One of the ways to boost traffic to your Web site is by purchasing keywords from one of the pay-per-click search engines or directories.
But with literally hundreds of choices, how do you pick the pay-per-click engine with the best visibility that has the potential of giving you a higher return on your investment?
And, just as important, what are some strategies for working with the pay-per-click engines, and how do they operate?
For years, the search engines have continued to introduce new factors into their algorithms to make their search results more relevant and to keep savvy search engine marketers from "cracking the system."
We've seen many ranking factors come and go in importance. For example, years ago, META tags were the key to success, or so we thought. Stick in META tags that were loaded with your keyword phrases, and you were sure to achieve top rankings.
Then, we had keyword weight as a ranking factor. We struggled to determine the keyword weight of our competitors' pages, then duplicate that weight in all of the various areas of our pages.
With the recent acquisition by Microsoft of an integrated Outlook search tool (Lookout) we saw Microsoft's first move into the desktop search space.
Sure they have been talking about it for over a year, as part of the eagerly anticipated next generation OS Longhorn, but this is the first product we have seen that will have the Microsoft logo.
Further, company spokespeople have said that they will have an integrated desktop search application out by the end of the year.
Earlier this year, Google also made the same promise, but we have yet to see anything from the search giant.
Last week, we explained that it's important that people trust your company. However, even if your web site is trustworthy, web surfers still might not purchase something on your web site.
The following tips are just a few of the things I do as examples of setting my service apart from the crowd. In general, the weakest areas in the Internet Marketing and Web Development business, are "Customer Communications" and "Customer Service." Set your effort towards learning to deliver "excellence" in both customer service and communication, and you'll have distinct advantages over many other competitors. These tips are based on the tried and true method of "under promising and over delivering."
For me personally, Wordtracker.com is not just a tool for looking up keywords. Sure, that's one good use for it, but what I want to distinguish is another influential and exciting use for Wordtracker as an SEO resource.
"Keywords" for use in your Meta tags are probably the least influential element in search engine optimization these days. However, hunting for keywords still seems the most popular use for Wordtracker. After all, it contains over 336 million queries within its database, which is no older than 60 days. An SEO can spend long periods of time doing research and hunting for keywords. But let's really try and get our minds around the keyword hunting issue for a minute, and I'll explain a few other tips for using Wordtracker.
According to new research performed by MarketingSherpa, 81% of companies using online marketing find both organic and paid listings to be somewhat-to-very-effective. It is interesting to note that most of the people surveyed only found organic searching to be somewhat effective.
MarketingSherpa surmises that part of the reason for that includes the lack of awareness some companies have with regards to the online marketplace.
This makes sense to me. Too often we come across clients who consider their competition to be the guy down the street and not the sites occupying the top listings in search results.
In the early days of web development, business owners had learned the very expensive lesson that a Web site with no visitors is of little value. Once the business owner learned that methods could be utilized to increase their visibility through search engine optimization, it then became apparent that the traffic that really benefited them, was "targeted traffic." It only made sense that if you were selling a solution, the person who will buy the solution are the ones experiencing a problem or challenge. It also became obvious that the best products and services to sell online were niche or specialized markets. Large volumes of "general visitors" (general volume traffic) may have looked nice on a statistics report but only the truly "targeted visitors" (target traffic) were usually the visitors making purchases or doing business at the Web site.
One thing that has always disturbed me about "traditional" reporting software was that it did not differentiate between rankings on one engine versus rankings on another engine. For example, we get much more traffic to this site from Google than we do from Altavista. Therefore our Google rankings are "worth" more than our Altavista rankings. About 10 times more.
You would not know this using traditional search engine ranking reporting software.
Long before the days of researching phrases with the helpful online resources of today, the art of keyword/phrase selection was often left just to guesswork. However, guesswork by today's highly competitive standards is just not good enough. So how is it possible to select a powerful traffic-pulling phrase in this fashion without researching it in real time? Better yet, is it possible to choose such a phrase and get positioned before it becomes popular?
Well of course it requires some research, but in a slightly different way. Every single day, we have a world of information that happens all around us. With all of the focus on the Internet these days, we need to also consider giving our attention to other medias as well. We have television programs, we have the news and the radio which all bring us current and upcoming events. With the news itself, there are often many ideas that can help the SEO to really think and plan ahead for some truly unique optimization strategies. I am talking about the potential of developing part of your client strategy around an upcoming newsworthy event. Of course it needs to be relevant and useful to the target audience. It also needs to genuinely "relate".