Web Marketing Strategy Update

Good thread over at Webmasterworld to help publishers get the most from Adsense. I’ve pasted the initial post below, but visit the site for more discussion and plenty of links to more information.

Low CTR: Blend, put ads to heatzone, test colors, decrease # of ad units

Low EPC: Block MFA, decrease # of ad units, improve content topics, lookup SmartPricing

Earnings High Fluctuation: Try removing ads from low performance pages

Low Earnings: Build more content, get more visitors, see Low EPC, test AdLinks, test Referrals

Bad Targeting: Find & zap the offending keywords in your pages, lookup section targeting

Low # of Visitors: Lookup SEO

Sudden surge in Traffic: Study stats, don’t panic it’s good news

Sudden surge in Clicks: Study stats, don’t panic but inform Google if CTR is to the roof and all from few IPs

Clicked my own AD: Just don’t do it again, if repeated inform Google

Can’t Login: Check connection, wait 1 hour see if its reported already on WW, contact support

Low sense of security: Join the club, diversify with other networks, use alternate ads

Keyword research is the first, and most important step in search marketing.

You can probably see why keyword selection would logically be the first task. But why most important?

Because if you choose the wrong keywords, everything else you do to improve your search engine rankings is wasted effort.

Or to be blunt: If you target the wrong keywords, you will not make money.

When you create a new website or web page, you want to focus the content on popular keyword phrases relevant to your subject matter. These are the keywords that people in your target market regularly type into search engines to locate information on the products or services you provide.

But it’s often the case that many of your first choice keyword searches will be very competitive, making it difficult — if not impossible — for you to get your pages to rank highly for them unless you employ an SEO expert.

What you need to do is find other, less popular keywords that are also quite heavily searched, yet are easier to rank well for because there are fewer competing pages in the search results (this also applies to Adsense keywords and other PPC’s, but in terms of paying less for your clicks because there are less competing ads).