Businesses engaging in pay-per-click campaigns can do a number of things to increase click-throughs and ultimately conversions.

This is according to Noah Belson of Yahoo!, who wrote on the firm”s Search Marketing blog that marketers could see success by opting for specific keywords and phrases rather than more generic ones.

Generic terms such as ”dvd” are more likely to attract bids from a wider range of competitors, whereas the likelihood of the same happening for a more specific phrase such as ”transformers dvd” is lower, he said.

Marketers may also want to engage in extensive testing to ensure ads and URLs are of the highest quality and identify low-performing keywords so they can be moved to another group, Mr Belson advised.

“There really is no hard and fast rule as to how high a click-through rate should be. But if your ads are compelling and your click-through and conversion rates are well balanced, you”re off to a great start,” he commented.

Internet Advertising Bureau figures suggest that more than half of online marketing spending in the first half of 2007 was accounted for by paid search, redorbit.com reports

Many SEO tools will guide you towards an SEO optimized website.  However, the most commonly used SEO tools are: keyword research, keyword optimization and link building. The first step towards SEO is selecting the few words and phrases most relevant to the main business of your website.

The second step involves optimizing these keywords effectively in the text of the pages of your website.  Usually, including the keywords in the form of Meta tag descriptions (i.e. those that describe your website to the users in search engines) is the best way.  Building inbound links on your website, which will also improve your search engine rating, is next.

The two ways to increase the number of inbound links are “article submissions” and “directory submissions”. Article submissions come in the form of links on other websites and build up further traffic to yours, helping your online marketing campaign.  Directory submissions help by bringing you a number of inbound links and therefore, automatically increasing the ranking of your page in the search engines.

With the increase in online business and marketing strategies, almost everyone is making use of SEO as their marketing strategy.  What can be done in order to make a difference, then?  The answer comes in the form of the integration of SEO with PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing.  These are sponsored links and greatly improve the website visibility.  Going via the PPC route ensures that your website comes up amongst the top results in any of the search engines.

For those not interested in Integrated SEO with PPC, ensuring your website gets top ranking in any search engine will require further checkpoints.  Google ranking, for example: Google has its own pointers to base a website’s ranking on.  Some of the top ways to get Google ranking are listed below:

The more inbound links that a website has, the better its page ranking will be, depending on the nature of the inbound links.  The better the PR value of your website (i.e. inbound links), the higher the page ranking.  To increase the Google page ranking more, ensure that the Anchor text – or the text in Meta tags – contains proper keywords that match the text of the site or page.

With the above tools and pointers, the Search Engine Optimization along with the Pay-Per-Click marketing, your website will surely start facing a swarm of clicks and hits.  In turn, you will be flooded with business, fulfilling the motive behind the marketing campaign.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most cost-effective methods of getting leads known to Internet business owners. It gives you instant traffic, and allows you to test your business model in real time.

At the same time, pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is not as simple to use as the PPC companies will have you believe. If you jump into the system without preparing for ‘tracking’ your results, doing deep keyword research, establishing your ROI and most importantly, testing your ads, you’ll lose a lot of money really fast.

Before we start talking about the major PPC engines, here’s a brief overview of what you need to know.

The Basic of PPC

There are some terms that you should know if you want to understand any discussion on PPC. Some of these are self-explanatory, some you might have heard before. Either way, go through this section and make sure to read those parts that you don’t know of.

The PPC Model

In the PPC advertising model, you have three core elements – keywords , ads , and bids . These three elements are combined with ‘ placement ‘ to create an advertising model that displays ‘relevant’ ads on search engines (in response to keyword searches), portals and websites that opt to display such ads on their pages (the ads to be shown are determined by a keyword analysis of the page).

For a PPC campaign, you need to know the keywords that you are targeting. For example, for a niche site that promotes a time management product, I would create a list of keywords that included keyword groups containing terms related to time management, productivity, saving time, self improvement and maybe even business soft skills. As I’ve told you before about keyword research, you should have a big list so that you capture most, if not all, of your target traffic.

The next step is to write the ad copy for the ads that will be displayed for your searches. The ad copy is extremely important because along with your bid amount, this will determine the ‘conversion rate’ (explained below) of your ads. Write concise, compelling ad copy that highlights the benefits of your website / product, and avoid fluff.

Once you’ve written your ads, it’s time to bid . The bidding mechanism differs from PPC engine to engine, but the idea is the same – your bid amount is the maximum cost (usually calculated in U.S. dollars) that you are willing to pay for each keyword. It’s important to know how much you can afford in terms of bidding costs so that you avoid going into bidding wars with your competitors, and also so that you don’t spend more than you make through this campaign.

Cost-Per-Click

Cost-Per-Click ( CPC ) is the amount you pay each time a potential customer ‘clicks’ on one of your ads that they see on their search engine results or on websites. This is often less than the maximum bid amount you set for each keyword.

Conversion Rate in PPC

Conversion Rate is the ratio of clicks over impressions (the number of times your ad is displayed on searches or page loads on websites). A typical conversion rate is between 2 to 3 percent – that is, for every 100 impressions, you get 2-3 clicks on your ads.

Conversion Rate is closely tied in with the quality of your ad copy , and also with Placement , which I’ll discuss next.

Placement in PPC

If there is more than one person bidding for a keyword (as is almost always the case), the placement of the ads (which ad comes in on the first slot, which comes in on the second, etc.) is determined by bid amounts of each competitor. The higher your bid, the better your placement (Google adds the conversion rate into their placement calculations, and I’ll tell you how later). Your conversion rate to a certain extent depends on how high your ad is placed on the ‘rankings’ and this leads advertisers to place high bids just to rank at the top. The trouble with this approach is that you might enter into a bidding war with your competitors and lose a lot of money.

Tracking In PPC

Tracking refers to measuring which keywords are bringing you the best leads or sales, and which keywords are bringing you ‘window shoppers’ – people who are ‘compulsive clickers’ and don’t buy or sign up. Tracking your ad campaign will help you further fine-tune your ads and improve your ROI.

Return-on-Invetment (ROI)

Your Return-on-Investment (ROI) is determined by how much you are spending over how much you are earning in net profits from your ad campaign. It’s important to establish a base ROI before your start your ad campaign – assume a conversion rate of 1 percent – so that you don’t over-spend and are able to run this campaign within your budget.

The Pay-Per-Click (PPC) World

Currently, there are two major PPC engines, Google AdWords and Overture (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing ). While there are many alternatives such as Espotting (now Miva), MetricsDirect and Kanoodle, the top two PPC engines are a class apart when it comes to delivering results.

However, one of the first pieces of advice you’ll hear from most people is that bigger PPC engines such as AdWords and Overture are too ‘expensive’ to break into (with CPC for top positions easily passing $3-$4 for many keywords, and reaching $10 for really competitive keywords).

In reality, if you are just starting out, it’s critical that you pick one of the top two PPC engines. Why?

Traditionally marketers judge PPC engines on the following criteria:

• Reach – How large your potential target market is.
• Cost-per-click
• Quality of traffic – Do the leads fit your customer profile? Are the willing to spend on your products?
• Quality of service – The tools and help offered by the PPC engines.

Overture and AdWords beat their competition on all of these metrics except CPC. However, the benefits of ‘cheaper’ clicks are more than compensated for by the ease of use of the big two, and more importantly, as any PPC expert will tell you, the quality of traffic from Overture and AdWords is far better than from other PPC engines.

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