You’ve just redesigned some pages of your web site. The pages have high search engine rankings that you don’t want to lose. How can you safely redirect web site traffic from your old pages to the new pages without losing your rankings? You can do this by using a ” 301 redirect ”

What is 301 redirect?

301 redirect is the best method to preserve your current search engine rankings when redirecting web pages or a website. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”. After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name. You implement the 301 redirect by creating a .htaccess file.

What is a .htaccess file?

When a visitor/spider requests a web page, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

• How to implement the 301 Redirect
• To create a .htaccess file, open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension).
• If you already have a .htaccess file on your server, download it to your desktop for editing.
• Place this code in your .htaccess file:
• Redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm
• If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it, skip a line, then add the above code.
• Save the .htaccess file
• Upload this file to the root folder of your server.
• Test it by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.

Notes: Don’t add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:

• redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)
• /old/old.htm (the original folder path and file name)
• http://www.you.com/new.htm (new path and file name)

When the search engines spider your site again they will follow the rule you have created in your .htaccess file. The search engine spider doesn’t actually read the .htaccess file, but recognizes the response from the server as valid.

During the next update, the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, plus some fluctuations in rankings. According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages.

Other ways to implement the 301 redirect:

To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your .htaccess file if you are on a unix web server:

redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com

You can also use one of these in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirect permanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html

This will redirect “index.html” to another domain using a
301-Moved permanently redirect.

If you need to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com and you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on
your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

or this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Tip: Use your full URL (ie http://www.domain.com) when obtaining incoming links to your site. Also use your full
URL for the internal linking of your site.

If you want to redirect your .htm pages to .php pages and you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can
put this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php

If you wish to redirect your .html or .htm pages to .shtml pages because you are using Server Side Includes
(SSI) add this code to your .htaccess file:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html

Frequently Asked Question:

What’s the difference in using a 301 redirect versus a meta redirect?

Meta Redirect

To send someone to a new page (or site) put this in the head of your
document:

Content=”10; tells the browser to wait 10 seconds before transfer, choose however long you would like, you can even choose 0 to give a smoother transition, but some (really old) browsers aren’t capable of using this so I’d suggest putting a link on that page to your new site for them.

With a meta redirect the page with the redirect issues a 200 OK status and some other mechanism moves the browser over to the new URL. With a 200 OK on both pages, the search engine wants to index both the start page and the target page – and that is a known spam method (set up 10,000 domains full of keywords for the search engines to index then meta redirect the “real visitor” after 0 or 1
seconds to the “real site” ) so using it gets you penalized.

The 301 redirect simply issues a Permanently Moved message in the HTTP header which tells the search engine to only index the target URL.

Conclusion

The safest way to redirect old web pages to the new pages or old web site to the new web site and keep the same search engine rankings is to use the 301 redirect. It will also pass on the page rank from your old site to your new site.

After several months in the planning, Microsoft has finally taken the covers off its new web search engine, Bing. Set to go live in under a week, Bing is not just a re branding of Microsoft’s previous search site Live Search but is a major update introducing new features and a new interface, touted as a “decision engine“.

Having been in internal testing for a while under the codename of Kumo, Bing was unveiled today – as expected – at the All Things Digital D7 conference by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Bing is expected to start rolling out in the coming days with worldwide availability expected by June 3.
According to Microsoft, Bing will initially have four main search verticals: shopping around for products (with reviews and price comparisons to help you make your decision), travel planning (using technology from their acquisition of Farecast), researching health conditions (possibly linked to Microsoft HealthVault), and local business search (with integrated reviews and maps).

You may be wondering where such a strange name came from. Yusuf Mehdi, the Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business Group who demoed Bing on stage at D7 today, reveals “We needed a brand that was as fresh and new – A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world – the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.”

Along with the relaunch, the Virtual Earth mapping platform will now be known as Bing Maps for Enterprise, the advanced travel search features made available from Microsoft’s acquisition of Farecast will be fully integrated as Bing Travel, and the Live Search cashback program will also be branded to Bing Cashback.

Will Bing be able to save Microsoft’s ever-dwindling search share? The product will have to seriously impress consumers and become an excellent brand if it is going to reach anywhere near Google’s search market and many believe that Bing could be aimed more at finally removing Yahoo! search from the competition. An advertising campaign for Bing, costing Microsoft up to $100 million, is expected soon as they try – yet again – to make larger inroads into the world of internet search.

If you’re a frequent Twitter user, we’ve all had the problem of space limitations due to long Urls since the length of the text message is 140 characters. If you don’t know about it yet, then there is a solution available!

TinyUrl.com

Ever heard of TinyURL.com? Well, basically, it’s a redirection service that gives you a short Url for your given your destination Url, which you can use in your web pages or emails. It has served many different purposes for years.

Typical reasons for its use to to shorten the Urls that are not only long enough to accommodate in limited spaces, it’s unlikely that users would be able to reproduce the long urls exactly by typing it without errors.

For example,

In Twitter, small Urls are preferred due to space limations

In emails blasts where long urls often get malformed and become non-functional. Tinyurls serve a good replacement for long urls.

For (casual) anonymity to users, such as for hiding affiliate links etc Tinyurls are mostly used.

TinyURL.com does not require you to create an account before starting with creating short urls. Just fill up the form with the long url and press the ‘Make TinyURL!’ button and instantly you get a short url that you can use in place of your given url. TinyURL now also allow an optional alias for your url which you can use to point to your page, given that the alias is not already taken.

So, the short link to an inventory page on one of our dealers (http://www.reedmantoll.com/new-inventory/vehicle-details.htm?vehicleId=75a132e44046381e01cc7e90761a4815&useHistory=true) is as small as http://tinyurl.com/422nlt!

That was all about TinyURL that most of you might have already known. Many developers wished if they could find a way to create TinyURLs without manually typing them, from within their online applications is actually quite easy to do in VB.NET.

It turns out that there is an API available and to make a request it’s as simple  as calling a page as below.

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=<your url here>

The output you get contains just one line containing the TinyURL corresponding to the url that you passed. I have already started using this API and am sure you are not far behind!

Here is an example using VB.NET:

   Private Function generateTinyUrl(ByVal url As String)
        Dim tinyUrlQuery As String = "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=" + url
        Dim tinyUrl As String = LTrim(RTrim(GetHTMLPage(tinyUrlQuery)))

        Return tinyUrl
    End Function

    Public Function GetHTMLPage(ByVal URL As String, _
      Optional ByVal TimeoutSeconds As Integer = 5, _
      Optional ByVal proxy As Integer = -1) _
      As String
        ' Retrieves the HTML from the specified URL,
        ' using a default timeout of 10 seconds
        Dim objRequest As Net.WebRequest
        Dim objResponse As Net.WebResponse
        Dim objStreamReceive As System.IO.Stream
        Dim objEncoding As System.Text.Encoding
        Dim objStreamRead As System.IO.StreamReader

        Try
            ' Setup our Web request
            objRequest = Net.WebRequest.Create(URL)
            objRequest.Timeout = TimeoutSeconds * 1000

            ' Retrieve data from request
            objResponse = objRequest.GetResponse
            objStreamReceive = objResponse.GetResponseStream
            objEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding( _
                "utf-8")
            objStreamRead = New System.IO.StreamReader( _
                objStreamReceive, objEncoding)
            ' Set function return value
            GetHTMLPage = objStreamRead.ReadToEnd()
            ' Check if available, then close response
            If Not objResponse Is Nothing Then
                objResponse.Close()
            End If
        Catch ex As Exception
            ' Error occured grabbing data, simply return nothing
            ' MessageBox.Show(ex.ToString)
            Return "Exception"
        End Try
End Function

Facebook Steps Up SEO for Brand Pages with Millions of New Indexable Links

This past November, in a move that increased the amount of Page Rank and traffic Google gives to Facebook Pages, Facebook launched a new feature that essentially added hundreds of millions of new internal links to Facebook’s brand Pages in users’ public search listings.
Public search listings are Facebook’s way of exposing user information to Google.

Before November, the default public search listings included users’ name, profile picture, network, and a few friends’ photos. Now, Facebook has added Pages that users are a fan of to users’ default public search listings.

This means that if a user is a fan of The Gap, U2, or Barack Obama, that information is now listed in that user’s public search listing. In addition, each of those items listed point back to Facebook Pages – such as The Gap’s Facebook Page, U2’s Facebook Page, and Barack Obama’s Facebook Page.

The net result in essence is 112,000 links to The Gap’s Facebook Page just appeared this weekend. 188,000 links to U2’s Facebook Page just appeared, and 3,100,000 links to Obama’s Facebook Page just appeared.

Considering that Facebook turned on links to Pages from about 120 million profile page public search listings, the number of new internal links to Pages on the facebook.com domain this November likely increased by several hundred million.

The SEO experts in the crowd will be able to gauge how impactful this change will be in light of the thousands of complex factors Google looks at when deciding who to give SERP real estate to.

Facebook describes the update to users as a way to make it easier for friends to find you in search results, and that is surely the case:
But ultimately for marketers, this step by Facebook increases the weight Google will give to brand Pages. Brand and marketing managers should not be surprised to see their Facebook Pages rising in Google search results in the months ahead.

So how does this benefit Me for SEO?

In principle the more networked your business’ page is (via customers, friends, vendors, etc.) the more likely you are to show up in Facebook and be found by a potential customer. These pages are also getting indexed in Google and certainly help drive search engine traffic to Facebook, but based on a small sample, most businesses are getting no local search engine optimization help from these pages.

For example, this page for an Arizona adoption attorney may be helping promote this business, but there is a “nofollow” tag on the link to the business’ website, meaning no pagerank is being passed on.

So how does this relate to me as an SEO marketer?

How to Get Local Search Engine Optimization From Your Facebook Page

1. Set up a blog on your website.

2. Go to your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page”, then “More Applications” and browse for a RSS reader application like Simply RSS. Add the app to your page using your blog’s feed url – Make sure your feed urls are on your domain, or if they are going through an RSS manager make sure that the RSS manager 301 redirects to your domain else the links will be redirected and not pass pageran). Now your blog posts will show up on your Facebook page and the posts will not carry the “nofollow” tag. As long as the links are pointing to your domain (and not 302 redirecting via your RSS manager) you should be able to pass pagerank from this page to your site.

3. Post regularly with target keywords in the headlines so that you can get the SEO benefit from keyword rich anchor text.

4. Network your Facebook page as much as possible. The more profile pages that link to your page the more likely your page is to get crawled and the stronger the page rank that will get passed on to your site.

Social networking makes it possible to cross paths with people that might not be available under normal circumstances. It is fun, exciting, and productive as long as it is done right. Start with one well researched social media group and work from there. Remember, the better people know you, the more they want to know. Focusing your energy will help you achieve the results that you so richly deserve and desire.

What Social Network Members Want

Social networks, also known as social media, are websites that people can join as members of an online community. These social networks provide tools that enable members to configure a customized version of a user page; create profiles and bios; manage invites and contact lists; upload photos, video and music files; and interact with each other via multiple channels.

People join social networks to socialize, share and self-promote. They are not receptive to marketing messages or sales hype, but they do seek answers and advice. If you have experience and expertise of relevance, they may value your altruistic contributions to the social network.

Social network users want to meet other people, make friends, find love, display art, showcase expertise, promote blog posts, distribute music mp3s, express feelings, state opinions, ask questions, update their status, argue about trivia and obtain peer-to-peer advice.

They want friends. They could use a selfless mentor, an expert who first seeks to help, and only secondarily—almost reluctantly—engages in sales behaviors. In the digital realm, marketing has to be 80 percent education and only 20 percent sales communication, especially in emerging technology markets. The more your customers understand how your product solves a problem better than your competitors’ products, the more likely they are to spread positive word-of-mouth advertising for you.

Tips for social networking successfully on the internet:

When you’re on the social networks stop trying to sell, it does not work; the key is to build and develop a reputation, a relationship and credibility. You can easily accomplish this by offering free tips, advice that relate to your niche or market. On the web, trust is given to peers with no ulterior motives. Social network members seek uncoached, “un-incentivized,” spontaneous, genuine reports of product use. They will also want to hear from CEOs, business owners and entrepreneurs who have special knowledge or professional insight about a topic of relevance.

Socializing by definition excludes sales hype. If pushy, money-hungry salesmen showed up at a private party, they’d be kicked out, right? Aggressive, obnoxious sales pitches would spoil the fun.

Know your social media goal? Are you trying to build a brand, get additional customers, get recognized as an authority within your niche? Whichever the goal you must make sure that you set them and write them down so that you may focus and execute them. Once you write things down you will have direction on what to do while your spending time in these social mediums.

Schedule yourself on a Social Network, one of the biggest problems that frustrates most bloggers is the lack of focus and attention on projects; seeming to be all over the place and needing a schedule. Allocate a specific date and time to focus on social networking activities and make sure to commit and stick to this scheduled meeting. Like in business, don’t give yourself goals that are too broad and not in depth enough to actually follow through with. If you schedule yourself for your social networking then you will be focused, precise and be sure to follow through which will gain you popularity and eventually get you more followers and friends.

You can’t be on all of them. You will have to make a choice for which to focus your efforts. The most successful social networkers have a handful of sites that they frequent and your friends and followers will take note of this because of your attention to detail and follow through on the things you have planned on doing on these sites. Browse through your favorite ones and the ones you feel relate to your market the most and stick to the top 3 – the more social networks you are on the less you will get done.

A few things to Avoid when Social Networking

Faking. You can’t fake it. Social network members can sense a company or individual who is pretending to be unbiased, but is really oriented only to quick, easy sales. Manipulation is easily detected. The worst thing you can do is constantly promote some product or site or try to trick people into visiting your site. Ghost blogs, fake social media and pseudo profiles are scams that are pre-judged. It’s common knowledge in the blogosphere that such antics are taboo. Exaggerated hype exploitation is what most companies seem tempted to do, but it always backfires and generates negative PR.

Pushing Products. It’s counter-productive to invade these sites just to push products at the communities. When companies try to do so, it backfires, generates negative buzz and ends up doing more harm than good. Can you afford to alienate bloggers or social networkers? In social media, a company representative will be warmly welcomed—if that rep provides valuable, relevant information that the community needs and is very low-key about marketing anything.

Social media, and the web itself, is based on trust. Trust is gained by helping, advising and educating your audience. Promotional messages and ads are ignored and/or despised. But good advice, free samples and instructional materials are actively sought, enjoyed and respected.

You should see these social media sites as groups of potential friends who have needs you can meet, not as prospective consumers who you can take advantage of or revenue streams that you can exploit. If you have a grossly commercial, non-helpful approach, you will be hated—and the negative publicity could possibly ruin your business.

If you gain their trust and respect, you’ll probably gain some new paying customers, too! But be patient. Social media is not a “get-rich-quick” scheme zone—it’s more a “get-trust-slowly-but-surely” arena. If you hang in there and share some trivia now and then (what movies or music you like, for example), you’ll be seen as a good member of the community—a regular guy or gal—and a source for solutions.

The worst mistake you can make is to pretend to be a non-commercial member of the online community, and then promote products like you’re an average user giving an uncoached, unbiased report. The trust path is the only avenue to sustainable profits and long-term customer loyalty. To succeed in influencing social networks, first be a good member of the community, sharing abundantly! Successful social networking is a must in today’s society, follow the preceding guidelines and you will be successful.

Diversify Your Backlinks

The more natural ways to build your credibility and embed yourself in the social structure of the web, the more likely you will become successful without risking getting penalized by search engines for having an artificial link profile.  Search engines currently base relevancy primarily on linkage patterns.

Who links to you and how they link to you are what determines where your site will rank for competitive search queries. Links from other webmasters are viewed by search engines as unbiased third party votes. Basically, Google will recommend your site, if others recommend it first.  If people are linking through to your site, the Google spider will think your site is well liked. If relevant sites are linking through to you, this is even better, because Google will consider you to be an authority on this topic.  You can’t just get links and then stop. You need to constantly increase, improve and diversify your sources of links. Focus on QUALITY links. Authoritative sites will have a greater impact on your link popularity than unknown sites. Do not fall into the trap of sites who promise to get you hundreds of links and shortcut the whole process. As you evaluate these services, realize that the quality of your links is important to your success. Don’t participate in link farms or free-for-all links pages. These will not create any direct traffic and may have a negative impact on your link popularity.  So here are some great resources to get your backlinks from:

Social Networking

Utilize social networking to create links pointing back to your site.  Some example of the social network sites are Facebook and Twitter.  This way you can create a fan base and interact with your customers, all while getting backlinks.

Directories

Submit your site to as many directories as possible. Directories differ from search engines in that they are usually maintained by a human editor rather than a robot or spider that indexes your site. In most cases, directories provide links to your site on static pages.

This is important when contributing to link popularity. Thus, directories provide a relatively simple way to create incoming links to your site and can contribute significantly to link popularity.

Launch other Websites

Consider launching more than one website. The links from one site to the other (and vice versa) will increase the link popularity of both. Just remember that the content of the sites must be ‘unique’ or all the work you have done will be discredited.

Publish Articles

Write and submit articles to the top article directories. In each article include a resource box that contains a link pointing back to your website. For additional keyword relevance try hyperlinking your primary keyword phrase to your site as well.  Search engines love fresh content and your blog articles will be spidered quickly if you submit them to the top social directories.  Start writing relevant articles about your niche and syndicate them. There a ton of these article syndication sites out there and easy to find with a quick search

Comment on Other Blogs

It is likely that you can find blogs relevant to your site that you can comment on. If you find a blog that already has a loyal fan base, become a part of their community and you can tap into that fan base. Start leaving comments on the blogs with a link back to your web site. Engaging with these relevant blogs is a great way to get noticed.

Trading Links

Trading links with other sites is a way to create backlinks to your site.  You can contact site owners and PERSONALLY request a link. You can tell them that you have linked to their site and would appreciate a link in return, or you can just offer to exchange links. When choosing which sites for reciprocal links, focus on sites that complement your own site but do not directly compete with it.

SEO Marketing and the Title Tag

Title tags are important to SEO marketing and will make your pages stand out from the rest. The Title is the first object that Search Engine Spiders see and is also displayed as the hyper-linking text in the Search Engine’s results. Without the title tags the search engine spider may pass your page over even when you have unique content to offer your customers.

As far as the Search Engines are concerned, the title of your web page is one of the most important parts, and all Search Engines support the Title Tag. Because the Search Engine Spiders see this tag first, and because it’s the most important line of code in your document. Search engines see your page from top to bottom and left to right, putting your title tags at the top of the page will increase the likelihood of your page getting indexed and subsequently seen by more people.

More is less

In title tag design, more is less. The larger the title tag the spammier the search engine will believe your page is. If the engine believes it to be spam, then it will not be indexed or will show up much lower on the results for searches. Another thing to think about is making sure your title tags are appropriate and relevant to your webpage.

Making the Best Title Tag Possible

Brand your traffic: adding the specific company you are optimizing for to the beginning or end of your title tag will allow the consumer to know what site they are on so that they can come back.

Include your keyword phrases: it may go without saying, but this is essential to optimization to drive traffic to your specific sites and pages.

Use a divider: when splitting up the brand from a term I use the “|” symbol, aka the pipe bar. Others choose to use the arrow “>” or the hyphen “-“which are equally effective.

Be consistent: Once you’ve determined a good formula for your pages in a given section or area of your site, stick to that regimen.

And lastly repeat in the headline: Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 header tag can be valuable from both a keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. Users who go to a page from the SERPs will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked – deliver and you’ve fulfilled that obligation. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they’re reasonably certain fits their intended goal or query.

The most important part of any SEO campaign is getting more links to point to your site. Links really are the measure of power on the internet, as a site with bad content but a lot of links will outrank a beautiful, relevant, site with great content but no links…everytime.

So, you know you want links, but what’s the best way to go about getting them?

• Get links from sites in your industry
• Have links point to deep URLs on your site
• Don’t do it all at once; do it over time
• Consider paid links and organic links
• Get Links from Related Sites

When building your site’s authority on the web, you should always be striving to get links from sites that are in the same industry as you. Google tends to give more weight to links that are in the same industry, especially when the link is from a site that Google views as an authority, which is usually a site domain that “has been around a while” and/or one that has garnered a reasonable amount of PageRank (at least ≥ 1).

Don’t worry about only getting links from sites that are in your vertical, but if you have a choice between a link from a general blog and a blog that specializes in your industry, always go with the industry related site first!

Get Deep Links

When acquiring links from other sites, don’t just have the link point to your homepage (http://www.mydomain.com). Instead have them point to the content pages that you would like to have rank better in the search engines. By getting a link that points directly to a content page, you are showing the engines that the site contains useful content.

The more links you get pointing to a specific content page, the more the search engines are going to believe that the content page is something special and should be ranked at the top of the results.

Build Links as “Naturally” as You Can

Although any link is a good link, getting 10,000 links in a week is not as beneficial as getting 10,000 links over the span of 6 months. When a site suddenly gets a ton of links, this throws up a red flag at the search engines that the site may be trying to cheat its way to the top. There are exceptions, but it is best to take a long-term approach when acquiring links for your site, especially if your site is less than two years old (another red flag).

Have a plan of how many links you want to get and then work on that plan a few hours a week for several months. This way you can show the search engines that your site is gradually growing in popularity and is regularly receiving new backlinks (the best indicator of a good site!).

Consider Paid Links

Getting someone to link to you for free can sometimes be hard, especially if you’re in a competitive industry where people have so many other choices of sites to link to. If this is the case, you may consider buying a certain amount of links every month.

Introduction to Paid Search

If you already own an internet business, then you have discovered by now, just how important it is to have a powerful online presence. In particular, making yourself easily accessible to potential buyers, who are looking for what you are offering. Of course, your ideal would be to have your business obtain and hold, the number one ranking in the natural listings of the search engines. But as you know, that is not always possible – especially since the methods that search engines use to rank websites, are changing constantly. A faster, more effective approach – and one adopted by many internet businesses today – is Pay-Per-Click advertising. Properly executed, it can help your business prosper, by placing your compelling offer in front of the correctly-targeted, hungry crowd!

There are many uses for pay-per-click. Always remember that pay-per-click is a vehicle to drive targeted traffic to your desired web page, and can be used in all sorts of creative ways.

You can use pay-per-click to drive traffic to sales pages for direct sales. Drive traffic to opt-in pages to build your opt-in lists. Drive traffic to lead generators offering free reports to build up your marketing funnel. Drive traffic to survey forms for market research.

Again, it’s all up to your imagination, and the most desired action you require from your visitor. There are many popular pay-per-click search engines, that you can use on the internet.

What is Pay-Per-Click?

Before anything else, let’s answer a very important question: What exactly is pay-per-click? “As the name implies, it is an advertising medium, in which an advertiser pays to have his advertisements viewed by prospective customers.”

Advertising and Ad Publishing

The first is described in the definition above.  Ad publishing, on the other hand, can be defined as the following: “The display of advertisements on a website, which gives visitors a chance to visit the URL of the advertiser’s choice.” Pay-per-click is a concept that has been around for a long time. The company that first started it all was Overture (now a part of Yahoo! Search Marketing), in 1998.

Since then, pay-per-click has evolved greatly as marketers and consumers alike grew more and more savvy as this medium grew more and more popular. Pay-per-click is also the vehicle of choice that newbies tend to use for driving traffic to their websites. Unfortunately, they often jump onto the bandwagon without learning the basics of marketing and the technicalities of pay-per-click, thus often incurring ridiculously high costs and quitting internet marketing as a result. So widespread is this phenomenon, that the Advertising end, (known as Google “Adwords”), has often been labeled “The Newbie Graveyard.” However, if proper due diligence is carried out by you, payper-click has the potential to drive hordes of targeted traffic, to wherever you want it to go!

Advertising With Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the greatest inventions of online marketing. Gone are the offline, direct-mail-order days – where you could be waiting days, weeks, or even months, to test out each of your marketing campaigns. With pay-per-click, advertisements, sales letters and offers can be tested with a global audience in as little as 5 minutes’ time.

Statistics in various areas are also easily obtained, which allows you to easily tweak your ad campaigns to maximize profits and cut out the losers fast.  A/B split-testing allows you to split-test headlines, images, and many other elements of your sales page. This saves you a lot of time and guesswork, resulting in maximization of profits.

Let’s walk through an example of a pay-per-click campaign. Let’s say an author of a dog-training ebook wants to promote his ebook with pay-per-click advertising.
Let’s call him Tom.

He signs up with one of the pay-per-click search engines, which happens to be Google, and goes on to create an ad that leads to the sales letter of his ebook, which is hosted on his site.

In the process of setting up his campaign, Tom finds out the average cost per click and other relevant information, and decides that he can afford to spend $0.50 per click to break even. Thus, he decides to set $0.50 as his “maximum cost per click”.

Within minutes of creating the advertisement, it goes live. Mary is the new proud owner of a poodle and wants to learn how to train it. She decides to seek help from the internet.

She goes to Google.com, types in “how to train my dog”, and is presented with the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP: The red ink highlights the paid ads. Mary spots Tom’s ad and clicks on it. In this process, Tom pays about $0.50 for that click, and Mary is directed to Tom’s site.

Mary loves what she sees, and purchases his ebook, resulting in a successful sale. And that, is a very simplified account of how a pay-per-click campaign works.

Ad Publishing

This other end of the pay-per-click advertising model allows content publishers to earn money from having ads displayed on their sites.

For example, Jack has a site that informs people about where to find the cheapest hotels in his area. He sets aside a certain amount of space to have Google ads displayed.

Here is what one of his ad blocks looks like: A tourist stumbles upon his site and clicks on one of the links to find out more about “cheap hotels”. The advertiser behind the ad is then charged a certain amount of money for that click, out of which a certain percentage is allocated to Jack.

This, in essence, is ad publishing. What Jack has done is to insert a piece of javascript code onto his site. What happened after that is that Google has “decided” what the theme of his site is about, and has thus aptly displayed the relevant ads.

Pay-Per-Click Terminology

Every specialty has it’s own puzzling jargon. The following list will have you speaking like a true pay-per-click master:

• CTR: “Click-through rate”. The percentage of visitors to the website displaying your ad, who click on your ad and go “through” to the ad’s target web-page.
• CPM: “Cost Per Thousand Impressions”. The cost per thousand “impressions” of your ad, on the displaying page. eCPM: “Effective Cost Per Thousand”. The CPM is adjusted to take into account other, relevant factors.
• CPT: “Cost Per Thousand”. The same as CPM.
• CPI: “Cost Per Impression”. The cost of a single impression of your ad.
• PPC: “Pay Per Click”. What we’re talking about here! The entire system of displaying your ads on the internet, by paying a set cost for each “click” on your ad.
• PPI: “Pay per interaction”. A variation of PPC, where you pay a set cost for each “interaction” resulting from your ad.
• CPA: “Cost Per Action”. A calculation of what it is costing you, to get one visitor to take a particular action you desire.
• CPC: “Cost Per Click”. The specific subset of CPA, where the action you want the visitor to take, is to click your ad.
• eCPA: “Effective Cost Per Action”. The CPA, adjusted to take into account other, relevant factors.
• SERP: “Search Engine Results Page”. When you enter a “keyword” (or several keywords) in the search box of a search engine, that engine returns a page-by-page listing of web-pages, that match your keyword(s).
• XML: A markup language that supplies a set of standards for programmers to follow. But for our purposes, XML provides us with the ability to paste a simple piece of code into our web page and thus, easily obtain an automated content “feed”.
• ROI: “Return On Investment”. The percentage of your original investment, that you get in profits. For instance, in our dog-training example, Tom “invested” $0.50 per click. Let’s say that Mary bought his ebook which costs $50. And let’s also say that Mary was the 50th person who clicked on Tom’s ad, the other 49 of whom did not buy Tom’s ebook. Then Tom’s cost was $0.50 per click x 50 clickers = $25.00. Which means Tom’s profit was Mary’s $50.00 purchase – Tom’s $25.00 cost = $25.00. Thus, Tom made $25.00 profit on his total “investment” of $25.00. Therefore, his ROI is 100%.

Top Pay-Per-Click Search Engines

Google AdWords

A cost of $5 is required to set up an account. However, this $5 gets credited into your account as well so it does not go to waste. Bids start at $0.01, but as you know by now, competition is very fierce on this search engine and you should be realistic and realize that you very often have to pay far more than $0.01 for your clicks.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo!’s flagship product provides sponsored listings in search results on the Web’s top portals and search engines, reaching over 80% of active Internet users. It pioneered the pay-per-click search engine model in 1997,after seeing a need for a more focused search engine. After operating as GoTo.com for about 8 years, the name was changed to Overture and in 2005, it was renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing.

ABC Search

ABC Search is currently having a promotion and matches any initial deposit up to $100 delivering qualified Pay-Per-Click traffic. 2.5 billion monthly searches are conducted on ABC Search and is certainly worth a look at.

SearchFeed

Advertising with Searchfeed.com provides a level of personal service every online advertiser deserves, extending an ad campaign to its fullest potential. Searchfeed.com offers exposure to millions of unique visitors each day on a costper-
click basis, determined by the advertiser. By only establishing partnerships with Web properties that operate in accordance with industry acceptable standards,
keyword buys deliver the strongest Return On Investment (ROI).

7Search

The 7Search advertising program generates quality website traffic on behalf of thousands of advertisers through its payper-click (bid for placement) search engine.
Currently providing sponsored results for over 1.5 Billion searches per month, 7Search specializes in serving website owners of “low profit margin” categories of business that cannot afford to pay over ten cents per visitor.

MIVA

MIVA is a network of partner sites powering over 2 billion searches monthly. The network includes sites such as CNet.com, InfoSpace and WorldNews. MIVA provides a full suite of management tools to help you maximize your earnings. Get $25 in your account when you sign up with Miva today!

Enhance Interactive

You can open an Enhance account for $50 get a $25 bonus to new advertisers if you’re a new Enhance user. It is a payper-click network that allows you to efficiently and costeffectively extend the reach of your search campaigns. The Enhance network receives over 2 billion targeted searches monthly.

Findology

Findology is dedicated to provide you with highly targeted, quality traffic. With their customized technology and performance based advertising, they deliver the traffic that your company is looking for. By bidding on relevant keywords and listing your site, you will reach their entire network of partners. The program is built for any budget and you will only pay when potential customers click on your listings.

Microsoft AdCenter

Signing up with Microsoft adCenter is quick and easy with a $5 signup fee. If you’re spending $30 a day in search advertising you can take advantage of QuickLaunch and have one of the Microsoft Media Specialists help you plan, create, execute, and analyze your first adCenter campaign.

GoClick.Com

GoClick.Com has special systems in place to make sure that you are only charged for unique clicks and not overcharged for your online advertising. You can request any remaining funds be returned to you at any time. There are no membership fees to use our service at all.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a concept that company marketing executives are now taking seriously. The viral marketing capabilities of social networks, platforms, and social sharing can have a dramatic effect on the overall content and search optimization process.

Social Media Optimization was a prevalent concept to search engine optimization (SEO) experts during the rise of social networking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr and YouTube, as well as many syndication and RSS driven tools like Netvibes. Many personal bookmarking tools gave individuals the ability to publish their favorites and thus perpetuate the sharing of bookmarked content.

As with many new web technologies and concepts the bloggers “got it.” Syndication and sharing had always been a key element of how blog publishers gained attention and social promotion of their content. Social media platforms were now the perfect catalyst for articles the were ripe for social media promotion.

Social Media Optimization became mainstream when content publishers began to understand the value of this viral marketing and started “optimizing” their articles for social media sharing. Major publishers and content creators began adding social media tools to their published news articles setting the pace for all other traditional publishers. Again, taking a lead from the content management optimization of popular blogging systems we started seeing comments, tagging, and social bookmarking tools as key social tools on all new stories.

Social media marketingWe also see the rise of SMO as a tool for marketing. Social media marketers learned that while there was a tremendous potential for viral marketing (mentos and diet coke) via social media channels they also could not control all aspects of virally promoted messages or content. Social media marketing and formal social media optimization firms developed techniques defined basic guidelines for allowing citizen media to promote content and messages.

Social media optimization can relate to both individual content items, such as a stories “SMO content value,” or to an entire website and the overall structure as it may invite social media sharing behavior.

Individual social media optimized stories are written to highlight some interesting core fact, premise, hypothesis, or controversy and often elicit feedback or comments from readers. Social media consultants help commercial news and independent news and writers to follow a complete social media workflow process to insure their new stories are positioned for social media promotion. Video and other socially shared content can also be promoted as other publishers utilize this content in their own blog posts and articles.

Social media optimization is now a factor that online marketing firms will review as they release cross media promotions as well as product marketing. Small companies have already adopted blogs as their company and client communication channels in addition to or in place of traditional press releases.

Specific SMO social videos are already appearing online with reference to the power of the socially optimized website.

SMO websites are created to allow optimum community, interactions, networking, and sharing. Social community websites that allow users to build profiles and identity are also integrating tools and widgets that allow users to also link to their other social platform identities like MySpace and Facebook accounts. Social media optimized websites often leverage content promotion by integrating social content promotion widgets directly on stories that report back the popularity of their stories

As social media becomes a greater part of corporate advertising and promotion we will continue to see content publishers and producers leverage their sites and stories with social media optimization techniques.