Zosap Blog | The Internet Marketing Experts

PPC Marketing – Creating Adgroups – Chapter 3

administrator — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:28:19 +0000

An adgroup is the place where the real PPC game takes place. This is where your creativity and thinking process will be tested.

Continuing with our example of a Pet Shop site, if you have created a campaign for Pet Dogs, then your adgroups will be decided by the breeds of dogs.

This organization not only gives you a clearer picture about your PPC campaigns but also makes it easy for you to manage your budget across different sections of each of your campaigns.

Once you begin the process of creating an adgroup, you will be asked to insert keywords for that adgroup.

So if your adgroup is about Labradors (under the “Pet Dogs” campaign), you will add keywords such as:

Labrador dogs for sale

Labrador puppies for sale

Black Labradors for sale

Food for Labrador retrievers

Labrador training guide

Etc…

While you’re adding the keywords, you will also be suggested some by Google. See if they match your requirements and add them if you find they are relevant. Also, here you will be asked about the budget that you want to allocate to this adgroup.

Once you’re done adding keywords and allocating the budget, you need to create ads that resonate with those keywords. You can create as many ads you want.

Now hit ‘Submit’

Voila! Your PPC campaign is live now! (Provided you have linked your credit card with your PPC account )

Yes, this post is quite short because if I go into the details of choosing the keywords and creating ads, this post would be mighty long. Also, they deserve to have a post of their own. They will be my subject for the next 2 posts.

PPC Marketing – Setting Up Your Campaign – Chapter 2

administrator — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:00:12 +0000

So you have signed up with Google Adwords and are clueless as to how you should go ahead with your PPC Marketing endeavor?

In this post of our PPC series, I will be helping you understand the interface of Google Adwords (the primary PPC Marketing channel).

Once you are logged into your Adwords account, you might get overwhelmed by the number of options provided by Google. But the first place you need to go in order to start your PPC journey begins by creating campaigns.

What Are Campaigns?

An ideal PPC account should look like this:

Campaigns form the basic structure of your Adwords Account. Imagine that your Adwords account is a multi-storey building, the campaigns form each floor in the building. Within these campaigns all your PPC details will lie.

How Do I Create Campaigns?

The campaigns you create must reflect the structure of your website. Assume your site is a Pet Shop and you have divided your site into the following categories:

Pet Dogs

Pet Cats

Pet Fishes etc…

Then your Adwords Campaigns should reflect the same structure. Hence, you need to make campaigns for Dogs, Cats, Fishes etc.

In case you want to show different ads to different people (targeting geographically), you need to segment your campaigns based on your target demographics.

Benefits of Campaigns:

This categorization ensures that your account is well organized and the Adgroups/Keywords within each campaign are relevant to each other.

In the next post, I will be talking about AdGroups and Keywords. Stay Tuned.

Beginner’s Guide to PPC Marketing – What is PPC Marketing? – Chapter 1

administrator — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:44:53 +0000

What is PPC Marketing?

PPC Marketing is the marketing channel through which sites get their ads featured on the search results pages when someone searches for a product/service similar to theirs.

Have you searched anything on Google and seen any links on the sidebar (and top) that are slightly different from the organic search results? Something like this:

As indicated in the image itself, the PPC ads run on the right sidebar and on top with a highlighted background to differentiate it from the organic results.

From the example above, we can observe that brands such Volvo, Nissan, Jaguar, Mercedes and Kia are jostling for ad space when someone searches for ‘used cars’.

They are called Pay Per Click ads because the advertiser has to pay the search engine only when someone clicks on the text ad. The price ranges from anywhere between 0.05$ to even several hundred dollars.

This variation in price depends upon the niche. Certain niches such as finance, law and health cost a bomb per click.

How Does PPC Ads Work?

Whenever a user searches inserts any search query, Google goes through the ads of all the advertisers that are vying for an ad spot. Based on the quality of the ads and the price the advertisers are bidding for the ad, the positions of these ads are determined.

In a page only of 10 ads can be placed and those which are on top 5 are the ones who get the maximum number of clicks.

As an advertiser your goal must be to come up with a good quality ad and have a bid adequate enough to get sufficient number of clicks. Also your ad costs should be lower than the profits that you generate by bringing people to your site.

How Will It Benefit Me?

Get Instant Traffic to Your Site

With PPC marketing, you can get your ads live in no time and start accumulating visits almost instantly. There’s just a slight lag of time where your ads go through an approval process.

In most cases, it’s up within few minutes.

This instant traffic is what makes PPC a great marketing channel. Unlike SEO and Social Media which take weeks or months to get some good traffic, PPC doesn’t take much time to start accruing hits in your hit counter.

Get Targeted Traffic

The traffic that you get to your site is laser-targeted… and guess what?

You are the one who decides how much targeted the traffic should be!

Yes. You have all the freedom in the world to choose for which keywords your ads should be displayed. Your ad will not be displayed for any unrelated search query, hence saving you some precious marketing dollars.

Also, a highly targeted ad means that the user is serious about his query and wants his issue to be served. Which means that there’s a high probability your product will be sold.

Test Your Landing Pages

You are coming up with a big marketing campaign and have designed few versions of your landing page. Your mom likes them all but you want to test it out in the wild to see which one is the best converting.

Enter PPC. With the instant targeted you can split test your landing pages and check for yourself how they are performing. Well, of course you will have to shell out some money but the investment would be absolutely worth it.

Where Can I Start with PPC Marketing?

The two dominant PPC Players are Google and MSN.

But Google, being the biggest search engine in the world, is the first place anyone should begin with.

You can join Google’s Advertising network at Google Adwords: https://adwords.google.com/

And to join MSN’s ad network, checkout MSN AdCenter: http://adcenter.microsoft.com/

How Fast Should I Build Links?

administrator — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:39:58 +0000

Link Building is the most crucial part of any SEO campaign. But I have come across many webmasters who overdo their link building efforts and end up getting their site penalized.

Basically, Google wants you to build links in a natural way. That is, your site needs to be so awesome that people should link to it voluntarily.

However, realistically speaking this is very difficult because if nobody knows about your site how would they link to you??!

And, this why you need to build links to your site as it gives your site that much required initial push. Now since it’s an artificial activity, you need to be a trifle careful as to how you build links

But most people get so excited that they go all out building hundreds of thousands of cheap links within few days. The engineers at Googleplex are very smart and they can sniff out when a site is doing too much of link building.

The essence lies in building links at such a pace that it doesn’t raise a red flag with Google. Building 2-3 links a day is enough for the first few weeks. Later on you can upgrade your link building efforts and start building 5-8 links every day.

So if you are doing any article marketing or directory submissions keep it slow and steady. Don’t submit your articles to thousands of directories in just one week. This would undoubtedly make Google suspicious about your activities.

Always remember, slow and steady wins the race.

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Blog

administrator — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:38:05 +0000

The art of blogging, regularly updating content in a diary-like style, has been in vogue since many years now.
The Internet, which started off with static HTML-based websites has now moved on to dynamic content websites, blogs.

Many businesses now have a blog accompanying their static website because they realize that having a blog can boost their business tremendously.

Regularly Updated Content

If you still haven’t started a blog for your website, keep reading this post as I will be explaining some really cool reasons how blogging can enhance the business your static site generates.

In the last few years Google has started favoring sites that churn out fresh content on a regular basis. This means that a static site has to face a very stiff competition on the Search Results from a site which has a blog accompanying it.

The reason is that because a blog gets updated daily/weekly, the Google crawler visits your site on a regular basis in search of fresh content.

The more you post, the more is the frequency of Google crawling your blog. Now compare this to a static site where the content hardly changes, the Googlebot won’t care to crawl it for ages because it knows the content is not getting updated.

Face Behind a Brand

Most of the static websites look like a ghost town. Nobody knows if it is still being managed or not. Personally, whenever I come across such sites I doubt if the ‘Contact’ form even works.

But when you or an employee of yours starts blogging regularly, it goes to show that you are still active and that your site is not dead. It gives a face to your brand; it tells people that you are a real person trying to communicate with them.

This will increase the trust people have in you. They will come to know that this business is being managed by real people and it is not ghost town.

Be an Authority in Your Niche

Your blog is your channel to communicate with your readers. Instead of posting about your products and services, you should use the blog to showcase your knowledge and expertise.

What you cannot accomplish with a static website can be easily achieved with a blog. When you share content that benefits your readers, they start respecting you. This feat cannot be accomplished with a mere static website where all you can do is add description about your products and services.

Your blog will be your communication tool which allows you to talk with your readers and help them out of their problems. And when you do that, you start becoming a thought leader in your niche.

Keep People Engaged and Updated

Social media has changed the way a business works. There was a time when you just had to broadcast your message to your readers and they would buy from you. But now, with increasing competition and with the customers being more and more skeptic about the products being sold online, a one-way dialogue doesn’t work that effectively.

A blogs enables you to have a 2-way communication with your potential customers through the medium of comments (which you can see below this post). This allows the reader to ask direct questions which the blogger can reply either in the comments section itself or in a future post.

Whenever a user comments on your blog post, he engages with your brand; which is a good sign. An engagement of a user is a hint that he appreciates you and is probably easier to convert into a customer.

Also, you can use your blog to keep people updated about the recent changes in your company or the products/services that your company provides.

Collaborate with Others

For those who don’t know, Guest blogging is posting your articles on the blogs of others. This is a really great way to get your message across to an even bigger section of readers and potential customers.

There are many A-list bloggers who simply don’t have the time to update their blogs, and so they start accepting guest posts from their readers.

If you come across any blog which has a good readership then you must approach the owner of the blog with an article that you believe will benefit his readers. The guest post will carry the link to your blog at the end and when it gets published you will notice that your traffic has risen a great deal.

As you see, blogging is something that will definitely help your brand gain more credibility and exposure.

I hope you are motivated enough to start a blog on your website. Please feel free to mention any questions or concerns in the comments section below.

Featured Image Courtesy: Kerim

Post Image Courtesy: Svilen001

Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research

administrator — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:02:12 +0000

If you want your site to get maximum traffic from Search Engines, you need to have a vast stack of keywords that you can leverage to bring people on your site.

Based on these very keywords, the content of your site will be generated. Also, these keywords will be majorly used as your anchor text.

The following slideshow will teach you how to do the Keyword Research and come up with a list of keywords that are profitable to you:

Beginner's Guide to Keyword Research – How to Find Keywords in a Niche

View more presentations from Zosap

On Page Optimization Can Make or Break Your SEO Campaign

administrator — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:00:44 +0000

Day 1: Say hello to my new website!

Day 7: 20 incoming links. Zero search traffic.

Day 30: 100 incoming links. Zero search traffic. Site on page 13 of Google.

Day 60: 200 incoming links. Few search visitors. Site on page 8 of Google.

Day 100: Aaaaarrrrggghhhh!!!!

Sounds familiar? Well, you’re not alone; most webmasters have gone through this phase of frustration. They spent countless hours building links only to find a handful of search visitors. Their website was buried deep inside where no searcher cared to go, he was just too lazy.

No matter how much link building you do, your site cannot move up the search results unless your On-page SEO is perfect.

What is On-page SEO?

On-page SEO is your way of telling Google why your website is the best for the given keyword. This involves your content, source code, usability and all the nitty-gritty features that make up your site.

While link building is an ongoing process that cannot be perfected, On-page SEO can be perfected and is just a one-time affair.

Let’s take a look at some important On-page SEO factors:

URL

Do you prefer a www in your domain name? It’s up to you whether to have a www attached to your website. But whether you use it or not, make sure you stick with your URL structure.

Using http://domainname.com and http://www.domainname.com is not a good idea as Google sees them as two different websites.

If you have used both in the past, you can use a 301-redirect to point it to your preferred URL structure.

Also, be very careful about what goes in your URL. I strongly recommend that you must include the title of your post with relevant keywords within your URL.

A URL like this: http://www.domainname.com/free-dog-training-guide/ is better than a URL like this: http://www.domainname.com/post1234/

TITLE

Most websites either abuse this wonderful ranking factor or simply neglect it. A great title is a must for every website and the pages within.

When someone sees you in the search results, he reads your title first. If your title is not compelling he will not click through to your site. So make sure your titles are catchy and have a relevant keyword as well.

A lot of people try to stuff their keywords multiple times within their title which is not very smart. If you are selling ‘used cars’ through your site, your title can be;

Used Cars in Great Condition for Sale | Get The Best Deals

instead of;

Used Cars | Buy Used Cars | Used Cars for Sale | Best Deals on Used Cars

Since Google only displays the first 63 characters of your title, try to make it short and relevant.

Meta Description

Not a very important ranking factor but it does affect your CTR on the search results. The Meta description is visible to a searcher and including relevant details in it increases your chances of making him click through to your site.

Body Tags

Header Tags: the headline of your website or the page within must be in the H1 tag while the sub headings can be in the H2 or H3 tags.
Alt Tag: When using an image you can include your keyword within the alt tags. The alt tag is a great way to optimize your image for a given keyword.
Image Name: Try to include your keyword in the name of the image that you’re uploading. If your article is about dog training and has the image of a dog, you can name it as ‘dog training in the park’.
Keyword Usage: Do not stuff your article with keywords so much so that it sounds obnoxious. Use the keyword only when necessary. Including your keyword in the beginning and end of an article is also a good idea.
Internal Linking: While the benefits of internal linking are a debatable topic, it serves good from a usability point of view. It keeps your readers engaged with your website as they move from one article to another instead of hitting the back button.

Site Design and Usability

A good website structure results in a great user experience. Also, light design with less flash and less javascript decreases your site load time and thus lowers your bounce-rate.

Have any questions or suggestions? Leave your comments in the box below.

Image courtesy: Search Engine People Blog

Importance of Anchor Text in SEO

administrator — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:03:03 +0000

The success of your Link Building strategies depend largely upon the anchor text you use to link to your web pages.

When used correctly, it can work wonders for your site.

And if ignored, all the money and time you spent on building those links go down the drain.

The success of any link building strategy depends upon 3 factors:

The type of sites which link to you.
The frequency of link building.
The anchor text of your incoming links.

Starting from the bottom, today I am going to talk about the anchor text of you incoming links. The rest two factors will be discussed in my next posts.

What is an Anchor Text?

When someone links to you in an article, he/she selects a part of the text and inserts your hyperlink there. This selected part of text is called the anchor text.

It is the clickable piece of text that takes you to another URL when clicked. Usually, the font color of an anchor text is of different color than its surrounding text, and most likely it will be blue in color.

Example:

In the phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, ‘brown fox’ is the anchor text which links to the Wikipedia page of ‘Brown Fox Code’ having the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_fox_code

In HTML code, the link is given as

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_fox_code“>brown fox

The text highlighted in red is the destination URL and the text highlighted in blue is the anchor text.

Use Relevant Anchor Text

The goal of an anchor text should be to let the user know what he will see when he clicks on it. The anchor text should be relevant to the destination page.

For search engines, the anchor text acts somewhat like the same. It helps the spiders decide what the site is about and when google indexes your site, it knows that it should render your site when a related keyword is searched for by a user.

So, if you want to build links to your site which is about dog training guides, your anchor text must have the relevant keywords in it. Avoid using ‘click here’ or other such irrelevant keywords.

One the biggest mistakes SEO noobs make is to build links with just one anchor text. They tend to believe that doing this will increase their SERPs.

Vary Your Anchor Text Regularly

However, Google sees this tactic as spam.

Google reckons that links to a website should be given voluntarily, so when one links to you it’s not necessary that he/she should link to you with your primary keyword as the anchor text.

That is why it is suggested that when you build links, you need to vary your anchor texts.

So instead of linking every time to your blog with ‘dog training guides’, try other variations such as:

Dog training
Guides for dog training
Dog training tips
Dog training help guides

I personally prefer to use my primary keyword 50% of the time while for the rest half, I use the different variations.

To summarize, keep your anchor texts relevant and non-spammy and your site will gain trust in the eyes of Search Engines.

Have any questions? Want to add your 2 cents? You’re most welcome to use the comments section below to voice your views.

Image courtesy: Leo Reynolds

If SEO Is a Religion, Link Building Is God

administrator — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:23:23 +0000

Imagine that your girl likes Thai food and you want to take her to a date. What would you do? You would ask your friends which restaurant in your city serves the best Thai food. Now each of your friends will recommend a restaurant, this recommendation acts as a vote for that particular place.

Most likely, you will visit the place which gets the most favorable reviews/votes.

This is precisely how the Search Engines work. They gather votes from all over the web and recommend you the best and the most useful result.

If you are the restaurant owner, you want people to talk favorably about you. You want to people to recommend your restaurant to others.

As an SEO, your job is similar to the restaurant owner. Your job is to get the web talking about your website and link (vote) to you. The more links you get, the more Google and Bing will see you worthy of a higher search result for your desired keywords.

Yes, there are many many factors apart from the links that decide your position, but links are the most dominant factor.

Factors like clean code, title tags, page speed, keyword density etc can be easily controlled by anyone. But getting links to your site is a tricky issue.

Allow me to stretching the restaurant analogy further.

A favorable review from an accomplished restaurant critic carries more weight than several random people.

Similarly, incoming links from high authority sites carry a lot more than low PR obscure sites. I have personally seen many websites shooting up in SERPS after getting a link from a high PR authority site.

Also, the relevancy is big factor in determining the weight of a link. This is determined by two things:

The niche of the page/site that links to you.
The anchor text of the link.

If the page that links to your finance website is about home furniture, you are not likely to gain much from it. Even if you get a link from you related finance website but the anchor text says ‘Click here’, you’re missing out on some really good link juice.

So to sum up, the three biggest linking factors that affect your SEO are:

The authority of the site linking to you.
The relevancy of the page/site linking to you.
The anchor text of the incoming link.

Have any questions or suggestions? Feel free to write it in the comments below. Would love to hear from you.

Image courtesy: spaceamoeba

3 Reasons Why Your Business Needs To Be On the Web

administrator — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 05:24:07 +0000

Gone are those days when you opened a shop on a busy street hoping to catch the attention of passerby’s in order to do some business. All you had to do was to put up an attractive banner outside your shop. And if you had some cash to spare, you would publish ads in your local newspaper.

Today, the world is different, all thanks to the Internet. If you know how to leverage the power of Internet, your business can make millions and you don’t even have to spend a dime.

If you don’t trust my words, the following 3 reasons will tell you why your business needs to be on the web:

Your Customers Are On the Web

You may not be net savvy, but your customers most likely are. According to comScore, Google Search now gets 1 billion unique visitors per month who are busy searching for a zillion things.

You can only imagine how many are searching for you or your products.

If you don’t have a website, or a website with bad SEO, you are losing out on thousands of potential customers.

Your Competitors Are Most Likely On the Web

You may not be that enterprising to make a foray into the webosphere, but your competitors are. We at Zosap are contacted everyday by several business owners who want to leverage the power of the Internet. They want to be on top of search results for their products/services.

If you start up soon, you will find it easy it cement your position on the search pages. This will make it hard for your competitors to beat you because now you have the power a great headstart.

You need

to be on your toes, one step ahead of your competitors. Always.

Manage Your Reputation

Internet has made it simple for anyone to express his views and opinions with no censorship. May be you have a disgruntled customer who is ranting against you in all online discussion boards. Or worse, you have a competitor who is spreading lies against you.

You need to make sure that the disgruntled customer is pacified and the lies of your customers are nullified. You don’t want people searching for you to come across negative posts about you.

To be honest, the web has become so powerful that if you don’t adopt it, you are most likely to miss out on thousands of potential customers and millions of dollars in revenue. I would highly suggest that you plan your Internet Marketing strategy and go online as soon as possible.

And if you need any help or guidance, we are always there to help you out.

Google Image Source: meneame communications.