It seems it was only a matter of time before the cleverer element of the SEO world developed a workaround for Google’s penalizing of paid links. The workaround involves a pretty creative “dynamic” linking strategy, and it’s playing a little bit dirty.

No longer the province of tax accountants, lawyers, and politicians, an elaborate loophole has been developed by Andy Beard proposing how to get around Google’s paid-link vigilance via robots.txt and paid reviews.*

Beard’s explanation is complicated, lengthy, and loaded with historical context so visit Beard’s blog for further clarification, complete with nifty diagrams. What we will provide here is an overview and basic introduction, and not necessarily an endorsement.

Vigilance, micromanaging and attention to detail can help you avoid some common and costly mistakes of PPC advertising. What are those mistakes?

Here are the terrible 10 that are typical to most pay per click campaigns.

Too Many Keywords Per Ad Group

It’s important to target your ad to be as relevant as possible. Don’t group all your keywords into one or two ad groups. Break them out. Keep them tight. This gives you more control over ad variables so that you can be as relevant as possible.

Not Using Negative Keywords

First the good news. Pay per click, as it has been perfected by Google, is unarguably the Web’s highest business achievement to date. Google has become an international corporate icon worth more than some of the most famous name brands of our generation like Disney, McDonalds and Hertz.

Even more impressive is that pay per click has empowered literally hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs in their web businesses. Quite a few sites, which prior to pay per click would have trouble producing income, are earning more than $10,000 per month. Large sites such as NY Times, CNN, BusinessWeek and ESPN are also using pay per click to supplement their ad revenue.

Click fraud is the latest ‘hot topic’ circulating the online marketing arena, but what is it? And how does it affect you as a merchant running a pay-per-click campaign?

Spending on Internet advertising is growing faster than any other sector of the advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to $29 billion by 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to the researcher eMarketer Inc., with around 50% of this spending being spent on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Here we offer you a complete guide as to what this phenomenon is, who is likely to commit such an act, how to identify & prevent click fraud and how to best report instances of suspected click fraud on your PPC campaign.

By Jim Hedger (c) 2007

The problem might have been that Jeffrey had heard the same set of questíons once too often or it could just be the night noises one hears when traveling in strange cities. It could have been an undigested slice of deep-dish pizza from the evening before or a phantom blues-riff floating in his head. Whatever it was, it was 4AM on the morning of the last day of the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference and Jeffrey K. Rohrs was wide awake.

Promoting your internet business can be a tough task. The costs of traditional advertising are prohibitive. It can cost as much as $50,000 to run a print advertisement in a prominent publication. It can cost much more than that to produce and run a TV commercial, especially if the commercial airs during peak viewing hours. Online marketing is a problem too, because it is extremely difficult and takes a long time to climb to the top of the search engine rankings.

Whether you have outsourced your SEO campaign or are performing it in-house, here is a quick list on how to lose ROI and create diminishing returns for your business. Why 13? Well, because that’s your lucky number!

1. Make and upload site changes using old un-optimized backup files rather than the more recent optimized page files. And forget to tell your SEO you have done so.

2. Upload a malformed robots.txt file that tells the search engines that all your pages are disallowed from being spidered and indexed.

3. Require visitors to login personal information before viewing your site.

By Michael Cordova

A landing page is a website page that is created for one purpose - to persuade the site visitor to convert into a customer by making a sale, completing a form (thereby becoming a qualified lead), signing up for a newsletter, etc.
We provide this landing page quick reference so you can pull it out every time you are creating a persuasive landing page. It is divided into 4 sections and is intended to be an all-inclusive tip sheet.

Every business out there is competing hard with others offering like products or services, thanks to the way the world has opened up and provided consumers with access to many different resources. Thanks to the pay-per-click marketing strategy found across the internet, someone requiring a service in Canada can easily hire a business in Florida or a product manufactured in Colorado can reach an end user in Australia. This is great, because the opportunities for higher sales and income are vast, compared to previous decades where your business was only locally known or only popular in the surrounding cities.

By Kent Lewis

The good news: you can setup and manage a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program on Google, Yahoo! or MSN within minutes.

The bad news: you can setup and manage a PPC advertising program within minutes. That means anyone can set up a PPC program, which has led to higher overall cost, lower click-through rates and conversions. There is hope, however.

The Process

Developing and refining a PPC advertising management process is essential. It enables a company or individual to train, automate and scale a PPC program, compounding the ROI. There are four key components of a winning PPC advertising program: explore, evaluate, expand and enhance. By following the 4E process, you can virtually guarantee an ROI on your PPC advertising program.