32 things you ought to know about Pay Per Click

PPC can be a rather strange and potentially expensive world for newcomers if things go wrong, but with a bit of knowledge disasters can be averted and money saved.
Duncan Parry, Head of Paid Search at digital marketing agency STEAK Digital was on hand at SES London 2012 to run through the basics of PPC.

“PPC is like a cross between scrabble and Sudoku”
Duncan Parry

Google had a 93% share of the UK search engine market as of Jan 2012. The reality of the PPC landscape is that if you do paid search advertising, the majority of your time will be spent on Google's AdWords platform. Whilst there are other search engines that are worth considering, you need to set your expectations realistically.

How PPC works

1) According to Duncan, successful advertising is all about relevance. To ensure advertisers produce relevant content for users, Google doesn’t only rank adverts based on the amount of money someone is willing to pay. They also use a 'Quality Score', which takes into account the relevance of your ad to the searcher's keyword. Your quality score should be at the heart of your AdWords campaigns and a good one will help reduce your advertising costs.
2) Google wants to deliver relevant content to its searchers. In a nutshell, relevance creates clicks and clicks create profit. And, from Google's perspective, clicks to relevant useful sites create loyal search engine users who come back (and keep clicking).
3) Google’s system calculates quality score for each of your keywords. Over time, Google has refined how quality score is measured. Some of these changes are publicized on the Google AdWords blog

What influences Quality Score?

4) Your historical clickthrough rate (CTR) for the keyword and the related advert influences your quality score. The clickthrough rate of an advertisement is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. A high clickthrough rate will improve your quality score. (Find your quality score by adding the attribute Qual. score to a campaign as shown in the image below:)

5) The historical CTR of the display URL (the one you see on Google at the bottom of an advert) also influences quality score, as does your overall account history.

Live elements that affect quality score

6) The quality of your landing page and the relevance of the keyword to the advert it is associated with will affect your quality score. Your overall account history (the CTR of all ads and keywords in the account) also comes into play. If your account history is poor, don't worry. Improve things, get it right today and you'll be able to leave the past behind.

Keywords and AdWords functions

7) Negative keywords are words you don’t want your ads to appear for. You need to keep adding negative keywords, as you don’t want your ads to appear next to things that are negative to your brand. And you don’t want to pay for irrelevant clicks. Recently it has become easier to add negative keywords to an AdWords account and to control when your ad appears.

Google search query reports

8) You can use Google's search query reports to check for appropriateness. Your report will show the actual searches your ads appeared against next to the keyword you bid upon. You can use these reports to find negative keywords that aren't relevant to your business and identify new search terms with potential.

Match types

9) Google offers a variety of match types. Let's look at some examples, using the keyword formal shoes:

• Exact match If you chose to advertise against searches for formal shoes your ad would only appear for searches on this exact keyword. Nothing more, nothing less.
• Phrase match This matches phrases with the keyword in that order. So your advert would appear for black formal shoes.
• Modified broad match eg, formal + shoes. This also matches evening shoes, black dress shoes.
• Broad match - matches formal footwear, evening footwear and men's dress wingtips.

PPC adverts

10) Check the clickthrough rate and bounce rate for your ads. Check whether people are clicking on your ad, then bouncing off your site because the ad is misleading.
11) Also consider whether people clicking through are not buying because the product is not competitively priced.

Tips on writing ads

12) Put keywords in your title. Aim to convey your unique selling point (USP) and relevant features in your ad copy.
13) Remember consumers skim read so make it easy to read your ad quickly.
14) Put the primary keyword in your display URL if space permits.
This ad includes the searched keyword in both the title and the site URL.

Structure and organization

15) Your account structure is also important. You should aim to create a campaign structure that is easy to manage. This is how you can turn the theory of relevance and quality score into practice, and demonstrate to Google you understand how the system works. This is the account structure that Google recommends:

Definitions

16) Clickthrough rate (CTR) – this tells you how well consumers are reacting to your ads and keyword choices.
17) Max CPC – the maximum you specify you are prepared to pay per click.
18) Average CPC - the average amount you are actually paying.
19) Ad rank - this is a score based on your quality score and your bid, that determines your average position.
20) Quality score - this is measured out of 10.

Ad Extensions

21) Ad Extensions are free to set up and you are charged per click as usual. These include:
22) Social extensions such as showing the Google+1 button.
23) Call extensions for ‘click to call’ on mobile ads.
24) Sitelinks, which add additional links to the ads in the top positions. These can be good for directing consumers to the right page in one click, on brand and ambiguous terms. This can help boost CTR and conversion rates.
25) Location extensions add a map and address in a dropdown (eg, Pizza Hut can show local pizza places).
26) Product extensions and ratings show ratings stars from reviews gathered across the web. You have to be promoting a physical product to have those turned on.

Google Display Network

27) Google display advertising can be useful for brand awareness as well as for sales. It shows PPC ads on third party content sites including YouTube.

Re-marketing and re-targeting

28) Re-targeting can work really well. It is possible to re-target consumers who have visited your site but have not bought from you. Or you can cross-sell to those who have bought.

Tips on planning and launching a campaign

29) It’s important to know your numbers. Work out what you can afford to spend to acquire a customer. Educate the other people in your business and manage their expectations.
30) Try and learn as much from your competitors as you can. Look at their ad copy, their landing pages and keywords.
31) Think about what can be automated in your PPC campaigns. If it can be automated then do it, as PPC can eat up your time otherwise.
32) Check everything and never stop!

Wordtracker Strategizer

Wordtracker Strategizer is a great way of analyzing SEO keyword data that you are using in your PPC campaigns and getting to the real meat of what keywords you must protect and which you should expand or indeed drop entirely.
Source: WordTracker.com

4 Factors That Increase Your Articles Effectiveness

A well-written article can drive significant of targeted traffic to your site. It will catch the eyes and interest of your customers and keep them coming back for more. Here are 4 factors that can affect your article effectiveness.

1- Keywords and Keyword Phrases.
An article must should be centered on one main keyword and keyword phrase. This serves as the main theme of your article.

Besides the main keyword or phrase, there should be 3-5 secondary key-phrases related to the main keywords. This gives your article more room to expand without deviating from the main theme.

For example, if you maintain an auto parts site, you have articles about cars and their parts. The main keyword will probably be ‘auto parts’. The secondary keywords could be ‘cheap auto parts’, ‘original auto parts’ and ‘Honda auto parts’.

2 - Keyword Density
Although this factor has been de-emphasized over the last few years, it can still help your article rank well in the search engines.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used on an article. The number varies depending on the number of words used in an article. An effective article must have a keyword density that is not too high or too low. Too high, the article will lose its naturality. Too low, the search engines may ignore it.

A 3-5% density should be good enough. This number is not cast in stone and should be tested.

3 - Good Article Content
Even though keywords are important, you cannot just riddle an article with keywords. They must be reader-friendly. Articles must be able to entertain people as well as provide good and relevant information. Correct spelling and good grammar is also important.

People respond well to figures, facts and statistics. Try to incorporate as many facts as you can in to your article. But do not over do it else your article may become meaningless. It is just a number-filled article that no one understands.

4 – Good resource box with a valid link
If you are going to submit articles to ezines and/or contribute your articles to newsletters and other sites, remember to include a link to your site. A little resource box with a brief description of your site and you should always be placed right after your articles that you have submitted. If people like your articles, they will most likely click on the link directing them to your site.

Onpage Optimization Factors - Every SEO should know . .

On Page Optimization is the most important and complex part of search engine optimization. This website helps your search engine ranking through their keywords need. It should be kept based on which some great tips on optimizing your site for articles while the page is going.

This website helps you rank your page or your keywords to increase search engine ranking will depend on the page of your website search engine optimization on any kind of score. It is mainly seen on page factors of your index page, set your keyword rankings.

Page optimization is often forgotten these days, because we focus more and inbound links with targeted anchor text to get more of our time. - Optimization page, but you quickly to do something yourself an extra boost in the SERPS can offer.

There is great for a list page SEO technique that search engine optimization is considered in the evaluation process. Recognizing these factors, but are not limited to: words in the web page URL, title tags, meta tags, headlines, sub headlines, keyword density, words start page, page content, words that are bold in touch , words, site navigation, website link structure and a number of other reasons.
On page optimization tips:

   1. URL Naming:
      If your domain name as possible, try to prime your targeted keywords, if still does not include your keywords in the url.
   2. Title Tag:
      Title tag, the first words that you place your keywords Place and after using the word can attract visitors
   3. Meta Description:
      Many search engines use the description tag at any time, but it is best to set it properly just in case. Put your keywords in the beginning of the first meta description, meta description and your website attract visitors do yo tour.
   4. Meta Keywords:
      Yes many search is now not counted meta keywords, but use less engine search engine keyword tags, meta keywords using the search engine is still worth something to have your site rank
   5. Use Alt Text for Image Optimization:
      Are unable to see images for Crawlers. Thus, appropriate displays using Alt tag your content with targeted keywords to optimize the images,
   6. Static URL:
      Remember that all of your important pages should be short and static URLs.
   7. Use Headings:
      H1, h2, and use the h3 title tag to define their key subject categories, and putting your keywords in style at least once a title.
   8. Valid HTML:
      Use the W3C HTML validator on your page's HTML is valid. A web page for more HTML errors will create not rank well in SERPS.
   9. Robot. Txt:
      Your website for search engines with robots.txt file you can restrict access. Check on your website with robot.txt is apposite crawler information is required.
  10. Sitemap XML:
      Create your XML Sitemap XML Sitemap using search engines crawl your pages.
  11. Keep Your Body Text To Read
      Use your keywords in the text body, but keep your body text readable. Not in my drywall text keywords you drywall drywall stuff by humans until the drywall dry wall is unclear.
  12. Internal Link
      Internal link between the construction related posts

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