PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is something I’ve been dabbling in for about five years now, but it’s also something that I’ve taken time to try and understand. I’ve learned from Perry Marshall. I’ve learned from Anik Singal and Amit Mehta. I learned from Simon Leung, and I’ve learned from Glenn Livingstone. All great teachers. Heck, I even learned some tricks from Frank Kern, who loves to “Screw Google.”
But I’m definintely NOT a ninja. I’ve been able to break even, and have made it work for me in terms of building my list. I’ve found some keywords that kill for SEO and I’m using them on Yahoo. I can exponentially raise the number of optins I’m getting with the amount of spending that I do every day. So… that’s cool. Yet, I’d never call myself a PPC expert.
Most people hear the horror stories of people signing up for AdWords, not knowing what they’re doing, and coming away with a bill for thousands of dollars. So, many folks shy away. In fact, they may tell you you’re totally and completely insane for even considering PPC. Well.. perhaps. I’m the jump in and figure it out along the way type, but I learned early on to set my daily spending limit which takes the scare out of doing PPC and getting that huge bill. continue reading »
I was over at Google Reader checking out the newest SEO posts, and came across one that tickled me. It’s from Kay Dinsdale and entitled, “So, You want to be an SEO?” Kay, I feel your pain and loved your post. Put me in mind of SEO Myths and Bullsh*t’s post of last week, talking about submitting sites to search engines. (See SEO Myths and Bullsh*t) Sheesh. So much crap floating around out there that it’s no wonder people become confused.
Kay’s post rants about SEO forums where people come in posing as SEOs, and asking questions like, “What’s an H1 tag?” or “What’s a backlink?” Seriously. I mean, if you don’t know those things… you need to study WAY more, my friends.
When I first started studying SEO (and can you ever learn it all, really, eh?), I started with Web CEO’s online “university.” There’s some darned good training in there, and if you go through it all, you’ll come away with a very basic understanding of SEO. That much is really not rocket science. continue reading »
People spend so much time trying to gear their sites up to attract customers that they forget about what’s important to search spiders. They may have cool flash, awesome graphics or code that just tagged along from their free WYSIWYG HTML editor and they don’t even know about it. Did you know that these things can be daunting to search spiders?
Yep. Here are a few things you should know:
- Never use an iframe as your entire page.
Spiders ignore iframes because an iframe’s purpose is to pull in content from other websites or other pages on your own. Whatever is in the iframe appears blank to spiders. So, if your whole page is an iframe, it’s like you have no content at all! Not good. It’s OK to use an iframe, if you must, but make it only a part of the page, and use solid SEO on-page tactics for the rest of the page, and certainly content that surrounds it. continue reading »
When you think of “spam,” as it involves online business, the mind traditionally flies to email. Unsolicited bulk email or UBE is most definitely spam. In this case, the recipient never agreed to receive email from the sender, and it goes against the CAN SPAM act of 2003.
But some websites are classified as SPAM websites by search engines, as well, and this is where SEO comes in. There are definite practices that you want to avoid so that you aren’t penalized. And you will be… it’s only a matter of time.
Not only are search spiders very smart and pick this stuff up pretty readily, there are human editors out there policing these things so that the search results returned by their search engines aren’t all the same, crappy stuff that nobody really wants to see. The site in question is flagged and a real, honest-to-goodness person just comes in and nukes you right off the face of their planet… continue reading »
I was reading the SEOMoz blog today from my Google Reader, when I see a very cool article on marketing articles to Google News, appropriately entitled “Getting Started Publishing on Google News” by Sam Niccolls. Did you know that Google News gets about a billion clicks each year?
Apparently it can’t keep up with CNN, the NY Times, and Yahoo News, but Google is no slacker. And here’s the thing… pretty much no matter what it is, Google just gets better at it as time goes on. Would this be a good place to pulish content? Of course!
But it’s tricky. You have to fill out an application first, which is understandable. So, you’d better have a competent writer working for your company because well… it’s Google. They want serious articles, not the run-of-the-mill drivel that you often see posing as writing online. To write for Google News, you’ll really have to be someone who’s dead sure about grammar, spelling, and writing articles — and your topic.
First realize that news items are very similar to the articles that live in the article directories online, so if you have news about your business that you can write about — that would be worthy. Or, if you have a great article about something your company is engaged in, then you probably have an article. continue reading »
