Blomped.com - Business Blog

Search Engine Ranking Software

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:47:52 +0000

I have been doing business on the internet since 1996, and have seen search engine software come and go. From the search submission software that submitted sites to "thousands of search engines" and free for all link pages to the software that generated meta tags for your site to help with your rankings, I saw them all, and I used them all.

As of lately I have been using more online tools for SEO like the tools at digitalpoint.com. Their keyword ranking page is a great tool for tracking how your keywords are doing on different search engines. The only drawback is that it is limited to two hundred listings or something like that, which is great for a free service. So I started the search for software that did this and did it at deeper levels.

I went to Google, and did a search for �keyword ranking software�. I fully expected to spend the next two to three hours searching and trying every piece of software imaginable. So, I clicked on the very first result, which lead to the site http://www.advancedwebranking.com/ that had software called Advanced Web Ranking. I looked through the features and I was very impressed with the list I saw. Could it be that a search like this could end in a few short moments? I downloaded the software which had a 30 day trial and installed it. Now came the big test, does this software do everything it claims to do?

So after installing the software I went through all the options and sure enough everything that was advertised on the site was there, and more. I created a project and had it search for my keywords in the three main search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I then input the sites that it should look in these engines for, and set it to search the first 1000 results and away it went. The only drawback the software had was that this type of project would take hours. This is not a real drawback as there is no real way to speed up this type of process. So, I left it overnight to do its job.

Once morning came I was very excited to go see my results and to see if the software was able to find my site under the keywords I had input. Much to my delight, the program had done its job perfectly. I was then able to export the results into fancy PDF reports and share them with everyone in the office. I ran the software again three days later, and found that it tracked the trends of the keywords that I had input.

I have not as yet bought the software because I am still on the 30 day trial, but I am so impressed by it that I had to write an article about it to let others know about it. Being an older internet user I am very skeptical of any software that I install on my computer but I will have to admit the software I found at http://www.advancedwebranking.com/ called Advanced Web Ranking is definitely worth a try if you want to check out your Search Engine Rankings.

Google Adwords Advertising - Part 2

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 14:42:46 +0000

Today we will be discussing how to create ads with good appeal and high click through ratios. This was the most challenging aspect of Google Advertising for us for several reasons. Creating ads that were attractive and got lots of clicks does not mean those clicks will convert into sales, and so we had a very hard time trying to find a balance between high click through ratios and good conversion rates.
When we first started using Adwords to generate traffic and sales on our site, we used ads that simply said exactly what was offered on our site. Example:

Windows Hosting $9.95/mo
250MB web space � 10 email accounts
25MB SQL space � 10GB traffic/mo

This ad did not get very high click through ratios, but those who clicked it had a high rate of converting into customers. One of the main factors we found contributing to this was the lack of the name of the business in the ad. Many people would say that having the name should not matter, but when doing an ad campaign branding can be very important and if the person sees your name in the ad it makes it easier for them to remember you. We then started using ads like the following:

E-Insites Hosting $9.95/mo
Windows Web Hosting 250MB Space
10GB Traffic/mo � 25MB SQL Space

This ad had a higher click through rate along with a stable conversion rate. We were still not satisfied with the click through rate so we decided to get fancy with our ad text to see what happened. And example of this is as follows:

E-Insites Web Hosting
Windows Virtual Hosting Accounts
With ASP, SQL, FrontPage & more

This ad had a much higher click through rate because it mentioned the features offered, and did not mention the price. This caused more people to click through to see what they could get all these features for. However, the conversion rate went way down. The amount of hits went way up, but we felt like the people who were price hunting just clicked the ad to see the price and moved on.

We came to the conclusion that we needed to find a balance between the last two ads. One that generated more traffic but also had a higher conversion rate. It took a lot of time to come up with ads that did both considering the amount of characters that could be used was very limited. We came up with the following ad:

E-Insites Hosting $9.95/m
Windows Web Hosting 250MB Space
Includes ASP, SQL and 99.9% Uptime

We also found that when we targeted ads to certain regions and countries we could then change the ads to be more descriptive and still have good click through and conversion rates. We ran the following ad in the US only and it did very well:

E-Insites Hosting 9.95/m
Get Web Hosting Service Online
Many Plans & 99.9% Network Uptime

Not all businesses are the same, but in our industry getting the right type of ads with your Adwords campaigns can have a huge impact on your Return On Investment.

The Old Man and the "E" More Thoughts

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 14:16:24 +0000

To the younger generation:

I just wonder what you in the younger generation will look back and marvel at when you are my age. I'm 56 years old. The spectrum of technical advancement that spans this life of mine is really quite extraordinary. Since the theme here is business related let me give you an example. The telephone is an intragal part of business and has been in my life time. As a child I remember a few "old style" phones. They hung on the wall and had a wooden case, a crank for ringing the operator, a mouthpiece attached to the phone and a receiver on a cord you put to your ear. Our phone however was "modern" it had the mouthpiece and receiver in the handset. It did not however have a dial. You had to pick up the handset, wait for the operator and tell her whom you wished to call. The line was a party line of course with 3 to 5 other families sharing it with us. And yes it was not uncommon to have 1,2 or maybe 3 others on the line listen in when our ring combination sounded. This was called "rubbering" and was common practice although Mom never would allow us to do it, much to my dismay. Having a private line wasn't even an option on our road and besides it would have cost a lot more to have one.

Now contrast that with the latest cell phone. All have private lines. They are a hand held voice recorder, text massager, video camera, alarm clock, calculator, phone directory, tunes player and voice mail recorder aside from being a compact phone that will fit in the front pocket of a shirt. It truly is amazing when I think about it. Keep in mind the closest thing to mobile communication I had as a kid was a walkie talkie that wouldn't work from a distance over about 60 feet.

So what has all this got to do with the web hosting business? Well maybe nothing directly but generally maybe a lot. The business environment is now in the throws of a metamorphosis as extreme as anytime in history. Long term this transition to the "E" template for commerce is going to turn traditional business methods inside out. The telephone example is just a small picture of what is permeating business practices right down to the essence. Some are being hit with all this change later in life and it does take big time adaptation.

Web hosting is playing and will play a huge part in this business "E " evolution. By definition the web hosting industry is in the midst of much of the change occurring. The danger is forgetting that not all businesses and customers will be. We must remain relatable.

We must not forget who pays the bills in any hosting company, the customer and we better treat them right. Many hosting customers are from my generation. They aren't techies or code monkeys they don't have to be. That is why they pay hosting fees. It is the responsibility of those in the hosting industry to patiently guide them and fill their needs. Remember they have come along way technically from where they started.

You of the younger generation might have to show those of us who are older how to use text messaging on our cell phone, but if you had to figure out how to call someone else on the same party line and the phone had no dial you might have to ask us. So don't act too superior, both get the same end result, it's just that that was then and this is now.

Google Adwords Advertising

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:09:57 +0000

Over the last few years we have successfully used Google Adwords to advertise our site and services. Though we have had some success it took a lot of trial and error to get a good strategy for getting targeted visitors to our site using Adwords. In this series of articles I will shed some light on how we were able to get good results from our Google Adwords Campaigns.

Targeting Your Ads By Countries -

Our first edition will deal with what countries we should target with our ads and whether to use the search network, content network or both. In the past we allowed our Adwords to run in any country. This left us open to a lot more fraudulent orders. We then compiled a list of IP addresses in our database of orders that were fraudulent. We took these IP addresses and created reports that compared fraud orders to good orders by country. Any country that had a high ratio of fraud orders we removed from the list of countries that our ads were showing in. Now this might not work for everyone depending on what country you are in, and it also cut down on the amount of orders we got, but, in the long run it saved us money by eliminating the fees for charge backs from our merchant company.

Once we had eliminated the countries that had high fraud ratios, we then moved on to eliminating the countries with low conversion rates. Before we move on we must point out that these strategies are not for everyone, as we had large budgets and were able to run the campaigns that were not having great ROI while we tried to increase the ROI. We ran the campaigns for at least 2 weeks and observed our web stats software to see the trends in conversions by country. We then used this data to narrow the countries we allowed that ads to show in to those who had high ratios of signups vs clicks. Once again this is a judgment call on whether you want a broader branding campaign not based solely on ROI or a campaign that is more targeted to getting high returns.

Content Sites Vs Google Search -

Our next step was to decide whether to have the ads on the Google search network or on the content network or both. We allowed the ads to run on both for a while and watched our stats once again. We found that the visitors from the Google search network were converting to orders at a much higher rate than those of the content network. However, we found that clicks on the content network were a lot cheaper than those of the search network and we were getting a lot more visitors from the content network. In the end after running the numbers even though the Google search network ads were a lot more expensive, the conversion rates made them have a higher ROI. We decided the go with the search network ads.

We are not sure why the conversion rates are higher on the search network, but one can speculate that the fact the ads on the content network are on sites trying to make money from those ads might allow for more fraudulent clicks than those on the search network where there is nothing to gain by clicking on the ads other than wasting the money of the advertiser.

Tomorrow we will discuss how to make ads that get high click through rates.