You can have the best looking web site in the world promoting a fantastic product, but if your potential customers don’t know about it, you won’t get any traffic or sales. This is the single biggest problem facing all internet marketers. This is especially so for newbies who frequently get discouraged and give up their attempts to make money online.

What Is Pay per Click

This is one of the more expensive methods of generating traffic, but provides an instant stream of visitors to your site. There are a number of companies offering pay per click advertising, such as Google, Yahoo and Overture, to name but a few. The most well known is the Google Adwords program, which I will use to illustrate the principles of pay per click.

You may have noticed the ads displayed on the right hand side of Google’s search page results. Each ad is associated with a keyword phrase (e.g ladies golf clubs) and is displayed next to the search results when someone searches for those keywords.

These ads are known as contextual ads because they are displayed on pages where the content is closely related to the keywords associated with the ad.

You will also come across these ads when you visit certain websites. The same principle applies and the theme / topic of the page matches the keywords associated with the ad. In this instance, the webmaster will receive a payment from Google for displaying their ads. This program is known as Adsense.

How Does Pay Per Click work

Place your ads with Google Adwords and pay for every click that takes a visitor to your site.
The price per click is determined by the popularity of the keyword and its position in the list. Prices generally vary between a few cents and $5 but can be very much more for some keywords.

There is no fixed price for a specific keyword or the position where it’s displayed on the page. The advertiser specifies the maximum amount they are prepared to pay and then Google uses this and other information from all the other advertisers to work out the position of each ad. Exactly how this is done is outside the scope of this article and many books have been written on the subject.

You can open a free Adwords account with Google Adwords. They have very good online help screens and examples to help you set up your campaigns.

If this method appeals to you, you can at a later stage spend a lot more time specializing in the numerous strategies that have been devised to make this technique successful. In common with all advertising, the secret is to continually test and improve on the performance of your ads. The bottom line is quite simply, if you make more profit than the cost of your ads, you are on a winner. If not, stop immediately and try something else!

A good idea is to get some help in the form of step by step instructions and coaching videos designed specifically for newbies.

The major hurdle for people is getting that website traffic to your site, and reading the various information guides on the internet will provide you with practically thousands of useful ways of generating traffic such as keyword rich web pages, article writing and reciprocal linking to name but a few.

But people must also realise there are actual ways on the internet that are expressed in articles as being the golden ticket to riches, which are in fact the sure fire and quickest way to get yourself banned by Google, ruining any potential of you making a decent income from your website, and people must be aware of the problem outcome.

From my own experience when first starting out with Google Adsense, I found myself to be very impatient at the fact that I may have to work at my website for possibly years to generate enough traffic to click on my ads and earn me a decent income from my website. So being frustrated at this lengthy procedure, I embarked on searching Google for possible quick fix methods which would start traffic flooding to my website and greatly increase the potential of visitors clicking on my Google Ads.

The method I fell upon was the TRAFFIC EXCHANGES, which guarantee visitors to your site in exchange for you visiting other people sites. Some of these TRAFFIC EXCHANGES operate with Google Ad clicking in mind, promising no guarantee that people would click on your Ads, but you will see an increase in Google Ad clicking.

Being stupid and impatient and at the time not realising I was doing anything really wrong I joined ten of these TRAFFIC EXCHANGES and built up my traffic credits every day for a month and sure enough I got thousands of visitors and quite a few clicks on my Google Ads, it wasnt thousands of dollars but it was enough to put a smile on my face.

Then like a bolt of lightening from the heavens, a nice little email came from Google expressing they had been detecting invalid page impressions from TRAFFIC EXCHANGES and if this was to continue they may have to ban my account.

Now I tell you I immediately went to all them TRAFFIC EXCHANGE accounts and promptly deleted my urls to my Google Ad site and ceased the use of these traffic programs straight away. Sure the traffic to my site dropped to under ten a day, but I felt very lucky and relieved that Google had not banned me permanently from the Google Adsense program.

The trouble with the terms and conditions at Google Adsense, is it does not clearly state what is illegal page impressions and it wasnt till I received this email that I realised I was doing anything wrong, and im pretty sure that many webmasters out there have had the same conclusion and have not been as lucky as me and have had their Google Adsense accounts permanently closed.

This articles main purpose is drive a point home, if youre wanting to make an income from Google Adsense, then the slow methodical approach of adding keyword rich web pages and writing and submitting articles over many months will eventually start giving you that much needed traffic and hopefully reward your hard work with enough Google Ad clicks to give you that dream income. DONT CHEAT!!

Simon Ecclestone

* It helps to get your site listed in the search engine.

* It helps to boost your position in the search engine.

* It helps to build small streams of traffic to your site.

Links to your site are normally given by also giving a link from your site to the other one. These are called reciprocal links or link swaps. And naturally there are a few services available to automate the link somehow.

Some of these services will automatically add the link to your site and the other site once your link request is approved (through some software to be installed on your site).

Some will simply point you to sites which do use link swaps and who are interested in hearing from you.

Some will also check that the link to your site remains in place, and email you if it disappears. It’s then up to you to either contact the owner of that site to find out why the link has vanished, or to remove the reciprocal link on your site.

But there is one thing they do not do, and which you need to watch for:

How would a visitor to the other site FIND the link back to your site?

Because you can be sure that if a human visitor cannot find it, then it’s unlikely that a search engine will.

Let me give you an example: Andrew was using the service at LinkMetro.com to get links to one of his sites. Someone had a site on a related topic, and they requested a link back to Andrew’s. He checked the link back to his site, and everything looked OK. The other site had requested a link back to their homepage (rather than another specific page), so Andrew checked out that home page.

What did he find?

* No links to the “link directory”.

* No link to a “related sites” page.

* No link to a “resources” page.

It seemed that the link directory on that other site was not linked from the home page of that site.

The other site was requesting inbound links back to its home page, but effectively hiding the return link from the search engines and from website visitors. And that makes the link back to Andrew’s site useless – it’s like that link doesn’t even exist.

So next time you get asked for a reciprocal link, check the route that people and search engines would use to get from that site over to yours. You might be surprised what you find.

Conflicting Manchester SEO Expectations

Manchester SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood Manchester SEO expectations deal with keywords. Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.

A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home page and other centralized pages should be devoted to keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To counterbalance this, additional pages should be built focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.

The exact time periods on this approach are entirely dependent on the subject matter of the site and the keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to six months and Google in six to nine months. For an established site, the figures will be shorter but it is dependent upon the results of the keyword research in the specific field.

Understanding optimization is the key to having reasonable Manchester SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term goals is the best method of attack in nearly every situation.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a “pretty” website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site…after all, isn’t that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.

This is probably one of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.

When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.

How many times have you heard or read that “this is the Internet and it’s ok” to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don’t do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your website.

Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as “sex”, the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn’t have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.

Somewhat like keyword stacking listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the “alt=” HTML parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.

You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn’t hurt. Wrong…. Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.

This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.

Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.

Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements.

Make sure to check every page in your website for completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will increase.