A Good Slapping From Goolge And Then Another One From Me – March 2009
Hello and welcome to the March 2009 issue of the APD Marketing newsletter…the first to be truly, properly Blog based!
Yes, here we are on the new all singing all dancing APD Newsletter Blog and I have to say I am rather proud of it. No, I don’t think the picture is particularly flattering, but it is me!
Just as an aside, the (full) picture was taken on our Mallorcan break in September last year – I was standing on top of a thousand foot cliff with very little behind me at the time, hence the slightly worried look and false smile!
Anyway, on with the fun as this is the first Blog based newsletter I have a real blockbuster for you this month! Loads of great content.
First up, our dear friend Google!
“What are they up to now”? I hear you cry.
It seems our dear friends at Google have had a bit of a hissy fit and have started slapping people around again. I’ve heard stories of existing campaigns that have been running at 5-10 cents per click suddenly being told that Google don’t like their landing pages any more and slapping them up to $10 a click – ouch!
As it happens I’ve had most of my Adwords campaigns shut down for the last month as I’ve been trying to develop a new “free” traffic system and wanted to see what happened if I just relied on that.
So, I don’t have any first hand experience of this, but I will do some research and let you know what I find out.
I’ve also heard that Google is about to flush out the search results. They believe there is too much crap (for want of a better word) at the top of the search results.
The message is that if they don’t consider you totally and utterly relevant, you are gonna get purged! As I understand it from the index all together, not just from the front page!
I heard one Guru describe this as Google throwing all of their toys out of the pram and running off all upset and indignant, telling the entire marketing world it’s their ball and they don’t care if we don’t want to play.
In essence, Google is prepared to turn away millions in advertising revenue for the sake of quality relevance (the quality of course being totally determined by Google and Google alone!)
As far as PPC on Adwords is concerned, this means yet more hoops to jump through to ensure you meet and satisfy Google as to the relevance and quality of your landing page. On the surface it does seem that Google is trying to eradicate the sales landing page.
Personally I don’t think this is the case, but I do think they have set some very stringent guidelines that are quite harsh if they are slapping Internet marketers who have a long and stable PPC history on existing, long running campaigns.
Bearing this in mind, it makes your search engine optimization strategy even more important.
So, this month I am going to give you a basic guide to on page SEO.
Just before I get started on SEO, I want to “de-mark” the difference between free and paid traffic. Yes, you can buy instant traffic with Pay Per Click through Adwords, YSM etc.
However, you need a long-term traffic strategy and that is what Search Engine Optimization brings you. It’s true, PPC traffic is instant, but it that’s it. It sees your ad clicks, looks (if you’re lucky) and goes away again, and in 95% of cases never returns!
Getting your on-page SEO right ensures a steady flow traffic long-term traffic and that’s why it is such an important part to your marketing strategy.
The first thing you need to do is identify the keywords and keyword phrases you want to optimize around. This is vitally important, and you can only optimize a page around one root keyword!
Then you need to build content pages around those pages. Remember, and this is the most vital point – Content is KING, it’s what the Internet is here and Google lives for!
There seems to be this mystique around SEO. People seem to think it is this great mystery that you have to be a rocket scientist to unravel.
What a load of bull! I’ll tell you here and now, it is NOT as difficult as you have been lead to believe!
Once you understand how it’s done! You can have a page “SEO’d” in less than five minutes! I know…you’re sitting there thinking, “Yeah, come on then smarty pants – show us”!
O.K, I will :>)
This is a quick checklist of the main things you should do to optimize you content pages.
1. Your Title Tag should include the buying keyword – easy enough?
2. Use headline tags (H1, H2, H3) these should also include the buying keyword. Make sure you use at least ONE headline tag – always.
3. Your images should have “alt tags” with the description afforded by this tag containing the buying keyword.
4. Now this is important, your first paragraph of each page must include your buying keyword.
5. Each page should be roughly 500 words.
6.You should aim for a keyword density of around 3-5%. That’s 5 times in every hundred words or 25 times in a 500 word article :>) (I’ve got GSCE Maths you know).
7. Throughout the page you should make the keyword (or phrase) a mix of bold, italic and underlined.
So, this is a guide to the basics and some of the easiest and yet most important areas of SEO, it is by no means a definitive guide. To be honest SEO is like a diminishing returns graph. As you get deeper in and apply more and more complicated and advanced techniques, the level of benefit you attain decreases massively.
So, once you are past these fundamentals, the incremental effect is far less.
This guide it is more than enough for your content websites and will allow you, over time, to build decent levels of traffic from the Search Engines – for free!
And, by optimizing your websites in this nature, it will provide a positive knock on effect for your PPC activities, so not only will you benefit from greater levels of free traffic over time…you will also see
1. A better Adwords Quality Score
2. CPC lowering
3. A better CTR
4. Higher ad positions
So, to finish off, say you have completed your research and found 5 buying keywords for your niche. You then need to create five separate landing pages each of which focuses on a different one of your chosen keywords.
Then optimize each page as described above.
Having completed those simple tasks, in time, traffic will start to flow from the search engines! If you do this correctly, over time, you will begin to see more and more traffic from search engines than you do from your PPC efforts!
The end game of this is to try, over time to make your free traffic exceed your paid traffic without spending a penny more! In effect you get double traffic for the same money!
This is simple, easy to implement, good SEO practice at the most basic level. There are many products that go into SEO in far more depth, but, to be honest, for the purposes or Internet marketing, this is more than enough to get loads of traffic flowing to your landing pages.
I’ve even made a video for you to show you how to do these simple techniques, you can view it below.
I have heard it said that this seems like an awful lot of work! However, I have said many times, too many people think they can read a $27 eBook and make millions.
Internet marketing is like any other business; it takes time and effort on your part if you want the success.
As a little added bonus for this first Blog based newsletter, I’ll give you an incite into what it takes.
You see there are two types of people in this world.
The Whingers and the people, who go and do it, take action.
Which category do you fall into?
The Whingers think it’s everyone’s fault but their own.
They whinge, they whine, they complain, they bitch and they moan. They probably do lots of other negative things as well. I’m long gone at the first sign of whinging!
They strut around and act like the world owes them a living.
Everyone is out to scam them.
Internet Marketers who work hard to develop great products should give them everything free! Maybe if they succeed they might hand over some money.
These people have a victim attitude about life. They do NOT take responsibility for their own actions. And, when they do buy a product and don’t have the persistence to see it through and jump ship to the next fad, it’s the fault of the product or person who sold it to them.
It’s never their fault!
In my humble opinion people like this are VICTIMS of themselves! QED!
If this is YOU, you do need to change your thinking NOW if you want to be successful.
I think I said to you once before I did Amway when I was very young. There was a great guy called Bill O’Brien that used to call this sort of attitude “stinking thinking”.
If you suffer, you need to change…if you want success.
On the other hand, there are others who take responsibility for their actions, they are proactive and go out and make things happen.
They are positive, happy and a joy to be with. They say, “If it is to be, it’s up to me”!
They take action and if it goes wrong, get up, dust themselves down and go at it again! They learn from their mistakes and come back stronger for it. They also (and this is very important) realise it is their responsibility.
They don’t blame other people, they realise the outcomes are directly related to the actions they took and there must be a logical reason if things didn’t work out as expected.
In the society in which we live, where most do expect everything presented to them on a silver platter, in this instant gratification society, this type of thinking requires a quantum shift for many people.
It’s everything Napoleon Hill talked about in “Think And Grow Rich”, the principles still hold true today, and if you need to address your thinking, then you can get a free copy courtesy of APD on the Free Download Page.
So, if things don’t go right in your life or business, there is only one person to blame – YOU!
My apologies if that offends, but by now you should know I tell it to you straight!
Of course the flip side to this is…that if your responsible for things going wrong, you can easily put them right!
If you need to lose some weight, you can make the decision to go to the gym, or take up squash or go for a jog!
Hey, I had my third knee operation in as many years four months ago, but I was back on the squash 11 weeks after the op. I was back playing football (soccer) and going to the gym. My body hated it at first, but gradually the fitness is coming back.
If I can do that at 50 and still play in the top 10 of my club’s leagues (with two very dodgy knees), you can too!
If it’s the business, get out and do some more.
Put a new Adwords campaign out, try some variations on the ad content, add some new keywords. Write a new article and publish it at ezinearticles. Put a new affiliate promotion up, build a new landing page, do a product review.
The answers are within you; this is the best advice I can possibly give you. If you want it you can have it.
You can have the big house with a pool, you can have the exotics holidays, the mobile lifestyle, the fast cars…even the yacht.
It’s up to you! As Nike say….”Just Do It”.
Thank you for reading; I hope you have found this newsletter useful. I really want to hear what you think so drop me a line.
As always…to YOUR success.
Cheers now and, enjoy the ride!
Derek
Internet Marketing from APD
If you feel someone else would benefit from this information, please feel free to pass it on!