Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing

For many small and medium business owners, drawing traffic to their site is a major concern. With so many websites competing for people’s attention, you have to learn how to best manage and exploit your site. Without traffic, there are no sales, and just like any business, without sales, your company quickly sinks beneath the waves of obscurity.

Let’s have a look at some of the fundamental ways that a site owner can direct or entice traffic to their website. Most of them are relatively easy to do, but using them in conjunction with one another is a key element of online marketing. Using just one method to draw traffic isn’t good enough in most cases. Only by optimizing a number of key areas on your website, can you hope to raise your site to prominence.

PPC

Pay per click advertising is a great way of drawing traffic to your site. Basically, you pay for a keyword laced ad on a search engine, and watch as it directs traffic to your site. Converting that traffic into sales is the tricky part, and requires your site to be interesting and up to date.

Keywords

Key words or phrases are used by search engines to index your site. Without them, your site will not do very well. Research your keywords carefully, and use only the best of them.

Content

Your content is your single best sales tool. It must be engaging, interesting and constantly updated to ensure that people want to come back to your site again and again. Your site should also utilize keywords, but still be interesting to the reader. In other words, plan your content, and try to create text that incorporates your keywords, without being obvious to your readers.

Have an Easy to Remember URL

Your URL should be easy to remember, and it should also tell your potential customers basically what your site offers.  For instance, if you’re selling fish food, your URL shouldn’t be based around cat food.

Load Time is Important

People are by nature impatient. If they have to wait a significant amount of time for your page to load, they’re likely to leave and try the next site on their search list. Don’t load your site with slow loading pictures and video, especially if you want visitors to return.

Article Directories

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is a unique and often overlooked method of having your site noticed. By writing articles, you not only set yourself up as an expert in your field, but every article has a link to your site. Search engines use links to index sites, so you gain visibility in more than one way by utilizing article directories. If you don’t have the time to write the articles, hire a copywriter to do it for you. It’s well worth the investment.

Those are just a few examples of how to increase traffic to your site. There are many more, but these examples are some of the most important.

Affiliate marketing is a pretty easy concept to grasp. Basically, you’re going to sell products on your web site for other people. While the concept is easy, the practice is much tougher. In order to make money at affiliate marketing-which is your ultimate goal-you have to understand the internet, and market your web site accordingly. This can be accomplished a number of different ways, and we’re going to explore a few of them now.

Hire Out

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you might want to consider hiring a professional web designer. A web designer can enhance your sites performance greatly. They can optimize your site for the search engines, make your site pleasing to the eye, and you don’t have to worry about learning everything about site design in a few short months.

Before you actually hire the site designer, you should have a look at their previous work. See if those sites are ranked well on the search engines, especially Google.

Host

If you plan on doing it yourself, without hiring a site designer, you should get your own domain name, and never use free sites. When you use free sites, you’re basically doing their advertising for them. Your site will be littered with free banner ads, free pop-up ads and other pieces of advertising that makes your site look unprofessional. Spend the few extra dollars and get your own site name and domain. It’s well worth it in the long run.

Don’t Add Junk

Your site should be clean, to the point and free of annoying clutter. Your sites load time is important. The more junk you add to your site, the longer it will take your site pages to load. Avoid using weather cast buttons, calendars, email buttons and other non-useful tools. Stick to the basics, and make your site useful but clear to your visitors.

Choose Good Affiliates

Make sure that the affiliates you choose are legitimate and that their products closely resemble what your web site is about. You can find local businesses that are willing to affiliate with you, or you can visit an affiliate marketing network and have a look around.

Content is Important

The content on your site is very important. Many affiliate marketers lose sight of this fact, to their detriment. You want your site to be filled with pages that are so useful to visitors, that they feel compelled to bookmark your page. If you can achieve that, you are indeed a successful affiliate marketer.

An affiliate marketing web site should always stick to their niche. Many beginners make the mistake of trying to use one web site to promote all different kinds of products. This is a huge mistake, and eventually leads down the road to failure.

An affiliate marketer must carve out a niche, and cater to those specific customers. That’s impossible to do if your marketing more than one product on any given site.

Pay per click, or PPC for short, is a great advertising method. It can drive traffic to your site, and help line your pockets with money. PPC is relatively new, but if you want to make money online, you’d better get up to speed fast. Because this advertising method is relatively new, online business owners make some mistakes when developing their PPC campaign. In this article, we’ll have a look at some of those mistakes, and explain how to avoid them.

Landing Page Confusion

Many business owners use their home page as a landing page, which is a huge mistake. They think it’s a good idea. After all, it is the doorway to their site, right? Yes, it is the doorway to your site, and it does serve its own purpose. However, if someone clicks on a specific keyword, they are looking for a specific item. That keyword should land them on the page that will be most useful to them. Don’t make them scroll through your entire site in order to find the merchandise they’re looking for.

Combining Products

Your PPC campaign, which usually engenders a website, should be geared to one product and one product only. Don’t combine products on one landing page. Keep it specific, and make sure that it offers your customer what he or she is searching for. Combining different products on the same landing page is a near fatal mistake that can cost you a lot of money.

Poorly Written Ads

Every single word of your PPC ad is crucial. It should contain your keywords, the title should peak the readers interest, and frivolous statements, such as “Operating since 1900’s,” should be left out. Google only allows an ad to have a maximum of 70 characters. The other major search engines allow for similar amounts of characters, but the important thing to remember is that you don’t have a lot of space to get your message across.

Your title should contain your keyword, and the first sentence should outline for the searcher the benefit they can expect when they click on your ad. The second sentence should be aimed at pointing out the difference between your company and your competitions. What sets your company apart? The last line should be a kind of call to action. Perhaps offer a free deal, or highlight a product with a discounted rate.

Test Your Ad

Don’t just write one PPC ad. Once you’ve won a bid for your keyword, you should write multiple ads using that keyword, and test their effectiveness. Once you have a good idea which ads are the most effective, cut out the other ones and go with the ads that work.

Businesses are always trying to propel their site to the top of the search engine rankings. Even to be one of the top ten sites means money in the pocket and businesses are well aware of this fact. To climb your way to the top of the ladder, you have to be aware of how search engines rank sites. And just like any ladder, there is always a first rung, which in this case means keywords. Search engines use all types of methods to rank sites, but none of them are as important as keywords, although some are close.

Writing keywords into your content seamlessly is the key. In order to find your keywords you need to think like a web browser. Ask yourself what you’d type into a search engine to find your product? Next, do a little bit of research. There are a number of free keyword tools on the web that can be invaluable in your search for the right keywords. You can also have a look at your competitor’s sites, and see which keywords they use in their text.

Once you’ve picked out a list of keywords or keyword phrases, it’s time to get down to the business of writing your content. You can do this yourself or hire a professional writer with SEO experience. Either way, you want to make sure that your content is going to be interesting and informative for your readers.

When writing your text, try to incorporate your keywords without being blatantly obvious about it. Nothing is worse than reading text that has obviously been written for machines and not the sites guests. Ultimately, a business is about selling a product or service, which means you need customers. However, nothing is more insulting to a reader than having to weed through text that is rigid, of little use and is written for a search engine spider rather than your customer. In most cases, your visitors will move on to the next site and never visit yours again.

Your keyword or phrase should be in the title of the article or page. It should also be featured within the first 90 characters of the first paragraph and the last 90 characters of the last, while being sprinkled liberally throughout the text of the article.

If you have META tags, put your keyword in those too. While META tags aren’t used by the search engines nearly as much as they used too, it’s better to be safe than sorry. It doesn’t take long to set up a META tag, and every little bit counts.

A good rule of thumb is to have your keyword in the text about 2%-4%. This means that for every 100 words, your keyword should appear two to four times. If you use the keyword more than that, you take the risk of having boring, obvious keyword filler, that may get you banned from the search engines all together.

Keywords are an integral part of any good web site. Learning how to write keyword articles is a must if you want to rank highly in the search engines.