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.

It seems that every other web site we visit has some sort of hit counter on the main page, supposedly telling us how many people have been there before us.

So we’re going to explain why you don’t need one, and what you should be doing instead for SEO.

Most web sites will normally implement a hit counter on their site for one or both of two reasons — to give them a rough estimate of the number of visitors, and/or to give visitors the impression that their site is popular and thus worthy of a good look.

Let’s consider the first reason. There is nothing wrong with wanting to know how many people have visited your web site, in fact it’s something that you really do need to know for SEO. However…putting a visible hit counter on your home page is not the answer, especially not one of those free services.

For one thing, the free services require you to promote their site as part of their free service. For another, they are normally slow and increase the time it takes for your pages to load.

Most importantly, a hit counter doesn’t provide you with all of the information you need for true SEO.

Just look at any of the top web sites out there and we promise that you will not find a visible hit counter on any of them!

That alone should tell you that the common hit counter is worthless. If a visible counter was worthwhile, don’t you think CNN or Yahoo would have one?

You just can’t win with a visible hit counter. If your site does not get many visitors, all it’s going to do is make sure that the visitors you do get know that they are not visiting a popular site. If anything, this will most likely discourage visitors from exploring your web site in detail. (more…)