Pay Per Click Advertising - where to start?

If you are fairly new to Online Marketing i.e. because you have just built a website for your business and now need to get traffic to your site, where do you start.

It can take a year plus to start getting good search engine positions and thus you might need to get instant traffic and custom online. In this case, Pay Per Click advertising can be your best bet.

By Pay Per Click it literally means you only pay if someone clicks your ad and goes to your website. If you look on Google on a search results page, you'll see these ads on the top and right side of the page. These are sponsored results. You literally bid what you are willing to for certain phrases.

There are 3 main options for online PPC.

1. Google Adwords (The best in terms of the most structured and developed and best reach online).
2. Facebook Advertising (Can be much cheaper than Google Adwords but less refined).
3. Bing.com PPC (Is a very new system from Microsoft and different to get any real significant traffic right now. This will change over time though, quite likely.

My advice is to start off with Google Adwords but with a small budget. Ensure you carefully set your monthly budget to cap the expenditure. You can read more about Adwords PPC and training here..

Twitter site is down - site crashed?

Well, I have heard that twitter has been under attack for a while by hackers but it seems maybe they have finally succeeded. Twiter ha snow been down for a few hours (6th August 2009) and there seems little information online and from twitter about when it will be back.

Is twitter can go down then it does not bode well. Watch this space and we'll keep you updated. I have tried caling twitter direct for more information but culd not get through.

Twitter is down but I am sure they will be back very soon!

Analysing competitors links

As part of promoting your own website, one way to work out good link opportunities and good sites to build partnerships with can be to analyse your competitors inbound links. So how can you do this?

A very easy way to analyse your competitor links is to do a Google search and enter the term:
link and then the URL you are analysing. An example is:

link:www.cuba-culture.com

if you dealt with holidays in Cuba and wanted to analyse the site www.cuba-culture.com. To analyse the links on Yahoo then you would enter into a Yahoo search:

linkdomain:www.cuba-culture.com

Simply replace the URL cuba-culture with the URL you want to analyse. Once you then start going through the links that go to competitor sites you will start to see partner sites you might also want to consider, article submission sites which seem to work well and the online Directories which you might also want to consider.

Google Ocean and taking a few minutes break from SEO

SEO and eMarketing in general is very time consuming and building your sites value up does not happen over days or weeks, but months. So, taking a few minutes out to enjoy what the Internet has to offer, is sometimes as important as just using the Internet for work.

Apart from my favourite sites whereby:

• I order far too much from amazon.co.uk and play.com
• Enjoy learning about the stock market via the Naked Trader
• Am forced by my wife to check her Belly Dance website :(
• Checking the latest on BBC's HardTalk
• and always booking new holidays

I also cannot help but be fascinated by Google Earth's latest addition - Google Ocean. If you have not already tried it out it is worth doing so. Dive under the ocean and experience 20 layers of visualisation and see what ocean planners see. This is an amazing feature. The only question is - what next from Google. It seems as though Google are taking over the world.

Online Marketing in a recession

Paul Symonds, UK SEO and eMarketing expert:

A lot more eMarketing news and ideas coming soon especially for companies ot market in a recession.

URL length problems and issues

If you are adding a link to some forum signatures or on other sources, one problem you might have is that your URLs are too long and that the end of the URL gets chopped off in searches.

One of the tools I came across recently which I think is excellent for overcoming this problem is 'Tiny' URLs. I do not work for them and have no relation to Tiny urls but I just think they are an excellent idea and thus am happy to share the idea with you.

Tiny URLs are excellent and incredibly easy to do. All you do is add your URL into a box, click 'Enter' and then they create a very small URL for you. If you take the URL
http://www.promarketingonline.com/adwords.htm for example, it makes it into
http://tiny.cc/fDtFA

This new URL is said to be one which will be permanent and unique and the idea seems good. I just hope that in 10 years time Tiny URLs do not suddenly become unusable. That would mean a whole load of lost links. So if my URLs are short enough I will still use the original URLs.

Online and Internet Branding

Online Branding or Internet Branding (according to which way you prefer to say it) is something which is fast gaining popularity and it is not hard to see why. Marketing online means you immediately have a window open to the world and if you get the Internet Branding right, you could do extremely well from it.

There are a number of ways to go ahead Online Branding. To start with, I would advise you to start with an overall eStrategy. There are so many possibilities with Online Branding that pre-planning could literally save you a lot of money.

Once you are ready for Internet Branding the first and most obvious way to go about it is directly on your website. Getting the logo right, positioning your logo appropriately site-wide, ensuring your site is branded as a whole.

Then there is branding through search results. With the Triple Branding Effect (Symonds 2008) you can really gain a presence to open up traffic opportunities for your site. Getting on the top of Page 1 in Google Results for Adwords, Google Local Business Listing and the organic search results, will give you a triple presence on the every same page. As you can imagine, this is powerful branding and very effective.

You can learn more about Online Branding from promarketingonline.co.uk

Theming and SEO

Have you ever wondered why some search results are indented as shown in the image below? Well, this is called Theming and in SEO Theming is an important technique.

Theming is actually something which will occur naturally if your sites theme runs down through the site with a natural architecture. So what is theming?

Theming is where you have a common theme which runs through the site. On the above example if you type in 'Bristol SEO' into google.co.uk, ProMarketingOnline.com will often come 1st or 2nd and also with a result underneath it which is indented. This is achieved by having subpages which also use the words you use on the Home-Page and in the Home-Page Meta Tags. In other words, there is consistency throughout the site.

So to get indented search results think more about theming and how the information flows through your site.

Google Chrome to wipe out SERPs?

Some of you might have noticed that starting from a few months ago, google's search page predicts the text you are writing to try and auto-complete the phrase you may be looking for, based on the current search results. There is also a small number of the amount of results that google could display for you on the right hand side of the drop down option bar.

Google's Chrome has gone one step further - including the search bar within the actual address bar. Chrome has had a rapid rise to fame and has been the quickets Google product out of Beta, with over 2 million followers, accodring to Google themselves. There are obviously improvements to be made along the way, considering the fact that it is a brand new concept in browsing, and the direct competition - Microsoft Internet Explorer - is about to release explorer version 8, and this is only from continued testing and correction of problems.

At the moment, a user can write in Chrome's address bar as if it was the search bar, and google with then throw up a SERP, or in some occasions, a result directly. Google is collecting and storing a massive amount of data about search through custom search, Universal search, Google wiki, Adwords and AdSense, and is in the most powerful position with regards retuning search results - even now, certain results are given to you based on your search history, or are "personalised".

I would not be surprised to see in the future (maybe not too distant) to see that the search term you type in change directly into the top result of a SERP - as this is what is considered to be the most relevant result. There is even talk of Chrome being pre-installed on certain computers, almost as an OS which would mean even less use of Google toolbar or Google homepage to show SERPs - bad news for numbers 3-10.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the clever people at eyetools have also shown that 100% of users in a controlled test look at position 1, 2 and 3 for longest and first. This means that people expect to find their answer to their search term in the first 3 results. If Chrome decides which one to show you in the toolbar, too, then this means SEO as we know it is changing.

Never more has conversion tracking, maintianing users onsite for longer, and "real" marketing and sales been more important. What's the use of having huge amounts of traffic if your sales skills or online presentation is terrible? Please feel free to comment on your thoughts and idea regarding this new possible shift.

David Brydon is an expert in SEO and runs Barcelona SEO. The company also offers comprehensive in-house SEO Training in Barcelona.

Google Insights

In case you have not yet noticed, Google have introduced what is a fascinating facility which goes by the name of Google Insights and which is in Beta version at the time of writing. This new tool is invaluable if you have a business online and use Adwords and want to further utilise your website.

Google Insights enables you to view a varity of information including:

• Seasonality and search numbers.
• Geographical Distribution for Google searches.
• Search volumes by time, trend and much more.

The statistics available to you potentially could be overwhelming at first but with time and effort there are some extremely handy stats available. The seasonal trends for example can be extremely useful if you for example work with travel and want to spend higher budgets on phrases which change seasonally. Google Insights is free and personally I find ivery useful and thus recommend it.