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Frequently Asked Questions about Search Engine MarketingThese are the most common questions our clients and prospects ask us about search engine marketing. If your questions are not addressed from the list below, be sure to contact us and we will be happy to discuss this in more detail:
Why advertise at the Search Engine web sites?Studies have proven that people searching for products and services will utilize a search engine as part of the buying process as one of the most common experiences. The real proof is in your own experiences and the fact that search engine web sites themselves rank high themselves as top Internet properties, for example 9 search web sites are in the top 20 most popular sites. Ignoring advertising at these important sites to increase market mind share is an opportunity lost. You have a range of budget options from costly banner advertising to special ranking in search results. Isn't submitting to Search Engine Web sites free?Like any marketing tool, there is a cost associated with it's use. Although many search engine web sites will allow free submission it could take several months before your site is indexed (crawled) by their automated programs (spider, robot, crawler). Even after your site has been indexed don't expect it to achieve a positive ranking position. Plan your site navigation, write keyword rich copy in static pages and solicit quality links to your site. Good web content is the foundation of high ranking. Increasing your partner program links and other relevant content or directory listings to develop link popularity will improve your ranking. If you are new to search engine marketing, read over Market-Vantage's simple budget planning guidelines for submitting to search engine web sites. What is a search engine Pay Per Click marketing program?Pay Per Click programs are probably the quickest way to the top and the best ROI online! Pay Per Click allows you to bid for whatever sponsored listing position you want within the PPC providers search engine partners. PPC providers partner with search engines and portal sites i.e. CNET, ZDnet. One of the most popular Pay Per Click programs in the U.S. is Overture. They claim to have 85% of the web, meaning they have partnered with 85% of the top search engines according to Jupiter Media Metrix. Overture brokers sponsored listings on behalf of their search engine partners. You can bid for the position you want for a specific keyword phrase. Your Title and Listing Description must be extremely relevant to the landing page URL. This is how they maintain the integrity of the listings. Your listing submission to Overture is subject to their editors’ review and acceptance. Therefore, be as clear and honest as possible or you will waste a lot of time resubmitting your listings. It takes approximately 3-5 days for your listings to be reviewed. Google also offers an affordable Pay Per Click AdWord program. The ad’s position will be determined by the click-through rate it receives. If it drops below .04%, Google assumes that it is not relevant enough for the keyword phrase and the ad is automatically removed for that keyword. You can rework the ad in an attempt to gain a higher click through rate (CTR). You can choose to have Google’s AdWords to appear in AOL, Earthlink and AT&T. Other Pay Per Click programs include: Ah-ha, and About.com’s Sprinks as well as a few others. We have had the best experience with Overture and Google as well as FindWhat. FindWhat has an excellent audience and bids can cost considerably less than Overture or Google providing excellent ROI. How can you get burned by a Pay Per Click provider?Unlike Overture and Google, other Pay Per Click providers don’t make it well known who their partners are. As a customer, you want to know what type of visibility you will get and whether the PPC provider’s partners have the right audience for you. Try to contact them for this information. If you can’t get it up front, invest the smallest amount of money and test the program. Track and measure your results. We’ve experienced PPC providers who send a lot of hits from very strange referring URLs that don’t make sense. The large number of hits either resulted in very little conversion or conversion from unqualified people that clearly were not honestly interested in what they were requesting. We traced their referring URLs to sites where the listings did not appear related to any keyword search. The listings were rotated as banner ads. What about International Pay Per Click programs?Espotting is the leader in Pay Per Click for Europe. The cost per click is much less than the U.S. Espotting currently provides PPC through popular European search engines in the UK, France and Germany. Spain and Italy will be added in the 3rd quarter of 2002. Overture has expanded to the UK and Germany. Google offers the ability to target different languages and countries. Google has been the most successful program for our high tech clients in Europe. What is link popularity?Search engine robots or crawlers have the ability to calculate how many sites link to your site. Some of them consider the keywords on the site that link to you in order to match relevancy. In other words, if your site is about “travel in Italy”, sites linking to you that also have text about “travel in Italy” would be considered relevant. The popularity of the sites linking to yours is also considered. Therefore, you would not want to solicit links from sites for the sake of a link. In fact, this could have a negative ranking affect. This part of the algorithm seems logical: if many other sites think your site is worth linking to, then your site must be worth consideration. It’s a popularity contest.
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Copyright © 2004 Market-Vantage LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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