Pay Per Click Adopted by 80 Percent of Advertisers

For the full report go to Center for Media Research but the top line is that pay per click is the fastest growing advertising sector growing 26% in the last year. Print spending grew by 3.3% and TV/Radio 2.4% both losing share. Pay per click is now used by 80% of advertisers, a massive adoption rate not broadly acknowledged. Its expected that this figure will be 90% by 2008. Google is generally though to be more effective than Yahoo! & MSN

Total online marketing spending will grow by 19% in 2006, 8 times TV/Radio and 6 times Print. Blog marketing spending is still small accounting for less than 2% of online budget but is expected to grow 43% next year.

According to Outsells Advertising Tracking database the breakdown in marketing spend in 2005 looked like this: Print Media 29.2%, Events 22.7%, Online 16.2% and TV& Radio 31.9%.

Jim Williams www.ju2.com

Microsoft Rolls Out Revamped Search Engine

E Commerce Times reports on the roll out of Microsoft's new search engine Windows Live Search which marks a shift in Microsoft strategy away from software towards online products.

The key goal with the new search engine will be to give people more control over how they search for information. New features include:

(1) A search slider bar that offers previews of data in various forms, perhaps just the Internet address of a Web site, or a snippet of text. As the slider is adjusted, more or less information appears.
(2) A "smart scroll" function that displays all search results at once rather than on separate pages.
(3) Various ways to view pictures, as small "thumbnail" shots or full-sized images.
(4) An ability for users to save their search parameters as macros that can be run to perform the same search in the future. Microsoft promise that people will be able to publish their search macros so people with similar interests can use them.

All exciting stuff lets see what it looks like. The market will decide!!!

Jim Williams www.ju2.com

How to Design an Adwords Campaign that Works

Setting up an Adwords campaign is easy isn’t it? You bid on your chosen key words and the visitors will come rolling in. Well it’s not quite like that and its all because of the fiendish way Google decides when and at what position to display your ad.

Your ad is ranked on search results and content pages based on various performance factors, including maximum cost-per-click (CPC), clickthrough rate (CTR), and the relevance of your ad text to the keyword you have chosen to sponsor. The name of the game is to write relevant ad text, have a high CPC and a strong CTR.

How do you achieve all this? The answer is structure. The Adwords service has a strict hierarchy. First up you will need to set up an account, each account can be divided into campaigns and each campaign has at least one Ad Group. The Ad Group contains the keywords and is associated with the actual advertising placement.

The maximum CPC is similar to the bid on Overture and it is directly related to your available budget and can be set for individual keywords or automatically budget optimised across a whole campaign.

The CTR of your ads depends entirely on how well you write the ad copy. Using the keyword prominently is a good idea. If you’re looking for “blue widgets” then you’re more likely to click an ad with “blue widgets” in the title and ad copy than one mentioning “red widgets”. Having a strong call to action is also a good idea so go for words like “get”, “buy”, “order” and “purchase”. The third part of the equation is relevancy which means that your copy needs to relevant to the keyword and here’s where the structure comes in.

You need to group your keywords in closely themed ad groups so that you can write relevant text. It would be difficult to write relevant text for blue widgets and red widgets so set up different ad groups one for blue widgets and one for red ones. If you end up with 50 Ad Groups with one or two keywords only don’t worry. This might seem like a lot of work to start with but it will make you life a whole lot easier in the long run because the structure gives you control.

At campaign level you can target Ad Groups to geographical regions so if you’re products are called widgets in the UK and something else in the US. Don’t panic! You can set up a campaign called “Widgets US” and create Ad Groups based around US terminology.

You should also take a look at keyword matching. If you want to advertise on the phrase “French lessons” you probably don’t want to display ads or get click throughs from people looking for “French polishing lessons”. You can handle this by adding negative matching on the word “polishing” so you ad group would contain the keywords “French lessons” and “-polishing”. This action will reduce your ad impressions but increase your CTR and ranking and save you cash. Use the Google Keyword Tool to identify possible negative keywords they’ll always be pretty obvious and sometimes surprising too!

Now with the structure in place you can activate the campaign and see what happens. You’re going to have to manage the campaign quite closely at first but pretty quickly you’ll see which ad groups are performing. When you find an ad group that has low CTR change the text or even better create a new ad group containing the same keywords. Then write some new text taking a look at your competition for tips,. Running two parallel ad groups will allow you to objectively identify the ad placements that work best for your campaign.

If you want more advice on running pay per click advertising campaigns take a look at www.ju2.com

Web Content Mass + Keyword Optimization + Links = SEO

How does web content really affect SEO? It's often said that the answer is simply that content does not affect SEO very much–it's all about more technical issues. Yet a website's content still plays an enormous and fairly direct role in search engine ranking.
Of course, the whole goal of the search engines' ranking schemes is precisely to deliver good, relevant content to users. The mechanism for how search engines select and reward good, relevant content is essentially just a technical issue, though admittedly an extremely important technical issue.

But even in purely technical, mechanistic, terms, web content affects search engine rankings three ways:

1. inbound links 2. website mass 3. keyword optimization

1. Web Content and Inbound Links

Inbound links are the number-one factor in getting search engine rankings. They also yield plenty of traffic on their own. The importance of links is what has led many people to say that content is no longer important. But those people forget that content really does play a big role in getting links in the first place:

At the very least, good content will make potential link partners more comfortable with linking to your site. No one wants to link to a link farm, splog, junk site, or even just an unprofessional-looking site. Lots of good content gives other webmasters (and particularly bloggers) a reason to link to your site spontaneously without being asked. You can allow other websites to post your content in exchange for a link back to your site.

2. Web Content Mass

More web pages of content = more search engine traffic

Here’s why:

Adding pages to your site is like putting out extra nets to catch surfers. Search engines see bigger websites as more prestigious and reliable. The more content you have, the more reasons you give other webmasters, particularly bloggers, to link to your site spontaneously, without being asked.

3. Web Content Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization used to be the most important step in SEO. Now it matters little in ranking for highly competitive keywords.

Still, keyword optimization can really help you get traffic from searches not on competitive keywords. While you may never rank number 1 for "finance," you may still show up tops for a search on "household finance rent federal tax deductions" if you have that phrase somewhere in your content. Such non-competitive searches make up a very large proportion of total web searches.

Web Content Keyword Optimization Checklist:

There are four legs to keyword optimization:

* Research/selection * Density * Prominence * Stemming/Variation

Keyword Research and Selection

You need to identify keywords searched on by your target audience. Use tools such as those offered by WordTracker and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

There are two big pitfalls to avoid:

* "Negative keywords" that look relevant but are not really searched on by your target market. For instance, "website copy" is a synonym for "website content," but most people searching on "website copy" are looking for software that copies an entire website to the hard drive for offline browsing.

* Impossibly competitive keywords that you have no realistic chance of ranking high for them. How do you know if a keyword is impossibly competitive? One rough measure is to look at the PageRank of the webpages currently ranking in the top three for that keyword. If the PageRank of those pages is much higher than the PageRank your site will likely have in the future, you will probably never outrank those pages.

A pay-per-click campaign with Google Adwords of Yahoo! Search Marketing will help you to find which keywords really are searched on by your target audience.

Keyword Density

Keywords appear in the content the right number of times for search engines to recognize the page as relevant, but not so often that it looks like keyword stuffing. The longer the content, the more times the keyword should appear.

Keyword Prominence

Keywords appear in just the right positions within your web pages for search engines to recognize them as relevant. The page title, headings, and first lines of the page are often considered the most prominent positions.

Keyword Stemming/Keyword Variation

* Using variations of the keyword will help ensure web pages appear relevant to the next generation of more sophisticated search engine algorithms.

* In the meantime, variations of popular keywords helps your site appear for the "non-standard" searches on variations of the keyword.

There are three main types of keyword variations:

* Word-stem variations. A stem of a word is its base. For instance, "optimize" is the stem of "optimized." Other stem variations of "optimize" include "optimizing," "optimizer," and "optimization." You can also shuffle the component words of multiple-word keywords. Variations of “website content” would be “web site content,” “web content,” “content for websites,” and “site content”).

* Synonyms (such as “web page content,” “internet content,” or “writing for the web” for “website content”).

* Related terms (such as “internet,” “SEO” or “web page”).

For many people, the SEO side of content feels like a moot point. You need to create content for your visitors even if no search engine spider ever notices. But there is a case to be made that an extra page of content is good not just for visitors but search engine spiders, too. Every website budget, both of money and time, is finite. If you're ever choosing whether to invest in another link to please search engines or another page of content to please your visitors, don't forget: search engines still like content, too.

About the author: Joel Walsh is a writer and owner of UpMarket Content, a website content provider. Request a no-cost, no-obligation proposal for your website content www.UpMarketContent.com


Want to know more about SEO for your site speak to us at JU2 or take a look at www.ju2.com