Most marketers want to get the most out of both organic and paid search. Existing sites are getting more attention as marketers make sites search-engine-friendly (or even search-engine-maximized) as well as user-friendly. Any search engine marketer can tell you SEO (define) requires compromise in areas such as layout and copy length, style, and flow.
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Yet, marketers recognize such a compromise can result in a great experience for spiders and users alike. After taking into account a site’s search-engine-friendliness and adapting copy and design, you may have made compromises in user-friendliness and conversion. These compromises may yield thousands of new, targeted visitors to your site. The navigational structure helps both search engine spiders and human visitors understand the breadth of your site’s offerings. A bit of conversion loss as part of SEO efforts is generally OK.
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Paid search marketing campaigns provide something SEO doesn’t: complete user experience control. When you pay for clicks, your ability to afford high positions is directly related to your ability to meet marketing objectives with each and every inbound click stream. Those objectives usually include a basket of conversion behaviours, including lead generation, purchase, and site immersion (to indicate early-stage, research-related buying behaviour). The least desirable behaviour is clicking the back button.
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Pay-per-click (PPC) search’s control is a gift. By not exercising that control, you hand it to your competition. Below, 10 reasons your existing Web site may be completely wrong for your PPC search landing pages:
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• Call to action. Landing pages for visitors with specific needs (as articulated by their search queries) require specific calls to action. Regular site pages don’t carry strong call-to-action messages because they aren’t appropriate for general visitors.
• Copy. Regular site pages have more copy than you want to show paid search visitors. You need a tight correlation between the specific search and the landing page copy to engage potential customer.
• Navigation. Regular site pages generally have full-site navigation, which can distract paid search visitors. Less is often more when it comes to navigational clutter. You already know exactly what every paid search visitor seeks; additional navigation can distract the visitor from your message and her mission.
• Animation. Flash, illustrations, and other animation are a significant part of the user experience for paid search visitors. These elements aren’t present on your general site.
• Personalization. You know more about paid search visitors. Personalize their experience! Many automated personalization engines and methods don’t play well with search engine spiders and may be disabled as part of organic SEO efforts. In paid search, personalization takes on a whole new meaning, including treating returning customers differently from new prospects.
• Merchandising. A retail store is merchandised based on geography, neighbourhood, and season. Route paid search traffic to pages designed to take advantage of different merchandising.
• Offer testing. It’s much easier to test an offer when you know what makes the traffic unique. You need a control to test, and paid search provides it.
• Microsites. Sometimes you need an entirely new look, structure, and flow for paid search visitors. A microsite is your best route.
• Domain name. If you don’t have a branded domain, a new keyword-packed domain coupled with a microsite may provide far better impression-to-click conversion at the ad level. Particularly in Google, this results in a higher AdRank and more efficiency. When you don’t have a brand, a descriptive URL may more readily catch searchers’ attention.
• Ambiguity. Some keywords fit your target market but not your landing pages. A new landing page, separate from your current site, can help test, improve efficiency, and offer new opportunities.

If you didn’t set aside a separate budget or additional internal resources to take your site beyond what’s necessary for organic SEO, look closer and imagine the characteristics of the perfect landing page for each power keyword in your campaign. If those landing pages don’t exist, create them.

By Kevin Lee

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.?

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.?

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.?

The title bar is the coloured bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.?

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.?

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.?

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.?

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic format. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.?

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that Meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.?

To find out if your page is set up with Meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.?

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.?

If you visit Google and type in “link:” (without the quotations) followed by your site address (no space after the colon), you will be shown the sites that are linked to your site as per Google. Example link:www.yoursite.com. Note that searching link:yoursite.com will return different results than searching link:www.yoursite.com . To find your site’s link popularity on other search engines search the phrase “free link popularity check” and try one of the many link popularity tools available on the Web.?

If you find that there aren’t many sites linked to yours, or that the sites that are linked have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.?

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

By Dan Meiyers

Click-Fraud is the greatest threat to the rapid growth of the paid-search marketing sector. Speaking about click-fraud to an investor conference in December, Google CFO George Reyes stated, “I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model.” Accounting for an estimated 5 – 15 percent of all PPC clicks (estimates differ by sector), click-fraud is assumed to cost advertisers tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The problem has become so pervasive the April 7 edition of Wall Street Journal ran a front-page centre column story titled, “In Click-Fraud, Web Outfits Have A Costly Problem”.?

What is click-fraud and what makes it so dangerous to the stability of the major search engines’ business models??

The pay-per-click or PPC business model generates a lot of money for search engines and webmasters who allow paid advertising to be displayed on their sites. A search conducted on Google, Yahoo or MSN will show several advertisements running down the right hand side of the organic search results and sometimes across the top of a search engine results page. Every time a search-user clicks on one of these ads, the advertiser pays the search engine for that click. Advertisers bid for placement under associated keywords and phrases in a virtual auction format. Generally the advertiser with the highest bids, or in Google’s case, the one that generates the most revenues through a combination of high bids and stronger click-through rates, wins the highest placement in the list.?

For over three years paid-search has been the primary revenue generator in the search engine industry. Promising front-page placement and massive contextual distribution across associated network websites, paid-search delivers rapid exposure to an audience that pre-selects itself based on keywords entered in their search query or found on a document. As a means of reaching a market too massive for TV, paid-search and contextual distribution is an obviously winning idea. Unlike organic SEO, paid-search marketers can make guarantees and back them up with quantifiable (and easily understood) data.?

For major search firms such as Google, Yahoo and Ask, paid-search is to one degree or another a fundamental cornerstone of their increasingly bountiful bottom lines. Actually in Google’s case, paid-search represents about 95% of annual revenues. Built on the power of paid search, the major search engines are reporting record revenues quarter after quarter. Paid-search marketing, for the most part, is much easier for an agency or advertiser to facilitate. It is also one of the easiest ways to scam money or damage one’s competitors. In this often-unscrupulous Internet age, there are a lot of very talented people stealing other people’s money in one way or another. The provision of paid-search advertising which experiences double and triple digit growth from quarter to quarter is a tempting place to practice their larcenous skills.?

Savvy webmasters and advertisers, along with a growing number of forensic click-analysts are getting better at detecting simple fraudulent click activity. The growing spectre of click-fraud has given rise to an industry that detects fraud and works to find ways to combat it and help clients seek refunds.?

Jesse Stricchiola, the founder of Alchemist Media, has emerged as one of the leading experts on click-fraud detection among SEM practitioners. She was one of the first SEMs to approach the major search engines with highly detailed forensics and is recognized as a credible advocate for advertisers who feel they have fallen victim to click-fraud. In a presentation at the recent Toronto Search Engine Strategies Conference session “Auditing Paid Listings and click-fraud Issues”, she outlined the two basic forms of click-fraud.?

The first and likely most pervasive is generally known as “competitor clicks”. In this scenario, a business works to drive their competition into financial distress by wasting their paid-advertising budget. Every time an ad is clicked, the cash-register dings at the search firm providing that ad space. While keyword bids might be as low as $.015 per click, they can reach into tens and in some extreme cases hundreds of dollars per click. Through simple and often stupid means or highly elaborate robot driven campaigns, one clicks away on their competitors’ ads. This type of click-fraud is increasingly easy to detect and deal with, however the onus is on the advertiser or their agent to diligently inspect and analyze their web-logs. Jesse noted two case studies in which one business worked to burn the budget of competitors. One case involved having staff members click on paid-ads from their workstations. The other involved the use of a specialized “hitbot” commissioned to spend as much of a particular competitor’s money as possible. After tracking several identifiable signatures such as IP address and repetition, click-times and the succession of clicks on an ad, she was able to help both clients get their money refunded.?

The second basic type of click-fraud is called Affiliate Fraud. Stemming from the vast networks of small affiliate partners who display paid ads generated by the major search engines on their websites, this type of click-fraud is more difficult to detect and manage. When looking at a typical website, users are increasingly noticing paid advertising discretely appearing somewhere on the page. These ads usually relate to the topic of the page and are delivered by the search engines based on keywords found on the page or through a specific choice by the webmaster. Every time one of these ads is clicked, the search engine bills the advertiser and gives 50% to the webmaster of the site the click came from. The dozens of ways to scam this sort of system are obvious and as click-fraud becomes a bigger concern for advertisers and search engines, people with a propensity for illicit gain are jumping on the short-term bandwagon.?

There are a lot of highly talented programmers looking for work around the world. While all of us live in a time of legal transition in relation to cyber-crime, some people live in nations with relatively weak legal systems and abysmal cyber-investigative infrastructures. Faced with huge brains and tiny employment prospects, several turn to cyber-shenanigans for fun and profit. By exploiting fake IP addresses, using clever algorithms to determine click behaviours and finding ways to destroy identifying references, a fraud artist can stretch their gains over several months or even years without getting detected. There have been stories of click-for-pay positions offered to web users in Europe, South East Asia and Oceana in which surfers are paid to click on paid-ads on one of their employer’s thousands of websites. If done properly, it can be next to impossible for the major search engines to keep up.?

Lori Wieman from KeywordMax noted this issue in the same session. KeywordMax provides PPC analytic software for SEMs and advertisers. While the search firms must bear responsibility for dealing with legitimate refund requests and work to limit click-fraud, it is unrealistic to expect them to take a firm stand on the issue. Lori stressed that the onus for detecting click-fraud remains on the advertisers themselves. In her presentation, Lori outlined a number of specific things advertisers should look for in their web-logs and if found, record using a spreadsheet program like Excel which allows easy comparison of several points of data.?

Lori stressed that advertisers (or their agents) should capture IP numbers of those who visit their sites. Every visitor has an IP address and your server will record it. If you record the IP of all visits to your site, you can eventually see how often a specific IP visits the site and how the user got there. If the same IP appears day after day after day (and hour after hour after hour) and it comes from one of your paid ads, you are almost certainly the victim of click-fraud. While recording visitor IP addresses, Lori also recommends tracking competitor IP addresses to see if they show up in your web logs. Every visit from an affiliate partner site generates a unique reference number. Lori suggests recording those numbers whenever possible. Visitors can also be tracked geographically and advertisers are advised to check where visits originate from to see if any odd or unexplainable patterns emerge.?

Ultimately, Lori notes the responsibility for auditing billings and listings falls to the advertiser. The search engines are improving their ability to track fraudulent clicks but the volumes of clicks they work with make specific-campaign analytics a lower priority. The search firms could help advertisers by offering more detailed billing, creating fraud investigation departments and becoming more communicative and responsive to advertisers’ complaints.? At the same time, it is up to the consumer to diligently pursue their complaints. If you think you are a victim of click-fraud, Lori urges you to file a detailed report within 60-days of the fraud and to provide as much documentation as possible.?

Backing Lori’s call for consumer diligence was Danielle Leitch from MoreVisibility, a Florida based SEM. Danielle urged the audience to audit their own server logs as well as use analytic software noting that some things might be missed by software but obvious for human eyes. Danielle also pointed out that if you do receive a refund from one of the search firms due to click-fraud, you need to manually adjust your stats as the report activity generated by the search engines will not be changed. Keeping track of campaign metrics is the key to detecting and dealing with click-fraud.?

Danielle used a number of PowerPoint slides to show a forensic audit she conducted for a client. She found a number of click-fraud signatures including similar IP addresses, tell-tale timing and geographic patterning. By compiling very detailed notes and developing both verbal and written contact with the search engines, Danielle was able to get her case-study client a substantial refund.?

As an issue, click-fraud can be managed and perhaps even eventually tamed but that will require a high degree of cooperation between the search firms that sell the ads and the advertisers or their agents who purchase them. It is in the best interest of the major search firms to work with advertisers and their SEM agents to protect the integrity of the paid-advertising systems. Facing a number of paid-ad focused lawsuits, one of which is threatening to be granted class action status the search engines are being forced to be more open to the concerns of their consumers. With the advent of click forensic analytics and advocacy as a professional segment of the Search Marketing industry, a strong foundation for such cooperation is being built. While click-fraud remains the most frightening issue on the paid-advertising front, increasing sophistication of consumers, advertisers and search media and a willingness to collaborate presents a strong and responsive defence.

By Jim Hedger