Alaska’s Best SEO

Pay-per-Click (PPC) are the fee based ads you see at the top and sides of the major search engines. There are two kinds of links in search engines. Links are either unpaid (the organic ones on the left side that the engine index and rank) and the paid links on the top and right side. There are several major PPC services: Google AdWords, MSN adCenter, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), Ask.com, and dozens or smaller PPC services.

Using you PPC account you write small (typically two line) text ads. Then, using a list of keywords you choose (most services have tools to help you select keywords if you have not done so beforehand) you set “bids” - the amount you’re willing to pay - for your selected keywords. The better you bid, the higher your ad will appear in the search engines. However, only when someone clicks on the ad, do you pay the bid price - thus the term “pay per click.”

By definition the nature of PPC is a competitive one making it complex. In a bidding environment, the highest bidder usually wins. However you must be cognizant that keyword values are always changing, as new advertisers enter the marketplace. A PPC campaign must be monitored and updated (on an hourly, daily basis, and at minimum weekly basis) unlike organic SEO methods.

OK…Is this something I need to do?

The truthful answer is…it depends…but we say YES! There are lots of reasons to here are a few quick ones:

• If your site is fresh out of the starting gate, PPC is a great way to get it on the radar quickly (manual submissions are taking upwards to six months as of this writing) with search engines.
• If you are in a highly competitive market (i.e. Used Auto Sales near a military base), it’s a great way to get a leg up on the competition.
• You want to steer visitors to a specific place on your website (that new product/service/promotion or just a landing page).
• You want to have more conversions (that’s visits to sales/sales calls or whatever your site is designed to do for you/your business).
• You only pay for the click through.

That last item is a really good point to stress. How much do you pay for your phone listing or yellow page ad? Imagine that the phone company provided you real time reports on 1) who is reading your ad, 2) who is calling from the regular listing vs. the yellow page ad, and lastly 3) you only pay the phone company ONLY WHEN a potential customer used the yellow pages to call you)! With a PPC campaign you can budget by bid/time so you can stretch the money for the web campaign. You can also increase or DECREASE your budget amount (so a ski resort can up the ads when the snow flies and then lower them during the summer) with a few clicks. The yellow page people can only give generalizations and averages…and just try to change your yellow page subscription rate or ad on the fly! A PPC campaign provides REAL value to your marketing dollar.

Also w/PPC you become a “customer” of the search engine…so they provide tons of useful information to help you get the best performance out of your ad. After all…it’s in their best interest to help you get lots of people clicking your ad!

So is PPC really right for you? Our rule of thumb is - if you are a non niche business (and who isn’t thanks to the internet) and would like to get more visits to you site, then yes.

Here is a simple SEO Checklist you can use to get started in enhancing your site’s visibility.

Basic SEO Checklist:

• Determine what specific key words you want to target with search engines. You can use a tool such as Wordtracker to see what search words are popular, and optimize your site for them. Make sure the key words you choose are relevant.
• Clean up your URLs. Don’t use capital letters, spaces, or special characters. Separate each word with a “-” dash.
• Redirect the non-www version of your site (many hosts allow for you to browse to http:// and http://www). When you enter mygreatdomain.com into the browser, it should redirect you to www.mygreatdomain.com using a SEO friendly 301 redirection.
• Make sure you don’t link to “index.htm” or “index.php”. Instead, link to “/”. If you know of or find specific links from other sites, ask them to do the same.
• Good relevant content. SEO will be much harder if you don’t have plenty of content, so spend more time writing!
• Add both an HTML sitemap (containing a link to every page on your site) as well as an XML sitemap. Use this tool for your site (free if your site is less than 500 pages).
• Remove frames from your site.
• Ensure the title and meta (description and keywords) are different on every page of the site.
• Remove any flash or image based navigation. If using CSS styled text for navigation is not possible, then add a text based footer navigation on every page.
• Optimize your images. Ensure all have alt tags and are placed near text that is relevant to the image.

There are lots more things one can do beyond the basics, but with these simple items…you’ll be headed in teh right direction.

Google has once again stepped up to the plate with another utility well worth using….Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics you ask?

It is Google’s very own visitor tracking utility. Using the Urchin 5 engine, this free service provides information ranging from simple traffic measurement through to sophisticated predefined sales goal assessment (or conversions). Google Analytics allows you to keep tabs on site traffic, visitor numbers, traffic sources, behavior & trends, how long visitors spent on the site and a host of other information.

However, unlike Google’s other free tools, Google Analytics is unobtrusive (as in it does not have any special banners or visible components), which when you consider it’s price - free - is a great analysis tool to monitor and improve the performance of your website. (more…)