Money-Code » keywords

SEO Elite Review

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:22:50 +0000

Some of you following along with the blog are aware that I’ve been on a buying spree lately for internet marketing tools. I’m a strong believer of “it takes money to make money”, and I’ve been trying to find ways to maximize my time and efforts, and tools are vital to this. Lately, I’ve been on a big SEO (Search Engine Optimization) kick, and finding ways to drive organic, targeted traffic to my sites.

I recently purchased Blog Comment Demon which is fantastic and Bird Feeder for Twitter followers, but I also needed a tool to help gauge and provide as much information about how my sites ranks with various keywords. This is where SEO Elite comes in. After several recommendations from friends/associates as well as reading some posts on Digital Point, I figured this was the next tool in my tool box I needed.

I’m currently using SEO Elite for two large purposes, while I discover and maximize other features. I’m primarily using SEO Elite to determine how my site ranks with the keywords I have chosen with Google’s keyword tool. The second area I use is to view other sites that compete with me and see how they rank on similar keywords. By doing so, I can potentially find where they’re backlinked.

SEO Elite also has some great tools similar to Blog Comment Demon for finding blogs and other potential linking sites.

Another key feature, but I haven’t worked on this yet, is to be able to submit articles to article directories with a centralized tool. Part of streamlining things is staying organized, and that’s my goal for July is to establish a ‘process’ and work a ‘plan’ for SEO to my sites. By using tools to help organize, centralize and optimize I feel this will help in the big picture of my internet marketing ventures.

I would highly recommend purchasing SEO Elite. It’s a quality product with tons of video and audio tutorials. I’m just scratching the surface and I’m thoroughly impressed with this piece of software by Brad Callen. If you purchase this, and have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to try to help you out.

Optimizing your keywords for better CTR (YSM)

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:35:28 +0000

Today, I wanted to talk about optimizing your keywords for better CTR. This is specifically for YSM, but could be applied to Bing or AdWords. Lately, I’ve been seeing better results in having fewer, more targeted keywords then a ton of random, possibly related keywords.

The reason being that I wanted people interested in the specific item I’m trying to promote. I don’t want to attract ‘readers’ or random surfers. For example if I wanted to sell dog supplies (food, containers, toys, etc), but I was bidding on ‘dog’ as a keyword I would most likely get plenty of impressions but low clicks. My ad would show up if someone was searching for ‘dog trainers’ or ‘dog bites’, etc. What this does is give a lower CTR percentage on my overall campaign. Low CTR % will then raise my keyword costs since my ads are not targeted and performing well.

What I like to do is to start with 50 or so keywords that are fairly specific to what I’m offering. I then let the campaign run for a few days. I then look for keywords that have high impressions but low clicks (poor CTR) and I pause the keywords. Your overall campaign or ad CTR % should go up. Personally, I like to hit around 2% CTR. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but in my experience, that seems good. I’m usually rewarded with higher quality score and lower cost keywords.

I’ve seen it mentioned with AdWords to create a ad for every keyword (using AdWords Editor and other tools to automate the process). And pausing ads with low CTR %. This will keep your keywords bids down overall, since each ad will have a high CTR. I’ve yet to try this, but I’m planning on firing up my AdWords campaigns again for additional testing.

Incoming search terms:

how to pause keywords in ysm

Tracking converting keywords from your PPC campaigns

admin — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:10:44 +0000

I’ve seen various questions about tracking PPC. You can do alot with Google Analytics (see goal tracking) but it’s hard to put all the pieces together to see a clear picture. I personally want to know what PPC network (YSM, MSN or AdWords) is coming to the site, but more importantly what keywords are used, and what keywords convert to sales.

I’ve been rolling out various eBay storefronts and trying new things to separate from the pack, and one of my goals was to get a keyword tracker to feed my SID value in my rover code. This could be adjusted and altered to fit your needs, and is basically just shown how to pass the keyword around in your site, and drop that value in the SID.

The first thing I want to do is use a accessible function called getKeyword(). This function is set up to look in the REQUEST object (POST/GET) and see if there is a variable called ‘x’. This ‘x’ variable will hold our keyword as the user visits our site. We’re also checking YSM keyword string. It’s also important to note that you should have Tracking URLs set to ‘On’ via YSM Control Panel.

function sanitize($requestVar){
$requestVar = urldecode($requestVar);
$retVal = eregi_replace("([\<\>]+)","",$requestVar);
$retVal = strip_tags($retVal);
return $retVal;
}
function getKeyword(){
$keyword = ”;
if(isset($_REQUEST[‘x’]) && strlen(trim($_REQUEST[‘x’])) > 0){
$keyword = sanitize($_REQUEST[‘x’]);
}
// check yahoo
if(isset($_REQUEST[‘OVKEY’]) && strlen(trim($_REQUEST[‘OVKEY’])) > 0){
$keyword = sanitize($_REQUEST[‘OVKEY’]);
}
return urlencode($keyword);
}
?>

Next, I have a navigation file (I’ll exclude it here, since your scenario will differ). Basically, I see if we have a keyword, and if we do I, append it to the navigation URL. If your a BANS users.. this will slightly suck, since you’ll have to dig for the navigation output and add this. Why didn’t they abstract their navigation to file or single function call? Who knows.. but now I’m off topic.

$keyword = getKeyword();
$qString = (strlen(trim($keyword)) > 0 ? ‘?x=’.$keyword : ”);
?>
"/Action-Figures/Star-Wars">Star Wars

Now, this will carry our keyword as the user navigates through the site. Now we need to pass it to our rover code if they click a auction link. I personally like to cloak all of my eBay links, but for this example, I’ll just show the straight rover code.

On your auction page, you can simply add this code

$keyword = getKeyword();
$sid = (strlen(trim($keyword)) > 0 ? $keyword : ”);
?>
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-1751-2978-71/1?AID=5463217&PID=xxxxxxx
&SID==$sid?>mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2FblahblahblahblahblahPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

With SID being passed in rover, we can see what keywords were used to produce sales. Simply click on Reports -> Transaction Reports in CJ. Then click on the day. You’ll see a listing of sales for that day, and your keyword should appear in the SID column. You can then take this data to determine what keywords are converting for you. The keyword that is clicked the most in your PPC stats does not mean that it’s the most converting, so this is a important piece of the PPC puzzle.