Google Trends

Google Trends

Google recently started adding ‘Hot Trends’ to the search results for the 100 top rising search terms on the web, this feature is only around in the Japan and the US and show as a line graph at the very bottom of the first page of search results.

PPC Campaign Management

PPC Campaign Management

PPC or Pay Per Click Campaigns refer to Advertising on services such as Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Sponsired Search. These services especially Google’s Adwords program are extremely effective at getting leads to your website.

Online advertising has recently overtaken television advertising for the first time and this goes to prove that PPC cannot be ignored.

PPC advertising has a radically different charging structure to other types of advertising. With PPC advertising you Pay Per Click as the name suggests. The price you pay for each leads depends on a number of important factors:

• The quality of your advert.
• The quality of your landing page.
• Your Click Through Rate (how many people that see your ad click on it).
• The time you have been running your campaign.
• The position you would like you advert to appear.

When you get all of these factors working together you can be sure that your campaign is providing you with the most cost effectived PPC traffic possible.

The other thing worth doing with every PPC Campaign is setting up full end to end tracking. All AliveWalls PPC Management Campaigns offer our clients full tracking so they can see where every penny is going and what outcome this traffic is having on the business.

It is always worth making your campaigns as specific as possible. When we look at PPC Campaigns people often choose very broad keywords. With broad keywords you need to be very carefull what type of leads this is bringing your business. For example if your company offers Football Boots then it can be tempting to use the keywords Football but firstly think how many people are targetting the term Football and what this term means. Football would be a very competitive (and very expensive) keyword to target and you can be sure that only a very small portion of the traffic is actually looking for Boots. So why not just go for Football Boots?

With all of these factors contributing to the price you pay for each lead you get the importance of getting your PPC Campaigns right cannot be higher. AliveWalls have been optimising and managing Pay Per Click Campaigns for many years and we pride ourselves on being able to drastically reduce thecost you pay per click. This means that you can either dramatically reduce your budget or increase the number of leads you get without paying more.

With every PPC Management Campaign we always sit down with the client and work out what they wish to achieve, not just for the PPC campaign but as a business. This is the only way that we can analyse what keywords and strategies are best for your PPC Management Campaign. It is quite often very surprising how many campaigns are setup that only require a small amount of ‘tweaking’ to make them 10 times more efficient.

We have worked with many clients, some small, others large companies and have successfully saved these organisations thousands of pounds per year (sometimes thousands of pounds per month).

More Pay Per Click Information?

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Google Forum Search Results

Google Forum Search Results

We always like to keep track of the latest enhancements and changes to the search engines algorithms here at AliveWalls.com. We have recently seen a change to the way that Google handles results from Forums.

Google have realised that when you are searching for something quite complex or technical then forum posts are the best response to your answer. Anyone who has searched for that really hard to find piece of advice knows that searching through forums is a pain.

So what is the solution?

Google now highlights results that come from Forums as you can see in the image above. The third result down shows a forum with a few relevant results for my search string. This should save a lot of hassle.

10 Steps to Article Domination

10 Steps to Article Marketing Domination

Submitting articles to third party sites in order to promote your website or build back links is one of the oldest methods of interest marketing. It has fallen from favour in most internet marketing circles in favour of press releases. This is largely due to the abuse of this method of internet marketing by internet spammers

However, done properly it can still deliver highly effective results. Here is how and how not to do it:

1. Write Useful Content

Submitting your article to an article directory will get you 1 link from that directory but the aim is to write something sufficiently interesting that bloggers will pick up on and want to republish extracts from on their site. If they do this in a gentlemanly manner they will acknowledge the source thereby both helping you build your brand and gain you a further back link.

2. Duplicate Content Favours No One

Much article spam involves writing 1 article and then using an article distribution service to submit the same article to many separate article directories. Yes, this will get you a whole load of back links as most of the low quality directories will publish your duplicate article but the search engines can detect that the links originate from mass distributed articles and from our experience this can actually hinder your search engine progress. One article to one article directory. A simple rule to follow.

3. Place your Back Link Appropriately

Since the aim is usually to build back links as well as promote your brand make sure that you include a link back to your site in the Author profile of the article. Some article directories permit a limited number of links in the body of the content. Where this is allowed always do it as unfortunately half the people publishing extracts from your article won’t bother to quote its source.

4. Choose Your Directories Carefully

When engaging in article marketing you should choose a select number of article directories to submit to. In terms of seo you want to make sure that you maintain a balanced link profile and so do not want a disproportionate amount of article directory links in the mix. We favour submitting articles for an individual site to no more than 20 article directories. Our favourite 5 are:

ezinearticles.com
www.goarticles.com
www.articledashboard.com
www.articlealley.com
www.buzzle.com
www.articlegold.com

5. Set up A Google Alert

To make the most of your efforts you need to track who is republishing your article. If they don’t credit it to you then don’t be afraid to contact them and point out that as they have republished your article they should credit you as the original source. You will find most people will then add a link back to your site. There are two ways to track your article. Either set up a Google Alert or purchase credits at CopyScape . Either service will enable you to input your original text and track who has reproduced it.

6. Don’t Use Spinning Software

A common shortcut is to use spinning software to rewrite an article multiple times. Don’t do it. Your article will in all likelihood still get accepted into the article directory but no one is going to feel the desire to quote from or republish what is clearly spam as it won’t add any value to their site.

7. Don’t Put Your Article on Your Own Site

This may sound odd at first. After all if you have gone to the effort of writing good quality material to submit to an article directory then why wouldn’t you want to put it on your own site? By doing so you run a serious duplicate content issue. Many of the article directories are indexed by the search engines multiple times each day. Your own site may only be getting indexed once a week. If they pick the content up first on the article directory then chances are they will see your site as a republished version of other people’s content. That won’t count in your site’s favour.

8. Good Grammar Does Count

Before you submit your article take time to check your spelling and your grammar. It may surprise you but good grammar and spelling does still count. Remember the aim is to maximise the chances of third parties picking the article up and republishing it. If the website is of the sort of quality you want picking up your article bear in mind that they probably do care about grammar and spelling.

9. Become a Guest Writer

Many websites will encourage people to submit guest articles for publication on their site. These sites will often be of good quality and the perfect place to have an article. You can find such sites by using a search engine and the appropriate search queries. Try searching using search queries like the ones below (replace the keyword with whatever is relevant to your site’s niche):
• Golf clothing “looking for writers”
• Golf clothing “submit an article”
• Golf clothing “contribute content”
• Golf clothing “contribute to our website”
• Golf clothing “contribute an article”

10. Boost the Link Juice

Once you have submitted articles to the main article directories a good tactic is to then build some links in to the page where you article is. The article directories are themselves very strong websites but the link back to your site is only of minimal value because it is unlikely to have any links pointing in to it (hence why you need third parties to pick up and publish the article too). So boost the strength of the link by building some readily available links to the article page. A good way to do this without spending money is to set up pages of social bookmark sites such as Wet Pain or Squidoo and then link from those pages to your articles.
Following the above do’s and don’ts will take what may seem a “has been” way of internet marketing and super charge it!

10 WordPress Resources

Top Ten Sites for WordPress Site Owners

Here’s a list of the top 10 sites we use when creating WordPress sites and blogs. If you use WordPress make sure you check them out…

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