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The coolest thing about adwords is that if you have a relevant ad, then you can easily jump to the top of the search results for any keyword……..for the right price. Its a quick way to take a new site that no one has heard of and instantly generate relevant and highly targeted traffic. That is pretty cool and very powerful.

However, becoming successful with adwords is hard work and can be an expensive learning process for the beginner. Its also very competitive and the costs per click can easily rise up to $20 or more for a highly competitive keyword.To be successful, you need to be careful with your advertising dollars and meticulously test ads and landing pages. Before you start spending money, you need to do your homework. Its easy to put an ad up for the highest cost per click and rocketing to the top of the page. Its an entirely different thing to turn that ad campaign into a profitable investment for your business. Put another way, its easier to lose money than to make money on Google Adwords.

Is free “organic” traffic better? Or course. Organic searches receive between 60-70% of the overall clicks on any given search. It would be great to rank #1 on google for your most important keywords without having to pay for each click. But sometimes, keywords are so competitive that it is extremely difficult to drive your site to the top of the rankings. Not only is it difficult, but it can take a great deal of time to reach the top using legitimate methods that can sustain that ranking over time. So with all of the work that is sometimes involved with SEO, you have to ask, how free is it really?

Another issue with “natural” search is that it can sometimes be unpredictable. For example, if you are getting a reliable stream of income from a keyword that shows up in the #3 ranking, and suddenly you are dropped to page 2, that stream of income can disappear overnight. Adwords allows you to have a much more predictable slot in the rankings, however, that spot may become more expensive overtime.

So which is better? The answer is, it depends on the situation and your overall strategy. Most likely, a blend of the 2 strategies will be necessary for your success. Adwords provides a guaranteed path to the top, but is expensive and profitability is not guaranteed. SEO rankings can be more volatile and can take more time to achieve, but “free” traffic is very desirable. Ultimately, you must find the right combination that is best for your business.

CSS (short for Cascading Style Sheets) are a part of the HTML standard that tells a browser how to display HTML elements. There are a number of benefits for using CSS to design your web pages. An external style sheet can make pages easier to design, manage and update, because every page can reference the same CSS file for style guidelines including font, color, size and more. Pages also can load quicker and can be easier for search engines to index because you reduce the amount of code that is needed for each page. Furthermore, you move important content to the top of your html file.

The other important aspect of CSS as it relates to SEO is that it allows you to use standard tags like <h> headline, or <ul> unordered list and format them using CSS. Search engines can use these tags recognize important content or crawl your site more completely.

If you are interested in learning CSS, W3 schools has a nice intro tutorial to CSS.

I am a firm believer that every website should include a blog as part of their overall strategy for building traffic. Not only does it add fresh valuable content to your site, but it also loads up your site with a wide variety of potential new keyword combinations that will show up in search engines.

Here are my ten reasons why every site should include a blog.

1. Fresh content added to your site on a regular basis.
2. Gives readers a reason to check your site everyday for new content.
3. Lots of great new keyword combinations for search engines to pick up on.
4. Works as a great tool for announcing new products and features.
5. Allows you to give away valuable content for free, adding more value to your site.
6. Writing stimulates thinking and can help you generate new ideas for your business.
7. Share new ideas with your customers and get immediate feedback.
8. Adds more searchable pages to your site (be sure to create a unique page for every blog entry).
9. Helps build credibility and trust with your visitors.
10. It’s hardwork but it can also be very fun and rewarding.

Are you spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on advertising with poor to mediocre results? Do you know how many people leave your landing page without visiting any other pages on your site? Why are certain products selling better than others?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you are missing out on one of the most important elements of your marketing campaign………………

Analytics!

Google Analytics is a powerful web statistics program that is free and easy to install. Here is a screen shot from one of the websites that I manage:

Google Analytics

Analytics are my favorite part of a marketing campaign. This is where you find out what works, what doesn’t work, and what you need to fix in order to get it to work. Let me walk you through a typical scenario.

Lets say you are running a new Google Adwords campaign to collect leads for potential new clients of your services. You have designed three landing pages and you want to find out which landing page is more successful at converting visits into leads that you can follow-up on. The best approach to handle this is to set-up 3 identical new ads in adwords (if the ads are different they may negatively influence the outcome of your experiment) and point each ad to a different landing page. You then set up 3 goals in analytics that track each time a visitor fills out a form on a landing page. Google Analytics will track separately the number of conversions for each of the three landing pages. After a period of time, you will be able to decide which landing page is more effective and concentrate your ad dollars on that landing page.

For every marketing campaign you run, you should spend at least as much time on Analytics as you do creating your campaign….if not more. This is a topic I will continually revisit in more depth on this site as we discuss various ways to fine-tune your campaign.

If the title tags are the headline for your search engine ad, then the meta descriptions are the text or the body of your ad. You have space for more words than you do in a title tag (Google will display 154 meta description characters in the search results). So you can expand a bit more on what your webpage will offer the visitor. The Meta Tags will not improve your search results rankings, however, they can improve your click-through rates as people browse through the various listings that google displays.

Check out the descriptions for these listings when I search for “Windows 7 vs Snow Leopard”

Windows 7 vs Snow Leopard Search

Take some time to look at these and see which descriptions you think are the most effective. Which ones stand out more? What are you more likely to click on? I found myself drawn to this one: “CNET Labs’ Dong Ngo tests the two operating systems side by side and finds that while Snow Leopard is faster with Apple software, Windows 7 is the way to go …”

Google offers its own guidelines for meta descriptions. Here are the basic rules of thumb:

• Use different descriptions for different pages – Every page should have a unique meta description.
• Use clearly tagged facts – For example, you can tag an author or a price to be included.
• Programmatically generate your descriptions – Example…Wordpress blogs automatically generate this for you.
• Focus on Quality Descriptions – Just because this content isn’t always shown on your site, don’t forget the importance of creating quality text. It will pay dividends in the search engines.

Similar to title tags, when you think about writing a meta tag, think as if you are writing copy for a paid advertisement that you are placing on the Internet. Hopefully, if you are paying for an ad, you will take some time thinking about your headline and your ad text and what you can do to attract visitors and convert leads or sales. Your title tags and meta descriptions are the headline and ad text for your “natural” search engine ad. Approach these elements as if you were paying for them.

Title tags are the headlines for your search engine ads. If you run a Google search on the keyword “baseball” you will see the following results:

Baseball Google Search

The title tags are the headlines for each listing. For example, the very first listing has the title tag of “The Official Site of Major League Baseball | MLB.com Homepage.” Its a descriptive title tag that gives you an understanding of the content that you will find on that site. This is the headline for your “free” search engine ad and your best attempt to convince a searcher to visit your website.

You need to think of your title tag in the same way that you would think of a headline when you are writing an ad for Google adwords. If you just put the name of your site in the title, you are doing your site a disservice. Ideally, you want your title tag to contain a call to action. What do you want your visitor to do or what will you offer your visitor?

Moreover, you will want to customize your title tags for each unique webpage in your site. Certain software, such as Wordpress, will do this for you automatically. But if you are building your own site from scratch, you will need to make an effort to write a title tag for each unique page or product line. This is especially true if your business sells many products. For example, if you visit Amazon.com, their homepage has the following title tag: Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more. However, if I go the the page for the new iMac, I find a different title tag: “ Amazon.com: Apple iMac MB952LL/A 27-Inch Desktop.”  This is the same “headline” I will find on Google if I search for the model number for the new iMac.

Now, if Amazon.com didn’t have a unique title tag for each product page, and you saw a generic Amazon.com title tag you would not be very inclined to click on their search listing….and it probably wouldn’t achieve a very high search ranking to begin with.

Go through your website pages and read your title tags at the top of the browser. Ask yourself the question: “Does this title tag describe the content of the webpage?” If it does not, take some time and write a new one.

If I had to choose between getting natural search traffic via google searches or paid traffic via google adwords, I would choose natural or “free” traffic in a heartbeat. Why pay up to $25 per click or more for visitors to come to your website when you can have people visit your site without paying anything?

You could certainly try to skip paid search ads all together and focus your entire strategy on SEO (search engine optimization) for natural search listings. However, certain keywords can be very difficult to achieve a high ranking on for various reasons. For example, lets say you are a local insurance agent in Cincinnati and you want to collect life insurance leads on your website. A quick search for the keyword “life insurance” yields the following results.

Google Search for the keyword Life Insurance

The top 6 natural search results are metlife.com, prudential.com, lifeinsurancerates.com, newyorklife.com, money.cnn.com, and colonialpenn.com. Pretty steep competition. These are national companies and the chances for your local insurance agency appearing in the “free” search top 6 are slim to none.

This is where Google adwords becomes the great equalizer. Anyone with a relevant ad who is willing to pay the asking price can appear in the top 6 paid ad results that appear highlighted at the top of the search listings and continue down the right side of the page. Furthermore, it is easy to target your ad so that it only appears in the locality of your choosing. So if your agency is located in Cincinnati, your ad will only show to people located in Cincinnati who search using the keyword “life insurance.” A quick check on Google adwords shows that paid clicks average between $8 and $25 per click when targeted locally to Cincinnati. These are not cheap clicks, and you will certainly want to spend time continually narrowing your campaign to weed out any unwanted clicks.  However, you do have an opportunity to have your local agency website shown on the first page for a keyword that draws in fierce national competition.

It is important to consider the relevant keywords for your business and decide on an appropriate marketing strategy based upon those keywords. A local insurance agency will not be able to compete in the natural search listings for many of the main “high traffic” keywords and shouldn’t waste any effort trying to do so. However, a highly targeted Google adwords campaign may provide an opportunity to drive relevant traffic to your conversion page for a price.

On a related note, an alternative strategy that may allow you to still benefit from “free” Google traffic would be to focus on a unique brand name and then build brand awareness in your local area. Pick a unique or unusual brand name that does not already have competition on Google. If your name is unique enough, it will be easy to quickly gain the top “free” search listing in Google. Then you can run a local campaign to build brand awareness and associate your brand with something like “life insurance.” The key will be to get more and more people typing in your brand name instead of life insurance when they are shopping for life insurance on Google.