Because of this, some sneaky SEO “experts” create pages of complete gibberish that end up looking reasonable to the robots. This helps the pages rise in search engine rankings, though they have little to nothing to offer readers. The article gives the following example from one of these underhanded pages (the topic is allegedly about privacy):

Your remoteness is critical to us. To improved strengthen your remoteness we yield this notice explaining a online report practices as good as a choices we can have about a approach your report is picked up as good as used. To have this notice easy to find, we have it accessible upon a homepage as good as during each indicate where privately identifiable report might be requested.

When I find sites that read like this one, I click away in disgust. It makes no sense at all and is clearly part of the realm of sneaky SEO (why be straightforward when you can be sneaky, right?). But so far, pages like this one seem to generate results for the owners. Madrigal looked up the owner of this particular junk site and found that he or she also owns 276 other domains, most of which appear to have the same nonsense text on them.

Here’s what you need to know about this particular SEO tactic: You should NOT do it. It’s essentially a way to cheat the system and get better rankings without having to provide quality content. It means sacrificing customer trust and loyalty for a slightly better search engine position. As Madrigal notes (and as anyone who has clicked on one of these pages before can attest), it’s “ruining the Internet.” Half of a page’s readers might be robots, but robots aren’t the ones ultimately buying products and services. HUMANS are.

And consider this: Sooner or later, the robots will learn how to figure this trick out, and gibberish will no longer work as a sneaky SEO method. Google is constantly working on ways to foil those who try to get around standard SEO rules, and this is no exception.

Want success online, in SEO and in your business as a whole? Do it right the first time. Provide quality content that people can use, target your niche, and the results will follow. Maybe not as quickly as with sneaky SEO, but in the end, it’s more valuable to have customers who respect you and tell their friends about you than it is to show up high in the rankings and then disappoint those who actually click on your site.

1. Click Through Rate – This is pretty obvious; it measures how many people click on your ad. This is important since it tells you how well you’re appealing to and connecting with your audience. CTRs for online campaigns are typically pretty small (1 to 3 percent is considered decent). To do better on your CTR, test often to see what works and what doesn’t, and be as relevant as possible to the keyword search results. Entice viewers to click by following these tips for great Adwords copywriting, posted earlier this month.

2. Average Position – This is how high or low your ad shows up on the search results page. Being number one isn’t always the best; in fact, some experts suggest that being in spots two through five are ideal. Again, to get the best results here, keep testing what works and what doesn’t. Marketing is testing, and repeated testing will help you reach your ideal average position.

3. Quality Score – This is a stat that Google takes for you. It measures how well your landing page, ad and keyword relate to a specific search, also taking past performance into account. Your Quality Score helps to determine your cost per click, and the higher your score, the lower your cost. You need to keep your Quality Score between 7 and 10; to do that, make sure your landing page loads quickly, is related specifically to the keyword in question, and has a clear call to action. If your landing page isn’t adequately targeted and takes too long to load, your Quality Score will suffer.

4. Impression Share – This indicates how often your ad shows relative to the total number of searches available for the keywords you’re using. For example, if you’re Impression Share is 50 percent, then your ad is showing up for half the searches being done for your keywords. The number you want to shoot for here is at least 80 percent. Since Impression Share is made up of budget and rank, you can determine which aspect to focus on if your Impression Share needs a little kick. If you’re losing Impression Share because of budget, try to up your budget. If you’re losing because of rank, you may need to increase your bids and get more visibility for your ads.

5. Bounce Rate – Bounce rate is determined by how many people who click on your ad click through to another of your pages after that. For example, if 100 people click on your ad and end up on your landing page, but only 40 of them click to another of your pages from there (say, a link to a sales page or information page), then you have a 60% bounce rate. The goal number for bounce rate is under 40%. To keep your bounce rate low, make sure that your landing page delivers what your ad promises. Dump the clutter and stick to targeted content that’s clear and aligned with your ad copy. Make sure your page loads fast and has a call to action, as well.

6. Conversion Rate – This is the measure of how many unique visitors become buyers. A result of at least 1.25 is the target for conversion rate. This is a metric not just for your PPC campaign, but also for how well your website is optimized to really sell (and beat your competitors in the process). All of the other metrics influence this one, so be sure you do the best you can to optimize your PPC and get the best conversion rate you can get.

The metrics behind PPC results are vital for getting great results out of your campaign. Good PPC is part of online advertising success, so be sure to keep testing and tweaking your campaigns until you get the outcomes you’re looking for!

SEOPressor is a plugin that you buy, download and install to your WordPress site. It takes almost no time or effort to do (I’ve done it on a few sites, and I’m not the most tech-savvy person in the world). Once installed, SEOPressor uses an intelligent, automated program to comb through your WordPress pages. It analyzes your content and calculates your SEO score, which is then available in your dashboard. It also gives you a list of suggested changes you can make to raise your WordPress SEO score on each and every page.

The price for the SEOPressor plugin is $37, which is well within most budgets. But what really matters is, does it work? Most definitely, yes. I’ve had it installed on a few sites for a while now, and I’m seeing actual results in my search engine rankings. I haven’t been doing anything else differently, so I have to think SEOPressor is the reason for the improvement. Of course, it ONLY works in WordPress sites, so make sure your sites are WordPress before downloading and using SEOPressor.

If you try it yourself, let us know how it works for you…. We’d love to hear any feedback, good or bad, that we can share here. But so far, for our money, SEOPressor is a great, inexpensive way to optimize WordPress SEO.

1. DO realize that it’s about how much you engage your readers, not about how much you spend. Some of the best blogs are run on a shoestring budget, but they provide helpful, useful info for their readers, and as a result, they are shared across social media networks. Paying a lot for a slick page and content is useless if the readers aren’t engaged.

2. DON’T put ad copy in every blog post. As we’ve written before, you want your blog posts to have quality content that draws readers in, not be spam in disguise. Offer free information to the reader: tips, how-tos, advice, etc. Keep your corporate blogging personal and conversational. Definitely make sure the writer knows the language and knows what he or she is talking about; after all, they’re representing your company in the blogosphere. Then you can put a soft sell near the end of each post that ties back to your product or service. Blogs are NOT a place to push marketing! If you write every article about how great your company’s offering is and why people should buy, or you pay someone who knows nothing about your company to generate useless content for you, your blog will fare poorly with both readers and search engines, and your online reputation will suffer.

3. DON’T pay people to post fake comments to your own blog (or anyone else’s). This has backfired on companies before; readers can tell when a comment is genuine and when it’s not. And if you’re paying people to go out to other blogs and post spam comments that link back to your blog, that shows, too. Spam comments are at best ignored and at worst deleted and blocked, so you do your business’s reputation no favors by putting them out there.

4. DO listen to (and post) the comments from your actual readers, even if those comments are negative. Negative comments, while often cringe-worthy for businesses, are a great way to learn what your customers need and want from you. You can tailor your content and offerings to better suit your visitors’ desires if you take negative feedback to heart. Of course, not all negative feedback will be helpful to you, but any constructive criticism is a good thing. Remember, the point of a blog is to have a human interaction with your very human customers!

Be sure not to simply delete negative comments simply because they’re negative; you’ll want to delete any comments that contain profanity, inappropriate content or spam, of course, but publish the rest of the feedback, good or bad, to the blog. That’ll give you a chance to respond to the comments directly in the comment thread of the blog post, so readers will see that not only are you listening to what they have to say, but you’re also responding in a timely manner and participating in the conversation. That’s a big step for building trust with your customers and growing a loyal community around your brand.

5. DON’T send standard press releases or social media releases to third-party bloggers. You have your own corporate blog, but you’d also like other bloggers to talk about your company. The trouble is, most bloggers don’t respond well to press releases. Blogging is not the same thing as traditional journalism; there’s usually no pressing reason why a blogger would need or want to write about you. Instead, give the bloggers an experience that they will want to share with the readers. Offer them a free sample or deep discount on your product or service and ask them to write about it in their blog. Of course, you run the risk of a blogger hating your product and writing a negative article, but that’s a chance you have to take. Be sure to target bloggers in your niche and not just the highest-traffic blogs out there; a blogger who specializes in gardening tips will not care about your free sample of snowboarding equipment, and your company will look foolish for even contacting that blogger.

6. DO tie your blog into your social media profiles so that everything plays well together. Put a link to your corporate website AND your corporate blog on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other profiles that your company should already have. Post links to your most recent blog posts on the wall of your Facebook page, and tweet about your great blog content on Twitter. Send your blog post URLs to Digg and Reddit for social bookmarking. Raising awareness of your blog means getting more traffic to it, and more traffic means more people becoming part of your company’s social community (and ultimately becoming customers).

Corporate blogging does not have to be a difficult task! Simply keep the above do’s and don’ts in mind, and your company’s blog will be well on the way to helping you achieve online marketing success.

Start by creating a profile for your company on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. In addition, set up a company blog on one of the several blog platforms available, and make sure it’s linked from your company website. Keep your profiles and your blog updated; make sure the info in your profiles is current, and try to get at least a few blog posts per week on your blog. These steps alone will help your company turn up higher in search engine results and also allow you to engage with customers more often.

Next, submit your business to Google’s Local Business Listings, even if you don’t have a real-life storefront. Being in this listing boosts your rankings and also gives customers more reason to trust that you’re a reputable company.

While these steps will improve how your company turns up for branded keyword searches, you can also help build the strength of your sites through links from social media platforms. Put links to your site(s) on your social media profiles. Use trending topics and hash tags in Twitter to keep up with Google’s real-time search results. Send the URLs of your blog posts to sites like Digg and Reddit, both social bookmarking sites that help drive traffic to you. Be sure buttons like “AddThis” and “Share” appear on your blog posts so that people who read them can share them with others with a simple click. The more cross-linking you do and the easier you make it for people to find and share you, the better your results will be.

Above all, stay on top of your social media personality! Build a loyal following of customers by interacting with those who follow you on the social media sites. Respond quickly to any negative posts or tweets about your company, answer questions in a timely fashion, and be honest, forthright and helpful at all times. Make sure your blog posts contain fresh, useful information for readers, not just page after page of sales copy (how-tos and lists of tips on doing something are among the most popular blog content you can share). Remember, content is key, and the content you put out there will help users determine whether your company is just another soulless corporation or a real, human company that cares about its followers.

With these tips, SEO and social media can play nicely together and create greater marketing success for your company overall. Good luck!

Source: ClickZ

According to the official Google Adwords blog, Small Business Corner is “designed to give those of you who are running your own AdWords accounts the opportunity to share best practices in discussions with your peers so that you can make sure your AdWords account is doing all it can to support your business goals.”

Topics that will be explored include how to write great ads, how to use the tools available, and even how often to sign into Adwords. Users will be encouraged to submit their own topics and also trade tips, tricks and ideas for helping each other get the most out of their Adwords usage. In fact, Small Business Corner came about because of users asking for such a place to discuss their experiences, according to Miles Johnson of the Inside Adwords team.

Setting up Small Business Corner is a smart move on Google’s part. They rely almost entirely on ad revenue, and it’s in their best interests to keep Adwords users happy and well-informed about how best to use the system. Letting users help each other by building a solid community is an especially good choice for providing this information.

To use Small Business Corner, be sure you have a Google Adwords account, for starters. Sign in and start by creating a Google Profile that will introduce you and your business to the community (you don’t have to do this step, but it helps).

Then head to the Small Business Corner! Read, post, learn and explore what’s available to you. Find out what works for others and what doesn’t when they use their Adwords accounts. Small Business Corner is just one more way to make your ad dollars go as far as possible and maximize your online marketing success. Good luck!

Once you get a GWT account, you must add and verify your site. Click “add a site” to add your URL, and then follow the instructions under “verify ownership.” The verification is to ensure that you actually own the site about which you’ll be tracking data. That’s all you need to do to get started, but just in case, we suggest you submit a Sitemap, as well. A Sitemap is essentially a list of the pages on your site, submitted in case Google can’t find them all easily with its crawling process. This is especially helpful if your site is new to the web, populated with dynamic content, and/or lacking links to it.

Once your site is in the system, Google Webmaster Tools will be able to provide you with tons of useful stats on your page, including keywords, subscriber stats, search queries and how many other sites are linking to yours (that’s particularly important for SEO, as we’ve discussed before). You’ll also see problems like 404 errors and crawl errors so you can troubleshoot and fix them. You can submit more than one site under your account, of course, so you can track how all of your sites are doing.

What use is all this data? Knowledge is power! If you discover that your site is coming up in searches for something in particular, you can tailor your content accordingly. If you find that you’re not ranking for the keywords you thought you were, you can adjust your AdWords campaigns or other SEO efforts so that you’re not wasting your time or money. If you’re conducting a link-building campaign and want to see if it’s working, you can check on which sites are linking to yours (and raising your PageRank in the process).

Use Google Webmaster Tools to stay on top of what’s working (and what’s not) for your site, and you’ll be in a better position to optimize your search engine rankings. Better SEO means better online business success, so be sure to put this great resource to use!

1. Remember how we as humans tend to read things. For starters, most people read the first few words of a paragraph and then decide whether to stick around or move on to something more interesting. We follow our instincts on this, and our instincts tell us to bail out if we’re not engaged pretty quickly.

2. Hook ‘em with headlines. Attention-grabbing headlines have been part of the media’s toolbox for decades. Think of what grabs your eye when you’re standing in line at the grocery store, scanning the tabloids. Try to be catchy and a little intriguing in your headlines, and imply that there’s so much more if the reader just continues to read.

3. Keep your paragraphs short. Giant blocks of text tend to be daunting. A few sentences on a single idea are usually sufficient to inform without overwhelming the reader. While we’re at it, don’t let the sentences themselves run on and on without an end in sight… Keep them short without being too choppy.

4. Check your spelling. Seriously. A misspelling goes a long way toward ruining your credibility; after all, if you can’t be bothered to spell check, is your page really worth reading? Misspellings also mess up the flow of your writing and tend to be jarring to the reader; after a misspelled word, some readers will start subconsciously spell-checking your sentences instead of simply reading them, which means they’re not soaking up your awesome message. They’re fixating on your screw-ups.

5. Write for your target audience. How do they talk? What do they do for a living? How much money do they make? Think hard about the group to whom you’re marketing, and be sure to stay on their level. Modern web customers respond best to content that essentially holds up a mirror; the more like them you are, the more likely they are to trust you (and buy from you).

6. Focus on your niche, and don’t be too rah-rah in your phrasing. Keep the info relevant to your niche market, whatever it is. Don’t try to suck in anyone and everyone on the web as a potential customer; instead, keep to the keywords that define and highlight your niche. Oh, and for the rah-rah part: people can generally tell when you’re spewing too much sales drivel. If you say “This is the best product EVER, in the history of the world, and you should BUY IT now now NOW!!!” then the average user will respond with a healthy dose of skepticism. Stay conversational and realistic while also being positive.

7. Don’t make stuff up. Don’t make false promises, fake testimonials, bogus endorsements, artificial claims or outright lies. Dishonesty will leave you with nothing but unsatisfied customers and a blackened reputation, not to mention potential lawsuits, bans and other unpleasantness. No matter how badly you want to promise the world to your customers, stick to the truth. After all, the truth is pretty darned good, right?

Writing good copy is not rocket science. This is not a term paper for your college lit class; it’s a page of content that illustrates what you have to offer and invites potential customers to learn more (and, of course, spend some money on your offering). So if you’re ready tackle content and try to reach new levels of online success, take these tips and start writing good copy. Good luck!

1. Don’t use your own industry jargon or language; speak in the voice of your customers! What terms would your customers be using to search? What words do they use when they discuss your niche? Think like your customers and tailor your keywords accordingly.

2. Don’t pull a switcheroo with your links. If a customer clicks on a link that says “Best All Natural Cleaner” and is sent to a general home page (like the Lysol home page) instead of a specific product page, that customer will hit the back button, probably with an extra oomph of frustration. Send people where you say you’re sending them! A link to “Best All Natural Cleaner” should go to a page that’s specific to that product so the customer can learn more and potentially buy.

3. Don’t blow off your site’s content. Content is the single most important thing about keeping visitors on your site and convincing them to purchase. Remember, a lot of site visitors are on the fence about buying from you, so give them the best reasons to. Be clear, honest, trustworthy and informative in your content, and you’ll be more likely to turn visitors into customers.

4. Don’t ignore your customers once they’ve purchased. Many merchants think that, once the sale is over, their work is done, but that’s far from the case. Give your customers the best possible service, respond to issues or complaints quickly, keep the lines of communication open, and give them a reason to refer their friends to you. Keep them in the loop with regular emails, ideally with special offers and coupons. Turn one-time customers into repeat customers! They could be loyal customers for life (and encourage their friends to be the same).

5. Don’t go the “black hat” route. There are lots of unethical and underhanded means out there to artificially drive up SEO, a lot more quickly than the straightforward methods. But the black hat route will come back to bite you. Google has a bad view of low-quality backlinks, link farms, spam/replicated content and other nefarious tricks, and if you try these methods out, your online presence will eventually suffer. Your pagerank will drop, your traffic will dry up, and you’ll wish you did the right thing from the beginning. So do it right! The white hat SEO techniques take a little longer (and take a bit more work), but the long-term results are worth it.

PPC and SEO are vital to making your business successful online. Keep these don’ts of SEO and PPC in mind as you market, and you’ll be in better shape to reap the rewards of your efforts!

First, it’s important to remember that there is no hard and fast rule for across-the-board ppc copywriting. Every situation is different, so you must start by examining your niche. Look at what your competitors are putting out there. Watch the top few advertisers and see if they keep coming out on top. If they do, that means those ads are working. So look at how those compare to the lower ads on the page… what makes the top ads more powerful? Are they giving something away, or calling for users to buy right now? Are they simply collecting emails or using testimonials to build credibility? Whatever they’re doing, do it better. If your offer is the most compelling, people will be more likely to click on your ad over the competition.

Next, to whom are you marketing? You have to know your potential customers to know how best to handle the ppc copywriting. What age group makes up the bulk of your customers? What are their interests? What do they do for a living, and how much do they make doing it? What would they need badly enough to buy from a newcomer to the marketplace (i.e., YOU)? And what might STOP them from buying from you?

It’s also important to know how your potential customers talk about what they need. For example, someone with a medical need may use terms like “symptoms,” “diagnosis” and “treatment,” not “product” or “service.” If you can communicate with your visitors in the language they use, they’re more likely to trust you and buy from you.

So how do you learn all this about your potential customers? Market research! It’s not as tough as it sounds. You can conduct A/B tests (testing two messages to see which works better), buy market research reports, survey your existing customers, survey your non-customers (perhaps as they leave your site without buying), and most of all, use social networks like Facebook to see what your potential customers like and talk about. Join groups in your niche and be partof the conversation that goes on around you. You can learn a lot from just observing the social networks!

So now, you’re ready to start your PPC copywriting. You know what your competitors are doing right (so you can do it better), and you know what your target market needs and wants. Make an offer that’s compelling and focused on your customers’ needs. Use a personal, conversational approach. Keep it SIMPLE, no matter what group you’re targeting. And make your call to action clear so that people know what you want them to do.

Keep in mind that credibility in modern times lies in being as much like your potential customers as possible. They want to see themselves in you and your offering. This is why research is so important; if you can more or less hold up a mirror to your potential buyers, they’re more likely to buy. Know your market, know what’s working for your competitors, and know how to write in simple terms, and you’ll have turned PPC copywriting into online success in no time!