Internet Marketing Journal

To SEO or to PPC?

That is the question . . .

In today’s ever-growing online marketplace, with companies constantly jockeying for top position to grab the attention of potential customers, two different methods of promoting websites have emerged: SEO and PPC.

So, what do those letters mean, and which method is best for your goals?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This method works to position your website as far near the top as possible in search engine results, by embedding certain “keywords” throughout your site’s content. The presence of these keywords (words that users might type into a search engine such as Google in order to find information on a given subject) in your site is what causes search engines to find your site and list it in search results.

Many people consider the SEO tactic for web promotion to be a “free” method of bringing customers to your website, since they are not paying a fee for it. However, it’s not actually free. It takes a lot of time and effort to optimize your website and build content, and that can be very costly. You can learn more about SEO at this link:

http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/category/seo/

Also, check out my e-book on this topic here:

http://www.jdcnet.com/index.php/free-ebook-download/

get-ranked-high-in-search-engines.html

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is an advertising technique that is gaining popularity on the Internet. PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads (appearing both in search engines’ result pages or their affiliates’ websites) and graphical ads (usually appearing in affiliate websites only). Advertisers pay per visitor who clicks on the advertising link, hence the term “pay-per-click.”

PPC is the fastest and easiest way to set up in your advertising campaign. Take Google’s popular Google AdWords program as an example. With Google AdWords, you can go to http://adwords.google.com to set up and register an account. After creating a simple text ads message for your website and choosing your targeted keywords, you are ready to start your campaign immediately.

In most pay-per-click programs, you can control the daily budget to be spent, and through the Internet, you can easily track your campaign’s effectiveness by taking measure of the visitors’ activities on your site and tracking their behaviors using website software. Google now offers a very popular free service called Google Analytics to track visitors. To access this service, simply go to http://www.google.com/analytics/indexu.html and start your online tracking.

Which method is right for you?

That depends on your goals at this point in your development.

In short term, if you are in a hurry to bring customers to your site and test the effectiveness of your newly built web page(s), go for pay-per-click. There is no easier or faster way to set up an advertising program than PPC, which you can use immediately to bring your website to millions of Internet visitors all over the world. And you can also target specific niche customers by using carefully chosen keywords, regions, and languages. But remember, it is a recurring expense that could eat up a lot of your advertising budget.

In the long run, try your best to capitalize on your efforts in using SEO techniques to build your website to receive free referral traffic from search engines. This method can be costly at the beginning, but your effort will pay off in the long run.

Tags: SEO Vs PPC

Google once again demonstrates its exceptionally innovative power, as we have discussed in other posts, by stunning analysts with its greater-than-expected 30% increase in its first quarter report. Google’s share price in after-hour trading jumped 17% to 525.96 last Thursday night. Again, this demonstrates how important people are, as assets of a company.

Before this news broke, analysts worried about the “paid clicks,” or the number of times users click on Google advertisements and its affiliated websites slowing down. Among these critics, the loudest warning voice came from Comscore (Nasdaq: SCOR) whose share price slipped 8% because of Google’s unexpected good news. People now question the accuracy of Comscore’s survey, on which it based its cause for worry.

Google’s explanation of its success rests on the fact that more than 50% of its business is conducted outside of the US, which it says attributes to its ability to withstand a slowdown in US economy. Google achieved more than 20% growth in clicks worldwide last quarter.

In my view, Comscore might not be wrong. The paid clicks rate has dropped overall. Google’s growth in paid clicks was 30% in Dec 2007 and 45% in the preceding quarter. Obviously, there is a trend of slowing down. But the paid-click rate represents only one factor of paid advertising. The other factor people often overlook is the price per paid click.

Google does not have a standard price list for its pay-per-click Google Adwords program. It uses an auction model to determine pricing, where advertisers bid for “keywords” they use their advertisements, that they would like to appear in Google’s search results and its affiliated websites. The more competitive a keyword is, the more expensive a click could be. With some popular keywords like “web hosting,” the charge per click could be as much as several dollars.

In my experience using Google Adwords, there is a solid growth trend in the average per-click price of keywords in the past few years. With some of the popular keywords that I use, I have noticed that the increase in price is as much as several hundred percent within a three-year time frame. It is increasingly difficult to find effective keywords that are “cheap” now.

This can be explained by the fact that more and more businesses are entering the market, using online advertising media to promote their products and services. In the past, small business owners were the major players in this market. But now more and more big guys are coming in. More competition for keywords drives up the per-click price, and that helps to compensate for the drop in growth rate of number of clicks.

And Google makes continuous efforts to combat click-frauds and click-arbitrage by some website affiliates, by refining its Google Adsense program. This effort pays off in improving the quality of leads brought to Google customers. Advertisers are more willingly to pay for the clicks if the customers are of good quality. This also explains the increase in Google’s average paid-click price.

In my view, the recent setbacks of Google’s share price are largely due to the general market sentiment. Google’s value is not totally reflected in its current share price.

To invest in a company, you need to consider the market, the industry, and the company’s management. As far as the industry goes, the online advertising industry is still budding and there is a lot of room to grow. As for the company, I always opt for Google’s exceptional management team that can attract and retain smart people to knock down its competitors (read my post about Microsoft Acquires Yahoo!). And with its ability to withstand the recession in the US economy (as proven by its first quarter results), it seems that Google is very likely to keep its momentum going in the coming years.

Tags: Google first quarter results

Microsoft sent out the warning message this Monday to Yahoo’s board of directors, reasserting its proposal to acquire Yahoo!, and citing a deadline of three weeks for Yahoo’s consideration of the proposal.

Many people regard this as a bold move on Microsoft’s part to escalate its head-on competition with the number-one player in the Internet advertising field, Google. But . . . is it a good move?

Google’s success in the lucrative online advertising market rests on one single word: innovation. Yahoo is losing its market share to this tough player due to its own failure to compete in terms of innovation. And so is Microsoft.

Innovation: A Key Consideration

Innovation has nothing to do with the size of the player, nor its predominant market share. Note that Microsoft’s primary motivation in acquiring Yahoo is the direct inception of its well-established market presence, including a number of successful services serving the Internet community, such as Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Answers, as well as portal services such as Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! News. But this motivation does not hit the main point of this argument: There is no leverage of innovation in this acquisition.

Microsoft’s success in its predominant strategy for dealing with competitors has seldom hinged on innovation. Its usual strategy for outpacing its competitors is either by beating the competitors through its dominant market share in other related services/products, or simply acquiring them in order to kill the competition. And perhaps this is the reason Microsoft has faced so many anti-competitive legal proceedings both in the United States and Europe.

For this reason, the combination of these two players, Microsoft and Yahoo!, could never increase Microsoft’s competing power against Google.

Google’s Use of Innovation

If you take a look at Google’s history, Google’s success can be attributed to the clever deployment of innovative services. Consider the following examples:

1) Google’s first success was the ranking algorithm of its indexed web pages based on inbound links from other websites. This algorithm is based on the PhD thesis written by Google’s two founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The search results of this algorithm are excellent. Many users switched to using Google as their primary search engine instead of Yahoo because of its superior relevant search results. Google now commands more than 57% of the US search engine market share.

2) Google moved to use contextual text advertisements as opposed to traditional graphical based advertisements, successfully raising the click-through rate of the advertisements it holds for its clients. This is a vital move in Google’s history as contextual based advertising creates strong revenue streams for Google. And it literally proved that text-based online advertisement is indeed more effective than graphical ones such as banner advertisements.

3) Google further increases contextual advertisement exposure by introducing a well-accepted program for most website owners: Google’s Adsense program. This program allows a website owner to post Google’s contextual advertisements on his or her website. Google then charges its client for successful clicks on those contextual advertisements, and shares the commission with the owner of the website on which the ads were posted. Google makes this “pay-per-click” form of advertisement the defacto standard online advertising program. While Google is not the first company who promoted this form of advertising (Overture, now part of Yahoo, used this technique before Google), Google is the most successful at administering it.

4) Google stunned the industry back in 2004 when it offered its Gmail service with a user’s mailbox size of 1GB, capturing a large share of online email users. In this strategic service, Google is able to further expand its exposure of online advertisement to email users. The offering was so successful that it forced Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail to offer comparable services in order to keep their customers.

5) Google offers other excellent services such as: Google Earths, Picasa, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google Desktops, Google Videos (which is about to merge with Youtube). These services work to encourage various types of Internet users to use Google’s services. Some, such as Google Docs, are even targeting corporate customers, which promises to convert to excellent revenue sources in the future.

6) Google moved into the battlefield of mobile platforms earlier than any of its rivals except Microsoft. But Google’s eye is not on the license fee of the operating system, but on mobile advertisements. Google started the Open Source operating system Android for mobile phone manufacturers, offered for free in exchange for mobile advertisement exposures. Google takes a serious look at the growing trend of users’ online activities on mobile platforms and makes its move into this market aggressively.

To further illustrate Google’s commitment to innovation, take a look at http://labs.google.com. Here you can see they have a pile line of many products and services for online users. Each is targeting the specific needs of online customers in an innovative way.

Can the Microsoft / Yahoo! Combination Compare?

When you look back at Yahoo and Microsoft, there is no way they can compare with Google’s excellent work and work-to-be in innovative services. Google wins over Microsoft and Yahoo! through its people and clever strategies, not simply by a dominating presence in the market (though Google is already the market leader in many online services).

From that perspective, there is absolutely no leverage in Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo!. Google’s heavy objection to the acquisition is perhaps an over-reaction. Maybe the merger of these two Internet giants is good for Google. The uncertainties involved in a huge merger—such as the difficulties of merging two companies of totally different corporate cultures, the possibility of “brain drain” for those involved in the merger, and the significant cost of the integration process—could help Google defeat these two rivals altogether. Isn’t this a good piece of news for Google?

Tags: Overture, Google Labs, Microsoft acquires Yahoo!

When people talk about keyword density in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), they usually limit themselves to saying, “use the exact the same keyword throughout your web copy to stress the related keywords”. And the general rule is: the more repetitive the keyword is, the more it looks relevant to your site from the standpoint of search engines.

However, search engines have become even cleverer now. They do not simply index your page by keywords in your site. They also use applied semantics technology to aid the work.

Applied semantics is a technology that teaches search engines to group variations of your targeted keywords into meaningful clusters. What this means is that synonyms and other related, relevant words are counted into the calculations of the keyword density of a particular keyword.

It is not an easy job to apply the semantic technology to different articles using the exact words. Let’s look at an example to illustrate what I’m talking about. Search engines have to distinguish the word “Apple” in a website discussing Apple, Inc – the manufacturer of iPod and iMac – from that of the site that discussing farming technology or agriculture.

Here’s another example of what could be a headache for you. Search engines have to understand more than a dozen variations of the same word, “design”. According to Thesaurus.com, design could also refer to:

• Architecture
• Arrangement
• Blueprint
• Chart
• Composition
• Conception
• Constitution
• Construction
• Diagram
• Draft
• Drawing
• Idea
• Layout
• Makeup
• Method
• Model
• Outline
• Paste-up
• Pattern
• Perspective
• Picture
• Plan
• Rough draft

And that’s just 23 variations. There could be many, many more! So do you see why I say that it could be a headache?

In 2003, Google acquired Applied Semantics, giving it a new platform for its contextual pay-per-click Google Adwords and Adsense Program. However, what I have been watching closely since then, is that its adoption of the semantic technology can effectively be put to use in their search engine technology.

Many SEO forums are discussing the changes in the past few years in Google’s ranking algorithm. However, few of them are able to attribute it to this acquisition of Applied Semantics

What I conclude is that the tactic of using a carefully planned list of identical keywords in a single passage is no longer a good strategy. You now need to use a variety of synonyms of the specific theme in your website copy.

So is this good new or bad? The good news is you are no longer tied in your copy to using the identical keywords just because you want to build keyword density in your article.

However, the bad news is that you don’t have a simple formula to calculate the keyword density of your website copy any more.

Perhaps there is one conclusion can be drawn: Search engines are getting smarter. The SEO game is becoming more difficult to play.
Related Topics: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Applied Semantics, contextual advertising, pay-per-click advertising, keyword density, Google Adwords, Google Adsense

Google has just acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion US, one of the largest acquisitions in Google’s history. It is creating the same exciting feeling as we used to experience in the dot.com era in the ’90′s. However, the move is not really well understood.

If we take a look at the background of YouTube, it lacks the very successful elements of previous successful dot.com companies. It does not have proprietary technology nor does it possess customer lock-in capability – a very important element for a market leader to keep on dominating market.

In study of successful dot.com companies like eBay, we have to go back to a special network utility phenomenon called Network Externality Effect. Its basic argument is a network’s utility increases exponentially with the number of users in the network, making it more valuable in due course. For explanation of this phenomenon, refer to another post here:Â Metcalfe’s Law and Network Effect.

Theoretically if you run a similar auction network service like what eBay started to do more than 10 years ago, it’s unlikely you can knock down eBay because it has already had so many buyers and sellers entrenched in its network. Its network utility is so high that you have no way to attract new users to your service, no matter how hard you try. When a new user (irrespective of whether he/she is a buyer or seller) is looking for an online auction service to join, their most likely choice will be eBay.

The network effect keeps boosting the increasing network dominance power of eBay, making it virtually invincible. Sometimes we call this phenomenon “The Law of Increasing Returns”.

But we don’t see this in YouTube. It has no customer lock-in capability. Theoretically, let’s say that if you have sufficient capital to start with a server farm facility as big as YouTube, you can start offering services to public like they do, allowing users to upload their videos and share them with others. A new user can select your service or YouTube. YouTube has no immediate advantage over your new service to this new prospect.

YouTube model actually works on the viral marketing effect – the marketing effect that takes place to boost its exposure by people’s word-of-mouth. For a further discussion on viral marketing, refer to this post – Viral Marketing: A Powerful But Free Marketing Tactic. The new service can definitely take this viral marketing approach. It doesn’t matter if it’s a late comer.

Let’s go back to the discussion of eBay. The only way you can knock down eBay is to start a new service that rests on a new technology that eBay does not have. And that technology must truly benefit the new and current users of eBay in a way that can pull them away to try your service. This is the only way you have chance to succeed.

To put it another way, the way to win and keep your market position is to possess new technology, if you do not have the network externality effect that helps like companies like eBay.

We cannot see this in YouTube either. The video broadcast technology is neither new nor exclusive to YouTube. Although we know that they claim to have proprietary technology to identify copyright protected material, but that is not the main theme of this deal.

Google spent $1.8 billion US to acquire this company. The same amount of money (perhaps much less) can definitely be used to build broadcast facilities that resemble the power of YouTube. This is addition to the fact that Google already started its own video service years ago.

The only advantage we can see for this deal is its immediate access to its vast number of broadcasting page views, and that it can put to use for its famous and profitable Adwords’ service customers.

Even though it represents only a tiny portion of its vast market capitalization of $131 Billion US (as of stock closing at Oct 10, 2006), is it really worth the $1.6 billion US expenditure?

Related Topics: Google , YouTube, Google Acquires YouTube, YouTube is acquired by Google, Google Acquired YouTube, Network Externality Effect, Law of Increasing Returns, Network Effect, Market Capitalization of Google, Market Capitalisation of Google, Viral Marketing, The Law of Increasing Returns, network utility, customer lock-in capability, Google Adwords

Get this report if you want to earn multiple streams of income by selling advertising space in your websites.

Nowadays, People flock to setup Adsense program to earn. But indeed, there are a lot of rumors about this program. How easy it is to get banned and how difficult it actually is to earn good amount of money now using Adsense.

The fact is: The Adsense program has been changed since November 2005 and you are unlikely to earn easy money using Adsense.

Take a look at this report and you’ll understand how an Adsense guy has earned more than US$50,000 per month using non-Adsense ways.

By all means, grab this report before he stops giving away his method for free.

Best Internet Marketing,

Damen

Related Topics: Earn Money without Adsense, Adsense is dead, My Adsense Account is banned

The power of viral marketing has been discussed in the post “Viral Marketing: A powerful but free marketing tactic”

Here comes one good example of how you can use public domain material to create powerful presentation for viral marketing.

Enjoy the show!

Please note the dialogues in the presentation are actually excerpts from public domain work. This is an excellent example how you can use public domain material to create attractive content.

Access this post to get some free public domain work in MS Word format.
Damen

If you don’t know what viral marketing is, take a look at the definition at wikipedia.org

According to wikipedia.org, the term viral advertising (or marketing) refers to “the idea that people will pass on and share interesting and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, images, and even text.”

The beauty of viral marketing comes from the fact that you can spread your message exponentially, reaching people in tens of thousands quite rapidly. For example, you send an interesting video to 10 people. Each of those 10 people re-distributes the video to 10 more people, reaching 100 people in turn. If each of those 100 people then sent the video to another 10 people, you’d reach 1,000 people in third round!

You do the math. You can easily see that the number of people you can reach in each round goes up exponentially at the power of 10. And more importantly, you don’t pay a dime for it. It is free! And what’s better than free advertising for your message?

However, for viral marketing to be successful, the single most important element you need to have is a product/message that is meaningful and useful to the people in a particular niche market. And that product/message has to inherently motivate those people to want to introduce it to others, and then the viral effect takes off!

Want to have some examples? Here is a good one. Go and choose to watch the presentation. Enjoy!

Best Viral Marketing

Damen
P.S Stay tuned by subscribing to this blog if you want to know more about viral marketing. I’ll have an interesting case study to share with you next time!

I was always dreaming of a new tool that can automatically covert your content site’s keywords into hyperlinks that point to your selected affiliate sites’ product. In this way, you can easily build a new source of affiliate income on your content sites, Adsense sites, blogs or discussion forums, etc.

Now there is a solution. The beauty of this solution is you do not even need to know HTML, FTP or any other web hosting related knowledge. All you need to do is to install the desktop program and the program will automatically install the required code into your websites.

After you login the user interface and customize it with your targeted keywords, all  you need to do is to add the single line of javascript to the webpage where you need the affiliate links to be automatically inserted and you are done.

Ready? Let’s check it out here….

Related Topics: Affiliate Links Generator , Multiple Streams of Income

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a consistent plan of building your website to achieve higher ranking in particular sets of keywords and phrases in a search engine’s search results.

Why do we need to know about this? Because the result pages of a search engine can bring you a lot of targeted visitors who can be easily converted into your customers. And this method of bringing in new customers is free!

Why are they highly targeted customers? Because they have found your site by searching for a particular keyword or phrase. If that keyword or phrase is related to the theme of your web business, chances are they are very likely interested in knowing more about you and your services. Therefore, they are more easily converted into your customers.

When I say “. . .a consistent plan of building your web site. . .”, I mean that you have to follow a structured process of using on-site and off-site optimization strategies for a considerable period of time before you will see the results. You have to stick to a plan and work it until you see the positive outcomes. And it’s not going to happen overnight. This is one of the pains of doing SEO. At the beginning, you’ll find that you have invested a lot of time, effort and money without seeing any immediate reward. It can be frustrating.

There are two classes of SEO strategies:  Black-Hat SEO and White-Hat SEO.

Black-Hat SEO refers to the short-term tactics that target consumers, like auto-content generation and automatic inbound link building, to trick the search engines to believe that the relative importance of your site is equal or higher than others with the same theme as yours.

This used to work quite effectively in the past. From time to time, you’d hear people shouting in the market, trying to sell you information on how to do a particular trick where you can see immediate search engine ranking improvement. Those days are gone! Search engines are smarter now. You’ll soon see your efforts of using Black-Hat SEO vanish. And worst of all, search engines can ban those sites that they consider spamming the search engines using the Black-Hat SEO.

White-Hat SEO promotes the idea of using a legitimate site building philosophy – building your website with highly targeted, content-rich information. In fact, most successful search engine experts that can stand the time in the market agree that this is the ultimate strategy in SEO. It’s just that most people do not have the patience to wait it out. They prefer Black-Hat SEO because they can see the results fast and it seems easy to do. But they forget the risks that they run. Their entire web site could get delisted from search engines if they are got caught using the Black-Hat SEO technique.

Strategies, like natural link building (off-site optimization) and structuring your site with rich keyword targeted site content (on-site optimization), etc., are all you need to do consistently to be successful with White-Hat SEO.

Want to know more? Subscribe to my Internet Marketing Journal to keep yourself up-to-date on this.
Related Topics: Search Engine Optimisation