It’s New to You Series: Setting up PPC Campaigns

Best Practice Tips for Newbies

Whether you run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google only or across the three major U.S. search engines (including Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Bing until the two merge their platforms), setting up a pay-per-click campaign is fairly straight-forward. That is, until you have the campaign up and running and realize you’re shelling out a ton of money for little or no return.

Because we work so often with small and mid-sized businesses just beginning to dip their toes into the PPC waters, we’re introducing a new series — the “It’s New to You” Series — and we’ll be covering how to set up a campaign for the first time, including methods for getting started, making keyword lists, developing your first ads, setting up groups, and how to focus on keywords in each group.

There are a number…

How Safe are Your PPC Links?

Anti-Spyware & Anti-Virus Programs “Rate” Your Links

More and more people are using a couple of anti-spyware / anti-virus programs that alert Web searchers whenever a search result link is considered “unsafe.”

By “unsafe” I mean that the link goes to a landing page or website where nefarious activities take place: the searcher’s machine is infected with a virus, Trojan, worm, malware, etc. These programs also alert searchers whenever a website is invading their privacy, the site’s shopping cart is “unreliable” or the company inundates them with spam.

One such program is AVG, the free anti-virus, anti-spyware program. It places a little red, yellow, or green icon next to each search result in order to alert the searcher if it’s safe to click on the link. And, users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser can also add a plug-in called…

SEO Strategies Series: Developing Powerful Title Tags that Convert

Eight Dos and Don’ts for Driving Clicks and Traffic

In my last blog post, I discussed how to develop the right list of keywords – that is, keywords that people are actually using in their searches. Once you have your keywords in hand, you’re ready to incorporate them into your Title and meta tags. A significant part of your website is each page’s HTML source code, which includes these tags and which give the search engines information about your site.

From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, the Title tag is most critical because it’s where you add your important keywords that describe what your Web page is about. (Some people call this tag the Page Title Tag for this reason.)

You see a Web page’s Title tag every time you open your browser as the Title tag is…

Web Marketing 101 Series: Intro to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Marketing

Pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing is a form of web advertising in which advertisers pay the publisher (the site that displays the ad) when their ad is clicked.

When you view a search result page in Google, Yahoo! Search or Microsoft Live Search, you almost always see two kinds of results: sponsored links and natural search results.  On Google, for instance, sponsored links can be found on the top and right-hand sections of the page, while natural (or organic) search results can be found in the main section of the page.  At the bottom of the page, you’ll typically see that the page is one of many, many pages of results.

Google Search Result Page

Yahoo! Search Result Page

Microsoft Live Search Result Page

The way in which advertisers (you!) get into the sponsored links sections of those pages is through a…

Web Marketing 101 Series: Intro to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which owners of websites make improvements to the content, HTML code and inbound links of their web pages to make it easier for search engines to index them, and to ensure their pages naturally appear in results for relevant searches.

When you view a search engine result page in Google, Yahoo! Search or Microsoft Live Search, you almost always see two kinds of results: Sponsored Links, which advertisers pay to place on the page, and natural search results.  On Google, for instance, sponsored links can be found on the top and right-hand sections of the page, while natural (or organic) search results can be found in the main section of the page.  At the bottom of the page, you’ll typically see that the page is one of many,…