Pros and Cons of PPC Advertising
Internet marketers tend to be either passionately in favor or passionately opposed to P P C or Pay-per-Click advertising. People who love P P C cite its potential for bringing in quick investment returns. People who dislike P P C cite its vulnerability to fraud and abuse.
As with most things in the world, P P C advertising has many face. This means that it has both good and bad sides. It,s not all good nor is it all evil. The following are the advantages and disadvantages of P P C advertising.
The Advantages
P P C advertising,s main advantage over other internet marketing media is the fact that it can bring in fast returns. With S E O, it would take months before you begin to see any results. Due to sand boxing and time delays, you will need a lot of time before you experience any increment in search engine traffic. With P P C, your ads will be immediately displayed in the search engine results pages when the keyword you have bid for is pulled up by an internet user. Thus, your site stats will immediately show the difference.
Aside from generating fast results, P P C advertising also gives you targeted traffic. Since P P C ads are linked with particular keywords, your ads will be shown only to people who use the relevant search terms. Thus, there,s a high probability that your ad will get clicked and your site visited. More importantly, because of their initial interest, the visitors that you will get to your site are predisposed to become your customers.
Finally, P P C has the advantage of making you pay only for the traffic that your site gets from the ad. Thus, your investment per click is clearly laid out and easily measurable.
The Disadvantages
The main disadvantage to PP C is its susceptibility to fraud. There are affiliates who have made pay-per-click fraud their main source of income. These fraudsters will set up an affiliate marketing website or a sign up for Google Ad Sense. Then they will hire or con other people into becoming the ads clicker in their site. Some even go so far as to get clicker booths designed for them. To you, the advertiser, this means that you may be paying for worthless clicks: clicks that have no potential to bring in any profit.
One other disadvantage is inadvertent waste of resources due to accidental clicks. Some people click on P P C ads for malicious pleasure. Some, on the other hand, click ads as a means of testing their internet connection. Such clicks are not going to generate any sales, but you will still have to pay for them.
Written by Steve Pavis
Knowing Your Keywords
Search engine optimization (S E O) is a task for the professionals. However, there,s no reason why you should not try to understand it so you could practice it yourself if only for maintenance purposes.
It,s a Keywords Game
S E O is about making your website one of the top results in a search engine query. What search engines do is index web pages. These web pages are scanned and the keywords are indexed by the software made for the purpose. There are also programs to relate the words found to one another so as to find a unifying thread and determine the topic or the purpose of the page. After that, these pages will be ranked according to their category (their purpose). When a keyword is queried, the search engine will yield only the pages that are relevant to the keyword used; these web pages will be those that contain the keyword and related keywords in abundance.
Being returned on top of the list, therefore, necessitates determining the keyword and the related keywords for which you wish to garner top rank. After this crucial step, you need to optimize for these keywords.
Determining Your S E O Keyword(s)
How do you determine the keyword for which you should optimize? This involves (1) determining your site,s purpose; (2) finding out the terms that people who are looking for accounting services online would be likely to use to search the internet; and (3) weighing everything against the competition for the keyword(s).
In the case of an accounting firm, the natural choice of keywords would be ,accounting services., This keyword phrase fulfills the number 1 criterion for the accounting firm obviously provides accounting services. It also fulfills criterion number 2 for it,s the most likely choice of keyword when people are looking for accounting services online. However, it does not pass criterion number 3 for Google,s keyword tool will tell you that there,s stiff competition for this phrase.
Admittedly, this measure comes from the number of advertisers competing for the keyword in Google,s Ad Words scheme, but it is a good enough gauge of the general degree of competition for this keyword.
Google,s tool will show you possible variations on the same theme. In the above example, Google,s keyword tool shows that there are people searching for the term ,accounting bookkeeping services, but there,s hardly any competition in AdWords for it. This makes this keyword phrase a good replacement. Thus, instead of optimizing its website for the keyword phrase, accounting services, the accounting firm may be better off optimizing for the keyword phrase, accounting bookkeeping services.
Optimizing Your Web Pages
At this point in the S E O process, you will have to apply your chosen keywords to your meta tags and to your web page content. The more keywords (and their related keywords) there are, the better optimized the site is and the better its, rank in the result for an ,accounting bookkeeping services, query.
Written By Steve Pavis
S E O The Basics
Search engine optimization or S E O is the process of making a web page (and consequently a whole site) easier to find through search engine queries. Specifically, the main purpose of S E O is to make a web page number one or as close to the top as it can possibly get in its own keyword or category.
Why S E O?
The simple answer is to increase website traffic. The more involved answer is to increase the rank of a web page in a certain category. After the rank has been improved, there is an expected rise in the page,s position in the results pages when a keyword related to the site,s purpose has been queried. With the rise in the position, it is expected that people will more easily find it. As a result, more people will visit the site, which brings us back to the initial answer.
How to do S E O? There are two acknowledged ways by which a web page may be optimized for search engines, and these are keyword optimization and link building.
Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization involves increasing the number of keywords in the web page,s code and content so that the search engine ,spider, will ,see, the keywords, take note of them, and deem the page to be relevant to these keywords. To illustrate, if there are a lot of the term ,basketball, (as well as its variations), the search engine algorithm will conclude that the site must be relevant to the sport ,basketball,.
However, do be careful about using keywords. While the rule of thumb says having more keyword and related keywords is best for S E O, search engines have begun to wise up to spam pages; pages whose content are all keywords and are therefore no longer human-readable. There are penalties for spamming your page. Be careful to stay within keyword density limits to be safe.
Link Building
Actually, this is truly one-way link building or the process of posting links in other web pages; these links, when clicked, should lead the user to your website.
Originally, links were just another way to direct traffic to a website. However, with the advent of Google,s new Page Rank algorithm, one-way links now influence a site,s status with Google. That is, the more sites provide a link to a web page, the better the ranking of that page should be. Furthermore, the categories of the sites on which the links have been found also matter.
If a web page for a Caribbean hotel gives the site of a Caribbean tour and travel agency a one-way link, the latter,s rank will get a significant boost. However, if a Japanese electronics company gives this same site a one-way link, the site,s rank is barely affected. The hotel is related to travels, but electronics is way off base. It,s as simple as that.
Written by Steve Pavis