words as well, Google will return "Your search did not match any documents". The good news in this case is that you have uncovered all words that Google considers synonyms for "PPC". The bad news is that unfortunately none of them had anything to do with "Pay Per Click". But you might have more luck than me and find an additional keyword that you didn't think of yourself. A keyword that will help Google to serve well targeted AdSense ads on your page. Hey, the worst that can happen is that you get a list of keywords you must avoid at all costs when creating your pages. Google Loves a Good Blog by Henrik Flensborg http://www.keyword-optimization-tools.com When I looked at my logs the other day I discovered that one of my pages were receiving traffic in a totally different way compared to all my KFCP's. Where the KFCP's are focused narrowly on a specific keyword or keyphrase this page isn't targeted at any specific keywords. On my KFCP's I get search engine traffic where the queries used are very similar, but on this page I'm seeing all sorts of different queries. Besides breaking one SEO rule about not targeting anything specific this page also breaks another one: It's 46K big , which is rather large. And another strange thing about this page is that nearly half of the queries don't make any sense sentence-wise. The searches that found it were just 2 or 3 keywords right after each other. The page I'm referring to is my blog page. By its very nature this page tends to grow as big as recent events tells it to. And by nature it's focused on what's happening right now in the search engine community - and not a statically targeted keyword. I've talked a lot about why this page shouldn't be getting any traffic, but the most important thing is really WHY it is getting this much traffic. I would be a rather poor newsletter publisher if I only showed you how NOT to get traffic, so let's get on with WHY this page is attracting so many search engine users. 1) Content Blogs are about content - period. And because of the way I'm writing each blog entry I get lots of keywords crammed into very little space. This is not by choice but rather 'by accident'. 2) Freshness Because I blog about news in the SEO industry and we see quite a few new alliances being formed this page tends to have information on subjects that wasn't searched for at all before. A year back nobody would have searched for "Gator" and "Overture" in the same query or "SearchScout" or "MatchDriver" Because of this freshness Google tend to visit this page more often than the remaining - more stale - pages on my site. Combine 1 and 2 and you get "fresh content" Some would argue that freshness also could be achieved simply by changing the "Last-Modified" HTTP HEAD tag, but that's nothing more than pseudo-freshness or "Last-Modified Spamming". It might fool some search engine spiders to spider you and keep you in their index, but with stale content you will inevitably fall behind your competitors. And just like any trick in the SEO book it's a hole just waiting to be patched. So what are the benefits to you to have a news blog? 1) You have to stay on your toes to keep up with news in your industry and this extra knowledge can only help your business and develop your skills. 2) You can become an authority and have your blog visited by your peers. 3) When you blog about new pages on your own site or significant changes to existing pages these pages will be picked up/re-spidered more quickly because fresh pages are spidered more frequently. 4) More search engine visitors because you use a wide variety of keywords and keyword combinations. Getting the information for your blog is actually fairly simple in most cases. A visit to news.google.com once a day, subscription to other industry newsletters or visits to other related blogs should easily provide you with enough information for your blog to grow to a significant size within a very short timespan. How to Get Google to Index Your Pages Faster-and With Greater Certainty by Henrik Flensborg http://www.keyword-optimization-tools.com/ Here's a way to get Google to index your new pages faster: One of the problems with getting new pages indexed by Google is making it known to Google that you have created them. There are two ways to make your pages known to Google: Use the 'Submit URL' page or link to the new page from an already indexed page. I would say that the safest way is to link to the page from an already indexed page and let GoogleBot find it when he spiders your site. Safest in two different ways, because there is no risk of oversubmitting. It is more likely to get indexed. The only issue now is selecting the page that will link to this newly created page. I suggest linking to it from 3 different places: From the page where it fits naturally, from your site index map, and from a frequently crawled page. Linking from a page where it fits naturally: Linking from one or more of your pages where the new page fits naturally is a must - you do after all also have human visitors that will love you for this ;-) - it's all not just spiders and search engines you know :-). Linking from your site index map: You should link to your new page from your site index. Because your site index page changes every time you create a new page it is more likely to get spidered more frequently. Another important aspect of a site index is that it links directly to pages that are normally hidden several levels deep. The further away from your homepage a page is - the smaller the chance of getting spidered and indexed. Linking from a frequently crawled page: The very nature of a site index page is that it is changed frequently and so it gets spidered more frequently. But you might have other pages on your site that Google spiders more frequently than the rest. Such pages would also be excellent places to link to your newly created page. But how do you know which pages Google spiders more frequently than others? Two possible solutions: Server logs Depending on where and how your site is hosted you might only have one option. Server logs If you have access to the raw server logs you can determine when GoogleBot last visited each of your pages. You can also reveal the frequency of spidering for each page. These two numbers - 'How fresh' and 'How often' - will give you a good indication of which page is most likely to be spidered by Google - and how soon. Link to your new page from one of the frequently spidered pages, to increase the chance of getting spidered quickly. If you don't have access to your server logs you can always get Google itself to help you. The way to get Google to reveal this information to you is to use the "site:" search modifier. "site:www.yourdomain.com" tells Google to return results exclusively from your domain. Besides the "site:" modifier you must also specify a search term that Google should look for. Pick a search term that you are sure is found on every single page. "Copyright", "home", "about" and other phrases commonly found in standard navigation would be an obvious example. Other choices could be your primary keyword, your company name or your name or email address. For my search at Google I would use: "site:www.keyword-optimization-tools.com keyword" What you should be looking for in the results is a date. The date (if present) is found in the last line for each returned result. The last line of the #1 result for my query as I'm writing this article says: "www.keyword-optimization-tools.com/ - 10k - 1 Feb 2003 - Cached - Similar pages" This tells me that GoogleBot visited my home page on February 1st - and therefor it's a good candidate for housing links to new pages. Perform the same search for your own domain over a period of time to spot the pages that gets spidered frequently. Now you know where to put links to your new pages to have GoogleBot pick them up fast - how you take advantage of this information now is totally up to you. AdSense Keyword Research by Henrik Flensborg http://www.keyword-optimization-tools.com Google AdSense ads are contextual text-based ads that depend very much on the content of the page they are displayed on. Obviously AdSense looks at several different thing to place the page at its correct location in the taxonomy so relevant ads can be selected and shown. And consequently there isn't just one thing that can be changed to get AdSense to pick different ads. One could argue that because it's such a complex algorithm that determines the theme of the page it doesn't really make sense to talk about keyword research and optimization in the usual sense. There are basically two different reasons why you would want to do keyword research and change your pages. 1) To get rid of irrelevant ads, so you don't waste ad space on ads that almost certainly get 0 clicks because they are far away from what the visitor search for and expect to find. 2) To show higher paid ads, so you earn more per click. So is Google AdSense keyword research something that should be treated differently from regular keyword optimization work? Yes it should. A page serving AdSense ads must serve a dual purpose. It must attract enough search engine visitors by focusing on keywords with high demand but little competition. This is the way keywords are normally selected when you want the pages to generate traffic without having to put all your resources into tweaking and tuning the page. It must attract high paying AdSense ads to maximize the revenue generated. Let's say you have a page about "keyword optimization". Through regular keyword research you have decided that "keyword optimization" should be your primary key-phrase. Google show a favorably low number (4,760) of competing pages for "keyword optimization" But a quick look at http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/ reveals that the maximum bid for "keyword optimization" is only $0.76 I know that there isn't a 100% correlation between bids for Overture keywords and for Google AdWords, but it's good enough to demonstrate why you can't rely on ordinary or traditional keyword research when it comes to maximizing Google AdSense income. So what we are after now are additional keywords that are related so they can we woven into the content of the page - and help force AdSense to pick higher paying ads to show on your page. "search engine ranking" would be such a phrase. Google knows of 193,000 pages competing for the phrase "search engine ranking", so it's highly unlikely that you should be able to rank high for that phrase. So traditional keyword research wisdom would say that it shouldn't be targeted, but when it comes to AdSense you have to think differently about this second keyword. A quick look into the Overture View Bids tool show us that the maximum bid is $4.21 So the price an advertiser is willing to pay for clicks to the "search engine ranking" keyphrase is five and a half times more than the maximum bids for "keyword optimization". So besides targeting "keyword optimization" to get targeted traffic to your page, you should also target "search engine ranking" to increase the likelihood that Google's AdSense will pick a higher paying advertizer. WordTracker (of course) would also be an invaluable aid and you can purchase this service for as short as a one-day period. For an invaluable tool for generating supporting keywords you must take a look at Theme Master,which does a great job of picking supporting keywords that helps define the theme of your page. Monetize Your Web Site with Google AdSense by Herman Drost Why would you want to earn a few cents or dollars per click from displaying Google AdSense ads on your web site? Can you really make good money from this source of revenue? Well, multiply those clicks for every page on your web site and you will build a monthly residual income with very little effort. What is Google AdSense? Here is an excerpt taken from Google's FAQ: "Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant, text-based, unobtrusive Google AdWords™ ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages". How much you earn per click depends on how much the advertisers are willing to pay. If the keywords the advertiser has chosen are in high demand you could receive several dollars per click. Alternatively low demand keywords will yield a few cents per click. How does Google AdSense work? 1. Sign up for a new Google Adsense account. It only takes a few minutes. 2. Once your site has been accepted (usually within one day) you will receive a snippet of code to include on your web pages. You can insert this code on as many pages or web sites as you like. Google AdWords will start appearing almost immediately. 3. You earn a few cents or a few dollars per click when someone clicks on the Google AdWords displayed on any of your web pages. Don't create revenue falsely by repetitively clicking on your ads. This will result in Google penalizing or possibly eliminating your site. You may also lose the money you already earned. 4. Viewing your stats - you can check your AdSense earnings anytime by logging into your web-based account. Here is what you will see: Impressions - how many times Google AdSense ads have been displayed on your Web page. Clicks - the number of times an ad is clicked. Clickthrough rate - the percentage of times an ad is clicked, out of the total number of impressions. Your earnings - how much you have earned from Google so far. 5. Google will send you a check every 30 days when you earn $100.00 or more. You will also receive payment at the end of the year, regardless of your account balance. Who is Google AdSense for? Content-based web sites - google advertisers want their ads on web pages that contain highly targeted keywords. This enables the Google search engine to easily spider the site, plus engage the visitor in the web page content. This better prepares the visitors mind to then click on the Google AdWords ad. Theme-based web sites - create a web site that focuses on highly targeted keywords. These should be keywords that are often searched for (high demand) but don't have too many competing web sites (low supply). For more information on this read topic read my article "How to begin to make money online" How to increase your AdSense earnings 1. Choose one topic per page - write content for your topic with a few targeted keyword phrases. Google will then serve ads that are more relevant resulting in higher clickthroughs. 2. Use white space around your ad - this will make your ad stand out from the rest of your page so visitors can easily view it. Google also provides different colors for your ad so it will harmonize with the web page color. 3. Test out your ad placement - Google recommends using the vertical skyscraper format that runs down the side of your page for optimum results. Try testing both horizontal and vertical formats over a period of time to see which format gives you the best results. 4. Create more content-based pages - expand the theme of your web site by creating pages that focus on your keyword phrases. Optimize those pages for the search engines. This will not only attract traffic to those pages but make them more relevant for Google AdWords to be displayed. 5. Site Built It - the perfect tool for creating lots of Adsense Revenue. Site Built It provides all the tools necessary to quickly create keyword-rich web sites that rank high in the search engines. This will produce a flood of traffic to your site of highly targeted visitors. My Personal Experience - "Since I added Google AdSense ads to the article pages on my web site last month (http://www.isitebuild.com), I have earned a nice residual income. Since this extra revenue was unexpected, I am grateful that I took the time to implement the Google AdSense program". Conclusion - give Google AdSense a try by writing keyword-focused pages based upon the interests you are passionate about. You will not only enjoy writing about them, but earn some extra cash as well. Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com Affordable Web Site Design and Low Cost Web Hosting. Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles. subscribe@isitebuild.com. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles Getting Ranked on Google by: Tinu AbayomiPaul Company: FreeTrafficDirectory.com You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren't getting more clicks, and you find out that you're ranked in the 30's, 50's, or heaven forbid, the 300's. "Great", you think, "I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it's a worthless ranking". Not necessarily. If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game's not over yet. If your site's content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How? The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you'd spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood. Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to: http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you're ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant. So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to: http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/ I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it's also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You'll need a free Google API key to use it. Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ Okay, let's say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won't be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts. Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page. This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details - http://www.gorank.com Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you're almost done. Great, you're all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right? Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don't mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There's been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters. What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member's sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days. Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight- my site didn't start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5. So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you're better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That's the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it's great new changes. And yes, there's an even faster, better way to get Google.com's search engine spider to re-index that page, but that's another article, isn't it? ======================================================= Subscribe to Free Traffic Secrets to find out how to get the Googlebot spider sooner at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com to get more time-tested information on getting Free Quality Traffic to Your Site. How to See What Pages of Your Site Google Has In Its Index By Tinu AbayomiPaul There is a lag time between the indexing or updating of your site, and the time it takes to show new results in the database. Depending on your site, where it was linked from, who it was linked from, and who knows what other factors, the amount of time varies. With the method I teach in my book it seems to take two to four days on average for the Googlebot to stop by initially, and then another two days to one week to appear in search listings for the first listing. (You can read more about the book here: http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/book ) But even if it takes more than four to seven days for the Googlebot spider to show up at your site, or to return, if ever, there are several ways you can track the results. First, you can use Google itself. Go to www.google.com and type in site: then your domain name. So for yahoo.com, you’d type in “site:yahoo.com”. The results will show you which pages of your site are showing up in Google. If you know you won’t have time to check on a daily basis, you can use a site called Google Alert, which you can find at http://www.googlealert.com. The great thing about this site is that it will track up to five terms per email address and have them sent to you via email on a daily basis. Using this you can track your ranking for your most important terms, or see how often your competitor’s site comes up versus yours. To use this to see when pages of your site come up, create an account, then in the search terms section, type in, as one word, whatever is between “www” and your site’s suffix (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .uk, etc.) and you will start getting emailed results. The only problem is that the resulting page is sometimes a day behind Google’s actual indexing. But for a free automated resource, you really couldn’t beat it. Until now. Google’s new Web Alerts just came out on the 29th of March. You can access it here: http://www.google.com/webalerts You can use Google’s new Web Alerts service in much the same way. It’s currently in Beta development, so make sure you save the information sent to you. Since it’s so new, you’ll probably want to sign up to both services and compare the results. My favorite use for this is finding out when people mention my name or re-print my article at their sites, so that I can link back, or email to thank them. A big advantage Google.com’s in-house version of the web alerts system is that they have a news version that you can subscribe to, which will help you stay on top of your niche in whatever industry you’re in. Currently I use the Google Alert’s site for several on-going searches, and Google’s Beta Web Alert’s for my most mission-critical, time-sensitive news. There’s yet another way to use Google to track how your site is doing in Google. It will tell you the cached version of your page, which Google stores. Sometimes the date posted next to the listing of the cached page can help give you a good estimate of when Google will be back at your site. For example, at the moment, I seem to see the spider most predictably every day between midnight and 6 am EST since my home page began to score a PR of 5, then periodically at other points in my site during the day. I figured this out by looking at Google’s cache of my home page over a period of one week. This search will tell you pages that Google considers similar to yours. It will also show sites that it considered linked to you, and show sites that carry your full url, hyperlinked or not. It’s not 100% accurate, but it will give you a much better idea than you’d get from guessing - and it’s free. Go to Google’s home page - www.google.com - and type in info:yoursitenameandsuffix. So if your site was ExactSeek.com you’d type info:www.exactseek.com. You can also use site:yoursitenameandsuffix to find out which pages have been indexed by Google’s search engine spider. Curiously, Google used to show different results for info:www.exactseek.com and info:exactseek.com – instead of including results for exactseek.com in the www evaluation. I haven’t seen this much anymore, but if you see one permutation showing up in results for the other, you may want to do both. You’re going to want to bookmark this page and visit it on a weekly basis. The best day to look would be the one week anniversary of what day Google last cached a page at your site. The date will often be shown next to the word “cached” on one of your page results. If the cached page date is the same, that means Google hasn’t been back to your site. Marry this information with your study of your web stats to get more ideas on getting the most out of your weekly or daily exercises involving search engines and links from other sites, not just Google. ===================================================== Subscribe to Free Traffic Secrets to find out how to get the Googlebot spider sooner at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com to get more time-tested information on getting Free Quality Traffic to Your Site. The Budget Webmaster’s 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google By Tinu Abayomi-Paul You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30's, 50's, or heaven forbid, the 300's. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”. Not necessarily. If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How? The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood. Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to: http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant. So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to: http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/ I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it’s also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it. Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000. The term you want won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts. Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page. This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details-http://www.gorank.com Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done. Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right? Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters. What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member’s sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days. Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight– my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5. So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it’s great new changes. And yes, there’s an even faster, better way to get Google.com’s search engine spider to re-index that page, but that’s another article, isn’t it? Well, actually, it's another book. On the next page is all the information on Killer Secret Traffic Weapons- The Google Edition, including a list of 32 Secrets of Google that you be using yourself in the next few minutes if you chose. It will tell you how to get your site into Google in two- nine days, increase your Google page rank as well as how to target, and be ranked for, better keywords for your site. But before we proceed, here's a gift for visiting this site, that you can get completely free of charge. Once you have it, you'll be landed on the next page automatically. ================================================= Subscribe to Free Traffic Secrets to find out how to get the Googlebot spider sooner at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com to get more time-tested information on getting Free Quality Traffic to Your Site. How to Increase Web Site Visitors For Relevant Terms Using Your Less Relevant Listings By Tinu AbayomiPaul Completely by accident and through no effort of my own, besides the effort to get my site spidered by Yahoo's Slurp Search Engine Spider and Google's Googlebot Search Engine spider, I've seen an accidental increase in the visitors to my web site. Suddenly, I was ranking first page for Google, Yahoo and AOL for the phrases like "picture of William Hung", and "william hung she bangs". The Good news is, this means that when the Yahoo Slurp spider came to the site and indexed my front page last Saturday, (and no, I didn't submit my site OR pay for inclusion), my results were in the search engine by Sunday apparently, which is when I started getting clicks from Yahoo for this unusual term. The Bad News is, William Hung, except for being an example of the power of Free Marketing, has NOTHING to do with my site! So how does one fix this situation? How do you turn an accidental good ranking into several good rankings for other terms? Or say you've got great rankings for a relevant, but fairly insignificant term? The solution is the same. Just give the spider more of what it wants. Google, Yahoo - and apparently their search partners - love that page. So, first thing I did was improve the page in question. At the time there was no picture of William Hung on the page that was ranking so well. It's important that you satisfy web site visitors who accidentally happen up on your site. It only happens once in a while, but sometimes the person who come by is also interested in your regular content. The next thing I did, was create other pages I believed the two sites would like. Since the articles here primarily offer resources to webmasters who want to learn how to increase the number of visitors to their sites, all I had to do was tweak some of the wording to the liking of both those visitors and the search engine spiders, and write one more article. How did I know what the search engines would like, and how that would increase the number of people who would come to the site? Well, I found out that some guarded information about the latest optimization tips for Yahoo and Google was available on the Web FREE. (If you want to know what that resource is, just download the updated Free Google Optimization Guide.) Once I had the pages optimized to my satisfaction, all I had to do was link some of those pages to the front of my site (where the article was then located) and wait for the increase in traffic to my site. Google spiders me every day like clockwork ever since I made this tiny change to my website that increased my site rank from zero to five in January. Of course, I then had to figure out if my secret technique to baiting the Google spider was going to work with Yahoo's new search engine spider. Not only did it work, but it worked faster than leading the Google spider to specific page of my site! Yahoo's spider is not back at my site on a daily basis yet, but it does come regularly, finding new pages, and reindexing the area with the most content. So there you have it. If your site has been indexed well for a term you didn't really want, first, make the page as relevant as possible to the visitors who end up at your site. Next, give the search engine spider "food" to eat that is more relevant to your site. It doesn't hurt to optimize this page. You can now download the new optimization guide for FREE. IF you're one of the next 100 subscribers. Only 1000 copies will be available for download so get yours now. Third and last, get the spider to come on back to your site. If you know how to bait a search engine spider, great! You'll get your results faster, and since the spider finds the link on its' own, you may get better placement. Or, you can submit your site to one of Inktomi's partners, and/or Google and wait the 6-8 weeks it takes to be included. ================================================ Subscribe to Free Traffic Secrets to find out how to get the Googlebot spider sooner at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com to get more time-tested information on getting Free Quality Traffic to Your Site. Google Search Engine Ranking: High Search Engine Placement Tips Do you find many of your pages in Google? Quickly becoming the number one search engine, ranking high in Google should be a major marketing consideration to every business with a web site. Optimization and a decent ranking could even earn your placement in Yahoo! web pages. Whether you are having a professional do the work for you, walk you through the process or if you are up for learning all of the tips and strategies on your own, it is always important to have some knowledge on what it takes to gain a top ranking placement in all of the major engines -- especially Google. Google Search Engine Facts: Google uses a crawler named Googlebot which crawls the web approximately every thirty days. It is not necessary to submit any page to Google. If you do submit, submit only your most important page to this search engine. Googlebot is a deep crawler and should crawl all of your pages. Google supplies ranking results for placement in Netscape Search, the ODP, Anzwers, Yahoo! and Ilor. Google can crawl pages in ASP, JSP, CFM, PHP, Excel, Microsoft Word, newsgroups, PDF and PostScript files, Power Point and Rich Text formats. Google loves sites with a high number of legitimate, relevant incoming links. Google hates spam. Search Engine Placement Now that you know a few of the important facts, what can you do to win this search engine over and gain a top ranking to achieve visible placement? This is where those great web site optimization tips come in handy. Determine Your Web Theme Google is a "theme" based engine. They like to provide search results to web sites that primarily contain a lot of information on on specific topic. You should be able to name the "theme" of your site in a two to three word phrase. Create Many Pages! Google loves large sites with loads of quality information. The larger your site is, the more likely you are to gain a ranking under multiple variations of your keyword phrases. Heavily Cross Link Your Pages This not only makes it easier for Googlebot to crawl through your site, it will also increase your Page Rank and make your pages easier for your visitors to navigate through. Include a link to your home page on all of your pages. Your home page will be viewed as your most important page. The more links coming to it, the better. Keep All Important Pages On Top Keep all of your important pages on the first level of your site. You should never include important pages below the first level. Include A Site Map Again, this will assist in presenting Googlebot with links to all of your pages from one central location. Don't forget to include your links in text and add descriptions too! Analyze your competitors sites for their titles, keyword weight, placement, word count and link popularity and attempt to model your own web site optimization after these sites. ============================================ Web Submission Services ~ Providing Search Engine Advertising Services Specializing In Traffic Generating HIGH Search Engine Ranking Results http://www.internetmarketingwebsites.com 904-992-4341 Getting (and Keeping) a Top Search Engine Ranking by Tom Dahm So, you've developed a great site, found a reliable, affordable Web host, and set up your online store. You're ready to do business, but where are your customers? Maybe they can't find you in the crowd. July 25, 2000 The most recent Internet size estimate is 1 billion pages - and growing. 85-90% of all Internet users rely on search engines to locate sites, but only 7% of them look past the first three pages of search results. Those top slots are valuable and competition for them is intense. Let's look at several ways to move your site to the top. Content, Content, Content You've heard it before, but we can't stress it enough: the three most important factors in your search engine rank are: content, content, content. Good content is critical to a good search engine score because many elements of search engine algorithms rely on page content to score Web sites. It also increases the probability that Yahoo or other popular directories will list your site. Good content is vital. It's fundamental to every legitimate search engine strategy. Link Popularity Common optimization techniques (TITLE tags, META tags, and keyword frequency) are important because most search engines rely on them to score pages. Automated tools can help you simplify this task and leave you free to focus on another increasingly popular ranking strategy: link popularity (the total number of Web sites that link to yours). This technique requires no additional coding - just old-fashioned networking. Content is still critical since your site must contain valuable information that other sites want to share with their visitors. Search engines determine your link popularity score by counting the number of outside links to your site (your internal page links don't count). Some use more complex algorithms that consider link importance - they rank the importance of the links and calculate a weighted link popularity score. Sites linked to "important" sites are more likely to be ranked higher. For instance, if Web Developer's Journal were to link to your site, that link could be worth more than 20 links from your friends' personal Web pages. In fact, it may be worth more since some search engines refuse to include links to free sites (like Geocities homepages), because spammers can use them to set up bogus links. Many search engines are giving link popularity greater weight in their algorithms because they believe it indicates quality. After all, other sites are most likely to link to a site that displays good content, design, and usability. Google relies heavily on link popularity to rank sites. Other search engines factor it into their algorithms. Look at how some of the largest search engines use link popularity: Search Engine Link Popularity AltaVista Uses link analysis and ranks sites based on "good" link popularity. Tends to ignore links generated through "link exchange" programs. Excite Uses link popularity and quality data to determine relevancy. Inktomi Link popularity is one ranking criteria. GO Link popularity is one ranking criteria. Google Uses weighted link popularity and analyzes link content almost exclusively to determine site rankings. Recently partnered with Yahoo - the largest directory. Infoseek Link popularity is considered in the new retrieval algorithm. Site rankings based on link popularity impose huge penalties on new sites that haven't accumulated many links. This is where schmoozing counts. When you contact webmasters, offer to link to their site in return for a link and remind them how important link popularity can be to their overall ranking. While you're building links, remember to pay close attention to your HTML tags, keywords, and content. Until you have a large number of "good" links, those basic techniques are your best bet to improve your ranking. Avoid Spam and HTML "Tricks" As part of their continuing battle against spammers, many search engines have tightened their site eligibility policies. AltaVista recently instituted one of the most restrictive in the industry, banning sites for one or more of the following reasons: Using a hosting service that also hosts adult sites or documented spammers. Improper use of Gateway pages - also called Doorway or Jump pages. Submitting the same URL repeatedly or a large number of URLs from the same site. Excessive keyword repetition. Inserting keywords unrelated to the page's content. Hidden text. META refresh commands set to less than 30 seconds. The first two items may surprise you. Most beginning webmasters look for a Web host based on cost first, then speed and reliability, when their provider's policy on adult sites may be just as important. AltaVista sometimes retaliates against adult sites' spam techniques by blocking those sites' underlying IP addresses entirely (as does GO.com). If you host with the same provider, your site may share that banned IP address. Choose your host carefully: you are judged by the company you keep! AltaVista also seems to be taking a hard line against gateway pages - which they define as spam if the pages contain little or no real content. This is controversial; AltaVista dropped some sites that thought they were using them legitimately. Actually, the legitimacy of gateway pages has long been an issue with search engines. Many engines tolerated - but did not encourage - the pages. Now that AltaVista has become openly hostile, avoid submitting gateway pages to them and monitor the other search engines' policies closely. The balance of AltaVista's criteria is common throughout the industry. Some search engine algorithms are so strict that you can be penalized for innocent design mistakes such as inadvertently using hidden text. Learn the pitfalls before you submit. Several online tools will scan your Web pages and warn you about possible violations. NetMechanic will analyze a page for free at http://www.netmechanic.com/powerpack/optimize.htm. Be careful. Tricks may boost your site temporarily - then get it banned permanently. Ask The Experts: You spend months tuning your Web site to achieve high rankings, and then have it drop. Or no matter what you try, your site never gets a good ranking. Do you know why? If you don't have the time or expertise to ferret out the reasons yourself, consider paying for expert advice. Thousands of consultants are eager to advise you about all aspects of the Internet. You can even hire a consultant to advise you on which consultant to hire! Expect to pay a consulting firm anywhere from $35 per page to $10,000+ for complete site analysis and optimization of large sites. The quality of advice varies: carefully investigate the company's background and methods before committing. Look closely at their own Web site: is it professional and appealing? What exactly do they guarantee to do for you? Be skeptical of services that "guarantee your site a Top 10 listing!" What methods do they use? You certainly don't want to hire a consultant who uses techniques that can get you banned. Will they provide references? Good consultants supply focused, personalized service, but many businesses can't afford the expense. Webmasters for smaller sites often find less expensive automated search engine tools to be an efficient way to tune their Web sites. This requires a more do-it-yourself approach. While a consultant might personally optimize your page code and content, most automated tools require you to make the changes yourself. You can purchase or subscribe to tools that provide a full suite of search engine and page optimization services. The tools are simple to use and give you advice that is easy to understand and implement on your own. Some companies sell software packages for your PC that analyze your pages and monitor your search engine rankings, while others offer similar tools online. NetMechanic's Search Engine Power Pack is an online tool that tracks your site's ranking and provides keyword assistance to improve your position. Expert advice can come at a high price, but it doesn't have to. Get the best value for your money by carefully researching your options and evaluating your requirements. If you need immediate, reliable advice, a well-designed online tool may be your most cost-effective investment. Constant Monitoring Is Crucial Search engine ranking strategy is an ongoing process that begins during design and never stops. You may spend more time tweaking your site than you spent designing it! At a minimum, you must: Monitor your site's rankings by keyword on a weekly basis. Experiment with keyword and page content modifications. Be alert to changes in search engine policies and requirements. Today's legal design technique may be spam tomorrow if search engine policies change. If you depend on search engines to deliver traffic to your Web site, then a high search engine ranking is critical to your success. Think you can't afford to spend the time and effort it takes to get there? You can't afford not to. Tom Dahm is the Chief Operations Officer of Netmechanic, Inc. http://netmechanic.net Google's AdWords vs. Ordinary Search Engine Optimization by Perry Marshall A lot of people ask me about the merits of buying clicks on a search engine with AdWords, vs. getting free visitors with what's called "search engine optimization" - loading up your web pages with strategic keywords so you can get ranked #10 or #3 or #1 on Google's free search. Well at first glance free is certainly better than paid, but there are some big IF's that you need to consider first! Remember: you can only optimize a website for maybe ten words and phrases - not hundreds - so you should choose very, very carefully. But the most important thing is choosing the RIGHT words and phrases to optimize for. Now here's the kicker: If you don't use a pay per click strategy to determine which words and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you will almost always choose the wrong keywords. The words you initially think you want are almost always different than the ones that actually work - believe me, I've made that mistake many times. Considering it takes 30 days to several months to see results when you're playing the search engine optimization game, you CANNOT afford to target the wrong keywords. When you do pay per click campaigns properly, you'll see that there are almost always a few really productive words and phrases that only 2-3 people are bidding on, instead of 10 or 20 bidders. What that means is that those people are not optimizing their websites for those same keywords either. Well just like pay per click, search engine phrases have varying degrees of competitiveness. If you want a #1 ranking for the phrase "Digital Camera" it's going to be a LOT harder than getting a #1 ranking for "Kodak DX6340" which is a popular digital camera. And the traffic will be much more targeted, too. When you do search engine optimization, you must pick battles you can win. So here's the lesson: Use my Definitive Guide to Google AdWords to properly set up a pay per click campaign, Determine which keywords are productive, THEN do search engine optimization based on what really works. Then you'll get all kinds of free traffic and even more income from your website. How to Dominate Google Adwords from Day 1Copyright 2005 Anik SingalWhether you're promoting an affiliate program or your own product, using pay per click traffic is almost necessary. Wait, let me re-phrase that - pay per click traffic is almost necessary to TEST. Let's be frank, this form of traffic does NOT work for all niches and businesses. Also, succeeding with pay per click traffic is not as easy as just putting up an ad and sending traffic to your main site. There are lots of elements involved such as your ad, your competition, the landing page, and how much you're paying. Obviously, to discuss all these elements, we'd need to write a book - however, this particular article is going to make you an expert on how to pay less than all your competition and out rank them at the same time. Google has a unique system of ranking their ads that allows you to be on the top even if you're paying the least per click. How? Just make sure you have the highest click-through rate on your ad... There are two main things you need to do to make sure you can get to the top while paying the least. 1. Have a killer start - don't be cheap, spend the most in the beginning. 2. Consistently test your ads to improve your click through rate. ------------------
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they launch a PPC campaign is that they get cheap in the beginning and try to start slow. That's all wrong. You need to spend the most in the beginning. Go in with a bang...here are two reasons why. 1. If the strategy just isn't going to work, find out early and get out - don't waste precious time. 2. More importantly, spend the most on PER click in the beginning. Why? If you spend the most on "per click" in the beginning, that's the only way you can convince Google to put you on the top. You have no click through record, so you have to make up for that by spending more. By spending the most in the beginning, you'll get your ad on the front page and get quick exposure. This way you'll quickly build up your click-through record and can immediately start decreasing your "cost per click" without losing your spot. Now, if you had started with a low cost per click, you'd end up on some page far down, never really get any exposure and could potentially take weeks/months before you build up any kind of click through rate. So, first lesson, start fast - go in with a higher "per-click" budget. Get in strong and you'll see the best results. ------------------
The next best way to increase your ad rankings and decrease your "per-click" costs is to always test new ads. Google allows you to run two ads at the same time for the same keywords, they will automatically rotate your ads, one after the other. This way you can slowly tweak the headlines, the ad, the domain name - everything and find what works best. Always do this and you'll slowly see your click through rates increase - as your click through rises, you can decrease your "cost per click" without losing your spot in the ad. So, bottom line, even if you're in a niche with a lot of competition - you can still dominate. Go in strong, try to get your ad some quick exposure to build a clickthrough rate fast. Then, quickly start decreasing your per click costs. Just a quick word of caution, if you use this strategy, make sure to actively monitor your adwords account. ALSO, make sure you set your daily limit to something you can afford losing. You'd be surprised how quickly Google can eat up your mo*ney! Alright, now you're equipped with some advanced tips on how to quickly take over a niche in Google. If you have any further questions, please contact Anik Singal at Support@AffiliateClassroom.com. The Secret to Adwords SuccessCopyright © 2004 Darren PowerIt seems at the moment that everybody is telling you that the easiest and quickest way to make money online is with Google Adwords and affiliate programs. It sounds so easy. You join a programme, get a link, choose a couple of keywords, put up an ad and the money flows. Many have tried and many have failed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible to make money this way and to be very successful. There are many people making $100’s per day from their Adwords campaigns. But those that are successful don’t follow the herd, they think for themselves. As with all things in life the greater success is found on the ‘road less travelled’ which means if you do what everybody else is doing you will get the results that everybody else is getting. And the fact is that everybody else, or at least the majority, are trying maybe making a little money, getting disheartened and moving on to something else. We need to be different. So what does our average money maker do? First he goes to Click Bank and visits the ‘Money & Employment’ category and he selects one of the top 10 products. That is not bad strategy but maybe we should be a little different if we must sell in the making money online space then why don't we find excellent products that aren't available on Click Bank. A little but a bit of work at Google will uncover a number of directories where we can find products to promote. Or better still why not find out who the top names are in the making money online space and search out their affiliate programs. Yanik Silver, Marlon Sanders & John Reese all operate their own affiliate programs & these guys also have excellent materials that will help you to sell their products. But even better still we could target a totally different market. There are millions of people spending millions of dollars on things other than how to get rich products. Checkout these links to see what people are searching on this month. http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html http://50.lycos.com/ http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/ Once our Money Maker (MM) has selected the same product to promote as everybody else he then chooses the same keywords as everybody else to bid on at Google. He will type those words into the Keyword tool at Overture or into Adwords Analyzer. Then he will have a big list of the same keywords as everybody else promoting that product. Do you think there might be a little competition for these keywords? You think those words might be expensive to bid on? You betcha. What we need to do is think a little differently whatever market we choose there will be competition and if there is no competition it probably means that nobody is spending in this market. We need to think ‘outside of the box’. We need to get inside the minds of the typical buyer of a product. We need to think what related problems they may be having what other things they will be searching for and we need to create our own keyword list. Finally MM writes one ad, that will show for all his keywords. His ad describes the features of the product. We on the other hand will write an ad highlighting the benefits of the product. All those eyeballs will be attracted to our ‘sizzle, not the sausage’. We will include a call to action. We will have multiple ad groups separated out into themes, our ads will be relevant to the keywords in the group and we will have two ads for each group so we can see what works and what doesn’t. We will test, test & test some more. Our success will be found on the road less travelled. There is still plenty of room in the Adwords pool as long as we are prepared to think for ourselves and not expect a free ride. Darren Power is the author of The Money Seed your step by step guide to making money online. You can pick up his free ebooks at www.themoneyseed.com. For further free resources related to this article visit www.themoneyseed.com/articles Surefire Google AdWords FormulaCopyright © 2004 John GergyeSuccess with Google Adwords isn't quite as easy as some would have you believe. Still just about anyone who is persistent can succeed if they'll but implement a consistent testing program. Since testing can produce a nearly constant improvement in your click through rate (CTR). Here's the surefire three-step formula that's as easy as one.two.three. 1) Surefire Step #1: Develop Your Initial Test Ads Notice I said ads not ad. You want to present two competing ideas to your market right away. Letting your prospects tell you which they prefer. Tip: Test headlines first while keeping the body copy the same. Headlines can have a huge impact. Tip: Set it up so Google serves up both ads equally. Otherwise Google will present the ad that's producing the most click throughs more often which will skew your test. 2) Surefire Step #2: Monitor Results After 40 clicks review your results. Google displays the ads under your listings. Showing the number of clicks each ad got. Here's early results from a campaign I tested:
In case you're wondering I have no idea why one ad worked better. And really don't care. Marketing is about "what works" not so much "why it works". CRITICAL STEP: You've got an ad that produces clicks. Now you want to improve on th |
