Improving Your Website’s ROI with PPC Advertising

Pay per Click advertising provides a fantastic opportunity to attract targeted traffic to your website. But with great rewards come equally large challenges. So what can you do to make sure your PPC campaigns succeed? When it comes to marketing your website, you are almost spoilt for choice. Deciding what is the most effective search engine marketing strategy certainly isn’t as straightforward as it may seem, particularly when also looking to maximise Return On Investment (ROI). Search engine optimisation is a traditional favourite. It builds the strength of a site and improves its authority within search engines, all in an effort to improve rankings. Social media is a contemporary alternative. By engaging with customers through websites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can reach a huge audience; building traffic and enhancing your reputation in one fell swoop. Completing the modern online marketing triumvirate is Pay per Click advertising. Like SEO, PPC relies on search engine results pages to gain visibility. These sponsored ads ordinarily feature to the right of the organic results and occasionally in the top banner. As with the organic results, they also rely on keywords for success.Unlike SEO and social media marketing, Pay per Click requires ongoing investment. In terms of ROI, this can pose an issue. PPC is an expense, which if not managed correctly, can work against your return on investment. How Much Does PPC Cost? The cost of Pay per Click advertising is largely based on its success. First of all you have to determine what keywords you are going to target. Again, like SEO, making sure that your adverts are appearing for the right search phrases can make all the difference when it comes to attracting clicks and gaining conversions. With your optimised ad copy written, you have to determine how much you are prepared to bid for your keywords. This, understandably, is an important step. Unlike SEO, where positions can’t be bought, you can use the bidding process to get a leg up on the competition. This might mean paying over the odds, but it will gain you visibility. The amount you bid though will be the sum you are charged each time your advert is clicked on, so recklessness is not advisable. Budgeting your PPC Campaigns Going hand in hand with your bid prices is your budget. You need to set a budget that will allow you to gain maximum traffic, but won’t significantly impact your ROI. Starting low and building your budget, along with your confidence, is always recommended for anybody new to PPC. The budget is a balancing act. As with the old business adage, sometimes you do have to speculate to accumulate. However, the time to start pumping money in isn’t necessarily at the start with a fresh campaign. Often it is best to wait for your adverts to mature. Optimising Pay per Click Ads PPC advertising campaigns need to be continuously optimised. Before you set it live and unleash your ads onto the search engines, you have to build a solid list of keywords and negative keywords [see: What Are Negative Keywords]. Whilst the keywords make sure you are seen on the most targeted pages, negatives will stop you appearing on those with little or no relevance [see: How Negative Keywords Can Make Your PPC Budget Go Further]. If you are going to really maximise your ROI and get the most from PPC, you need to monitor your campaign regularly. Negative keywords can appear at any time; when they do, you need to be able to act fast. The more impressions your site receives without earning a click, the less relevant you will appear to the search engines. This lack of relevance will work against you, leading to higher bid prices and greater costs. A good enough reason to regularly optimise your campaign, eradicating costly irrelevant clicks and impressions. Conversely, the better your Click through Rate, the higher your Quality Score [see: Ways to Improve Quality Score] will be and the lower your bid cost becomes. When you’re paying less for clicks, your budget goes further and your potential for conversions increases – another trio of good news.Making Your Budget Go Further To really get the most from your adverts and stretch every financial sinew of your budget, then you need to produce targeted campaigns. To add focus you can ensure that your adverts only appear at the most popular times of day or within a certain locality. Geographical targeting allows you to go after certain cities, counties or countries, ensuring that you don’t appear for searchers anywhere else. Ad scheduling will mean that you can pinpoint times that your ads are active to within 15 minutes. Both will help etch out a little extra ROI. When it comes to choosing how your ads are distributed there are three basic choices; broad match, exact and phrase. Broad requires the most optimisation and incurs the most risk [see: The Dangers of Broad Match in PPC Advertising]. Exact and phrase match ensure that your ads only appear on SERPs that are related to your specified keywords – very much the safe options. The Danger of Click Fraud One other significant danger to your PPC campaign and ROI is click fraud. Essentially this is where malicious elements deliberately click on your adverts to drain your budget. As you can imagine, this gets very costly, very quickly. We have covered this in the past with our post: Do You Suspect Click Fraud? Here’s a Simple Solution… If you do find suspicious behaviour on your account, make sure you locate it and pass on your concerns to the search engine in question. They should then isolate the culprit and make sure they are unable to click on your adverts in future. There are many financial benefits of online marketing. With greater focus, variety of campaigns and exposure comes the opportunity to improve your website’s ROI. By integrating PPC with your current Internet marketing work, you can make sure that your site is being seen where it counts the most and bring more customers to your pages. Optimise PPC, Boost ROI Pay per Click advertising isn’t without its risks. However, when properly managed and professionally maintained, your campaigns can flourish. To get you off on the right foot, you might want to check out these 11 tips to improve your AdWords campaign. So if your website is in need of a little extra targeted traffic and you want to improve conversions, give PPC a try. Done properly , you could well see a major surge in your ROI as a result.Source: Improving Your Website's ROI with PPC Advertising

Expand your PPC Reach

Over the past 6 or 7 years, One of My friend consumed a lot of training materials on Pay Per Click advertising. He’ve seen some really great stuff and a lot of not so great stuff too.

One thing that has bugged him is the constant rehashing of the same material. Just to get everyone up to speed. However, he felt like most people who’ve done a fair bit of PPC in the past would already know 90% of the course material. It’s the 10% they don’t know that they are buying the course for.

Which is why we’ve created a 14 part (2 week) Advanced PPC Bootcamp.

They set out to create a course that tries to switch these numbers around. So giving you more of that 10% part, and less of the stuff you already know.

Each video is anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour plus long. They’ve designed them to be thorough and cover the material with specific examples. However, They’ve tried to ensure that they are fluff free and cut to the chases as quickly an efficiently as possible.

These are designed for intermediate to advanced users.

few day back they’re putting together a big package to celebrate SpeedPPC turning 3. they’re planning on giving this course away during this birthday week as a free bonus (plus some other stuff). Look out for more details soon!

How to improve Google’s Quality Score to decrease costs and increase ROI

Google AdWords Quality Score is the single most powerful influence on whether your campaign makes it or not. With a poor quality score rating, your campaign will be stopped in its tracks. Find out the different types of quality scores, how they’re calculated for Search and Content Networks and most importantly, how you can harness it to significantly cut your costs and increase your return on investment. If your Quality Score card is currently low or needs improving, then pick up some practical tips on how you can get back into Google’s ‘good books’. Make or break your campaigns now.

SEO Is Far From Dead

The search engine optimization industry is quite crazy at times when you take a step back and really take a look at things. If you have been in the industry for quite a while you will know that SEO has changed drastically from what it once was back in the day.

For a very long time the search engines have been significantly trying to eliminate those who spam the search engines only to increase short winded search results that might have worked a few years ago but might not be so potent in today’s business world. Search engine marketing is a very dynamic form of marketing and is always going to be changing which is actually quite a good thing.

It is an industry that is set to evolve and not become stagnant leaving entrepreneurs and innovators coming up with new and exciting ways to spread a message on the web. As quick as the internet is moving forward there are some things that are just never going to change when it comes to building your business online.

1. Being A Marketer: Being a marketer is something that is always going to be necessary when approaching the online space. I have said this before that it will be even more important in the near future to be wearing a marketing hat when trying to spread your message online. This is something I feel very strongly about when it comes to search engine optimization. Software programs and science like approaches are not going to put you into the shoes of your audience. Efforts like conducting keyword research are going to require a person to be able to get inside the head of their audience and anticipate what type of words they might use in order to find you.

2. Communication: I don’t care what business you are in if you cannot communicate with your target audience your business will simply never grow online. You can’t build a business brand online without communicating your message which is why good quality communication will be even more important as time goes on. Shoving your website URL into 1,000 directories is not quality communication, writing 500 articles with the hopes of them making it into search results is not communication either.

Personally I like the direction the SEO industry is taking right now. I can see it slowly cleaning itself up little by little. In the grand scheme of things the search engine marketing industry is unbelievably young compared to other forms of marketing and advertising like newspapers. We are still on the nose end of things and there is plenty of time to really weed out the bad apples. The SEO is dead claim is simply not true; businesses large and small are simply trying to approach it at different angles while incorporating new elements. I think what is happening is that the commerce world has realized that rankings are not the end all be all. At the end of the day they are important to the overall success over your business but they are simply one ingredient to your whole marketing plan. If others want to claim that SEO is dead because some of us are incorporating many new efforts into our marketing plan than call it what you want. The reality is that you, your business and your message have to visible in more areas than just the search results. The reality is that if you are not branching out into many other path ways it will take your business a little longer to spread its message.

Customers and clients want to see you in as many areas as possible trying to reach them tastefully with a variety of sources and efforts. For some of the larger branded keywords search results are just infiltrated with other items that SEO will never be able to really fight. You now have image results, and live social feeds along with stock ticker symbols and a variety of other industry specific information that no matter what you do with search engine optimization you are not going to appear. Take the time and put together a tasteful SEO approach and your business will grow the right way with substance.

Different Types of Links

Types of links and how to get them

Using a arbitrary ficticious example of an informational site about real estate law. **I do not currently work with any sites of this type.

1. Authority links
How to obtain them: Start with your related category in the Google Directory
What to look for:
-Top rankings for big terms - city or state + real estate, vertical category + lawyers
-Sites that currently offer links out
-Sites that would benefit from offering users your content

2. Directory links
How to obtain them: Pony up some cash
What to look for: Generally easy to find niche directories, don’t go overboard with more than a few directories per month, quarter, etc.

3. Reciprocal links
How to obtain them: Make some friends - Don’t go overboard
What to look for: Strong links that are complementary to your site.

4. Run of site links
How to obtain them: Easy to buy
What to look for: Sites that are highly on topic to you.

5. One way links from friends or related sites.
How to obtain them: Go to conferences and tradeshows, e-mail folks and make friends, offer something useful in return.
What to look for: People in complementary niches

6. Edu and .Gov links
How to obtain them: Be nice to future interns. Offer some career assistance and/or advice.
What to look for: .edus and .gov TLD extensions - Da ‘hoo recently changed some things to use siteexplorer, so most the good tools broke (sorry, I’m not a developer), but you can still used advanced search to restrict searches to these TLD types.

7. Radio station, television, magazine, or newspaper links
How to obtain them: Buy ‘em, or find a journalist
What to look for: Local news or someone looking to write a story.

8. Press release links
How to obtain them: Find sites that offer press release submission services and submit your NEWS (*note - this does not mean any crap you just want to link stuff)
What to look for: People in your niche who want news as content.

9. Article bio links
How to obtain them: Write a few articles, or have some written for you. Rinse, repeat.
What to look for: Industry authority sites that accept submissions from guest writers

10. RSS/ Blog aggregated links
How to obtain them: Pretty easy - start your blog and aggregate - also known as scraper links.
What to look for: Blog and RSS directories to submit to, and tagging sites.

11. Presell Page Links
How to obtain them: Obtaining presell pages takes link negotiations to a whole new level. Good luck outsourcing this. There are opportunities to purchase presell pages.
What to look for: Sites open to advertising that aren’t going crazy with it. Look for the happy medium.

Google's ranking formula

Google uses about 200 ranking factors to determine the position of a web page in the search results. Unfortunately, Google does not reveal the list of ranking factors and how exactly they are weighted.

Google's ranking formula is a business secret. The problem is that your web pages must have all of these 200 elements if you want to see your pages on Google's first result page.

The web pages that are listed on Google's first result page for your search terms obviously have all the ranking elements that are needed to get a top 10 position on Google for that search term.

If you want to be listed for the same search term, it makes sense to analyze the top ranked pages.

In which page elements do they use the search term? How many links do the top ranked pages have? How many of these links contain the search term? How often should you use the search term in the different web page elements and the links?

Analyzing the top 10 pages will help you to greatly improve the rankings of your own web pages for your search terms.

The easiest way to analyze the top 10 ranked pages and your own web pages is to use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.

Google SEO Report Card

Google ran search engine optimization audit on its own websites/products and compiled a report – Google’s SEO Report Card. From the SEO Report Card, Google’s search engine optimization audit can be categorized in three major SEO subjects:
>>Search Result Presentation: Title tag formats and lengths, description meta tag use, Google sitelink triggering and effectiveness, and main page result clearness on Google
>>URLs and Redirects: Directory forms, subdomain forms, 301s, canonicalization
>>On-page Optimizations: Heading tag use, H1 tag use, logo image link destination, logo image alt text, and descriptive internal anchor text
The 100 Google’s websites/products that have gone through the rating process in the SEO Report Card, include:
Advertising and publishing systems: Google Adwords and Google Adsense
Users’ search trend tools: Google Insights for Search, Google Trends
Blogging / feed management tools: Blogger and Feedburner
Personal profile: Profiles
Site search features: Google Site Search and Google Custom Search Engines
Product Tools: Google Store and Google Products
Other tools / services: Picasa Web Albums, Google Finance, Map Maker, Fast Flip, Knol and more

Google Instant - a fundamental shift in search

Google is already one of the fastest search engines on the planet — but apparently that isn’t fast enough.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s top search executive, announced a “fundamental shift” in how search operates with the launch of Google Instant at a press event in San Francisco Wednesday morning.
Google Instant still looks like the search engine’s home page people are accustomed to, but the results begin streaming in real time as a user starts typing out a search. When a user types in “SFM,” a search result for SFMOMA — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the event is being held — appears before the full search query is even typed.
A Google engineer later showed search results for local weather appearing after typing just the letter “W”.
Clicking on the search button or hitting “Enter” makes Google Search behave the way it always has — it brings up search results for your specific request.
Mayer said Google has spent a lot of time optimizing search on Google’s servers, bringing response time down to about 300 milliseconds, and on the network, though the latter depends on individual Internet connections.
But that’s just one second typically. Humans take 9 seconds to enter a search query and 15 seconds to select a result — that’s 24 out of the 25 seconds spent o the average search. So, Google has been focusing on how to optimize the “physical” aspects of search — the typing and the thinking that a user does when searching. She said she expects users to save anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds per search.
“We want to make search fast, fun and interactive,” Mayer said.
Google Instant will be rolling out starting today for Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 8. The service will roll out internationally throughout the week.
Google Instant will roll out on mobile devices later this year.

Google Ranking Factor Checklist

There are "over 200 SEO factors" that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). Few of them are listed below :-

1. Alleged POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors (38)
(Keeping in mind the converse, of course, that when violated, some of these factors
immediately jump into the NEGATIVE On-Page Ranking Factors domain.)

The term "Keyword" below refers to the "Keyword Phrase", which can be one word or more.
ON-Page SEO Factors Brief Note
---------------------------
For keyword selection, try Google Ad Words - Google Trends

1 Keyword in URL
First word is best, second is second best, etc.

2 Keyword in Domain name
Same as in page-name-with-hyphens

** Keywords - Header **

3 Keyword in Title tag
Keyword in Title tag - close to beginning
Title tag is of 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.

4 Keyword in Description meta tag
Shows theme - less than 200 chars.
Google no longer "relies" upon this tag, but will often use it.

5 Keyword in Keyword metatag
Shows theme - less than 10 words.
Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance.
No single word should appear more than twice.
If not, it may be considered spam. Google purportedly no longer uses this tag, but others do.

-
Keywords - Body

-
6 Keyword density in body text
5-20% - (all keywords/ total words)
Some report topic sensitivity - the keyword spamming threshold % varies with the topic.

7 Individual keyword density
1-6% - (each keyword/ total words)

8 Keyword in H1, H2 and H3
Use Hx font style tags appropriately

9 Keyword font size
"Strong is treated the same as bold, italic is treated the same as emphasis" . . . By Matt Cutts

10 Keyword proximity (for 2+ keywords)
Directly adjacent is best

11 Keyword phrase order
Does word order in the page match word order in the query?
Try to anticipate query, and match word order.

12 Keyword prominence (how early in page/tag)
Can be important at top of page, in bold, in large font

Keywords - Other

13 Keyword in alt text
Should describe graphic - Do NOT fill with spam
(Was part of Google Florida OOP - tripped a threshold - may still be in effect to some degree as a red flag, when summed with all other on-page optimization - total page optimization score - TPOS).

14 Keyword in links to site pages(anchor text)
Links out anchor text use keyword?

NAVIGATION - INTERNAL LINKS

15 To internal pages- keywords?
Link should contain keywords.
The filename "linked to" should contain the keywords.
Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only.

16 All Internal links valid?
Validate all links to all pages on site.
Use a free link checker. I like this one. http: //www . dead-links . com/

17 Efficient - tree-like structure
TRY FOR two clicks to any page - no page deeper than 4 clicks

18 Intra-site linking
Appropriate links between lower-level pages

19 To external pages- keywords?
Google patent - Link only to good sites. Do not link to link farms. CAREFUL - Links can and do go bad, resulting in site demotion. Unfortunately, you must devote the time necessary to police your outgoing links - they are your responsibility.

20 Outgoing link Anchor Text
Google patent - Should be on topic, descriptive

21 Link stability over time
Google patent - Avoid "Link Churn"

22 All External links valid?
Validate all links periodically.

23 Less than 100 links out total
Google says limit to 100,
but readily accepts 2-3 times that number. Linking to Authority
Some say this gives a boost -
Others say that is absurd. However, it certainly is the opposite of linking to trash, which WILL hurt you.

OTHER ON-Page Factors

24 Domain Name Extension
Top Level Domain - TLD
.gov sites seem to be the highest status
.edu sites seem to be given a high status
.org sites seem to be given a high status
.com sites excel in encompassing all the spam/ crud sites, resulting in the need for the highest scrutiny/ action by Google.
Perhaps one would do well with the new .info domain class. - Nope. Spammers jumped all over it - no safe haven there. Not so much, now - .info sites can rank highly.

25 File Size
Try not to exceed 100K page size (however, some subject matter, such as this page, requires larger file sizes).
Smaller files are preferred <40K (lots of them).

26 Hyphens in URL
Preferred method for indicating a space, where there can be no actual space
One or two= excellent for separating keywords (i.e., pet-smart, pets-mart)
Four or more= BAD, starts to look spammy
Ten = Spammer for sure, demotion probable?

27 Freshness of Pages
Google patent - Changes over time
Newer the better - if news, retail or auction!
Google likes fresh pages. So do I.

28 Freshness - Amount of Content Change
New pages - Ratio of old pages to new pages

29 Freshness of Links
Google patent - May be good or bad
Excellent for high-trust sites
May not be so good for newer, low-trust sites

30 Frequency of Updates
Frequent updates = frequent spidering = newer cache

31 Page Theming
Page exhibit theme? General consistency?

32 Keyword stemming
Stem, stems, stemmed, stemmer,
stemming, stemmist, stemification

33 Applied Semantics
Synonyms, CIRCA white paper

34 LSI
Latent Semantic Indexing - Speculation, no proof

35 URL length
Keep it minimized - use somewhat less than the 2,000 characters allowed by IE - less than 100 is good, less is even better

OTHER ON-SITE Factors

36 Site Size - Google likes big sites
Larger sites are presumed to be better funded, better organized, better constructed, and therefore better sites. Google likes LARGE sites, for various reasons, not all positive. This has resulted in the advent of machine-generated 10,000-page spam sites - size for the sake of size. Google has caught on and dumped millions of pages, or made them supplemental.

37 Site Age
Google patent - Old is best. Old is Golden.

38 Age of page vs. age of site
Age of page vs. age of other pages on site
Newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition.

Face Move With Cursor

Latent Semantic Indexing for SEO

Latent Semantic Indexing aka LSI is a form of indexing that the search engines use.It is a technique of analyzing, listing or categorizing certain keywords or phrases in the contents of various websites in such a way that they have contextually and conceptually the same or related intent and meaning despite the different words used in them.

The explanation above may sound a little long winded, in short it means using different variations of your keywords. So for SEO you would use search engine optimisation – Search engines – Onsite – offsite – ranking factors and so on.

As you can see the keywords above are all related to SEO. In the past if you wanted to rank for the keyword SEO then you would use that very keyword a number of times on your website. The search engines have now evolved and this no longer works.

So using synonyms of your keywords is the way ahead and the way in which the major search engines such as Google advise us to layout our text.

In the same way a LSI structure of contents is required then so is a LSI structure of anchor text. SO instead of creating a number of backlinks pointing to your website with the keyword SEO for example, you would rather use variations of your keywords as in the example above.

Optimising your text and webpages in this LSI form and also using the LSI structure for your anchor text will ensure that you do not get pulled up from spam and it will also help you to rank for many more keywords.

To drive certain keywords up in the rankings then I would advise to build more backlinks with that keyword as the anchor text however, do not forget to vary your anchor text along the way. I would also suggest using your domain url as a backlink alone as if your website was to get pulled up for human review then it will not be striking that all of your backlinks are anchor text backlinks which can be a sign of spam.