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Pay per click or PPC, is a great way of advertising your online business and can reach a large worldwide audience of potential customers. But it’s not easy to keep up with all the latest developments in the field of PPC services and if you slip behind then your next campaign may not be as effective as that of your rivals. The best way to ensure success is to work with a PPC agency so you won’t end up wasting your money by going about it the wrong way.

Different Targeting

Traditionally, selecting the right keywords has been the key to PPC management. However, today’s advertisers want to get more specific in the visitors that their advertisements target. Locally targeted advertising has become a lot more popular over the last few years. It’s good for your ads to be seen worldwide, but there are a lot of people who still prefer to deal with a local business. By targeting local ads or even people on smartphones in a target area, you can bring in more revenue for your advertising dollar than with traditional PPC campaigns.

The search results are not only being targeted more towards the local area, but so are the ads. Companies in the past focused on running campaigns that only offer cut-rate prices to try and get a consumer to their site.  But instead of running a promotion to tempt a consumer to a company website, the ad could deliver a personalized message with extra information such as the nearest outlet, opening times and a map or directions from wherever the viewer is located. It would be effectively the same ad, but so much more user friendly and much more likely to attract customers onto your physical premises.

Let’s be Friends

Social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, are very popular on the internet at the moment, and experts agree that their popularity will only continue to rise.  So it only makes sense that the PPC services will be looking for ways to target the users of these sites with advertisements. A lot of PPC management companies are trying to find the best way to reach their targeted audience on these sites. The amount of information stored about the users of these sites can really help in this department. The sites know where the users live so you can more easily target them with your campaigns.

Less for your Money

Over the last few years, the cost of a PPC campaign has increased steadily. The cost per click has climbed upwards and the merger of Bing and Yahoo in October 2010 pushed it up by another 15% in a short amount of time. If you haven’t run a campaign for a while, you’ll likely receive a larger bill than you may have expected from your PPC agency. You’ll now have the choice of looking around to find some extra monies to pay for it or look at less expensive methods to achieve the same results. This might include cheaper keywords, different search engines or trying to get more qualified clicks.

These new developments in the PPC management area only add more different choices for your next ad campaign. To avoid confusion and make sure that you get the best results, consult with your PPC agency before you start to make sure you are on the right track.

For a lot of us, our websites are both a source of pride and an income to us. And whether it’s a small extra income that helps to buy the nicer things in life or the main source of income for a large business, it’s important to try and increase profits by attracting as many visitors as possible to your site. One of the best ways to get new visitors to your site is to improve the search engine rankings with SEO placement techniques.

The majority of the people who perform an internet search will click on the top ranked pages, and only go to the lower results if the top few are not what they’re looking for. To maximize the visitors to your site you should aim to get your website as near to the top of the search rankings for your desired keywords as you can. There are a number of organic SEO techniques that aim to achieve that result for you.

One of the most productive ways of improving the popularity of your website is to improve your content and make it interesting to your target market. Having great, error free and interesting content will attract repeat visitors who are more likely to become customers. If these repeat visitors value your content then they’ll link to it and the more links you have the greater your organic SEO ranking.

But having great content is only half of the battle.  It doesn’t matter how good it is if potential visitors can’t find you. Take some time to go through your site properly and try to make sure that it can all be indexed by the search engines. Check out all the titles, text and any content tags to ensure that they contain all of your desired keywords.

You might also want to think about alternative methods of improving your rankings. This might be link building, where you use third party websites to link back to your own either as a reciprocal agreement or you might need to pay for links on some sites. Just try to avoid using any of the link spamming sites, as that can result in your site being blacklisted by the search engines. Legitimate links from trusted third party sites are a good indication of the relevance of a website, so you’ll want as many of those as you can get. Over the last few years, the search engines have started to take notice of the rise of social networking sites. Links to your website from Twitter or Facebook will also help to improve your SEO placement results.

For the best results, you’ll want to consult a SEO professional to work with you on an organic SEO campaign. This is one sure-fire way to achieve a great search result placement using SEO techniques. It will cost to use the services of a SEO professional, but the top search ranking results and an increase in visitors and sales will more than pay for the investment.

Your company website is an opportunity to advertise your products and services to a vast number of potential customers around the world. Creating and maintaining a popular website is a great way to increase your profits. The hard part is making sure that potential visitors can find your site easily from a search engine. As most visitors only click on the top few results after a search, you’ll want your website to be as near to the top of the list as possible. The best way to achieve this is to use search engine optimization techniques that make sure the search engines rank your site highly.

Basically, these techniques change your website so that it is friendlier to the search engines. If you are looking to do this on a budget you might be tempted to try some of these yourself, but you’ll likely get better results by letting a search engine marketing service do the work for you.

One of the most important parts of any SEO strategy is deciding which keywords or phrases you are going to concentrate on. Some keywords are really popular with searchers, but also have a lot of competition. You might be better trying to avoid using these and using less common terms that are still relevant to your business. These might not get as many searches, but there will be less competition for top rankings. Have a look at the various internet tools and use them to determine which keywords you are going to target.

Once you have determined what you want to target, you will need to amend all of your content that so it references those words and phrases. The key here is to mention them frequently in the title and headings, but only do so by using natural language. Avoid the temptation to overdo it and fall into the trap of keyword stuffing. The search engines frown on this and they can blacklist you if you are caught doing it.

Now that the keywords are used properly throughout your site, you will want to improve the content and make it interesting and relevant to any visitors. Having great content is a really good way to get lots of people browsing your site, and some of them might even link to it. The more links you have, the better your site is ranked. You could also look at using the link directory sites to increase the number of links to your site. Some of these are free, and others you need to pay for. An experienced SEO professional would be able to advise which link directories are worth paying for.

A good search engine marketing agency or consultant would be able to advise you how to achieve this and move your website near the top of the pile. If you think about your website as an advertisement for your company, then consider your SEO spending as an advertising investment. If the process works, you should be able to measure your increase in visitors and income through your website and compare to the cost. If you have done it right you will have made more than you invested.

Promoting websites is a competitive business. One minute you implement a successful campaign and your website is in the top results for your desired keywords. But your rivals can also do everything that you have done to improve the rankings of your website and if you’re not careful, you can lose all of your hard earned gains and slip back down again. It’s a never-ending battle, but one that you can win if you stick to these winning SEO strategies.

The first lesson that any SEO professional will tell you is that your content is the most important part of your website. If you have a dull website with boring content you simply won’t get many repeat visitors, even if you’re listed at the top of the rankings.  (They may come the first time, but they won’t likely come back.)  And since repeat visitors are those who are most likely to link to your page, you’ll need to do everything in your power to bring them back.  Having interesting, relevant content is the first step to that.

Make sure that you check your content when it’s first posted for spelling and grammar errors, and then check that any links on your pages work on a regular basis. There’s nothing that puts off new visitors quicker than avoidable errors. You might consider checking regularly that your content is still relevant to your visitors and the update or remove content that hasn’t been visited for a while. If some of your content is particularly popular, you should create more like it, and expand your website to include it.

Once you have the content under control, your next task will be to optimize your website for the search engines. There are many ways to do this, but to start with you can ensure that the search engines can index your site and that all of your pages contain the desired keywords. Other great SEO strategies would include building links and referrals from external sites back to your site, but only use reputable linking sites even if you have to pay to add the links.

The rise of social media has led to a number of new SEO strategies that use posts on those sites to promote your own. Most search engines now use Twitter tweets and Facebook status updates as part of the ranking process, so you might consider consulting with a SEO professional about the best ways to take advantage of the new opportunities that these sites present.

One great way to use these sites for cheap search engine optimization would be to host a competition for people to link to you. The only cost to you is the prize and you’ll get the benefit of a whole range of potential new visitors and inexpensive advertising.

If you are not confident with this aspect of promoting your website, you might want to consider outsourcing the work to an experienced SEO professional. This might be more expensive than doing it on your own, but cheap search engine optimization is a cost effective way to get more bang for your advertising bucks.

When you run a website, the main purpose of it is to attract visitors. When you run a business, you want as many visitors as possible and then you want to convert as many visitors as you can to buyers. One great way of increasing visitors is to run an effective advertising campaign. Pay per click, or PPC, advertising is a great way of getting your site noticed by placing paid advertisements on relevant result pages on search engines or websites that somehow relate to your area of business.

One measure of the success of your last PPC campaign is the return on investment. This is the increase in visitors and sales that result from your campaign. Ideally you want to increase your revenue by the maximum amount while spending the minimum to run the promotion. However, before you cut costs, you should do some careful analytics so it doesn’t backfire on you.

You’ll need to sit down and do some planning before you embark on your next PPC campaign. While it’s possible to get good results from a campaign done on the fly, a carefully planned and managed campaign will always produce better results. You can run it yourself, but you will probably be more successful if you run it in conjunction with a PPC management company, who will have the skills and experience required to maximize the success of your campaign.

The choice of keywords that you use for a search engine PPC campaign is very important. The best way to decide on them is to analyze current search trends and make a decision based on the cost of a keyword combination, the number of rival advertisers and the frequency of use. This is one area where a PPC management company can really help you on the path to PPC optimization. The best combination is one that is popular with searchers, but has no rivals bidding on it.  This will allow you to get relevant keywords for you site at an attractive price.

Remember that your campaign is not set in stone once you have started it. Continue to analyze the metrics and watch the trends. If a particular search term is not producing the results you’d hoped for, then you can simply drop it, or switch the emphasis to another term that might be more successful. A good PPC management company will be able to guide you in this area, and make sure that you’re not needlessly spending your money on keywords that aren’t producing results.

One thing that many people don’t think about is the use of negative keywords in a PPC campaign. There might be keywords that are common to your industry, but you know that the visitors who arrive using them are not likely to make a purchase.  For instance, if you sell paper supplies on your site, you might use “free paper sample supply” as a negative keyword, and anyone searching for free samples will not be directed to your site.  A lot of these keywords will be obvious, but they could change during the course of your campaign due to outside influences, and you’ll have to be ready to quickly make adjustments.

Running a good PPC campaign is a complicated business. When it all goes according to your plans you can achieve a great return on your advertising investment, but you need to be able to adjust your campaign quickly as it goes along. Using an experienced PPC management company could save you a lot of time and energy and give you far greater results.

It’s been a GREAT year and…
Exults wants to celebrate the Holidays with YOU (and some wine)!

Join top interactive marketers for a night of networking, classic car history, wine education and charity raffles and auctions at SFIMA’s 2010 Holiday Wine Event sponsored by Exults.

Each year SFIMA strives to host the Holiday Wine Event at a more interesting location than the last and the Fort Lauderdale Antique Car Museum certainly takes the cake. Between the antique Packards dating back to 1909 to the Automotive and Franklin D. Roosevelt Libraries, the museum is a destination for some of the World’s most avid car collectors.

Internet marketing Guru Tables will be sprinkled throughout the event. Focused on SEM (search engine marketing), Exults professionals will be stationed at each Guru Table to answer your most pertinent questions about constructing successful search engine marketing campaigns.

Admission is $39.00 at the door:
http://SFIMAHolidayWineEvent.com/register/

For more details about the SFIMA Holiday Wine Event and the happenings of the evening please visit SFIMAHolidayWineEvent.com, an event website developed by Video Sponsor EasySites.com.

From myself and on behalf of the Exults Family we wish you a wonderful Holiday Season.

We truly look forward to seeing you there and seeing you achieve a prosperous New Year!

Sincerely,
Zach Hoffman
Exults – Search Engine Operator, Inc.

Exults is proud to be a platinum sponsor for the Florida Direct Marketing Association (FDMA) Annual Summit that will take place on May 20, 2010 at the Westin Hotel in Fort Lauderdale. Business leaders in Fort Lauderdale will be attending the FDMA summit to watch corporate case studies from South Florida Bank – Bank Atlantic, Xerox Global Services, and Pitney Bowes. Strategic sessions will include social media management on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter,.and direct marketing strategies.

The day will begin with a presentation by Matthew Julian, Direct of Direct Response Marketing for Pitney Bowes, who will discuss the landscape, trends, and future of customer communications. Tom Triozzi from Bank Atlantic will follow Julian and deliver his insights on the latest trends on marketing and the community. The morning presentations will conclude with Susan Kelly, Vice President of Enterprise Marketing Services for Xerox Global, sharing her thoughts on understanding your customer to achieve loyalty and advocacy.

The afternoon’s presentations and workshops will focus on the latest methods to engage customers with social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Utilizing social media has quickly become an effective strategy to drive Internet traffic, increase branding and generate sales.

CEO of Exults, Zach Hoffman, announced, “Exults is proud to participate in the FDMA Summit along with business experts like Matthew Julian, Tom Triozzi, and Susan Kelly. Businesses will grow to the next level when implementing direct marketing and internet marketing strategies that have been proven to work.” Hoffman went on to say, “Exults is dedicated to providing South Florida businesses with educational platforms to learn about marketing services and the impact they can have on businesses large and small. Increases in sales and maximizing ROI doesn’t just happen – effective marketing and management makes it happen – so supporting FDMA in their educational efforts seemed like a natural fit.”

So you like the simplicity of uploading video files to YouTube and using the embed code to display the video on your website? Me too!

I don’t like the reality that comes with this level of simplicity provided by YouTube.

If your website is in any way a for-profit site you certainly have competitors and if you embed a YouTube video in your website you’ll end up introducing your prospects to your competition through YouTube’s convenient “related videos“. Worst of all the introduction will take place on YOUR website. The other fall back about using YouTube’s embed code is that if your visitors click the video once it has started playing they will click-thru to the video’s page on YouTube. That’s a huge visitor distraction, especially after you worked so hard to get them there!

The following example shows:
– how to stop related videos on embedded YouTube videos
– how to stop click-throughs to YouTube in embedded YouTube videos

This is how it ‘could’ be done. I’m not suggesting that you mess with YouTube’s perfectly coded embed. It’s already perfect, just leave it alone!

CLICK IMAGE TO SEE IT LARGER.

We found a hot Google PageRank tool that utilizes a unique algorithm to predict the future value of Google Page Rank on your website. Google PR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank ), is the Google patented algorithm named after one of their co-founders Larry Page. The Google PR algorithm has helped set the Google search engine apart from other search engines. The PageRank algorithm takes in multiple factors to grade the relevance of your website from a scale of 0-10. The PageRank tool is available on your browser by installing the Google Toolbar and choosing from “Toolbar Options” to have the “PageRank” display.

To improve PageRank takes a lot of consistent work and effort and can be established by activities improving both onsite and offsite architecture. Key factors that contribute to the onsite relevance of your website and to improve PageRank include, but are not limited to, relevant meta-tags, optimized content, properly structured image references, proper file infrastructure, and relevant in-bound content links. There are additional factors that Google may use to determine PageRank but you will find that things change over time. Offsite factors include links inbound to your site (the relevance and PageRank of the source of these inbound links), publishing content throughout the internet that links back into the relevant content of your website, hitting the viral/social-sphere with your content and creating relevant inbound links, publishing your website content in additional media types such as audio and video, updating content to provide the search engines with fresh information, and additional factors which are ever changing as well. The scoring methods of the Google PageRank tool will continue to evolve as the internet and search marketplace grow. Check out the innovative Google PageRank prediction tool at http://www.seomastering.com/pagerank-prediction.php.

Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques will be the base to establishing a solid PageRank and to potentially improve PageRank. A comprehensive Search Engine Optimization strategy should include creating relevant meta-tags, fresh and unique content, image alt tags, file architecture and proper onsite conventions, as well as offsite conventions which include creating back-links, content syndication, and alerting the search engines you are relevant to a specific topic. Search Engine Optimization continues to evolve and is a very technical and complex science, so there are components which lie outside of the above breakdown. Using the Google PageRank predictive model tool we provided, you should be able to see that proactive SEO is occurring on your website property and as a result you should see increasing search engine rankings in the near future. Please bear in mind that this tool is simply a best guess at what your Google PageRank may be in the future and should only be used as an estimate. This is not the end all answer as to whether your Search Engine Optimization techniques are effective.

Insightful article in regards to current trends in the marketplace, and highlighting video adoption and potential moves social sites may take to capitalize on their popularity in the near future:

Social Media Is the New Mass Media