Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Pay Per Click Advertisement

Pay per click, or PPC, is an online advertising technique used on various search engines. Pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results; when a visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount. Variants include pay for placement and pay for ranking.

PPC started in the year 1998 by Goto.com, a 25 employee startup company (later Overture, now part of Yahoo). However, Pay Per Click Advertising was only introduced in 2002, until then, advertisements were charged at cost per thousand (CPM) but Yahoo Advertisements have always been PPC, since its introduction in 1998. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Ad Center are the largest operators in PPC advertising.
  • Instant Results - No need to wait for your product or service to reach the user review. Immediate Traffic to your website.

  • Economical – It is economical as compared with other traditional advertising techniques.
  • Ideal for Testing Market – Pay Per Click is Ideal for short term advertisement campaigns. We can test the user reaction on particular products or services with immediate results.

  • Return On Investment – It can provide immediate return on Investment especially if your website is processing business or sales online.
  • Extremely Flexible – Its easy to adjust, add, delete or edit your keywords and copy, target geographic locations and set timings of appearing of your ad copy.

  • Avoid Unnecessary KeywordsFor those keywords which you do not want your adcopy to get appear & hence clicked can be avoided by using negative keywords.

  • Total ControlIn PPC Campaigns, the steering wheel is totally in your hands i.e you decide the daily budget, keywords, adcopy ( tile, description, URL) .

Friday, January 25, 2008

Online Marketing Strategies

There are a lot of techniques for us to approach our internet marketing strategy. The benefits of long term online advertising advantages is that, it can be the single most efficient advertising and marketing with compared to conventional advertising or marketing strategies. It is also a relatively even playing field, so even if we are beginner in this field, still we can compete with national or international household names.

Our online advertising and marketing are ranging from banner advertising, through to pay per click, email marketing, Social Media optimisation and search engine optimisation (seo for short), with or without link building, which is utilizing reciprocal or one way links, commonly referred to as backward links to increase your natural search engine listings and affiliates marketing.

Banner Advertising:- Banner advertising is a marketing strategy which is internet based, as opposed to magazine advertising which is paper based. With this online marketing strategy we have to pay search engines or web directories, or relevant sites to place a banner of our site at the top of their pages. There are a few qualities that generally make for more effective banner ads in many situations. If we are like to have a banner ad campaign, then we should keep these below suggestions in mind:

  • Post banner ads on pages with related Web content -- the more related, the better.
  • Advertise a particular product or service in your banner, rather than your site generally.
  • If you do advertise a particular product or service, link the banner ad to that part of your Web site, rather than your home page.
  • Put banner ads at the top of the page, rather than farther down.
  • Use simple messages rather than complicated ones.
  • Use animated ads rather than static ones.
  • Your graphic content should pique visitor curiosity, without being too obscure.
  • Keep banner ad size small. If the page takes too long to load, a lot of visitors will go on to another page.

The most important things are to make visually appealing ads with interesting content and to intelligently place the ads so they are exposed to audiences that would be interested in them.

Pay Per Click:- PPC (pay per click) bid management begins with identifying the maximum CPC (cost per click) we are willing to pay for a given keyword phrase. If we do not know this value, it is perhaps not advisable to engage in PPC advertising. The max CPC will change over time and could vary from search engine to search engine. If we don't know this value, start with an educated guess. This could be based on an industry rule of thumb or calculated based on internal factors such as profit margins. For example, let's suppose we're bidding on the keyword phrase "poker chips" but do not know our max CPC. One way to estimate a max CPC involves taking the top 5 bids on Overture and computing the average. The current bids are: $0.51, $0.50, $0.33, $0.32, $0.31. The average is 39 cents. Use that as our max CPC to begin with.

A better approach is to base the CPC on your profit margins. Let's suppose our average sale price on a set of poker chips is $80 and our profit margin is 20%. That leaves $16 of profit for each set. Also, assume that our conversion rate will be 1% (this is a conservative estimate). For every 100 visitors from a PPC ad, we expect 1 sale. If we have $16 of ad spend to spread over 100 visitors, then we have 16 cents to spend per click. Another way to approach this problem is to have an ad spend based on revenue. For example, if our goal is to spend 15% of revenue on advertising then our ad spend would work out to $12 per poker chip set. Again, assuming a conservative 1% conversion rate, that would leave us with 12 cents per click. As our campaign progresses and we have to determine our actual conversion rate, adjust the CPC accordingly.

Email Marketing:- Many email marketing programs develop organically. An idea is born, an email is sent, it works, and another email is sent, and so on. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, we can often accomplish more in a shorter time frame by putting a strategic plan into place.
What’s involved in developing a plan for an effective email strategy? Is it our first email marketing campaign or an existing campaign that we want to take to the next level? Writing such a plan takes considerable time and effort, and may seem a bit daunting at first. Not only is a plan necessary for the long-term success of our campaign, it’s also critical for keeping us on track in the short term.

A strategic plan is an evolving document. As your knowledge of, and experience with, email marketing grows, we’ll want to chop and change our plan to incorporate the new ideas that we’ve learned, and remove those that aren’t meeting our expectations

Generally these are the appropriate set of steps that we can use in our own email marketing campaigns. This process involves the following tasks:

  1. Undertake a competitive analysis.
  2. Answer some key questions about your offerings, audiences, content, mailing schedule, goals, and price.
  3. we have to set quantitative goals for the strategy.
  4. Set and allocate the budget.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a "Digg This" button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos. Social media optimization is a form of search engine marketing.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social book marking, video and photo sharing websites

Search Engine Optimisation: - Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users or online user find Web sites. That's why a Web site with good search engine listings may see a huge increase in traffic. In this process we can get a huge number of visitor or we can call online customer for our websites without investing much money in it.

Affiliate Marketing:- Having an affiliate program is one of the best and cheapest ways to increase sales and achieve higher targeted traffic. Affiliate marketing is very effective solution, because it allows us to base advertising on a pay-per-performance model. Instead of paying for advertising and "hoping for the best", merchants using affiliate marketing programs pay only when advertising results in an actual sale.

Friday, January 4, 2008

How to Develop an Effective Email Strategy

Many email marketing programs develop organically. An idea is born, an email is sent, it works, and another email is sent, and so on. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, you can often accomplish more in a shorter time frame by putting a strategic plan into place.

What’s involved in developing a plan for an effective email strategy? Is it your first email marketing campaign or an existing campaign that you want to take to the next level? Writing such a plan takes considerable time and effort, and may seem a bit daunting at first, but don’t let this deter you. Not only is a plan necessary for the long-term success of your campaign, it’s also critical for keeping you on track in the short term. Consider it a creative endeavor and you’ll soon discover that writing a strategic plan is actually quite a lot of fun once you get the hang of it!

A strategic plan is an evolving document. As your knowledge of, and experience with, email marketing grows, you’ll want to chop and change your plan to incorporate the new ideas that you’ve learned, and remove those that aren’t meeting your expectations. Even the most comprehensive plans will need tweaking with time, so don’t hesitate to do this - it’s normal and it’s smart.

Generally these are the appropriate set of steps that you can use in your own email marketing campaigns. This process involves the following tasks:

  1. Undertake a competitive analysis.
  2. Answer some key questions about your offerings, audiences, content, mailing schedule, goals, and budget.
  3. Set quantitative goals for the strategy.
  4. Set and allocate the budget.

An email marketing strategy is your map to success. It will point you in the right direction, keep you from veering off course, and identify the quickest routes by which you can reach your business goals. Like good directions, a good strategic plan will save you time, help you to budget accordingly, ensure that your email efforts are synchronized with your company’s goals, and allow you to plan ahead so that you don’t miss opportunities.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Web Site SEO Check List

There are a number of processes to take care when putting a website on the Internet. Failure to go after these steps will usually mean that your site will either rank very poorly in the search engine results page or not at all, which pretty much defeats the purpose of creating a website. Collectively these steps are called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

This list will definitely help to remember all of the most essential SEO steps. Once these are completed you can move on to “Fine Tuning” your SEO by applying some of the more advanced Optimization methods.

Onsite SEO

  1. Research Good keywords
  2. Sufficient page text – Too little text on a web page will cause Google to turn it into a supplemental page.
  3. Original Page Text – Pages that are too similar to other pages on your site may be filtered out by the search engines.
  4. Unique Page Title – Each page on your site should have a unique title based on the pages content and the most important or targeted keywords.
  5. Unique Meta Description – Each page on your site should have a unique meta description based on the pages content and your most important keywords.
  6. Unique Meta Keywords (doesn’t do much good, but it doesn’t hurt either) – Each page on your site should have a unique meta keywords based on the pages content and your most important keywords.
  7. Keyword repetition in page text. Keywords and keyword variations should be used frequently on the page. Don’t get carried away, make sure the page is still comfortable for your visitors to read.
  8. Keyword emphasis in page text – Use heading html tags and bold to tell the search engines what you think are the most important words on your page.
  9. Keyword placement in page text – Be sure the first and last paragraphs on your page include your major keywords.
  10. Alt tags – Search engines cannot read an image. Tell them what the picture is about. Don’t repeat the some keywords over and over, if you put the image there than it must relate to your content, tell the search engine about that relation.
  11. Page Size- Page Size should not be exceed 100MB
  12. Using of JS files – Try to avoid using of java script in your coding part. If you are using it then create a .js file & then use it. (Same thing with .css files)

Offsite SEO

  1. Incoming links
    • Directories - General directories have some value; however, try to find as many niche directories that are devoted to your industry as you can. We suggest though that you do not get too wrapped up in this form of link acquisition. We recommend a slow, steady rate in adding these links. Don't spam Google
    • Article Submission – This is a good way to establish yourself as an “Authority” in your field, as well as create a steady stream of new relevant links (and Traffic) to your site.
    • Press Releases – Find “News Worthy” events to write about your company and your website. This can give you a large burst of new visitors, although these will normally reduce over time. Some of the sites that use your release may keep it on their site, which will give you a good quality link back to your site. Most of the links that you get will be short term, which will not provide link value. It’s the traffic that makes this worth while
    • Link Trades – The search engines are reducing the values of these trades. Be picky; only add trades from quality related sites. These trades often will send you regular visitors. If one of your visitors are going to leave your site (you don’t always have what they want!), why not send them to one of your “friends”.
    • One-way links – These come in many forms. You may pay for some, often sites will give you a link if you just ask and your site would be valuable to their clients.
    • Look for opportunities, some additional sources are:
      • Forums
      • Blog Comments
      • Review sites
      • Classified sites
      • Don’t spam these sites, if they give you the opportunity to write something and add your link, be sure to give them something back. Follow their rules and give quality thoughtful comments, reviews etc.
    • Link Bait – This is a pretty new term. It means to add high quality content to your site that someone may want to link to.
  2. Outgoing links - It has been suggested that Google uses the sites you link to in determining the subject of your site. Link to a few authority sites.
  3. Statistics – Watch your Web Site statistics for trends. This will show you what is working in your SEO efforts and what is not. Statistics can also be used to see where people go when they visit your site. If people are leaving without visiting other pages, then you may have a problem with that page.
  4. Web Master Tools – There are many tools you can use to check the health of your web site.
  5. Google provided tools – Google provides a number of webmaster tools to help you to see if there are errors in your site, what the most common words are in your site (ie what your site is about), what words are most frequently used in link text pointing to your site (once again, what your site is about)

Saturday, December 15, 2007

A Natural Way of Linkbuilding :-LINKBAITING

Link bait (or linkbait) refers to anything on a website that encourages links from other websites. It can include content, online tools, downloads, or anything else that another site owner might find compelling enough to link to. Link bait is important because most search engines use backlines as a major factor in determining ranking.

Link Baiting is just like fishing. You publish a new page on a topic and set it free on the web. Hopefully others pick up on the content as fresh and interesting and link to it. The article is the bait, and the link is the catch.

Some common Link baiting Techniques

  • Talk about a specific community.
  • Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important.
  • Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community.
  • Be provocative or controversial.
  • Be a contrarian.
  • Be thorough.
How effective is Linkbaiting?- Linkbaiting is the most effective form of linkbuilding. Generally links gained using this method only increase in value so you don’t have to worry about massive disvaluing. Sometimes small webmaster sites will link to your linkbait, at this point the link has only a small amount of value but as time passes that site grows and the link from it grows as well. In this case overtime your value from that specific site would increase which effects your rankings positively. Now not all links achieved through linkbaiting will increase like this. But overall most are not disvalued.

What forms of linkbaiting I use?
These are the most common methods: Writing a killing single article or series of articles (a series generally does much better), a controversial article or a tool. Is one better than another? Not necessarily. It depends on the article or tool. Depending on that either could perform best. Tools generally cost more to produce but if they are unique and in high demand they can become a massive linkbait. Especially if your offering it free while the competition charges.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

What is LSI & How it Works

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is an algorithm used by search engines to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query. The LSI algorithm doesn't actually understand the meanings of words on the page but it can spot various patterns of related words. It may be possible that LSI return with relevant results that don't contain the keyword at all, but those pages contain related or relevant words.

In response to a query an LSI indexed database will return the pages it thinks will best fit the search terms. The LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean and does not require an exact match to return useful results.

Latent semantic indexing was initially used in Adsense to enable adverts targeted to the theme of a webpage to appear on the page. The algorithm checks the wording on the page and determines the theme of the page. It was only later that Google applied the algorithms to search engine placement, and it is used by search engines other than Google. It involves analysis of words used in natural language, the synonyms and closely related words used when discussing the general theme of a page. It complements, rather than replaces, keyword analysis.

How LSI Works....
The Search for Content in a document, Natural language is full of redundancies, and not every word that appears in a document carries semantic meaning.The first step in doing LSI is culling all those extraeous words from a document, leaving only content words likely to have semantic meaning. There are many ways to define a content word - here is one recipe for generating a list of content words from a document collection:

  • Make a complete list of all the words that appear anywhere in the collection
  • Discard articles, prepositions, and conjunctions
  • Discard common verbs (know, see, do, be)
  • Discard pronouns
  • Discard common adjectives (big, late, high)
  • Discard frilly words (therefore, thus, however, albeit, etc.)
  • Discard any words that appear in every document
  • Discard any words that appear in only one document

This process condenses our documents into sets of content words that we can then use to index our location. For more detail visit
1.http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml
2.http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-indexing-lsi-explained.php

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Content & Keyword Optimisation

Search engines love content ie text, and if there isn't any meaningful text or relevant content on our web site then no one is going to find us. If our site is basically an e-commerce web site or it has only product information or it is a shopping cart, then this can cause a problem. In this case we have to provide all the information related to products. If we sell widgets, we can talk about how the widgets are made, what we can do with the widgets, free widget recipes, etc. A quality & informatics content is a really great way to keep the customers coming back as well as being a good search engine strategy.

Keyword Optimisation:
The basic theory to keyword optimization is that each web page should be as focused on one or two keyword phrases, so the search engine will think the page is highly relevant to those keywords. Preferably you would create one page for each of your keyword and devote that page just to that keyword.

When Google’s bot is going through out site it is looking to try to figure out what each page is about. It does this by looking at a) the title tag, b) the heading tag, c) other onpage elements like body text d) alt tag and e) incoming text links. So ideally you would to choose one keyword or phrase for each. So we have to provide our targeted keywords inside the tital tag and also inside the page if we provide keywords in h1 tag then the search engine crawler give this keyword more importance. Here some points we have to look after when we are going to optimize a webpage.

  • Please write your title in a descriptive manner not as keyword1, keyword2, keyword3.
  • Excessive uses of heading tag may be make your site an a spam
  • Excessive uses of keywords also harmful to your site. (eg- Aim for 300-400 words on each page with 7 - 10% keyword density is generally treated as good —but this is a rough guide, as Google changes its algorithm often and there is much debate on what is ideal.)
  • Using the keywords in the tag of an image is a good habit.
  • Don’t use duplicate or copied content for your website. Always try to make your content updated & provide new fresh content to your website.