Ad Words

[24x7]

Got bad experience with ad words! How can I come up with good keywords to boost up my hosting sales? Is Google ad words OR Overture better?

[Khun]

it just depends. Overture tends to be searched more by Executives, and AdWords more by tech savy people. Also, with less advertisers and less competition, Overture can sometimes be a more economical choice. It really just comes down to experimentation in your particular niche. :o

[1PlanHost]

PPC advertising for hosting related keywords can be extremely expensive without ROI if not done right. I would recomend starting with Overature since it seems to be the easiest. They have an easy to use tool to locate keywords at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Look for keywords that are more specialized for best results and ROI.

Are YOU getting your Money's Worth
When Buying Traffic? There is an outstanding article written by Robin Nobles which clearly explains ROI on PPC engines at
http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/tracking-ROI.html

I attended her Search Engine Mastery workshop in Orlando last year and can testify that Robin is a pure genius when it comes to search engine optimization and PPC traffic. She breaths the stuff!

Also before you start spending large sums of money be sure to see how it can be easily dumped down the drain at http://www.infosyssec.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1496 with an army of paid clickers who could care less about your offer but are getting paid to click! Lord knows that our own company has wasted way too much over the years experimenting with PPC only to get bit by paid surfers. As an alternative, we spend most of our resources now increasing visits with search engine optimization. Sure it is hard work and takes time but it is worth it in the long run simply because we earned it the old fashioned way.

Best Wishes for a Net Success!

[Jilly]

Hi, just stop by and thanks for the info on search engine thing. :o Do you have any idea if I want to get some good amount of clicks from Google, how much should I invest so that I can have good ROI. Also, does Google adword is a must? or should I just focus on Google search optimize & ranking?:confused: Thanks a bunch!!:p

[1PlanHost]

Google Adwords are a good way to get targeted traffic to your site as long as you are not having to pay large amounts per click and you know in advance how many visits from targeted advertising normally results in a sale. Once you have your number of visits to sale conversion rate, you can then go to Google and use their tools to determine how many clicks are common for the last month for the keywords you desire. Then calculate your expected ROI. Many people have spent fortunes on Adwords without calculating ROI and have therefore bombed.

Google Adwords are a faster method of increasing traffic yet very costly. Again, I prefer the slower yet steady search engine optimization route.

Best Wishes for a Net Success!

[webhoster]

Hi! 1planhost. Thanks for new knowledge of your posts here. I really enjoy reading all! I just wonder about search engine optimization. How would you pick the best optimization for key word? Also, I wonder how much it costs to be sponsor links on Google. Is it work?

[1PlanHost]

The best advice I could provide to you would be to learn as much as you can about search engine optimization from trusted sources. One I use almost everyday is http://www.planetocean.com which is both the old timer in SEO marketing research and also the largest. All of their products are top notch. To identify good keywords, use overtures search tool and perhaps http://www.wordtracker.com

Sponsor links on Google are called Adwords. In the Google AdWords program, the cost of your campaigns really depend on how much you are willing to pay and how well you know your audience. It all boils down to knowing your own goals and watching your budget very carefully. Do understand that not all traffic will result in sales. You will receive a whole lot of tire kickers so understanding how many tire kickers it takes to get one sale is vital information. Once you have that information you can calculate how much to spend on certain keywords which will bring x amount of tire kickers to your site.

For example, a new advertiser paying in USD can activate his/her AdWords account with just US$5.00, and can then choose a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) from US$0.05 - US$100. Daily budgets start as low as 5 cents up to whatever limit he or she is comfortable spending based on click thru ROI (Return on Investment).

Best Wishes for a Net Success!

[MT Webmaster]

Will add words help page rank?

Pocono Mountain Web Designhttp://www.poconowebmasters.com

[1PlanHost]

Buying Google Adwords does not affect PR and it is for a good purpose to maintain the integrity of the search. Google maintains separate databases of AdWords and SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) and they do not influence each other.

However, there are some content partners of PPC (Paid Per Click) programs such as Adwords that have directory style listings and these may occasionally be counted by Google as backlinks. The problem is that often these pages have a low PR and many links on them so there is really not much benefit gained overall.

Your best bet to increase PR is to locate related sites to yours that have a higher PR (or at least equal) than yours 4+ and request a recipricol linking because your content can be a benefit to their readers. Be VERY CAREFUL about purchasing PR links (some people sell high PR links) because Google frouns on this practice big time and may ban both the seller and the buyer sites.

I cant say this enough, develop quality informative content that people need and others will be glad to link to it. For example, we have a tutorial on our site that shows Access database connection string examples How to Create a Database Connection from an ASP Page (http://www.1planhost.com/support/s_databaseconn.asp) Much to our surprise, many webmasters and even our competitor web hosting companies link to that page on their sites!

When asking for a link:

1. ALWAYS have a link already put on your own site BEFORE you ask for a link in return and give the location of the link. It's harder to say no if you can provide the URL of where their link is.
2. ALWAYS give them the exact link text to use, even going so far as to put it in HTML so they can just cut/paste it onto their page.
3. MAKE SURE they actually have a links page!
4. GIVE THEM as much information as needed in order to make it easy for them to link to you. If they have a big site that's divided into sections, give them the exact URL of where your site would fit in. Then, provide the HTML for the link to your site.

Be careful also about getting on those FFA (Free For All) or mega linking sites. Google bans these and sites on them frequently so don't waste your time there.

Insider's SEO secret to increasing link popularity = use text links in all of your signature files (email, forum postings, and links on others sites) that contain your keyword phrase. You will notice mine below "Windows 2003 Web Hosting" which is a keyword phrase that I am working on this month. Due to hard work and persistance that keyword phrase lands us #7 currently on G. Notice that I am not after "web hosting" or even "windows web hosting" but the more refined "windows 2003 web hosting." You can work for years trying to match the numerous hours of work and SEO budget of the bigger web hosts to try to get rankings in those highly competative phrases or work hard for a few months and get top rankings for the more specific phrases. Either way, let no one fool you, it is work either way. Yet it is rewarding for those who are committed and work hard. Let those guys waste their money and pay $4 a click for keyword phrases, while you get results with your hard work.


Best Wishes for a Net Success!

[Khun]

Look like every one using PR (PageRank) as the determining factor in your decision to link to another.
This is a false assumption. Don't waste your time using the Google Toolbar. PR has nothing to do with where your site is listed in a given search. Want some proof?
Let me show you, Try to search for "Spain florist"
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=spain+florist
look at the Third (bloomCentral). That page's got PR=0.
I've just launched that page last week.

[1PlanHost]

Looks like you did a great job of getting up there fast to the #3 spot. I also notice that the top spot has a PR of 5 and the next has a PR 2. Then nearly all of the following sites have zero PR. You also link to that Spain Florist page from a PR4 page and then to that PR4 page from your main bloomcentral.com page which has a PR5. These links give that Spain Florist page a significant boost in the Google algorithm which I suspect many of your competitors don't have.

So this is very consistent with Googles PR algorithm as seen on their site.

From Googles own site (http://www.google.com/contact/search.html#2) :
"Google finds most of its pages when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks. The best way to ensure listing on Google is for a page to be linked from lots of other pages. Google's order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including our patented PageRank algorithm."

and then again at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

"The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."

Best Wishes for a Net Success!

[Khun]

Thanks for a useful info...look like you are an expert.
I don't know any thing about search engine. just lucky to be on that position. Would you mind? I have one more question.
Does link popularity really importent?.If it does, I'll start looking for some..:rolleyes:

[1PlanHost]

I am not sure I would call myself an expert in the field but I have been doing search engine optimization daily for over 8 years and have learned from many professional workshops on the subject. Everyday it seems there is something new to learn since the SE's change their algorithms frequently and it takes a lot of research to attempt to figure the changes out.

Incoming links and backlinks are extremely important indeed! If you go to google and type in link:www.bloomcentral.com you will see that you have about 115 links pointing to www.bloomcentral.com and this is what is driving your page rank up for the main page.

A very helpful free tool is MarketLeap's Link Popularity Tool (http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/) This will reveal not only your links but also your competitions for comparison analysis.

Best Wishes for a Net Success!

[lelahosting]

i personally prefer google adwords but it took some time to get the best words and phrases that give the best results...

[host4future]

I would not recommend ad words on search engines. You will get your clicks from kanoodle, but they will be all junk clicks probably made from some hidden server. Overture was good in the past (2003-2004), but now we receive junk clicks from them, too. This could not be entirely their fault, but even so, they should be reasonable for the click coming from them.

Google seems to be a wise choice for many ad words, but if you wish to advertise hosting, casino or adult content, you won't stand a change, as your concurrence, will always click on your ad and you're at point zero again.

What I can recommend is place ads on sites like this, web hosting directories are the best choice for marketing your products, at least for the moment.

[highlighter]

I agree. Getting listed on web hosting directories is the least expensive and one of the most effective ways for hosting companies to promote their plans.

It is a very targetted marketing to visitors that are already searching the web to buy hosting plans.

This best practice is same for many industies just like hosting sector. It is always benefitable for companies to advertise at places where people came to search for what they are selling for.

Advertising on search engines is much more expensive in most cases I think.