#1 Without doubt biggest mistake a newbie to Adwords makes is compiling a long list of less than targeted keywords and whacking (technical term) them into a single ad-group.

#2 Using broad match only

#3 The unholiest of trinity – not tracking results.

#1 The Single Adgroup --------------------- Although at first it may seem tempting – collecting all your keywords and lumping them into a single ad-group for ‘ease of administration’ is not a good idea for a multitude of reasons.

First off, let’s say you have managed to find 1000 keywords for your campaign and you pop them all into a single ad-group. Yes, you get a single point of administration (or more accurately a single point of failure) but look at what you miss:

• The ability to group tightly cohesive keywords (which are mindset of your prospects) and construct targeted adverts which are more likely to gain a click through to your site.

• The ability to have specific landing pages on your site for specific customer psychographics. This alone will greatly increase your chances of getting a prospect respond to your call to action – be it an email address capture or a sale.

• The ability to keep tight control over budget of your ‘best’ keywords (where best are high traffic/high conversion). Sure you can adjust individual CPC’s within an ad-group, but granularity and control is not there and problems inherent with grouping too many loosely assembled keywords will ensure your efforts are thwarted and money wasted.

Have you ever had your account slowed? It’s a pain for sure but more keywords you have administered in a less than disciplined way, more of your keywords will be put on hold/in-trial and/or disabled.

Remember Google rewards good advertising performance and looks at all advertiser histories & your advertising history when determining how well you are doing.

Adwords is not a fire and forget medium (unless you have a very niche market with very little competition – but days of such markets are numbered).

Active campaign management is required to ensure you have not just a return of your investment but a positive return ON your investment.

#2 Using Broad Match -------------------- Consider keyword ‘widget’.

How many ways can you search for this keyword? In theory there are infinite number of searches that can be conducted but in practice there are considerably fewer thankfully.

However, how should you specify your matching options within Adwords?

Option 1: Broad Match This specifies keyword in an unadorned fashion within your list like so: Blue widget

What this means is that should somebody search for keywords: Blue widget Red blue widget Widget blue Widget who searches for these things blue? Don’t need blue widget

Then, your advert would show for all of these. This is all very well when broad match (I’ll not talk about expanded match searching for fear of confusion!) shows your advert for terms relevant to you. But…

For every term relevant to your market there could be 10, 100 or 1000 others which are not (which is why when you utilise broad matching you should use negative keywords exhaustively).

Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to other main pages.

They also have inherent potential to be well-linked.

If you haven’t already submitted to blog directories, you are missing out on some great one-way links. Many of top directories can be found on Robin Good’s Top 55 list at MasterNewMedia.org.

But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then your new listings can help your site get best keyword placement in major search engines.

These are my top five tips for lucrative blog search engine optimization.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #1: Lucrative Keyword Choices

You have a choice. You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic.

Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a “lucrative keyword”.

Whatever you call them, here’s most important thing: They may not get you most traffic, but they often bring most profit.

You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of most profitable sites in world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.

A recent article in Information Week stated that highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries.

The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

It isn’t just four word phrases that get converting traffic - there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales.

Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004.

As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you’ll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them.

Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #2: Keyword Placement

Your blog can be set up to repeat keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme.