Pay Per Click StrategiesBetter Pay-Per-Click Results Start Here – We Guarantee It!

Google uses a number of measures to determine how much a pay per click advertiser pays for one click. One of these ways is called a Quality Score. One way to improve your Quality Score – and pay less per click – is by properly using header tags.

Without spamming, you can use header tags to your advantage in upping your quality score. Following are some tips for doing just that.

Frequency: Some pay per click marketing experts say that you should only use one H1 tag per page (eg, on your landing page).

Sequence: Other Google AdWords pay per click marketers advise not breaking the sequence, the hierarchy of the header tag. For example, don’t use an H1 tag, followed by an H3 tag. Keep the correct sequence of H1, H2, and H3.

Keywords: Your keyword should always be included in your header tags. And again, it shouldn’t be meaningless, keyword stuffed copy. But, copy that actually helps search engines – hence, searchers – to know what a given page is all about.

In order to help with this, use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool to help find related (secondary) keyword phrases. By using this free tool, you will not only uncover many related keywords, but you won’t have to worry about whether or not Google thinks they’re related. This tool ensures that they are in Google’s eyes.

These tips not only help you improve your Google Quality Score; they bring down your pay per click costs as well – all the while driving more targeted prospects to your site.

Search engine optimization is mercurial. Things are constantly changing, which means that internet marketers must change with it in order to get the best returns from their PPC campaigns, for example. Following are two recently announced changes by search engine giant and ad network Google that every pay per click marketer needs to be aware of.

Site Speed Matters: When a user clicks through from you Google AdSense ad, your landing page had better load quickly. Why? Because Google is considering using site speed as a ranking factor. 

While the company has come right out and said emphatically that it plans to do this, the fact that it’s even a part of the conversation means that at some point they probably will. Also, they’ve rolled out tools webmasters can use to speed up their pages. Learn more about this at Google’s Site Speed site.

Personalized Search: This has caused a big hullabaloo lately. What exactly is it? It means that when you conduct a Google search, it returns results that are tailored to what the search engine thinks is most desired by the individual user as opposed to a more general relevancy for the average person who may be searching the web.

To explain by way of example, let’s say you conduct a lot of searches for home décor tips and click on results from HGTV.com often. Accordingly, Google might rank HGTV.com higher on the results pages it returns the next time you do a search for home décor ideas – simply because it sees that you go to this site often.

Why is this important to you as an online marketer? Think about it this way: if web users are getting more personalized results, it can fragment your target market more. This makes it harder for you to reach larger numbers of prospects.

While you can’t change what ad networks like Google do, you can stay abreast of the changes and adapt your SEO and pay per click marketing strategies to continually maximize your return on investment.

If you’re in a highly competitive PPC marketing niche, eg, credit, weight loss, insurance, and have a very small budget, there are going to be some keywords that you are never going to rank for. So, how do you put together a competitive Google AdWords pay per click marketing campaign? Following is one way to do it.

Taking the Long Road to Google AdWords PPC Marketing Success
You’re going to have to niche it to success – and be patient while doing it. To explain by way of example, let’s take credit repair.

If you ran a credit repair agency and wanted to rank high for strong keywords in this niche, good luck unless you have gobs of money. Keywords like credit repair, credit repair services and credit score repair are in the $5 to $10 per click range.

But, there are quite a few phrases in this niche that go for 5 cents per click, ie:
* New Credit Repair (260 monthly searches)
* DIY Repair (260 monthly searches)
* Credit Repair Experts (110 monthly searches)
* Sample Credit Repair (210 monthly searches)
* Good Credit Repair (140 monthly searches)

These keywords account for almost 1,000 searches per month and they cost pennies compared to higher traffic keywords like the ones mentioned above, which bring anywhere from right at 2,000 to over 90,000 searches per phrase, per month.

You may be able to find 20, 30 or 40 phrases or more like the low-cost ones just above. Combine your bid on these with a good organic marketing campaign (eg, writing and distributing SEO articles via free article directories) and over time, you will start to get steady traffic and sales.

Depending on the pricing of your services, you may not need to get hundreds or thousands of clicks to see a noticeable difference in your bottom line.

Just because you’re in a super-competitive niche does not mean you can’t put together a profitable Google AdWords pay per click campaign. It just means you have to be patient and take a different approach. You can learn more AdWords success tips from the experts during the AdWords Advantage Online Summit http://www.AdWordsAdvantage.com coming in March.

Click fraud is, unfortunately, part of advertising online. Major players like Google, MSN and Yahoo! take great pains to help advertisers prevent it. If you’re a pay per click marketer and you suspect click fraud, following are some actions you can take:

Identify the source: There are primarily three culprits when it comes to click fraud. They are listed below.

3 Types of Click Fraud Culprits

Your Competitors: By draining your account as quickly as possible, you are less competition for them. Except in the case of Google, this actually gives you a higher ranking (after all, if you’re getting a lot of clicks, your product must be good/popular, right? Google rewards this). While it may suck for your bank account, in the end it helps you.

Affiliates: Google AdSense affiliates make money every time someone clicks, so some are unscrupulous enough to click (or get someone else to click). 

Traffic Thieves: These are probably the most insidious of the bunch because it’s so hard to identify them. They can be a company that sells traffic to other sites, or an individual who is stealing traffic from you because they sell a similar product, or another type. 

4 Ways to Combat Click Fraud

Track Your Traffic: Knowing where your traffic is coming from is vital to preventing click fraud. You’ll have to provide this to Google anyway if you suspect it, so make it a habit to track it. You can find this out by looking at your web log referrer reports, or by using various tracking tools on the market.

Report Suspicious Activity to Google: Gather all of your evidence, eg, logs of the source of your traffic, normal activity report compared to a suspicious one (comparison click charts), region traffic is coming from, spike dates, etc. Give them everything you think they may need to do a proper, thorough investigation.

Contact the ISP. If the suspected click fraud is coming from an identifiable ISP, contact them to let them know. Do it in writing (email) and by phone.  If this doesn’t work, you can always resort to the following . . .

Retain an Attorney: They will be able to help you, for example, get a court order to release the name attached to the ISP from which the suspected click fraud originated, as well as several other options.

While this may not be cheap, it can literally cost you less if you spend thousands on pay per click marketing.