Organic search or SEO is most efficient when built directly into your company’s website.  Inserting keywords or phrases into your company’s website, combined with an easy to navigate page allows your organic rankings to climb.  These rankings allow your site to appear at the top of search engines, which gets the most traffic.  While you do not have to pay directly to get results you do have to invest in your website.  Time or money well spent gives long lasting results, proper SEO has little upkeep and after an initial invest does not cost you addition money.  Long term goals for the lifetime of your websites content are best for SEO.  Investing the initial time and money builds traffic over time and enables your organic presence to climb.

Paid advertising or PPC involves paying money for every time a customer clicks on your ad.  Businesses are able to set a budget and build campaigns around keywords or phrases that their target market would search.  Your ads appear based on your quality scores.  Steady monitoring your keywords is very important as poorly performing keywords drag your quality scores down.  PPC campaigns can have an immediate effect on your businesses traffic.  Unlike SEO, PPC requires constant funding, when you stop paying your ads stop appearing.

Implementing both PPC and SEO to your company’s marketing strategy can really bring great traffic to your site.  A solid foundation from your SEO greatly helps your PPC campaign.  Even the best PPC campaign needs a foundation to work from.  Once your ad gets clicked if your site is not optimized you may see high click-through rates with no conversions.  This will lead to a decline in your quality scores.  Though you can have a simple site and get success from PPC the better your SEO is the stronger your PPC campaign can become.

The flexibility of a PPC campaign allows for constant refining and testing to get the best results.  If you aren’t willing to put the time into managing your account you may not get your desired results.  This flexibility enables the business to continually change their account as new products and services become available to get immediate awareness.

Whether you choose SEO, PPC or both without the effort of time or money to have someone manage it for you, success will not be easy.  These tools when used together provide companies a great opportunity to effectively reach out to their target markets, and give a great return on investment.

As more people become firmly connected with the internet the need for online marketing has become vital. There are many ways businesses connect to the web. Online ordering, advertising, information, and customer support are globally accessible with a click. With so many options it’s hard to know what’s going to work for your business. One of the best tools for search engine marketing is Google Adwords.

By using a PPC account, companies have the ability to market their products and services to people already in the buying mindset. Putting your company in front of people searching for your product is an obvious necessity. PPC accounts for three basic functions, to create stronger branding for their product, general traffic to their website and to get specific conversions.

In order to rank high it is very important to have good quality scores. Your quality scores effect where your ad ranks and how much you pay per click. Click through rates are the most important element to a quality score. These rates are the number of times your ad is shown over your ad clicks. The more your ad goes un-clicked the lower your click through rates become. To keep your rates high there are a couple of basic strategies to apply. There are basic strategies to help your click through rates, like ad testing, which is rotating your ads in order to find the best performing ads. If a certain ad is not bringing you traffic than you should consider revising the weak ad or removing it altogether. The amount of keywords you use should be based on the number of ads desired. If you flood your keywords per ad, than your ads become too generic. People will glance at them and not click due to the relevancy.

Making sure that you are using the best network to target your keywords is also very important. If you are looking to get specific conversions try to avoid the display network which is typically only used for branding. When entering keywords you can choose from broad, phrase or exact match. By using broad match, Google can show your ad for synonyms of your keywords. This can cause your ads to show for things that you did not intend. Use exact or phrase match to ensure that only your targeted market clicks your ads. This will increase the click through rate and ultimately sales. Do not duplicate keywords, this will cause you to compete against yourself. Even if one of your ads gets clicked, the other won’t which will poorly affect your quality scores.

Having time to manage your account is essential to its success. Monitor your day of the week report. This shows you exactly which days are better for your ads. If your ads are performing very well Monday through Friday, and not performing well Saturday and Sunday then decrease your spend on those poorer performing days and put the spend to days that perform better. Make sure that you set up ad extensions. Ad extensions are eligible to show if your ad ranks in the top three. These extensions make your ad bigger and allow better access to your site. Another important tool is conversion tracking. This tracks which keywords actually lead to conversions, showing you which ads to focus more of your attention on.

Time is a huge factor to account success. It is hard for many subscribers because they also have a business to run. This is why Google started their Partnership and Certification programs. It allows third party vendors to give customers specific attention that their account needs to bring the best success. By choosing professional management you are able to focus more on your business and less on the schematics behind Adwords success.

With the Social Plug-in Tracking in Google Analytics, you will be able to see the influence of not only +1 metrics, but also tweets, Facebook likes, Facebook sends and more.

The reports available for this metric are Social Actions, Social Pages and Social Engagement. Included is time spent on site, page views, bounce rate and more.

This is exciting news because it feels like it is one step closer to more efficient and accurate ROI calculations through social media.

With this new release, you’ll be able to (amongst other things):

• Manage Site Links
• Improved MCC Management
• Improved Negatives, Placements and Audiences Management

If you’re neck deep in AdWords everyday, you’re already using Editor, so go grab 9.0!

There’s nothing that Google Loves more than April Fool’s Day.

The Google Blog post goes into great detail about +1, but if you just want the quick vid, here it is:

Maybe the funniest comment I’ve read so far was from a reader at Marketing Pilgrim.  He said:

Any moment now, Bing will launch +2!

Here’s a bit more from Google – http://www.google.com/+1/button/

What do you think?  Is this another Buzz Flop… or the next Social button phenom?

Google has added a “block all sites” feature that you can enable if you never want to see certain sites again.

On their blog, Google explain a bit more about why they are implementing this option:

You’ve probably had the experience where you’ve clicked a result and it wasn’t quite what you were looking for. Many times you’ll head right back to Google. Perhaps the result just wasn’t quite right, but sometimes you may dislike the site in general, whether it’s offensive, pornographic or of generally low quality. For times like these, you’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.”

Of course if you want those sites back later, there is the option to do so.

They report that this change will afffect almost 12% of the searches out there.  Was your website affected?

The basics are that spammed links and spammed sites are given less value than good quality links found in content that people are looking for.

Consensus?  We thought this update should have happened a long time ago.

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