Pay Per
Click Advertising
(C) Michael Rasmussen
All Rights Reserved

Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both
extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several
ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click
is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an
SEO, or search engine optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and
SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of
search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it
takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a
good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search
engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires
a bid for a "per-click" basis, which translates to your company
paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor
to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site
sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results
of other prevalent search engines.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and
disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your
pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of
the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web
pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must
do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a
pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process.
You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t demand any
specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search
engines and keywords, the easier - and more effective - the process
will be.

The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A
higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine
results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain
your position - which can obviously become quite expensive,
especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.

In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of
marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure
out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute
this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a
given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same
time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and
there were 2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50
cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.

The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your
business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not
to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure
less than 50 cents per click.

Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more
than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for
these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual
hit.

The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything you can
about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn’t a
limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because
additional keywords do not add additional cost. This translates into
a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your
site to index a particular set of keywords.

Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than others are,
but they will not cost you anything except time to set-up your
account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the popular search engines
that offer pay-per-click, one called Overture provides an online
tool that will give you the data on how often particular keywords
are entered into their search engine. They also offer suggestions
for keywords after you enter a description of your site.

In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You must
understand that the object of your description is not to generally
attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only
those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to
your site. You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your
description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal
candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool
to insure that your bid is profitable.

Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you
constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in
mind that the results of the top search engines providing
pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture and Adwords Select,
usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the
competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find
that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield
a profit.

If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that
particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay too
much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the
bidding war.

Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to
closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to
monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.

Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of
visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer
motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer
analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also
insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and
author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online
since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and
succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free
monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web
site promotions that can help YOU!

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Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
(C) Michael Rasmussen
All Rights Reserved

Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your
overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link
popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet
is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve
their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are
now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their
rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down
such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed
from the search engine’s index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites
are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in
danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and tossed from a search
engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such
harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you
should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of
misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are
linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website
ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use
it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link
popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful
about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes
penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the
purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have
actually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods."

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when
a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you
are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must
check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links
page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have
linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to
download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will
then see that most pages are given a "Pagerank" which is represented
by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale.
This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It
is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are
linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the
flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows
only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not
been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity.
However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links
to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once
you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost
their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines
usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their
rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your
keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search
engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of
keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their
keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to
their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them
the same color as the background color of the page, such as a
plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see
these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider
can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to
index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes
back and boosts that page’s link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search
engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine
perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit
overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the
background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text
inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text
and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false
penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color
to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called
"keyword stuffing." It is important to have your keywords appear in
the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard
in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses
what is called "Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying
to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords
to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit
to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you
have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without
sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of
your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword
density to soar. So, if your keyword is "renters insurance," be sure
you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text
on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not
repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should
never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." To those of
you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to
understand. For the rest of you cloaking is when the server directs
a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different
page. The page the spider sees is "cloaked" because it is invisible
to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s
search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider
everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the
list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of
deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these
sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked
for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of
code, often referred to as "pagejacking." This kind of shielding is
unnecessary these days due to the use of "off page" elements, such
as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that
absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster
understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great
risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and
your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly
penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any
appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and
author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online
since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and
succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free
monthly newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful web
site promotions that can help YOU!

Filed under: Search Engines by admin
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