You Had Me At the Search Engine
You’ve likely heard of the movie, Jerry Maguire, with its famous line, “You had me at hello.” Jerry Maguire was luckier than web sites we find in search engines. Many web sites don’t attract user devotion at the first word, let alone after scanning the home page.

How many times has this scenario happened to you? You’ve performed a search in a search engine or directory, reviewed the results and found a page description that fits your needs. When you click on the page that looks the most promising, you often arrive at the web site’s home page, where one or more things might happen:

1. The page loads slowly due to too many graphics, dynamic applications or scripts.

2. There are terms used on the page that you don’t understand.

3. It promotes products or services that were not mentioned in the page description from the search engine.

4. The products or services are unrelated to your search.

5. The page is “amateurish” in appearance and you’re not feeling confident about things like customer service, user privacy and security, experience with the product, or other credibility issues.

6. The page is so busy you don’t know where to go to next, or distractions caused you to forget your original mission.

7. Something has turned you off, such as swimsuit models that don’t look like you do, corporate images of businessmen, not women, or multiple animated things.

8. An invasive advertisement appeared that you had to click away so you could read the content underneath it.

9. The page loads but your scumware radar starts beeping like crazy or popup and security alerts appear.

10. You need a magnifying glass to read the content.

If a keyword search brings back an inside page, more common frustrations occur to drive people away from the web site.
They include:

1. There is no navigation to the rest of the web site.

2. There is navigation, but no visible, easy-to-locate link to the main home page or main web site.

3. A link “home” is offered, but sub-navigation is missing, so that the user must start at the beginning to figure out where they landed inside the web site.

4. Link labels do not explain what the web site is about, so the visitor may not be inspired to click around.

5. There is no suggested click path to follow. For example, if the page happens to be an article, it might be useful to say “Did you find this article helpful? Here are more articles that may interest you.”

We often forget that search engines index more than our home page. People often stumble into our web sites while searching for other things, linking from another web site, or receiving an email link from a friend. The starting place isn’t always home base.

So, how do you make a web site page approachable in a crowded room of search engine results? First, make sure your title tag is accurate. Every page requires a title tag unique to the content it represents. The home page is an overview page, so focus on the main goal, which is often also your primary keyword(s).

Next, write a genuine, honest description that isn’t all hype and glorified self-worship about your great website. If the site is going to sell something, what does it sell? Does it specialize? Avoid words like “unique”, “amazing”, and “special” because, frankly, everybody makes these claims.

It’s important to not “stuff” keywords in your title and description tags because these are displayed in search engines as your site or page description. When read by humans, they don’t make sense. People are getting wiser. They know that you are trying to get higher rank but it doesn’t mean your web site is any better in quality that those lower in search results.

Regardless of where the page is in your site, there are lots of ways to attract attention or generate curiosity so that your visitor becomes a potential customer, or least finds the content interesting enough to keep browsing around. My favorite part of discount stores are the displays where they toss clearance items, or the impulse “Oh yes, I forgot I needed that”-type items. You can do the same thing with your web site. Simply place the toenail clippers, scotch tape and calling cards out front where they’re easily seen. In other words, remind your visitors you carry the items they didn’t know they needed.

Here are some other ideas to try:

1. Provide a good reason to enter your site. Don’t expect anyone to take your word for anything. Offer incentives.

2. Put a visible text link to your sitemap on every page. Even your local shopping mall has a map with a “You Are Here” pointer.

3. Be forthcoming and descriptive with pictures. If you sell shoes, show the tread. If you design and make your own crafts, show close-ups of the detail and workmanship. The sunglasses line you offer is likely filled with brand name shades, but what types of faces will they complement? I have a difficult time buying artwork online because I can’t visualize the dimensions in my head. A picture of a framed version, hanging in a room with furniture, will help me understand what I’m trying to purchase. In a virtual world, you must go to great lengths to sell things people can’t touch or see in use.

4. Place words like “sale”, “getting started”, “first-time user”, “learn more”, “try now”, “buy now”, “free”, “download”, “we deliver” and “free shipping” on your pages, above the page “fold”.

5. On your home page, provide an introduction and suggestions for where your visitors might like to go next, based on their needs.

6. Search engines can only bring a visitor to your doorstep. It’s your job to grab them by the hand, invite them inside and show it off.

Author Bio:
Written by Kimberly Krause Cre8pc Edited by Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com

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Link to get traffic – Not search engine rankings!
There have been a lot of changes on the web since I wrote the first edition of “Power Linking Your Way to 1 Million Hits” in 2002. Back then I told everyone that the only thing that will never change, despite search engine shake-ups and search technology improvements, is that links will always be the most important part of any website promotion campaign.

In fact, the people best able to withstand major changes and shifts in the search engines that affect their rankings are the people who have a broad, multi-faceted marketing campaign.

In order to weather any drops from single-sources of traffic to your site, you must have a lot of irons in the fire (links). People you have targeted as your best prospects should be able to find your site virtually everywhere they surf.

Web site owners who rely solely on search engine ranking are leaving 90% of the marketing pie on the plate! For long-term stability and steady, predictable traffic, you simply must broaden your reach and utilize a host of different publicity tactics in order to keep sales up.

One of the most effective tactics I talk about is article publishing. It is also one of the most misunderstood and abused tactics I teach. If you don’t get it, don’t do it. Below is my explanation of why we write articles and other short publications in the first place.

Publishing and Syndication of Your Articles, a lot of people miss the boat on this one and it’s too bad that many people see that articles and other published works are important, but they don’t produce quality work, therefore their work doesn’t get picked up by big web sites and newsletter owners.

You see, most people focus on article publishing as a way to get a link published to their site. (Solely for search engines to find) Problem is, once they have syndicated their article to tons of free content sites, all they have at the end of the day is a link pointing to their site.

No one is READING the articles! Why? Because, honestly, they are terrible. Or they are just short of being blatant ads. People pick up on an amateur article within the first sentence or two and move on. Didn’t you write your article to get traffic?

Produce shoddy work and there is no click on the link. There is no traffic produced. The webmasters who focus totally on getting links as a tool to increase their pagerank in Google are missing the point entirely.

The point of Power Linking and all the tactics in the system was never to get high search engine rankings. Getting ranked well in the search engines was and still is a BY-PRODUCT of a properly executed Power Linking campaign.

When I talk to my clients about getting links, what I am talking about is getting links placed in places where human beings will see them and click on them. Not just link directories which are created solely for boosting link popularity with Google.

So when you publish an article, take the time to think about what people in your market need or want to know and give it to them. And write a GOOD article!

Linking is not just something that looks like this: www.power-linking-profits.com. Real linking is networking and making connections with future customers on an emotional level through your publicity pieces.

Linking is about respect. You gain respect by being published and being seen as the expert in your field. And it goes without saying that your published work needs to stand up to basic quality expectations of savvy readers in your target market.

Come off looking like a hack who is only interested in getting a link published at the end of their cruddy article, and you lose all respect. So even if someone does click on your link, they have reservations about you right off the bat before they even get to your site. This is no way to sell products and services.

If you remember nothing else, please remember this: No matter what linking method you work on this week, keep in mind that the most important links of all are the links intended for real people to see and click on!

Get linked in content directories and on web pages that get hit by as many of your target prospects as possible. And link to get traffic, not search engine rankings!

People focus too much on search engine marketing. If you do your job as a marketer, you will naturally rank high in the search engines. There is no need whatsoever to focus your marketing campaign on search engines entirely.

Focus your marketing efforts on people, your customers, and you will have what I call “Natural Search Engine Rankings.” You see, Google wants the most relevant results. That’s where their bread is buttered. Well, what I have been trying to teach thousands of customers all this time is that you need to focus your marketing campaign on your customers so that you are the MOST relevant site on the net in your market.

Don’t worry about Google. They WANT you to be #1 if you deserve to be. How to be #1? By marketing to your customers directly on sites they surf the most and being the natural relevant result in their search.

Good search engine rankings will follow a great marketing campaign. By the time you get your #1 position on Yahoo though, you should have so much traffic and sales because of a properly implemented marketing campaign that you hardly notice you finally made it!

That’s the REAL power of linking.

Author Bio:
Jack Humphrey is the author of Power Linking 2: Evolution, now in it’s 4th revision at http://power-linking-profits.com. He is also the CEO of http://EquipMint.com, a membership site for anyone who sells anything online.

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What Is A CMS?
A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to add, edit or delete content to your website without having to create and format the pages manually. All the pages get generated on the fly, the CMS application picks the template, adds the headers and footers, generates the menus and blocks for your page and then automatically renders the page.

The main reason people hesitate to use CMS is because they think a CMS site will not perform well with search engines. But when used properly, CMS can actually help with scoring points with the search engines. This article shows you how.

We all know that content is king and that the primary function of today’s Internet is to deliver content to those that are seeking it. CMS allows you to easily manage multiple pages on your site, categorized into appropriate topics and categories.

While it is a fact that most free CMS’s available were not designed with the search engine spider in mind, CMS applications are flexible and can be tweaked to help you gain a top rankings with search engines.

How Do You Customize A CMS Application To Improve Search Engine Rankings?
First, there is the issue of dynamic URLs. Most CMS’s will generate URLs with parameters embedded into them. As an example, each article link on your site may look like this:

http://yoursite.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=35&SESSIONID=200dbf5df81843102bc2ba2560207841

Not only does it look ugly, the search engines probably won’t spider it. It’s is best to cast that URL, into something like this:

http://yoursite.com/article35.html

This can be achieved by making use of the web server module called mod-rewrite. To use this, you’ll need to add a rule to your .htaccess file using regular expressions to convert the URL. The following 2 lines added to your .htaccess file (in your document root) will achieve the URL conversion for the example above.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article([1-9][0-9]*).* modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=$1

For more details on mod-rewrite, have a look at

http://powersitesystem.com/article1.html

The session id is usually not necessary in the URL. Most users have cookies enabled so CMS can store the session id using cookies. URL rewriting for session maintenance can and should be turned off in your web server settings.

Which CMS Application Do You Use?
For my purposes, the PostNuke Open Source Content Management System works well. But there are many CMS applications available that are open source and are easy to install. To access a review of the various CMS’s available see http://biz-whiz.com/article225.html – For a hands-free CMS setup with training to help build a search engine friendly website see http://powersitesystem.com

Site Navigation
Generally SEO’s feel that having the navigation links at the bottom or on the right side of your page allow you to position your optimized content towards the beginning of your html page, but users are accustomed to naturally look for a navigation menu towards the top left of the page. Attention to the anchor text used in the navigation links is important because these links will appear on all the pages of your site.

Islands of Related Content
When you add content to your CMS, you would classify it into a topic. A CMS like PostNuke, allows you to choose a category and a topic for each article that you add. The CMS will automatically create links in the chosen category page and topics page. If you define your topics and your categories properly, you can create a brilliant linking strategy.

Conclusion
Setting up a CMS managed website that can achieve good search engine rankings is possible if you take care of the key factors as outlined above. For proof that a properly customized CMS application can help you to gain top search engine rankings see the links in the signature below.

Author Bio:
Mufad has successfully setup a high ranking work at home community that ranks on top for “work at home” and “home business” at http://biz-whiz.com using CMS. He provides his clients with a template driven website setup using a search engine friendly CMS at http://powersitesystem.com

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How to Use Your Google API Key as Your Secret Weapon
Just over a year ago, Google.com began to provide access to its’ web search API to programmers and developers. This provided them with a way to utilize the optimum resources of Google’s database of listings. At first, there were few practical applications that would help the average webmaster. However, there are now plenty of ways that any site owner with an API key can benefit from these innovative programs, and web applications.

And since the licensing of the API restricts the creation of tools for commercial use, these resources will not cost you anything but some well-invested time. In the next few minutes, you’ll learn how to use this information to your advantage.

Let’s back up a moment and get some of the terminology out of the way. This won’t be a tech-guru explanation, more like an oversimplification to give you a basic idea in layperson’s terms.

An API means application programmer interface. Basically, the Google API gives programmers access to Google’s database of listings, which they can then use to create web applications.

When you get an API key it simply gives you the ability to access the interface the programs are based on. Therefore, your key will allow you to plug into the application they’ve created, for a pre-determined number of queries.

So now you can harness the power of Google’s database to your site’s advantage.

How?
First, get a Google API key.

The myriad of ways sites are using Google API keys are astounding. Some of them require you to provide your own API key to use them. You can get it at no charge here:

http://www.google.com/apis/

Your queries are limited to 1000 per day. But that’s more than enough for most web site owners. For some of the tools, you won’t even need it, as the developers seem to be allowing you to run tools using their own keys.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a software genius for this key to be useful to you. Developers have already built tools for you to use, all you’ll have to do is find the sites where their online applications are housed, and if necessary, plug in your key.

Think of it as a universal password. You’ll get the key via email, then all you’ll need to do is cut and paste it in the box provided. Which brings us to the next piece in the puzzle.

Tools
There are literally hundreds of places you can use the Google API key.

Some people have developed plug-ins you can use with database-driven sites. Many have developed tools that will help you increase or study your present rankings in Google, resulting in more targeted traffic to your site.

My favorite tool helps you study countless different pieces of data found through Google via email, automating hours of research. But we’ll come back to that later.

I’ve already written a step by step guide to help you increase your current Google rankings. Instead of repeating my brief review of those sites here, I’ve posted that article to a page that you can read at http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/increaserankings – it’s
a free online guide that you can start using today.

I wanted to get that out of the way so we can talk about some of the other sites I’ve discovered since then.

One site will search Google for you and compile a site map using the pages it finds for your site in Google. Visit it here:

http://www.tele-pro.co.uk/scripts/google/indexer_info.htm

You can study the relationship between your sites and others using GARBO (stands for Google API Relation Browsing Outliner). This can help you find sites to trade links with, or sites you can link to from your site to provide more information to your visitors, and otherwise study the relationship between two sites, as told by Google. Read more about it here:

http://www.staggernation.com/garbo/readme.html

Want to query only the newest additions, for research or for tracking purposes? Try Goofresh here:

http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/001405.shtml

You can also add Google searches to your site. It’s the number one search engine, and especially if you have a member’s area, it can help make your site “sticky”, meaning that your visitors will find themselves coming to your site over and over to use your resources. You can find the script to add this to your site here:

http://scriptsearch.com/details/8886.html

Another helpful Google API Tool can help you get users to search your site using Google. It uses PHP, and can be found here:

http://www.thinkbling.com/scripts.php

To find more applications on your own, you’ll first want to look around at the sites I have already mentioned, as many of them have multiple web based applications developed with their access to Google’s API, or will in the near future.

Summary
The reason I wrote this article is because it takes a bit of digging to find some of the best ones. Here is a good starting places that I found, naturally, through Google:

http://www.soapware.org/directory/4/services/googleApi/applications

If you want to search Google itself, you might try search terms like “Google API applications”, “Google API software” or “Google API scripts”. You can also start from “Google API” and search within results for implementations or the word “key”.

To read part two of this article, and learn how to combine the Google API key with tools that can traffic to your site, visit http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/apikey2

Author Bio:
Subscribe to Free Traffic Secrets to find out how to get the Googlebot spider sooner at ftdsecrets-subscribe@topica.com or visit http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com to get more time-tested information on getting Free Quality Traffic to Your Site.

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Beyond Keyword Optimization
The rate of change online used to be fun. Chasing the cutting edge was an exciting occupation with limited accountability. But now ROI, quarterly budgets, and the need to grow sales AND profits have replaced the cutting edge as the object of our efforts. Yet despite the transition to more traditional business goals and outcomes, the rate change remains the same.

Take keyword buys. This is still a relatively new phenomena, and many businesses are only just beginning to develop an approach to extract the benefits. Nevertheless returns have already been compressed as the cost of key words has quickly been bid up to their marginal rates of return – and in some case beyond. The ease with which results can be tracked has allowed the market to be extremely efficient in pricing keywords, making it harder and harder for the buyers of words to generate a return.

Pockets of gold still exist. Keywords that have been overlooked by competitors can still produce outsized returns. But these pockets will only shrink over time as more buyers enter the market chasing the same end customers.

To continue to extract value from keywords, marketers are going to have to turn inward. For most companies, getting the traffic is seen as the whole of the equation. But just as important is what you do with the traffic. So even as we are only starting to get the hang of keyword buys, we need to tackle landing page optimization.

To date, landing page optimization has been too hard and too expensive to generate a return. But with the returns on keywords contracting and the advent of new optimization tools, the math behind such efforts looks better everyday.

To date, most companies purchasing keywords have to settle with dropping a potential customer off at the home page. In some cases, they can send them to a category level page or to a particular product page. Going beyond this to a more customized landing page that better matches the keyword is simply too taxing in terms of time, people, and money. Simply getting the requisite page changes through IT is often a sufficient barrier in and of itself.

Some helpful services
But solutions exist for these problems. Services like Offermatica from Fort Point and Optimost offer tools that allow marketers and merchants to cost-effectively manipulate a page to reflect any number of necessary variants. Now a home page can show language and featured products that clearly tie to the keyword that brought a potential customer to the site. Even product level pages can be improved, be it through highlighting particularly relevant product features, adjusting pricing and promotion, or showing related products — all of which tie back to the source keyword.

In the case of Offermatica, the tool works as a hosted application. Portions of a page are defined as “mBoxes” that are then filled based on the keyword source. The content can be anything you would normally put on a web page – text, images, links, forms, etc. Because it is a hosted application, it bypasses the need for internal IT while providing the responsiveness needed to keep up with rapidly changing marketing requirements. And best of all, both Offermatica and Optimost are priced as a service – eliminating both difficulty and cost as an excuse for doing nothing.

Keywords – at least the ones that work – are not going to get any cheaper. They will remain a valuable tool for driving qualified traffic. But increasingly buying the right ones will only be the first step. Generating a return on the resulting traffic through landing page optimization will be the key to continuing to generate positive returns.

Author:
Robert Schmultz

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Nigritude Ultramarine
Search engine optimization experts are having fun with Google. Experts, with DarkBlue.com at the helm, are holding a contest to determine how Google really works. Experts are competing, with the goal of optimizing a webpage for a non-sensical phrase: ‘nigritude ultramarine’. On May 7th, the day the terms ‘nigritude ultramarine’ was announced, typing the phrase into Google generated no search listings.
Search engine optimizers hoping to define themselves as industry leaders are all vying for the number one spot.

Others see the contest as an opportunity to test theories and experiment without jeopardizing existing traffic. Some webmasters are leery at staking their professional reputation on a contest with an undefined number of participants.

As an added incentive for search engine experts and webmasters to participate and work their magic, DarkBlue.com is giving away an Apple Mini iPod� and a Sony Flat Screen Monitor to anyone who can take their page to #1 for the phrase ‘nigritude ultramarine’. The contest is scheduled to run for two months and will conclude on July 7th, 2004.

Magical Phrase
The phrase generating the frenzy, ‘nigritude ultramarine’, is likely to bring out the best and the worst in optimization tactics. The black magic optimization techniques that are suspected in having sites banned from Google are likely to be exercised, along with tried and true optimization practices. Immediately after the contest was announced experts snapped up hyphenated domain names and began tweaking their text. Many experts were surprised to see how quickly ‘nigritude ultramarine’ made its way into the Google’s listings, with new listings appearing daily it is clear that the contest is well underway.

The experts will be at the mercy of Google and any new algorithms implemented over the course of the next two months. Experts will have to anticipate and update on a regular basis, to ensure that they are able to obtain and retain a strong listings.

Results
The results of the contest are unlikely to have any lasting effects, as Google will likely implement filters that will prevent search engine experts from reaping the rewards of any tactics that are found to be effective. Regardless the sense of adventure and a method of testing Google are intriguing.

Author Bio:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net

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How to lower your client acquisition cost
The whole purpose of search engine marketing is to attract new prospects and buying customers. In certain cases however, your sales could become limited, for the simple reason that not everybody is seeking the products or services your company offers. Across the World Wide Web, if there are only 6,000 searches a month for the keywords �industrial pump rebuilding�, it will be hard for you to make more people search for that keyword phrase when Wordtracker tells us there has been only 6,000 searches for those three keywords in any given month or period.

Even if you were to buy the keywords �industrial pump rebuilding�, you cannot expect them to appear more than about 6,000 times a month, which will limit your page impressions to that same number of 6,000.

One efficient way to turn around this problem is to lower your client acquisition cost (CAC). If you can successfully achieve that goal, it will effectively boost your ROI for the search engine marketing campaigns you are currently managing.

The breakeven point
If your company sells a product for $25, there is normally a percentage or dollar amount of that total price which is profit. Using information from your search engine marketing ad campaign, if you actually spend $25 on advertising, you will actually need to acquire at least one new client at $25 just to break even.

In such an example, $25 would be your maximum client acquisition cost for this particular ad campaign.

Since search engine marketers usually want to maximize their ROI on their campaigns, to increase your profit level and by the same way reduce your CAC, some will try to reduce the unit acquisition cost set in this example ($25) to a lower level.

Importance of making some �road checks� along the way
Before committing any kind of significant ad budget to any campaign, an experienced search engine marketer will perform a few �road checks� along the way. This single step is critical to the overall success and ROI of your ad campaign, and will act as a �test-bed� for all your online marketing efforts.

One great way to start such a road check is by utilizing Google�s AdWords program. For only $ 5.00 you can set up a new PPC (Pay per Click) ad program, where your listings can appear within less than 30 minutes in most cases. Depending on your industry, and depending on the general level of competition there is in your market, it is suggested that you start with a low bid price, say fifty cents to a dollar. You might even try an initial bid price of less than fifty cents if you think it is appropriate to do so. This is one area where trial and error can actually save you money.

It is extremely important that you accurately monitor all of your road checks along the way, since you want to learn as much as you can from these tests. Failing to do this could seriously hinder your overall ROI later, once your ad campaign starts maturing.

More ways to �test-drive� your ads
As you delve deeper into your test runs, it will become more and more important to check your click-through reports (CTR) provided by your paid inclusion or paid placement search engine. Just log into your Google AdWords account and verify your number of clicks, page impressions, click-through rates and also check your single click fees for each and every keyword or keyword phrase in all of your ad campaigns.

One word of caution: CTR�s don�t always deliver the tell tale signs you need to discover or won�t always give you a true or accurate picture of your campaign profitability. The best tool to achieve that goal is to utilize a good ROI tracking system that will carefully monitor all your sales data, and produce individual reports for every product you sell on every search engine you are using, along with every keyword or keyword phrase used in your campaign.

Putting to work those conversion-tracking tools
No search engine marketing campaign can ever be complete or efficient without an accurate system of measuring conversion tracking. It�s great to get targeted traffic, but if those prospects don�t convert into buying customers, this will have a damaging effect in the overall profitability of any online ad campaign.

Today, most paid inclusion or paid placement search engine offers conversion tracking to most of their advertisers, large or small. Most of those tracking packages are good and can spell a marked improvement in a campaign.

However, if you are running many individual ad campaigns, spread across many different search engines, you should consider a third-party ROI and conversion-tracking tool available from a number of good vendors.

Conclusion
Significantly lowering your client acquisition costs for all of your online marketing campaigns can be easily implemented if the tips and techniques given in this article are followed. Remember that time can work for you, as it can very well work against you, if your competition is harder at work than you are.

Accurately measuring your ad performance against certain benchmarks you have developed in-house, by a third-party or by an experienced search engine marketing firm can make a big difference in the ROI your campaigns can really deliver.

Make good use of today�s campaign management tools available, either by buying the commercially available software needed for your application, or by using third-party management and monitoring programs offered for that task.

____________
Reference:
“Search Engine Advertising” by Catherine Seda.
347 pages. New Riders Publishing. Indianapolis, IN. 46240.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau or Rank For Sales

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Accurately calculating ROI in an online ad campaign
Today more than ever, the need to significantly increase your ROI (Return on Investment) in your online marketing campaigns is imperative to the overall success of your company. In order to avoid loosing valuable market share to your competition and to continually increase your brand recognition or brand awareness, boosting your ROI can have short as well as long-term beneficial effects on your overall sales, market segmentation and penetration.

To reach such goals, careful planning is everything and can save you a lot of time, frustration and, most of all, a lot of money.

The definition of ROI in online marketing campaigns
ROI is defined as the profit made from the advertising money your company spent on a particular ad campaign. At the most basic level, if somebody spends $ 3,000 on search engine advertising and if that money generates $ 12,000 in new sales and acquires new clients, this could be viewed as a positive marketing campaign and could be identified as a success.

In ROI, the ultimate goal is to increase the total volume of sales, while spending the least to acquire each and every new customer. �Fine-tuning� and adjusting all online marketing campaigns through the various search engines and reallocating your ad dollars to maximize your ROI should be your top priority in search engine marketing.

How to boost your ROI in any online marketing campaign
In order to calculate a campaign�s ROI with a reasonable amount of accuracy, you will need to have access to these five important data sets:

1. The number of clicks from visitors that used your paid listings. That number is usually provided by the search engine used in your ad campaign.

2. The amount of money you spend during a given timeframe. Many search engine marketers run daily, weekly or sometimes monthly campaigns and output ROI reports for those periods. Again, this data is provided by the search engine used during that advertising campaign.

3. The number of completed orders (or sales) from the paid listings for the specific product or service you are offering. These numbers are generated by the eCommerce functionality of your site or the eCommerce solution you are using, if provided by a third party.

4. The retail price of a product. That data should immediately be available to you, since you are the administrator of that campaign.

5. The total dollar amount in sales generated by all your orders for that product, which came directly from those paid listings. That data is available from your eCommerce solution or eCommerce third party solution.

What to do with all that data
To calculate your total ROI from that campaign is relatively easy. The simple math formulas below will guide you step by step:

� The ad revenue is the amount your campaign earned, after all your advertising costs have been determined.

The formula is Revenue minus Ad Cost

� Your CPA (Cost per Acquisition) is the amount of money you actually spent to get each sale in your campaign:

The formula is Ad Cost divided by the Number of Sales

� Your final ROI is the actual profitability of your ad campaign, based on a percentage:

The formula is Ad Profit divided by Ad Cost multiplied by 100

Important notes
One word of advice: in an ideal online advertising campaign, it is strongly recommended to include all ad listings (in your titles and descriptions) and your landing pages if you happen to analyze more than one product (or more than one keyword). Failing to do that could generate reports that could be useless to you, since there won�t be any accurate way of tracking which ad sold which product.

You can set up as many reports as the number of search engines you are using, since they should all be computed separately for maximum accuracy. If you prefer, you could also organize your reports by product only, or by specific keyword.

A little imagination or flexibility can go a long way in truly maximizing the overall value of all your reports.

Conclusion
Significantly boosting the overall ROI of any online marketing campaign is easy if you follow the steps given in this article. Implementing such steps will have a drastic difference in the overall return on investment of your ad campaigns.

Since search engine marketing represents such an important part of online marketing today, carefully analyzing and implementing the ROI reporting model above should significantly increase your market share and profitability of your online marketing efforts.

Additionally, and for maximum results, search engine marketers are encouraged to read more on Bid Management Tools and how they can help you optimize the ROI on all your online ad campaigns.

Reference:
“Search Engine Advertising” by Catherine Seda.
347 pages. New Riders Publishing. Indianapolis, IN. 46240.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

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Identifying your Niche
The Internet has become a valuable source of information and purchasing tool for today�s consumer. With the click of a mouse you can find almost anything from products to services on the web, and you can shop for the best prices and values all hours of the day from the convenience of your own home. For some of these same reasons, mail order businesses are also on the rise with consumers finding better values from companies that don�t have the overhead associated with a storefront.

With everything at the consumers� fingertips, the home business owner can also benefit from today�s market culture. Just as consumers can shop from their living rooms and kitchens, business owners can conduct business in the convenience of their own homes. If you are looking to set your own hours, have less commuting time, and enjoy the general freedoms of working for yourself, starting a home business may be right for you.

One important business plan to attend to when you first start developing a home business is to invest time in finding your niche.

So what does this mean, finding your niche? Identifying a niche is about finding a distinct segment of consumer interest, then capitalizing on it. It means finding that particular spot in the business world where you can stand out amongst others. For example there may be hundreds of booksellers out there, but how many specialize in books on a particular interest of yours? If your home business focuses on selling books, you may be competing with the hundreds of other sellers. But if your home business focuses on selling books about outdoor sports, you may find yourself in direct competition with fewer businesses.

Now that you know what a niche is, how do you go about identifying yours? You can start by asking your self a few important questions:

What am I good at?

Take an inventory of your skills. Are you a good mechanic? Are you a wiz with home decorating? Do your friends all come to you when they have computer problems to fix? Do you know almost everything there is to know about a particular topic? Find the things you already have some skill in, and start a list. You may be surprised where your talents lie.

What do I enjoy doing?

What things do you love to do so much that you would probably do them whether there was a profit involved or not? The best place to start with this question is to look at your hobbies. These are often the things you pay a fairly significant amount of money to be involved in. Why not check it out to see if you can make a profit at these very same things? Starting a home business can take a lot of time and effort, and having a passion for the focus of your business can be a great source of the stamina necessary to make it through the difficulties in the beginning.

What is there a need for?

After you jot down what you are good at and what you love to do, it�s time to assess the market for these things. Are you always looking for supplies for your hobby, but can�t ever seem to find what you need? It�s very likely others are having the same difficulty, and a home business that supplies this need would be very well received by this segment of the market. Or maybe you love to decorate your kids� birthday cakes, and your neighbors would rather pick theirs up at the local grocery store but can�t stand the small selection. This is a market for which you already have the skills and interest to meet the needs.

—–Side Bar—–
If you are planning to do your business entirely on the Internet, one great tool you can use to check whether there is market for your idea is the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

You simply enter the keyword that people might use to search for your product and it�ll return the number of times that term was searched on last month. Amazing isn�t it?
—–Side Bar—–

But don�t be afraid of markets where you may have some skill, but have a lot to learn. As long as you have the willingness to put time and effort into becoming an expert in your niche, you will be able to develop the specialization you need to be a leader in the market.

Once you answer these questions and find the distinct area that will set your business apart from others, you have identified your niche and are ready to develop your home business.

Author:
Vishal Rao

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Writing SEO Copy – 8 Steps to Success
We all know that the lion’s share of web traffic comes through the search engines. We also know that keywords and links to your site are the two things that affect your ranking in the search engines. Your keywords tell the search engines what you do, and the inbound links tell them how important you are. This combination is what determines your relevance. And relevance is what the search engines are after.

There’s a lot of information around about how to incorporate keyword phrases into your HTML meta tags. But that’s only half the battle. You need to think of these tags as street-signs. That’s how the search engines view them. They look at your tags and then at your copy. If the keywords you use in your tags aren’t used in your copy, your site won’t be indexed for those keywords.

But the search engines don’t stop there. They also consider how often the keyword phrase is used on the page.

To put it simply, if you don’t pepper your site with your primary keywords, you won’t appear in the search results when a potential customer searches for those keywords.

But how do you write keyword-rich copy without compromising readability?

Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s the visitors that buy your product or service, not search engines.

By following these 8 simple guidelines, you’ll be able to overhaul the copy on your website ensuring it’s agreeable to both search engines and visitors.

1) Categorise your pages

Before writing, think about the structure of your site. If you haven’t built your site yet, try to create your pages around key offerings or benefits. For example, divide your Second Hand Computers site into separate pages for Macs, and PCs, and then segment again into Notebooks, Desktops, etc. This way, you’ll be able to incorporate very specific keyword phrases into your copy, thereby capturing a very targeted market. If you’re working on an existing site, print out each page and label it with its key point, offering, or benefit.

2) Find out what keywords your customers are searching for

Go to www.wordtracker.com and subscribe for a day (this will only cost you about AUD$10). Type in the key points, offerings, and benefits you identified for each page, and spend some time analysing what words customers use when they’re searching for these things. These are the words you’ll want to use to describe your product or service. (Make sure you read WordTracker’s explanation of their results.)

3) Use phrases, not single words

Although this advice isn’t specific to the web copy, it’s so important that it’s worth repeating here. Why? Well firstly, there’s too much competition for single keywords. If you’re in computer sales, don’t choose “computers” as your primary keyword. Go to Google and search for “computers” and you’ll see why� Secondly, research shows that customers are becoming more search-savvy � they’re searching for more and more specific strings. They’re learning that by being more specific, they find what they’re looking for much faster. Ask yourself what’s unique about your business? Perhaps you sell cheap second hand computers? Then why not use “cheap second hand computers” as your primary keyword phrase. This way, you’ll not only stand a chance in the rankings, you’ll also display in much more targeted searches. In other words, a higher percentage of your site’s visitors will be people after cheap second hand computers. (WordTracker’s results will help you choose the most appropriate phrases.)

4) Pick the important keyword phrases

Don’t include every keyword phrase on every page. Focus on one or two keyword phrases on each page. For your Macs page, focus on “cheap second hand macs”. For the PCs page, focus on “cheap second hand pcs”, etc.

5) Be specific

Don’t just say “our computers”. Wherever you would normally say “our computers”, ask yourself if you can get away with saying “our cheap second hand Macs” or “our cheap second hand PCs”. If this doesn’t affect your readability too badly, it’s worth doing. It’s a fine balance though. Remember, your site reflects the quality of your service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your service�

6) Use keyword phrases in links

Although you shouldn’t focus on every keyword phrase on every page, it’s a good idea to link your pages together with text links. This way, when the search engines look at your site, they’ll see that the pages are related. Once again, the more text links the better, especially if the link text is a keyword phrase. So on your “Cheap Second Hand Macs” page, include a text link at the bottom to “Cheap Second Hand PCs”. If you can manage it without affecting readability, also include one within the copy of the page. For example, “As well as providing cheap second hand Macs, we sell high quality cheap second hand PCs”. TIP: If you don’t want your links to be underlined and blue, include the following in your CSS file:

Then format the HTML of each link as follows:

As well as providing cheap second hand Macs, we sell high quality cheap second hand pcs/font>.

7) Use keyword phrases in headings

Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site, so to do search engines. This means headings play a big part in how the search engines will categorise your site. Try to include your primary keyword phrases in your headings. In fact, think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of the site because it will help customers scan read.

Test keyword phrase density

Once you’ve made a first pass at the copy, run it through a density checker to get some metrics. Visit http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php and type in the domain and keyword phrase you want to analyse. It’ll give you a percentage for all the important parts of your page, including copy, title, meta keywords, meta description, etc. The higher the density the better. Generally speaking, a density measurement of at least 3-5% is what you’re looking for. Any less, and you’ll probably need to take another pass.

Follow these guidelines, and you’ll be well on your way to effective SEO copy.

Just remember, don’t overdo it. It’s not easy to find the balance between copy written for search engines and copy written for customers. In many cases, this balance will be too difficult to achieve without professional help. Don’t worry, though. If you’ve already performed your keyword analysis, a professional website copywriter should be able to work your primary keyword phrases into your copy at no extra charge.

Author Bio:
Glenn Murray heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.divinewrite.com for further details.

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