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Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is something most new website owners find difficult to master. The way PPC works is simple, you open a free account with a search engine (eg Google or Yahoo), then you place an advertisement for your website with a list of words (these are your "keywords") you wish to have trigger the showing of your ad, state how much you are willing to pay ("bid") for each visitor who clicks the ad and ends up on your website and set a daily maximum budget figure. The PPC search engine will then start to deliver visitors ("traffic") to your website. When somebody types one of your keywords into the search engine, your advertisement will be shown. Its position will depend upon the amount you offered ("bid") on the keyword. The highest bidder gets number 1 position, the next highest gets to number 2 and so on (in the event of a "tied" bid, the position is decided on first come first served basis). The higher the position of your ad, the larger the number of people who will see it and the more likely you are to receive visits to your website. It is called Pay Per Click because you only get charged when someone clicks the link to your website, there is no fee for showing your advertisement. The first thing to note is that although the way PPC works is simple, that is not the same as saying it is easy to use Pay Per Click advertising. Some people seem to take to PPC as naturally as breathing but, for the vast majority of people, PPC involves a steep learning curve and lots of experimenting and testing. For some people PPC brings major grief, lots of frustration and sometimes a lot of wasted expense. Here are a few simple tips to help anyone just starting out with Pay Per Click advertising. Search Engine Size Matters. There are literally hundreds of search engines for you to choose from when starting to use PPC Advertising. Some of these smaller companies will accept bids on keywords for a fraction of the minimum bid required by the bigger search engines. However, it would be a false economy to look only at price, you also need to take volume and quality of traffic into account as well as time spent managing your advertising campaigns. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft control about 90% of the total volume of search engine traffic between them. The remaining traffic is spread between the hundreds of smaller search engines. This means you might need to set up campaigns with 20 small search engines to match the traffic you would get from one Yahoo campaign. You might well be getting cheaper clicks this way but you would be spending 20 times as long managing the campaigns. Time is money: stick with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft when you first start using PPC advertising and save experimenting with small companies for later when experience will give you an advantage. Never Pay More Than A Visit Is Worth. Of course you want to get as many visitors to your website as possible but never be tempted to increase your bids above a level you know will be profitable. There is no point in getting to the number 1 position for a search term if you have to pay more per click than a visitor will potentially earn for you. Work out your conversion rate (ie what percentage of visitors actually make a purchase) to estimate how much each visitor to your website is worth) and make sure your bids stay below that figure with a comfortable margin for profit. The way to get more visitors is to use more keywords, use the keyword research tool the search engine provides, select keywords carefully for relevance and add them to your campaigns. Avoid The Obvious Look for cheaper, less popular keywords and keyword phrases and take advantage of them to bring visitors at a much lower cost than the obvious popular keywords. Single words and two or three word phrases are most popular and, therefore, most expensive. Use keyword research tools to locate longer keyword phrases, similes and less frequently searched terms. Make sure your keyword research is matched to the individual search engines. The best keywords for Yahoo, might not perform well in a Microsoft campaign, so use the keyword tool provided by each company to build up your keywords and keyword phrases for the particular search engine. Don't Think "Seen One Seen Them All" Take time to learn how each search engine works. Although PPC works on the same principles throughout the Internet, each search engine has a different interface. The way you set up and manage a campaign effectively is different with each one and it is essential that you spend time learning how each one works. Failure to do this can mean you end up doing things the hard way or, worse still, it can cost you money. The search engines have different rules, eg on what words may be used in ads and the way keywords relate to your landing page. This means you can't take your Yahoo ads and keywords and just upload them into a Google or Microsoft campaign. Make sure you understand exactly how to set your maximum bid and daily budget level for each individual campaign: if you get that part wrong you could be waving goodbye to large amounts of wasted cash.

It is important when placing pay per click advertising on the internet that you understand who will be viewing your ads. What is the target market and demographic of the audience of the pay per click provider? Where will they be placing your ads? Will they place your ads on their own search engine site, on their partners search engine sites, or even other content based websites? All of these questions are important to minimize the risk of overspending. Remember your goal is not how many people see your ad or how many people click on your ad, but how many highly targeted consumers will click your ad and purchase from your website. The key is not getting the most clicks, but maximizing your conversions and your return on investment. Let’s look at an example using Google Adwords, since Google is by far the leader in pay per click advertising. By default, when placing your pay per click ad with Google, your ad will appear on Google’s search engine, their partners search engines and their content network. Google’s partner sites include other search engines such as http://AOL.com, http://Shopping.com and Earthlink to name just a few. Both the Google search engine and the partner search engine site should provide good returns on your investment, given of course your bids are appropriate, your ads well written, your keywords are targeted and your sales page is optimized (all of these topics are points that should be researched prior to starting your campaign). If, however, you choose not to use the partner search engine sites, Google does provide an option to omit these sites from your campaign. In our Google example above, the third place your pay per click ads will be shown are the content network. These are independent sites that have applied to Google to host Google ads on their websites. Content advertising can be challenging and can be turned off if you are not familiar with it. Again, the key is to know where your ads are going, and who will see them. In the Google example if you choose to use the content network, another option is to build a site-targeted campaign, and target only the specific sites (and even pages within the sites) where the demographics are appropriate for your ads. This is just one example of knowing where your pay per click advertising is being displayed. Other popular pay per click choices have their own networks and sites. Highly targeting your ads by knowing where they will be displayed is just one more way of insuring that the traffic you receive from your campaigns will produce good results.

Guidelines For Keeping Customers Interested In You Search engine marketing is a way for your company to draw and keep consumers interested in your products and / or services. By properly including these guidelines into your web design your market will respond. Appeal To Your Audience In regards to written information on your site you want to appeal to your audience. For example if your site is marketed towards kids you wouldn’t use large or complex words, or to the other extreme, if computer engineers are your targets, you want to write to their level. This will ensure that you draw the right audience and that your content relates to your market. This guideline is the most important and stressed topic for search engine marketing. If you do not design information and content to your targeted audience, surely there will be no success. Give A Reason To Act Once you have targeted your audience, give them a reason to act now instead of later. This can be done through offering free products or shipping with purchase or offering a newsletter subscription with frequent discounts and current information. With this type of search engine marketing you want to be sure your not overweighing incentives, meaning selling is the high point to marketing but it should not take over your entire site. Offer Competitive Advantages Do research and find out how your competitors are advertising on their sites. Use this to your advantage by finding what works and what doesn’t. This can go as far as web placement, design and content. Viewers are drawn more to pictures and art than they are text-links. Stay true to your brand while designing competitive and unique advertisements. Incorporate Keywords Keywords are important when consumers are searching search engines. Again do research and see what keywords are used for the best search results of your competitors. Write them down and apply them to your sites content and design. The more keywords that are placed throughout your site the more likely you are to gain higher search results. For further keyword optimization view my article The Simple Basics To Search Engine Optimization. When designing your site think simple and straightforward. No one likes to skim through endless text or be distracted by large advertisements. Appealing to your audience, giving them a reason, offering competitive advantages and incorporating keywords are all excellent guidelines to optimizing your market.

If you want to driving traffic to your website, one of the most important SEO tactics is link building. Link building can help to increase your ranking on popular search engine like Google and Yahoo and can also help you to increase your amount of referral links to your site. There are a variety of different ways that you can build links to your site, but you want to make sure that you use the most effective methods possible. The following are four of the best ways to build links to your site. Online Directories One of the best ways that you can build links to your site is by using online directories. There are a variety of different directories that allow you to submit your site pages to them. Some directories may be free, while others will charge a fee to list your website on it. It is also important that you have your website listed in the right category as well so you will bring targeted traffic to your website. Press Releases Another great way to build links to your website is to submit press releases to the media about your website. You can use press releases to present great information about your site to the online world, and there are many free press release directories to choose from. You can also submit press releases to other press release directories for a small fee as well. This will help to drive more traffic to your site and will also provide you with even more referral links to your site as well. RSS Feeds You can also use RSS feeds as a great way to build links to your site as well. This allows you to have your content on other websites by using an RSS feed. You can have your RSS feeds appear on other sites that relate to your site so you can send targeted traffic to your site. This is also another great way of building links so that your site will rank better on the search engines. Related Websites Yet another great way to build links to your site is to get your site linked on another website. This is not also the easiest thing to accomplish, but sometimes you can find sites that are willing to do a link swap with you. A link swap allows you to put up someone else’s link on your site, and in return they will put up your link. This is an excellent way of building links if you can get other website owners to agree to it. Your ability to build quality links to your site can actually result in the success of your online business. Build a great deal of quality links to your site, and it will improve your search engine rank, which will in turn improve your business.

Search engine optimization (SEO) tips from successful Internet marketers can offer popular means of bringing more search engines and people to your websites. And more search engines plus more people is a simple formula for more clicks and sales, a win-win for online marketers in all niches. So let’s cut to the chase, here are some top SEO tips form those who’ve been there, done that, with successful results: 1. Select a Keyword Rich Domain Name This may not always be possible in many niche markets for the more popular keywords. Therefore you can focus on creating mini-sites that are keyword based. For example, if your website is about web hosting, you can create mini-sites about web hosting but with a lesser known keyword such as "low cost web hosting". 2. Choose Search Engine Friendly URLs Use search engine friendly URLs when possible. You want to be sure to use hyphens and underscores in all your URLs and preferably have the URLs be the keyword that relates to the page. For example, if the web page is about web hosting, then the URL could be web-hosting or web_hosting. 3. Check out your IP Address For the websites you believe to be most important, ensure that they have unique ip addresses for each site. The reason this is important is many sites on a "shared" hosting service share the same ip address. If any of these sites have been banned by the search engines, it could affect your site's ranking or even result in your site being banned as well, since it is sharing the same ip address. 4. Do some Keyword research It's important to do thorough research before deciding what keywords you'll focus on when optimizing your website. A popular tool you can use is Good Keywords, a free keyword research software application. Give these SEO tips a try and check your own results. See what works best for your products and services, and then repeat accordingly with new campaigns all year long to keep a healthy flow of traffic, clicks and sales coming your way.

Over the past few years, pay per click advertising has become an extremely popular option for online marketers. Whether you are working for a large corporation or just have your own web site, PPC advertising can help you achieve your online marketing goals. Thanks to the diversity of companies offering pay per click advertising (from the major search engines of Google, Yahoo and MSN to smaller players like Search Feed and 7Search), you can use PPC advertising to benefit your web site, regardless of your budget. In order to help you understand the true potential of pay per click advertising, here are three benefits that it can provide: Traffic-Obviously, this is the number one benefit of PPC advertising. Because of the low costs of bidding on keywords, pay per click advertising can help you drive a large amount of traffic for a relatively low price. The other major advantage of PPC traffic is the fact that it is instant. Unlike organic traffic (which can many months or even a year to start coming for new web sites), you can start driving pay per click traffic to your web site right now. Branding-Many online marketers are working under the misconception that once they have achieved strong organic search engine rankings, running a PPC campaign is worthless. On the contrary, setting up and running a pay per click campaign is quite valuable, even if your web site is drawing in quality traffic organically. The reason that a PPC campaign can compliment organic rankings is that it can help improve your web site’s branding. When potential visitors see your web site listed twice in a search engine’s results, their trust for you will increase immensely. This will translate into more leads and/or sales from your web site, along with more return visitors. Easy Conversion Tracking-The reason I am adding this as a benefit is because it shows how much easier it is to control and manage your PPC budget versus an SEO or similar budget. When it comes to PPC, you not only know exactly how much money your web site is generating, but you also know exactly how much you had to spend to make it. This will help you carefully plan your budget and get the most results for the money you have.