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!

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.

For those of you out there that like to stay up-to-date on current SEO practices, I know of a few websites you might be interested in.  There are literally thousands of websites out there that claim authority on the subject, but I’ve found that most of them just repeat what they’ve heard, regardless if whether they know their advice to be true.  That being the case, I’ve narrowed my selection down to a few good sites that I recommend everyone in the SEO community read for reliable, up-to-date information on the latest and greatest in the wide world of Search Engine Optimization.  They include:

1. SEOBook Blog
2. SEOmoz Blog
3. Bluce Clay Blog
4. Search Engine Journal
5. Search Engine Watch
6. Search Engine Land
7. Matt Cutt’s Blog
8. Netmark Essentials’ Blog

We don’t use gimmicks or unscrupulous search engine spam techniques that could get your site removed and “blacklisted” from search engines. Instead we perform legitimate optimized writing and programming that meets search engine rules and makes for top search engine positioning that lasts and continues to perform well for months and, in many cases, years.
Here are some of the questions we believe you need to ask before hiring a SEO company:
•    Find out how long the SEO company has been in business (in the SEO world 3-4 years old is very old)
•    Does the SEO firm or its principals have marketing experience background?
•    Will they perform an analysis of your competition’s websites to understand why the other sites rank highly?
•    What will the SEO company base their keyword recommendations on? Keyword research is a necessity to determine relevant, targeted keywords in order for a SEO campaign to succeed.
•    What are realistic traffic expectations for your site? Obscure keyword phrases may bring top ten or #1 ranking positions but if only a trickle of people search for the term each month, it likely won’t result in increased sales.
•    Does the SEO company differentiate between “traffic” and “qualified traffic”? Bulk unqualified traffic arriving at your site for irrelevant keywords is unlikely to convert to a sale or new customer. Does the SEO firm understand what it takes to create a sales conversion? More than likely, you as a business owner knows!
•    Does the SEO company fully comply to search engine’s posted best practices and a strict no-spam policy to avoid your website being penalized, possibly indefinitely, by search engines?
•    What methods will the SEO company use to increase traffic? Will they make changes to your existing web page coding or will they just be adding or revising meta tags? Will they be performing search engine optimization copywriting and editing to add relevant keywords to your visible page text? Will they be adding new pages, or possibly redesigning your navigation to make it more search engine friendly?  Do they recommend an entire redesign when it is not necessary?
•    Does the SEO company use Latent Semantic Analysis for proper keyword placement?  Do they know the proper keyword density needed?
•    Is what the company does standard for everyone, or are certain techniques used for your specific needs? (Keep in mind that the same shoe does not fit all companies feet, so to speak)
•    How many pages will they be optimizing in your website?
•    How many people actually work at the firm? 90% of SEO firms have 4 people or under.  Are they going to have the resources, time, and man power for your campaign?
•    How much, if any, of their strategy relies on pay-per-click advertising and how much will that cost? Remember, pay-per-click is like leasing vs. buying a car. When you stop paying, the traffic stops. We sometimes recommend pay-per-click advertising for specific marketing strategies, but not for ongoing search engine visibility. Pay-per-click is not a long-term solution unless you have deep pockets. Obtaining “free” search engine positions in natural search engines, such as Google, is the preferred - and longer-term - route to more qualified traffic.
•    If the SEO company is offering high ranking guarantees - how is that possible when no-one can control or influence the search sites? Even Google’s own published guidelines states: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEO’s that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a “special relationship” with Google, or that claim to have a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.”
•    How will your website traffic be monitored and measured? What type of reports will you get and how often will you receive them?
If you can feel good about all of the answers to these questions about your SEO firm, you have probably made a good decision.  Why wouldn’t you hire an SEO firm that is willing to go the extra mile to follow strict standards to make sure you see success?

A 301 canonical redirect is a way to get all of the web pages on a site to point to a certain address. For instance, if you wanted all of your non www-prefix pages going to pages with a www prefix, you would use a 301 canonical redirect.  A more concrete example would be taking the page http://something.com and redirecting it to http://www.something.com. This is the 301 redirect part. Canonicalization allows all pages to point to other sites. For instance, a 301 canonical redirect could point all pages with the format http://something.com/morestuff to http://www.something.com/morestuff.

So why would anyone want to do this? From an SEO perspective, this is a very important optimization technique. Search engines don’t look at non-www prefix websites and their corresponding www-prefix sites as the same. If people place links to each of these URLs then you are in essence building a link campaign for different URLs. 301 redirects centralize these pages and allow all link juice to go to a central page.

There are various techniques to achieving a 301 redirect depending on the type of website or the server the website is on. If the website is hosted on an Apache server, one needs to access a file called .htaccess and modify with the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In most cases this will work. It will not work on a website hosted on an IIS (Microsoft) server, however. If this is the case, one can add the following javascript code to the global header or footer to achieve the same effect:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pathd=”http://www.moorenonprofitlaw.org”+location.pathname+location.search;
if (location.hostname.substring(0,3) != ‘www’)
window.location.href=pathd;

But be forewarned. Some search engines such as Google do not understand Javascript and will therefore  not help you with you SEO efforts. According to Google Webmaster Help:

“When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot…”

If you page is an ASP page, you can use the following redirect code:
<%
If InStr(Request.ServerVariables(”SERVER_NAME”),”www”) = 0 Then
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.”& Request.ServerVariables(”HTTP_HOST”) & Request.ServerVariables(”REQUEST_URI”)
Response.End
End if
%>

Or the following if it is an ASP.NET page (I’ve found that the redirect only works if interested right after an <html> tag):

<script runat=”server”>
protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpApplication app = sender as HttpApplication;
string domainName = “example.com”;

if (app != null)
{
string host = app.Request.Url.Host.ToLower();
string requestUrl = app.Request.Url.PathAndQuery;

if (String.Equals(host, domainName))
{
Uri newURL = new Uri(app.Request.Url.Scheme +
“://www.” +
domainName +
requestUrl);

app.Context.Response.RedirectLocation = newURL.ToString();
app.Context.Response.StatusCode = 301;
app.Context.Response.End();
}
}
}
</script>

If you want to add code to a .php file, the following should work:
<?php

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != ‘www’) {
header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header(’Location: http://www.’.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}
?>

There are several different ways to achieve the 301 canonical redirect and sometimes it takes some code tweaking to get it to work properly, but this is a start.