Real Web Marketing Blog

Marketing Attitude

by John Eberhard

I have been doing marketing for 21 years. I really love marketing for a couple of reasons.

First of all, when I was a kid I really loved all the creative arts, including music, photography, painting, writing, etc. So I love marketing because it offers the chance to be creative, especially with copywriting and design.

Secondly, I love the fact that with marketing, I can craft a message and design a promotion, then send it out to thousands or millions of people, then move hundreds of people to respond. It’s like I can reach out to all those people and cause a response, i.e. create a large effect. It’s a very powerful medium.

One of the first jobs I had in marketing was at a medium sized software company. The whole team would work hard on doing surveys on our target public (IT Managers), then design the ads and write the copy. Then we’d draw pictures of what we wanted to use in the ad, then take them out and show them to IT Managers and make sure it communicated the right thing. Then we’d have the pictures created in final form by a pro illustrator, photographer or computer graphics artist, then send out the ads. Then hundreds of responses would come in, sales would boom, and the company would make millions of dollars.

So I saw how powerful marketing was and it was and is exciting to be part of that.

One of the vital components of doing marketing is that you take one communication, and you send that communication out to hundreds or thousands or millions of people. Each company has a certain target public who can potentially buy their products or services. This may be a certain type of person or it may be limited to the geographical area around the business if it serves the local public. But within that target public, you want to send out your communication as broadly and to as many people as possible.

On social media networks you can apply this principle by getting as many followers or friends as you can. Apply some sort of criteria to who you befriend or follow, so that your friends are your target public as much as possible. Also on social networks be aware of the fact that you can’t pummel people with “buy my stuff” messages all day long, because it is a social network. You have to observe the etiquette and follow the way other people communicate on the network.

In recent years I have seen certain attitudes creep into the collective consciousness that it is somehow bad to communicate a commercial message.

For some strange reason, in the IT field there is a pervasive “anti-marketing” attitude, the idea that to market some product or service is bad.

Another of these is the idea that it is not OK to send out commercial emails, or elaborate ideas of how much permission you have to have in order to send someone an email. To be sure there has been a lot of abuse on commercial email lines, and the volume of email today is high.

But my attitude is to go for it and just make sure you follow the laws. Don’t do anything deceptive in your emails, put your street address in it, include an opt-out option and take people off your list within 10 days when they request off. And don’t get into a propitiative attitude with the public of “Oh please Mr. Public, is it OK that I send you something? Are you sure it’s OK? You won’t be offended, will you?”

One boss of mine used to say that it is easier to get forgiveness than get permission. I like that idea.

Another of my former bosses said that his policy with the mailing list was to continue mailing to them (this was before email) until one of three things happened: 1) they died, 2) they asked to be off the list, or 3) they bought something. I loved this aggressive attitude and have continued in this vein throughout my marketing career.

The moral of this story is that being aggressive is the way to go in marketing. Follow the rules of the road, but don’t buy into the idea that you shouldn’t communicate. Get your ideas out there, as widely as possible, get your responses, and flourish and prosper.

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One Size Does Not Fit All

by John Eberhard

I have observed a couple other companies that are marketing Internet marketing or social media marketing programs that are the same for everyone, regardless of the type of business. In other words, the marketing program is a template, and everyone is sold that same program.

Although this approach may simplify selling the program to prospects, I do not think this approach will work in the long run or get good results for the clients. And when I say “good results for clients,” as usual I am referring to leads or sales for the client. As why else would a business pay money for marketing online?

I believe that each type of business requires a different approach, and that one has to consider such factors as the price of the product or service, the target public, what other marketing media work well for this product or service, how much traffic the web site is getting now, how technologically savvy the target public is, what other competing web sites are doing, whether the business targets a local, regional or national area, and other factors.

In my experience, each type of business requires a different mix of Internet marketing actions. For that reason I design a customized Internet marketing program for each client.

For instance, pay per click (PPC) advertising is not appropriate for each type of business, especially if the price of the product is low, like under $100. But it works great if you are selling something that costs say $1,000 or more. PPC also has the added benefit that you can target exact geographical areas. So it tends to be a good fit for businesses that are servicing only a local area, that are selling a high ticket item, such as home improvement businesses. I have seen the effectiveness fall off for luxury type home improvement products over the last few years (due to economic factors), but for things that people really need for their homes, PPC is extremely very well right now.

As another example, link building, through article marketing, press releases and blogging, is very effective in raising your search engine rankings. But it takes time, like 6-12 months of consistent work, to get real results. So a company has to be able to afford to do that longer term building. And I usually pair it with something to get results more quickly, like pay per click advertising.

I have also observed that social media is more appropriate and effective for some types of businesses than others.

So is it more work to design a customized program for each client or type of client? Sure. But that is the route to real results. And if a company is selling the same package to everyone, they might sell some packages. But in the end I believe the results will not be good. And that muddies the field and the subject for everyone. The route to real results is a customized program for each type of business.

Tracking Your Search Engine Ranking Success

by John Eberhard

So you’ve done keyword research and found the best keywords to target. Then you’ve done search engine optimization on your web site. Then you’ve started link building, with blogs, article directories and press releases. So how do you know when it’s all working? How do you track your success?

Well fortunately, as with many things on the Internet, in this case it is possible to track your success very closely.

Basically what you want to do to track your success with search engine marketing and link building, is to track two things:

1. The traffic you’re getting monthly from the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN
2. Your site’s ranking on the big three for each of your list of target keywords

The first thing is probably pretty obvious. Because the more successful you are at SEO and link building, theoretically the more traffic you should be getting from the search engines. That’s the goal of the whole process. You can check this by having Google Analytics or any other quality web statistics program on your web site.

But why do you care about your ranking on search engines for all the keywords? Because the whole process of selecting keywords, doing SEO on your site, and then doing link building with blogs, articles and press releases, has as its goal: raising your rankings on the search engines for your targeted keywords.

The higher you rank for each of your keywords on the big three search engines, the more traffic you will get. The thing is, it will really start happening when you break the top 20 for a keyword, and especially when you break the top 10, i.e. on page one. That’s when you’ll start seeing real traffic from search engines.

The way you check your ranking for a list of keywords is not to do it manually by going to each search engine and entering your keywords. You can do it that way, but it takes forever. It’s better to do it with software that checks your rankings for a list of keywords. There are two excellent software packages that I have used for this purpose: Internet Business Promoter, and Market Samurai.

In the last six months or so I have started using Market Samurai, since I did Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge training program in August 09. It’s great for keyword research and will also do search engine rank checking for you. I like Market Samurai because it will check your rankings down to the 500th place.

So let’s say you have a list of 100 keywords that you have selected and that you are targeting with your various actions. By using one of these software packages you can get your ranking for each one of the keywords.

I do the reports for each of Google, Yahoo and MSN, then put the results into a table, once a month, like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google Dec 09	Yahoo Dec 09	MSN Dec 09
Keyword 1	Not top 500	326	153
Keyword 2	Not top 500	52	Not top 500
Keyword 3	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 4	372	19	109
Keyword 5	18	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 6	5	35	185
Keyword 7	227	117	Not top 500
Keyword 8	6	1	5
Keyword 9	41	14	73
Keyword 10	37	27	140

The above is an excerpt from one of my clients’ monthly report, with the actual keywords taken out of course.

Then I add up all the #1 keyword positions, top ten positions (including the #1s), the top 20 (including the #1s and top tens), top 100, and top 500. Then I track it monthly like this:

Number 1 and top 10 positions	Aug 09	Sept 09	Oct 09	Nov 09	Dec 09
Keywords with #1 position	1	3	4	4	6
Top ten keywords including #1s	3	4	9	11	23
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	n/a	8	26	29	41
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens, top 20s	19	33	57	67	81
Top 500 keywords including #1s, top 10s, top 20s, top 100s	36	65	69	88	102

The above is actual data from one of my clients where we are doing aggressive link building. Note that over a 5 month period we are seeing good progress. Note also that it doesn’t happen overnight.

So if you mainly get traffic from search engines when your keywords reach the top 20 or top 10 positions, why do I track or care about the top 100 or top 500? Because, as I do more link building a blog posts and so on, more and more keywords will be added to the list of ones that are ranking. But they won’t start out in the top 20, they’ll start out way down the list. So I believe this is an effective way to track what we’re doing with link building. The monthly totals really tell the story, and tell us whether the strategy is working.

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Conversions with a Web Site

by John Eberhard

You work hard to get traffic to your web site. That’s great.

But now the job is to get conversions. In other words, you want a good percentage of your visitors to either:

1. fill out a form to give you their name and email address, or
2. become a lead, or
3. buy something

If they give you their name and email address, you can email to them in the future repeatedly and market your products or services to them. If they become a lead you can call them and sell them. If they buy something from you online, great.

Let’s talk about each of these items above separately.

Filling Out the Form

Years ago web designers used to put up “guest books” to try to get the name and email of web visitors. But in today’s world, people get way too much email. So they are very selective in giving out their email address. That means you have to come up with items of real value that they want, and then require that they give you their email address in order to get that item.

So what do I mean when I say “items of real value” that will entice the visitor to give you his email? I’m talking about information products. Things like an email newsletter. Or white papers, i.e. reports on some topic related to your business. If you’re a software developer you can offer software demo downloads.

I have used email newsletter subscription offers, and free report or white paper offers, with great success on the web sites for a variety of companies.

The trick with a free report or white paper is to come up with topics and titles that will appeal to your target public. You can apply quite a bit of ingenuity to the creation of a white paper or coming up with a great title, and this can make quite a bit of difference in the response.

The trick with an email newsletter is to decide on a schedule (weekly, monthly, etc.), stick to that schedule, and come up with articles of interest each time.

Partly what you are doing with either a newsletter or white paper is establishing yourself as a source of helpful and accurate information. As a trusted source, the reader then feels confident in buying products or services from you, because he can see that you know what you’re talking about.

I use autoresponders when someone responds. When he signs up for the newsletter, he gets an email back right away saying “thanks for signing up.” When he requests a white paper, he gets an email right away that says “click here to download the white paper,” and “by the way, we’re also signing you up for our newsletter,” and “you can unsubscribe at any time.”

Leads

If you are using the web site to do lead generation, then the lead is your highest quality conversion from the web site. This allows your sales team to contact him. But don’t forget to automatically add him to your email newsletter list. This is for two reasons. One is that, in case he doesn’t buy right away, he can still be receiving information from you regularly and will this not forget about you. And the other reason is that if he does buy right away, the newsletter keeps your name in front of him for when he is ready to buy again.

Sales

If you are selling products directly on the web site, make sure you make it easy for the prospect to find them. You should have a “buy” button, or “shop” button or something of this nature on every page of the site. Your prospect could decide to buy at any time. Make it easy on him when he makes that decision.

Web Statistics

I recommend Google Analytics as a great, free tool offered by Google that allows you to know how many web visitors you’re getting weekly, where they are coming from, what keywords they typed in on a search engine to find you, what pages they visited and so on.

You should look at these statistics once a week (I graph them). Then look at how many conversions you’re getting weekly, i.e. how many people are filling out a form to request one of your free offers, or asking for more info and becoming a lead, or buying something online. Divide the conversions number by the total number of visitors, which will give you your conversion percentage.

So the million dollar question is – what’s a good conversion percentage? That depends. If you are just selling products on the site and aren’t offering any free offers, then the percentage will definitely be lower. Online marketing guru Ed Dale says that 0.5% is an acceptable conversion percentage for selling products. I would say that for sites with free offers, I have had as high as 50% conversion, but that’s unusual and with a really great offer. If you are not getting at least 3% conversion, you should work on your site and come up with ways to increase it, with new offers, bright buttons, etc.

Good luck.

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Landing Pages vs. Landing on Your Home Page

By John Eberhard

I started doing email marketing about 10 years ago, and started doing pay per click advertising about 5-6 years ago. One important element of each type of marketing is: where are you going to have people land on your site?

I noticed 10 years ago and still notice now that many people just automatically have visitors land on their home page. But is this the best way to go? And when I say what is the best way, let’s clarify that the goal is to get the most leads or sales from the campaign.

I developed a technique of making a special, customized landing page, for use in both email marketing and pay per click. This landing page:

1. Has sales text and pictures, of varying lengths
2. Has a form at the bottom of that page for people to become a lead or buy something. Also has a phone number in case they want to call in.
3. Has no navigational buttons
4. Often has a video or audio clip on it
5. Has some kind of compelling offer

Over the years I have tried this type of customized landing page on probably over 100 campaigns.

One of the advantages of both email marketing and pay per click advertising is the ability to track the results extremely well. For example, with Google AdWords, you can have what is called an “A-B” test, where half of the people who see your ad will go to landing page A, and half will go to landing page B. And you can see in great detail, after a week or two of testing, whether it is better to have people land on your home page or on a customized landing page.

Sometimes when I have described the customized landing page concept to clients, they have been skeptical. They have sometimes said:

1. “I wouldn’t like that if I came to a site like that.”
2. “That would piss me off if I came to a site like that, I would want to surf around the site.”
3. “People want to surf around the site.”
4. “Anyone with any web smarts would just back up to the main domain name and then be able to navigate around the site.”

While I can’t particularly argue with whether any of these statements is true, what I can do is say that over the last 10 years, the customized landing page, with no navigation, has worked better in 80-90% of all cases.

When I say that it has worked better, I mean that a customized landing has in 80-90% of all cases worked better in terms of getting more conversions. And by conversions, I mean leads or sales. The customized landing page got a higher percentage of people going to that page, converting to leads or sales than when landing on the home page or any other page of the site with navigation buttons.

What about that other 10-20%? I have seen it work better to give the visitor the option to tool around the site, in rare cases, such as when the product is very visual, such as certain home improvement companies (landscape, paving stones, ponds), where the most highly trafficked pages of the site are generally the photo gallery pages.

For the rest, I recommend leaving the navigation off.

My theory for why this works better, is that letting the person wander around your site is not as focused an experience. They wander around and they leave. But if the only option for the person is to fill out the form or call you, they do, at least in higher percentages.

If you don’t believe me, test it.

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Writing Content for Your Newsletters and Blogs

by John Eberhard

So you have an email newsletter. Or you have a blog. Now what? Does it matter how often you send out the newsletter, or how often you post something to the blog?

Yes it does matter. I have found that the optimum frequency for putting something on a blog is once a week or more often. If you also make sure to send out a ping to the blog search engines (using www.pingomatic.com) and post something once a week or more it will drive traffic to the blog and thus to your site. With a newsletter you have to find out the optimum frequency for you and your public. I send out my newsletter once a week and it definitely drives business for me.

So how do you come up with content? What topics do you write about? How do you come up with ideas? How can you possibly come up with a new article every week?

Well believe it or not, it can be done and it won’t kill you. I understand that if you’re not accustomed to writing, especially writing regularly, it can seem hard. That’s why I’m here to help.

1. For topics, assuming that your newsletter or blog is there to support your business, you should write about topics related to your business and your industry. This may be a “duh” but I’m just making sure.

1. I find that during the course of each week, something will often come up in dealing with a client or prospect that will make for a good topic for an article. Like a couple of weeks ago someone told me that a guy had walked into their office and promised them the #1 position on Google. Bang – article! Another time in talking to a prospect, I realized that it was not real to him that a blog could drive traffic to a site. Bang – another article! Each week in dealing with your business and your clients or customers, you deal with various issues that could be topics for interesting articles or blog posts.

1. If I’m stuck for a topic when I’m writing for my own newsletter or when I’m ghost writing for one of my clients, I go to Google and enter words relating to the general topic, maybe including the word “article.” Then I find articles written by others in the same field, and that gives me ideas. It’s important not to plagiarize, meaning to just steal someone else’s writing. So minimally if you are going to write something using the topic someone else used in another article, then rewrite it using your own words.

1. I think it can be helpful to get on some other newsletter mailing lists for other similar businesses in your industry. That way you can see what others are doing and it can give you ideas for content.

1. If possible use some humor occasionally, even if it is dry humor such as that favored by yours truly.

1. Especially for blog posts, they don’t have to be that long. You can make a blog post as short as 50-150 words. Most newsletter articles should be a bit longer, like at least 300 words. Most of mine are 500-700 words.

1. One thing you can do on blogs is comment on something that is happening in your industry, or link to something written on another site with a short comment about the link. I sometimes post a YouTube video on my blogs, especially my political blogs.

1. I recommend setting a schedule for yourself, whether it’s a newsletter or a blog, and always write something on that schedule. So if you decide to get out your newsletter every two weeks, then stick to that and get something out every two weeks.

Believe it or not, the more you write content, the easier it will get.

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Internet Marketing into the New Decade

by John Eberhard

From my perspective as a former full time musician I used to be oriented to music by the name of the decade it came from; the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and so on. Here we are coming to a close of the first decade of the new millennium and there has not even been a widely accepted name for it yet. I heard a reference to the decade recently as the “oughts.” We’ll see if that one sticks.

Timothy Noah, on Slate.com, stated at the end of 2004: “The most logical candidate is a term often used to describe the first decade of the 20th century: the "aughts." But despite heavy promotion from journalists and others, it's never caught on.”

Five years on, and still no name for the decade. Oh well.

I’ve made it a habit over the last few years to name what I thought would be the most important Internet marketing strategies for the coming year.

Here’s what I said for the most important strategies for the beginning of 2008:

a. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising
b. Article Directories / Content Hubs
c. Optimized Press Releases
d. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Actions Done to a Web Site
e. Email Marketing
f. Banner Ads
g. Web 2.0

Here’s what I said for the most important strategies for the beginning of 2009:

a. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising
b. Blogs
c. Online PR
d. Social Media
e. Video and Audio on Sites and Blogs
f. Article Directories / Content Hubs

Interestingly, in an industry that thrives on change, there was not a lot of change from 08 to 09. Certainly banner ads are not a major force anymore. Article directories are less of a force than they were a couple years ago but are still very effective. Blogs and online PR are still very effective. Social media has become a more dominant force in online marketing in 2009.

My Website Marketing Picks for 2010

As we prepare to enter the new decade (which we assume will be called the “Teens”) here is my prediction for the best website marketing strategies for the next year.

a. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC is still a very dominant force and very effective, though its use is pretty much limited to high ticket items because of its cost. I was concerned a couple of years ago because of the multitude of companies that had begun using PPC and the resultant rise in bids and higher cost per click. I suspected that either the competition would have a self-normalling effect, driving some players out of the market and cost per click prices would fall somewhat, or the high costs would make the medium irrelevant eventually. Happily the former has occurred. PPC is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site on an immediate basis, and due to the excellent statistical and monitoring tools, in skilled hands it can be very effective. It’s just not viable for selling books and CDs.

b. Social Media: I have a friend who was bugging me to get into social media a couple years ago when I was reluctant, and he loses no opportunity to remind me of it when the topic comes up. Facebook is the #3 site in November according to Compete.com with 128 million unique visitors. YouTube is #4 with 85 million visitors. Twitter is #43 with 22 million visitors. True enough, social media has become a dominant force in website marketing, as long as you know how to use it. This means developing lots of friends/followers/connections, then sprinkling your marketing message into the conversation in a tasteful, non-offensive way. Shouts of “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff” at every opportunity will not work, because people can easily sever their connection to you and will. For my business I find it works to post several things a day saying what I am doing, such as “I am working on designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am ghost writing an article for a client.” It’s not obnoxious (at least I hope not) and it regularly reminds people of who I am and what I do. And I get business from Facebook and Twitter.

c. Single Dissemination Points Out to Multiple Sites: I believe that one of the primary essences of marketing is to have one message and to send it out as broadly as possible, without having to initiate the communication over and over again yourself. For this reason I really like sites that allow you to put out one communication one time, and have it go out to multiple places. I use Ping.fm to type in short communications (140 characters which is the Twitter limit) and I have it configured to post the message to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, and several other sites. So every time I post an update it goes out to 11 sites and to all my friends on those sites. I use Posterous.com for posting longer communications to my blogs, and I have it configured so it goes out to my blogs on Typepad, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and several other blog sites.

d. Keyword Research: I think keyword research is vital to do at the beginning of your website marketing efforts. The reason is because search engines base all their ranking on keywords. You do not just rank well or poorly on a search engine. You rank well or poorly for specific keywords. And it does practically no good to rank well for a keyword that no one searches for. But at the same time, if you think you are going to be able to rank well for general, single word, category keywords like “golf,” “computers,” “furniture,” or “mp3,” I’m afraid that just isn’t going to happen. There is way too much competition for those keywords. So the key is to find keywords that have decent traffic but not a jillion sites competing for them. Then work those golden nugget keywords into your strategy for blogs, online PR, social media, article marketing and so on.

e. Email Marketing: I first got into email marketing when it was a newfangled thing back in 1998-99, and made millions with it for the company I was working for at the time. Unfortunately a few years after that saw “the deluge.” By that I mean the flood of mostly small businesses flooding cyberspace with their sales emails promoting stock picks, male enhancement products, printer toner cartridges, and a host of other products. And most engaged in tactics that were considered unethical then and are against the law now, such as not removing you if you asked, using deceptive subject lines and so on. My observation is this killed the market for rented email lists. But what does still work today and work well, is developing an in-house email list of customers and prospects who inquire about your products and services, and emailing to them regularly. It works great for selling your products. Just comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

f. Blogs: I have written extensively about the effectiveness of blogs (some have kidded me about how much). I still believe that they are one of the best things you can do. Blog on Macduff.

g. Online PR: Optimized press releases, containing your target keywords that you found when you did keyword research and submitted to online PR sites, are very effective in building quality links to your website. These links also rank very well in the search engines.

h. Article Directories: I think article directories have become the ugly stepchild of Internet marketing in the last year, because no one in the SEO community talks about them (they rarely ever did for reasons unknown) and the number of directories have dropped off. But I do this for my own sites and for several clients and it still works like gangbusters in developing quantity links.

That’s it. Best wishes for 2010 and may you have the most prosperous year yet. Remember, if you market yourself properly, you can overcome all this “economic uncertainty” and together we will.

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What So Important About Keywords?

by John Eberhard

Keywords are an important subject when doing just about any marketing on the Internet. These are words or phrases that people are going to be typing into the various search engines.

You have to know what the best keywords are to use, when you are doing search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, blogging, article marketing, or sending out optimized press releases. Each of these activities is more effective when you have the properly targeted keyword phrases to use.

So it’s important not only to know what keywords to use, but you also have to be aware that the kinds of keywords you need to use will be different for different purposes.

The Big Picture

The first thing to know about keywords is that you have to select keywords or keyword phrases that have a lot of people searching for them. This may seem obvious but I have talked to people who had selected keywords and thought those were the keywords to use but no idea what the traffic was for them. There are several good tools to find out keyword traffic, including online services Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, and software such as Market Samurai.

The next thing to know is that at the beginning of the search cycle, people type in more general keywords, either single words or phrases that describe the whole category of thing hey are searching for, such as “MP3 player.” Then after they have done some initial searches and learned a bit about the category, they will then enter more specific phrases, such as “ipod mp3 player.” Then as they are getting ready to buy, they will enter even more specific phrases describing the specific product they want to buy, such as “ipod nano 4GB.” Note that this final, third phase is the time when the person is most likely to BUY. At that point he is usually looking for places where he can buy the product and comparing prices.

Keywords that are from this third phase of the searching cycle, are most descriptive and which tend to be 2-4 words or more are called “long tail” keywords. These keywords are not only usually easier to have your site rank for them, they tend to be the phrases the person types in when he is closest to being ready to buy.

Most people who I talk to who are not trained in these facts tend to think that they want to target keywords that describe the overall category, usually single word keywords, like “golf,” “consulting,” “dentist,” “chiropractor,” “marketing,” “computers,” etc. Although these single word keywords tend to have lots of searches, people typing them in are not usually at the buying point in the whole search cycle, and because of another factor which I’ll describe next, you won’t usually ever be able to rank well for them.

Competition

One of the facts of life is that there are usually fewer resources than there are people that want those resources. So it is with keywords. There are lots of companies trying to sell products on the Internet.

For the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, you want keywords that don’t have too many sites that are competing for them. If the keyword phrase has too many sites competing for it, you just won’t be able to ever rank well on search engines for that keyword. Most single word keywords have tens of thousands or millions of sites competing for them.

The goal, when looking for keywords for SEO or link building, is to find keywords that have decent numbers of people typing them in, but low competition. I use Market Samurai software to find this information, and I look for keyword phrases that have less than 50,000 competing sites for them, and the lower the better.

Different Uses for Keywords

There are essentially two major uses for keywords, one is SEO and link building on one side, and pay per click advertising on the other.

With SEO and link building, you want to find keywords that have as high traffic as possible, and as low competition as possible. Then with SEO you want to put those keywords into the appropriate places on your website, and with link building, you want to use those keywords in your blog posts, press releases and articles. All of these actions are geared towards getting your site to rank well for those keywords and raise them up onto the first page of search results for those keywords. That gets you traffic from search engines.

For pay per click advertising (PPC), you want to select keywords with high traffic. But here you are not really concerned with how much competition there is for a keyword. And with PPC you want to choose both long tail keywords and more general keywords. PPC is a different animal and if you only choose long tail keywords you will probably not get enough traffic to make it worth your while. There is a lot to know about PPC and I’ve covered that in other articles and will continue to write more in the future.

Good luck with your keyword finding efforts.

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He Said “I Can Guarantee the #1 Position on Google…”

by John Eberhard

Someone called me up recently saying that someone had walked into their office and said he could guarantee them the #1 position on Google for two specific keywords related to his business. My contact wanted to know what I thought of this?

There are a bunch of people out there making this kind of offer to businesses, and I happen to think that most of them are being totally dishonest and preying on the lack of knowledge of most business owners in how this website marketing stuff all works. I have run into quite a few of these guys, who have sold their offer to someone who later became my client. Let’s take a look at some facts regarding all this:

1. First of all, there are two sets of search results on a Google page; the organic results, and the paid or sponsored results. The organic results are the regular results for that search on Google, appearing in the left-hand wide column. The paid results are achieved through setting up a pay per click advertising account on Google AdWords, and these appear in the right-hand narrow column, and usually at the very top, the 1-3 results on the left, highlighted in yellow. Many of these people who make such promises will just put you up with an ad on Google AdWords, bidding high enough to achieve the #1 slot for the keywords they have promised you. There is no trick to this.

1.  Promising someone the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords, even if they achieve this through Google AdWords or other means, doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It all depends on how many people are searching for that keyword. Do you think it would mean anything to have the #1 spot on Google for “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” if only one person per month searched for that keyword? I’m using a ridiculous example but the concept applies to any business. Owning a keyword that no one searches for is meaningless, and any money you pay to achieve that is pretty much wasted. I remember one home improvement client who had been sold a certain number of keywords at X amount per keyword, with all of them having various city names included in the keyword. Most of those keywords had zero traffic and he was being charged monthly for each one, paying around $2500 per month.

1. Even if this guy who promised you the #1 spot for the keyword “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” went out and got you that spot using Google AdWords, you probably wouldn’t get any traffic from it. One of the things to consider when setting up a Google AdWords account is getting keywords that have lots of traffic. And the final product of a Google AdWords campaign is supposed to be conversions, i.e. a person who responds to you and becomes either a lead or a sale. The product is NOT having the #1 position on Google. That may sound great and may be a means to an end but it is not the product itself.

1. There is no way that someone can guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for a high traffic keyword in the organic listings. Maybe they can guarantee it for some lousy keyword for which no one is searching, but this is pointless as I said above. The key with search engine optimization is to first do some keyword research and find keywords that a) have decent numbers of people searching them monthly, and b) don’t have a ton of sites competing for those keywords. These are the gold nuggets. Once you find them you embark on a link building campaign to move yourself up in the rankings for those keywords, and this is a several month process.

In summary, I think these guys who guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords are, for the most part, being dishonest and ripping people off.

The real way to do this, is:

1. Start a Google AdWords account and select high traffic keywords, set your geography so the ads appear in the geographical locations you want, and put your ads up. Then bid high enough so your ads appear somewhere in the top 5, and set it up correctly so that you start driving traffic to your site. Remember that conversions are the key. Using AdWords you can achieve high rankings quickly, while you are working on the next part.

1. Do keyword research, select keywords that have decent traffic but low number of competing sites. Then optimize your site and put these keywords up on the site. Then start a link building campaign using these selected keywords and stick with it for at least 6-12 months.

If you do “b” above and stick with it and don’t bail too early, you will achieve a good number of keywords in the top 20, top 10 and some #1 positions. And they will be keywords that will be worth something.

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Link Building Case Studies

By John Eberhard

Link building is a vital activity to do when engaged in any kind of website marketing. Google says that the number of links coming to your site is the main criteria that determines your search ranking for any given keyword.

When doing link building, it is a good idea, not only to check how many links you have coming to your site on a regular basis, but also to look at what types of links you are getting and how high they are ranking. In other words, there are categories of types of links you can get, and looking at which ones are ranking the highest will tell you which link building activities to work on.

Here are the general categories of links you should be concentrating on:

1. Online PR sites such as www.pr.com
2. Blogs
3. Article directories such as www.goarticles.com
4. Social media sites and directories
5. Miscellaneous sites like keywordspy or YouTube

I do not include “reciprocal links,” where you try to get someone to link to your site and you link to theirs, because Google stopped giving much link value to these types of links nearly two years ago, though some consultants still recommend them.

I’m going to show three sites I have been working on for link building, and show how many links they have in each category on page 1 of Google results, page 2, page 3 and so on.

RealWebMarketing.net – 53,800 links

Note that 42% of my links on the first 5 pages of Google come from online PR sites, 20% come from article directories, and 26% come from social media sites.

This shows me that the online PR actions I’m doing, writing optimized press releases and submitting them to online PR sites, are creating the largest number of high ranking links to my site. Social media is giving me the second highest hit at 26%, followed by article marketing at 20%. These are all actions I do for my own site on a regular basis.

Client #1 – 8,900 links

Client #1 has 54% of his links in the first 5 pages of Google results coming from article directories, which makes sense as we have been doing article marketing for him for over two years. 22% of his links come from online PR sites, and 8% from social media. We have done mostly article marketing and press releases for this client, little social media, so the results make sense.

Client #2 – 4,100 links

Client #2, whom we’ve been working with for about four months, has 24% of his links on the first 5 pages of Google coming from online PR sites, 16% from blogs, 16% from social media, and 14% from article directories. The number of links coming from the various categories is more evenly distributed here, which you would expect as we are doing link building for him in each category.

The First Page of Google Links

If we summarize the results for all three web sites for the first page of links from Google, we see that 30% of the links on the first page came from article directories, 20% came from online PR sites, 20% came from social media sites, and 10% came from blogs. These percentages show that each of these actions is effective in building links.

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