The PPC Search Engine

Here’s a fact for you, 85 to 95% of Websites are found through a search engine. You may have the most incredible Website on the Internet, but it will receive little or no traffic without search engine visibility and ranking. Can you imagine a billboard in the Sahara desert? Who sees it?

So, how will searchers find your website? What types of search engines could they use?

Search engines fall into two categories. The first is referred to as natural, organic or standard. The second is called pay-per-click, paid inclusion or paid placement.

Natural, organic and standard are interchangeable terms describing a search engine that bases its search rankings on a ranking algorithm. The algorithms involve a number of criteria and parameters, all relating to the content of the website, the websites size, the number of incoming links to the website, and the content’s relevancy. You will hear terms such as keyword relevancy and keyword density to describe various components of the algorithms. (more…)

Google Adwords is a great tool! Careful use can lead to legions of highly targeted visitors breaching the moat around your site, and demanding to pillage your products! On the other hand…

Adwords is also a great place to drain your advertising dollars if you’re not careful. Like any other automated system, it requires constant feeding and attention to keep you from wondering just why you spent hundreds of dollars and received a paltry return on your investment. Here’s 7great ways I’ve found to do just that, (and yes I’ve been guilty of several of these to one degree or another.) (more…)

Google has announced some time before some significant changes in their popular AdWords Pay-per-Click System (PPC). In future only unique URL’s per page will be displayed. If several advertisers uses the same URL (i.e affiliates of the same program), only the one with the best Ad will be displayed.

It is obvious that Google is trying to maximize the diversity in their AdWords results. Very popular Affiliate Programs, like Amazon.com, lead to hundreds of affiliates showing the same product with different Ads. For the affiliates using this system the “easy way to get money with affiliate programs” is now over, since it will be practically impossible to advertise just the affiliate link. Significant more effort, but also significant changes are the consequence.

The following tips can help you to get maximum benefit of your AdWords Campaigns. (more…)

You may already have heard of this method to get people to your web site. From my point of view and experience it turns out to be expensive and you have to write the ads yourself, pay for them, and change and maintain them to be the correct ones to work and be the right price in competition with many others.

When people search for a particular topic like healing a headache or other malady, they will see in the column to the right an ad that when clicked on takes the person to their web site selling the book or service on healing headaches.

Advertisers pay a set amount for every time the ad is clicked by a prospect. This is referred to as a click through rate or ctr.

Yes, there are benefits: The opportunity to place your ad directly in front of a prospect at the exact moment they are searching for your product or service is good. (more…)

Why do some companies bid on keywords for products they don’t even sell? Or fail to provide the basic information people need to make the decision to buy? Here’s a cautionary tale– with a happy ending.

HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?

I’m looking online for lamp shades. I go to Google and click on the top Sponsored Link in the right column: Expo.com. I’m taken to their “Lighting and Fans” page. There are 29 links in the left navigation, but no lamp shades. So I do a keyword search. Products Found = 0. All I can do is wonder why they wasted my time and their money, and move on to the next ad.

CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR.

Clicking on the second ad takes me to a home page with a “Shades” tab. I click on that and arrive on a page with information about sizes and a link to the lamp shade collection. (more…)