Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Its Benefits

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising can be a very effective advertising tool while establishing a successful SEO campaign. It is also known as Sponsored Links or Pay Per Click, and drives immediate traffic to your website. It is a method of bringing visitors to your website by using an advertisement for which you have to pay only when someone clicks on the ad to visit your site. The good news is - you only have to pay for those who are interested in your products or services.It is a very successful method of online advertising, developed by Overture (now Yahoo search marketing) and perfected by Google where instead of paying a fee for online advertisements which appear on various websites (banner ads), search engine PPC advertising works on a pay-per-click system, whereby the webmaster only pays the search engine when a user clicks on his ad.

Made popular PPC advertising is by Google.com AdWords system which allows advertisers to place context sensitive advertisements on the search results of the Google search engine and on
other websites that choose to display Google AdWords content in return for income.

Google Adwords are advertisements which are placed on the right or on top of your Google search results page. You can also specify the search terms for which your ad should appear.

Another example is the Yahoo! owned Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) that also offer sponsored search results on a PPC basis. These two services are the largest PPC systems available however many individual sites also offer similar sponsorship opportunities.With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. When a user a keyword query matching an advertiser's keyword list, or views a webpage with relevant content, the advertisements may be displayed. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above the "natural" or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster or blogger chooses on a content page.

Content websites commonly charge a fixed price for a click rather than use a bidding mechanism.Although many PPC providers exist, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007 Minimum prices per click, often referred to as costs per click (CPC), vary depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular phrase or keyword.

Difference Between SEO & SEM

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising a page so that it performs better in organic or natural search engine results. It is a form of search engine marketing.

Search Engine Marketing describes any marketing efforts done to promote site in search engines. (PPC) advertising could also be considered a part of search engine marketing. Many marketers use the term SEM to specifically refer to PPC advertising as a way to differentiate between organic SEO and paid SEM.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a type of internet marketing used to promote websites by increasing their visibility in result pages of search engines.(SERPs). Its basically a process of getting targeted traffic to your site by getting exposure of your site through various ways. Some of them are listed as given below:

1. Press Releases
2. Article Writing
3. Blogs
4. Engaging in a link campaign
5. Directory Submission
6. Purchasing Text Links
7. PPC Campaigns
8. Banner Advertising
9. RSS/XML Feeds

Long Tail Keywords & Its Importance

If you have a brand new site, then trying to get your website rank among the top 10 positions for most popular search terms in the search engines, will be next to impossible. Since you know that keywords are meant to drive traffic to a website from search engines, but you must have seen that popular and regularly searched terms/keywords are very competitive and its often very difficult to get good ranking for your site for those keywords. In these situations long term keywords comes into play.

Long Tail Keywords are the keyword phrases which are 2-6 words in length that people search to find some information related to some product or any service. These keywords (and keyword phrases) have less numbers of searches on the search engines.

The main idea behind the long term keywords is that while most of the traffic will surely come from a few main/primary keywords, some traffic will definitely come from less but highly targeted keywords and phrases. If you consider the combined traffic that comes from the less searched terms you will find that it adds up to quite a nice number of visitors. When you’re creating content for your website, focus each page for a different set of lesser searched keywords and keyword phrases. While these keywords won’t bring in huge traffic individually, but having multiple pages each with its own set of keywords can bring add to good amount of traffic.

The extra advantage of long tail keywords is that they usually are quite relevant to your site and you don’t need to seperately optimize for them. Another good thing is that the visitors who come using long tail keywords are more likely to convert on the site. The reason being that the more detailed a search query is, the more serious the visitors are.
If you target the keywords in the long-tail there is much less competition, so its easy for you to dominate the search engines for these terms. And if you rank well for enough of the long-tail keywords, you can produce the same amounts of traffic that you could see if you were to rank well for the more popular keywords.

Importance of Proper Navigation Structure In Website

1. Navigation system helps users to move around the web site from one page to another. A good navigation system can help promote the right pages to the users. It is extremely difficult to guess where relevant content might be located without the help of proper navigation structure.
2. A good navigation system also helps in placing web sites prominently on search engines. This is important since online marketing is one of the key ways to bring traffic to your web site.
   

Some of the facts about internal page navigation structure are:

1. Text based links are preferred for navigation structure rather than graphical links. Not only do they display well, they are easy for the search engines to look up.
2. A Multi-tier navigation structure is recommended for complex web site. This provides excellent level of ease of use. It also allows the users to jump from one link to another without going through various unrelated pages.
3. Effective navigation structures are the ones which are left hand oriented or top down.
4. Navigation structure should remain uniform through out the website.
   
5. There should not be too many navigations systems within a web site.
   

How to Get Quality Backlinks to Your Website?

Even if you have made a good site with good content, good navigation everything, unless and until people know about it is of no use . To make it popular it has to have good ranking in serp as people generally go till 2-3 page, your site appear within top 20 . For this having good quality backlinks is one of the major criteria. More the no. of back links, more is its PR and more frequently the chances that your site will be crawled and hence help in getting better position in SERP's.

The backlink or inbound link is the link of your website placed in another site. Getting quality backlinks to your website is very important because it helps to increase page rank of your website which helps in boosting its ranking in search engines for particular keyword.

The quality backlinks are the links that come from the websites related to the topic of your website. The higher page rank of the site will help your website in ranking better.

There are ways of getting quality backlinks from high page rank websites. One is free method through which you can get one way links and other is paid. Some sites will ask you for some fee to keep link of your site in their site. This amount may be sometimes too much to afford.So you can always go for alternate free yet effective ways to get quality back links. Those are:

1. Forum posting

Forums are the online communities where you can share your ideas and views about any topic you are interested but before giving any comments you need to have proper knowledge about it.For this you can first of all start with answering any problem posted on the forum. Once you get an idea of how to answer and other members also gain interest in you you can go ahead and start a topic. The idea is to share valuable information with other participants. Also you have an option to advertise your website. At the bottom of every post there is a option where you can place links to your websites. The more topics you post or answer, the more backlinks to your website you get.You are building trust to other forum members and at the same time building traffic to your site. Search engines index even message boards. So if you are posting a lot in forums, you may achieve a great rank and you will be able to drive more traffic to your site.

2. Articles distribution

Writing articles is a great way to brand your business, giving people valuable information and earn their trust. These articles are also a great source of good quality backlinks to your website. Normally at the bottom of every article you publish, there is a resource box in which you can include a short biography about yourself and links to your website. This way you can get good quality backlink to your website because article directories usually have high PR.

3. Directory submission

There are lots of free directories available that will accept your listing. You can choose the proper category for your website and submit your website for consideration. The more directories you submit your site, the more backlinks your website will receive.

4. Blogs and websites comments

Posting comments on blogs is great idea not only to express your opinion about the post you're commenting but also to get backlink to your website. Many blog owners lets you put the link of your website whenever you write some comment. This way you can get backlinks from high ranked blogs.

In a similar way you can post your comments on websites related to your topic. Many of them include guest book where you can put your comments together with a link to your website.

The above ways to get quality back links are really effective and will cost you nothing.

Link Popularity & Link Building

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN rank the websites by the link popularity.
Link Popularity means popularizing a particular link of the website for it to get top search engine rankings. Nowadays Link Popularity is being considered to be the most important process for the search engine optimization. Link popularity is determined by the quantity and quality of relevant backlinks the site has.

Backlink is the incoming link to the website from other site.

Good ranks are completely impossible without the effective Link Popularity Plan.

There are some Link Popularity methods:

Link popularity can be done through different methods like:

• Reciprocal Link Exchange among websites

• Write articles and put links in the articles to your website.
  

• You can also post in blogs or in niche forums and put link to your site as well

To have link popularity it is necessary to go for Link Exchange.

• For this look out for the sites that are relatively same to that of your site. This means exchange the links with the sites which have the same area of work.

• Try to exchange links with the sites with Google Page Rank of atleast 4(PR 4).

• Check the details of the site with which exchange process are going on.

• Create an HTML page in which the details of the link partners should be mentioned.

• Most importantly try to get more inbound links than outbound links for your site.

• Lastly submit these Link Pages to the Search Engines- Google.

By going through these steps one can easily increase the Link Popularity of the site.

Link exchange is one of the most popular techniques in internet marketing among webmasters to increase the page rank of the website and link popularity. Good linking strategies are useful to increase the page rank and link popularity score of a website.


Google:

Google considers Link as a vote of trust. But that does not mean links from unrelated sites, irrelevent sites. Google ranks your site based on the relationship between your site's content and the content of the sites that link to your's. One way links from sites with content similar to yours ranks higher than one way links from totally unrelated sites. So you have to be actually choosy while selecting quality links. Links from .org, .gov, .edu, editorial sites are mostly preferred but its very difficult to get one way links from them. So you can try out links from other relevant sites. Links that are bought through any kind of network like link firms or Paid Links and automated link generators can give you immediate good results but in the long run they will harm your site and your site can also get banned by google.

The purpose of link farm is to link to other sites with the sole purpose of increasing the link popularity.


Google implemented the concept of Page rank in its Search Algorithm long back. High page rank is important for a website because the chances of being crawled by search engines tend to be higher. The website with a good page rank receives more web visitors from search engines and other directories.This was incorporated by google since concepts like link farms and bad neighbourhood came into being.Webmasters all over the world started misusing them for their own benefit. Google does not like link farms. They analyze page content of the website and also analyze the content of neighboring websites to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query. Once Google discover a website links to unrelated sites with irrelevant information, it labels the link they generate as spam and the site will be penalized.



Yahoo and MSN

Yahoo and MSN ranks pages on different factors. If you have proper page structure with great navigation, content and on-page optimization, then you have good chance to rank for fairly competitive keywords.

Important Point to remember while Link Building

1. Do not link out to bad neighborhood site
2. Always check the link provided to you.
3. Before giving a link out to any site think how it would help your site visitors.
4. Getting a link from related site is much more appreciated.
5. Check the Anchor Text of the link pointing out to the site linking to you.
6. Prefer directories for best one way links
7. Editorial links are preferred ahead of other links.

Link Building Through Directory Submission

Directory submission is the most popular way of getting one way links. While submitting website to directories, the probability of web site coming in search engines increases as directories rank high in search engines result page. The URL of the site submitted to the directory is reviewed by the editor. They determine whether the submission of particular website is appropriate in terms of the description, content and category in the directory or not. You should be careful while doing submissions and avoid those directories which ask for link back.

Submission to the directories helps in 2 ways:

1)Helps to drive traffic to your site from these directories.
2)Quality one way links improves your site's ranking in various search engines.
3)Increases the visibility of site in various search engines.

Other factors to be taken into account before going for directory submissions are:

1)You should submit your site in the most appropriate category based on the theme of your site.
2)See the page rank, back links etc of the directory to which you are submitting. If it is a new directory see whether it is cached or not and see the date when it was cached.
3)The different categories in the directory should have sites present in them.
4)Check the quality of the sites that are present in the directory.

Search Engine Optimization Through Press Releases

SEO Press Release:

An SEO press release is a way to deliver news of new events taking place within your company. It is written in such a way that it will rank well in the search engines for your keywords and provide your website with important backlinks that will also help improve the position of your website in the search engine results page.

Advantages of SEO Press Releases:
There are many benefits of SEO press releases if done properly:
1)Backlinks from good news sites increases the ranking of your website or blog for your keywords
2)Increases sites visibility in various search engines.
3)Ranking in Google News and Yahoo News for your keywords.
4)Potential media coverage.
5)Helps new website escape quickly from the “Google Sandbox”.

Steps For Writing Press Release:

Before writing press release, you must keep in hand which keywords you are optimizing for. For that do little bit of research work through google adwords or wordtracker.

There are different sections of Press Release:
a)Title Of press release
b)Summary
c)Body
d)About the Company
e)Press Contact

Title: Include the keyword phrase in the title. The title should not exceed 100 characters.
Summary: Give a synopsis of the press release . Should not exceed 250 characters.
Body: Write the content in the third person, giving the details of your news. Length of the content should be at least 300 words and include 1-2 quotes and 3-4 keyword phrases.
About the Company: Give some information about your company in 2-3 lines. Include a link to your homepage in the summary (preferably in anchor text.)
Press Contact: Provide the name of contact person for the company. It can be anyone in the company. Mention the name, address, phone, email and website of the press.