Many webmasters are unsure whether they should advertise their website with SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per click advertising).

Actually, most commercial websites work best if you use both SEO and PPC. The exact mix depends on your goals.

Pay per click advertising (PPC)

Advantages:

• You get instant results. If you advertise your website through PPC, then you will get traffic now and not several months later.
• PPC ads are perfect for time limited offers such as holiday sales.
• You can stop PPC ads at any time.
• PPC ads make it easy to test different keywords and landing pages.
• PPC ads also work with websites that are not very well designed and wouldn’t get good search engine rankings.
• PPC ads allow you to bid on a large amount of keywords, including misspellings and other keyword variations that you cannot put on your web pages.

Disadvantages:

• PPC advertising can become very expensive if you bid on the wrong keywords or if you don’t calculate the maximum bid price correctly.
• Click fraud can be a problem. Not all clickers are potential customers.

If you advertise your website with PPC ads then you should use a ROI tracking tool to make sure that you don’t waste your money.

Search engine optimization (SEO):

Advantages:

• Traffic through organic search engine results is almost free if the up-front work has been done.
• After optimizing your website you can use your money for different things and the optimized site will still run.
• A larger number of visitors and search result clickers is not a problem.
• Search engine optimization delivers long term results that don’t require permanent financial input.

Disadvantages:

• SEO can be relatively time-consuming up-front.
• SEO can require a redesign of your web pages to make your website search engine friendly. However, this usually also results in a better user experience.

Search engine optimization delivers lasting results and it costs considerably less in the long term. However, you must make sure that you optimize your website correctly, if your want to get high search engine rankings.

Pay per click advertising and search engine optimization both contribute to the success of your website. If you use both wisely, you can get many new visitors and customers without spending a fortune. See the recommended resources below for PPC and SEO software tips.

What Exactly Can a Competitor Analysis Reveal?

This is a very common question because many site owners don't know the lengths that a competitor may have gone to obtain top rankings. The following examples are some of the discoveries I have uncovered in a typical competitor analysis:

• By examining a competitor's link structure I have found that many of the links with the most credibility came from websites the competitor actually owned. (Determining the ownership of the domain names required some sleuthing because the whois information was 'private' but ultimately the info became available.) In a couple of cases several of these domains had legitimate websites and this prompted some great ideas for my client to attain more traffic.
• While researching a competitor I noticed that although the competitor's website was very similar to my client's, there was one major difference; the competitor's website structure was far better optimized. By outlining the structure the competitor used and improving on it with my own expertise our client had the information he needed to apply changes to his own site.
• In another instance I provided a client the list of all the pay per click keywords and organic keywords that each competitor was currently using. The client was flabbergasted when she realized just how many keywords she had missed promoting for her own comparable services.

The Basics of Conducting Your Own Competitor Analysis

Now that you have seen some examples of what can be gleaned from a competitor analysis you might want to conduct one of your own. For the purpose of this tutorial I am assuming that you are fairly new to SEO so I created a basic plan that works for most users; but even this will require a little preparative reading. The following is a list of essential reading material:

• Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist
  This article will show you what elements of a website make it search engine friendly and this will help you see which optimizations your competitor used.
• The 10 Minute Search Engine Optimization (Updated in 2007 from 2004)
  A refresher on the proper elements of optimization.
• 15 Shades of Spam
  Jim Hedger wrote this back in 2006 to increase awareness of the types of Spam that can get webmasters into hot water. It is an excellent refresher to help you identify them.

Many more free SEO tutorials are available if you find yourself needing more information. The following is an outline of the most revealing steps with the least amount of technical expertise required. Please keep in mind that the objective of this competitor analysis is to compare what you find to your own website later on. What you find may not seem earth shattering (or it might) but this analysis is meant to show you what you might be missing:

Competitor Walkthrough
Grab a piece of paper and a pen and while you walk through your competitor's website look for any particularly obvious search engine optimization techniques. Here are some elements you should check:

• Does the title tag appear well written and if so is there a common syntax used throughout the website?
• Look at the source code of the home page and search for "H1", "H2" or "H3". Do any of these tags show up? If so that means the competitor is using heading tags within the page. Now try identifying the text they used in the heading. Likely you will find the competitor's Keyphrase is found within the tag.
• Check if the navigation is search engine friendly. Sometimes the navigation is a drop-down menu; make sure it is a type that is search engine friendly. If not, check the footer of the page and see if a text menu is placed there.
• Keep an eye out for a pattern of keywords being used in text links. Certain words are likely to appear more often and these are likely some of the target phrases your competitor has decided to focus on.
• Look for nofollow tags. No follow tags are often used to channel Page Rank efficiently throughout a website. This is called a themed structure and it can have incredible ranking benefits. If you see a pattern of nofollow tag use then you can be relatively certain your competitor has/had a well-informed SEO firm on hire.
• While you roam through the site look for pages that have particularly high Google PageRank and try to identify why. In most cases these pages have information that visitors decided to link to. Perhaps this will give you some ideas for creating similar quality content for your website.
• Check the site for the presence of an XML sitemap. Usually it will reside at the root of the website so try typing in the basic URL of the competitor's website and add (minus the quotes) "\sitemap.xml" on the end. The details within the sitemap might be a little confusing to you but just acknowledging that the competitor has one is noteworthy.
• Have you found any incidences of spam throughout the site? Take note, I have lost count how many competitors succeeded using shady tactics. This doesn't mean you copy them, however, but it may at least give you yet another indication of what helped the competitor attain rankings. Believe me, in most cases these sites will get caught with their hands in the cookie jar at which point you won't want to be associated with the same tactics.

I can't possibly list everything you need to keep an eye out for when walking through a competitor's website; at least not in an article format. Just keep an eye out for anything that looks particularly purposeful in the site and linking structure as well as the content of the website. If you find something you can't be sure is worth noting, then try researching it online; chances are someone has written about the topic/concept or can provide you advice in a forum.

Backlink Analysis
This portion of the analysis will require that you use one of the following link analysis tools: OptiLink (not free but my first choice) or Backlink Analyzer from SEO Book (free). In each case these tools have excellent help files that I suggest reading in order to get the best results from the data they generate.

In this particular stage you are going to use your new tool to analyze the first 1000 backlinks of your competitor's domain.

Program Setup Note: Be certain to set up the software to acquire Google Rank and Alexa Rank information for each backlink and filter out any rel=nofollow links. The setting is easily found on the front of both applications with the exception of the rel=nofollow which is an option in Optilink but automatically checked in Backlink Analyzer.

When the report is completed sort the backlinks by both PageRank and then Alexa Rank; examine each sorting separately.

Why Are Both PageRank and Alexa Rank Used?
The reason both are used is because they each have notable disadvantages and advantages. PageRank is notoriously unreliable especially lately since Google now penalizes the PageRank of any site with any relation to link buying. As a result, sites with low PR could be missed as a quality site. Furthermore Alexa Rank is a decent indicator of a site's popularity but I can't rely on it since it is not an established indicator of how well a site is regarded in Google. Between the two stats, however, we can glean a good indication of the sites that have the best reputation for link building.

Creating a List of Authority Competitor Backlinks

Using Excel or another spreadsheet application copy and paste the data you received from OptiLink or Backlink Analyzer into a worksheet. Then create a copy of the sheet so that you have an exact copy of all the data on a single sheet. Now follow these steps:

1. On the first worksheet sort the data by Google PageRank (PR) from highest numbers to lowest. Now remove all of the pages that had less than a PageRank of 4 so you are left with the best sites according to this data. OR just separate the lower PageRanked sites so they don't get in the way.
2. On the second worksheet sort the data first by Alexa Ranking (sort lowest to highest numbers) and then do a secondary sort by the Google PageRank (highest to lowest numbers). Delete or remove all sites that have a negative Alexa Ranking ("nm" is how it shows in OptiLink) or otherwise partition them from your other more valuable data.

Now you have two excellent worksheets that provide lists of authority pages that have links pointing to your competitor.

How to Use the Backlink Data

Take some time now to filter the links by domain and you will see just how many links per domain each competitor has. If you see a website that appears to be linking to a website a lot it is usually because either the competitor owns the website or has purchased a link on the website. To find out if your competitor owns the website try running a Whois on the domain.

Also check the content of the link data for how many pages listed are from the competitors own website. If you see a great deal from their own website then you can be relatively assured they have good content which is important to note; perhaps you need to focus on better content on your own website OR how to get others to notice your good content.

Now the most logical step is to figure out which links are worth getting for yourself. Chances are a decent number of the links you found are from pages that would be willing to link to you as well.

Don't Lose Focus on Your Own Website

So now you have a few tools to conduct a cursory competitor analysis. You will likely find some very useful data that you can act on but is this all you need to do? Is a competitor analysis going to be the golden key to increased profits? No. I have a great deal of faith in competitor analysis because I know determining what a competitor is doing successfully can improve a marketing plan dramatically. That said, you also have to pay close attention to your own website and the quality information that can be gained from using free tools like Google Analytics or handy paid tools like ClickTracks Professional.

Using a quality analytics program will allow you to get as granular as monitoring the success of each page in your website with details such as: where did visitors come from (somewhere in your site or from another?), how long on average visitors stayed at a particular page, what keywords led visitors to the page (if any), and much more.

With proper analytics you can actually compare and contrast the effects of minor edits to a page's content; this is called multivariate testing. For example you can run tests to see if you can improve the retention of visitors by adding a better image or a better tag line because you noticed that many visitors were entering at a page deep within your site that was not originally designed as an entry page.

Truly, the sky is the limit with analytics and it would be irresponsible for me to state that competitor analysis is more important than making your own website run smoothly. Do yourself a favour, if you haven't already got an analytics program running on your site, get it done now or learn how to use the one you have; it will pay off in the long run. Especially when you want to monitor the success of the tactics you applied to your site from your competitor analysis findings.

Article By Ross Dunn. Ross is the CEO and founder of StepForth Web Marketing Inc, a web marketing company founded in 1997 and based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Ross Dunn is a Certified Internet Marketing and Business Strategist (CIMBS) with a background in web design and online marketing. His broad Internet experience in combination with a talented staff has made StepForth a name synonymous with top results.

Today, the Internet is the primary means of information for a growing number of people. From news and entertainment to work-related issues and shopping, so much takes place and is available online.

Of course, it is also fair to say that the Internet is a great place to advertise. You can't visit a single website without seeing at least one advertisement. Some companies pay huge dollars for a slice of cyber-real estate advertisements, but others use a much more cost-efficient means — affiliate marketing.

Why Selling Products Through Affiliate Marketing Makes Sense

Affiliate marketing is an effective approach that helps your product gain visibility. It also helps the person, or the affiliate, who is displaying your ad. In essence, you are getting free advertising on as many websites as you can.

When someone clicks on one of your affiliate links and makes a purchase, that affiliate gets a commission on the sale. You're only paying for the advertising when it actually sells. This benefit is causing more and more companies to add affiliate marketing to their overall advertising plans. In fact, here are five reasons to sell your products with affiliate marketing.

No. 1 — Visibility and Selling Products Through Affiliate Marketing

With a properly managed affiliate program, you can display your products simultaneously on hundreds of websites. These ads are being noticed as the reader scrolls through the website. If the reader doesn't click on the first ad they see, there is a good chance that they may click on the ad when they come across it again on another of their favorite websites. The more affiliates you have, the greater visibility for your products.

No. 2 — Control and Selling Products Through Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing, you can essentially control which websites will host your advertisement. Since affiliates will come to you, you can make sure that their website is suitable for your products to be advertised. You will notice much better success when you have your ads displayed on relevant websites, in which your products will appeal to visitors.

No. 3 — Flexibility and Selling Products Through Affiliate Marketing

In advertising, flexibility is important. Affiliate marketing allows for extreme flexibility. You should offer a variety of advertisements so affiliates can choose the perfect one for their websites. In addition, a fresh advertisement rotation will help ensure that your affiliates post the latest advertisement, as they also want to make money.

No. 4 — Selling Products Through Affiliate Marketing Is Cost Efficient

As stated earlier, you only pay your affiliate when you actually make a sale, so all of this advertising is free! Imagine having your product displayed on hundreds of high-traffic websites and not paying a penny for it until you make a sale. You can determine how much commission your affiliates will earn per sale, with the freedom to increase it for special promotions. For a small company trying to get a foothold in the industry, affiliate marketing is one of the best and most affordable advertising solutions available.

No. 5 — Support Through Affiliate Marketing

By using an affiliate marketing company, you will have all the support necessary to get started, with help managing your affiliates. Companies like Commission Junction and ShareASale help set up affiliate programs for online businesses and make it easier for affiliate to find affiliate programs, right for them. They offer all the necessary tools to ensure accurate credits and sales. These companies also serve to bring new affiliates to your program, thus strengthening your chances of marketing success.

Affiliate marketing allows website owners the opportunity to work as your pitch-men. As an affiliate, you're giving them the ability to make money by advertising your product. Some website owners will even go so far as to make entire websites dedicated to your product to enhance their earning potential.

Utilizing affiliate marketing in your business plan is like having an army of advertisers out on the front lines, selling your product. But perhaps the most important aspect of using affiliate marketing lies in the fact those companies can notice tremendous gains while effectively minimizing their losses.

What is TNX ? 

TNX.net allowes publishers to sell links from each page on their website, and for advertisers it allowes to buy millions of links from other sites in few clicks. TNX is a convenient tool that allowes publishers and advertisers to save time, efforts and money: in just a few minutes you can have thousands of links from hundreds of high quality relevant sites linking to yours.

All links are direct, they are located on main pages and inside pages that are also very important. Ads are displayed mostly on well-noticeable spots so they can attract visitors.
The system can be used to promote main page of the advertiser's site as well as inside pages.

Site publishers can not only use TNX.net to earn money, they can also use it to promote own websites by taking advantage of our system as an advertiser (balance in the system is unified).

How to Make Money with TNX  

I will show you how this blog earns 20 bucks a day from just one source - TNX. It takes minutes to register and setup your linking code on your site or blog. Lets say you have a blog with 100 posts. When you add your code and your blog gets approved it places upto 4 links on EVERY SINGLE Page or Post which makes 400 links that earn you points. These points can be converted into Money and sent directly to ýour Paypal. What Makes TNX different is that all the links are placed automatically. The advertiser does not need to chose you site. The process is really fast and you get hundreds of links that make you money instantly. 

How To Boost Your Site Traffic and Ranking with TNX 

An advertising campaign consists of only three steps. You choose the subject and link popularity of websites, quantity and quality (PR) of pages you want to display your links at, upload link anchors. This way you get lots of bakclinks placed instantly. You can boost your site ranking in Google for specific keywords in no time.

You have nothing to lose - Try TNX.net. It can be great source of additional income for you site. :) 

Like i said we are going from $0 to upwards, which means $0 out of your pocket. When i tell people about how i started my online business with "NO MONEY" out of my own pocket, people just freeze up. Most people think "you need money to make money". Here is how i got started.

PPS - This was how i got started from $0. You can do it too, Just take action.

Why is it easier to get high rankings with older websites?

Brand new domain names are often used by spammers to make a quick buck. These spammers buy hundreds of domains, fill them with automatically created scraper content and hope to make some money with the ads that appear on these sites.

In addition, some webmasters use new domains to test new search engine spamming techniques.

As it is difficult for Google to find out whether a new domain can be trusted or not, Google invented a set of filters that downranks new websites until Google thinks that they can be trusted.

What can you do to overcome Google's filters for new websites?

It's very difficult to get high rankings before Google trusts your website. For that reason, do things that make your website trustworthy:

1. Start with the right keywords

   It's not possible to get a top 10 ranking for highly competitive general search term such as "cars" for a new website. However, it is possible to get high rankings for terms such as "used car dealer atlanta".

   It's not just easier to get high rankings for more specific search terms, these terms are also much more likely to convert to sales. Take some time to find the right keywords for your site.

2. Get links to your website

   It is not possible to get high rankings on Google without good incoming links. Try to get as many links from related websites as possible. If the right websites link to your site then Google will trust your website more quickly.

3. Optimize your web pages

   While more links to your website greatly increase your chance of getting high search engine rankings, you must also tell search engines for which search terms you want to have high rankings. Optimize the content of your web pages to make sure that Google lists your website for the right search terms.

   Search engines should be able to parse the content of your web pages easily. Consider this when creating a new website from scratch.

4. Wait

   A website that has been online for several years is much less likely to game Google's ranking algorithms than newer sites. For that reason, your Google rankings will also increase just by waiting (given that you followed the steps 1 to 3).

If you do it correctly, getting high search engine rankings for brand new websites is possible. It's important that you do the right things in the right order.

1. Lack of a Clear Purpose

Why was your site designed? What is the purpose of your site? Are you selling a product or service? Are you sharing information or serving as a forum to aggregate ideas and comments? Are you providing a social benefit?

If your website doesn’t communicate its purpose in 3 seconds or less, you’re going to lose visitors. I’ve seen this on numerous occassions, especially among companies who don’t know what they want their site to be or communicate. Make sure your website has a clear purpose and everything else will follow.

2. Making it Long-Winded and Complicated

Today, individuals have less time than ever before. As a result, time is their most precious asset – don’t waste it. The majority of people using the internet today still prefer brevity over verse. Try to say what you need to say in as few words as possible. If users have to scroll through 2 screens or more then it’s too much.

When writing for your site, highlight things of importance. You can use bulleted lists, short paragraphs, bolded and underlined text. Some of you may be asking about the marketing websites with long copy. If you know what I’m talking about, these are generally marketing pages (squeeze pages) that have been developed to promote a single product or service. This is not what I’m referring to here. For websites, copy should be brief and to the point.

3. Giving Web Visitors Too Many Distractions

As I alluded to before, websites should be designed with the single purpose of directing visitors to the information they want. A real prospect is one that needs the same information you want to provide; the art of sales is directing potential clients to relevant information, and presenting it in a way that visitors see your product or service as fulfilling their needs.

This is the reason why I don’t promote Google Adwords on my website. Why? Because it distracts potential buyers from purchasing what I have to offer. Don’t get me wrong, I make a nice living promoting affiliate products, but I do so on my own terms and I only promote those products that I haver personally reviewed and approve of.

4. Eroding Your Own Credibility

Does your website give first time visitors plenty of reasons to trust you? Website visitors are constantly looking for reasons why they should abandon your site. Does your site have a number of spelling errors or images that don’t display? How easy is it to find your 800 number or other contact information?

If you want to develop trust among your visitors, make sure that the basics are covered, that your site looks and feels the part of a well established company. Present important information in obvious places, have an about section, and make it easy for visitors to contact you via email or phone. This will establish trust and confidence in their buying decisions.

5. Not Giving Web Visitors Enough Options

When offering a product or service, it’s a true benefit to offer multiple options, but not too many. You want to make sure that website visitors have more than one item, price point, or model to choose from. When analyzing why people leave websites, I’ve found that the reasons are much to often simpler than you might think; “I didn’t want everything in the package, only the trading cards…”, “They had X but didn’t offer Y”, “The price was too high…”, etc. People like options. Identify the most compelling bundles or most popular products and offer solutions at various price points. This is the most effective way to position your products or services.

6. Giving Web Visitors Too Many Obstacles

Removing obstacles to a purchase is the most important thing you can do to ensure optimal sell through. Do you make people go through the order processing system before they can find out how much something costs, or do you demand potential customers read all of the fine print that only a lawyer could understand? Is your order process long and complicated?

When evaluating the effectiveness of a website’s checkout process, I’ve always found a large drop off rate. In fact, the majority of consumers who click, “buy now” never finish the purchase. There are a lot of reasons why, and its unrealistic to think that 100% of these individuals will convert, but a major reason is that the purchase process is much too long and complicated. Keep yours simple.

7. Giving Web Visitors Too Many Forms To Fill-in

Do you attract your visitors with special offers or free white papers and then demand that they fill-out complex forms, surveys, and questionnaires before you give them access to what they came for? If you do, you are probably losing a lot of people you attracted. Keep your sign up forms very brief.

Many websites loose a significant number of individuals who are just no longer willing to complete a long form. Keep your questions to a minimum – only collecting the information you need to take the next step with your prospect.

Conclusion

There are a number of ways to keep visitors on your website and improve conversion rates. I just described a number of the most common mistakes that websites are making today. Start with a clear purpose and put yourself in the shoes of a first-time visitor. Is your website clear, authoritative, trustworthy, and easy to navigate? Think like a potential customer and make your user experience second to none!

One way in which you can drive traffic to your landing page is through natural search engine optimization. This is the slowest process, but it is also one of the best ways to ensure a continually-increasing stream of traffic over time.

Generating natural search engine traffic generally entails getting links to your site. While reciprocal linking was once the best strategy, experts now believe that major search engines are devaluing reciprocal links in favor of one-way links and triangular links (which search engines can't really detect).

Another way in which to get natural search engine traffic is by optimization your website for certain keyphrases. You can do this by creating pages that specifically focus on one keyword on your given niche. You can then set the page extension to that keyword and optimize the content at a 1.5% density for that keyword. You will also want to use it in header and title tags.

Now, in addition building natural search engine traffic, you will want to consider using pay per click advertising. You can do this by opening an account with Google Adwords.

As mentioned earlier, successful Google Adwords campaigns do two things: they group keywords into multiple, small, related groups – and they send leads to multiple, tweaked landing pages.

This means you will have to start with some careful keyword research; and you will then have to alter your landing pages to match that research.

These are some of the most commonly used tools for driving traffic to a landing page; however, they are not always the most effective.

In the first portion of this article, we discussed driving traffic into your landing page using pay per click advertisement and natural search engine optimization. Now, both of those methods can be effective, but they both usually have rather high barriers to entry and require a lot of work.

Luckily, you do have another option: human connections. And this is where most Internet marketers fail. They don't realize the power of human connections because they are so caught up in the idea of making transactions and collecting massive checks without having to deal with customers and clients.

One quick way to get traffic through human connections is a joint venture. You can enter into a joint venture by compiling a list of possible “partners” — or people who might be able to assist you in some mutually-beneficial way. This list might include other list owners in your niche, site owners in your niche, and experts.

There's only one important thing you should keep in mind when contacting joint venture partners – and that is to make it as quick, easy, and beneficial for them as possible. If they have no incentive for doing it, they probably wont even reply to you. And if it isn't easy, they'll accept other joint venture offers over yours.

Another way in which you can drive traffic to your landing page is through blog and forum posting; however, it is important that you do not spam, as many businesses do. Instead, actually participate on the forum, provide people with something of value; and, after a while, post your product in your signature – and try to network with people on the forum who work in similar fields.

Your approach to blog posting should be similar. Include a signature file that links back to your landing page, but don't spam. Instead, post useful comments. This is not only more ethical, but it is plainly more effective. Spam gets deleted. Good comments get praised, inducing people to follow your link and check out your products.

The similarity in all banned from AdSense webmasters was that they all used massive stumbling as primary traffic source. Also and Google sent them email stating that they ban/terminate their accounts for invalid ad impressions, but didn’t explain what exactly that meant bu that, and actually I didn’t know also until I found one book on per-per-click marketing book where the I stumbled across the term invalid impressions fraud.

A large number of impressions, without the accompanying click on your ad - if you notice that there are a lot of impressions (views) of your advertising, this could indicate impression fraud. Impression fraud is artificial inflation of your ad impressions that may cause your ad click-through rates to drop below the Google minimum and your ad will be disabled. Until you realize this, your competitors have free reign to use your keywords, sometimes at bargain prices. As well, your relevancy ratings for search engines may drop as they record numerous impressions, but no interest shown via visits to your website, which could lead to a shutdown of your campaign.

— source: Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook

Most of the AdSense Publishers know that Stumblers generally don’t click on ads and this somehow generates very low CTR. Depending on the ads generated to your particular page and the number of AD units, you might get stuck in a situation where your CTR goes below the required minimum and therefore you’re unintentionally making impression fraud. In order to protect their publishers (actually to keep their ads active so that they continue to pay) AdSense might send you the “you’re banned” email that can get you in really bad situation.

If you do get this email, I strongly suggest that you contact AdSense and tell them that you will lower the number of your ad units and ask them to give you some test period where you can increase your CTR above the minimum. Actually most publisher are afraid to get banned for high CTR, but in this case having low CTR is also a big problem.

Also I strongly suggest that if you have very low CTR (lower than 1%) you should try to change/optimize your pages in order to show highly relative AdSense ads or lower the ad units so that you CTR can go higher. This is common need for more clicks, but still some type of content don’t really generate too many clickers and in this case we must artificially keep the CTR higher due to this impressions fraud problem.

Please note that I don’t really have that much experience with impressions frauds since all my websites have average CTR between 5%-30% and I never got below the 1% mark. If you know more on that topic, please consider sharing it with us and helping fellow webmasters.