Dot Com Note » search engine

6 Tips To Cost Effective PPC Campaign For Small Businesses

Dotcom Note — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 02:36:01 +0000

PPC or pay per click is an online marketing technique where you bid on keywords relevant to your web sites and when people search for those keywords, your ads are shown along with organic search results. You can see all those paid ads when you perform a search in Google, Bing or Yahoo! These ads are on the top and right hand side of the page. However, recently it’s becoming more and more expensive to bid on those keywords.

Companies with large budget are buying hundreds of thousands keywords by paying exorbitant prices. Some keywords are going for upwards of $50. That means when a person clicks on that keywords, the advertiser is paying $50 to receive the visitor on their site. Unless you have a solid way to convert these visitors into paying customers, you will lose your shirt on keyword biding for your PPC campaigns.

As a small business owner, neither you have the time, budget, or ability to optimize these campaigns to make a profit. So, what you do? Is there a way to simplify the process and make these bidding cost effective? That was my mission this week. Find information about cost effective PPC campaign strategy. I am glad to report that I found an excellent article in SearchEngine Journal (SEJ).

SEJ is a popular website for search engine marketers. It has lots of very useful and effective information that is easy to implement for improving your search engine marketing effectiveness. The author lays out 6 tips that you can use to reduce your bid price on keywords and still be in the PPC marketing game. Here are the 6 tips:

Time/Day Parting – Google allows advertisers to determine the day of week or even the time of day they want their ads to display. This can be a very useful tool for small business advertisers who know when their customers are most likely to look for their product or service. By setting your ads to display at only high performance times you increase the effectiveness of your campaign and reduce your costs.

Match Types – Gone are the days of simply adding keywords that are all set to broad match and hoping for a return. Sure, casting a larger net brings in more traffic, but it also punishes your budget. The quality of that traffic might also suffer depending on the chosen keywords. Try using the available match types, especially exact match, to control costs and which searches are actually displaying your ads.

Negative Keywords – Selecting negative keywords to offset unwanted traffic is an absolute must for any campaign, large or small. For example, f a florist that sells only fresh flowers and plants might want to include the negative “artificial” to prevent traffic from artificial flower type keywords. Using negatives also allows you to pursue higher volume keywords without the exposure to unrelated searches.

Geo Targeting – According to a 2009 TMP/comScore report, 80% of consumers expect businesses in their search results to be within 15 miles of their location. This definitely doesn’t apply to all industries and regions, but it should provide a starting point with your targeting. It’s important to mention that with Google’s targeting granularity, you could potentially target your business out of traffic if it’s set so small that only a few people will see the ads.

Other Search Engines- Google has the lion share of the search market, but they also carry the highest bid prices. Bing and the like might not offer the volume that Google does; however, smaller search engines often have lower bid prices, which ultimately produce lower conversion costs. Test out a small budget on these other engines to start looking at your PPC efforts as a portfolio.

Keyword Development–The Google traffic estimator tool might show you that the keyword “new shoes” generates 1,500,000 searches each month, but that doesn’t mean it’s a quality keyword for your ad group. To maximize your budget, think locally and specifically. For example, if you’re in the printing business, expand past the generic and more expensive “printing” keywords; pair them up with location identifiers to better define your product and audience. By using the keyword ”printing shops Denver 80202,” you pay less for a consumer that is further along in the buying cycle.

Original Source: PPC Tips for the Small Business Owner

As a busy small business owner, if you don’t have time to read the article, I will summarize it below:

Schedule your ads when you think your customers are mostly looking for your products and services.
Use exact match types
Use negative keywords to weed out non-targeted prospects
Use geo targeting to get prospects from your local area
Use local and specific keywords

So, instead of bidding on broad keyword for a high click price, bid on keywords that are specific to your geographic location. It will be cheaper. Now that you know these six tips, implement them to reduce your keyword price and still be in the PPC marketing game.

Secrets To Make Your Business Found In Local Search

Dotcom Note — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:55:47 +0000

Local search is the buzz word right now. Every day, hundreds of blog posts are created on local search and how to effectively leverage local search to catapult your business on the first page of search engine result pages. Many Internet Marketers have collected all these information, including free information from Google, and packaged them nicely and selling them for a big buck. They have suddenly become local search expert.

What is a Local Search?

More and more search engine users are not only using keywords for what they are searching, they are also using keywords indicating geographic location in their search queries to find relevant information in a particular region. For example, the other day I wanted to find an ac/repair person in my local area. So, instead of using the keyword air condition repair, I used the keyword air condition repair, middlebrook, fl. Because I was looking for a/c repair shop in middlebrook, florida. I did not want to know about an a/c repair outfit in New York.

Besides, the name of the place in a local search, you can also use zip codes, latitude and longitude of place, etc. The search engines are smart enough to figure out that you want search results restricted to your search region. Another example of local search I recently performed is Bangkok apartment to look for apartment in Bangkok only.

Why Local Search is Important to Your Business?

If you have a local business of any kind, restaurant, eatery, plumbing, computer repair, etc., you can easily rank in Google for local searches in your region. You can easily use Google features to offer discounts and coupons to people searching for your type of business in your area. You can increase your clientele using Google and other search engines for free. You can also advertise in local search at a far cheaper rate than in a non-local search.

Now the big question for all you local business owners is how do get into this craze and make sure your business is found in relevant local searches. What strategies you should adopt to become more relevant in local searches.May be you already have a presence in a local search but want to improve your positions.

I found an excellent article on DuctTapeMarketing.com about how to make yourself more relevant in local searches. DuctTapeMarketing is a blog about simple, effective and affordable small business marketing. If you’re a small business owner, you should check their blog regularly and you’ll find some golden nuggets their to improve your business and increase your bottom line. The article discusses 5 effective strategies with plenty of relevant links to other articles to make you a local search guru. Here is the article:

1) Location content

It’s important that you review the content on your web pages with an eye on adding geography based terms and content. Add it to your HTML through page titles. Add it to your page footer with addresses. Add it to your internal linking anchor text – Omaha plumbing supplies instead of just plumbing supplies. Don’t overdo it and makes certain that real humans are kept in mind, but amp up the local content, including the names of suburbs, neighborhoods, companies and events that are commonly linked to your area of service.

In addition to localized content on your own site, you should consider adding content to sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Slideshare and adding very localized tags, descriptions, links and file names. (Don’t get spammy, but do get descriptive)

2) Location pages

Google SEO education spokesperson, Matt Cutts, recently said without reservation that businesses that serve multiple locations and communities should create individual pages for those communities and optimize those pages so that search engines understood exactly what they were about. I think this is about as clear an invitation to having location based landing pages are you can get. Businesses should consider separate pages for each location, suburb and community they serve. These pages should feature unique content and be optimized for hyper local search. This is the place I would also add a sidebar of local events and happenings with neighborhood, school and not for profit organizations. (You could use RSS technology to ease this chore.)

3) Profile pages

Profile pages on local and social networks are a must. Hopefully you’ve already claimed your Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local pages and taken full advantage of the fact that you can optimize that content with lots of links, photos, and descriptions.

Take a look at the new Google Places tags and posts features that allow you to buy enhancements to what shows on your listing for local search, including the ability to change coupons and special deals on the fly.

Build these same types of profiles on the major social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, but don’t bypass business portals and community niche sites. (Here’s a list of business related social networks to get you started) Also, try this list of social bookmarking sites that allow do follow links. These may carry more weight if the site is popular at all. (Go for anchor text links when you can – local keyword phrases for the link as opposed to just the URL)

4) Citations

Citations are simply listings for your business in various high profile business directories. This factor is probably the least talked about, but considered very important in a recent survey of local SEO experts conducted by David Mihm’s fabulous Local Search Ranking Factors report.

Two of the easiest ways to get more citations are to update and enhance your InfoUSA listing (they provide info to lots of directories) and to pony up the $30 a year to get a Universal Business Listing (another source provider for many directories). If you want to learn more about this topic you should also spend some time nosing around GetListed.org.

5) Location backlinks

Links from relevant sites have always played a very big role in how a site ranks. Quantity and quality count here, but quality is the biggest concern. When you are trying to rank highly for local search terms quality links from other sites should contain local anchor text what at all possible.

Look for local bloggers in sites like placeblogger, with an eye on finding related sites that might welcome your guest post and make sure you include a link back to your site in the body of the post in your bio.

Take advantage of associations, including alumni, Chambers and networking groups as potential homes for your content and links. Look for local publications that would welcome your guest columns for their online features. Work your vendors, suppliers and strategic partner network to develop opportunities for local links back to your site. Obviously if you are blogging (and you should be) you’ve got a ready make device to reciprocate and link out to other local businesses and events – a practice that both creates high value localized content and draws links to you.

Original article source: 5 Ways to get more from local search

Now you know what a local search is and how to make sure your business is found in local searches easily. You don’t need to buy any expensive Internet marketer’s guru product. If you cannot make it happen to due lack of time, you can make a list of things you need to get done and outsource it scriptlance.com or odesk.com

3 Common SEO Myths Busted by Backlink Flood

Dotcom Note — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:14:25 +0000

To rank higher in search engines, you need to do search engine optimization, or SEO. What that really mean is you need to apply some techniques so that your fake affiliate review sites and long copy sales letter sites will displace higher quality, useful information rich site for a better ranking in the search engine result page. Backlink Flood will make sure that it happens.

: Image via Wikipedia

Internet marketers complain that Google is not fair because it is hard, time consuming, and expensive to trick Google algorithm to put Internet Marketers’ fake affiliate review sites, blogs made for promoting affiliate products, and one page long sales copy site on the top of the search engine result page. But now, it is going to change forever.

Every time you use Google to find some useful information, you will see these f*cking, mind numbing, brain freezing affiliate review sites, useless blog sites, and long sales copy sites on the search engine result pages because Backlink Flood is on a mission to render the search engines into useless piece of shit that only Internet Marketers and people looking to buy their stuff will find useful.

How do I know that? This is what I got today in my inbox. Read it and decide for yourself.

1. SEO is a long and slow process, it takes months or even longer to start seeing traffic and results.

2. Article marketing is easy… simply upload a few articles about your niche to high ranking directories, and you’ll get all of the traffic you need.

3. You can’t rank mini sites or sales letters for competitive keywords… you need an authority site, and trying to rank a small site is a waste of time.

Do any of those sound familiar? They’re all common beliefs in the world of SEO, and they’re all just plain WRONG. So, how can you rank your site for your keywords in days instead of months? What are more effective ways of driving traffic and building links than submitting articles?

And how the heck can you rank a minisite for extremely competitive keywords? We’ll tell you in a second, but first we have to let you in on a little secret.

When people like Paul Johnson and Angela Edwards rave about a new SEO product, smart marketers take note. And if you want to stay one step ahead in the SEO game – if you want to get that organic traffic to your site (or keep it coming if you already have it) – then you need to keep up with the latest industry news.

The newest breakthrough is Backlink Flood by Andy Fletcher. Andy isn’t a household name in the SEO world… yet. But he just released a product that’s going to turn the world of SEO upside down forever.

We’re talking about brand new concepts that have never been published before, like Rapid Link Indexing, and ranking for keywords in days that would take months using the old SEO methods you’re probably used to.

If you want to see the answers to the questions we posted above, or you’re just curious to see the product that is taking the SEO world by storm and has the biggest names in the business drooling, head on over to:

Backlink Flood web site and buy their product. Use all the techniques revealed in the ebook and your fake affiliate review sites, affiliate blogs, and long copy sales letter sites will be on the top of the search engine result page and people will flood to your site and buy from you how to make money quick online ebook.

How to Make a Million – Buy A Search Engine For $10

Dotcom Note — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:00:21 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

This is the most ridiculous blog post I read this week. This guy at AltSearchEngine is looking for an entire search engine built for him for $10. To be fair, he will give you $100,000 if he can sell it for a cool million.

He has put other restrictions also. For example you can only write the engine in C++, a computer programming language. You cannot write it in any other programming language. What he is afraid of if it is written in another language? I don’t know. Ask him.

Of course, he does not mention how much he will pay you if he sells it for half a million dollars. You are out of luck. You have to be content with $10.

He has conjured up a nice business model – pay people ridiculously low wage with a promise to pay in the future if he can make a fortune. If have to give credit to him for coming up with such a brilliant idea. May be somebody in Afghanistan will take up his offer.

While I am at the search engine, I have to mention another ridiculous search engine I happened to discover this week. It is called SearchWinds. This guy pulls out 10 results for each query from Microsoft’s newly launched Bing (promoted as a decision engine) and asks searchers to vote on the results.

As if the the searcher does not have any better thing do. Not only she has to be content with the limited search results brought from a third party search engine, she also has to waste her time voting on the results.

If you are a desperate person living in Afghanistan with C++ skills, take up the $10 project. If you don’t have any better thing to do, go vote on search results.