Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Keyword Selection as an Internet Strategy

If you are starting your site from scratch, selecting keywords at this stage is a time and money saver. If you are redesigning your website, this is the time to outdo your previous mistakes.
Zeroing On the Right Keywords
If you are wondering what keyword has to do with website design think again. It determines whether your website architecture will have a folder or linear structure. If it is a folder structure then how many levels?

Let's take a hypothetical example. Suppose you are a company selling confections. You are designing an e-commerce website. You may have two or more options for website architecture.
Option 1: confectionary company displaying products by type e.g. cakes, candies, cookies, chocolates etc.
Option 2: confectionary company displaying products by occasions e.g. birthdays, weddings, thanksgiving, baby showers etc.
Option 3: This option is a tad expensive because it involves more complex programming at the database level. You can let the visitor decide how he or she wants to view the website product wise or occasion wise.

Which structure will be more appropriate?
Before deciding we need to find the online search behavior of our future customers. Using a keyword tool we find out that the search phrases customers use to find the ' cakes' are for specific types of cakes like wedding cakes, birthday cakes, diaper cakes and so on. Same stand true for candy.
Naturally the second option is a better website architecture structure. It can grow both laterally and longitudinally. It's more suitable for search patterns hence later it will be easier to optimize.

The best way to do a keyword search is to write down the phrases that describe your website's purpose. Start with:
5 one-word phrases
10 two-word phrases
5 three-word phrases
Run them in a keyword tool. You will be amazed at the results.
Save them in a spreadsheet.

Selecting the Right Keywords:

Your spreadsheet probably has a thousand keywords. It's best to have a base keyword in mind around which your site will evolve. Keep these in mind before you start selection.

One word phrases are the hardest to rank for because they require a high number of backlinks which is difficult for a new site.

Their conversions are also the worst because people are not searching for that product or information. They realize it as soon as they type it and see 44 million websites for 'cakes'.

Two phrase keywords are good to optimize for as they have more searches and hence more conversions. But they are difficult to do so especially for a new website.
Three phrase keywords may be few but are relatively easy to optimize for. It's best to start with three word keywords.

Select the 3 word phrases most suitable for your site. Make them top priority for now...But do not ignore the 2 phrase or single word keywords. With time you will be able to drive traffic to your website using these keywords too and they most probably will have more search traffic.

The other factors that matter are:

The number of competing sites
The strength of those competing sites
Select a long string for 3 word phrases whose searches rank more than 5 per day. This is the starting list for keywords for your site. Repeat the same procedure for two word phrases.

At this stage it may be suitable for you to leave out 1 word phrases not in the website design but in the optimization process..

Integrating the Keywords in your Website Design
All efforts at selection are useless if keywords are not properly integrated in design.

2 tips before starting:

Do not optimize for more than 3 keywords on one page
Preferably optimize for related keywords Example:
Virtual Offices in Irvine Orange County (keyword)
-Virtual Offices
-Virtual Offices Irvine
-Virtual Offices Orange County

Get your website designer to use these search phrases in the page in Title tags, Keyword tags, Header tags and Alt tags. While writing the content for the page make sure you use the phrase at least twice in 350 words of content. Use synonyms of the keywords.

Monday, February 8, 2010

How to Maximize Benefits From Google Adwords Keywords Tools

Google Adwords is the major platform to operate Pay Per Click advertising campaigns. Pay Per Click also commonly known as Double Click Digital Advertising. Pay Per Click advertising is a very successful method to reach to the potential clients or in other words it is the way of advertising where you can customize your advertising campaigns as per your budget, client demographic requirements or target customers based on geographical location. You have full control on advertising budget to explore the market. Pay Per Click Advertising has a great impact on building the brand globally or locally depends on your product market reach.

There are few steps must be considered while creating the keywords list for the advertising, use the keyword tool various new option to find the most related keywords:

* Find keywords based on your site content. Instead of entering your own keywords, try using the Website Content option. It lets you enter the URL of your business website or of any site related to your business. The AdWords system will then scan your page and then suggest relevant keywords.
* Create new, separate ad groups with similar keywords. We recommend creating several ad groups in each campaign, each with a small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords. Use the Keyword Tool to discover relevant keywords, then divide them into lists of 5 to 20 similar terms.
* Identify negative keywords. The Keyword Tool can show you off-topic keywords that users may be thinking about. Suppose that you sell cut flowers and that you give the keyword 'flowers' to the Keyword Tool. It may suggest the related term 'gardens' and you may want to add that term to your ad group as a negative keyword. That will keep your ad from being displayed on searches for 'flower gardens' or similar terms. This helps to ensure that only interested customers see your ads.
* Find synonyms - or not. The Use synonyms box in the Descriptive words or phrases option is always ticked by default. This means that it might suggest 'bed and breakfast' as a synonym for the keyword 'hotel'. If you untick the box, the tool will suggest only keywords that contain at least one of the terms that you entered.
* Specify a language and location. If you're using the Keyword Tool while signed in to your account, you may see an option to tailor results to a particular location and language. If you happen to be targeting Spanish speakers who live in France, make sure that you set the Keyword Tool to that language and location.
* Start broad and then get specific. Try broad terms like 'flowers' in the Keyword Tool first. Then try specific terms like 'red roses' or 'miniature cactus'.


Google Adwords has made it simple for the advertisers to target the desired audience by providing the various built in tools. An advertising campaign normally comprised of budget, cost of click (CPC) or bid on keyword, keywords, text ads and the landing page and the most important part of the campaign is the history of Google Adwords Account (The Google Adwords Account that is maintaining the campaign, history of keywords and bidding options and CTR.

Google Adwords while designing the campaign keeps track of three things in common, The Keyword you choose, the text ads you write and the content of the landing page or contents of the website as a whole. Google Adwords algorithm calculates the relevancy of these three variables. Let me say it in other words how relevant are the keywords to the text ads and combined these two how relevant to the content of the landing page.

The secret behind doing all this in Google Adwords is to serve the internet user the most suited information what he is looking in the search engine while surfing and querying the search engine. Most of the advertiser bluntly hammers the keywords in the campaign to get the cheap visitors, this attitude of advertising gives them LOW CTR and un interested visitors. Google has launched this advertising mode to reach the potential clients on the fly and not to get the blind visitors. This method of stuffing keywords only increases the cost of the campaign in terms of invalid clicks or no sales.

Well, going back to the topic of maximizing potential through Google Adwords Keyword tool, the factor is relevancy. The keyword, the text ad and the landing page content.

The best practice is to divide the Google Adwords campaign into appropriate Ad Groups and better option is to name them logically to manage. All Ad Groups should be named as per the purpose they are going to serve and then accordingly fill the ad groups with the related keywords and write the compelling related text ad or text ads. Try to add one or 2 keywords in the text add. Let me elaborate more here for example you have 50 keywords in a ad group, try to first group these keywords logically in the ad group and let say you have 3 logical categories of keywords, you need to write minimum three text ads containing at least 2 keywords in the text ads. This way you increase the relevancy factor in your text adds and collection of keywords.

The third and most important part of the Google Adwords campaign is the quality of the landing page, quality means the relevancy of the contents of the page with the text ads, remember here keywords you already made relevant to the text add.

Now look into the scenario how you query the search engines, you first enter the keyword or phrase in the search box of the search engine, when you press the hit button the paid ads display, and you clicked one of the paid ads and landed on the advertiser's website.

Google Adwords also works in the same fashion; this is what the reason writing highly compelling text ads relevant to the keywords comes first and determines the bid price. And at last user visits the website, if website contents are not relevant to the text ads, customer will leave the website without doing any purchase or registering the products etc.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application of crowd sourcing.

Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site.

The affiliate marketing industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network, the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate') and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers.While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

You can place your affilitate marketing using
http://www.clickbank.com/index.html.