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Pay per click campaigns need to be properly planned

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If you want to market a product or service, the internet is the only place where you can get a large audience. All the other forms of marketing and advertising cost a lot of money. Also, there is no guarantee that you would reach the intended group of people. But with the internet, you can target exactly those people who would be interested in using your product or service. One of the best tools that are available for companies that are looking to market through the internet is the pay per click option.

There are a lot of people who think that the pay per click option is very costly and does not give the desired results. But that is not the case.

When done properly, it would generate a lot of traffic to your website and help you in creating awareness of your products and services. When you use a pay per click service, you would be placing ads on websites that see a lot of traffic and are in some way related to your products and services. You would have to pay these websites money based on the number of clicks that are generated by visitors and users.

For a pay per click campaign to be successful, you need to do proper research regarding which websites to place your ads in. It is also necessary to keep a track of the websites in which you have placed the ads so that you would know where you are getting the traffic.

If a particular website is not being effective and is not generating much traffic for you, then you need to take your ads out of that website and place it in another website that has the potential to generate more clicks.

If you have decided on going for a pay per click campaign, you need to have a proper strategy to make it successful. You can always take the help of professional marketing companies that would be able to place your ads in all the right places so that you would be able to generate a steady stream of traffic to your website. Using the right keywords and having the proper landing pages would help you in your quest for more visitors. Once a visitor clicks on your ad and lands on your website, it would be your responsibility to ensure that you keep him interested.

Darin Carter

How to: Escape Google’s Supplemental Index

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Unfortunately, the Google Sandbox now has two levels. Yes, you still need a lot of trust to get your pages ranking. But before you start worrying about that, you need to worry about getting your pages indexed in the first place.

Because, of course, you’re not really indexed if most of your pages have gone supplemental!

What happened? Well apparently the Google Indexer got tired of her nickname “Loose Louise”, she’s born again and now very choosy thankyouverymuch about who she lets enter. Rumor has it she’s only interested in trusted sites that are after a whitehat, long term commitment.

“What exactly is that supplemental index again?”

I won’t parrot the quasi-official Google answer here. (In fact, I can promise that I will never give you the “official Google answer” on SEO.) Take your pick:

The Google Supplemental index is the Siberian work camp for web pages.

The Google Supplemental index is to the normal index, as Scoreboard Media is to SEO.

The Google Supplemental index is where they put web pages with little trust.

The Google Supplemental index is where they put web pages that aren’t going to rank for anything important.

Got it? Cool.
Now, assuming your site is supplemental, here are five tips to get it out of Supplemental Hell.

1. Give each page a unique title. This is so basic it kills me but sometimes people still aren’t doing it. There is absolutely no reason not to do this, as a unique title also helps SEO-wise, it helps accessibility-wise, gets higher clickthroughs in the SERPs, etc.

2. Give each page a unique META DESCRIPTION. Remember when we all thought META tags were dead? Well, Google’s gotten funny about that. Let’s not waste time wondering why. Just give every page a unique META DESCRIPTION, even if it just matches the title tag.

3. Make sure each page has a good amount of unique content. This problem can rear its ugly head in a few different ways. Most commonly, a particular piece of content is being served at multiple URLs. This is usually a CMS or shopping cart issue, and the fix will be unique to whatever system you use. Also pretty common is the existence of very thin pages (a lot of large, hollow/empty web directories have this problem). My rule of thumb (and it’s not authoritative, just what I go by), is that a page should have at least 100 words of unique content at a minimum.

4. Get some more trusted links. Link building is all about trust these days. A few links from older, already-ranking domains will do wonders towards convincing Google a newer site deserves to be trusted. I also like to get a few higher-PageRank links in there (sitewide? even better). Yes, I know that tip is going to bring out the haters (insert “PageRank is dead!” comment here). But it appears that “overall link weight” seems to matter again in Google, if not in terms of rankings, at least in terms of indexing.

5. Get some links to internal pages. This is all about convincing Google your site doesn’t have “hollow shell syndrome”–when a site has, say, 20 pages, and a few dozen backlinks, but 100% of those backlinks are pointing to the homepage. Most often, the homepage of the site is in the normal index but all of the internal pages have gone supplemental. I usually go “brute force” at one internal page and get 3 or 4 links to it (giving this one internal page so much link weight that Google pretty much has to index it); normally, GoogleBot revisits the entire site and re-crawls and indexes the other internal pages, too (up to a point: if the site has hundreds or thousands of pages, you’ll need to rinse+repeat this a few times).

That about covers it.

Darin Carter