Pay-Per-Click Advertising – The BasicsWritten by Halstatt Pires
Search engine optimization can take a long time to show results. The Google sandbox alone can delay optimization results by 6 to 8 months. So, what can you do to get traffic while you wait? Pay-per-click [“PPC”] campaigns fill time gap. This article discusses basics of PPC advertising.What Is A PPC? A PPC search engine allows you to bid for placement in search results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and most others bolster their organic search results with sponsor advertisements. If you search on Google, links in blue across top and little ads down right side of search results are PPC listings. In one form or another, similar listings appear on every major search engine. How Does It Work? When you use a PPC, you will bid for placement in search results under particular keywords. Instead of optimizing your site to appear high in listings, you simple pay for position. While this may sound great, keep in mind you are paying for listing and have to watch return on investment closely. To get started, you must open an account with PPC in question. The two biggest PPCs are Google Adwords and Overture. You will need to register with PPC, provide a credit card number and, depending on PPC, deposit money into account. Next, create ads with a title, body text and link to landing page of your site. The title of each ad should correspond to a particular keyword you want to promote. If at all possible, include keyword in actual title. Finally, you will be asked to bid on placement in search results. Bidding for placement is not as simple as it my sound. Ideally, your ad should be in top 3, but never below 10th position. This has to be balanced, however, by return on investment of campaign. If you sell a product that produces a $10 dollar profit per sale, you probably can’t afford to pay $.90 per click. If your site converts 1 visitor out of every 100 into a sale, you will spend $90 for every sale. Obviously, that is going to work out very well. The one caveat to this situation is a business with reoccurring revenue.
| | Promote Your Site DirectlyWritten by Lee Munson
Set your site on right trajectory by submitting it to every directory! Webmasters across globe are involved in a race to top of search engine listings. Everyone has their own set of racing techniques that they swear by, some work well, some not so. However, one thing is certain; if you want to get to top of rankings you need inbound links to your site. But how do you get inbound links? Well, you could buy them. That gets pretty expensive. For many keywords top ranking sites have hundreds if not thousands of inbound links, so unless you have a MEGA promotion budget then you will have to find another way. Writing articles and submitting them to resource sites (such as those listed at...http://www.info-sales.co.uk/article.htm) is another way to get many inbound links. However, not everyone is an aspiring modern day Shakespeare and not everyone has time to research, write and then submit articles. Okay, so you don't have Bill Gates' bank balance and therefore cannot buy all links you need. You lack either expertise or time to write articles. What can you do? Don't panic! The secret lies in two words, music to your ears and answer to your inbound links dilemma... Directory submission. "Set yourself daily targets..." In race to top of search engine rankings directory submission has to be isotonic sports drink. Submitting your site to directories will boost its performance immensely. There are hundreds of high quality free directories available. This means that your wallet will be untouched by process. Earlier, we discarded idea of article submission as too time consuming, doesn't directory submission take time too? Yes. Not much but it does take time. The most time consuming job would be finding right directories to submit to, however, conveniently other kindly webmasters have already done this for you. A number of quality free directory lists exist on internet but I would recommend (http://www.info-sales.co.uk/dirs.htm). That site lists directories alphabetically, this means that if you're too busy to submit to all directories at once then you can take it a couple of letters at a time. Set yourself daily targets i.e. today I will submit my site to directories under A, B and C and tomorrow I will do D, E and F. This way you will get your site listed on every directory on list in no time at all. Alongside each listing is a measure of popularity of directory (Google Page Rank), this means that if you are short of time you can select more highly ranked directories to submit to first.
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