Posts Tagged “Search Engine Optimization”

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Making It Work For You

The Google Adwords keyword tool is a very well known, and highly used, tool for many online marketers. Many people use it for more than just running Pay Per Click Adwords campaigns. You can use this tool to narrow down a list of great keywords for your article marketing and search engine optimization needs to name just two.

When it comes to search engines Google is definitely one of the ‘big boys’ and since they have so much traffic on their search engine every single day, it only stands to reason that you can get very comprehensive keyword lists from their keyword tool.

When you are starting your keyword search, no matter what you are doing with those keywords, it’s usually a good idea to start with a fairly broad phrase. Once you’ve gotten a list you can narrow down on some of those terms.

To illustrate, let’s say you’re doing a search for the term ‘dog toys’ you will get many results and these results will be things like ‘tough dog toys’ and ‘interactive dog toys’. Then you can pick a few of the broad results and narrow those down further.

Take the term ‘tough dog toys’. When you do a search for that term you’ll get even more, and more refined, results such as ‘indestructible dog toys’. You’ll also get other results that may or may not work for you. Things such as ‘dog treats’ or ‘dog beds’.

With the more ‘honed down’ phrases, you’ll notice that they don’t get as many searches monthly as the broader phrases. That’s ok. Actually, in some ways, that’s better. Unless you have a huge advertising budget it’s unlikely that you can afford the high bid prices for the broad term of ‘dog toys’. The estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) is likely to be higher.

When you start paying over one dollar per click, you had better have a very highly converting offer. If you can convert one out of every ten visitors into a paying customer and you get over %10 per sale that’s not bad. But if you have to spend %50 for one sale and you only make %10, that’s not good. You won’t be able to stay so upside down in your advertising and be profitable, let alone stay in business for long.

Remember though that the ‘estimated average cost per click’ is just that: an estimate. Google, and the other search engines, seem to love to make things as complicated as possible. They will use their own, and usually secret, parameters for determining how much an advertiser will pay per click.

Generally, if you have a high quality score you can pay less per click for a given keyword than your competitor who has a low quality score will pay for the same keyword. It’s complicated, I know. That’s the reason you need to make sure you fully understand the ins and outs of PPC before you dive into the deep end of the pool.

Even if you do know what you’re doing there will be some ‘tweaking’ that will need to be done to optimize your results. Make sure you have enough money to run your campaigns long enough to do the ‘tweaking’ and really get the most out of your adwords campaign and the Google Adwords keyword tool.

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Link Building Tips For Blogs

If you are involved in internet marketing, then you need to set aside some time for the purpose of link building. And let’s face it, just about every business is marketing online today. When we talk about link building, we are referring to the links on other sites that point back to your sites, as well as your site’s internal linking structure. With that in mind, here are some tips to put your link building on the right track.

There is one important thing you must do before you start doing any link building, and that’s making sure that the people who will be visiting your site will see one that is of the highest quality possible. This is what will make everything else work. In fact, you will naturally start to pick up links from other sites because they will see you are worth linking to.

Use blog directories to your benefit. Go to your favorite search engine and search for “blog directories” and you will see that there are a lot of them out there. Some will accept links to any blog, while others cater to a more specific and targeted audience. Register for as many of these as you can, and be sure to focus on your keywords when signing up.

During this whole time, you should also be adding more fresh content to your blog. When you have published a decent amount of content you can start contacting other bloggers to swap blogroll links. If possible, start by approaching those bloggers who are at your level or above as this will give your site more credibility.

One of the most overlooked link building tips is to write articles for sites that allow guest contributions. Again, aim for those sites that are ranked the same or higher than yours to get more bang for your link building efforts.

Another great way to get more traffic and back links is to have a blog contest. How you set it up is up to you, but the goal is to get people to link back to your site. One way to do this is to give bonus contest entries to everyone who links back. There are also sites that promote current and upcoming blog contests, so be sure to submit your contest to them also.

Commenting on other people’s blogs is a fantastic way to generate back links. Look for related blogs that are placing high in the search engines, and leave thoughtful comments. Of course there is nothing stopping you from creating other sites and blogs that link back to the blog you want to rank best for. You can then “comment” on your own posts using various pen names.

Link building tips are great, but a lot of people forget about the internal structure of their sites. This is simply how all of your pages are linked to one another. The easiest way to do this is to make sure all of your pages have a link to all of your other pages.

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Domain Name Search – Buying Pros And Cons

Any well thought out and effective domain name search should first start out with nice thorough keyword research. With so much competition in domain names and online in general, you want to give yourself any help you can. Taking the time to find what keywords and phrases related to your site are getting a lot of monthly searches is a great place to start. To be successful online give the people what they want. Find out what they are searching for, then use that phrase for your domain name and give them what they want.

Buying a domain name can be very inexpensive. You have two basic choices, you can buy one that has never been registered before by picking it out and paying for it at places like GoDaddy.com or you can find a great domain name that someone else has bought but is now ready to sell it.

Either option will work but each has it’s own pros and cons. For example, buying a previously purchased domain name will very likely get you a website too. That website may even already have a nice stream of traffic going to it. It could also have a lot of other sites linking in and top search engine rankings. All of that will help you get more visitors right away (and hopefully a lot of sales to go along with those visitors).

Of course, if you go this route, you have to remember that you don’t get something for nothing. Any domain name with a website that is getting a lot of traffic, has a lot of inbound links and has a high ranking, will cost a lot of money. It may well be worth it but this isn’t the place to get any bargains… for the most part.

Buying a brand new, never registered domain won’t have all those benefits – it’s own website, a lot of links and traffic, but it will be a lot cheaper to buy. You can get a domain name for only %10 a year. Yes, that’s a year. For that one year period you own that domain name and you can make money from it in many different ways, not just by placing a website on it.

If you want to save some money when you buy your domain name you can register it for a longer time frame and/or buy multiple domains and receive a quantity discount. Some of these options can lower the price of the domain to just a couple of dollars. The extension that you get will also determine what you pay for the domain. A .com tends to be more expensive that a .net for example.

Building a profitable online business will start with doing a domain name search
to find just the perfect domain name. Whether you choose to buy a brand new domain or if you prefer looking for an older more established name is up to you. Just follow these simple tips to get the best bang for your online marketing buck.

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Running A Link Building Campaign – The Ins And Outs

Perhaps you have just heard about how effective incoming links are at boosting the visibility of your website and now you believe you’re ready to start a link building campaign of your own. Before you do that, however, there are two terms you need to know. Link popularity is another way of saying the number of inbound links you have pointing to your site. Link analysis looks at what those sites are as well as the anchor text being used for each link.

A large number of internet marketers think of building links as something that takes up a lot of time. While that may be true in some cases, there is more than one way to do it. But, there is one thing you must do before you try to get even one link back to your site, and that’s making sure that your site is as good as it can be. After all, getting visitors to your site doesn’t matter if you have a bad site that people will leave as soon as they get there.

How your site looks to human visitors is only part of the equation. You also need to make sure that it looks good for the bots and spiders crawling your site from the search engines. This means you need to pay attention to your internal linking structure, have your keywords set up, and other basic SEO elements in place. As you are trying to get links back to your site, you also need to make sure all of the links on your site are active.

Why does any of this matter? Because a lot of site owners will automatically check every submitted site to see if it has broken links. If broken links are found then the site is rejected. That means you could do all of the work to try to get backlinks from the best sites, only to have done that work for nothing. That’s why it’s best to make sure your site is ready for anybody or anything that may stop by for a visit.

There is one part of a link building campaign that a lot of webmasters seem to overlook: budgeting time to do it. You need to set aside time to build backlinks or it won’t get done. At the very least, it will be hit or miss. If you plan on running your business in that way, then you are doomed to fail; to be blunt. If you aren’t budgeting time to run a campaign then do so right away. Things are much more likely to get done when you allot a block of time to get them done.

Because link building tends to be a time-consuming process, a lot of site owners will hire a service to do it for them. There’s nothing wrong with this, but you should at least run a small link building campaign on your own first, so you have a better idea of what you’re getting from whatever service you choose.

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Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool – Using It Right

The adwords keyword suggestion tool is used by most internet marketers, even if they aren’t running a pay per click campaign. This tool is recognized as one of the premier keyword tools around. I mean after all, Google is pretty much top dog when it comes to search engines so who wouldn’t want to get keyword information directly from them?

Picking the right keywords to target for your pay per click campaign is one of the most important elements you will have to consider. There is a fine line when it comes to choosing which keywords to use. If you use a one or two word keyword you will likely see that they get a ton of monthly searches, but they will also be very, very difficult to be competitive with. For most of the smaller online marketers the bid prices for those keywords will simply be too expensive to be profitable.

For most of us, the ‘long tailed’ keywords will work much better. These are actually keyword phrases that have 3 or more words in them. They can still get a great number of monthly searches (though not as high as the one or two word keywords) but they will usually have much less competition.

By using the keyword tool you will have access to a lot of helpful information. You will not only get a list of the top keyword phrases and the average number of monthly searches they get but you will also be able to find out what the average cost per click (average CPC) price will be for those keywords.

Obviously, the cost per click will just be an estimate since the popularity of the keyword is only one of the elements that determines how much you will pay for each click, but it’s a place to start. You’ll know right away that if you have a daily budget of %50 that a keyword with an average CPC of %10 will probably be out of your budget even though it might not really cost quite that much it’s more than likely still going to be too expensive for you.

The keyword tool will also give you and idea (it’s just a rough estimate, don’t expect it to be exact) of the amount of competition a given keyword has. That can come in very handy when you’re planning your campaigns.

Another cool thing about this keyword tool is that you can type in your base keyword and be provided with other keywords phrases that are relevant that you may not have even thought of. It’s virtually impossible for us to think of all keywords associated with our niche market, so it’s nice to have a keyword tool that makes suggestions to give us more ideas.

Besides the sheer volume of potential customers online the neat thing about the internet is the vast array of free tools you can use for your business. When it comes to finding good keywords the adwords keyword suggestion tool will work very well.. and it won’t cost you a dime. Use these tips to get the most out of it for you.

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