Netmark's Search Engine Marketing Blog

Third Level Push

Websites are typically made up of levels or tiers. The first level is the home page itself. The second level includes your main categories. The third level opens those categories into products, information, etc, and so on. Because second tier pages end up on global navigation bars, this causes those pages to gain a lot of page rank at the expense of 3^rd level pages. The third level push essentially takes some of that 2^nd tier page rank and pushes it down to 3^rd tier pages. To accomplish this task you simply just need to add a “nofollow” attribute to all links on the 2nd tier that point to other 2^nd tier pages. Not too difficult really.

From a spider’s perspective your global navigation is different on the 2^nd tier. The result of all of this is that you get more traffic on your 3^rd tier pages, which are typically your product pages and that means more sales! This technique can get more complicated though. You can get even more ambitious and do the same for your 3^rd tier links but link back to the home page, not the 2^nd tier pages. You can be even more aggressive by nofollow-ing links back to the home page on the 2^nd and 3^rd tier.

Getting into the more advanced side of this technique can be risky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Try it at your own risk and only if it makes sense.

I got a call this morning from a client that had been extremely distraught last week about a negative review posted on PissedConsumer.com, saying that as of this morning the review is nowhere to be found in Google.  When he called us about the review last week, it was in position #3.

We checked it out, and not only is that negative review gone, but PissedConsumer.com has been dropped out of the index completely, along with nearly 200 other domains that were part of a link network that YOUmozzer “Chris1″ exposed on the 22nd.

Chris1, an SEOmoz blogger, did some great research and quickly got the attention of Google, getting this site, and the others removed from the Google index completely. Hopefully Yahoo will follow suit quickly.

7. Specific Targeted Keywords. There is nothing more important than this! If you don’t have the right key words, you’ll waste your money. You’ll want every person who clicks on your ad to do something when they get to your website, right? Whether it is to:
- Subscribe to your newsletter
- Buy your product
- Fill out a lead form
-Send an email wanting to know more, etc…

Remember who your audience is and what you want from them. Make it as easy as possible to get one of the ^ (above) from them. Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher.
8. Use the keyword research tools provided. Most pay-per-clicks will show you synonyms for phrases that are searched relating to your key word ideas. The following links are just a couple of many tools you can use to help you research your “best” keywords:
Google Keyword Tool
Wordtracker
Keycompete

9. Use negative keywords where possible. Google AdWords allows you to specify which word you don’t want to have included in your campaign. For example, if you are bidding on the terms:
- ISO 9000 Training
- ISO 9001 Implementation
- ISO 14001 Certification
And you offer these paid services. You may want to use the negative keywords of “free” and “wholesale” and “cheap” for example. That way, your ad won’t show up when people are looking for “cheap ISO 9000 Training” or “Free ISO 9001 Implementation”. Especially if that is not what you would like to be found under or known for. This helps in properly targeting your traffic.

10. Use phrase match and exact match, where possible. There are a few options you have when creating your Google AdWords account. Exact, Phrase, and Broad matches. Google allows you to ensure that your ads appear only when you want them to, and as often as you’d like them to. You can specify if you only want your ad to appear when the “exact” phrase is entered without any extra words (exact match), the exact phrase with extra words allowed (phrase match), and when a general term that is a synonym to your keyword is typed in (broad match)
Put quotation marks: ” ” around the phrases you want phrase match for.
Put brackets: [ ] around the phrase you want exact phrase match for, and last of all – the broad match is the default setting. So there is nothing special that you need to type in for that setting.

11. Some times you can take advantage of common misspelling errors. Find common misspellings for words. You’ll find those have lower bids and may be entered frequently.
Google Keyword Sandbox and Wordtracker allow you to find some of the common misspellings.
Some of the great examples of this would be to add both terms of “Mortgage” and “Mortage”. The second version is misspelled, but searched for VERY OFTEN. It is a common mistake that you can capitalize on.

12. Be patient “youn’ grass-hoppa”. Remember that no one is an expert on running a PPC campaign right away. It may take you a month or four months to hone in on your bidding and ad optimization skills. Every market is different. Very rarely will you make a PPC ad and have it work as well or better than expected right away. The best learning lesson that can be taught is to be patient, and watch. Some times that can be tough, but a change to your PPC account does not need to happen every hour or even every day. Make small changes at a time, sit back, watch, and see what happens. You will not learn all you need to in a week. Like I said earlier, it may take you a month or two to see some of your markets trends.

There are many more tips that are out there. This is just a small, simple, and complied list of easy and big points to pay attention to. These tips are merely for your own help in starting up, and becoming aware of what is needed to run a successful pay-per-click campaign. Managing it yourself can become very tough and time consuming. If you ever feel like you need some help, Netmark Essentials is always up to taking on the task. There is nothing to big or small that we can’t help with. For more information, please see our PPC Management page. Good Luck!

If you are looking to start and run your own PPC campaign there are a few things that you need to consider. Below is a brief list that our company has learned about the basics of managing your own pay-per-click. Instead of jumping into a pay-per-click campaign and immediately blowing a ton of cash, keep these simple pay per click tips on hand:
1. Leave your Bold Attitude and Pride behind. It is very tempting to get into a bidding war with others, just for the competition…(guys you know what I’m talking about) don’t do it! It’s not worth it.
2. Calculate your profit on the items you are advertising. How much are you actually benefitting from having this PPC campaign? If you only making a couple of bucks per sale, it may or may not be worth having a pay-per-click campaign. However, what are your biggest motives for getting this going? Once you decide that, don’t forget it.
3. A Simple Calculation for your conversion rate. Check your websites’ analytic statistics and find out how many clicks it takes to make a sale on average. This is a helping factor to determine how much you can afford to pay per click, or what your budget should be [daily/monthly].
Let’s say you have an item that gives you a $30 profit margin, and it takes you 100 clicks to get a sale. This means you could bid 30 cents per click (…again average) to break even. However making sure you target your pay-per-click campaign for the right keywords will likely give you a better conversion rate.
4. Make an aggressive budget and stick with it. If you can’t afford more than 55 cents per click, don’t continue to bid higher. There are always other ways, or more targeted keywords to be found. Remember that your ad is not solely positioned based upon price, there is a quality score accessed to it based upon a combination of price and how well the ad performs. Even if you aren’t on the first page, you will still get clicks. Maybe, not as often…but you will still get clicks even if you are 3 pages in, especially on frequently and popular searched key terms.
5. Give your campaign an efficiency boost with optimized landing pages. If you have an online store with a variety of polishing or car care items and you are bidding on “metal polish”, don’t send them to your home page. They may not be able to find the exact metal polish, or your closest polishing product, and that’s what they are looking for.
Remember that people are searching certain key terms looking for something specific. The faster you can put the information or product in front of their face, the better chance you have to make a sale or conversion.
Landing pages are also great to figure out the “true” conversion rate. You can place analytics on this page to find out how many people are buying. You can add a “thank you” page that the customer is directed to after they make a purchase.
6. Try different ad variations for different products. If you are bidding on the terms “Mens Running Shoes” and “Nike Running Shoes”, write separate ads that will capture the attention of the searcher.
Take a second to imagine with me - if you were searching for “Nike Running Shoes” yourself and you saw an ad that said:
“Discount Shoes”
Then you saw an ad that said:
“Nike Running Shoes Sale”
Would you more likely click on the Nike ad? Probably. That is the whole idea.

Google, Yahoo, & MSN recently mentioned something very interesting that caught my attention. Around 70% of the pay-per-click ads that are currently being used are written by people who are new to PPC. That means that around 70% of the ads are written by mostly inexperienced people. Whether that’s actually true or not, we know a fair amount of people don’t know much about pay-per-click ads. That being said, how much do you know about PPC? How much experience do you have with optimizing your ads so that you can keep your cost per click, AND cost per conversions at the most efficient rate? When any company makes a claim to be able to help you with your Pay-Per-Click Management, what do they really do?

• Do they just help you with your bidding?
• Do they write the ads and make the necessary changes to keep them from a downward slope of traffic trends?
• Do they actually spend the time doing the keyword research so that you are not wasting your money on ads that won’t get targeted traffic?
• Are they manually making the changes (like they should be doing), or just using a quick click-of-a-button software to make all the management calls and changes?
• How much time are they spending, and how often are they actually managing your specific account?
• Do they create a whole new campaign or do they just take over the one you may currently have?
• If you cancel the Pay-Per-Click service with them, does the account go with you, or do lose ownership and they retain ownership of the account?
• Is the company tracking the success of the ads with analytics on your website so that you know the “real” conversion rate from PPC?
• Does the company build and optimize landing pages to help the traffic convert more often?
• Does the PPC firm offer any options? What else do they provide for PPC?
• What are the actual costs involved with hiring a Pay-Per-Click Manager?
• Does the PPC firm have any results from past clients that they can share?
• What is the baseline strategy for using your PPC? Is it in conjunction with any other marketing methods (for example: Search Engine Optimization, radio ads, phone book ads, billboard ads, etc…)? How long is the plan it run your campaign? How much should you expect to spend to give PPC a good run and see some results with in your market?

All of the above questions are very important to understand when you hire or look at your current PPC Management firm.

I would love to tell you that Netmark Essentials is the one and only true Pay-Per-Click Service you should use, but the truth is that there are probably a few other companies who actually do PPC the right way as well. Be very cautious of those companies who make big promises. The big advantage to having a firm like Netmark Essentials run your PPC Campaign is that we DO have the needed experience, AND most importantly we don’t cost an arm and a leg to use. There are no minimums to your ad spend, and we can help everyone. We are not the joe-schmoe, run of the mill PPC service provider. Our goal (yes going back to the basics again) is to make sure that you can justify using a service like ours to maximize your ROI. Remember that “Our Business Is Your Business”. Check out a little more about us and our Pay-Per-Click program. Netmark PPC Management Then you can make the call on where you would feel most comfortable spending your money. Either take the time to tackle and manage it yourself, or let the professionals handle it.