Archive for the ‘internet marketing’ Category

Google changes PPC rules with New Broad match

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

Those managing a PPC account are very well aware of the fact that Google AdWords has 3 types of match types: broad, phrase and exact. Most people also know how their results are matched up to searches performed by people. Till now, broad match used to mean that your entire keyword phrase matched with exact query performed by a user.

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Then, Google decided to modify broad match and called it “expanded broad match”. In here, Google’s search algorithm used to decide whether the search query performed was close to your keywords and only then displayed the ad. Unfortunately, many results weren’t favorable and often people complained of wrong ads being displayed. Broad match has often being called the Holy Grail of the search engine world. Until now that is.

Recently, Google has started offering more options to users to make peace between relevance and traffic. Basically, Google has combined the new ‘expanded broad match’ and the old broad match. As such, Google calls it modified broad match. It aims to offer a broader reach as compared to phrase match and more control than earlier broad match. Let’s discuss some of the changes implemented.

Now if you add a plus (+) sign to your phrase in the beginning, Google AdWords will consider the search queries that exactly contain your phrase or are most close to it. Now these close variations are defined as plural/singular, misspellings, acronyms/abbreviations, stemming and synonyms.

At the very core, Google now allows advertisers to select between newer broad match, old broad match or a combo strategy. You can rein in words to be displayed relative to search queries and decide which keywords trigger the ads. Let’s consider an example to explain this.

If you type business +cards, it will be matched with search queries predominantly related to cards. However, this also means that your results will be matched to business ID cards.

If you type +business +cards, it matches the early broad search functions. It will always mean both business as well as ID cards. The results as such will be more in number.

The point here is that Google has let users customize their keyword research as much as they want it to. The ads now will be more organic since users can tilt the results according to the relevance with the keywords. Also, broad keywords research and analysis will become simpler. All in all, this is not a big change but will definitely affect the broad keyword niche of your SEO strategy.

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Posted in Internet Marketing Ireland, internet marketing, search engine marketing | No Comments »

Worth of SEO Services – Are You Paying Too Much?

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Search engine optimization is a necessity for any business in these times of fierce online competition. You need to get exposure through search engines to reach your targeted market. As such, thousands of SEO services have sprung up on the internet providing search engine optimization packages as dirt cheap prices. However, there are some elite services who promise to improve your search engine rankings and charge huge money for the same.

If you are a webmaster, you are probably using some SEO service provider. But have you ever given consideration to how much these services are worth? If not, its time you do a research and find out how much you are getting for your money. Here are some tips to help you decide if you are going to pay an SEO service provider or not.

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  1. First, make up your mind whether you really need SEO assistance. For example, if you aim to target some “long tail” or unique key words, you should rather try it yourself first. Why blindly waste money on an SEO consultant? However, if you are unsure about how to conduct a keyword research, it is better you outsource it to a competent SEO firm.
  2. Let’s face it – search engine optimization is not rocket-science. Most of the times, it’s just monotonous drudgery. So, most of your monetary resources can be allocated towards other important tasks. Though, an experienced SEO personal can make considerable difference to your rankings. You need to decide whether you have enough resources to spend on these exorbitant services.
  3. The worth of a SEO endeavor boils down to effective sales conversion or clicks. Just like a PPC or Search Engine Marketing campaign, SEO should also be measured according to the cost-per-click basis. Its success should be according to the ROI. If you do not have any goal of how many clicks or conversion you want, it better not to bomb money on SEO services.
  4. SEO is a dynamic process. Your competitors are not going to sit idle when they see you on the first page. With fierce competition, you can lose your top spot anytime. Due to this fact, your search engine optimization process must be an ongoing process. You cannot depend entirely on SEO firms and only you can understand your business best.
  5. Search engine were and always will be secrets. Anybody claiming to have an insider source is lying. Search engine companies are not willing to trade their secrets at any cost. They constantly update their algorithms and change the key to the lock. So, even the most expert people can only guess. SEO firms do help but they don’t have a 100% guarantee of what works and what does not.

So, there you go. This is the big picture of SEO services. They can help you a great deal if your website basics are clear and you now need a good conversion. However, those thinking that an SEO firm can quickly change their sales overnight are in for disappointment. When you hire a SEO consultant, keep in mind the ROI element because if you have a positive margin here, you are on the right path.

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Posted in Online Marketing, internet marketing | No Comments »

Local SEM – Your Key to Better Sales

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Have you ever thought about local search queries while fine-tuning your search engine marketing strategy? If no, then you are not alone. Most internet marketers don’t give much importance to local traffic while optimizing their websites. However, this small niche can be highly lucrative provided you follow the right guidelines. Just consider the fact that one out of every five search queries in the U.S.A. is regarding local information or products. With 16 billion searches performed every month, the local search market is huge.

It is obvious that a local search is regarding the purchase of a product and consumer is more than likely to buy the product almost immediately. This can mean huge profits for local companies. If geo-specific searches are targeted at your business, then you can leverage the enormous potential of your local market. Apply these 5 tips to improve your local search engine marketing results.

search engine marketing
Local Listings

If you are running a business, you should claim your local listings through online business centers. You can take the help of local search engines like Yahoo, Google and Bing to achieve this. This ensures that information related to your business is visible to the public in the best way possible.

For e.g. a non-working phone number can lead to potential sales loss. Also, if you have offices at 2-3 locations, it is important that you list all the addresses and contact info clearly. Sites such as CitySearch and Yelp also provide local listing services.

Impressive Profile

Most businesses don’t go beyond managing a simple profile containing name, contact number, address, and products. However, if you take it a step further and optimize your profile better, you’ll experience much better exposure. You can do this using informative business descriptions and customized fields. The descriptions should be highly informative and keyword rich. You can also add maps showing your detailed location. Here too, the key is to keep the information up to date.

Content Distribution

You need to include content distribution in you online marketing strategy. Besides search engines, you need to have exposure on online directories and smaller search engines. Failure to distribute content on these services results in potential loss of customers. You can begin by having a list of article directories and then proceeding to submit articles on it.

Check Performance

After performing search engine optimization, you need to track your performance regularly. You need to create reports of existing click traffic, diverted traffic, backlinks, geo-specific traffic and average sales generated due to local search queries. Use Google analytics to check and customize performance tracking.

Let the Customer’s Speak

Encourage your customers to write a review of your business. Google and Yahoo consider online reviews as a positive aspect to your online ranking. If reviews related to your business and products are positive, more and more people will be interested in doing business with you. This is user-generated content and you don’t have to make much effort either.

Once these elements are implemented into your search engine marketing strategy, you’ll get an edge over your competition for local search queries. Better SEM strategies result in improved sales.

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Posted in e-commerce, internet marketing, search engine marketing | No Comments »

Google and the Sitelinks Saga?

Monday, July 26th, 2010

If sitelinks are displayed below your website by Google, it’s highly likely that more clicks and visitors will be attracted by your website. Most of the visitors are known to click the first 3 results. This is the very reason why you should get more links included in your top 3 results. This boosts the amount of clicks on your website and, subsequently, your profits. Unfortunately, Sitelinks displayed by Google are not always correct. So, let’s discuss how to optimize your website so that Google displays the correct Sitelinks on your site.

Check your Current Sitelinks Displayed by Google

Google tends to display a certain Sitelink only after determining that the searcher/visitor really is seeking a specific website. To check your website’s Sitelinks, you need to perform a search on Google regarding your exact domain name sans the .com. Also, do not include any other keyword that you use to optimize your website.

For example, search for “dictionarytips” if your website is named dictionary.com. This will enlighten you about the number of sitelinks your site fetches.

The Type of Sitelinks

When you search as mentioned above, you’ll get the following results:

  • At most, eight text links will be displayed by Google. These will be identical to the navigation links of your website. If this happens, Google parses your website’s navigation and divides it further into different categories. It is a positive development.
  • Sitelinks directed towards your website’s random pages: In this case, Google is unable to parse your website’s navigation. Google gives priority to the pages having the most backlinks and chooses them to display sitelinks. This isn’t a desirable situation.
  • No sitelinks are displayed by Google: This means that your website and its pages are not SEO friendly and Google cannot parse your website’s navigation.

The Way towards Better Sitelinks

Sitelinks are generated by Google keeping in mind the links of your website and its navigation. Here are some tips to help you:

  • You need to work on improving your website’s linking and navigation.
  • Don’t go in for fancy Flash navigation and JavaScript. Instead, stick to conventional <a href> links.
  • In case your website uses images , ensure that alternative texts are embedded in them so that Google can easily categorize your links.

Having a clear navigation will ensure that Google is able to easily parse it for better sitelinks. Avoid selecting a complex navigational pattern as it reduces the credibility of your website in front of search engines. Sitelinks can increase the appeal of your website in front of search engines. So, follow these tips and boost your profits.

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Posted in Online Marketing, google adsense, internet marketing, search engine marketing | 4 Comments »

Official Google Tips: The Best SEO Path to Tread

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

SEO is an ever changing game. As such, there is no safe path except the official Google tips. These come right from the company and are sure to make a difference. So cutting the chat, let me discuss some official tips from Google to boost SEO rankings.

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Tip #1

“Ensure the presence of indexable text-based content on your SEO optimized website or page which Google search bot can easily see.”

Most SEO guys make this mistake. Remember the basics of SEO, and ensuring whether your text is indexed or not is one such basic. Your text shold be well indexed with relative content. One of the best way to index your text is through a text browser. The most popular choice here is Lynx, which can also help you diagnose crawling-related problems.

Tip#2

“Add substantial text to your content. For websites in which it seems difficult to add text to your content, implement ‘user reviews and comments’ to add more text to your site. Make sure your website has enabled the ability to add user comments. ”

This is a vital on-site SEO method recommended by Google. In layman terms, it means lacking website content. There should be considerable text accompanying your content. This can be problem if you have a low-text website such as a website consisting of flash videos, images and MP3 streamers, etc. In such cases, webmasters can use reviews or comments to increase text on the pages.

You can increase comments on your content by increasing traffic to your website. To boost traffic, you can tap into sources like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, article marketing etc.

Tip #3

“Keyword Research – Think about what users will type when searching for your services and make sure that your content contains those keywords.”

Webmasters tend to research keywords only from SEO point of view. Avoid this and think like you are actually a client searching for your industry’s products. These are the words and phrases people actually type in search engines and conduct searches. While researching keywords, think like a client not a webmaster.

Tip#4

“The prime aim is not to achieve the number one ranking relative to a particular hard phrase and take advantage of only the user’s search volume. Find traffic from other great sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Google map listings, etc.”

Nowadays, there are many traffic sources besides Google. The social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, Google Map listings etc are fast catching up. They can also act as a source of traffic. Attracting traffic from these sources is much more fun and easier to do. Also, you save a lot of resources which aould otherwise be spent on getting difficult keywords.

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Posted in Online Marketing, internet marketing, search engine marketing | 1 Comment »

Commerce Search 2.0 Launched by Google

Friday, June 18th, 2010

The summer is here and most people are busy shopping for summer apparels. Realizing the retail opportunity, Google has launched Commerce Search to 2.0. Initially offered to UK and U.S. retailers, the upgraded version aims to provide a superior online shopping experience while at the same time offering improved ROI and greater control to online retailers.

Six months ago, the enterprise search team launched the custom search 1.0 with one aim in mind – to simplify online shopping experience. However, the initial version served a beta purpose and the developer team soon realized the popular changes. Reviews of version 1.0 demanded greater security and better ROI features. As such, the new and improved version addresses both these concerns besides offering much advanced features.

On its official blog, Google described Commerce Search 2.0 in the following words:

  • More Merchant Customization: Today we’re introducing a full merchandising dashboard, which gives merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering. Marketers and product merchandisers can now do all of this themselves—no custom code necessary. New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, navigation bar with filters, and simple product ranking rules mean seasonal optimizations can be done on the fly.
  • Better Shopper Experience: With query auto-completion, retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding. GCS is also faster and more relevant than before thanks to search quality improvements. Because it’s hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. We’ve also added spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonym options to make shopping on a retail site as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com.
  • Improved Browsing and Navigation: Many shoppers depend on the search bar on retail sites when they’re looking to make a purchase, but some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products. Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around your site as well as searching directly for products.

commerce search 2.0

In a recently concluded research, Digital marketing firm OneUpWeb found that ‘Task-Failure rate’ in case of e-commerce websites is as high as 45%. As such, Google wants to enter this degraded niche and offer improved usability to consumers.

Just like any other high quality professional service, Google’s Commerce Search 2.0 is also a paid service. An online retailer has to shell out $25,000 per year to implement this service on his website. Though, this is significantly less from the previous $50,000 per year figure. The service will likely witness more adoption due to the improved features and reduced costs.

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Posted in Online Marketing, internet marketing | 3 Comments »

The Best Internet Marketing

Friday, January 29th, 2010

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No matter what kind of business you have or manage you really have the depth need to connect with marketing strategies in order for your services or product s to be attracted by clients and customers. As the world continues to modernize, the changes with marketing strategies also never stops especially when your business is online. Some strategies work and some don’t. However as business personnel you really have to give your best in order for your business to be on top; you really have to work hard, spend time, money and effort in order to compete with thousands of other online companies. Yes competition is really tight these days and if you’re marketing strategy is not working, you will have to try another one till you achieve your goals for the business you run.

What is Internet Marketing? internet_marketing

The marketing of products and services with the utilization of the internet as a medium is what we call Internet Marketing. The major benefits of internet marketing are lower cost of dissemination of information about the products and services and gathering audiences globally.

Internet Marketing also includes digital customer data management as well as electronic customer relationship management (ECRM). The two of these are extensively utilized in almost any types of business these days.

The success of your online business depends with the kind of internet marketing strategies you choose to apply.  As a website owner you have to be very careful in choosing the marketing strategy to be making use of in promoting your business. Nowadays, achieving success in your business is not that easy as thousand of competitors worldwide are also keeping an eye to what you want to achieve. You are reaching for the same star and it’s no joke at all.

Now if you really want to achieve victory with your business without having to worry what strategies to follow, it would be a best choice to select an internet marketer who already made in a mark in the world internet marketing. It could be someone who worked for successful companies or a group of individuals with complete team members who can do the entire marketing strategies you want.

Some of the most effective Internet Marketing Strategies are:

  • Article Submission
  • Directory Submission
  • Bookmarking Submission
  • Blog Submission
  • Social Networking Submission
  • Blog Comments
  • Press Release
  • Forum Posting

To find out more about Internet Marketing please visit this site.

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Posted in internet marketing | 6 Comments »