Monthly Archives: January 2011

Search Engine Marketing – an Effective Tool for Marketing

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Search Engine Marketing – an Effective Tool for Marketing

Marketing and advertisement is of foremost importance for any business / company. There are different reasons why companies pursue it. The popular ones include: getting more sales; branding, increase in visibility, and/or market share; or to introduce a new product line or services. According to recent trend branding and positioning is not only limited to offline world, Internet and Search Engines such as Google, Lycos, Yahoo, MSN, AOL etc., also play an important role in achieving this objective.

How does it relate to Internet and Search Engines?

If your product is not right in front of your customer at the respective stores where these products are typically purchased, you can certainly say that you are missing out on sales, market share, and branding. The same concept applies to the Internet and search engines. If your web site doesn’t shows up in the top rankings for your offered services and products in major search engines you can calculate how much business and branding you are missing out on?

SEM is a Combination Art & Science.

According to SEM Experts, Search Engine Marketing is both an art and science. Its goal is to optimize a site’s ability to be found on Internet search engines and directories for the most targeted keywords / phrase by employing various Search Engine Optimization strategies and drive qualified traffic to the web site. This leads to more quality referrals & hence increase in sales.

Search Engines provide Target Traffic.

Search engines are the most widely used means of finding information on the Internet. It provides an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to your web site. A new study shows that the Web has grown to more than 2.1 billion documents and is growing at the rate of 7 million pages per day. Another study indicates that people who spend five or more hours a week online, spend about 71 percent of their time searching for information. That goes to show that how important are search engines in branding and marketing of products and services through your web site. It is the No.1 way people find your web site.

Positioning your right web site at right place.

If your business’s main product is “fashion garments”, you have undoubtedly positioned your product at most of the department and fashion stores. Following the same suit, SEM Experts position your product/website at the top of the search engine results so when users search for ” fashion garments” roughly 1,500 times daily on the major search engines, your website shows up in the top rankings. Now suppose this campaign is conducted for 8 months (including the maintenance) and there are 1,500 searches a day and your website is seen as #1 daily, the users will begin familiarizing your company / brand name, thus helping in better brand recall and easy sales.

How does it differ from Offline Marketing approach?

With a successful search engine marketing campaign you can accomplish every goal and objective that is sought after with offline marketing and advertising. There are two major differences between offline and online marketing: 1) Marketing your website via search engine marketing, email marketing, banner adv. have proven to be drastically less expensive than their offline equivalents, and 2) Search engine marketing facilitates you to demonstrate your product throughout the world or whichever geographical area you chose but with offline marketing, your marketing and selling efforts are restricted to a particular area in a city or town as the case may be.

Why is Search Engine Marketing more effective?

The ROI for SEM is excellent compared to any other online marketing means, especially when compared to online banner adv., direct mail campaign etc. With SEM, you get better conversion rates, lower cost-per-click, and lower acquisition costs. A study by market intelligence firm NPD Group, say “consumers are five times more likely to purchase products after seeing search listings versus online banner advertisement”. In the same market research report it was found that high search engine listings drive the highest awareness or branding for a website, with consumers recalling websites 60% of the time from search engine listings #1-5, and roughly 20% for online banner adv.

Among the Top search engines, Google is considered to be the major source of referrals for all web sites and the main target of every SEM campaign. It is followed by others major engines and directories such as Lycos, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista.

Search Engine Marketing is no trifle task. It is an art and science of applying the knowledge and experience gained over the years researching the search engine’s distinct criteria, unique indexing parameters or algorithm. It requires a calculated approach guided by proven and ethical methodologies to deliver the results.

With usage of Internet increasing in multiple folds in India and abroad, search engine marketing is an effective and appealing means of marketing and advertising to reach your target audience and cannot be ignored. For more Search Engine Marketing

Article Writer

Article from articlesbase.com



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Mastering Google Adwords – How To Lower Your Adwords Cost Per Click By Getting A High Quality Score

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Mastering Google Adwords – How To Lower Your Adwords Cost Per Click By Getting A High Quality Score

It’s undeniable that Mastering Google AdWords is the fastest and most effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website or offer. The problem with pay per click, especially AdWords, is that your AdWords Ad, your site content, and the fact that if you are promoting an affiliate offer, your URL most times would be the same as 1,000’s of other promoting the same offer; if there are other people promoting the same offer and the same destination URL, your cost per click is going to be higher.

You need a unique URL, among other things, to stand above the rest when promoting via AdWords pay per click marketing.

Ok, so you’ve decided to start a Pay Per Click campaign with Google AdWords. Depending on what keywords you are targeting and how competitive they are, there are certain key factors that you need to take into account when setting up your campaign, and they are:

1. Ad URL – this is the URL that is displayed in your ad. It should be as relevant and closely related to the actual URL that a person is taken to when they click on your ad, or the destination URL. It doesn’t have to be the same as the destination URL, but it can be.

When you are advertising say, an affiliate program, and using the same URL that everyone else is using to promote the same offer, there are already 1,000’s if not 10’s of thousands using that same URL, and depending on the quality of their landing page, and the density of the relevant keyword content, they will have secured a certain cost per click for their ad. You should strive to be relevant and unique. This is a key factor in Mastering Google AdWords and lowering your AdWords cost per click..

2. Destination URL – I know, you’re thinking that if you are promoting an affiliate offer, you have no choice but to use the affiliate link that they give you; not true.

What you do is, go to your affiliate page, click the view tab on internet explorer and then click source, save that as an HTML file to your PC. Then you can save all of the image files to your PC, upload them to your server. Open the HTML file in an editor, even notepad and use the edit button, click find and replace; make sure you look for the line(s) in the source code that link to the images.

Paste that in the “find what” field, and in the “replace with” field, you put the path to the respective image on your server. If you can’t download all of the images, you can ask the merchant if it is ok to link to the images on their server. Generally they won’t have a problem with this because they are incurring bandwidth anyway with every affiliate page that is served.

3. Landing Page Keyword Relevancy and Density – The keyword density and corresponding relevancy of your landing page need to match the keywords of your ad title and copy. Google assigns a higher quality score to those whose landing page is VERY closely related to their ads and keywords

Track your conversion rates, and pay attention to the tips that Google gives you about your ad(s) and how to improve them. These are the first steps to Mastering Google AdWords, effectively lowering your AdWords cost per click.

4. Negative Keywords – You should make a list of negative keywords, ie. keywords that you don’t want your ad displayed for when the word, or term is searched. Why?

Because, let’s say that you are promoting an affiliate offer that is a FREE Traffic Generation Guide, meaning that it teaches you how to generate free traffic; it does however, not mean that the guide itself is free. If you don’t add the negative keyword “free” then anyone looking for a free guide to free traffic generation, or traffic generation in general, will see your ad and could click on it, but most likely won’t buy because they were looking for something free. Get it?

If you learn the secrets to Mastering Google AdWords Marketing, optimizing your AdWords cost per click, and other effective methods of promoting your website, you will get a high quality score, lower your cost per click, and drive unlimited amounts of fast, targeted traffic to your site.

Learn everything you need to know about Mastering Google AdWords  and how to lower your Adwords Cost Per Click with a High Quality Score.

Article from articlesbase.com

Dominating the New Google, Google Traffic Tricks & Google Buzz Secrets
Get Google Traffic! Eleven videos and two PDFs, teaching you how to get free traffic from classic Google properties, and the New Google, including Google search, Google Buzz, and Google Social Search.
Dominating the New Google, Google Traffic Tricks & Google Buzz Secrets