It is possible for you to make your website ‘the best and most relevant’ for certain searches and to convince the search engine operator you are just that too. That is SEO.  I assume that you will be committed to a long term marketing strategy, and to measuring results with a view to adjusting your activity. The steps include those of preparation as well of those of continuous repeated activities. The early preparatory steps are perhaps the most important as errors here will frustrate the effectiveness of the later ones.

Armed with our clear objectives and online strategy:

Step 1 – Keyword Research

A vital first step that should not be undertaken lightly. While experienced pay-per-click advertisers will know that you can easily test and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, they should understand this not possible for organic search optimization. It is normally advisable to concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site around a core theme. Then, for individual pages only one to three phrases. For large sites with hundreds of pages it is hard to optimize every single page. The effort and cost of SEO to the full extent produces diminishing returns.

Step 2 – Competitive Intelligence

SEO is competitive. There is only one front page and only one top slot so it is important to know your competition and perform better. What are they doing? Where do they rank and for which keywords? Who is linking to their website and why? The less competitive your industry is online the easier it is for you to outperform your competition. This is an important determining factor in the cost and resources necessary to achieve your desired SEO outcome.

Step 3 – Web Design and Development

Like trying to cable an old building for modern communications or boosting performance of an obsolete machine, fixing a bad website design is much tougher than building properly from scratch. When you create a new website, make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. Almost all template-based websites are tough to re-engineer for SEO. A good design from the start will save you a lot of time and money. In most cases it will put you ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. In most cases a high performing design for SEO is also a user friendly design, but occasionally compromise is necesary.

Step 4 – Get Your First Inbound Links

There is no need to pay to submít your website to any search engine. Just as soon as you create inbound links from other websites to yours the search engines will find your website.

There are plenty of scam products and services. Avoid them. They are a waste of your money. No one can guarantee you a number 1 ranking. It must be earned and maintained by being the best and most relevant.

There are some web directories that are recognized by search engines and gaining a trade listing there will be a helpful kick-start to your SEO campaign. Then ask your customers and suppliers to place a link to your website from theirs. Most will be pleased for the favor to be returned.

Step 5 – Sitemaps

The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines also provide reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the submission of a site map to the search engines, it is advisable to create an account and register your website with them, just for the reports and statistics they provide free of charge and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

After completion of the first 5 steps, schedule them for occasional review. The remaining tasks require regular and repetitive effort. In Eleven Steps to SEO Heaven (steps 6 to eleven) we look at taking a website that is a SEO ready site with a ready to run campaign and look at the steps and work needed to claim a high search engine ranking.

About The Author:
Tim Meadows-Smith is an experienced non-executive chairman, director and business advisor from a classical sales and marketing background gained with famous global FMCG brand owners. He has worked with businesses globally in the FMCG, logistics, service and technology sectors.

A major determinant for the prices you end up dealing with is your quality score as determined by Google. Your quality score is a reflection of how your ads perform. What percentage of people click on your ads, and what percentage of people who do click on your ads end up as bounced, or one page, visitors?

When you write ads that are more appealing to people, and you provide them with the content they are looking for once they make that click, Google recognizes you as a quality source and improves your rating, thereby decreasing costs. Ultimately Google wants to provide consumers with the best and most relevant ads – because it makes them a more trusted and reliable service. That’s why they reward high quality advertisements and campaigns.

Besides writing improved and more appealing ads, you can reduce your costs by targeting more appropriate markets. The more specific you get with your campaigns, the more relevant you can be. Therefore if you’re a mechanic in Steamboat today, instead of targeting “car repairs” you may want to target “winter car checkups Steamboat” or something along those lines, which will guarantee you can provide a match for a consumer making a search.

There are many other factors that you’ll have to consider to help lower your minimum bids as well. One of these is ad grouping, which goes hand in hand with the market selection described above. You want highly specific ad targets that include the keywords you use, and ad groups that play off relevant words and targets.

Of course, don’t forget that you can also lower your budget by changing your bidding strategy. You can target less popular keywords to reduce your costs, and you can also aim for a different spot besides the number 1 position to greatly lower your budget.

Sometimes it doesn’t make monetary sense to go for the top spot or the most popular market, particularly when you’re just getting started with your Adwords campaigns. So choose your markets and your targeted positions wisely, and you’ll actually end up driving more traffic to your landing pages for a lowered cost.

Businesses in Steamboat today are looking for as many ways as possible to reduce the costs of their marketing while improving the results that they see. Steamboat Springs marketing services should be well advised to take a new and improved approach to Google Adwords. Focus on improving the quality and relevancy of your ads, and in turn you’ll be rewarded not just with traffic that can be converted easier but also with lowered costs for your campaigns.

1. Subscribed & Published Lists

Twitter “Lists” continue to mold the face of Twitter.  With the widespread use of the Lists gadget, your tweets are bound to appear in many different places throughout the web.  Tweets are now popping up in blogs and other sites related to your niche.  This increases the mass reach of your tweets by an exponential number if you are effectively targeting the right audience on Twitter.

2. Complete Transparency and Openness

Twitter is now presented to other audiences such as Facebook and various social networks.  With this in mind, your tweets are no longer contained solely within just the spectrum of Twitter itself.  The sharing of valuable tweets amongst more people across numerous online mediums is more rampant than ever.  This gives your tweets an even bigger pool of prospects from which to target.

3. It’s All About Relationships

The book ‘Twitter for Dummies’ states that your success with Twitter breaks down to 4 basic rules: listen, learn, care and serve.  Twitter is very much a community and your ability to listen to it will create an opportunity to learn from it.  Once you show you care about your peers (or your audience) you will better understand how you might serve them best.  By “serving” your community we mean to say that you are contributing something of value.  Without value, your chances of reaping rewards from Twitter are slim to none.

4. Targeted, Caring Traffic

Twitter will bring you a fair share of traffic “just stopping by” or those you might consider random.  But the tool is also well set up to bring you a highly targeted audience that honestly cares about the niche you represent.  The ability of users to “retweet” your information becomes increasingly important in this regard.  If a person is willing to retweet your content, they are in essence giving you a testimonial of sorts.  This form of public support goes a long way in attracting dedicated followers.

5. Always Current

Showing up in real-time Twitter searches, which is becoming an increasingly important area of focus for many search engines, provides a load of opportunity for added online exposure.  The goal of remaining relevant in present time is becoming more and more imperative to the engines and Twitter is the best example of this today.

6. Attracting Local Customers

Yes, even Twitter gives you the ability to connect with a local customer base.  Downloadable tools such as TwellowHood give you the ability to find and attract Twitter users in your immediate locale.  Related to Steamboat Springs marketing, using Twitter could be as targeted as the Steamboat Today or Steamboat Pilot for advertising purposes.  As the emphasis on creating better tools to target users locally increases (which it is, as seen in the Google “Social Search” example) people’s user profiles will naturally become another means by which savvy marketers direct their efforts.

7. Still A Young Gun!

Considering that Twitter is still being developed into an application that will ultimately fit into the grand scheme of overall search, its current state is still that of a fledgling.  Even with the thousands of current apps designed to give Twitter more productivity, developers have only scratched the surface of what it might do.  Everyday uses of Twitter by various people and businesses both locally and internationally is growing daily.  Chances are good that if you closed your eyes and thought of what you might like to see from Twitter in the future, there is probably somebody already working on its creation.

Social Media policies of well-known organizations often appear in the news with commentary throughout the Blogosphere, the Twitterverse, etc. There is an ongoing debate about just how restricted social networks should be when it comes to employee use.

Bloxx, based in the UK, has released some research finding that 90% of IT Managers surveyed believe access to social networking site should be banned or restricted. 90%. That’s a lot. The managers surveyed came from across the UK public sector as well as private organizations.

The concerns addressed in this survey were the usual suspects: staff productivity, network security risks, and damage to the corporate reputation. Productivity was by far the top concern.

The Bloxx Report Findings

More Bloxx Study Findings

The research found that not only are an increasing number of organizations completely banning staff access from social networking sites, but it is also quite common for staff to post disparaging remarks regarding other employees, their boss, or the company on social networks.

Over 22% of respondents don’t have any controls in place for staff accessing social networks. 35% of IT managers believe staff are spending over 30 minutes each per day on average accessing social networks. The companies are potentially providing an additional 16 days paid vacation for each employee, Bloxx says. Still, the research also shows that social networking is increasingly being used as a valuable business tool. Obviously access is required to take advantage.

“UK businesses really can’t afford to underestimate some of the risks of Social Networking use in the workplace,” says Bloxx CEO Eamonn Doyle. “However, our view is that a complete ban is unrealistic and adopting this approach means that companies can’t obtain the potential business benefits of Social Networking and can alienate staff.” Among Doyle’s suggestions are increased employee education, “well-thought-out” acceptable use policies, and the use of Web filtering. 

There are plenty of reasons why social network access shouldn’t be completely banned. We cover these reasons about every day. If  your company completely ignores social networks, you’re ignoring a tremendous amount of opportunities for marketing, customer service, traffic, sales, communication, etc.

Social networks are not going away. The popularity of specific ones may change in time, but the concept of social networking is going nowhere. It’s not even a new concept. Forums and email are pretty much social media for all intents and purposes. Social networks have recently been blamed for $2.25 billion in lost productivity. I wonder how much money lost productivity from personal email and general web surfing accounts for. I wonder how much employees simply talking to each other at the workplace has cost companies. That’s not necessarily online, but it’s still socializing. How have you handled email and general web use in the past?

Reputation issues are one thing. Security is another (and I think employee education plays a big role there) but as far as productivity, I really don’t see that the use of social networks is really that different than any other form of simply not working. People can spend their time using the phone for personal calls, but you probably haven’t completely banned the telephone. You may need that to communicate with customers, drive sales, etc. I’m sure you see my point.

Whether you’re a Steamboat Springs marketing company or you work in Steamboat web design, there are many different best practices that can help you make the most out of your pay-per-click advertising campaigns. The truth is that many companies waste a great deal of money through ineffective and inefficient PPC campaigns, and many companies also leave a great deal of money on the table by failing to capitalize properly on the potential of PPC marketing. If you learn the best practices that will enable you to instantly improve your PPC campaigns, then you and your online business will be able to take off.

One of the biggest mistakes made with PPC advertising is getting into a bidding contest for the top spot of a particular keyword. Unless you have a huge budget, this strategy is going to backfire. Save your money and see a higher ROI by bidding more moderately. Shoot for a middle of the road first page ranking, perhaps the fourth or fifth spot. Your costs will drop off by a huge margin, but you’ll still be able to drive a large amount of high quality traffic to your website.

Another best practice for making the most out of your PPC campaigns is to test different versions of them. The littlest factors can have an effect on the performance of your advertisement. The wording of your ad title, the page URL it shows underneath, the keywords you target, the way your landing page looks and what it offers and many other factors as well.

With all of these possibilities, the only way to find a working solution is by testing out different variables. Test one factor at a time across a series of similar advertisements and campaigns, take a look at the results and then optimize your campaigns with what you found out to work better. Your ads will become much more successful and cost efficient in the process.

Don’t forget that when you’re participating in PPC, you are providing an ad that people find when they search for something. Your job is therefore to make your ad compelling to that person, and to make your website compelling to the person who clicked on the ad. Therefore you have to provide the searcher with exactly what they are looking for. Target your ads as precisely as possible and strive to provide an exact solution to a specific need.

For example, people looking for Steamboat Springs marketing and Steamboat web design often are really looking for the same thing. They want to break their company out into the national stage, find new prospects and customers and ultimately bring in more profit and revenue. The same thing holds true from companies from all corners of the country and the world. Learn to maximize your PPC campaigns and you’ll be one step closer to accomplishing this goal.

PPC- What Exactly Does It Include?
The concept of pay per click advertising is actually very simple to comprehend.  There are a ton of tools online that can help you with your keyword research to find what your customers are searching for.  If you’ve done your job, you’ll know exactly “where” you want your ads.  The next step is of course to design your ads.  Think of an Adwords ad as a one sentence summation of why a buyer should visit your site.  Next you’ll need to set your bids.  That’ right, gaining top search results takes spending a specific amount of money for every visitor you attract to click over to your landing page.  While your first reaction might be to say that the highest bid always wins, this isn’t the case.  As I addressed in a previous post, there are other factors (like Quality Score) that will affect what you have to spend.

In order to run a profitable PPC campaign, you’ll need to become master to skills like effectively writing ads, tailoring your ads to the right audience, choosing the most appropriate keywords to target and judging the competition.  The next step of the process is to properly track your results so you can hone in on the gold and toss the junk.  This is where many PPC marketers make their mistakes and end up pursuing more organic search engine optimization (SEO) instead.  The immediate results aren’t there like with PPC, but the risks (i.e. throwing away your money on bogus ads & targets) seem to be less.

NEW Website – PPC Is The Best Initial Strategy
Once a new site is built, the litmus test becomes how it performs.  The best way to quickly judge this is through immediate high traffic.  There’s no better way to instantly attract visitors than with PPC.  Besides, it will most likely take months of steady link building before a new website will even begin to see traffic from its SEO efforts.  Simply put, PPC may often be the lifeline your business needs to drive the steady stream of traffic you need to generate immediate revenue.

As I advocated before, the reality is that using a combination of PPC and SEO tactics should be the keystone to any web marketing strategy.  By initially pursuing a PPC campaign you give time to let the SEO endeavors take hold.  In fact, the most savvy entrepreneurs tend to continue their successful PPC campaigns well past the time they begin to see results stemming from their SEO plan.  A synergistic approach like this when approaching one’s online marketing will win the day every time!  A well-rounded use of both PPC and SEO will ultimately lead to multiple streams of revenue for years to come.

A far as a long term strategy goes for customer acquisition and consumer presence, SEO is taking a larger role versus traditional marketing avenues.  Reports are in that corporate spending on SEO pursuits is expected to see a dramatic increase over the coming years.  With the current down economy, more serious talks are taking place in boardrooms across the country as to how these businesses will more effectively position their websites within the search engines.

Highly touted publications predict that organic search efforts (unpaid traffic generation) will rise anywhere from 17 to 20 percent while we simultaneously witness paid search (pay per click advertising) decline in the neighborhood of 11-15 percent.  A fantastic outline of this is depicted in the graph below, from our friends at eMarketer:

SEO Market Growth

Surveys are also beginning to suggest that companies placed in the top 5 of organic search results hold a slightly higher value and garner more targeted click-through traffic.  This doesn’t mean that paid advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing doesn’t get its fair share of traffic, just that organic results are getting equivalent conversions as consumers become more aware of the differences between paid vs. organic rankings.

The most obvious way to positively impact search engine results is to participate in both paid and SEO endeavors.  Pay per click offers immediate results while search engine optimization is a longer process that takes time and persistence.  Many large and small companies are finding that a pay per click campaign becomes a needed initial expense while SEO initiatives take root.  Many businesses can then realistically begin to decrease dollars spent on pay per click as they see their organic search results rise.

No matter what online activities a company decides to begin, proper reporting is the key ingredient to success.  Without having the proper tracking and reporting infrastructure in place, many dollars can be wasted on poor decisions.  There becomes no way of properly gauging the return on investment received from these pursuits without the statistics to back it up.

Web analytics are vital in order to gain useful knowledge and information when judging the results of a campaign.  Google offers “Google Analytics” which is free and only requires a small line of code be added to your site.  The type of data supplied from Google about a site’s traffic and visitors sources can be extremely helpful.

The bottom line with increased investments put toward companies’ online efforts is that anyone not exploring the options with search engine marketing is sinking further behind the curve.  In addition to increased traffic to their website, businesses need to consider SEO much like their public relations arm.  Getting ranked in the search engines gets customers in the door but in the end, it is the products and services offered that ultimately make the sale.

So what exactly is Quality Score?  Quality Score is the rating assigned to your pay per click ads (by Google) based on the relevance your ad and destination URL have in relation to the keyword(s) you are bidding on.  Staying true to form, Google strives to provide relevant content to all of their search results, paid or organic.  If they didn’t have some way of monitoring relevance then Adwords would simply become an auction site.  Ads would be placed solely based on the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay.  If you thought this is how pay per click advertising works you are sorely mistaken.

You see, if ads were placed solely on the willingness of an advertiser to pay the highest amount with no consideration given to it’s relevance to the search phrase, I’d go as far as to say that we’d see Viagra ads pop up in just about every search.  Google assigns Quality Score to prevent this very occurrence from happening.

Factors involved in calculating Quality Score are many.  However, the main ones you’ll want to concern yourself with seem to be:

• Relevance of your ad to the keyword phrase a user queries
• Relevance of the specific ad to the keyword within the ad campaign
• The historical click-through rate of your ad for a specific keyword phrase
• Relevance of your keyword in relation to the landing page you use as your destination URL

Now that we know a little about what Quality Score is, the next question is naturally “How do I increase my Quality Score with Google?”  Following right along with what we know affects your Quality Score, you’re best served by managing the following:

• Verify that your ads and keywords relate to one another.
  • Make sure to include the keyword in the ad itself
  • If possible (without looking forced), try to use it twice
• Group similar keywords, but ONLY similar keywords, within campaigns
  • Knowing that the same ad will appear in the results of any keywords you include in a campaign, it’s best to make sure your groups are small and targeted
  • Ideally, you would set up each keyword as its own campaign
  • Expecting one ad to cover multiple keywords with high relevance is unrealistic
• Pay close attention to keeping your keywords relevant to your customer.
  • Its great to have lots and lots of keywords, but only if each one has some tie to the customers your want to attract
  • By keeping your keywords (and ads) relevant to your customer, your click-through rate will be much higher
• Make sure to use specific (relevant) landing pages for your keywords/ads
  • Don’t automatically send everything to your Home Page
  • If your keywords relate more specifically to a drill-down page of your site, link your ad to that page
  • Don’t expect your customers to work to navigate your site… send them directly to what they are looking for

By following these general guidelines and keeping your Quality Score high, you will not only achieve higher search result placements but you’ll be rewarded with lower cost per click.  Google wants their user experience to be a good one so they will give preferred placement to ads with high Quality Score.

(please find this blog posted at Technorati – wc8bse2hdz)

Now let me explain why you should consider that a GOOD thing.  Let’s face it, in learning the ropes of effective search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, there become open doors all around to make money.  After learning the craft over the last year and more, I have become proficient in getting businesses noticed by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Wouldn’t you expect me to put these talents to use for myself just the same as you? 

Whether it’s affiliate marketing, launching new e-commerce sites, blogging for traffic or whatever, you should expect me to be doing these things for myself if you are to ever trust me to do it for you.  I dare say that if I weren’t moonlighting on projects aside from the nuts and bolts of Zirkel Exchange, I run the risk of losing credibility.

I liken it to a realtor who doesn’t own property for themselves or a stock broker that doesn’t manage his own portfolio.  By putting my own skin in the game (so to speak) of online marketing and e-commerce I hope to prove that my tactics and knowledge are solid like a rock.

Every client is different and I learn something new from each one of them.  The same holds true for my own ventures.  By exploring new markets and opportunities I see available when I am online I am able to broaden my depth of knowledge beyond just what I might learn from my existing client base.  Besides, I’d much rather try and fail at something new when it is my own test site than to experience that disappointment with a paying customer.  By taking my ”off hours” to work on my own SEO projects, I am essentially opening up a platform for experimentation at no risk to my clients.

The SEO business is a tough road to plow and continuing education needs to come from hands-on experience.  New ideas are constantly being presented and I receive hundreds of emails a week with the “latest and greatest, must try” techniques.  By putting these tools to use in real world situations for myself first, I am able to form an even sturdier bank of knowledge on which to stand.

For these reasons I hope it is clear why I am open about the fact that my SEO and PPC clients are not my only source of income.  I am passionate about this business and I cherish the relationships I have formed with the businesses I help.  But I honestly do not believe I could perform as well as I do for them without having first seen success for myself.

For an example of one of the e-commerce sites I have launched and manage, please visit the Swimwear Clothing Store.