SEO/ PPC Tips: Optimize your Online Marketing Efforts

In today’s competitive world of online industry, every one is looking for an efficient medium to get popularize. Advertisers are spending a huge amount on various activities just to get more & more traffic. But many advertisers are overlooking some great medium to get free publicity. “Article Marketing” is one of them. Yesterday, when I was suggesting this activity to one of my client for his web promotion then he simply said NO. He said that these kind of free promotions are of no use as they drive very less or no traffic. But I am not agreeing with this statement!!!!!

My past experience is totally defeating this statement. Article Marketing is an amazingly good way to get free advertising & publicity. It helps to get many free & targeted visitors to the websites, if done in right way.

Article Marketing is about writing quality original articles to promote you, your business, your products and your organization. It’s basically a pre-sales activity. It’s about exposure and pre-qualified traffic/visitor attraction back to your website.

To attain maximum benefit from Article Marketing, we have to take care of some factors which actually decide the success or failure of your marketing strategy.

Important Factors for Article Marketing:

• Original & Information Rich Content: Create original content with useful information for others. Don’t try to use selling pitch in your language. Now, your question can be- When we are here just for marketing then why we should not use selling pitch? That’s right, we all are here for marketing but there are so many advertisers in the same industry or niche so how users will find which one is the best for them. So, we have to prove our authenticity by our quality, original & information rich article content and it will market itself more successfully if written in a “non-sales” manner. Your quality & expertise will speak for you.

• Write effective & relevant Titles: Title plays a very important role in Advertising. There is no use of even a good article if people are not ready to open or read it. The Title decides almost 85-95% of the success of the article. Article title should be keyword rich, should be very appealing & should offer readers a glimpse of the content with their first glance. It should immediately capture the interest of your intended audience and motivate them to read further. I have seen many decent articles which are neglected because of bad title.

• Take care of Body content: The key concept is to use your article body to share your unique expertise. The Resource Box at the bottom of the article submission page is where you provide a link back to your website.

  “The Article Body Is Where You Give;
  The Resource Box Is Where You Take”

  -Christopher Knight
  CEO of EzineArticles.com

  Provide just enough information in the resource box to whet your readers’ appetite for more and they will be more inclined to visit your site. Make sure the information in your article body relates to the information in your resource box. Once at your site, you have the opportunity to deliver your pitch.

• Try to avoid using technical terms (Jargons): Try to use very simple & easy language so that every one can understand it. If you are writing on any industrial topic or technical thing then you can use Jargons but at that time take care of your tone & try to make the overall language easy to understand for all.

• Take care of information flow: Information should be in proper flow. It should not be randomly placed without any context. Every sentence should have sense & should complement the whole theme.

• Font Type/ Style: Use Bold and Italics Occasionally. It should be use only to draw readers attention to important information only.

• Submit your articles in to top article directories: Submit your article in many different article directories. You can find a good list of free article directories on the net. This will increases the chances of getting more back links & more visitors.

• Take care of Category: Always submit your content/ articles in to relevant category only. Also take care of the quality of article directories otherwise you will not be helpful to drive any traffic. Ezinearticles.com is the best article directory which can actually drive 1000’s of visitors to your site.

• Take care of Submission Guidelines: Many people don’t read the guidelines before submitting the articles in to article directories, which result in to rejection. We should carefully read all guidelines & take care of the quality standards.

• Author/ Resource Box: This is the part which you can use to market yourself & to get back links also. We should try to optimize our resource box to get maximum benefit out of it. Always use “call to action” phrase in your resource box as it is the selling/advertising portion for you. Try to differentiate you & your services from others. Highlight your USP & don’t forget to mention the exact URL of your website.

These are some of the most important factors which we all should take care of to get publicity from Article Marketing.

Try these tips & it will change your traffic status.

Please leave your comments or feedback about these tips.

Thanks for your time!

Normally people think that it is difficult to make money from Google Adsense & it needs a lot of effort even to start with. But I personally believe that anyone can build a successful & and regular online income with AdSense…that too with no previous experience & success…. Excited??

People normally create sites & start high paying AdSense Ads on them to get money. When a visitor clicks on the ads, they (site owner) get paid by Google.

This means you just need a Website to make money online…..That’s it!!

But if it would be that much easy, then surely every one would have been doing only this..right?

Yes, to get money from AdSense we have to take care of several things, which actually people do not take into account.

Here are some tips which might help you to earn more & very quickly:

• Build your site around profitable markets or industries. Search more about what people want? What is hot in market? & then provide that to them. So don’t start randomly & do proper search before starting.

• Keyword research is again very important for the success of your Adsense account. It can definitely increase the chances of hitting good niches. When researching for your profitable keywords related to your niche, you should look for keywords that have a high Average CPC, high number of ads for that keyword, high number of searches per month, and a low number of competing websites for that organic keyword search term. For keyword research you can use several tool available in the market like keyword elite.

• Don’t close the eyes to your site structure. It can be the cause of your failure. Always take care of the template & header image of your site. Many people leave the site in 7 seconds only because of unprofessional & scattered layout.

• Put your AdSense Ads Above the Fold, means to the section of a webpage that is visible without scrolling down. This can increase your CTR & earning as well J

• Position of Ads is again a very important factor. Though there is not one defined position which ensures the maximum CTR or great earning but we should always play with different positions to find out the best one.

• Don’t place your ads on empty pages & try to combine the ads with web content. But, Take care of the relevancy.

• Try to avoid using Black or any other dark background for your site. A light or white background will highlight your ads more clearly.

• Add unique & quality content to your site. Remember, people are coming on your site to find out quality & relevant info not to click ads so try to provide them the same. It will increase the site credibility. Too much ads on the site with very less content normally irritates the visitors.

• Now, the most important thing which is the key to success is the TRAFFIC. Try to drive the relevant traffic to your site.

More Visitors = More Clicks = More Pay Out

Take care of the optimization of your site as it will be helpful for you to get the free (organic) traffic from search engines. You can try PPC (Google Adwords) also to get more clicks but you have to pay for the same.

Try these tips & you will be earning more dollars from AdSense.

Remember, there is no fix pattern for success….so keep trying different things & be creative!!

Which browser do you use? Which is the best browser? These are some of the common question which many people asked me.

Well as a SEO specialist my answer is very obvious…”FIREFOX” , though all browsers are important for graphic & web designers as they have to check their design, work & functionality on each & every browser. They have to check the compatibility of the site on each.

Anyways..I really like FireFox because it has many great Plugings that makes my work easy & helps in quick SEO analysis.
If you are an expert or just starting to learn SEO, these Firefox plugins are great. I use the majority of these SEO Firefox plugins on a daily basis, if not more often.
Here’s a listing of the best plugins available for SEO work:

Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

Clipmarks: Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.

SeoQuake: Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. General set of parameters consists of such parameters as:

Google PR (Google PageRank of current page)

Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version)

Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain))

And similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

LinkChecker: Check the validity of links on any webpage.

SEOpen 0.8: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar.

Search Synchronizer 1.3.0.3: Synchronizes the firefox searchbox 16 default search engines, and the ability for you to add more!
So when you search for something from the google website, for example, the firefox searchbox shall automatically show that search. Works with:
-Google
-Yahoo
-MSN
-Ask.com
-and 12 others!

SearchStatus 1.25: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar 3.9.2: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

FireFTP 0.99.1: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

About This Site 1.1: One-click access to web site metadata - traffic, related and linked pages, and more - added to the Tools menu and context menu.

Page validator 0.3.3: Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.3: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal

Google Global 2.0.1: Google Global allows users to see organic and paid Google search results as they appear in different countries, cities, regions, ZIP codes and IP addresses.

Google Pagerank Status 0.9.3: Display the google pagerank in your browser’s status bar.

Web Developer 1.1.6: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

StumbleUpon 3.23: With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector 0.6.4: Detects Duplicate Bookmarks when bookmarks are added and specify where the previous URL is. You can also search and delete duplicates URL already in your Bookmarks.

del.icio.us Complete 1.3: del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

This extension is not only a sidebar it provides an excellent post dialog as well.
Social Media for Firefox : A submission on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Delicious is sometimes a good candidate for submission to the others. This add-on makes saves you the time of checking if an item has already been submitted by showing vote counts right on the home pages of these social bookmarking sites.

In addition, vote counts are shown in the Firefox status bar as you move from page to page again saving you the trouble of going through the bookmarking process if someone has beat you to it.

Compete.com: The Compete Toolbar automatically creates three alerts for every web site you visit:

Trust Scores: help you experience a safer web by warning you of potentially malicious (spyware, phishing) web sites

Site Profiles: tell you how popular the web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing

Deal Light: automatically lights up if there are any special promotions or coupons that can save you money on the web site.

I am sure these plugins will increase your SEO efficiency.

We all know the Google’s influence over Internet Industry. Google is just amazing!!

It provides many free tools to help advertisers & users. Recently, Google has introduced a new free tool called Google Ad Planner to potentially increase its already widespread influence.

It’s a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications.

So, with Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

The Google Ad Planner account interface consists of:

• An audience definition tool, where you define your audience by language, age, and other criteria.
• A list of sites matching your criteria. The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data for each site to help you make informed decisions about where you might advertise. To make your research more efficient, Google Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

With Google Ad Planner, you can choose to research sites only or create a media plan to save a list of your desired sites and placements for future use.

How does Google Ad Planner work with Google AdWords?

Google Ad Planner can help you identify appropriate sites to target through Google AdWords. First, filter your Google Ad Planner results to display sites in the Google content network and export the appropriate list of sites to a .csv file.

You can then take any of the following actions in your AdWords account:

• Create a Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
• Edit an existing Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
• Use Google AdWords Editor to add placements to your ad groups: You won’t need to create a new spreadsheet, because Google Ad Planner has already done it for you. Simply copy sites from your .csv file directly into AdWords Editor.

I hope this information will helps you manage all your other media planning, buying and campaign management activities.

The main source of information is http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-google-ad-planner.html & Google Help Center.

Landing page plays a very important role in the success of online advertising efforts. This serves the ultimate objective of the website to get conversions which can be of different type as per marketing objective of the site like it can be sign up for newsletters, purchase of specific products, contact form fill up & many others. Previously I have written some posts about landing pages like importance of landing pages, quality factors, impact of landing pages on quality score of Google Adwords campaign & many others.

Today, I am trying to create a comprehensive checklist or you can say it guide about website landing page so that we can keep some basic points in to mind while working on landing page design.

I would like to define the landing page before making the checklist of effective techniques to create an influential landing/ sales page.

Landing page is the page which is highly focused & specifically designed for selling purpose like to get the leads, sales or conversions without giving any single change to visitors to loose focus.

This is the page where visitor lands after clicking on your advertisements. Squeeze pages can be defined as different version or face of landing pages. Squeeze pages are basically designed to get leads not for immediate sale, you can take the example of open source solutions selling firms, as they sale customize software solutions as per different organization needs & they don’t have any physical products, so what they actually requires…is simply the lead, means the contact details of the potential service buyers.

Now I would like to answer some questions which can come in your mind-

Is it really important to have specific landing pages?

Then my answer will be definitely, Yes. If you want maximum out of your advertising efforts then you need to have an appealing & highly focused landing page which can suggest the specific solution to the visitors for their specific needs.

The other question can be – Do we have separate landing page for visitors from SEO & visitors from PPC?

In this case my answer would be both Yes as well as No. Actually that would depend upon your objective. For example, if you have an online store with different products, free e-books & many others, then it is good for you if people are coming to reading your free books, getting reviews before buying or purchasing. But obviously you don’t want to spend lots of money on PPC for these pre sales activities. In that case marketing thru SEO would be a better option for you. If you decide to generate traffic through search engine optimization, planning your landing page will entail finding phrases within your niche which have a high demand (aggregate search value) and a low supply (small amount of competing sites) and then creating multiple landing pages, each which is optimized around a different phrase. If, on the other hand, you decide to generate traffic through pay per click (PPC) programs, such as Adwords, planning your landing page theme will again entail tuning a number of different pages to fit the keywords you are purchasing & products which you are selling.

Many people (including most of my clients) usually asked me to define the layout of landing page. Well, there is no explicit mock-up which we can work for all website or every single industry. One specific model which is very successful for one site may not work for other. Landing page depend on the marketing objective also and again testing is the best way to find out the best model for you.

So, let’s start creating the Landing Page Checklist

• First & the most important thing is to define your focus or objective before designing the landing page. Identify what action exactly you want from your visitors on your page. You should have some goal like you want your contact form filled or you want newsletter sign ups or the final purchase of product. Your lading page should have the accurate action point which can lead to the achievement of marketing objective. For example, if your marketing objective is to sale some products then your objective would be the “Immediate Sale” and in that case you should highlight the special offerings (if you have any), your USP, any free offer with your products, any discount or guarantee etc. These things will help you to persuade visitors to take the required actions like sigh ups, purchase etc. and at this stage the action point will be a “Buying Button”, so your page must have shopping cart, checkout service or any quick buying buttons on that sales page. All of these services will allow you to make transactions quickly. Agree?

• Don’t forget to define yourself. When a visitor first comes to the website, chances are they want to find out a little more about you. Information about you adds instant credibility to the site. You can create a separate About Us page on your site. It will put a face to your site through profiling your company, business policies, and partners. It will humanize your site to your visitors. It will help visitors to understand the site as a whole. It will work as a way for your readers to know you on a personal level. Otherwise many times it is difficult for visitors to pull out his or her credit card on the spot and make the purchase.

• Try to highlight the undeniable sales points with powerful psychological triggers. This means you should have content a mix of sales points & what visitors will gain from your offering & what they might loose if they don’t. Say for example, if you are selling some cosmetics which cure the acne. Then you should highlight your best selling points like discounts, guarantee, money back guarantee etc. etc., but simultaneously don’t forget to highlight acne as the biggest issue which can harm overall look & personality & what might be the benefits/ results once someone get rid of this problem. These psychological factors are very helpful in getting the conversions or the required actions. You can miss the final sale if you miss any of these 2 things.

• Take care of the information flow. Don’t put information randomly on landing page. All information should be in right context & in an appropriate manner. Visitor should not loose interest or focus …anyhow.

• Also, don’t forget to highlight the alert factor which instantly create the urge for visitors to act immediately like if you have a specific offer for limited period then you can highlight this as “Offer is valid till…” . But don’t create unnecessary hype with misleading or false information otherwise you will loose credibility very soon.

• Try to generate maximum trust as much as you can. Users or visitors normally hesitate to give their personal contact information & other details. Try to show your authenticity to them by defining your secure transactions policy, any authoritative seal etc. You should always define them the purpose of asking for specific details with the guarantee of not selling/ reveling these information to others like spammers & hackers.

• Refine your landing page by eliminating unwanted or unnecessary elements. Unneeded baffled information can distract the visitors. It should have very specific & relevant information as people expect it & they can be disappointed by not getting the same.

• Don’t overlook the layout & design of page. It is very helpful to catch the user’s attention. Mostly visitors leave the site with in 7 seconds because of the unprofessional & catchy look. So, now you can understand the importance of looks

• Be precise or to the point while asking for information. Don’t put a lengthy fill up form by making all the fields mandatory. Keep the form as short as you can. Don’t expect to fill all unnecessary information. They may leave your site as they might not have too much time to fill a big form.

• Don’t forget the “Thank You” page. Thank you page basically appears when required action has been completed on your site. We should optimize this page. We can optimize it by placing some important links of the site (which can be useful for visitors) on this page, we can ask for our free newsletters (if this is a thank you page of sales or sign ups etc), joining mailing list, we can offer free E-Books etc. which opens up more means through which you can up-sell.

• Landing page should not be a splash page as it can confuse a visitor. We should avoid using flash, animation & other fancy code to fascinate the visitors as all these increases the loading time of the page. We should focus on simple & clear layout that allow visitors to find what they want in the shortest time available.

• You can find some important points in one of my previous posts- Landing Page Quality Factors. Here, you can find other information also like how landing page effect the quality score of Google AdWords PPC campaign.

In this guide I have tried to highlight all important factors, though there is always a scope of elaboration.

Hope this post is making sense to readers who really want to work on their landing pages to get the maximum output from their advertising efforts.

Your comments & suggestions are always welcome. In fact comments really help me to research more on the subject matter. Also, let me know if you want me to answer any query related to your online advertising (SEO & PPC) issues. I would like to solve them by writing post on those specific topics.

If you have any query about your landing page or need any suggestions, do let me know.

Thanks for your time.

Happy Reading!!