Submitting your site to a PPC is certainly a lot faster than submitting to a search engine or a directory. You must, however, make sure you consider the following: .. The maximum amount you can bid (I can’t stress that enough!)
.. The keywords you wish to bid on.
.. The titles and descriptions of the site.
That last point is very important for making the most of PPC’s.
Just because you don’t have to worry about putting keywords in your title and descriptions to please the search engines, that doesn’t mean relevance isn’t important. On the contrary, relevance still matters. You need to let the user know that your site is exactly what they’re looking for. That means putting the keyword in the title and having a catchy, informative description. Remember, the more good clicks you get, the more money you are likely to make.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Show Me the Money!
With PPC’s, the name of the game is profit. You need to be careful not to get carried away with the ranking so that your promotion doesn’t cut into your revenues. This is essential! There’s no point in being top if you’re out of business in a month. You have to figure out what you can afford and keep to it. Base your decision on your visitor-to-sales-ratio (the number of visitors on average that it takes to generate a sale) and your net profit per sale.
So for example, if you get a sale from every tenth visitor, and you net a profit of $20 from each sale, then you can’t pay more than $2 for each click without operating at a loss (unless you have an effective back-end sales campaign setup as discussed earlier). In practice, you might make one sale for every 100 or so clicks and pay perhaps 15 or 20 cents for each visitor, depending on your market. It’s absolutely crucial for you to know your visitor-to-sales-ratio. It’s also important to keep that ratio as high as possible, and that means only bidding on relevant keywords. If you pay for visitors who are looking for something completely different than the services you’re offering, you’re just throwing your money away. They aren’t going to buy, and even at five cents a shot, those wasted nickels soon add up.
On the other hand, because you can pay so little, it is worth bidding on as many relevant keywords as possible.
The key is to balance high payments for top keywords with low payments that bring in less traffic.
You should also consider the quality of visitors the site will send you. The more targeted a directory, the better your visitor to sale ratio will be and that might make it worth increasing your bid price.
So for example, if you get a sale from every tenth visitor, and you net a profit of $20 from each sale, then you can’t pay more than $2 for each click without operating at a loss (unless you have an effective back-end sales campaign setup as discussed earlier). In practice, you might make one sale for every 100 or so clicks and pay perhaps 15 or 20 cents for each visitor, depending on your market. It’s absolutely crucial for you to know your visitor-to-sales-ratio. It’s also important to keep that ratio as high as possible, and that means only bidding on relevant keywords. If you pay for visitors who are looking for something completely different than the services you’re offering, you’re just throwing your money away. They aren’t going to buy, and even at five cents a shot, those wasted nickels soon add up.
On the other hand, because you can pay so little, it is worth bidding on as many relevant keywords as possible.
The key is to balance high payments for top keywords with low payments that bring in less traffic.
You should also consider the quality of visitors the site will send you. The more targeted a directory, the better your visitor to sale ratio will be and that might make it worth increasing your bid price.
Pay-Per-Click — Buying Status
Pay-per-click programs (PPC’s) allow you to buy a prime position in a search engine by selecting the price you wish to pay for each visitor you receive. This can place you exactly where you want to be in the listing, or let you decide precisely how much you want to spend on advertising.
The big advantage of PPC’s is that you don’t have to worry about messing with keywords or links or any of that. You can just figure out how much you want to pay for a keyword and buy your position. In addition, you only pay for people who actually click on your link (for banner ads, you often have to pay when someone sees it.) And you can also get cheap visitors. Bids usually start at around five cents per click. The top three bids though are often promoted across a network of sites so there can be big bonuses for bidding high.
This is how most pay-per-click programs work:
.. You create your page title, description and link as you want it to appear in the search results.
.. You enter the keywords and phrases that will prompt your listing to appear.
.. You enter your keyword bid (the amount you are willing to pay for each click to your site).
.. Your keyword bid is compared to that of other bidders for the same keyword. The results are returned to the user with
the highest bid appearing first.
The big advantage of PPC’s is that you don’t have to worry about messing with keywords or links or any of that. You can just figure out how much you want to pay for a keyword and buy your position. In addition, you only pay for people who actually click on your link (for banner ads, you often have to pay when someone sees it.) And you can also get cheap visitors. Bids usually start at around five cents per click. The top three bids though are often promoted across a network of sites so there can be big bonuses for bidding high.
This is how most pay-per-click programs work:
.. You create your page title, description and link as you want it to appear in the search results.
.. You enter the keywords and phrases that will prompt your listing to appear.
.. You enter your keyword bid (the amount you are willing to pay for each click to your site).
.. Your keyword bid is compared to that of other bidders for the same keyword. The results are returned to the user with
the highest bid appearing first.
Submitting to Search Directories
Submitting your site to a search directory is a little tougher than submitting to a search engine. Directories don’t have spiders. They rely on humans. When you submit your site to Yahoo! or any of the other directories, you’ll have to complete a form that will include your “URL”, “Page Title”, “Keywords” and a “Page Description”. Your keywords and title will play some role in your ranking, but for the description, it’s much better to put a hard sell that will attract users. There’s no point having a link at the top of a category if no one wants to click on it.
Bear in mind that because each submission to a directory is checked by a human editor, it can take quite a while for your site to be approved and listed. Some sites do have express services but these are pretty pricey (Yahoo! wants $299 and $600 for adult sites!), and if they decide your site isn’t suitable for a category, you don’t get your money back. It’s usually worth the wait.
Bear in mind that because each submission to a directory is checked by a human editor, it can take quite a while for your site to be approved and listed. Some sites do have express services but these are pretty pricey (Yahoo! wants $299 and $600 for adult sites!), and if they decide your site isn’t suitable for a category, you don’t get your money back. It’s usually worth the wait.
Search Directories – The Benefits of Browsing
Search directories differ from search engines by providing a range of categories for users to browse. Rather than enter a keyword into a search box, users click through categories and sub-categories narrowing down their options.
You could say that search engines are like going straight up to the sales assistant and asking what they have in evening wear; search directories are like browsing through the store and seeing what catches the eye.
How you make your site catch the eye in a directory is actually pretty similar to standing out in a search engine. It’s all about relevancy — a mixture of keywords and links.
You could say that search engines are like going straight up to the sales assistant and asking what they have in evening wear; search directories are like browsing through the store and seeing what catches the eye.
How you make your site catch the eye in a directory is actually pretty similar to standing out in a search engine. It’s all about relevancy — a mixture of keywords and links.
Submitting to Search Engines
Submitting sites to search engines is much easier than submitting them to directories or pay-per-clicks. In fact, you only have to submit the home page. The search engine’s “spider” (a neat little software program) will then follow all the links from the home page and include your other pages. Spidering actually increases your relevancy score more than hand-submitting your internal pages yourself.
The disadvantage of spidering is that it can be slow. Google has the best spider but even they can take up to a month to index all your pages. For other search engines you can wait three times as long. Say What?! Is all of this search engine talk confusing to you? Do you want to make money online, but don’t want to figure it all out by yourself? You’re not alone. Click here for a turn-key money-making system that you can start earning from within the next 24 hours.
The disadvantage of spidering is that it can be slow. Google has the best spider but even they can take up to a month to index all your pages. For other search engines you can wait three times as long. Say What?! Is all of this search engine talk confusing to you? Do you want to make money online, but don’t want to figure it all out by yourself? You’re not alone. Click here for a turn-key money-making system that you can start earning from within the next 24 hours.
WEB COPY FOR SEO
The search engines will scan the text on a web page to see if your site is relevant to the search term. That means that in effect, your web copy is going to have to do two things: persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engine it’s relevant. When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, but throw in 4-8 keywords. You’ll have to try to balance a smooth text flow against getting in all the keywords you need to be listed.
You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create opportunities for link exchanges. So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position of your site in a search engine. More important than where you put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s not really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to have done the job for you. Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’t mean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google. One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve been online, so success on the search engines won’t come overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the sooner you can start to rise.
You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-to articles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in some keywords and they can turn up in search engines and create opportunities for link exchanges. So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position of your site in a search engine. More important than where you put the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s not really a huge challenge as your competitors are likely to have done the job for you. Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’t mean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google. One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve been online, so success on the search engines won’t come overnight. The sooner you start submitting though, the sooner you can start to rise.
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