Search engine optimization - SEO, website traffic

Success in internet marketing can be dependent on many factors. Are your traffic strategies right for your niche? Is the niche the right one in the first place? Do your keyword ads pull the right responses? Is your landing page compelling? Are your calls to action, well placed? There is so much to think about and when you are just beginning, the amount of available information is overwhelming. In fact, information overload is one of the main reasons that many people give up almost before they’ve started. Spend a few days researching online opportunities and in no time at all you will be swamped with information on everything from pay per click to autoresponders, Adwords to pop-ups, SEO to Adsense. It’s just too much.

However, those who persevere and actually start digging deeper into this pile of data will start to see a pattern emerging. There are some teaching products that come up time and time again. They are mentioned repeatedly and with respect by others. These products could be classed as the Guru products; the ones that have stood the test of time and stand up to real scrutiny.

There are genuinely some very high quality packages out there that offer authentic uo to date information and real advice that works.

It is important though to not become overwhelmed and try to learn everything at once. Choose an area of knowledge and focus on that till you are comfortable. Too many beginners in online marketing, make the mistake of thinking they have to learn everything straightaway. This is a big mistake.

The successful ones are the ones who take the time to concentrate on one particular area of their business, learn to do it as well as possible and then move on to the next area and so on. If you take this approach and begin shopping around for a training product that will help with your chosen starting point, you will start to see that the choice becomes much easier.

Once you have chosen a particular knowledge area that you want to master, you’ll find that there are probably only a handful of products to choose from and that makes the decision easier immediately. Let’s say you needed advice on pay per click, for example. Try to find a review site that compares and contrasts a few products and tells you which ones are right for your stage of development and your market.

Now you’ll find that the huge mountain of choice has come down to a much more manageable one or two. And all thanks to a little focus.

If you think of Google as only useful for search and for emtying your wallet via your Adwords account; think again. One of it’s most useful services is completely free and very powerful.. Analytics is a no-charge, website tracking system that will give you incredible insight into the visitors to your site and how they use it. Perhaps, you were unaware that Analytics was available. Well you will find it at http://www.google.com/analytics or if you already have a Google Adwords account, take a look at the tabs at the top of your screen and you’ll see that you can access Analytics there too. Why not visit Analytics and sign up for your free account.

Setting it up is pretty easy. There are two bits of code which Analytics will generate automatically for you. One is the tracker code, which simply needs to be copied and pasted to the pages of your website. Some webmasters only put the code on their main pages, but I’d recommend putting it on every single page ? that way your stats will be much more in depth.

The other code is for Conversion tracking, which I’ll cover in a minute.

So now you have it set up, let me tell you the three reason why I absolutely love Analytics.

Reason #1 ? it’s incredibly comprehensive. Analytics will tell you how many visitors came to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they looked at, which site they came from, what kind of browser they had, what country they live in and whether they have been before.

It will tell you which keywords, campaigns and ad versions brought them here. It will tell you how long they stayed on each page, which page they looked at before and which one they went to next. It will tell you which page they came in on and which one they left from. You are able to see the big picture of your site in it’s entirety or drill down to just a single page, or form and you can look across a whole year or just one single day.

In fact, at times there is almost too much data, so I tend to focus on my key metrics. Number of unique visitors, top pages and most importantly the traffic source. For example I know exactly how many visitors are brought in by my pay-per-click campaign and how many come from my article writing efforts. This is powerful because it allows me to directly measure my free of charge traffic building activity against my paid advertising.

Reason #2 ? Conversion tracking. The second piece of code that Analytics will generate is a conversion tracker. This is copied and pasted to whichever page or pages in your site mean that you have a made a sale. I use it for my newsletter sign-ups, by putting the code on the Thank you page.

Once a vistor arrives there, Analytics will record the visit and allow me to cross reference against other statistics.

For example, I know that visitors who find my site in a standard web search and click on the link, are almost twice as likely to sign up for the newsletter as those who come from an Adwords ad. So, you can see why free traffic is so valuable. Not only does it cost nothing but it is better quality too.

Reason #3 - Last but by no means least, Analytics lets me test and tweak to my heart’s content. Having such comprehensive data at my fingertips, means that I can see the effect of any change to my site, the very next day.

If I change my home page, I can soon see the effect on my conversions and watch whether visitors now navigate down a different route. I can see if they spend more, or less time reading my new content and I can see what it makes them do afterwards.

No matter what tweaks I make, the results are rapidly available to me and if things go wrong and traffic or conversions fall, I can see immediately what needs to be done.

Back to my original question. If you’re not using Google Analytics on your site. Why Not?

If you are running affiliate marketing campaigns at Pay-Per-Click search engines then you can benefit from these pay-per-click advertising tips for improving your campaigns. Almost every pay-per-click advertising campaign can become more profitable if you try the following tips.

Add Keywords to Boost Traffic

Add more keywords. Generate larger keyword lists using software such as Good Keywords which is free, or Keyword Elite if you can afford it.

Don’t go too broad with your keyword selection. Be sure to only add keyword phrases that will result in targeted visitors who might purchase the product you are promoting.

Always Split Test Your Ads

You are probably not the only affiliate who is bidding to show an ad for that affiliate product. One of the best ways to get your ad showing above the rest is to increase the click-through ratio of your ads. Remember, most advertising networks love ads with good click-through ratios.

The simplest way I know to improve your click-through ratio is to split test all of your ads. Always try at least two versions of each ad. Check the click-through rates for each version, keep only the best ad and then write a new one. Repeat this process again and again, improving your click-through ratio each time.

Use Multiple Advertising Networks

If you have a product that is converting profitably with one pay per click advertising network, try it at the other major advertising networks, including Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Sponsored Search.

Target Additional Countries

Maybe until now you have only targeted USA or North America. Once you have found a good product, try promoting the product to additional countries. United Kingdom and Australia are good options and you might also consider Europe and Asia.

Search Engine Marketing is a very useful tool for getting a particular product noticed by a particular demographic. However, the amount of traffic one receives hinges on many different things and events. Many marketers have experienced lack luster results in their attempts to utilize search engine marketing because they failed to understand the complexity of running a successful search engine marketing campaign.

Acting under the guidelines of pick a keyword and watch the traffic roll in, has doomed many would-be search engine marketers. Inexperienced marketers choose their keyword list, place an ad on the keywords, and wait for the sells that never happen.

Thats the way it works right? Wrong! That would work well 10 years ago. But now, marketers must contend with a much more savvy customer that can use a search engine like an extension of their own bodies. If they arent satisfied with what they found in their initial search, they can quickly come up with a new search that can potentially put them on the trail of what they seek. This means that ads appearing on the side of the page are less likely to be read , as the user determines from the first couple of listings that there may be a better keyword to try. If they search the keywords correctly, the top five listings should be all they need. Ads on the side of the page, 5 pages deep in the rankings are, for lack of better terms, useless. Ads that are in the top of the advertising categories are usually too expensive to make a profit for smaller organizations, so they arent really an option. Add to this that most search engine marketing campaigns are approached with the wrong strategy for making the web surfer interested in their product offer and you have a perfect storm for search engine marketing ad inadequacy.

Todays search engine marketing campaigns, like many other marketing techniques, are usually deployed with the same tunnel vision game plan that proved limitedly valuable for smaller businesses a decade ago. Now, those antiquated strategies are proving ineffective. The old train of thought envisioned a strategy to catch the users attention when he or she is looking for a different product all together, then sell him or her your products. This thought process eventually gave birth to the pop up, slide in, pop over, the text ad, and many many more angles to implement the plan of interruption marketing. At the surface, this marketing technique seems flawless but as the lame ROI figures would indicate, one must come to grips with a sobering conclusion. Interruption advertising is not as effective as it once was.

The internet and the internet surfer has matured. Web surfers have somewhere they are trying to get to online. If you dont have the exact solution, they are very good and telling you to get out of the way by skimming over your website and clicking off of it. Search engine marketing campaigns are increasingly being thwarted by the fact that much of the advertising budget goes to paying the cost for website skimmers. Skimmers are web surfersthat have a very short attention span when it comes to internet surfing. They click on an ad, and are successfully directed to the website being advertised, but only stay for a few seconds or less. That, my friend, is a skimmer. As a search engine marketer, you still pay the fee for the click through but get none of the benefit of having a potential customer read about why your product is so wonderful. That is an ROI buster.

The shear number of skimmers online today has grown and flashy website designs do not slow them down like they used to. Been there. Seen that. Search Engine Marketing now has to adapt to the changing marketing climate. The focus can no longer be all about getting the readers attention, it must instead focus on getting and keeping the web surfers attention.

An impressive advancement in search engine marketing is the introduction of error marketing through TypoBounty dot com. Through Error Marketing advertisers seek to better their sells pitch by eliminating any problems and errors that exist on their web properties. They offer a bounty or cash reward to anyone that can find a specified type of error on their web property. This draws massive amounts of traffic from potential customers that are seeking to earn money for finding errors. In the mean time, they read the entire website, giving the advertiser a greater opportunity to tell why their product should be purchased. Since it costs less than 10 dollars per month to advertise this way, and the advertiser can pick and choose the types and number of errors they will pay for per month, and the amount they will pay, and visitors read the entire sells pitch, powerful advertising campaigns can be embarked on for less than 20 dollars per month. Compare this to the 300 to 15,000 dollars per month advertising campaigns and other techniques that cost more and deliver much less and the benefit is clear.

The art is keep their attention and have the hang on your every word.literally.

Since searchers dig to the deepest depths of the TypoBounty dot com website looking for a chance to earn, ads are not overly affected by bid wars from larger more financially equipped marketers.

I think most people are aware that where your ad appears in the newspaper can have a great effect on how your ad pulls customers. For example, if you are a CPA, you’ll want to be in the financial section. TV’s and Satellite dishes… the sports section. But where should your ad appear on the pages of that section?

You are usually at the mercy of the editor or layout person but if you are a consistent advertiser the newspaper may make an effort to help you position your ad for a greater return.

Best place to be is on the right-hand side of the page and above the fold. The worst place? The exact opposite. Left-hand side and below the fold.

As we move toward the 21st Century the buzzword seems to be the Internet. Well, just five years ago it was the fax. The fax was supposed to put the post office out of business. Obviously that didn’t happen. Now, email is supposed to eliminate the fax machine. That seems like a more realistic argument. But until that happens use your fax cover page to increase your advertising.

Your fax cover page is a great place to let customers and vendors know more about your business. Your cover page should contain: Company Name, Address, Phone Number, Fax Number, Email Address and of course, your web site address. At the bottom of the cover page include special information about sales, promotions, new services, special offers and any other information customers should know about your business.

Warning: Don’t fill the page so full of information that the fax information is lost. Keep it simple. The purpose is to make the recipient call, fax, email, or visit your web site. Give it a shot and see your call increase.

For most businesses there comes a time when you will receive some kind of quote or write up in the local paper. When that time comes try to purchase an ad in the same section of the paper containing all the information about your business that will not be included in the quote or article.

Include things like services offered and years in business. Store hours and phone and of course, don’t forget your web site address. People who see your quote see you as an expert in your field.

Your business reputation is further enhanced by the presence of your ad.

The most costly form of advertising is TV. Nothing else even comes close. So, how do you get your business on TV for free? Here’s one way.

Give a prize or become a sponsor of an event that will be running a lot of TV ads. For example: Every year we have a Bridal Fair here in Bozeman. By donating a prize your company logo appears on all printed advertising and in all TV ads.

You won’t be alone but it’s a great way to expose your company logo and name to a large number of people.

As we all know, click through rate (CTR) plays an important role for the major pay per click search engines including Adwords, Yahoo! And recently MSN adCenter.
Here are some good practices to follow when accessing your campaign performance.

• Ad rank is low and CTR is high - marketers should consider increasing spend to improve rank and drive more qualified traffic.
• Ad rank is low and CTR is low - marketers should consider reassessing keyword selection and creative.
• Ad rank is high and CTR is low - marketers should reduce bid price and emphasize better performing keywords and creative.

Gordon Choi wrote an interesting post about why not to advertise on 2nd tier pay per click engines. He explains a few strong reasons to stay away from them. To reinforce his point take a look at this chart.

With a majority of users searching on Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and AOL the time you spend setting up and troubleshooting those smaller engines may have been better spent optimizing your engines that drive more qualified traffic. Also, most 2nd tier pay per click engines get their sponsored results from one of the bigger engines, so your ad will most likely already appear there.