Author: April Hall
Internet Copywriter

For internet media planners, much of the difficulty revolves around deciding which sites to target, how to find your ideal audience and reduce the number of missed opportunities. Many media planners eventually decide to reach out to a relatively few number of larger, well-known sites, deciding that it is best to aim for the known rather than to spend countless hours and unnecessary budget finances on online ad buys that may or may not hit their target customers.

Fortunately, the gurus at Google have developed a way to assist media planners as they organize their ad buys. Yesterday, Google introduced a new tool known as the Google Ad Planner. Like many of the tools offered by Google, Ad Planner understands that many users are like me–not overly technically-savvy, and intimidated by complicated applications. For this reason, this new media planning tool is surprisingly simple and completely intuitive. Of course, web design and internet marketing companies, which often have a talented media planner on staff, will also appreciate the capabilities of Ad Planner.

From the very first glance, users can recognize the value of using Google Ad Planner:

Media planners can easily find out invaluable information about sites that pertain to their industry:

• Which sites are the most popular for their target audience
• Smaller, less well-known sites that are popular with their customers
• How many countries each site reaches
• Page views
• Unique visitors information
• Demographic information of site visitors such as: gender, age, education and income
  

Aside from the vague disquiet I initially feel once I realize how much information that Google has about me at its disposal, and how willing they are to share that information (alas, a topic for another post), I am amazed at what a powerful media tool Ad Planner is going to be. Planners can now microtarget websites that reach the majority of their target audience, without wasting unnecessary time and resources.

Once you know which sites your business should target for online ad buys, you can efficiently transfer your media plans, and then export them to a .csv file for easy opening in spreadsheet applications. Or, if you prefer, you can export your plans to DoubeClick’s MediaVisor in order to manage all of your media planning, purchasing and other online campaign management activities.

While we all would love to begin using Google Ad Planner immediately, it is currently open to users by invitation only. Those of you who are interested in learning more about how it works, in particular the fascinating research aspects of the tool, will enjoy Arthur Freydin’s succinct walk-through, during which he points out that Ad Planner would be even better if it were integrated with Ad Words accounts.

Like most Google tools, this new facet of campaign management will continue to grow and develop as it makes its way out of the beta stage. Why not sign up to be a part of the group of media planners that helps to influence how it matures?

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

What is the ultimate purpose of the internet? (Wow-I know that’s a loaded question that could take forever to answer!) For some, the internet is a source of information. For others, it’s a place to interact with friends, play games and enjoy the range of available entertainment. For many of us who work with SEO, however, we have one true purpose for ourselves and our clients: to make money. We want to sell as many of our products and services as we can, and this is done by attracting customers–not just visitors–to our sites.

But, how can we attract those ready-to-buy customers to our site, when there are so many other sites floating around out there? How can we make our businesses stand out and make it to the top of the search engine results page when there are such giants as About.com and Yahoo to content with? The answer is to make use of long tail keywords.

I first head the term “long tail keyword” a few months ago; and although I got the gist of what that term meant, I was still confused about exactly how to write content using them. Did it mean that I had to put the entire string of terms together, without any words in between? Did I have to use the long tail keyword in its entirety every time? Some quick conversations with SEO pros, along with some sample searches, led me to these conclusions:

• Long tail keywords are one of the most effective ways to draw unique visitors to your site
• You may break up these strings of words with minor prepositions without causing any major differences to your page’s searchability
• It is best to use long tail keywords in conjunction with shorter keywords on the same page
  

Long tail keywords are 3 to 4 word keyword phrases that are very specific to what you are selling. For example, rather than a t-shirt company writing content that targets “t-shirts”, they may choose to target the long tail keyword phrase “funny political t-shirts”. It seems like targeting such a specific keyword would reduce your number of site visitors and reduce your page views, doesn’t it? Well, this may be true, but there are three very good reasons to use long tail keywords anyway:

1. It makes writing SEO Content much easier. Any content writer is more easily able to write a page of content on “used hybrid cars gas mileage” than they are “used cars”. A more focused keyword content makes for sharper, more focused writing.
2. It makes it easier to target customers who are actually ready to buy. An internet searcher who is looking for “home security systems company houston” is much more likely to be to the point of actually buying a product than a searcher who simply types in “house alarms”. You may be reaching a smaller pool of searchers, but you are reaching those customers who are ready to close the sale.
3. It makes it more likely to reach the front page of search engine results. Using long tail keywords means that you will have fewer competitors trying to reach the front page of the search results, because fewer pages have targeted that string of keywords. Big-name sites usually dominate the search result pages of simple, broad searches; but smaller sites that have created properly targeted content stand a good chance of reaching their ideal customers.

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Author: Jeremy Schooley
PPC Coordinator

Many website owners out there think Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a waste of time and money. The amount of time and money should vary for different goals and niches. The functionality of PPC is useful for every website owner. Here are 10 reasons why.

10. Click fraud has been minimized considerably.
When it comes to PPC, click fraud was the phrase that scared many website owners away. These days, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. keep a very close eye on the clicks and automatically refund and amounts that accrued from fraudulent clicks.

9. You can expand your PPC as your business expands.
It is very easy to add a new product or service as your website expands into new areas.

8. PPC is perfect for seasonal products and services.
You have the ability to turn on and off campaigns as needed. If you sell Halloween costumes, you can run the campaign in October and turn it off when Halloween is over. The beauty is, once it has been set up, it will still be there next year, just waiting to be turned on.

7. You can set monthly/daily budgets.
PPC allows you to spend your marketing dollars strategically. If you want to test something out, but are only willing to spend $100 on the testing, you can do it easily by setting your budget accordingly.

6. PPC is a great test bed. If you have a new promotion, but are unsure how potential customers will take to it, you can set up separate campaigns with limited budgets just for testing purposes. This can save tremendous amounts of money on marketing a poorly received promotion.

5. PPC campaigns gather tons of useful data.
This is crucial information. It gives you insights to your customer base and changes in the market. You can also use this information to determine what is giving you the best return on investment.

4. PPC is very customizable.
You can spend your money exactly the ways you want to if you take the time to set up the PPC campaigns properly.

3. PPC is another doorway to your site.
If your site is ranking on search engines for certain search queries, then having an ad that shows on the results pages of those queries ads another doorway to you site. This increases the chances of searchers turning into traffic.

2. You only pay when people click.
PPC is like a virtual billboard on the super information highway. The key difference is, with traditional billboards, you pay for how many eyeballs drive past your billboard. With PPC, you pay when they click the ad.

1. PPC brings immediate traffic to a website.
Your website can literally start receiving traffic within its first hours of existence if it is promoted using PPC.

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Author: Henry Adaso
Internet Copywriter

So now that you know why you should start building links today, are you ready for some tips? If you’re an expert in the field of search engine optimization, you may already know most of these. For the rest of us, here are 5 characteristics of a quality link.

Informative - No reader will fault you for linking off to an article or website that adds value to their experience. But linking to a sub-par site is an easy way to lose readership.

Credible - Quality inbound links come from credible sites. Elevate your own credibility by offering only fair, objective, and accurate information to readers. If you establish yourself as a trusted source, inbound links will be less difficult to obtain.

Descriptive - Explain what the link has to offer. Why should a reader click on the link? Don’t use phrases like “click here” when crosslinking. Use a creative signal phrase instead.

Brief and Useful - Writing links in blocks of sentences or paragraphs is bad SEO practice. Keep it brief and user-friendly or it will look like you forgot to close a tag.

Groundbreaking - Be the first to report a breaking news story in your niche and others will be happy to credit you for the gesture.

In summary, a quality link is brief, useful, descriptive, and enhances user experience. If you’re new to SEO, you may first want to get acquainted with linking, inbound & outbound links.

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Author: Jeremy Schooley
Pay Per Click Management
 

I’ve never been so proud to be as bad at spelling as I am today.  I will stand in front of any high school English teacher or spelling bee champ and rub one simple fact in their face – I get paid to spell words incorrectly.  What a great world we live in, right?  Fact: search queries on the major search engines are often mispellings misspellings.
 

Let’s take a little test.  Choose which word is spelled correctly:
Acceptible    Accepteble       Acceptable   Axceptible   Axeptible   Agseptable
 

If you chose Acceptable, congradulations congratulations, you chose correctly.  Your English teacher would be proud.  But you would also be paying more for that keyword, and you would have to compete against more advertizers advertisers.  If you chose any of the others, then traffic from those keywords would usually cost you less.
 

Another thing to keep in mind is a lot of misspellings come from typing errors.  For instance, I may want to type in google, but I accidently hit the “o” key once and ended up with gogle.  Try typing the word that you want to use for misspellings and ask yourself if it would be easy to hit surrounding keys or cause other typing errors.
 

Apostrophes are a good source as well.  Some people type don’t, while others type dont.
 

Endings supply us with numerous misspellings.  Is it trophies or trophys?  This goes back to the “able”, “eble”, and “ible” endings, such as in the Acceptable example.
 

Spacing leads to even more opportunities.  Is it powerpoint or power point? Is it desktop or desk top? How about website or web site?
 

The great thing about misspelled keywords is these web surfers are looking for the same things as the ones that spelled the search query correctly and they are just as important.  But these relevant keywords take more effert effort and creativity to generate.  There is less competition and lower bid prices.  So, if you are willing to think outside the box, you can generate more sales leads at a lower cost. In your face, Webster’s Dictionary!

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