Managing PPC campaigns

When you consider management of your PPC campaign in the context of reducing the budget, there’s
a lot you can do to reduce your costs without decreasing the effectiveness of your campaign. Your first
step should be to replace any poorly performing ads. Monitoring your ads should already be a key
part of your PPC campaign, so determining those that aren’t performing well should be easy.
Another way to reduce your PPC costs is to reduce the amount of your bid per keyword. As noted
earlier, it’s not necessary to strive for the top advertising slot. And reducing your keyword bid by a
few cents per click can make a huge difference in the cost of the campaign.


Just remember that reducing your bid shouldn’t necessarily mean reducing your budget. Instead,
use your existing budget more effectively. If you cut your budget too much, you’ll lower the number
of times that your keyword ad is shown each day, which in turn lowers your conversion rate.
In addition to reducing the amount you’re bidding on keywords, you should also examine the
keywords you’ve selected to see if you can remove any that are general in nature or high demand.
“General” and “high demand” can be the same, but there can be a subtle difference. General keywords
are good for branding purposes (and branding purposes only), so they are automatically
high demand and high cost

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What’s the Robot Exclusion Standard?

Because they do have the potential to wreak havoc on a web site, there has to be some kind of
guidelines to keep crawlers in line. Those guidelines are called the Robot Exclusion Standard, Robots
Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt.


The file robots.txt is the actual element that you’ll work with. It’s a text-based document that should
be included in the root of your domain, and it essentially contains instructions to any crawler that
comes to your site about what they are and are not allowed to index.
To communicate with the crawler, you need a specific syntax that it can understand. In its most
basic form, the text might look something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
These two parts of the text are essential. The first part, User-agent:, tells a crawler what user
agent, or crawler, you’re commanding. The asterisk (*) indicates that all crawlers are covered, but
you can specify a single crawler or even multiple crawlers.
The second part, Disallow:, tells the crawler what it is not allowed to access. The slash (/) indicates
“all directories.” So in the preceding code example, the robots.txt file is essentially saying that
“all crawlers are to ignore all directories.”
When you’re writing robots.txt, remember to include the colon (:) after the User-agent indicator
and after the Disallow indicator. The colon indicates that important information follows to which
the crawler should pay attention.
You won’t usually want to tell all crawlers to ignore all directories. Instead, you can tell all crawlers
to ignore your temporary directories by writing the text like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Or you can take it one step further and tell all crawlers to ignore multiple directories:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /links/listing.html
That piece of text tells the crawler to ignore temporary directories, private directories

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Picking the Right Keywords

Keywords are really the cornerstone of any SEO program. Your keywords play a large part in determining
where in search rankings you’ll land, and they also mean the difference between a user’s finding
your page and not. So when you’re picking keywords, you want to be sure that you’ve selected
the right ones. The only problem is, how do you know what’s right and what’s not?

Selecting the right keywords for your site means the difference between being a nobody on the Web,
and being the first site that users click to when they perform a search. You’ll be looking at two types
of keywords. The first is brand keywords. These are keywords associated with your brand. It seems
pretty obvious that these keywords are important; however, many people don’t think they need to
pay attention to these keywords, because they’re already tied to the site. Not true. Brand keywords
are just as essential as the second type, generic keywords.

Generic keywords are all the other keywords that are not directly associated with your company
brand. So if your web site, TeenFashions.com, sells teen clothing, then keywords such as clothing,
tank tops, cargo pants, and bathing suits might be generic keywords that you could use on your site.

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Anchor text for seo

Probably one of the most important elements of keyword use is in anchor text. Anchor text is text
found on a given web site that appears to be a hyperlink.
on web pages that companies often use it without any thought as to how it could affect their search
engine rankings.
How you use anchor text does matter, however, because anchor text is one of the most important
search engine ranking factors. When a search engine looks at your web page, it automatically follows
all the links that you have on the page. If those links (or even a large portion of those links)
are text-based links, that’s even better, because then what the search engine sees is not just the link
to another page, but also your keywords. It’s not enough just to make all your links text-based,
however. There’s a fine science to taking advantage of the power of anchor text.
The first thing you should understand is that there are two kinds of anchor texts: yours and everyone
else’s. I’m not being facetious here. It really is important that you consider not only how you link
with other people, but also how they will link back to you. For example, if you do a Google search
for the term “click,” you’ll find that the Apple QuickTime web site is at the very top of the list. This
isn’t because Apple loaded down the QuickTime site with the keyword “click.” What’s actually happened
is that many people link to QuickTime using the word “click” in their anchor text. This isn’t
hard to believe, because most web sites that use the QuickTime application usually include a text
link to “Click here to download” or something similar. As you can see, it’s not just your own anchor
text that matters. How your site is included in others’ anchor text is also important.

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seo for small business

Use your keywords: Including your keywords in your advertisements can increase the
efficiency of those ads. Additionally, if you’re using the keywords that you’ve selected,
then your ads are likely to appear in conjunction with related topics, making it easier
for you to entice traffic.
Qualify your traffic: Creating an advertisement that people will click on is not enough.
You must create an ad the right people will click on. Not all traffic is equal. Even people
who search with the same phrase might have different needs. One purpose of your ad is
to appeal to your target audience, while signaling to anyone else that your business would
not be a good fit for their differing needs.
List features and benefits: In your ad description, include at least one feature and benefit
for the product or services that you’re advertising with the PPC program. Generally,
you have very little space in which to include a description, so choose the words that you
plan to use very carefully.
Use a call to action: Too often, advertisements are created without including a call to action.
However, studies show that including a call to action will increase your conversion rates,
whereas ads that do not contain a call to action tend to perform less efficiently and effectively
than those that include it.
Stand out: Many PPC advertisers in the same areas will have very similar PPC advertisements.
If you can create ads that stand out from these other, more generic ads, you have
a much better chance of having an effective PPC program. It will be worth your time to
spend some planning hours creating an ad that helps you stand out from the crowd. That
extra effort will be well worth the results.

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Increasing Keyword Success

Usually three- to five-word phrases that site visitors use to
find web sites. The idea of non-competitive keywords and phrases relates to the more specific terms
that you can use to describe your products or information. The concept of the Long Tail of Search is that
you begin any search with a very broad term. For example, if you’re searching for Italian dinner recipes,
that term is broad enough to return far too many results to be useful.
Using the Long Tail theory, however, the more precise and less common keywords and phrases are
usually the most effective. These are located at the end of the “tail” and are represented by a very
small tip (as if on the end of a tail).

Normally, a product site gets visitors by several types of keywords and phrases:

Product names and brands
General keywords and phrases
Long-tail keywords and phrases

The magnificence of the Long Tail of Search is that you don’t know how effective it is until you have
optimized your site and have some content on your site to attract it. Sure, there will be some Long
Tail queries in your logs, but it will be only a fraction of what could be there.
To conquer the Long Tail of Search, you need to create a rich foundation of content. The tricky part
is knowing what content to create. If your focus is on providing value to your customers, it’ll be easier
for you.

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Building Your Site for SEO

Search engine optimization is essentially the science of designing your web site to maximize your
search engine rankings. This means that all of the elements of your web site are created with the
goal of obtaining high search engine rankings. Those elements include:
Entry and exit pages
Page titles
Site content
Graphics
Web site structure
In addition to these elements, however, you also have to consider things like keywords, links, HTML,
and meta-tagging. Even after you have all the elements of your page optimized for search-engine
friendliness, there are other things to consider. For example, you can have all the right design elements
included in your web pages and still have a relatively low search engine ranking. Factors such
as advertising campaigns and update frequencies also affect your SEO efforts.
All of this means that you should understand that the concept of search engine optimization is not
based on any single element. Instead, search engine optimization is based on a vast number of elements
and strategies. And it’s an ongoing process that doesn’t end once your web site is live.
SEO is a living, breathing concept of maximizing the traffic that your web site generates, and because
it is, that means that it’s a constantly moving target. If you’ve ever played a game of Whack-a-Mole,
you can understand how difficult search engine optimization is to nail. In the game, a little mole pops
up out of a hole. Your job is to whack the mole on the top of the head before it disappears back down
the hole and appears in another.
Search engine optimization is much the same concept. Search engines are constantly changing, so
the methods and strategies used to achieve high search engine rankings must also change. As soon
as that little mole pops up in one hole, he disappears and then reappears in another. It’s a frustrating
game, but given enough time and concentration, you can become very good at it.

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Sectioning HTML5 Elements

header :-Header content (for a page or a section of the page)
footer:- Footer content (for a page or a section of the page)
section:- A section in a web page
article:- Independent article content
aside:- Related content or pull quotes
nav:- Navigational aids

All of these elements can be styled with CSS. In fact, as we described in the utility design principle
earlier, HTML5 pushes the separation of content and presentation, so you have to style your page using
CSS styles in HTML5. Listing 1-1 shows what an HTML5 page might look like. It uses the new DOCTYPE,
character set, and semantic markup elements—in short, the new sectioning content. The code file
(sample.html) is available in the code/intro folder.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" >
<title>HTML5</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="html5.css">
</head>
<body>
<header>
<h1>Header</h1>
<h2>Subtitle</h2>
<h4>HTML5 Rocks!</h4>
</header>
<div id="container">
<nav>
<h3>Nav</h3>
<a href="http://www.example.com">Link 1</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com">Link 2</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com">Link 3</a>
</nav>
<section>
<article>
<header>
<h1>Article Header</h1>
</header>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor HTML5 nunc aut nunquam sit amet, consectetur adipiscing
elit. Vivamus at
est eros, vel fringilla urna.</p>
<p>Per inceptos himenaeos. Quisque feugiat, justo at vehicula pellentesque,
turpis
lorem dictum nunc.</p>
<footer>
<h2>Article Footer</h2>
</footer>
</article>
<article>
<header>
<h1>Article Header</h1>
</header>
<p>HTML5: "Lorem ipsum dolor nunc aut nunquam sit amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit. Vivamus at est eros, vel fringilla urna. Pellentesque
odio</p>
<footer>
<h2>Article Footer</h2>
</footer>
</article>
</section>
<aside>
<h3>Aside</h3>
<p>HTML5: "Lorem ipsum dolor nunc aut nunquam sit amet, consectetur adipiscing
elit. Vivamus at est eros, vel fringilla urna. Pellentesque odio
rhoncus</p>
</aside>
<footer>
<h2>Footer</h2>
</footer>
</div>
</body>
</html>

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HTML5 Content Types

Embedded:-Content that imports other resources into the document, for example audio, video,
canvas, and iframe

Flow:-Elements used in the body of documents and applications, for example form, h1, and
small
Heading :-Section headers, for example h1, h2, and hgroup
Interactive:- Content that users interact with, for example audio or video controls, button, and
textarea

Metadata:- Elements  commonly found in the head section— that set up the presentation or
behavior of the rest of the document, for example script, style, and title

Phrasing:- Text and text markup elements, for example mark, kbd, sub, and sup

Sectioning :-Elements that define sections in the document, for example article, aside, and title

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HTML5 introducection

HTML5 introduces
a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern websites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block (<div>) and inline (<span>) elements, for example <nav> (website navigation block), <footer> (usually referring to bottom of web page or to last lines of HTML code), or <audio> and <video> instead of <object>.Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as <font> and <center>, whose effects have long been superseded by the much more powerful Cascading Style Sheets.

When you use the new HTML5 DOCTYPE, it triggers browsers to render the page in standardscompliant
mode. As you may know, Web pages can have different rendering modes, such as Quirks,
Almost Standards, and Standards (or no-quirks) mode. The DOCTYPE indicates to the browser which
mode to use and what rules are used to validate your pages.

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