If someone were to ask me, “If I were to do only one thing to SEO my website, what would you suggest”, I would, of course, respond “There is not just one thing that you can do that will magically optimize your website to get higher search engine rankings, but….”. If you were to do one thing TODAY to your website to improve your SEO, I would suggest optimizing your page titles and descriptions.

Your page titles and descriptions tell both the search engines, as well as users, what a particular page in your website is about. Therefore, you want to make sure that the page titles and descriptions are unique and relevant  to each page of your website. They should also be descriptive, and include the targeted keywords you have chosen for that page.

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Whether you are running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, other paid advertising, or relying on organic search engine rankings, these tips on optimizing your landing pages will help you to achieve higher conversion rates on your website.

Are you getting traffic to your web site, but finding that visitors are not taking any action? The following suggestions will have you on your way to optimizing your landing page(s) thus, improving your conversion rates:

1. Focus your Landing Pages

Your landing pages should have one offer that you focus on in order to achieve higher conversion rates. If your visitors land on a page where there are many options, with many calls-to-action and paths they can take through your site, you are only losing focused attention on the primary goal. Whether your conversion is completing a lead form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter or membership, make this the main intent of your page. Give your visitors too many choices, and you run a high risk of losing them. This term is called “abandonment”. Abandonment is when your visitors initiate an action, but do not follow through. Look at your landing pages, and identify potential “abandonment points”, and remedy the situation by eliminating them.

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Website owners know the importance of marketing their website online in order to receive more targeted traffic through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but oftentimes, usability is not even factored in to the equation.

Unfortunately, when all of your internet marketing efforts still don’t seem to be increasing sales or leads, or not as expected, a usability check is called for. Usability is critical. If the experience is not as easy and clear as possible for the user, they will go elsewhere to buy.

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There are a good number of SEM and SEO resources available, both free, and paid. These resources can help you to find information about how to optimize your website to running PPC programs. The following is a list of 5 of the best SEM and SEO Resources.

SEO Book

SEO Book is one of the best resources for learning about SEO. The site features a blog, free SEO tools to help with optimization of your website, forums, videos, and free marketing tips & strategies. There is also a training course with modules covering PPC, SEO, Analytics, and much, much more. This is a resource for website owners looking to improve their search engine rankings through SEO, whether you are a beginner, or have years of experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Optimizing your anchor text for links within your website and for incoming links to your website is an important element to implement into your SEO strategy to get higher rankings in the search engines.

The anchor text is the text that is hyperlinked on your page as in the following: anchor text optimization. The text that is highlighted on your link is seen by the search engines as an indicator of the content on the page that it links to. Therefore, you will want to use relevant keywords for the target page in your anchor text.

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In part one of “How to start a pay-per-click program”, I discussed the first steps to take in your PPC campaign, which included setting goals, determining your budget, creating your landing page, choosing your ppc program, and choosing keywords and key phrases. I will talk about the next steps to creating a successful PPC campaign in this post.

Creating your PPC ads

After you have your landing pages set up, the next step is to create the ads or creatives that will be shown for your PPC campaign. When writing creative copy, you have limited space, so getting straight to the point of your ad, and setting the expectation of what the user will see when a visitor clicks on your ad is key. You want to have a clear call to action in your ad, as well as matching the text in your ad to the text on the landing page. It is proven that higher conversion rates come from relative ad copy to the landing page. Don’t try to fool your visitors into clicking on your ad, then sending them to something they aren’t even looking for. This is a quick way to get your visitors to bounce, as well as deplete your budget.

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Pay-Per-Click campaigns are an immediate source of traffic to your Web site or blog, and can potentially be a crucial part of your marketing success. Before you jump in head first, though, I would like to provide a general guide on how to go about starting a PPC program.

Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign

This obvious, yet crucial step is necessary to determine the success of your campaign. Typically, the major objectives are:

1. To make a sale
2. To obtain a lead
3. To get a phone call or visit to your business
4. To brand your company, blog, Web site
5. To make money from your Web site through affiliate programs, etc.

If you take the “I’ll just get traffic, and see what happens” approach, you do not have clearly defined or measurable goals. Some of the above objectives are easier to measure than others, but success in anything has some sort of relative measurement, So, determine what your goal is, and make future changes accordingly.

Determine Your Budget

This step is a bit like taking a trip to Vegas. Take as much as you can afford to lose. The first time you start a PPC campaign, you need to realize that just because you are paying for clicks does not guarantee anything. You must be able to afford to lose money for a short time, until you are able to measure, analyze, and adjust your campaign until you reach scalable metrics.

Create a Landing Page

This is yet another crucial step that you should not ignore. A landing page is the page that your visitors will reach when they click on your ad. The landing page should include a means to your end goal or objective. For instance, if your objective is to make a sale, your landing page should include the product(s) you wish to sell, a clear call-to-action, and a quick and easy way to make a purchase. If you want to acquire a lead, you must present a need or desire that will be fulfilled by the user submitting their information, and a form that is either on the page or maximum 1 click away, and is as simple as you can possibly make it. I will explain more about landing pages in a later post, as this is another topic that can be greatly expanded upon, but the poing of creating a landing page is to send your visitors directly to what they were looking for when they typed in a search term, and then clicked on your ad.

Choose a PPC network

There are many PPC networks to choose from, but to start, choosing one of major search engines is your best bet, as you will get the best measurement of success, more volume, and higher-quality clicks. If you haven’t already heard, the top 3 are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. You can typically find deals for signing up, like free credits.

Research Search Terms

Once you sign up with your provider, you will be able to use their built-in keyword tools to find keywords to add to your campaign. You want to choose the most relevant terms for your campaign, and determine how popular your search terms are. You can also do this without opening an account by using some of the free keyword research tools, such as Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool or Google’s free keyword tool. There are also many great programs out there like WordTracker and Web CEO. Use these tools by entering some of the key phrases in your landing page. For instance, this blog is about PPC campaigns, so I would type that in, and the tool will give you other suggestions, and an average number of searches you can expect. This helps to broaden your keyword base, but getting too broad will result in non-relevant clicks to your site, which have less potential to create conversions. Try different combinations of keywords and key phrases, and measure which ones give you the best conversions.

This is the conclusion of “How to Start a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Part 1″. Check back or better yet, subscribe to this blog for Part 2. In the meantime, start on these first steps, get your goals set, and do your research. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know your thoughts. Happy marketing!

After years of professionals asking Google what makes them happy as far as getting their website indexed and acheiving higher Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs), Google released “Google’s SEO Starter Guide” in order to provide information to webmasters to help their Google SEO.

The 22 page document provides best practices in the most common areas to improve SEO, including improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, as well as ways to use Google’s Webmaster Tools in order to identify problems with SEO in these areas.

I have outlined the basic points that this document covers. I recommend webmasters and anyone looking to get a basic understanding of the different aspects that should be addressed to improve SEO. Download “Google’s SEO Starter Guide” here.

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Keyword research is probably the single-most important aspect of achieving successful results in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns. Whether your keyword research will be used for your organic SEO efforts, or for PPC campaigns, the keywords you choose to try to win will determine the base starting point for optimization.

While keyword research is one of the very first activities that should be completed, it should also be an ongoing part of your campaign. After your campaigns are launched, continual analysis and research will lead you to discover not only more keyword opportunities, but will also bring awareness to what keywords are working well, which ones are not as successful, and what other tactics can be used to improve rankings and conversions.

When conducting your initial keyword research to determine your target and top-priority keywords, some of the top factors to keep in mind are keyword popularity, keyword competitiveness, and relevance to your niche and site content. You can find out this information and more through a wide range of keyword research tools available online, both free and at a cost. I recommend using more than one of these tools to compare, and to come up with your final keyword list.

Regardless of which keyword research tools you choose to utilize, whatever you do, don’t skip this very and crucial step. Without researching and determining a baseline keyword list, you will not have a clear SEO or SEM strategy to base your campaign on which could waste very valuable time and money.

Pay Per Click, or PPC Advertising can be a very quick way to drive targeted search engine traffic to your website. Basically, the PPC model involves choosing an PPC search engine, such as Google Adwords, starting an account, and start receiving traffic to your website. Simple enough, right? Yes, and no.

Although you can quickly setup a PPC account and start receiving traffic to your website, if you don’t know the basics of how PPC programs work, at the very least, you may find yourself amongst the many who spend a lot of money, get no results, and end up jaded, and convinced that paid search marketing is a rip off or doesn’t work at all.

Actually, PPC advertising can be a very lucrative and successful online marketing tool if used and managed correctly. I can’t tell you that there is an exact method to creating and managing a PPC campaign, but there are absolutely guidelines that should be followed to help to ensure a successful Pay Per Click campaign.

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a form of Search Engine Marketing in which you bid on selected keywords, create ads that will be shown on the search engine, and then you pay only for the actual clicks on the ad. PPC advertising is also known as “paid search”.

There is a difference between a paid search campaign, or PPC, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can learn more about SEO in other posts, but. Basically SEO involves optimizing your website for “natural” or “organic” results in the search engines, which you do not pay for when users click on your listings, while PPC results appear in the “Sponsored Results” sections of search engines. Here is an example, in Google of the difference between paid and organic search engine results:

Google Search Results - PPC vs Organic

The green portion in this graphic represents the areas where Paid Search Results (PPC) appear in Google’s search results, while the blue portion represents the organic listings.

If you are considering starting a PPC campaign, it is a very wise idea to learn as much about it as you can or hire a Search Engine Marketing Professional to manage your PPC campaign to ensure your marketing dollars are spent most effectively.