Article Surfing Archive

1. Why paying to get your web site automatically submitted to ten zillion search engines doesn't pay off.

The key search engines prefer you to submit manually in order to get the best results. In fact some view automatic submissions as spam, persistent submitting may result in more harm than good for your site.

Search engines get their listings by either surfing (spidering) the web like you and I, or from the 2 key directories Dmoz and Yahoo. To my knowledge you cannot automatically submit to these directories, nor would you want to as they are manually updated.

If you still insist on going the automatic submission route there are lots of free submission sites out there - just do a search for "Free search engine submission". I just entered that phrase for an exact match on Google and got 268,000 results!

2. Ignoring the importance of "Negative Keywords" in PPC campaigns.

Why? First let me explain what is a negative keyword in this context. When you create a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign through the likes of Google or Overture you want your ad shown when people search for certain keywords. These keywords are probably not that different from the contents of your meta tags. A negative keyword is a word or phrase that you do not want to appear along with your keyword. For instance an internet marketing company might choose "Web Promotion" as a keyword. Their ad will now appear whenever someone searches for those two words.

Consider this company may not want to do web marketing for a particular line of business. The web company may want to add "Free" as negative words. By adding the negative keyword, when a User does a search for "Free Web Promotion" the company's ad will not be displayed. This saves a potential wasted click by the User and stops the company wasting money on a useless Sales Lead.

So just as you may have hundreds of Keywords in a campaign, you could have 10-100 Negative Keywords, depending on your target audience. But that just goes back to the point above - Marketing Plan!

3. Running a PPC campaign and don't check your own web site logs.

Why? PPC sites give you lots of stats telling you how many Users saw your ad, whether they clicked on it, what keywords were most successful etc. But a PPC site's idea of success is a User clicking to your site and making them money. Your idea of success is the User staying a while on your site, and hopefully you making a Sale.

You need to follow Users coming to your site through these campaigns and watch what they do next. By tracking the referred url, it will tell you what PPC campaign and keyword they used. This can be done easily enough by adjusting the urls within the PPC campaign itself. But now you need to track their stay on your site. Did they actually look at more than just that one page they landed on, how long did they hang around for, etc?

You can buy software to do this, but you can also do a rudimentary job of this yourself looking at your web stats. It depends on what type of traffic volume your site gets and what type of stats you get about your web site. I have to recommend some freeware software that does a great online tracking job http://www.statcounter.com. For larger operations , you can upgrade to a more detailed analysis.

PPC campaigns have 2 parts. a) Listing your ad on search engines and b) Listing the ad on "Partner Sites". Usually you can turn the latter off if you want, but not always. The Partner Sites' listings are better known as those little boxes you see on the side of web sites saying something like "Ads by Google" at the bottom. I'm not picking on Google, but they are the most obvious.

Often the volume of click thrus can be much greater from Partner Sites, but the longevity of their visit at your site can be very short. It depends on your keywords and which PPC company you choose. We actually dropped using one PPC company due to the ineffectiveness of their Partner Sites' listings.