SEO is one of the most important online marketing trends available right now. Almost everyone knows that you need good quality text, keywords and links combined with lots of popularity and a good reputation to make it big. But it’s also important to take a holistic view of your online business pages. Your website is a valuable SEO tool in itself. By building (or remodeling,) your website so that it’s more easily accessible to spiders, you can boost your search engine score astronomically. It’s also important to have the “SEO-friendly website” conversation with your website design company and/or SEO firm if you have one to make sure that they on the same page as you. So with out further ado, here are some things that you should keep in mind when building or redesigning your website:

1. Content, Keywords and Links. As always ensure that your content, keywords and links are unique, of good quality and relevant to your business. Your back links should also be relevant so be sure to look out for and reject illogical links. Use absolute links which are less likely to have issues, but also allow you to get more backlink love if your content gets scraped. Remember that when it comes to keywords there is such thing as “too many” so don’t overdo it.

2. Make your links and keywords easily accessible to spiders. Drop down menus make the website user friendly, but they aren’t spider friendly. Somewhere on the page you should be placing good old-fashioned text links so spiders can find them. Also, be aware that SPIDERS CAN NOT CRAWL IMAGES OR FLASH. Be sure to label everything with text and include text descriptions so that spiders can find it more easily. Use minimal AJAX and Flash, and you shouldn’t be using frames at all.

3. Viral Videos and Pics. Enable the “Enhanced Image Search” option and list a video sitemap in your Google Webmaster Central account. Also, get your videos played on viral sites like YouTube, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Metacafe and MySpace. All these places are crawled by Google. When posting captions and descriptions for pics and videos use words like “image” “pics” or “video” since many searches for pictures or videos include obvious words like that.

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4. Unique Title Tags. Make sure that each title tag on your website is different and has a keyword in it. Don’t put your company name in there unless you are so big and popular that people ask for you by name. In other words, unless you’re Wal-Mart, Gucci, or Vera Wang, you should put your name somewhere else on the page… like at the end.

5. Interior linkage. When linking pages within your website, don’t simply hyperlink the words “click here”. Use keywords instead. So if you’re selling diamonds then hyperlink the phrase “Buy Wholesale Diamonds” or “Wholesale Diamond Information”. Also, if you have “index” associated with your home page (ie: DelawareDiamonds.com/index.html) then be sure to arrange it so you’re not splitting your links. You don’t need index.html, default.php or any of those. Your URL should just be your URL with a plain-Jane dotcom (net, org, edu or whatever) ending. When linking internally though, spiders and search engines don’t pay attention to your URL file extension.

6. Location, Location, Location. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, be aware of local search keywords. Don’t be afraid to put your location (i.e. Florida, New York, Presque Island,) into your keyword phrases. “Delaware Diamonds,” “New York Fashion” or even just “Presque Island Store” instead of “our store” helps people find you better. This is especially important if you count on your customers finding you online, and buying your products/services in-store.

7. Make sure to buy up any similar URLs to yours and have them redirect to your website. This is not the same thing as creating doorways, gates or mirror sites. What this does mean is that if your original URL is http://www.happybusiness.com then you could buy up http://happybusiness.com, happybusiness.net, happybusiness.org, and have them all automatically and instantly redirect to your original site. This typically works well for website URLs which are commonly misspelled by searchers. A good example is Barnes and Noble: you can enter www.barnesandnoble.com into your address bar and you’ll automatically be redirected to www.bn.com. Just a note though before you go buying up URLs; Don’t buy up links that haven’t been updated or used in over a month. The best way to tell is to do a Google search for “cache” plus whatever website your looking for. i.e.: “cache:www.whateverwebsite.com”

8. Sticky Forwarding. If you’re completely renovating your website and changing domain names then be sure to use “sticky forwarding.” This will allow users to get redirected from your old site to your new one and help them transition through the change better.

9. Check Yourself. Google up some server header checkers (you can actually do a search for “Check Server Header”) to get a tool that will check your redirected websites. You should be popping up with a report that says: ‘301 moved permanently” or “200 OK” if they are set up and used the right way. If not, either fix them or get someone to do it for you.

10. Guilt By Association. Make sure to run occasional blacklist checks if you are running on a shared server to make sure that you’re not sharing space with any banned or notoriously shady websites. This could actually affect your ratings with search engines. It also helps to make sure that your domain ownership information is visible by search engines.

11. Sponsorship. Philanthropy is actually rewarded by most search engines. Find non-profit organizations on the web, see if they are looking for sponsors and reap the benefits of those back links.

12. RSS Optimization. It is what it sounds like. You need to be optimizing your RSS feed the same way you would any of your web pages.

13. Beneficial Blogging. Your title tag and blog title are two different things so make sure you’re optimizing both separately. Use a “call to action” style of blogging where you provoke people to respond or react to what you’re blogging about. Also see if you can get someone of influence to post something special on you blog. Build up to it ahead of time: i.e. “Coffee Guru, Joe Schmoe will be posting with us on October 10th!” You can also ask the person of influence to post comments and opinions on blogs that you’ve written.

14. Social Networking is SEO. You can’t do SEO nowadays without incorporating social networking into the mix. Websites like Digg, Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us have become SEO essentials. Also, adding components like blogs, podcasts, social content, reviews, sharing apps, user ratings and comments help to boost your website’s “viral appeal.” It does take extra time and effort to do this right and not spam every blog you come across so make sure that you or whoever you hire knows what they’re doing so your website doesn’t get penalized.

15. Quality not Quantity. I know I talk a lot about page rank, but it’s actually not so important that you’re #1. There are plenty of websites that outrank the #1 spotters in hits, quality, sales and time spent on the site simply because the lesser-ranked website has better and more relevant content. Another important thing to do is keep adding to or refreshing the content that you have to legitimize your website to search engines. You should be adding new content or changing content about 3-5 times a week to keep spiders happy.

Popularity: 47%

Web directories are not search engines. They are categorized lists of websites and function much like an online version of the yellow pages. Web directories are also not considered to be link farms which makes it a beneficial place to put your website address and work your way up in the search engines. In fact you’ve probably come accross Google , Yahoo!, Mozilla and MSN which all have their own directory listing sites. There are many others too if you are willing to search for them.

How you get listed in a directory is completely up how much you want to pay and where you go. Some websites will offer free submission or will list you at no cost if you are willing to add their link to your page. Be wary of free directories though since depending on how legitimate they are, you could end up getting penalized for link farming. More importantly though, you should consider paid submission sites because they practically never have a no-follow application which means your website will do better in search engine rank/ratings.

You have to be careful when submitting your website for consideration to a directory. Submissions are usually evaluated by real-live humans who are looking for spammers, black hatters and bogus or scammy websites. In order to let them know you’re legit, be sure to submit your website to the right category. If the directory doesn’t have a category that you really fit into, then suggest one and explain why you think you should be put there.

Hitting the web and doing some research on the directories that you want to submit to is the best way to ensure acceptance. Create a list of directories that you would like to be placed on and start looking into them. Some things you’re going to need to know are:

Mimic the Manager/Editor’s Preferred Style. Writing a very precise description that imitates the directory editor’s style will make it easier for him/her to accept you quickly and with few, if any alterations to what you’ve written. You can find this out by searching for businesses with similar keywords that have already been accepted. Look at their descriptions, keywords and categories and submit your keywords, description and category suggestion based on what you’ve found.

Equal, but Different. Ensure that although you descriptive style resembles that of the other businesses, your description still accurately reflects your unique business services. In other words if your company provides five specialized services or has a unique target market, then be sure to include that information.

The Long and Short of it. The criteria for business descriptions can be vary greatly from web directory to web directory. It’s useful to have several descriptions ready of different lengths. Have one that’s 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, and 200 words long. You should certainly include 1-5 keywords (one for every 10 - 20 words perhaps) but don’t stuff them in or make them too obvious since that will get you rejected. Keywords are allowed by web directories, but they certainly aren’t going to accept sketchy submissions.

Industry vs General Directories. When submitting to a web directory, keep in mind the type of directory it’s marketing itself as. Always be sure that your content belongs in the category you selected, your information is unique and your keywords aren’t crammed in there like a pack of sardines. You also want to place your keywords correctly so that search engines can pick them up easily. Only choose keywords that your company uses in the name or title of your website. Anything else may look suspicious and the directory manager will remove them.

Additional Things to Keep in Mind:
Always submit your homepage first. You can submit more specific web pages later, but it’s good form to start with the basics. Chances are that your individual web pages will be accepted if your main web site was.

Keep in mind that directories rank websites by keyword popularity within each category. I can’t reiterate enough that if you don’t typically use a keyword for your website in the title or business name, then don’t use it in your description. It will only get you rejected for looking like a spammer.

If you do get rejected you can resubmit your website after about four weeks, but don’t resubmit more than three times. After that contact the directory manager and find out what you can do to get in there. Sometimes it’s your keywords, submission lengths or maybe it’s your website. Getting into directories can help boost your rankings and they don’t have as stringent rules as search engines. If you aren’t successfully complying with them then you certainly aren’t going to rank well in search engines either. It would be beneficial for your website to find out what you can do differently and accommodate their standards.

Popularity: 46%

Proper SEO and SEM techniques are often things that marketing managers have to learn themselves. They certainly weren’t teaching it when I graduated college back in 2005. No matter how much we research or how hard we try, it’s all too easy to find ourselves in some sticky situations by doing things we never knew were wrong. I’m talking of course, about Black Hat SEO practices. Here’s a list of things (in alphabetical order) everyone should avoid in order to keep their website from being banned from every major search engine out there. You’ll notice that a lot of ideas listed below are simply a matter of good ethics or common sense, but just in case you didn’t get the memo…

Astro-Turfing
Don’t launch a fake PR campaign or create a social networking upheaval based on false information just to generate traffic to your website.

Celebrity Look-A-Likes
When someone posts blogs, or creates blogs and forums under the name of someone significant. By “significant” I mean either a celebrity or someone who is well recognized in their industry. This celebrity impersonator will usually post comments or blogs that are damaging to a competitor. A less illegal, but certainly just as immoral act would be if an industry guru posted discouraging comments on their competitor’s site anonymously to ultimately drive traffic back to their own website.

Cloaking
Another form of misrepresentation. It’s when you are Showing one set of keywords and content to spiders and bots and a separate set of content to visitors.

Code Swapping
Other wise known as the “old switcharoo.” This is when companies take a top ranking page URL (usually one they’ve purchased) and swap it around so that it shows a different page that benefits their business. This is almost always a temporary fix, so it doesn’t make much sense to swap code if you don’t need to. Most companies have legitimate reasons to swap around their code if they are changing their business model or even owners. However, swapping code for the purposes of duping search engines is against the rules.

Doorway Site
Similar to gateway sites, but instead of having a link or redirection tool that the user follows, the user actually never even sees the doorway site. It’s just a fake page used to trick spiders into indexing the main page higher up on the SE.

Gateway Site
These can be identified as web pages with practically no content in them except for some (possibly hidden) keywords. They usually have some sort of text in the center or up top that says: “Click here to enter” They have no use to the web surfer, and their purpose is to simply rank high in SE results so that people can click on that link and be taken to the real website, which may not rank as well or have scammy content.

Google Bombs
Remember when you learned that if you Googled “miserable failure” George Bush’s website would pop up at the top of the SE list? That happened because hundreds (thousands?) of people linked Dubbya’s Whitehouse homepage to their websites by hyperlinking the words “miserable failure”. That was just a collective joke, but when one person Google bombs it can get them penalized or even banned – and that’s not funny. A website owner can create a Google bomb by hyperlinking the same (usually irrelevant) text to the same URL on various other websites. This will allow them to jump up in ratings when people Google that keyword. That is, until they get banned.

Google Bowling
Google bowling is essentially sabotage. It’s when a company links SEO spam links to a competing company’s website in hopes that Google will penalize or banish their competitor.

Invisible text
Not commonly used anymore since it’s easy to get caught. It’s when irrelevant keywords and phrases are hidden on a webpage by either making them incredibly small, hiding them in the html code of the page, or making them the same color as the page’s background.

Keyword and Meta Tag Stuffing
When companies fill up their web page with as many keywords and meta tags as possible in a pathetic attempt to get better SE Ratings it’s called stuffing. Typically they are hidden, but many times they aren’t. Fortunately Google doesn’t view this as “quality content” and it won’t work.

Mirror Sites and Purchasing Expired Domain Names
Sure, those expired sites may have great page rankings, but by using multiple websites and using them as mirror sites, (or websites with the same content, but different URLs) and to create backlinks to your original site, you’re making yourself a likely candidate for dismissal and penalties.

Page Hijacking
This involves creating a duplicate site of an existing website which will ultimately redirect users to an unrelated website. This specific tactic is often used to download malware and spyware on to users’ computers once they have reached the hijackers website. Whether or not the real website is malicious, this tactic will still get you banned.

Scraper Sites
Otherwise known as “Made for Adsense” (MFA) sites. These websites use automated programs that steal and amalgamate various content from top ranking websites in order to create original looking content for themselves or a third party.

Spam of All Kinds
There’s a few kinds of spam that we’re talking about here. Most of these are blantently unethical, like comment spam or spam pages, but others like “wiki spam” were used commonly simply because the marketer didn’t know better.

Blog Spam (Splogs) are essentially “link farms” (a colony of web pages that all reference each other) and are created for the sole purpose of spamming other blogs and driving traffic to either their own website or another “main” website that the spammer owns. They can do this by placing links, keywords and hyperlinked text on random blog sites. It is often a source of comment spam.

Comment Spam is when a company posts comments in the blog, forum, wiki page, guestbook or articles section of a high-ranking website in order to improve their own standings on a search engine. They are usually obvious to anyone to sees them. They may or may not be relevant to the discussion, they usually contain some kind of link or information that leads the reader back to the spammer’s website, and they are chock full of keywords making it even more conspicuous.

Spamdexing or Referrer Log Spam. This works on the basis that when a web surfer accesses one website through a link on another website, the website that originally “referred” the link is entered into a referrer log. This is essentially a list of websites that have referred people to that site and is usually displayed publicly on a special “links” page. Sometimes the referrer will employ the use of software to automatically and arbitrarily access a large amount of websites over and over again creating numerous amount of backlinks through these referrer index logs thus improving their page rank.

Wiki Spam. Wikipedia started using “nofollow” values in their html code back in 2005 because of this black hat tactic. It’s when website owners/managers use the open edit capabilities of wiki pages in order to backlink to their own website. While users can still follow these links, they will not affect the website’s rank on Google since Google’s algorithm is designed to ignore “nofollow” links.

Final Word on Black Hat SEO
About a year ago some major companies were caught using interns to do some Astroturfing. (I remember one company was Amazon’s Shelfari. I know there were some others but I can’t find a record of them anywhere.) They hired on interns, told the interns to post spammy blogs on other people’s sites and when they were caught, the companies basically told everyone that they knew nothing about it and blamed everything on the interns. Although these companies recovered in the Google rankings fairly quickly, their reputation with customers and blog owners remained bruised for a lot longer.

The general rule of thumb is to be careful and do your research. If you’re trying a new SEO method or your not sure about something ask someone who probably does know. Hiring a professional SEO/SEM company is always a good idea - just make sure they have a “No Black Hat” policy. If you do find yourself banned or penalized by a search engine, don’t panic. Banishment isn’t necessarily final and neither is falling in rank. Contact the search engine and find out why then work with them to correct the problem. You’ll usually find that they’re pretty reasonable. They know that most SEO/M managers don’t do these things on purpose and don’t want to be tagged as a Spammer or Black Hatter. Unless of course, they were going to change careers anyway.

Popularity: 41%

There’s a global financial storm brewing and it’s just getting started. Here in the USA we’ve got a subprime mortgage crisis, rising gas and energy costs, (I know, I know. Our gas prices are lower than most of the world - but it still hurts,) overall inflation due to those rising gas and energy costs, and the bankruptcy of some of our major financial firms. Just this week the USA Government made a very controversial move by bailing Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG out of trouble. The bust of these major financial companies has even affected India’s recently booming economy, where most of those troubled firm’s IT positions were outsourced to. Russia’s Micex index fell 25% which is the largest financial crisis they’ve experienced since 1998. I’m also sad to say that Japan, Vietnam, Europe and many others are either heading for or already engulfed in a similar economic crisis situation.

Luckily, for those who are running their business online, the internet could act as a kind of “flotation device” in which we can ride out the storm. Don’t get me wrong, the seas of our global economy will still be fairly rough, but online businesses can make it through if they play their cards right. So far US technology stocks have not been reduced to ash the way other industries have. In fact Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and IBM are all in very good financial health right now. Internet usage is up due to an increase in telecommuting and job searches. Which also suggests that the search demand is growing (or at least not shrinking) too. Granted increased searches and traffic don’t necessarily add up to increased sales if people are just searching for new jobs. However since internet businesses don’t have any major connections to the financial industry they automatically gain more faith from investors and consumers. Also, the internet is notorious for bargain hunters looking for good deals on essential (and even some non-essential) items. The trend towards consumers purchasing less from the brick-and-mortar counter parts of online stores should increase dramatically. In short, there may be less frivolous spending going on in the near future, but more of what sales do occur will be online.

Also, as our new “Net-Gen” gets older and starts to flood the workforce, we should see many new innovations, uses and opportunities for the internet to boost our economy. We should see an increase in consulting, freelance and contract workers as people start their own home based businesses. Internet jobs won’t pay what they used to as companies try to grab the cheapest talent possible, but there will be work nonetheless. Online businesses have super low start up rates by nature so if you haven’t already, find your forte and hit it.

If you already own an online business, be sure to play it smart. This doesn’t necessarily mean play it safe all the time though. It’s better to take a risk on a project that has a more predictable or quicker return on investment, as opposed waiting until something “better” comes along. Stagnation is very dangerous in times of recession. It’s also better for the global economy as a whole for business to take care of themselves and invest their time and attention wisely.

Also, now is a good time to closely analyze your overall financial picture. If you don’t think, or don’t know if you can weather out the next year or so, you should either cut your expenses and ultimately jobs, or invest in growth (the smarter and more responsible of the two options). Invest in traceable advertising and marketing to make ensure you’re not spending more money than you need to. SEO, pay-per-click, email blasts, webvertising are all intelligent choices for online marketing. Just remember to use offline marketing wisely and keep your offline and online marketing mixes fairly consistent.

Popularity: 16%

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.

Popularity: 40%

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.

Popularity: 24%

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.

Popularity: 23%

Todays post is the first in a new series of educational, step by step guides which will help those just starting off with search marketing on Google to hit the ground running. I will throw a few extra steps into the process and give advice based on what you should be doing to start with a more optimised campaign, instead of a campaign which will get you a lot of irrelevant clicks and blow your budget like most adwords starter campaigns!

This guide is obviously aimed at those who are just getting search marketing running on their website. More advanced optimisation and development articles will follow.

Step 1) You need to load up http://adwords.google.com this is the homepage of the worlds biggest and most talked about online advertising program Google Adwords. You will see up the very top of the screen a link which says “Click to begin”, go ahead and click on that which will take you to step 2.

Step 2) Once you have decided to start the signup process, Google is going to ask you to choose Starter Edition or Standard Edition. Now, if i were starting a new campaign i would choose the Standard Edition however, lets go through the process of using the starter edition as there are a few different steps involved.

Click on the starter edition radio box and also on “i have a webpage” then click continue. (If you don’t have a webpage, we will be developing a simple how to guide shortly to suit your needs)

Step 3) The next thing Google is going to do is pop-up a little sub window which will ask for additional details. Let’s ignore that and get on with the signup process, so click continue without entering the additional information.

This next page is where you enter all of your target information such as location, language, keywords and other factors which will help to refine your advertising and ensure that you aren’t just throwing money away.

Step 4) So let’s choose our location and language, if your business is a local and geographically specific business such as a bakery or a doctor, this is probably the most important step. Make sure that you choose a specific region or at the very least your state. If your business is a countrywide or global, online business, then i would suggest choosing some of the major countries such as the USA, Canada, UK.

To start off with, lets simply choose the USA.

Step 5)Next, Google is going to ask us to write your very first ad! First, let’s enter your URL. The important thing to remember here is that this won’t always be your homepage. You should be delivering users directly to the most information rich, sales driven page on your website. So think to yourself “What is the page which would best sell and explain my product or service?” then enter that page in.

Next, we need to write your ad. The most important thing is to remember that there is very limited space with only 35 characters in the headline and 70 characters worth of description text. So each ad has to be to the point and if possible, feature part or all of the keyword you are targeting. There is no one, trusted way to write a text ad but i will give a few quick tips.

Step 5A) - Headline The headline is the most important part of your ad, this is the part of your ad that gets noticed more than anything else. Your headline should be to the point and feature at least one of your major keywords. Ideally you would write a variation of your ad for each major group of keywords so that they are all closely matched. To begin with, we are only writing one ad so lets create an example.

Let’s say you are a doctor in Boston and you offer services only within the Boston region. For this kind of account i would write a headline like: Experienced Boston Doctor or Local Boston Doctor You basically want to try and sum up the service you are offering within that small 35 character space.

Step 5B) Ok, now for the description this is where you can start to be more creative and try to differentiate yourself from other competing advertisers. I recommend going to Google and searching for a keyword like Boston Doctors for the sake of this example, look at what your competitors are using and then try to improve on it!

Try your best to include any points of difference between yourself and your competitors. An example descriptions for this kind of ad are: “Serving the Boston Community for 15 Years. Trusted and Professional”, Basically i think since its a medical industry ad, trusted, safe, reliable are all words which should be focused on.

Step 5C) Display URL, this is the domain name of your site which if you are lucky, will be highly relevant to your market. However one important thing to remember is that you can add a folder name onto the end of your display URL without it existing on your website. This extra bit of advertising space can be a great way of fitting in an extra keyword and making your ad more relevant.

For the example of a Boston doctor, your display URL might look something like this BostonDoctors.com/Advice or BostonDoctors.com/HouseCall - Take advantage of this as your competitors will most likely be. Anytime a user searches for a keyword, if that keyword is within your ad it will highlight in bold!

So that i don’t overload you with all of these things, i am going to leave part one of getting started with Adwords for today and continue on tomorrow. We will get more in depth into keyword research both using the Google tool and other resources.

Come back tomorrow for part 2 in this new series.

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