SEO For Bing

It’s by no means an especially closely guarded secret that you can buy your website a good listing in the Google search results for just about any keyword you want.

If nobody finds out about it having a fancy CPA website design isn’t going to do you much good. There are a lot of great ways to publicize your site, and one of the fastest is advertising using Google Adwords.

You have no doubt seen the sponsored listings on Google search results pages. They appear on the right side of the search results page, and often up to the first three listings on the left side. These websites are using “pay-per-click” (or “PPC”) advertisements through Google’s Adwords advertising platform. An ad incurs an impressions when Google displays the ad on the search results page. When you click a sponsored listing you are taken to the advertisers website and that advertiser will incur a charge from Google. In other words, that advertiser pays Google per each click their ad receives.

The final cost of the click that is ultimately payed to Google, is impacted by the landing page quality score. Quality score is determined by a lot of factors, including the relevance of the content on the landing page to the search term, as well as the Click Through Rate, or “CTR”.

Click through rate is the rate of clicks to impressions. If your ad is displayed 100 times, and receives 10 clicks, then your CTR is 10%. If you have a higher CTR then Google will believe your ad is more relevant for the search phrase being searched on. This will improve the keyword’s quality score

The higher your landing page quality score, the lower you will pay per click. Adwords is essentially an auction. You bid on keywords. In very simple terms, the more you bid, the higher your website’s ad will be displayed.

Now there are a number of valuations and specific calculations Google makes to specify where your ad will be placed. These calculations happen in real time when a search is performed. We’ll take a closer look at the specifics of these calculations in a future article. For now, it is just important to be aware of that what you bid, is not what you will pay for a click. If you bid $2.00 for a click, and your quality score is 5, you will pay more for a click then if your quality score is 7, and you will never pay more then your bid, or $2.00, for a click.

Remember Google’s 1st priority is to showcase relevant search results, even for the paid results. They could just give the first spot to the highest bidder, but that would only ensure the website willing to spend the most money would be listed first. The most relevant search result however may not be the listing with the highest bid.

A great example of this is your company name. Let’s say you are Adidas, and you want to bid on the keyword “Nike”. The most relevant search result for the keyword “Nike”, is obviously the Nike website. Google is going to give Nike a higher quality score for that keyword, in effect rewarding them for their relevancy for that keyword.

Before we look at tips to improving your quality score, it’s important to also understand match types. There are three match types you can and should bid on for each keyword. The three match types are broad, phrase, and exact.

Exact Match: Exact match is the best keyword to bid on. An exact match means the search phrase being searched on is an exact match for the keyword for which you are bidding. For example if you are bidding on exact match for “Accounting Firms”,  your website’s ad will be displayed only when someone searches for “Accounting Firms”.

Phrase Match: Phrase match means your keyword is a phrase within the search string. For example, if you bid on a phrase match of “Accounting Firms”,  you ad will be displayed when someone searches on things like “small accounting firms”, or “accounting firms and CPAs”.

Broad Match: Broad match essentially let’s the search engine decide if the search phrase is a match for your broad match keyword or not. It is essential that you bid on broad match keywords, but it can also be dangerous. It’s important because a broad match for “accounting firms” might be triggered when someone searches for “accounting services”. It also can be triggered when someone misspells a word, such as “acounting firms”. The danger is that Google may decide that “Accounting Supplies” is a close enough match to “Accounting Services”, and trigger your broad match keyword. This is why Google allows advertisers to declare “negative keywords”. We’ll talk more about negative keywords in a moment.

Now that you have an understanding about your website’s quality score and keyword match types, here are some tips on how you can improve your quality score and click through rates.

Ad Copy

Your ad copy should reflect the search phrase, or keyword you are bidding on. The person doing the search will be more apt to click an ad that includes their search string. For example, if you bid on “CPA Services”, you want the headline of your ad to be something like “Quality CPA Services”. If your ad title says “Jim’s Accounting Firm”, the person doing the search then has to stop and think… are they going to find what they are looking for if they click you ad. Their decision is often made within a split second, so you don’t want the prospect to have to stop and think. Give them exactly what they want. If that means writing 25 different ad titles for 25 different keywords, so be it. Your work will pay off in the end.

Landing Page

The page on your site that the searcher is taken to when they click your ad is called the landing page. Frequently this should not be the homepage of your website. If someone searches for “Strategic Business Planning”, they should be taken directly to the page on your website that explains your business planning services rather than a generic accounting related homepage. If the ad goes to your homepage, and they have to search through a big pile of CPA related content just to find what they are looking for, they’ll probably just click the back button and go to the next advertiser.

If your website doesn’t have a suitable landing page for the keyword, add one. It really is that important.

Just like the ad copy, you want to remove as much of the decision making out the process as possible. Make it as uncomplicated as possible for the searcher to find what it is they are looking for. Google will reward your quality score for having a landing page that is specific to the keyword, because it improves the search experience for people who find you through their search engine.

Negative Keywords

Defining the keywords you don’t want to trigger your ads is just as important as knowing what keywords you do want to bid on. This is very valuable because of phrase and broad matching. If you bid on the broad match of “accounting services”, you may not want your ad displayed if someone searches for “accounting supplies”, so you would want to add “supplies” as a negative keyword.

When a search phrase has one of your negative keywords, Google will not display your ad.

Location Targeting

I’ve saved the best for last. Location targeting is extremely important, especially for firms that provide a service such as accounting or CPA services. If you provide CPA services you will want to be able to meet with your client, and more importantly the client is very likely looking for a accountant close to home. Having propsects more then 100 miles away clicking on yoru ad is going to become a big waste of money.

There are two ways to target a location. The first is to target your ads to only be displayed within a certain radius, such as 10 to 20 miles from your business location. You can bid on more general keywords, like “accounting firm”, within a very specific location.

The second way to target location is with very specific keywords in a more general area. For example, you might display your ads to anyone in Florida, or even the country, if they type in the specific keyword “Miami CPA” or “Tampa Accounting”.

Keep these basic principles in mind while you’re setting up your websites with Adwords campaigns and you’ll find the learning curve a lot easier and your initial results will be a lot more profitable!

Getting back links with your key words is essential to page ranking. However, not many sites want to give out complimentary links to you when they know they could get something in return for them. You’ll find you can get other web masters to link to you without an exhange of money, but you will need to do something unique. I wrote this page to help give you some inventive ways to find more free links for your web site.

The first step to getting free links is simply by creating fun, interesting, and useful content. People will link to useful pages and will tell their friends to visit them. Creating lots of unique web pages may just get you all the free links you need to rank well.

Another way to get free links is to offer other web masters content. This can be done through the traditional way of submitting to article directories, but it can also be done in another powerful way. Approach a web master through email and ask them if you can write content for them in exchange for a one way link. Wouldn’t you love to have another web master write free unique content for your site? One way to super charge this method is to write articles to the major article directories and search for web site owners that have re published them. These site owners are a warm market for approaching to write content for because they have already shown that they find your content useful and enjoy having it on their web site.

Running contests is a fantastic way to generate traffic. While this method isn’t exactly free, because you will have to give something to the contest winner, it does come at a very low cost. You’ll want to run a contest that involves people ultimately linking to or promoting your website. For instance, many contextual link companies like to make contests where they have their current users create videos about how fantastic their program is. Many videos are created and many links are sent back to the company, but only one or two prizes are awarded. Imagine getting a few thousand links for the price of a laptop case or some other prize.

Making a free report, ebook, or providing free knowledge on how to complete a certain task is a sure fire way to get people to link to your site . You could even insert back links into your ebook so that every time your ebook was given away you would expand your back links to even more people.

These contests, free reports, and content creation ideas can be done by yourself or with the help of a good seo package from a professional company. Doing all the work yourself can take an inordinate amount of time which will lose you visitors and rankings while you wait. However, doing it yourself may end up being cheaper upfront because you will not have to pay a company to do it. You’ll find that whether you outsource or do the work yourself, there will be down sides, so make sure you know what you want before proceeding.

Built a new website recently? In that case, one of the crucial first steps is getting it indexed by Google and other search engines as soon as possible. If your website has not yet been picked up by search engines, you’re obviously missing out on lots of juicy traffic. This post outlines a quick and simple method for ensuring that every new site you create gets indexed and listed very quickly.

How Not to Do It

First, let’s take a quick look at what not to do, in order to get your site listed. Every search engine has some option for manual site submission. There’s usually a link hidden away somewhere that reads something like “Register your site with Google/Yahoo/whatever”. This option lets you enter your website’s address and basically politely ask the search provider to come by and have a look at it.

There are even services that offer to submit your site to search engines for you.

Doing either of these things, manually submitting the site or having some software or service provider submitting it, is a complete waste of time. After manual submission, it can take days or even weeks before your website actually gets indexed and what’s the point in having your site submitted to hundreds of search engines no one uses?

Here’s What to Do Instead

Ok, enough ranting, here’s what you should do instead, to get your site listed within a few hours: Place backlinks to your site on highly popular sites.

Why do you want to do this? The more popular and frequently updated a site is, the more often it gets visited by search engine spiders. Google sends it’s “bot” to those sites every few hours or even more frequently to make sure they have all the new content listed in their search results. Now, if a link to your website appears on such a highly popular site, the Google bot will see that link, follow it and find your site. And since it was linked to from an important website, your website will get indexed soon thereafter.

Ok, great, but how do you do this?

Forum Sig-Lines
Register with a forum (or use one you’re all registered with), write some posts and add a link to your site in the sig-line. Make relevant and interesting posts! Don’t spam!

Social Bookmarking
Bookmark your site on delicious, mixx, folkd or any of the other few hundred bookmarking sites out there. The links on bookmarking sites get posted instantly and search engine bots are usually not far away.

Submit Some Articles
Write an article and submit it to an article directory.Every article directory let’s you place a few links in your “resource box” at the end of the article. Submit the article to ezinearticles, articlesbase or goarticles and it’s sure to get picked up by the search engines quickly.

If you do all of the above, your site will probably get indexed in a matter of hours. Though I also want to caution against abuse of this kind of strategy. Don’t create a spammy sales-site and submit each and every page to Digg. Don’t write a crappy, “empty” article and submit it to article directories. Don’t annoy people on the forums by posting irrelevant comments and having an obnoxious collection of links in your signature.

If you try and go the way of the spam, you’ll only piss people off and probably get a few accounts banned along the way as well. All in all, not really worth it.
In other words, while you are working for the search engine’s attention, don’t forget the human visitors that might get involved..

Related material: Click here to read my Best Spinner review.  —  Article Spinning Explained (Video)