The Swayne Company

Many websites include a section or two with the “Ads by Google” above it or below it. These are ads displayed via Google’s AdSense. When you do a search on Google and see ads in the search results pages, they are generally AdSense ads.

AdSense - The Yin:

Google’s AdSense is programming that “senses” the content of a page or search. It finds keywords on a web page or in a search phrase to determine the subject of the content. It does this by either “reading” the page, or taking a look at the search term that was typed into Google Search. It can “Sense” which ads in the system are relevant to the content or search and display them - thus: “AdSense.”

Before ads on a page are displayed, AdSense searches its database of advertisers and finds ads that are associated with keywords on the page or in the search. Now AdSense needs to decide which of the thousands of ads vying for position are actually displayed. To make this decision, AsSense looks at the advertiser’s bids for the relevant keywords. The advertisers that have a combination of the highest bid, keyword relevance and best click through get displayed first.

Google tracks clicks on ads and advertisers pay Google the bid price for each click. When the AdSense ad is on someone’s web page, Google pays the website owner a portion of the payment for each click. The term “monetizing” your site refers to taking your existing site and placing ads like AdSense on it to make money (or finding other way to make money with websites). If you get 10,000 visitors and 10% of them click an ad that pays you, theoretically, $0.75 per click, you just made $750! Not bad for just copying some AdSense code (which Google provides) into your popular website’s HTML (if your site is not popular, learn about SEO - Search Engine Optimization - from sites like AcmeWebResources).

AdWords - The Yang:

The other side to AdSense is AdWords. AdSense ads have lists of relevant keywords associated with them. Each keyword is bid on by the advertisers for placement in the results pages and on web sites around the world. The words that will prompt a display of an advertiser’s ad are bid on by the advertiser. When an ad matches the words on a page, the ads are displayed; thus: AdWords. AdWords is the system in Google that is used to place ads that display in AdSense.

You can enroll in AdWords to pay for AdSense ads to drive traffic to your site. The first step is to sign up with Google. The next step is to associate keywords to associate with your site.

The idea is to drive traffic to your site through the use of relevant ads. The more relevant the ad to your content, the more targeted your traffic will be. Compose your articles around your list of keywords. Next, write an ad based on the keywords and assign keywords to the ad. You will bid on the keywords at the time you associate keywords with the ad. If one of your keywords is searched for or relevant to a site, and you have a good bid and relevant ad, your AdWord ad will be displayed. Only when someone clicks your ad are you charged by Google.

The more popular keywords are wanted by many competitors, so the prices per click can get pretty high. It is not uncommon for a click to cost $5 or even $10. If you have 10,000 ad clicks, after you account for your conversion rate (the rate that you convert visitors into buyers) you better be sure you are making more than the ad click costs! But it should never break your bank because you can set the bid limits and the monthly budget.

What if you can’t afford $5.00 per click? Since the more popular keywords are so expensive, it is best to bid on less popular keywords because the cost per click is lower. Google presently has a minimum bid of $0.05 per click. If you can get those, you can reduce your advertising budget.

A popular site can make a lot of money, however, a lot of money and time can be wasted. To avoid waste, you have to learn as much as possible and get the right tools to do the research.

1. Increase awareness of your products or services.
2. Access to an International market.
3. Most cost-effective way to promote your business.
4. Always accessible (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) increasing your business potential.
5. Advertising is cheaper on the web and more targeted.
6. No delays or costs of printing as you can update your site instantly.
7. No post costs.
8. Reduced distribution costs.
9. Customers maybe able to purchase your products at any time through your web-shop.
10. Reduces your costs, so you can invest in web-design or web-promotion.
11. You can add enhancements e.g. A messenger client - adding extra value to your business.
12. Create newsletters, presentations and flyers, making them available for download or e-mail them to your customers, reducing (even get rid of) paper, ink and postage costs. You are able to target particular products to your customers.
13. The Web is the digital library of the future. Some people say - If you have not got a web-site now or in the near future, not only are you missing out, you are adding your business to the list of “the forgotten”.
14. Flexibility to update your website, without the need to re-print catalogues or publicity - simply add or delete pages as and when you are ready.
15. Unique URL (Web and e-mail address), e.g. www.SwayneCompany.com - Access to e-mail account(s) e.g. info@yourdomain.com
16. Ability to be contacted via e-mail, or a messenger service.
17. E-Mail is cheaper than post, making it more cost-effective.
18. You could include a searchable database of your products - so customers can view and search all of your products, view pictures of them, before they purchase from you.
19. Customers can print out, or save information and links for future use.
20. Up to the second information
21. Create targeted mailing lists, enabling you to send one e-mail to many different customers.
22. All of these methods will cut business costs enabling you to spend more time on increasing your market share and profit.

While there are many reasons to blog, there are two primary uses that are becoming more widespread with blogging: To game Google Adsense, and to also game the search engines for better rankings. 

Since Blogs are known to the search engines as daily snippets of information that are updated on a frequent basis, they get a lot of preference in the search results. 

So from this, how do you optimize your blog? 

Depending on the service you utilize, there are still some basics that you can apply. The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger. If you are looking for an advantage with SEO, you should use Blogger since they are owned by Google, and you’ll be indexed quicker. 

Blogs aren’t all that much different than a site. The power of a blog is from the frequency of the posting. If the search engines see a pattern of 3 postings per day, they will be very active on spidering that site. Depending on the topic of the blog, you may be able to boost your blog in the rankings if it’s related to a hot topic on the Internet. 

Now, to the actual optimization. 

Since blogs are typically a few pages long, you only need to establish a few rules that will be applied sitewide: 

• Use an interesting title - Also known as linkbaiting - your title should captivate the user to read more
• Try to use your blog keywords in the title - while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant
• Use the H1 tags - All blog editors allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags
• Link to other blogs - Find other related blogs that your readers might find interesting, and ask for a link in return
• Don’t forget about your archives - You may post a topic that isn’t hot at the moment, but comes up later - make sure your readers can find that posting

As stated above, the key to a successful blog is frequent postings. You don’t need to write up an article everytime, two paragraphs and maybe some resource links is what a typical posting should be comprised of. 

-To your online success! 

Dustin Swayne

www.SwayneCompany.com

Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it’s not, but if it’s related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.

Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.

2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.

Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be

3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine’s will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).

4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.

5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.

To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine… say Google… and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.

You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail’s from people requesting links because they don’t see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.

Important note: When looking for link partners don’t just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn’t look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.

So if Google one day decided to link to a website that was just created and this website has a page rank of 0 and has a domain that goes something like this: mywebsite.geocities.com it’s page rank wouldn’t increase even though Google’s page rank is 10, it’s rank would still be zero because it would only have that one back link.