The most important goal with any PPC campaign is a good Return on Investment so you want to get the best “value for your click” and that requires ensuring every aspect of your process is optimised for maximum return.

A well optimised PPC advertising campaign should be generating properly targeted traffic to an optimised web page at the lowest possible cost.

PPC management is a lot more than just managing clicks and should be viewed as a complete process to determine your true ROI.

It is impossible to use cookie-cutter tactics or expect that one-size-fits all when it comes to paid search marketing and you should be looking at exactly how you can take full advantage of every potential ‘opportunity’ that clicks through to your website…and how to get more of them at the lowest cost.

Google PPC in particular can be expensive and it is often hard for some companies to justify spending money on Adwords when it is just not generating any business however they fail to realise that there are many other paid search platforms like the Yahoo Search Marketing / Microsoft Bing Adcentre Search Alliance as well as a ton of other smaller networks that often have a far lower Cost Per Click.

In addition to looking at click costs for your PPC campaign you should also be looking at other factors such as landing page optimisation, location targeting and demographic targeting to ensure that your ads are only displayed to the most targeted prospects.

Regular testing, maintenance and updates are required to make small incremental improvements at the early stage of any campaign however do this right and it can produce long lasting and substantial improvements resulting in a much stronger ROI.

Pay per click marketing is literally guaranteed to get traffic to your website – even if it is brand new. The only drawbacks can be how much you want to pay for that traffic and your subsequent ability to get conversions.

Many times what separates successful PPC campaigns from a failures are a few tweaks at the front end (your campaign setup and ads) and the back end (your landing page or conversion strategy). These small things like well written ad copy, crisp banner images and a compelling landing page and call to action can be the things that determine failure from success.

One other thing that can also improve your success is having the right pay per click campaign structure that effectively targets your customers correctly. This applies to any PPC search engine you might choose to use (and there are quite a few other than the usual suspects of Google Adwords and the Microsoft Bing / Yahoo Search Marketing Alliance however in sticking with the popular option, lets look at a few things you can do to improve your Google Adwords campaigns.

Setting up a correct structure for your Google Adwords campaigns in the first instance makes it easier to manage your ads and creates greater relevancy across your ad groups which, in the broad scheme of things can help you get a better Quality Score from Google (and hopefully lower ad costs).

If you already have a Google Adwords account then you may want to follow these few simple tips to help you start heading in the right direction from your next campaign.

Create Campaigns By Topic And Ensure Your Setting Are Correct

Basic Adwords accounts are able to create 25 campaigns by default (however the master accounts for high-end users can sometimes be allowed to create 50 or 100 campaigns per account however even the initial 25 campaigns still gives you a lot of flexibility and you can create multiple adgroups under each campaign so this should be enough for most people to get started.

You don’t want to be lazy a this stage and although it may seem like a lot of work – it will pay off when it comes to monitoring and assessing your campaign performance so assigning names related to the campaign topic is generally a good practice. It doesn’t have to be anything clever but you want to know from first glance exactly what your campaign is targeting with the underlaying adgroups and keywords.

Each campaign can be setup to target your market as tightly as possible. For example, if you are running local PPC campaigns for a particular geographical location then use this and then when you set your daily budget and location targeting options they all apply to the ads you have written.

Getting these settings right requires you to have done some decent market research, obviously you would be wasting prescious advertising dollars by running a campaign for the whole country if your ads state a specific local offer or you are only able to deliver these products or services in your local City or State.

Also, when configuring your settings, unless you really know what you are doing you may want to limit your campaigns to just the Google Search Network and stay away from the content network for now. While the Google Content Network can provide you with a ton of impressions and low cost clicks, many of these are completely un-targeted and may end up blowing your budget without ever making a decent conversion.

Cluster Your Adgroups By Theme

Each Adwords campaign is able to contain as many as 100 adgroups. While this is still a lot of information to manage it is a lot easier if you have completed comprehensive keyword research before you start and classifying your adgroups correctly is another step you don’t want to bypass, no matter how minor it may seem.

Creating themes for your ads provides a great way to sort them into groups. Try to think of your campaigns as the main topic, the adgroups as subtopics and the individual ads as micro-topics. Drawing yourself up a simple tree diagram with a hierarchy of these three elements can also help in the planning stage before you start creating the adgroups.

As an example, if you were selling retail video games you would most likely be running a number of specific ads for the different hardware products and games available. In this case you would probably want to create a campaign for each gaming platform (Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii) and then think of groups in which the products for each platform can be classified.

Therefore, you would end up with something like “Xbox 360 Consoles”, “Xbox 360 Accessories”, “Xbox 360 Action Games” and “Xbox 360 Sports Games and other similar adgroups. Then, under an adgroup like “Xbox 360 Action Games” you would write ads for the individual games like “Call of Duty Black Ops” or “Medal of Honor” and then proceed to the keyword bidding phase from there.

Your adgroups are the place to keep related products and services together and this makes it far easier to browse through your campaigns and also to keep a level of relevance that is important to Google.

Bid For Keywords Relevant To Your Ads

Once you have successfully setup your adgroups then it is time to start creating the copy for your ads – again, at this point it is important to ensure that they are relevant.

Your ad text, keywords and quality scores will help to determine your Cost Per Click (CPC) and they should be as closely related as possible and there are a number of tools available on the market to assist you with determining your optimum CPC and to have an idea of what keywords and prices your competitors are bidding and you only need to outbid your competitors by the smallest amount in an attempt to get a better placement so there is no need to go crazy and bid excessively high prices at this point because Google will be happy to take your money.

So that basically wraps up a few key points that I wanted to make about setting up PPC campaigns, particularly for Google Adwords and just remember the important point here it to keep things relevant and logical and it is hard to go wrong when you keep that in mind.

Keep an eye out soon for some more posts showing you how you can maximise your PPC performance or speak to your PPC Company about how they can best help you.

If you would like to discuss how Sunshine Coast SEO can help you setup and manage your PPC marketing campaigns to target international opportunities or just a simple campaign for Sunshine Coast PPC Marketing then please Click Here to Contact Us by email or give us a call directly on 0424 808 337.

When it comes to SEO, one of the concepts that people struggle to understand is that when you are focusing on your optimisation strategies, getting all the traffic in the world won’t mean a thing if your visitors are doing just that – visiting!

In the case of some keywords and keyword conversions….Less Means More!

When people are searching the internet they may fall into one of two categories – buyers or researchers. Buyers, of course, are focused on what they are looking to purchase and are ready to take action where as researchers (also know as freebie hunters) may just be searching for all the free information that is available online and never have any intention of buying anything.

While narrowing down your audience you will get less traffic but the chances increase the they will buy from you because you are providing exactly what they are looking for. One of the keys to getting your customers to find you is by selecting highly focused keywords that will attract those buyers who are ready to take action.

One of the things you can do to find some additional keywords to increase your web traffic is review your server logs and statistics from your hosting company regularly to see what keyword phrases people are using to find your site.

Also, review all your existing and new keywords and look for the ‘intention’ in the keywords you are using and be sure to optimise your site for each of the problems people are trying to solve so you are giving them exactly what they are looking for.

Being successful with search engine optimisation does require some basic skills and understanding. It is not necessarily that these skills take a lot of time to learn, but understanding the basics before you get going will help you avoid a lot of the common mistakes that people make when trying to optimise a website for the best organic search results.

In most cases this will only require you to follow certain steps that are critical to the success of your website and a failure to follow these steps often results in a lack of traffic, lack of sales and the rest, as they say, is history……

This lack of foundation knowledge often allows people to think that they can skip a step or two in the process because it doesn’t matter. Well, the fact is that it does matter and could be the determining factor in whether you make a profit or loss from your website.

Here are a few of the SEO mistakes you want to avoid on your website:

Using the Wrong Keywords – While there is a lot of discussion about keywords and keyword research, unfortunately many people don’t take the time to do their research properly. Selecting the wrong keywords to target on your website will result in a lack of visitors (because the keyword is never searched) or un-targeted visitors (because the keywords aren’t finding people in the right stage of the buying cycle).

This is a critical step that you should never overlook and should be constantly evolving.

Once of the exceptions that I wish to point out here is that many Local Search Keywords will often show very little or no traffic at all when you undertake your keyword research however if you are promoting a local business that services these areas, then this presents a unique opportunity to promote your website for low current traffic / high growth potential keywords however I will discuss this concept further in a future article.

Not Using Title Tags – If you are not using title tags on your website, then it is not optimised for the search engines! The title tags are one of the consistent factors that are considered by all search engines and is one of the most important placed to include your keywords. This factor alone will drastically affect your search results.

However, I want to stress here that while it is important to include your keywords in your title tags, try to avoid keyword stuffing and just create normal text that starts with or includes your keyword phrase.

Lack of Keywords – Search engines give preference to websites that include content based around the target keywords. This is a vital component of your content optimisation and you should ensure that you not only include your target keywords in your content (again, without keyword stuffing) and also include a number of related terms and alternative variations for your keyword terms.

These are just some very basic tips covering some of the critical factors that go into effectively designing a website for search engine optimisation.

Contact us today or Click Here To Request Your Free Search Marketing Consultation so we can discuss where your website is headed and how we can help you get your search marketing efforts pointed in the right direction.

Check out some of the great search engine optimisation results that we have already achieved for our clients at Sunshine Coast SEO.

In addition to these results, many clients also have a variety of top search engine rankings for their chosen keywords on both Overseas and Australian Search Engines.

Unfortunately we can’t show you all of our ranking success here, however we would be happy to discuss how we can help you increase the exposure of your website on the internet.

Click Here to request your FREE Search Marketing Consultation to discuss how Sunshine Coast SEO can help you achieve top search engine rankings.

Click Here To Request Your FREE Search Marketing Consultation

One very important factor in website optimisation that is often overlooked is title tags. This is code for your page in the “head” section. Many website owners make the mistake of just using their company name on every page of their side in the for the title tags. Since the search engines use the title and keywords in your content, you are losing out on the chance for increased rankings.

Importance of Keywords

Before you begin building your website, you should choose three or four primary keywords. There are a number of free keyword research tools available to help you find the appropriate keywords for your niche and it is recommended that you take advantage of them to be certain that the keywords you use will work for you.

What Should  My Title Tag Include

This is where many people get lazy and it’s costing them, whether they realize it or not.

By just putting your company name, it will be harder for the search engines as well as internet surfers to find you, unless you are already well known, like YouTube.com. For the smaller business owner, it is recommended that you put your name, your city, and 2 or 3 of your primary keywords. For example, if you own Tom’s Marketing Company, “tom’s marketing SEO consulting,” would be far better than “toms marketing company.” This lets people know that you are a marketing company, and you also do SEO consulting. “Tom’s Marketing Company,” has no emphasis on what type of marketing you actually do. You could even add your city of state, “Tom’s marketing SEO consulting Brisbane.”

You should limit your title tag to no more than 65 characters since that is the limit that most search engines will display, so avoid any unnecessary words that just waste space.

Title Tag Mistakes

There are five major mistakes that people make that cost them increased search engine rankings.

1. Having no title. It may sound a bit odd, but there are many sites that don’t have a title. This is important as it tells the search engines what keywords to list you under.
2. Just using your company name. Unless you’re well known, who the heck are you among the millions of other small business owners and marketers?
3. Using your company name on every page. You may think that having your company name on every page is helping, but in fact, many of the search engines penalize websites that do this. Using different tags for each page will get you listed in the search engines for several keywords. In addition, it makes your page content relevant to those particular keywords for better rankings.
4. Saving files names incorrectly. When saving a file name, instead of saving it as the date, or your own personal method of saving files, consider using one of your keywords. Example:  Instead of saving a file as “010309.Jones,” saves it as “seminar.Jones.” If you conduct seminars, you would be using one of your primary keywords.
5. Hyperlinks. When most people put hyperlinks on their page, the use things like “Click here,” or “Read More.” Try using a keyword as a hyperlink instead, i.e. “Next SEO Conference.” Utilizing keywords helps increase your page in the search engine rankings.

These suggestions are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to search engine optimisation, but making a few simple changes in your title tags will prove to be beneficial to your online business.

For assistance in developing the correctly optimised title tags for your website, contact Sunshine Coast SEO today on 07 5641 2300.

Search engine optimisation is one of the most powerful tools ever!  When you are looking to increase the targeted traffic to your website, you have to know the what, where, and how of SEO. Lack of this knowledge will have you chasing your tail and feeling like a failure.

If you look at the number of people involved in online businesses, it is amazing that so many people don’t take advantage of all that the internet has to offer. Many people take an idea and run with it; thinking they can throw up a website and voile’ money magically appears. Without any knowledge of search engine optimisation, keywords, advertising plans, etc. YOU CANNOT SUCEED, at least not for the long haul. While many people run successful online businesses with little or not effort, they will tell you that it didn’t happen overnight. It takes effort and more importantly, time. If you are not willing to put in the time to ensure your online success, more than likely, you will not succeed.

Take a moment and review the do’s and don’ts of SEO optimisation.

Bad Keywords

This is the main culprit in online failure. Your keywords are just that K-E-Y
W-O-R-D-S. Take a look at your website; what is it saying? Does it reflect the message you are trying to convey? Will people searching for your products or services know how to find you? Without the proper keywords, people can’t find you and if they can’t find you, you can’t sell.

Using broad keywords will get you a significant amount of unwanted traffic because people are not looking for what you are selling. By narrowing down your keywords, you are reaching a target market base of people who want what you have to offer.

Website Format

When you look at your website does it flow? Is it easy on the eyes? Does it draw you in or scare you away? There is so much more to creating a website than putting up a few pictures and maybe a few flash intros. Your website should be planned and the information should be placed in such a way that the reader can scan it without being confused. One of the quickest ways to get someone to leave your site is to have a cluttered page. It is not necessary to put everything on one page. You want your first page to compel them to click other links and dig deeper to see what you have to offer.

Link Building

Link building is one aspect that the search engines use to push your site to the top of the search page. This is often overlooked, but it is a crucial part of good page optimisation and should not be ignored.

SEO Companies

There are many SEO consulting companies who can assist you in getting hits on your website. One thing to keep in mind is that there are just as many illegitimate companies as there are legitimate ones. Beware of companies who “guarantee” hits or those with numerous domain names. Ask them how their company operates and always go with your gut feeling. If it doesn’t feel right, move on.

If you are not taking advantage of search engine optimisation, you are not putting all of your efforts into your online business. Make your business the best it can be by using all of the tools the internet has to offer.

If you want to work with a Local SEO Company that you can trust, contact Sunshine Coast SEO on 07 5641 2300 to see how we can help you improve your websites rankings.

The absolute bottom line to an effective SEO campaign is having backlinks to your website. One of the primary considerations search engines make when rating a website is how many back links, especially if they’re one way backlinks, go to this website. Keywords are, of course, important, but the nature of their effective usage has changed, which has increased the necessity of back links.

Obtaining a high number of one-way backlinks is what makes an effective linkbuilding campaign. This is what really makes dominating the conversation such an effective technique. In fact, it’s really the only truly effective technique.

Every time you place your web address in a membership profile, or provide a link in a blog post, and so on, you are increasing your search engine rankings. This is why I suggest getting accounts with Xanga, Digg, Blogrolling, and all these different websites. Each one provides at least one opportunity in the profile generation to link back to your website. But blogs get so much better than that.

The blog community and forum memberships are a virtual goldmine to create back links. Every time you post a blog, comment on someone else’s blog, or post a message on a forum is an opportunity to create a new back link. Most of these services support HTML in these situations, and so each time you perform one of these actions, you can provide a link back to your website. Imagine if you have fifteen blog memberships and post even one blog a day on all of them. That’s fifteen new links a day.

Blogrolling is an interesting method to use for back link generation. Ever see those side bar advertisements in the blogs? Imagine if you put a link to your own website in these places. These links can be placed on every blog community account you have.

Of course, higher rankings on the search engines aren’t the only reason to have links to your website all over the place. We can’t forget the real reason we do all of this. You’re steering traffic back to your website so that people will spend money on your products or services.

Without that element, none of this is actually worthwhile, is it?

On this level, also, it is in your best interest to have one way back links to your website in as many places as you can.

Before I wrap this up, I’d like to explain why one way links are important, aside from being what search engines look for. Let’s say that you got someone to your website. You don’t want them to leave without spending money or at least giving you their details so you can contact them again, do you?

Then why present them with the opportunity?

When it comes to parting with their money, most people will be looking for a way out of it, so give them as few escape routes as possible and if you can’t get them to buy from you straight away then collecting their details ensures you will be able to market to them again in the future and that they aren’t a lost customer as soon as they leave your website.

Now that I’ve shared a little of what I know about backlinks, go out and make some.

If you don’t have the time or are not sure exactly how to properly target your links then contact Sunshine Coast SEO directly on 07 5641 2300 to see how we can help you develop a Link Building Campaign for your website.

The Legend of Three Way Link Schemes: Developments in online search marketing and SEO are ultimately driven by theories. Few of us really know full well just what goes on behind the white wall of Google. We can research, test things out, and so on and develop theories based on our results. This doesn’t always work out in reality and many myths are born this way. Just like the myth that three way link schemes just create one way links, rather than reciprocal links.

The idea behind three way link schemes (and larger ones) is that it simplifies the SEO on webpages, giving the full benefit of reciprocal links without a hodge-podge of links going this way, that, and the other. It’s an elegance of design, and saves the page developer a bundle of headaches if links accidentally get broken or during routine maintenance.

Also, a large part of SEO is about simplicity of page design and having as little code as possible in a website. It’s a proven fact that the search engines approve of having as little code as you can get away with on webpages. Three way link schemes minimize code by having all pages link reciprocally in a circle, rather than a lattice form.

Basically, the way three way link schemes work is a circle of one way links creating reciprocation. Imagine that you have three pages labeled a, b, and c. Connect page a to page b, page b to page c, and page c to page a to form a triad of one way links. Because page a is indirectly connected to page c through page b, and page b is indirectly linked to page a through page c, they reciprocate the direct, one way links.

If you don’t use three way link schemes, you wind up with a bunch of junk code. This can delay page loading time in some cases, which diminishes the SEO quality. With the above example, you have only three links to code on your entire three page site. If you reciprocally link each page to each other, you have six links to code on your three page site. This gets exponentially more complex for each page beyond three that you add. The amount of code for links goes through the roof at five pages, and gets astronomical at just six.

The myth would say that these one way links in the three way link scheme remain one way links, and that the indirect reciprocation doesn’t count. That’s not how the spiders see it. Back to our circular model, if a Google spider leaves page a and gets to page c and gets back to page a, it will see it as reciprocal linking. Of course, the same is true going from page b to page a by way of page c.

In the end, aside from ranking purposes, three way linking schemes also save on labor expenses for page generation and maintenance. It saves the developer time in sorting through code that doesn’t need to be there to begin with.

For information on how Sunshine Coast SEO can help develop a Link Building Campaign for your website, contact us directly on 07 5641 2300.

Reciprocal Linking Is Not Worthless, Just Not Great

Yet another myth that is circulating among search engine optimisers is that reciprocal linking has no value, and that one way links are the way to go. While it is true that one way links have more value than the reciprocal ones, they aren’t entirely without value.

The value of reciprocal links depends largely on how you make them. It’s all about relevance. As with any element of search engine optimisation, you have to make it related to your niche to make it worth anything.

If you do reciprocal linking with irrelevant, low-value directories, you probably won’t get much in the way of SERP ranking. It might bring in some human traffic, which helps with your ranking indirectly. All the same, though, it’s really not worth your while going this route.

Now, if your reciprocal linking is natural and relevant to your niche, that’s a different matter. Let’s say you have a site for a master plumbers association. If you link to your members pages, and they link back to yours, that has value. If you link to, say, eatmorefastfood.com, and get a reciprocal link, on the other hand, it doesn’t count.

Not only does relevance count in your reciprocal linking, but the quality also counts. If you link up with some back water webpage that has no authority and is low on the SERP pages, you’re probably not going to get any improvement in your own ranking. This is why many webmasters are not too keen on the idea of link exchanges with new sites. They have nothing to gain from it.

With this, it doesn’t matter one bit to your SERP placement how much reciprocal linking you do with low quality sites. If you have a massive reciprocal link directory at the back end of your site, you’re going to get jack. It’s much better to have just one good link to a quality site than a thousand crappy links.

With this in mind, you have to be selective about who you get into reciprocal linking with, at least in order to get any gain in ranking for it. It’s the indiscriminate linking with whatever site that proposes to trade links that will get you.

This isn’t really as hard to do as it may sound. As I’ve said a thousand times, you can’t just put up content and hope that someone with a quality site will propose reciprocal linking. It’s great when it happens, but it’s not something to wait for.

Instead, you can set up profiles on Web 2.0 properties and do reciprocal linking with them. Nearly every social blog has a website linking option in their profile generation. You can take advantage of this and do your own reciprocal linking.

It may sound like you’re playing dirty, but there is really only one judge and arbiter of your actions in your linking. Google, of course, will have a say in the matter, but ultimately, it’s your bank account that will give the final word as to whether it’s right or wrong.