Search engine optimization - SEO, website traffic

ABCSearch has just launched its proprietary patent-pending fraud-prevention software; ClickShield, which dynamically identifies and blocks click fraud from reaching your ads giving new life to second tier traffic. Additionally they encourage all quality feedback from their advertisers to better qualify the traffic.

ABCSearch passes through all traffic source ID’s and encourage advertisers to block channels of traffic that do not work for them, this can be done dynamically in the advertisers’ admin.

Keywords and listings are subject to editorial review to ensure that they meet ABCSearch and industry quality standards. Submissions are often approved the same day and no longer than 2 business days.

With the Bulk Submission Template it’s a simple matter to add your campaigns and manage listings and bids with an easy to use Excel spreadsheet. Simply fill in your data and upload, and after the short approval process your campaign will go live.

Once you’ve uploaded your keywords you can check on the top 3 bids for each keyword. The Max Bid system allows you to select your maximum bid for each target. Your bid will automatically adjust to 1 cent above the second position until your maximum bid has been reached.

ABCSearch offers an auto-rebill option, allowing your account to stay funded. As soon as your balance is $5 or less your account will be replenished with the amount you have set.

Geo-targeting is provided with new campaigns defaulted to US and Canadian traffic. Advertisers can edit geo settings down to the city. Their day parting feature allows you to choose the days and hours you would like your ads to run.

If you are looking for a lot qualified general traffic try their Run of Site inventory. Essentially bidding on all keywords, a static listing will be able to generate substantial revenues and significantly increase your bottom line profit as well as brand awareness.

ABCSearch provides a FAQ with hints for maximizing your click-through rates. The reporting system is quite simple but seems effective. The accounts area has a simple but effective navigation system.

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Creating an advertiser account with Searchfeed is easy and only takes a matter of minutes. The advertiser interface is very simple to navigate and understand, which makes it very quick and effortless to create a new online campaign.

Specialized tools allow advertisers to create campaigns from scratch or easily upload existing campaigns using the Bulk Keyword Uploader. For adding smaller sets of keywords, easy to follow online forms are available. Additional tools include Keyword and Bid Researcher, ROI calculator and free campaign cost estimates. Advertisers can also change all or multiple bids simultaneously using the Change Bids Tool.

Searchfeed Reports appear in real-time providing instantaneous feedback about campaign status. Reports are very detailed and extremely helpful when managing a campaign.

To start advertising with Searchfeed an initial $25 deposit is required. However, the deposit goes towards the execution of the campaign. Keyword bids start at $0.01 with no minimum monthly balance or spending requirements. With Searchfeed advertisers can have an unlimited number of keywords and listings.

All keyword and listing submissions are generally processed within 2 business days. Search terms are reviewed for relevancy and confirmation is given showing approved and rejected keywords. Keywords or phrases that were not deemed relevant are accompanied by the reason for rejection.

To ensure that a campaign will always remain active, Searchfeed offers an auto payment feature, which will automatically withdraw funds from a credit card on file whenever account funds run too low. This feature can be easily activated or deactivated at any time throughout the campaign.

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Search123 provides advertisers with an easy to use interface, and plenty of help to set up and manage their accounts.

Search123 offers free account set-up, keyword research and expansion, and account management and optimization services. Whether you need assistance writing a few titles and descriptions or would like ongoing assistance in managing or optimizing your account, the Search 123 Advertiser Services team is will provide free, personal service.

You can also use the proxy-bidding tool. It guarantees, within spending limits you choose, that you will never be knocked out of the top spot.

It supplies a good amount of technical help and beginner help. I also found it very easy to navigate the site, use the help and the accounts area.

There is a simple step by step system in place for adding funds, adding your site and your site’s details all the way through to adding keywords and bidding.

It makes it easy to bid on and add multiple or a small number of keywords at any one time. I have found the whole process very fast most of the time.

Search123 has a relevancy guide. This means they do have rules about the sites that are listed and whether they will list a site or not. If you list a site that falls outside the guidelines that are specified, or bid on inappropriate keywords, your account will be cancelled.

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It’s quick and easy to sign up with 7Search. Your ads can start appearing within 7 minutes of sign up.

7Search provides useful tools to help you manage your pay per click campaigns. There’s a Keyword Suggestion Tool and a bulk upload facility for large amounts of keywords.

There is a handy tool available that you can use to change all of your bids to a certain amount, or you can set all of your bids to the top position. The requests are processed on a first-come-first-server basis and you can only submit one of these requests every 24 hours.

There is plenty of reading to do on the website, a lot of it handy information about 7Search’s accounts area is good also, with simple navigation. When you view your keywords, it shows you the usual things you would expect to see such as, keyword, bid and ranking. It also shows you how many searches were done on each of your keywords in the last month. I think this would be very handy. You could then compare that number to the number of click throughs you got in the last month and where you are ranked. Then watch what happens if you raise or lower your bid.

When editing keywords you can make changes to a whole page and you can change the number of keywords that will display per page to numbers between 10 and 1000.

You can open an account with a minimum of $25 and there is no minimum bid. You can use their MakeTop tool to immediately make a listing first in the rankings. They also have a keyword generator tool to help you find relevant keywords, and you can opt-in for their 1:1 banner exchange program.

7Search will email you when one of your terms is outbid, and when your account is getting low and needs to be replenished.

There is a spreadsheet available for mass submissions and 7Search provides free campaign assistance to clients, including assistance with keywords, titles, descriptions & bids.

7Search traffic is now up to 1.5 billion searches a month. According to 7Search they strive to be the best in fraud detection in the industry and they will not accept poor traffic from their partners.

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Microsoft adCenter provides plenty of information for the new advertiser. In fact, there’s so much help available that you can get swamped working through it.

It includes all the features you’d expect in a major pay per click search engine. The interface is clean and very user friendly.

Setting up a new a campaign is easy, and AdCenter gives you a full range of options. There is a god keyword research tool which allows gives you the past month’s searches on your chosen term and other relevant keywords and also gives you the current month’s traffic for those keywords. This keyword tool also allows you to display each keyword in charts showing trends on time of traffic, gender, lifestyle and geotargeted information. Be careful! I had so much fun playing with the charts that I almost forgot I was supposed to be working.

Microsoft adCenter provides several options to help you improve ad exposure. If you want to increase the chance that a certain segment of your audience will be shown your ad, you can adjust these variables:

• Geographical location
• Day of the week
• Time of day (morning, afternoon, or night)
• Age and gender

The reporting features are very good, and you’re able to obtain reports based on a number of different variables.

Microsoft adCenter provides a number of specific campaign pricing options, including base bid (The lowest bid amount that you define for a specific match type. All advanced bidding is in addition to the base bid.), cost per click (a pricing plan in which charges accrue only as the advertiser’s ads are clicked. The cost-per-click rate is predetermined by negotiations between the advertiser and MSN.; average position (A paid ad’s placement on the search results page. For example, the top spot on the page is called position 1. This and all other positions are determined by the ad’s rank, which in turn is determined by relevance.); and monthly spend (The amount of funds expended during a specific period.). Overall, undoubtedly Microsoft adCenter is going to be a very important pay per click search engine. There are still a few bugs to be ironed out, but with a new product like this that’s only to be expected.

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goClick is a straightforward pay per click service which brings you quality traffic at low prices. Known for high customer satisfaction, many customers have stated they are likely to extremely likely to refer a friend to goClick. Customer loyalty is proof that their service works.

Fast and efficient account set-up and an easy to use interface are two reasons goClick has a large base of satisfied customers. Taking a straightforward approach, the goClick account management system displays your account balance, how much you have spent, and number of clicks received. You can easily toggle between sub-accounts and review lists of keywords and bid prices. A simple click of a button and you can change your traffic zone settings, or pause accounts and sub-accounts.

Adding keywords is quick and easy; there is even a bulk submission tool which allows you to add thousands of words at once, simplifying the process even more. Change bid prices, delete or modify keywords, and edit site details easily.

Using BidMaster, a keyword bid price tool, you can adjust bids for an entire sub-account quickly and easily. You can adjust your bid prices so that you are in the highest position possible while setting a maximum bid price. Bids can always be adjusted using the “Change Bids” page, but it is more time consuming.

Once you enter the amount you are willing to pay and click ’submit’, BidMaster will automatically adjust all of the keywords to the maximum position possible up to the maximum bid. There are three options with BidMaster:

• Standard BidMaster: Runs manually, meaning advertisers must log in and specifically run it to adjust the bids.
• Auto BidMaster: A special option that sets BidMaster to run automatically once per night. This removes the worry about overpaying for a position or missing potential traffic for days at a time.
• Power BidMaster: Power BidMaster adjusts bid prices using the bid values of goClick’s partner network, rather than the bids within the goClick site itself.

Reporting on your goClick campaigns allows you to view clicks and transactions at a glance.

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Enhance Interactive (formerly ah-ha.com) was founded in 1999 as a family friendly search engine, and has grown to be a principal player in the pay per click industry.

Owned by one of the leaders in search marketing, Marchex, Inc., Enhance’s network is made up of industry leading search partners such as Dogpile and Snap.com, as well Marchex’s own Vertical Network. With over 2 billion visitors per month, Enhance runs pay per click campaigns for many thousands of advertisers.

With a focus on account optimization, Enhance’s Search Team provides full-service campaign management. They will do anything from writing your PPC ads to managing your bids. Ideal for the busy business owner. You are in good hands with the Enhance Search Team. Email, chat and phone support is available 5 days a week.

Low startup fees and low minimum bid prices mean anyone can easily get started with an Enhance campaign. The robust reporting dashboard allows for real-time, at-a-glance reports, so you are always in the know about your campaign. Features that allow you to set a daily budget and turn on auto-renew further advance the control you have over your campaign.

Overall, Enhance brings you targeted, high quality traffic at affordable prices.

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MIVA offers a low cost alternative by specialising in the delivery of contextual and vertically focused Pay-Per-Click Ads. MIVA’s Pay-Per-Click Ads are distributed across two different networks.

The MIVA Precision Network concentrates on specific business categories or verticals and has been developed for advertisers looking for highly targeted vertical traffic. The Precision Network is currently available in the US and UK and covers sectors including automotive, finance, health/beauty and recruitment. This vertical approach to Pay-Per-Click is designed to enhance targeting for advertisers and in turn drive lower volume, higher value leads.

The MIVA Core Network is a broad distribution network comprising predominantly content sites. The Core Network is available in the US and Europe and enables advertisers to have their Pay-Per-Click Ads displayed on some of the world’s leading news and lifestyle sites. MIVA’s contextual focus provides advertisers with a solution that is both targeted and available at a significantly lower cost of entry than the pay-per-click search networks.

MIVA provides good tools to help advertisers manage their pay per click campaigns.

MIVA’s Campaign Manager allows you to easily manage groups of ads automatically by assigning them to a campaign that has a specific budget and schedule. The Campaign Manager gives you complete control over the MIVA Network on a particular date and time as well as how much of your budget will be allotted to those ads during that time.

The AdAnalyzer is a robust post-click analytical tool that gives advertiser complete control of their advertising by showing the actual return on investment by keyword and campaign.

Reporting is good and there is plenty of information to help you improve ROI.

• Bid Positions display the amount you need to bid in order to achieve a particular position.
• Statistics on click spend and average Cost-Per-Click ( CPC) are now displayed for each ad.

MIVA has an automatic account replenishing option where you can set a threshold and the amount you want automatically deposited to your account. It has a minimum deposit of $50 and a minimum bid of $0.05.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing’s main product, Sponsored Search, provides sponsored listings in search results on the Web’s top portals and search engines, reaching over 80% of active Internet users. These include Yahoo! MSN, Excite, CNN, Altavista, Infospace, ESPN and many more.

Content Match, a feature of Sponsored Search, enables you to broaden your reach beyond search results and reach customers through online publishers, newsletters and emails. Instead of your ad simply appearing in search rankings it will appear next to content such as articles and product reviews related to your business. For example, your music related site might appear with an article on the music industry on MSN.

With Local Sponsored Search you drive customers from the Web to your door whether your business has a Web site or not. You can precisely target prospects searching online for products and services available in your neighborhood, and connect with customers who are already interested in what you sell.

For a monthly fee you can automate the process of process of managing keyword bids with Search Optimizer, which automatically monitors listings to ensure that your target objectives are met. For example, Search Optimizer optimizes complex campaigns to a set cost per acquisition, cost per click, or return on ad spend goals and sorts keywords into those performing over- and under-target to allow for easy adjustment of the campaign for improved results, and to adjust the control of traffic based on the time of day or day of week.

For another monthly fee you can access the Marketing Console, a marketing tool that measures the effectiveness of all your online marketing campaigns. With the Marketing Console you can see exactly how your pay-per-click search, email, banner, paid inclusion or affiliate programs are performing - all in one location.

Yahoo! Search Marketing offers excellent tutorials and support and provides detailed reporting tools to help you track the performance of your PPC campaign and traffic generated. The Keyword Selector Tool helps in the selection of your keywords and there is a View Bids Tool, where you can see the current maximum bids and listings for the top advertisers on any search term. Yahoo! also provides PPC ROI Calculator and a CPM ROI Calculator.

Yahoo! offers two sign-up plans, FastTrack and SelfServe. For $199 the FastTrack plan will provide you with expert research of your website and recommend effective search terms based on the content of your site and Yahoo!’s editorial guidelines. They also create customized ad titles and descriptions based on those search terms. The SelfServe plan is free, but provides no assistance in setting up your campaign and your listings receive no expert feedback before submission and are subject to editorial review.

If you want fast results and you’re willing to pay top dollar, Yahoo! Search Marketing is the place to advertise your site. It’s a well known site with a good reputation - a professional site with a great system and excellent traffic.

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AdWords is the largest and most popular of all the pay per click search engines. In fact, it’s in a class all its own, with an index reaching over 10 billion web pages and 100 different language versions.

Google AdWords offers you benefits you simply won’t find on other PPC search engines. Even if your site appears in Google’s organic search results, using Google AdWords increases your exposure by listing your site prominently in its search results and its related search networks. You can edit your ads and adjust your budget until you achieve the results you want. You can vary your ad format and text continually, choose text or image ads, and target your ads to specific geographic locations and languages.

There is no minimum spending requirement or time limit. You pay a one-off $5 fee to register your details and once you’ve put your AdWords campaign together, it can be up and running within minutes. There is a minimum bid of $0.01 (although in most cases you will have to pay a lot more than this).

Like all PPC search engines, your Google AdWords ads are ranked by the bid price you are willing to pay, but Google also takes into account the relevance of your ad and will give precedence to ads with higher click-through rates. Therefore you could be paying $0.01 more per click than the advertiser ranked above you, but he has a better clickthrough rate, giving him greater “value”, according to Google.

But like most Google interfaces there is the hidden, no-one-will-ever-tell Google algorithm that affects your overall placement in the bidding line-up.

You can create as many ad campaigns as you like, break them down into specific keyword clusters and bid on as many key phrases as your budget will allow. It don’t come much better than that, folks!

Google provides great tools to help advertisers, including Google Analytics which is integrated with AdWords to help you discover which keywords perform and which you should cut. There’s a Website Optimizer (in beta) which enables you to test variations of marketing content on your landing pages to see which version results in increased conversions.

Google also provides excellent tutorials for the beginner, to walk them through the process of setting up an AdWords campaign.

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