Internal Link Building, Often Not Done Properly, Always Important

By David | Published: December 18, 2010

It is common knowledge that linking your own site to other websites will help you in terms of search engine optimization. However, you can achieve the same results using internal links. The way that you layout your website links will definitely affect your site’s search engine ranking, especially if your site has a lot of pages. All you have to do is build your system of internal links the right way, by using the right anchor texts, site navigation concepts, and in-context links.

Internal link building for SEO rests heavily on the anchor text that you use for your site. Most site administrators use the wrong kinds of texts all the time. You need to use a kind of text that will both boost your site’s reputation and push people to actually make the action of clicking your link. Use anchor texts that are relevant to search engines, instead of the usual “Click Here” or “Try This”.

You should also consider how your visitors will move through your website. This is probably the most important consideration in setting up your internal links. Make sure to link your all your best pages to your navigation menu.

To address this situation, you can use two types of navigation menus in your website. The first one may show the main sections of your website. You may use this to show your visitors the main pages that they should visit. The second type is for pages that will give your visitors information about your website and your business. You may use this to give out your contact information, your site and your company’s description, and other information that are relevant to stabilize your reputation.

Finally, you should use the right in-context links for your website. Internet link building for SEO needs links to be connected to one another in a way that makes sense. For this part of internal link-building, you need to consider the size of your website. If your site is relatively small, you do not need to a lot of internal links. Simply use the most important key phrases and connect them to your website’s most relevant pages. If you have a relatively larger site, then you can be more liberal on this area. Larger sites are more affected by internal link building than smaller sites.

If you follow the right link building concepts while building your internal links, you will definitely be harnessing the effect of good SEO foundations to promote your website.

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Why You Should Care About Your Google Quality Score?

By David | Published: December 11, 2010

In the past, if you wanted to launch a pay-per-click campaign, all you would have to do is set up a one-page offer site and wait for the traffic to flow in and convert to sales. These days, however, Google is cracking down on such poor-quality sites by implementing their Quality Score system. The system was implemented in 2006 and is a way of measuring the relevance of information (keywords, ads and landing pages) to Google users. A Quality Score is computed for each of your keywords and is calculated whenever your keyword matches a user’s search query. There are two types of Quality Scores that you should be aware of:

1.      Keyword Quality Scores that influence how and when your ads appear on Google and the Search Networks.

2.      Ad Quality Scores that influence how and when your ads appear on the Display Network.

Factors that are used to calculate the Quality Score include the historical click-through rate of the ads and keywords in your account, the quality of the landing page the ad links to and the relevance of your keywords to your ads. You can find out what your Quality Score is by looking at your account statistics, running a keyword performance report and visiting the keyword analysis field.

If you have a high Quality Score, you will not only enjoy lower actual costs-per-click, but also enjoy a higher ranking on search results pages and make it easier for you to enter auctions at a lower cost.

This means that you will be penalized for squeeze pages that have no useful information and won’t let visitors do anything but opt-in. For example, if 90% of visitors leave the site a few minutes after landing on it, it signals Google that your site has irrelevant content and will result in a lower Quality Score. Hence, you have to create a site that has not only has lots of quality content for your niche but also has links to other relevant sites. This will not only give you a decreased CPC but also help boost the chances of repeat traffic, increasing your visitor value as well as your click value.

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Using Google AdWords to Find a Profitable Market

By David | Published: December 4, 2010

Now that you know how valuable the Internet is in researching your target market, you should learn the right way to use it. While the majority of entrepreneurs see the net as a way to easily launch a new product and bring it to the market, professional marketers would first go online to find a market and then create a product to sell to it. Until you know your market, you should not even consider building websites and creating products. If you understand this basic principle, you can elevate your Internet marketing to a whole new level.

What is the first step in finding a profitable market that you can exploit? First, search keywords related to the market that you are interested in. For example, if you are interested in getting into tomato growing, you can use the Google Keyword tool to search for related keywords such as growing tomatoes. This will provide you not only with global and local (American) monthly searches, local search trends (for a 12-month period), but also keyword ideas such as “grow tomatoes”, “tomato seeds” and “how to grow tomatoes”.

If average global search results exceed 1,000, then tomato growing may be a viable market. However, just because tomato growing generates many searches does not mean it is lucrative, since the searches may simply be for informational purposes. One way to determine if the market is profitable is to see if there is a lot of advertising in that niche. If there are advertisers, then it is safe to say that people are spending money in that niche.

To check for advertisers, you can do a regular Google search. If the results return more than six advertisers, you can safely assume that there is money in this particular market. You can verify the results by logging onto Amazon or other retail sites and checking if there are books and magazines dedicated to the subject. There would not be a lot of publications on this particular topic if people were not spending money in the market.

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Split-Test Your Ads to Generate More Traffic and Higher Conversion Rates

By David | Published: November 29, 2010

Split testing is a great way of identifying which of your ads is more effective at generating click-through traffic and improving what works while eliminating poorly-performing ads. Split testing works by running two or more ads in parallel for the same keyword and, based on your click-through rates, keeping the ads that generate the best results. Keep in mind that even small changes such as capitalizing words in your URL can make a big difference to your performance, which is why split testing is so valuable.

The Google AdWords system allows you to easily split test different ads by alternating the ads you assign to specific ad groups. The system will then show you the number of impressions and clicks, as well as the click-through rates for each ad. Although you can test as many ads as you want, it is best to stick to only two at a time to generate faster results.

When you have at least fifty clicks for both ads you can decide which ad to keep based on your CTR. Don’t rush this part because less than fifty clicks may not provide you an accurate picture and result in throwing out an ad that may be converting quite well. But remember to set your AdWords account to show each ad fifty percent of the time, otherwise Google will show the one receiving the most clicks more often and you won’t gain an accurate picture of your ads’ performance.

Although initially, you are using split testing to find an ad with the higher CTR, if you can afford to wait a little longer you should use Google’s conversion tracking function to find out which ad has a higher conversion rate. Remember that even if an ad has a lower CTR but generates more revenue, it is an ad that you want to keep.

What can you test? Virtually everything in your AdWords campaign, from your Google ads to the landing pages that is the first thing that visitors will see when they click on the link. In fact, you should test different landing pages since these are a critical component in your sales funnel. Remember that the Google ads are merely a way of driving visitors to your site. The landing page is what makes your sales presentation and converts the prospects into customers. Higher conversion rates mean that you will have more money to spend on AdWords, which will lead to more click-through traffic and higher sales.

Here are some tips for effective split testing:

  1. Use a “control” ad that you will keep constant while making changes in the other ad. This will enable you to determine which changes are making the most difference.
  2. Record all the changes you make. There’s nothing worse than testing an ad that you have changed and discovering that a previous version of the ad generated higher sales but you can’t remember what changes that you made. This is why you need to carefully record every change as well as the date and time those changes were made.

Be patient since it takes time for your tests to generate enough relevant data and solid numbers for you to analyze. Don’t give in to the temptation to change your ads as soon as you see a few clicks since impatience may result in your losing a lot of money.

Next week will be some steps on how to find a profitable niche if you don’t already have one.

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How to Find Keywords that Generate Sales

By David | Published: November 22, 2010

Finding the right keywords are vital to the success of your pay-per-click campaign, since these terms are what your prospects are typing into search engines to search for solutions to their problems. If you can’t identify these keywords, then you won’t be able to find your target market, won’t generate click-through traffic to your site, won’t generate leads and won’t make any sales.

However, finding keywords is just the first step. You also need to put yourself in the mindset of your prospects. Different combinations of keywords may signal at which stage the prospect is in the buying cycle. For example, a prospect searching for the keyword “baby strollers” is likely still researching for information but a more specific keyword phrase such as “used blue McLaren stroller” indicates they are closer to actually making a purchase. Keywords can actually reveal a lot about your prospects, and understanding these cues can help you tailor your advertising to make it more effective and ensure a higher conversion rate.

The goal of your AdWords campaign should be to generate as much click-through traffic to your site as possible and to have high conversion rates. Generating traffic that does not convert will only will only lead to high costs-per-sale and an unprofitable campaign. Here are some tips for finding keywords.

1.      Begin by making a list of keywords and phrases that are related to your niche, and then branch out into related synonyms and terms. You can create an initial list of keywords using online tools such as Google Keyword Tool  or Wordtracker. Then use Google’s Wonder Wheel or Related Searches to find related search terms.

2.      Test your keywords to eliminate those that are not generating high conversion rates and replace them with others. Remember to always put yourself in the place of your prospects so that you can customize your keywords further.

3.      Start with exact keyword matches and when you find which ones convert the best, turn those into broad and phrase matches. Exact keywords are those that are placed in brackets ( [ ] ) and will only show your ad to people searching for that exact term. To illustrate, if the keyword is “blue cars” only people who type in that exact phrase and not related ones such as “buy blue cars” will see your ad. Phrase matches (keywords contained in quotations ( “ “ ) will show your ad when people type in searches in which the phrase appears exactly, i.e. “used blue cars” and not “blue used cars”. Broad matches have no delimiters so your ads will show up for all searches that use these two particular keywords. Bidding on phrase and exact matches will give you a higher click-through rate over time with a lower bid price.

4.      Use negative keywords. These keywords are entered with a minus ( – ) sign and when they are typed into a search box, Google will not show your ad. For example, if you want to exclude people searching for free stuff, enter “– free” into your list so that you can prevent a lot of irrelevant traffic from flooding your site, saving you money and increasing your click-value immeasurably.

Online pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has totally changed the way advertisers test products and services they are launching. In the past, before the Internet became so ubiquitous, new businessmen would introduce their products that they hoped would be appealing to potential customers. The only way for them to gauge customer acceptance of the product would be to hire a market research firm for thousands of dollars, money that most small businessmen would not be able to spare.  With PPC advertising however, small business owners can simply offer visitors to their site a product and test their response to it. With PPC, you can now assess products in a matter of hours rather than months and at a cost of hundreds, rather than thousands, of dollars. Another important advantage of PPC advertising is that it allows you to test and tweak your sales funnel virtually on a daily basis, allowing you to reach extraordinary conversion rates and take your business to the next level.

Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs continue to take the approach that the Internet is just a way for them to quickly and easily take their product to market. Their approach remains an “if you build it, they will come” approach. They fail to grasp the basic principle that you need to focus as much on conversion as on click-through rates. This ultimately means that no matter how much you are paying per click, if you are focused just on driving traffic to your site, you can still end up in the red.

To illustrate, if you are selling an e-book for $30 and paying around $0.5 per click on your keyword, every 500 visitors to your site will cost you $250. But if your ads are not targeting the right people or your sales funnel is not properly set up, you could end up with a low click value. The click value is the income you generate for every click. In our example, your click value is $0.06. Hence, it is essential that you increase your click value and not just your click-through traffic.  This is a common error committed by many businessmen who are new to PPC and believe that generating traffic is vital without considering how such traffic will convert. Hence, the key to making money is to drive targeted, qualified traffic to your site which can generate high conversion rates. Even if you get millions of visitors a month, you can still end up losing money if the traffic is not converting. Conversion rates can be affected by a wide variety of factors, including choosing the right keywords, writing effective ads and creating a well-optimized landing page.

Next week we’ll go into split testing ads so your conversion rates go up.

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Crafting Pay Per Click Ads That Will Result in Increased Conversions

By David | Published: November 15, 2010

Good Google AdWords ads are vital to the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaign. Unfortunately, Google only allows 130 characters, including spaces, in your ad, making it a challenge to capture the attention of your prospects and make them curious enough to click on your link. But you don’t just want to generate high levels of click-throughs to your site, but qualified, motivated traffic that will convert into sales. Even if you have tons of traffic in your site, you can still lose money without high conversion rates. Remember that anytime someone clicks on your ad, you pay for it whether or not they buy anything from your site.

One approach that many PPC advertisers take is the bait and switch, in which you advertise a product at a low price to attract customers and then try to convince them to a more expensive product, or tell them the promised product is not available but a pricier substitute is. However, this approach will not build your sales in the long run, and can even give you a bad online reputation that will turn people off your site. You will simply end up with high costs-per-click but have little to show for it.

You also don’t want to create ads that sound too generic, since while it may cause more people to click on your link, it will likely not result in conversions. To illustrate, if your product is a course teaching you how to speak French, you don’t want to create an ad that reads “Learn How to Speak a Foreign Language Quickly!” since while everyone who wants to learn another language will click on it, a lot of them will leave quickly if they are not interested in learning to speak French. You have to make your ad more specific to attract people who want to learn French in order to generate more conversions.

Here are some tips on creating an effective ad.

1.      You need to understand your prospects. Be aware that the best way to generate sales is to show them how your product can help meet a particular need that they have.

2.      Don’t assume that your customer is more knowledgeable than they actually are. For example, if they have a sore knee, the majority of users will likely not be searching for a specific term such as “displaced knee cap” but will be using the more general keyword “sore knee”. Keep in mind that most people are likely to click on an ad that promises to explain the reasons behind sore knee clearly and offers remedies to the condition in layman’s terms rather than on an ad filled with technical jargon.

3.      Grab the attention of your prospects with strong headlines. One way to do this is to include the targeted keyword or key phrase in the headline. Another is to phrase the headline as a question. To illustrate, if your keyword is “sore knee”, your headline could be “Want Relief for Your Sore Knee?”

4.      Your ad also has to focus on its unique features that make it distinct from similar products. For example, if you are selling a sore knee remedy, highlight its unique selling proposition, such as a more potent formulation.

5.      Add a call to action to your ad, since if you have successfully piqued the attention of your prospects and drawn them in, you need to explain to them exactly what to do. For example, invite them to click on a link to learn more or avail of special offers.

Next week we’ll be talking about how to find keywords for you to target.

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Build a PPC Campaign: The Basics

By David | Published: November 8, 2010

Once you have successfully used keyword research tools to locate a profitable market that you can tailor products for, you can begin launching your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. PPC campaigns basically involve finding relevant keywords, bidding on your keywords, writing ads and then monitoring traffic flow to your site. Here is the step-by-step process for building a PPC campaign.

1.      Research the market to find a product that is in high demand or find a need that you can create a product for.

2.      Use keyword research tools such as the one available on the Google Adwords site to find keywords that people are searching for which is related to the market you’re interested in. But you should not only conduct vertical searches, but lateral ones as well. To illustrate, if you are researching the keyword “used cars”, don’t just expand the keyword phrase to “used blue cars” or “used blue cars 2007” but also use synonyms and related terms such as “used blue sedans” and “second hand cars”.

3.      Check your competition for the market. You can do this simply by searching for your keywords and key phrases on Google or other search engines and looking at how many ads appear in the search results pages. If there are too many ads, then the keyword may be highly competitive and you may want to find another one. On the other hand, if there are only a few ads, then it may indicate that there is little money to be made in this particular market since people are not spending on it.

4.      Create ad groups by grouping your list of keywords based on a major theme or main keyword. Then, research an additional ten to twenty keywords related to the main keyword or phrase for each ad group.

5.      Write your ads, making sure you use the basic AIDA (attention-interest-desire-action) copywriting principles used for creating an effective sales page. Create one ad per ad group, making sure that the main keyword or phrase is used in the headline, since this has been proven to generate higher conversion levels.

6.      Split test your ads so that you can constantly improve your PPC campaigns and generate more profitable clicks. Split testing is vital to the success of your campaigns, since even minute changes can severely affect your click-through rate as well as the number of sales you generate. Fortunately, real-time software allows you to test your ads and get the results back in a matter of hours or days, rather than the months that more conventional testing would entail.

Of course, you have to set up a Google AdWords account, where you can set a daily budget as well as the maximum cost-per-click that you are willing to pay for each keyword. The cost per click is the amount you will pay every time someone clicks on your ad. To illustrate, if you are in the currency-trading niche, and want to advertise using the keyword “forex”, you could pay anywhere from $1 to $8 per click. Once your daily budget has been exhausted, Google will simply stop showing your ads for the remainder of the day. Hence, if you take $5 per click and you have a daily budget of $1,000, Google will stop showing your ad once 200 people click through to your site.

If your resources are limited, many experts advocate setting a lower CPC rather than a smaller daily budget, since its better to be shown at a lower position on search results pages for the whole day rather than at a higher position but for only a part of the day. There are also some studies that reveal that ads in lower positions tend to convert better and generate more sales.

Next week I’ll explain how to write ads for your PPC campaigns.

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Prosper202 Tracking Plugin

By David | Published: January 10, 2010

Sorry I haven’t been around in a while.  We’ve been working on tons of new projects and just staying busy in general.  Anyway here is a plugin that can be very valuable to your business.

This is a plugin that will help you use Prosper202 and/or Tracking202 with WordPress without having to edit any WordPress files.  It’s extremely easy to use.

== Installation ==

1. Upload `prosper202-tracking.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

== Useage ==

1. Under Tools look for Prosper Tracking Settings
2. Under Account – Name put something descriptive for example the page name or the campaign name for that page
3. Under Pages IDs put the page ID for each page that you want tracked.  To find page IDs go to Pages or Posts and then click Edit.
Mouse over the page you want to track and you will get results like example: http://customrequest.com/wp-admin/page.php?action=edit&post=172.
172 will be your page ID for this example.
4. Insert Tracking Domain URL from Prosper202 or Tracking 202.

Download the latest version of this plugin.

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Psychological Marketing Part 1: Colors

By David | Published: June 9, 2009

A very powerful and often underutilized psychological trigger is colors.  That’s right good old fashioned, basic colors.  Each color makes us feel a certain way and gives us different impressions on different things.

For this post though we will look at web/internet colors and the way these colors make people feel.

Of course in keeping things simple I’m not going to get into the complete psychology of colors but will give you a brief description of feelings that are associated with certain colors.

White: cleanliness, innocence, creativity, purity, neutrality, simplicity, spirituality, life (Western Cultures), marriage (Western Cultures), death (Eastern Cultures).

For more information on color symbolism and the psychology of colors have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism

Black: power, seriousness, authority, elegance, darkness, stability, strength, sophistication, secrecy, intelligence, death (Western Cultures), evil, mystery, anger, sadness.

Gray: conservative, practical, neutrality, security, maturity, indifference, timeless, reliability, gloominess, old, reserved, sadness, death, depression.

Red: energy, passion, excitement, danger, movement, warning, life, impulse, love, action, giving, adventure

Orange: fun, comfort, happy, creativity, energetic, celebration, warmth, youth, ambition, affordability

Yellow: laughter, curiousity, happiness, playfulness, good times, cheerfulness, optimism, amusement, cowardice, fire

Green: calming, money, wealth, nature, conservative, health, envy, healing, good luck, life, fertility, harmony, generosity, peace, harmony, nurturing, support

Blue: calming, trustworthiness, restful, success, wisdom, seriousness, dependable, calmness, loyalty, power, productive, professional

Purple: royalty, wealth, justice, prosperity, ambiguity, uncertainty, sophistication, luxury, mystery, fantasy, wisdom, dreams, respect, pompous

Pink: love, tenderness, softness, romance, sweetness, calm, innocence, soothing, youthfulness

Brown: readability, primitive, stability, earth, friendship, natural, simplicity, organic, mourning (India)

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Domains with Dashes or Not

By David | Published: May 13, 2009

A lot of people buy domains with dashes and some people swear they won’t touch a domain with dashes in it.  Are domains with dashes any good?  Do they hurt SEO?

The search engines do rank sites with dashes, but you might end up in the google sandbox for a bit because a lot of spammers, scammers, and just all about shady characters use domains with dashes because the regular one isn’t available or they can make it look like they are the normal domain to steal their traffic.

The keywords are viewed by the search engines and you can definitely be ranked for your keywords using domains with dashes and they are definitely a good alternative if you can’t find a decent domain extension with your keywords or decent domain alternative.

Personally I rarely buy domains with dashes because I like people to remember my site.  People forget to add dashes and end up on other sites.  I want them to get to my site the easiest way possible.  Dashes make a domain name harder to remember and you have to be careful when using them.

I have bought dashed domains and used them to quickly get ranked for my chosen keywords but I don’t like them and try to avoid them as much as possible.

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