Sunday, October 12, 2008

Creating An Effective Pay Per Click Campaign

By Brian Basch

In the past several years, the world of pay per click advertising has changed. Google's changes in policies mean that you can't just put a huge number of keywords into an ad campaign without thought anymore. At least, you can't do this if you still want to turn a profit.

Doing this sort of thing today will result in most of your keywords being deactivated, or they'll be active, but expensive. Bid prices on basic keywords have gone up, so you'll have to pay attention to the ones you choose if you want an effective campaign.

The good news is that a little attention will result in a better chance of success. If you know why Google behaves in the way that it does and you choose your keywords appropriately, you'll stand a good chance of making a profit.

Advertising is what makes the money for Google. The ads must be appealing to readers so that they will click through and Google will profit. This is why Google is very strict about what ads will be shown.

To this end, Google is working to weed out spam, false information, and websites that don't provide anything to the viewer. Too many pay per click sites fit these criteria. If you want to succeed with your campaign, make sure Google views you as legitimate.

So what can you do? Add some more information to your site to make costs go down and your website quality goes up. All you need is a few additional pages to improve your standing with Google.

Firstly introduce an "About Us" page, list of terms and conditions, and a separate privacy page. These additions will do a lot to raise your quality score. Google also considers a contact page to be very important.

Although these changes are relatively small they will make a big impact on your PPC campaign and search engine rankings. When you add an XML sitemap this will also help to improve your quality score.

An XML sitemap is really just a directory of the content in your site. However, it makes it a lot easier for Google to see what your site is and does. Ask a programmer to add a map for you. It'll cost a little, but it might make your bids up to thirty-five percent cheaper.

If you want to really jumpstart your campaigns then pay attention to Google's rules and whims. It is well worth the effort as you will improve your PPC campaigns this way. You can actually test your own keywords by looking them up in the search engines.

Another thing you can do is to review your competitors Meta tags and content. Always remember not to copy and paste from anyone's website. You can get good ideas for improving your own website. When you add new content to your website your Google quality rank will increase and your PPC campaign costs will decrease.

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