By Robert Lockard

An excellent blog post on Practical Ecommerce got me thinking about how paid-search campaigns are handled. The blog post is entitled, “Pay-per-click Advertising: Seven Pointers for Smaller Campaigns.”

I was amazed when I read all of the pointers on how people can improve their PPC efforts because basically all of them are easily handled by Submit Solution. I think it’s a great idea to be educated on the best practices of online promotion, so you should definitely read that blog post and take its advice to heart.

After you come up with a plan and thoroughly research your keywords, you can present your ideas to a Submit Solution PPC expert, and he or she will be able to improve upon your ideas and fully implement them for you. Submit Solution offers a number of pay-per-click solutions, including one-on-one support, easily updatable keywords, up-to-date reports and more.

The seven things you should keep in mind when using PPC in your marketing strategies include learning about negative keywords, long-tail keywords and match types. Negative keywords are phrases that include your selected keywords, but attach unfavorable or irrelevant words to them. I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t want to pay for people who click on its ads when they type in words like “Nintendo Wii defective,” or something to that effect. Those people are more likely to be looking for information or venting rather than hoping to make a purchase.

Long-tail keywords are great because a relatively small number of people search for them and so they used to be less expensive to advertise on. But now that the secret is out that Internet marketers want those targeted keywords more than the general ones, they’re becoming more expensive. A long-tail keyword is a search term with more than one or two descriptive words in it. Terms like “Internet marketing” have a high amount of competition to be number one on search engine results pages. Terms like “Internet marketing solution Orem Utah” will have fewer searchers, but they will be much more targeted.

Match types help you get even more targeted traffic to your website by adjusting how precisely you want people’s search terms to match your selected keywords and phrases.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my discussion of PPC campaigns. This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Submit Solution offers PPC solutions.” The photo of the bad advertisement is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Unlisted Sightings.

By Britnee Nguyen

Search engine optimization tends to have a lot of different aspects about it that businesses need to be aware of in order to see results. There are so many things that can be done when optimizing a website that it’s important to let experts in the field work on the SEO for your business.

Google is the search engine that most businesses want to be top ranked, but Google is regularly changing their search results formula which makes it more difficult to stay on top. Internet marketing experts who work with SEO everyday, such as those at Submit Solution, stay up-to-date on these changes.

There are several things that need to be kept up on an updated basis for businesses to succeed on Google. For example, the local results feature on Google helps target certain areas for results. So if your business wants to do more in a local geographical area, Google can get you more traffic from those in that area. You just need to make sure you write some local information when optimizing your website. To boost your local ranking, use local keywords when you’re writing directions on how to find your business with a map included.

You also want to take advantage of recent results. Some of those who use search engines only want to read about the most recent and updated information. This means you should be constantly updating the content on your website or blog to make sure you’re fresh to show up on recent results. Google also offers searchers to look for related results to their original search. This is where variations of your target keywords will benefit you. Your website will be more likely to show up if you have more related keywords on the niche you are in.

Google has been one of the top search engines for many years and businesses have continually found success when they’re ranking high on it. There are many other ways to strategize your SEO to get ranked high on Google, but hopefully the above tips will help you get started.

By Britnee Nguyen

Recently, YouTube announced they are allowing advertisers in Australia to buy search keywords for their videos. I never realized YouTube had the option of Pay-Per-Click ads for videos posted there. Apparently, they’ve been offering this service in the U.S. for a year now. It’s quite a brilliant idea for internet marketing since more people are apt to click on the ad because it’s a video over clicking on an ad that is just has text.

The two major advertisers who use this service are Mitsubishi and Holden who have been doing it in the U.S. Other popular advertisers are automotives, entertainment industry and packaged goods. It’s a clever way to get more hits on videos. How it works is that the advertisers buys popular search keywords that relate to themselves and then their ad for their video pops up when someone types in those keywords. When someone actually clicks on the video ad, then advertisers pay for the click.

With these YouTube pay-per-click ads for videos, it is starting to blur the lines between what is advertisement and what is entertainment. Because of this, I think it’s easier to get more clicks through YouTube, then through a regular search engine. To make it even more effective, if your company actually produces a pretty fun video that can turn viral, plus with pay-per-click ads of it, it would eventually get so many hits that it would probably organically show up in the results and you no longer have to pay for views. It’s quite the clever way to be creative and use YouTube’s paid search to promote it.

So it’s a pretty effective tool to use. The only downside that could happen with it is that a negative video about the company could show up in the organic search results right next to the paid advertising video from the same company. It might deter the message from the paid video. A YouTube spokesperson did say that advertisers can add keywords to their campaign that they don’t want to show up for. So that would probably solve that problem. Overall, it sounds like a great way to get a company out there in the web community.

By Robert Lockard

In the Wall Street Journal article, “Why Email No Longer Rules,” I found a fascinating argument against email and for social-media sites, like Twitter and Facebook. Email is on its way out as the primary means of sending online messages.

For a dozen years or so email was the freshest, easiest way to keep in touch with people over long distances without having to pay big phone bills. Now it’s old hat. Basically, the paradigm of online communication has changed and we’re all going to have to change with the times.

What do you think? Is it a good thing that email is being replaced by instant communications? I think it’s great for ecommerce. With the aid of instant messaging, tweets and wall posts, online marketers can serve their customers much better and faster than ever before.

Response times for online communication have shrunk from hours to minutes, to now just seconds. By responding to our customers’ needs at a rapid pace, we can increase our customer-retention rates and make sure the people we do business with feel valued and respected. We can also quickly identify and assist potential customers and other leads who visit our ecommerce websites.

I don’t think email will go away anytime soon, though. It’s still a great tool for holding somewhat private conversations away from the peering eyes of other Internet users. There is definitely something to be said for privacy and discretion online. We don’t want to reveal confidential information in public forums, but we want to have a positive presence on Twitter and Facebook. It’s a fine line we have to walk.

As search engines keep working harder to add social-media sites to their search results, the value of tweets and Facebook updates could increase. Just make sure your social-media communication points people to your website where people can actually make purchases and build your online rankings.

If you would like help getting a great website design, I recommend you contact Submit Solution’s professionals. They are extremely effective at delivering captivating website designs that help increase your conversion rate of visitors into customers.

This blog entry is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post, “Is email finished?” Keep coming back to the Submit Solution Social Media Blog for more exciting updates like this.

By Britnee Nguyen

Building external links is one of the vital things utah SEO technicians do to get their clients to the top of their search engine listings. These links are important to promote SEO for a site, but it’s also important to look at the internal links – those links that are already located within your website.

Internal links sometimes gets overlooked, but can help your utah online marketing immensely. You really should be taking care of your internal links before working on external ones. There’s times when a site with a better internal structure gets ranked hirer than one with a poor internal structure with a number of external links. The great thing about internal links is that they’re coming from an authoritative site which is your own. Authority is something that external links sometimes lack.

Internal links are used by search engine spiders to see what is on all of your pages. So you’ll want to build the content on your website by using keywords you’re targeting through out it. When you increase the page rank of your internal pages it will overall increase your site’s ranking.

If your website has been on the utah internet marketing for a good amount of time, it tends to get better SEO than others because it has a history of internal links that search engines use. If your website is newer, it will take time for the results to take effect, but it can definitely be ranked higher through internal links if done correctly.

Also, remember that not only should keywords be put into your content, but should be put into file names as well. utah SEO keywords should cover codes, tags, anchors, picture files, folder names, etc. It isn’t just limited to the content of your website.

If you place an image on your website and it’s named “1023940.jpg” then the search engines aren’t going to read it. But, if you named it “onlinebirthdaycards.jpg” for your on-line birthday cards website, then the search engines will be able to pick that up and rank you better.

Internal linking is important to get all of your pages found by search engine spiders. It’s useless to have 40 pages throughout your website if only six of them are being found. Keep internal linking in mind in your SEO efforts and Utah internet marketing techniques.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

Running successful paid search ads is almost a “guess and check” type of process.  It can often seem like ages before you find an ad that works for you!  However, there is one main aspect of internet marketing that is often underplayed in the world of PPC: landing pages.

Your paid search landing page should be carefully crafted to suit your visitors so that each click from your ad counts.  If you, like most companies, run multiple utah paid search PPC ads at once, catered to different key words and phrases, you should create corresponding landing pages for each ad you run. The “one size fits all” method, with all your paid ads running to the same, generic landing page, is a thing of the past!

Here are some of the reasons why you should create separate landing pages for different keywords:

Targeted Marketing: When you’re running more than one PPC ad, it’s likely that they all cater to a different feeling or benefit.  For example, one of your ads can claim to save people money while another can boast of its ease of use or low price social security disability.  All these ads create a different meaning to the visitor who clicks on them.  If they are looking for an easy to use product, you should create a landing page that outlines how easy to use your product is!  Your visitors will not only get the information they are looking for, they will also get a targeted marketing strategy that will prove profitable for your business.

Multi-Faceted Approach: If you were stuck with one generic landing page for every paid search ad you ran, you would only be able to address two or three benefits of your product in the same place.  For example, “Our online marketing product is easy to use, cost effective and will save you money!”  When you cram too many benefits into one page, your marketing starts to sound gimmicky and will be ineffective.  By creating multiple landing pages catering to different facets of your product, you can be more successful, for each specific page will be stronger than one catch-all page.

Keep these things in mind when embarking on any utah internet marketing endeavor you have.  And remember, if your landing page stinks, your paid search efforts will have been in vain, no matter how successful they were!

The photo of the friends smell bad sticker is from Flickr, and is the copyright of evelynishere.

By Robert Lockard

Search-engine giant Google is trying to buck the overall downward trend in Internet advertising sales by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie and by eating a little of TV’s pie, as well.

In my blog entry, “Google debuts ‘stock market’ for display ads,” I talked about Google’s attempt to make its new DoubleClick Ad Exchange successful. At the end I touched on Google’s attempts to grow beyond its core competency of search ads into the world of display ads. I’ll pick up where I left off.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Google Decides to Find Its Creative Side,” Google is trying to translate its ownership of YouTube and DoubleClick into a more dynamic advertising approach. Google is so well-known as the king of search ads that it might be difficult for it to break into Yahoo’s territory of creative display ads.

They’ve already created YouTube ad campaigns for J.C. Penney and Quaker Oats, but they saved their most innovative campaigns for Hewlett-Packard and Volvo. For those two companies, Google helped create YouTube ads and display ads featuring the latest updates (tweets) from Twitter.

Search engines are notoriously slow in catching up to social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can read my insights into this topic in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Google can’t keep up with Twitter.” It’s a promising sign that Google is making this effort to use Twitter in its online-advertising services.

Google’s foray into YouTube might be the key to grabbing some of the TV industry’s advertising sales. In the United States, TV receives more ad revenue than any other medium. Google’s ad-sale growth has fallen from 56 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2008 down to 3 percent in the second quarter of 2009. It’s still growing, which is remarkable since we’re in the middle of a recession, but Google wants to stop the downward trend.

Can Google pull it off? They seem to be fighting a war on three fronts. They’re trying to hold on to search-ad dollars, which have fallen because of the recession, while also jumping into both display ads and TV-like ads. I won’t count them out because they might just have the resources and patience to do it. We’ll keep an eye on what happens.

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Google flexes its creative muscles.” The photo of the cat in the Coca-Cola box is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Greencolander.

By Robert Lockard

In September, Google introduced a new way for its customers to buy and sell online display ads. It’s called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and it allows Internet marketers to find a variety of Web pages to advertise on and quickly make a bid. This speeds up the process for both advertisers and publishers looking for ad revenue.

I heard about this development in a Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Google Unveils Market for Display Ads.”

Google has literally thousands of partner websites scattered across the Web that display its online ads. However, Google has never been very good at display advertising. It bought DoubleClick back in 2007 for $3.1 billion and has been trying to come up with a good way to jump into this part of the paid-search market. This appears to be its big move.

This isn’t the first online-advertising exchange service. Actually, other major search engines, like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have had them for some time, though none of them has been able to make them particularly big or useful, yet. Maybe Google will find a way to make this exchange service popular and profitable.

Google’s move comes with plenty of risks. What if few ad publishers and advertisers sign on to the service? Who would want to participate in a service that no one else is using? Internet marketers are looking for ways to reach the right audience in simpler ways.

Surprisingly, Google is far behind other search engines in the display-ad market. Google is definitely the king of PPC with about a 70-percent share of the industry’s total revenue, but it only received 1.3 percent of all display-ad views. Yahoo is actually the leader in display ads.

Apparently, Internet marketers who want to target a specific audience with simple Internet ads turn to Google. But if they want something more dynamic, appealing to customers’ emotions more than their intellect, they are more likely to turn to Yahoo or TV advertisements.

This is a complete version of the blog post on the eHarbor Blog: “Google tries to expand into new PPC forum.”

The photo of the fiery wok is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of liber.

By Robert Lockard

Google could soon change the rules of keyword Internet marketing with the debut of its new Google Caffeine search engine. Right now, Google is not doing a good job of searching through social-media sites, like Twitter and Facebook. So the company is working on a new version of its popular search engine that will add them to the mix and shake up other sites’ rankings for certain keywords.

The online marketing firm 360i released a study a little while back in a blog entry on Digital Connections, entitled, “6 Things to Expect if Google Decaf Gets a ‘Caffeine’ Boost.” In the post, SEO Group Director Mike Dobbs and SEO Analyst Martha Mukangara noted some pretty surprising findings.

They included 40 retail keywords in their study of the differences between the first three pages of regular Google search results and Google Caffeine search results. The 40 keywords are made up of 10 major brand names (keywords), 10 retail head terms (single keywords), 10 retail torso terms (two-word phrases), and 10 retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases).

They pointed out six ways the new search engine will dramatically affect online marketers’ strategies. For instance, 15 percent of all first-page rankings were different for the 40 keywords used in the study. Amazingly, the single keywords and two-word phrases saw 50 percent of their first-page results change with the new search engine.

The reason for this big change is the fact that Google Caffeine is focusing more on keyword relevance and it’s steering away from blogs and wikis in favor of social media, video, music, photo and other sites previously outside of its search capability.

Since single keywords are so general, they will face more competition from these new sites being allowed to vie for top ranking. Longer phrases, with four or more keywords, will benefit from the new system because they will be drawn from a smaller pool with a focus on how relevant they are to the searcher’s needs.

All of these changes could have serious consequences for ecommerce marketers. At the end of the article, the study’s authors give the following advice to them:

Marketers will need to keep a close eye on their own set of keywords and determine how results change if a switch-over does takes place… [I]f your keywords shift in rank, you will need to refresh your strategy and focus in on any results drop-offs, or take advantage of subsequent wins.

What an interesting topic. Be sure to keep coming back to the Submit Solution SEO Blog for the latest updates on Google and Bing, as well as other major search-engine trends.

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog entry, “Internet marketers brace for Google Caffeine changes.” The photo of the upside-down YouTube page is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of engineroomblog.

By Robert Lockard

In Internet marketing, your website can be your first and best defense against lawsuits or it can be a huge liability. It depends on how strong your disclaimers are and how carefully you check to make sure your statements are all factual and ethical.

I bring this up because I just read an eye-opening article on InfoWeek’s website, entitled “Website disclaimers – yes, they do work.” In that piece, author Guy Burgess describes a recent case in New Zealand where an ecommerce website had given customers the wrong impression about the soundness of some of the companies it advertised.

A customer sued the website owners when he received the short end of the stick on a deal with one of the companies the website advertised. But a judge ruled in favor of the owners because they had included a provision on their website to protect themselves. The judge found the owners to be both negligent in their faulty information and protected by their admission that their site didn’t have all the information customers would want to make a final decision.

We all make mistakes, and it’s unfortunate when others are negatively affected by our errors. If we want strong relationships with our customers, we have to make sure our ecommerce websites are accurate and that our products or services are as good as we say they are.

The InfoWeek article suggests three things every website owner should do:

1. Publish a disclaimer on your website. It can be brief and it should simply suggest customers not just look at your site for credible information on whatever topic is the focus of your business.

2. Be honest. This seems like a no-brainer, but you should try to include the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on your website. Try to make sure you information is as complete as possible and you’re leaving out important details people need to know.

3. Carefully review your website and update it when necessary. It’s hard to catch every mistake, especially as laws change and you introduce new products or services. Make an honest effort and your customers will appreciate your diligence.

This is a complete version of the post on the eHarbor Blog: “Protect yourself with a strong website disclaimer.” The photo of the zombie warning sign is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of rchurch74.