Yes! That is the beauty of Pay Per Click Advertising. The major PPC advertising venues supply you with a variety of tools to measure your return on investment. The tools vary slightly in name and look across the three major PPC Engines (Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter) but they all offer similar measurements.

Your 1st line of measurement is usually offered in the form of a campaign summary or dashboard that shows you what is going on in your campaigns. These summary pages allow you to see your account status and budget as well as several performance metrics including clicks, impressions, cost per clicks, conversions, monthly spend etc. Basically a quick snapshot of what?s going on.

More detailed reports are also available in the major PPC engines reporting centers. These reports will tell you almost anything you want to know about your campaigns. Want to know how much you spent yesterday at noon? Run a report to find out. Want to compare weekly conversion rates vs. weekend conversion rates. No problem run a report and find out. Want to see which ad has a better click through rate, or better yet which landing page leads to the most conversions? You guessed it, run a report and find out? I could go on listing report scenarios for pages. Instead I will just show you a screenshot from the Google AdWords report center that shows some of the options you have when it comes to reporting.

These are just some ways to measure the success, yes I said success, of your PPC campaigns. With proper optimization and proper monitoring your PPC campaign should be yielding a positive ROI whether it be in sales, signups, leads or any other actionable goal.

Labels: PPC Advertising

Google's Webmaster Tools has provided yet another useful upgrade. Google announced the upgrade to the Anchor Text. This new feature tells you what text is being used in links pointing to your website. Since anchor text is an important part of the SEO pie, this feature shows you what keywords are being emphasized for your website.

This feature was not available on all sites, but has now been rolled out to everyone who has Google Webmaster Tools set up for their website.

Previously Google's Webmaster Tools only provided the most popular single words contained in the links, now you are provided with the full Anchor Text among variations up to 200 phrases. They have also brought back the section showing you the most common individual words contained in your websites anchor text.

I have to give my props to Google for this tool. It's a beauty!!

Labels: Link Building, Organic SEO

Google has been working on making the implementation of Sitemaps easy for everyone. In the process they have created a website www.sitemaps.org, which provides information of how your XML file should be formatted, FAQs, definitions and more. Most importantly to remember, not only does Google use your XML file, Yahoo, MSN and most recently ASK all use your XML file for assistance in crawling your website.

The major announcement came early this week, the solution to offering the search engines an easy way to locate your XML file, using your robots.txt file. Since every website can have a robots.txt file, you can now use it to tell the search engines where your XML file is located.

To do so, add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

If you are using a Sitemap index file, simply use the location of that file. You do not need to list each individual Sitemap contained in your index.

Create your XML file, add a line of code to your robots.txt file and let the engines crawl away!

Labels: Organic SEO

Never underestimate the power of content with the search engines. As many SEO gurus say "Content is King". They aren't kidding. Not only do search engines reward your website when new valuable content is added to your site, the opportunity to use this content for link building has become just as important.

With the rise of Social Media, content has become even more important than before. Links from Social Networking and Bookmarking sites are extremely influential within Google's algorithms and why wouldn't they be? Social Networking and Bookmarking sites are users directly telling Google that they find a page important. It only makes sense that Google and the other search engines would reward this.

However, while writing good content is an effective component to your linking campaign don't neglect high quality directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, GoGuides and JoeAnt. These directories still have a great deal of influence with the top search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Traditional organic linking is still an influential piece of the pie. Quality directories and links from authoritative sites still play an important role with search engine positioning.

By offering content that is non-marketing in nature and offers valuable information to users, you are creating your own organic link campaign. You can drive traffic to your website, increase brand recognition as well as increase sales, all by providing content that is non-marketing. You're marketing by not marketing!

Labels: Link Building, Social Marketing