Analytics 2.0™

Published by Jim

Social Media (Part 1)
Web 2.0 and Social Media has been a very hot area over the last couple years, and it’s wortwhile to think about the connection between social media and SEO.  As you may have already heard, social media is a great way for you to engage your target audience and community.

Short Term Plan

But at a tactical level, the question is what can you do with Social Media that will have an impact on my site.  In this blog post, let’s talk about some of the key things that you can do with social media that can have an impact quickly.

1. Start a Blog

Starting a blog is one of the best things you can do for your web business and web presence, because it gives you an easy way to have a dialogue with the people in your target market.  It also gives you a way to publish a lot of content that is keyword rich and - if you write quality content - it can be a great way for you to get links.

A couple pointers on starting blogs.  First, you need to decide where to host your blog.  Our advice is simple.  Don’t take the shortcut of hosting it on an existing blogging service (such as blogspot, typepad, etc.), since they don’t help you build the authority of your own domain.  It is preferrable to host your own blogging software (such as wordpress).  Second, you should have a regular posting schedule.  To build an audience, you will need to provide high quality content frequently.  This is what seperates a blog that is medicore from one that generates a lot of value for the owner.

2. Social Bookmark Everything

One of the best things about Web 2.0 is that it provides an easy way for you to get exposure for your content.  Social bookmarking services such as delicious, furl, reddit and social news services such as digg, mixx, sphinn, etc. are great services for you to push out your content (especially your blog content which can be easily bookmarked or pushed into these channels.)

3. Leverage Press Releases

Press releases are a great way to engage the rest of the social media and blogging community.  You can use press release services to push out press releases publicizing your services and findings.  This is a great way to build natural links and get exposure for your website.

Post a comment . Feb 28, 2009
Filed under: SEO, Social Media, SEO, Social Media

Published by Sonia

Before we go too deep into keyword density, it is better if we give it a definition first above everything else. Once you clearly understand what it means, you will have an easier time incorporating it in your SEO campaign. Keyword density is defined as the number of times a keyword or a specific phrase appears in contrast to the total number of words in the document. Search engines usually use keyword density as a way of determining when to show your site in the search results.  If you have the appropriate keyword density in your webpage, the search engine will determine that your website is relevant to a set of keywords or phrases. This will be a big help on how search engines index sites and place them in categories so it is important that you zero in on a good set of keywords.

Most search engines use algorithms and specific formulas when it comes to ranking web pages and keyword density is a major factor which can affect your website ranking. SEO practitioners consider keyword density as the cornerstone of SEO, it is an important part of any SEO campaign and you should also put time and effort creating web content with the right keyword density.

With this definition and concept in mind, most people tried to fill their webpages with the same keywords and phrases over and over again to the point that keyword density is abused already.  This is a practice that is frowned upon, not only by SEO experts, but also search engines. For example, the search engines may penalize your website if it thinks your site is too “spammy”

Place yourself in the shoes of the visitors of your website. If you are visiting a site, you look for two things above everything else and that quality content and readability. If you stuff keywords too many times on your website, there are higher chances that your visitor will have a headache trying to understand what you want to say. Your web content should be able to flow and the readers should be able to understand what you’re trying to say.

One common SEO practice is to think of synonyms for your keywords. Search engines will give you plus points for using alternative keywords plus your visitors will not have a hard time reading your content.

If you’re starting with keyword research in order to find which keywords will work best for your site, you can use online keywords tools which can give you an idea of how many times a certain keyword is being searched. Another tool that you can look into is a keyword density analysis tool.

Of course, when we talk of keyword density we do not only talk of the actual text of webpage. Your site’s keyword density will also carry over to your tags, HTML title, image captions and links.

Post a comment . Feb 15, 2009
Filed under: SEO, Keyword Density, Keyword Density Analysis Tool, Keyword Research, Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool

Published by Sonia

Some PPC practitioners become stuck in a rut after they start and launch their PPC campaign. Some are lost on what to do next and how to manage their campaign. Some are left clueless on what to do after the launch. So what really happens after your launch? What are the steps that you need to undertake so that you will ensure that your PPC campaign is on its way to success? What are the experts doing in managing their campaign effectively?

The number one thing to remember when you’re managing your PPC ads is to gauge its effectiveness. How can you do that? Simple, by determining which ads are profitable and which ads are not. Before you start your launch, you must have had written down specific goals of what you want to achieve during the run of your campaign. Specifically, you should be able to specify what amount you want to earn from each ad. Make sure that you meet these targets by managing your PPC ads well, even after the launch.

Updating your PPC ads is also beneficial to your campaign. You don’t expect to keep the ads running for months and months without updating it. Test your ads so that you will know which ones will bring you money and which ones will be a waste of time to invest in. Choosing the right keywords is the backbone of any PPC campaign. The best thing that you can do while managing your campaign is to have a keyword analyzer tool to help you out.

As you run your ads, make observations of what comes out of it and try to zero in on what practices can be done in order to make your campaign better. One thing that you can do is to identify your niche. Once you have identified your target audience then you can evolve your ads to appeal to those people. Identification of your niche can also help you in choosing the keywords that you will incorporate in your ads.

Another way of managing your campaign over time is to determine if you are sticking to your budget or if you need to increase/decrease it. If you want to stick to your previous budget, you can just maintain your campaign. On the other hand if you are profiting well from your ads, then you have the option to increase your budget to produce more ads and to earn more from the clicks. If you determine your ads to be unprofitable, then you can overhaul it and start all over again.

The launch of your ads is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many things stemming that you can do to manage your PPC campaign and it does involve hard work and commitment from you. To make sure that you are not going to waste time and money, try to think before you start your campaign if you can really commit to this project because if you do really want it, you have to really work hard to drive it up to success.

Post a comment . Feb 08, 2009
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing, gauging PPC effectiveness, PPC budget, PPC campaign management

Published by Sonia

Any Pay per Click (PPC) Campaign relies on the bid amount in order to be profitable. You must be able to know what amount you will be willing to pay for each time a user clicks on your ad. After knowing what amount will be applied to your ads, then you can now project your budget. When it comes to PPC, setting up an allocated portion of your money to PPC and sticking to it and at the same time profiting from it is one of the main concerns of PPC practitioners.

People have always believed that PPC is a cheap way of advertising your site and products. The thing is, it will be profitable if you know how to deal with the bids and any budgeting concerns.

PPC users have devised a formula to help you compute for your budget in a mathematical approach. There are four factors affecting this formula and these are:

1. How much the conversion is worth in actual dollar profits
2. The amount of sales leads that a company can handle
3. Conversion rate
4. How many conversions you plan on achieving. 

For determining number conversions, you can use the following formula: sales lead per day multiplied to your conversion percentage and multiplied again to the number of days per one month that your ad will run. From the number of conversions, you can now derive the maximum amount of budget that you can spend on PPC. You can arrive at this number by multiplying the number of conversions by the dollar profit per conversion. If you want to calculate your profit from PPC, you can do so just by subtracting your total budget of PPC from your total profit.

On the other hand, if you’re not a believer of numbers and formulas. You can determine your PPC budget just right off the bat and work around it. You have to determine what amount you will be willing to spend per day for PPC. If you have an advertising budget, you can just allocate a reasonable percentage of that and put it in your PPC campaign. If you are just starting out, it’s best that you do not spend your entire advertising budget in PPC campaign only.

Another thing that you can do is to set a monthly budget for your PPC campaign. Your budget on PPC, and advertising as a whole, will definitely increase over time.  Only capitalize on ads that bring you money, and remove the ones that are not profitable.  PPC marketing is a lot like panning for gold.

Here are some ways that you can do to waste money on PPC.  Keep tab on these things and make sure that you avoid them. If you start your campaign and leave it half-baked, then you’re doing the wrong thing. Stick to it once you started it already. Before starting make sure that this is one thing that you want to do and oversee until the end. You also should not let the search engines set your budget. In developing your PPC budget, you should be able to set your own amount and not let others dictate it for you.

Remember that PPC success will not happen overnight. It needs time to grow and be profitable and if you are just a beginner, then don’t expect to earn a lot in the first week of your ads’ run. You should already expect that there is a probability that your PPC campaign might make you lose money in the beginning and hopefully, it will pick up over time.

Post a comment . Jan 29, 2009
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing, conversion rate, Pay per Click, PPC budget, profit

Published by Sonia

One of the most popular PPC ads service providers is Google Adwords. Over the years, Google has introduced a lot of online tools and features through Google Adwords which can help you launch and maintain your PPC campaign. One of the newest methods that Google is now implementing is Pay-per-Action advertising. This is a new pricing method which allows the PPC ad owners to pay only for the completed actions which they themselves will define.

There are currently three advertising models which are widely-used in the internet and these are Cost per Click, Cost per Action and Cost per Impression. For Cost per Click, which is the most popular model and most used among the three, the advertiser will pay a corresponding amount whenever someone clicks on their ads. On the other hand, in Cost per Impression the advertiser will only pay for every time the ad will appear on the website.

If you want to use Pay-per-Action in your ads, you need to undertake the following steps:

• Define specific actions
• Set up conversion tracking, and
• Create the PPC ads

Once you have done this, the different publishers of Google will choose which ads they will place in their websites. When it comes to pricing, you will be the one who will set a fixed amount which you are willing to pay the specific action is completed. For example, you have decided to pay $2 for every complete registration form submitted and $4 for every complete purchase. When it comes to tracking, Google uses conversion tracking which will determine if the specific action you defined is completed.

Google’s Pay-per-Action Advertising product can be somewhat too technical and advanced for first-time PPC advocates. If you own a website and you know how much the process of acquiring customers cost, then this product is a good option for you. If you are starting out with PPC, you should stick with the basics first and gradually, you will be able to use these advanced programs to work for your advantage. But generally, Google products are very user-friendly even for beginners.

On the advertisers’ side, this is a good opportunity for them to select which ads they want to run on their site. One of the deciding factors they have is the level of relevancy that their site has with the PPC ad that they want to put in their site.

One of the main benefits that you can get from using Google’s Pay-per-Action Advertising is that it minimizes the risk of click fraud which can cost you a lot of money. With Pay-per-Click, the clicks are all registered without taking into account if they are valid or not. On the other hand, with Pay-per-Action you’ll pay only once the specific action is completed.

Click fraud is a serious problem when it comes to PPC ads and this will surely minimize the risks that websites are exposed at. If you are a small company or website, Pay-per-Action will definitely benefit you because you will be assured that the money you are spending is actually a result of a customer action.

Post a comment . Jan 24, 2009
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing, CLick fraud, Cost per Action, Cost per Click, Cost per Impression, Google Adwords