Last few weeks, I tried to promote a specific product using Google Adwords. So basically, I set up the Ads tried to spend as little as I can for the bidding of the keywords. I think I set up the campaign for Adwords for almost 2 hours. The next morning I checked my earnings, and saw 2 sales for less than 30 clicks of my ads. So I checked my Adwords to view my campaign but unfortunately, the campaign was stopped. Actually, it’s not the campaign but the keyword that is having a great search volume which is giving me the sale was stopped. This thing happened for that keyword that I am bidding is not “targeted” and “trademarked” terms. Although Adwords allowed me to bid on that keyword, the price for the keyword raise for $0.50, so I tried to higher my bid so if my Quality Score gets higher, the price will decrease. I got 2 clicks and got a sale from that 2 clicks. So I think I hit a great product with a high ROI. But Adwords, again asked me to bid higher which I don’t think that it would be profitable for me to bid for the price that was needed to reactivate the keyword.

Since I thought that the product was a hit, I stopped my campaign from Adwords and shifted to Yahoo Search Marketing. I ran the campaign for few days, and I got 100+ clicks and only 2 sales. So I calculated whether it would be still profitable to promote this product, the result is no. So now, I “paused” that specific keyword with a lot of searches and added more targeted keywords but lesser in search volume and wait for few days whether it would generate sales and lower advertisement cost with Yahoo.

When I started Adwords, I’m not fully aware of those what they called Google’s slap. So what happened was, most of the keywords that I am bidding needs at least $5, $10 or at least higher than what should I am supposed to pay. I research for some strategies on how to lower my cost on bidding with keywords I have chosen. And came up of what they called “Quality Score”. If your keywords have a high quality score, then you will be paying lower to those who have lower quality score on their specific campaigns. After few research and testing, the price for the keywords that I am bidding become lower compared to the price that I cited earlier.

1. Basically these are the things I have done to lower the cost of advertising in Google Adwords:

2. Regrouped all the keywords based on their relevancy using Adwords Editor.
Created at least 2 “Text Ads” for each of the Ad group created.

Sample Text Ad:
(Ad Group Name) Blah Blah Blah
Text here, More Text, More Text
Blah Blah (Ad Group Name) Blah
www.domain.com/ad-group-name

3. Created a Landing Page that has a keyword rich specifically for each Ad Group or optimized for the keywords I am bidding. To make sure that the keyword can be seen, I set the keyword density from 2%-5%. The landing page should have at least 200-300 keywords.

After doing the 3 steps above, I noticed that the price for the keywords dropped. It means the cost will be lowered too.

I just noticed after few days, the price goes up again and found out that another factor that affects the pricing of the keywords and the quality score is CTR of the ad you have created. Although the increase for the bid is only few cents, it is still high to what should I’ve been paying. Basically, I need to edit my “Text ads” to have a higher CTR, so for the mean time I have to bid a little higher.

Are you still asking yourself what’s the use of link building? Or maybe asking yourself, will this help to generate traffic to your site?

Many SEO specialists and other webmasters who are optimizing their website know the value of links pointing to their site. Link building can’t be done overnight. Web owners put effort and time to increase links pointing to their site. Because of this time consuming part of search engine optimization, some website owners hire a company or an individual to do the link building process for their site. And not to say, if you outsourced the link building to someone, it would also take some time to increase backlinks pointing to your website.

So what’s the use of having links pointing to your site? Links can ve compared as a vote to your site. Every link that is pointing to your site can be seen by the search engine as a vote.

As of now, maybe you are planning to do link building, aren’t you? But be careful not to just create a bunch of links pointing to your site. Keep in mind the quality of links pointing to your site. For example, if a webpage contains a link pointing to your site it doesn’t mean that you are getting quality links. Why?

There’s a lot of factors that may affect the quality of links pointing to your site.

1. Pagerank of the “webpage”.
2. Anchor text.
3. Number of outgoing links.
4. Location of link in site structure.
5. Follow and noFollow tag.

The first you may want to do is to find an appropriate website that is the same as your niche. For example, “web design”, find a website that is mainly focus on the “web design” theme. To find this kind of websites, use the search engine and type in the key phrase that you are competing with and try to email the webmaster of those websites that appears on the first page of the search engine result.

Another strategy if you are in a competition, is to search for a keyword or keyphrase that you are competing, then take note of those websites that are listed on the first page of the search engine result. After you have listed all these websites (competitors), try to do some research for those sites that are linking to your competitors and email those webmasters and try to have an exchange link with them.

Again, link building is an ongoing process for optimizing your website popularity and search engine ranking. Few hours every week is an advantage if you will be alotting this for link building.