As the adage goes, practice makes perfect. Any webmaster worth his salt will eventually reap the fruits of his labours if he practices Search Engine Optimization (SEO) endlessly and optimizes the site by accepting Pay-Per-Click (PPC) placements. Master these valuable lessons below and you will soon have both SEO and PPC mastered.
Page Optimization
1. Optimize your pages for some, not all keywords. Choose the 5 or 10 most relevant keywords and go with them rather than trying to cram 100 keywords into a single page. Readability of body copy, the single most vital element for visitors, will suffer.
2. Determine and dominate the appropriate niche. You have heard it said, rifled marketing delivers more customers (and cash flow) than random shotgun blasts.
3. Target your keywords. Every niche has keywords that suit. Optimizing for a highly-focused list of keywords will help you rank better in search engines results. For example, target ‘architectural books for sale’ instead of something broad and general like ‘books’.
4. Optimize for minor keywords as well. Guerilla marketers know this. Start optimizing with them, the returns on your efforts could be more satisfying.
5. Have a coherent theme for your site. If your site is a mixture of several themes (dating, finance, health, computers, etc.), this seriously undermines its value. You need to concentrate on one theme and stick with it.
6. Watch your Click-through rate (CTR). A low CTR is a sign that your ads are irrelevant to your audience. There are many reasons for this, but the most common one is that your site is not optimized for relevant keywords.
7. Use monitoring tools. Monitoring tools can help you diagnose problems and even suggest solutions. Even if everything is going fine, use monitoring tools to understand why. You will need this info when things go bad.
8. Server downtime. A reliable host goes without saying. Presence is your lifeblood. The odd downtime may be tolerable, but more than once yearly means it’s time to move on. Speak to Melbourne IT about reliable web hosting with servers in Australia.
9. Link selling. If you are discouraged by your Pay-per-click income, do not resort to link selling in order to utilize “wasted” space. It is believed that search engines will catch on and pull down your search rank.
10. Keep an eye on the competition. If the ads on rival sites are more expensive than yours, try to optimize for the keywords that could attract those ads.
11. Avoid black hat methods. This includes keyword stuffing, or spamming the social bookmarking sites.
Best Practices for PPC
1. Minimize ad clutter. Fewer ads will increase their likelihood of being noticed, triggered and contribute to your ad revenue share.
2. See what advertisers bid on. One valid method of keyword research is to see what rival advertisers bid on and then optimize for those words. Just remember that a price war can be cutthroat.
3. Get prominent positions for Pay-per-click ads. This is about visibility. Remember, audiences do not naturally search for ads.
4. Check that ads display properly. This may be due for technical reasons, coding issues, or poor contrast.
5. High traffic does not mean more Pay-per-click revenue. It can happen that high traffic does not produce a proportionate increase in click-throughs, especially if there is a mismatch between the featured ads and the actual audience.
6. Avoid ads from competitors. Most Pay-per-click networks allow you to filter out unwanted ads. Do this to block all ads from rivals.
7. Consider alternative Pay-per-click networks. If your Click-through rate is very low and you are certain that your site is optimized for the right keywords, maybe your ad network cannot provide relevant ads. Consider switching to another Pay-per-click network.
8. Consider other types of advertising. If you get no tangible results after trying three or four other Pay-per-click networks, maybe you should switch to other placements that yield better returns.
9. Pay-per-click and Search Engine Optimization rankings are unrelated. If you share the popular delusion that running Adsense ads on your site will help you rank better in Google, that is just plain wrong.
If you need assistance with SEO or PPC, speak to an eBusiness consultant at Melbourne IT today on 1300 654 677.
