There are two kinds of titles that you should be thinking about: Your web page title and your Headline Title.  They can be separate or one in the same, depending on what kind of website/blog you have.  Both can put you at the top of a search engine list if done right.  

Website and Web Page Titles
Your website title is one of the first things that major search engines look for when ranking your page. When your title and description accurately reflect your content, (which should also be fabulous,) it drastically improves the chances that your web page rank will rise like fresh baked blueberry muffins. That’s not enough though. You’ll also need a website title that’s noticeable and makes people want to know more and click through to your site.

Think local. If your business is in London, make a specific appeal to London and the surrounding area. People all over the world will still want to view your website for its valuable information. However, it makes good business sense to make a local appeal too since people are more comfortable making purchases from companies that are close by.

List your business name and some important keywords in your title. Small and New businesses list keywords first. Larger and well known businesses can list their name before the keywords. i.e.: A small business may write: Best gourmet coffee in Maine at Schmoe’s Joe. While a larger company may say: Schmoe’s Joe: Best gourmet coffee in Maine.

For every page on your website, use a different tagline with keywords that you know people will look for. i.e.: Schmoe’s Joe: About Our Gourmet Coffee Company, Schmoe’s Joe: Buy Gourmet Coffee Online, Schmoe’s Joe: Gourmet Coffee Accessories.

Website titles should be as short as possible. Don’t try to squeeze ten keywords in to one headline. You are more likely to get better results with one or two quality keywords than you will with half a dozen of them. This is mostly due to the fact that web surfers are looking for instant information. They don’t typically read that much into a headline anyway. In order to get lots of quality keywords associated with your site, use the method above and put a different keyword in the title of every page.

Content, Blog and Article Headlines
According to John Caples, author of “Tested Advertising Methods,” There are three major types of titles that attract the most clicks:

1) News Headlines:
It is human nature to seek out information and find out what is happening in their world. News headlines offer objective facts which make readers feel more knowledgeable and in control of their environment. Examples are: “Celebrity Searches Lead to Malware” “New Remote Application Available for iPhone and iPod” and “Buy New Wii at Discount Stores”

2) Curious Monkey:
Everyone has a little curious monkey inside their head distracting them from the task at hand and telling them to click on the video of the skateboarding dog. Headlines like “Cat Declared Hero” “$80M Disaster” or “Bubble Boy Lives!” can get people’s attention pretty quickly.

3) Self Interests:
This is the most effective since readers are interested in things and ideas that they will personally benefit from. It appeals to a need, a want or an ego. For instance: “Learn Spanish in Two Weeks” “Retire Ten Years Early” or “Affordable Mansions”

When appealing to the “self-interest” spectrum, beware of overuse. Consumers and web surfers have become fairly desensitized to marketing and advertising on the internet, if not extremely wary and cynical. Over-sell it and they may think you’re a scam operation. There needs to exist a delicate balance between a quality product and an intelligent, subtle yet strong appeal to their ego and desire. It all comes down to finding what kind of tone your demographic responds to. Do they want something edgy and fresh, subtle and intelligent, or maybe they are more likely to click on a headline that is funny and bizzare

Remember, you don’t have to be #1 on the search engine’s list to get the most clicks.  It’s better to have a few high quality keywords and an appealing headline than a title that is too vague or contains too much information.

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Quite often, we get asked questions like “How much should i spend per month on paid search?” - This one is a fantastic question, however, there is really only one person who can answer that and that is you!

Some things to consider when developing a budget for your paid search campaign:

1. Determine some solid campaign goals. These can be branding, traffic, conversions or whatever other metric you find is most relevant to your business.
2. How much each click is going to cost you - Do some keyword research, try to get an idea of what each click is going to cost you.
3. Workout how many clicks you need to make a difference to your bottom line and at what point you make a profit. I would recommend analyzing your current conversion data and starting with that to workout your ROI.

Now that you have some basic figures around what goals you need to hit to make you profitable, you should be able to work backwards and then workout how much money you can spend on your paid search campaign.

If you are running a CPA based campaign and you are making profit directly from the clicks, then its an easy argument to say that your budget should be unlimited. The more clicks, the more profit. Simple, so as long as you keep hitting your average conversion goals and your CPC stays within your target range, let it spend!

If you are after click volume and your revenue is based on lets say page views through an advertising network, the equation isn’t much different. Take your average CPM and work backwards, taking into account things such as the average number of times each user returns to the site etc to see how much you can afford to pay per click and still remain profitable.

The tough decision with budgets comes on purely brand based campaigns as the flow on effect from this is sometimes hard to directly attribute to paid search. So i guess, without knowing specifics about the brand, the tracking or anything else this is more of a “What can i afford to spend” kind of dilemma where you bite the bullet and allocate X$ per month and then re-evaluate.

This isn’t intended to be an in depth article about defining budgets, simply some thoughts around ways of allocating budgets and getting clients thinking about some more fundamental questions which factor into their search budget allocation.

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Yesterday we went through getting started with adwords part 1, so if you read that and it all made sense. Good stuff, if not, there may be a thing or two in here for you anyway, i do recommend going back to part one however if you haven’t read it yet.

We have chosen our language, written a simple text ad and explained a few little reasons why we do what we do. Now it’s time to develop some keywords and finish off the account setup process.

Step 6) As you can see in the screencap below, Google gives a very simplified version of its keyword tool when you are going through your first campaign setup.

Any keywords you do get from this particular tool, aren’t really going to give you any insight into why you should be using them, other than a quick relevance check when you browse over them. So, instead of using this tool i’m going to ask you to load up the Google Keyword Tool Basically, this is using the same back end technology as the above tool, however its giving far more meaning to any keywords that you do choose.

The first thing you should do when you come to the keyword tool page is choose the specific country you want data for. If you are reading this guide, i will assume its campaign number one so stick to just one country for the time being. Select that country and then enter some descriptive terms about your website and business. For the sake of this example, lets keep going with the boston doctor theme.

Once you have entered the CAPTCHA code, you are going to be presented with a window which looks like this:

You may look at this and go “so what does this do for me?” but to understand the importance of this you need to understand the way it used to be. Basically, until a few months ago, you had to go and buy third party software which would quite often cost many hundreds or thousands of dollars, just to try and attach any meaningful figures onto your keyword research. Then Google released the current incarnation of this tool with accurate, country level keyword volumes and keyword research completely changed overnight.

Ok, enough of a rant there. Basically, what this is telling us is that as expected, the keyword Boston Doctors gets a good volume of searches and actually has relatively low competition. Which is fantastic as it means you are competing against fewer competitors and will ultimately pay less for clicks!

Next, i recommend scrolling down the list and picking out keywords which the tool is suggesting that are highly relevant to the specific business you are trying to advertise and you can do this one of two ways. Go through them one by one and click add on the right hand column, then download the list when you finish. Or you can go right ahead and download the entire list, then sort through the keywords in excel (I would recommend the second option)

One last thing i will point out with this tool, is to make sure that you scroll down the list a fair way and then go to the section that says “additional keywords to consider” this section is going to be filled with keywords that Google things are logically related to the terms you entered in the previous step.

The last thing you then need to do is take all of the keywords you chose and enter them into the text box on the Adwords page (Step 3 of 7)

Only select keywords which are highly relevant to the ad which you wrote earlier, remember that the ad must match the keywords you use to trigger it and also match the page you are delivering users to. So stay away from adding in keywords like doctors for the moment as they will eat up your budget.

Step 7) - The final few choices i will roll into one step as they are pretty self explanatory. You need to choose your currency, so for this example USD will do fine. Next Adwords is asking you to set a monthly budget, so go and calculate what you are willing to spend on search marketing and then enter about HALF of that figure into this field. The reason i say this is because you are still learning, no optimisation has been done and for all intensive purposes you may waste that whole amount with very few results. I also recommend that once you have setup your campaign you go in and set a daily budget which further restricts your spending (We will show that in another post)

Leave the last two check boxed ticked and then press continue.

Ok, you will finally come to a screen which is going to ask whether you already have a Google account. I will assume that you don’t, so click the button which says “I do not use these other services” and you will then have the chance, to enter your email address and choose a password.

Click on “create account” and viola, you are done. You now have an adwords account, have written an ad and have chosen relevant keywords based on volumes and relevance.

Our next educational step by step guide will focus on what to do after you have created your account and how to understand whether or not you are getting any real value out of your campaign. So stay tuned early next week for that one.

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