SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

In today’s market, its crucial for every marketer to track keyword response rates. Its simply the only way of tracking advertising results and knowing which of your keywords are working for you.

In the online marketing world, its just as important to track your ad results. Knowing the exact response rate to your advertisement lets you to figure out how well it performed, which can help increase your profits and lower your costs.

Dont be afraid to change a poorly responding advertisement to try to make it work better. Pay attention to headlines, ad copy, graphics and layout, and then be sure to re-test the ad. You might also find that where your sites are running is the problem try alternative systems. By the same token, you should test your keywords to make sure that they will work the way you want them to. Theyre very similar to advertisements in that they either work brilliantly or not at all.

Tracking your ad results allows you to be sure that your ad publisher has followed through on their end of the bargain, and the information you gather allows you to prepare better campaigns the next time. The best way to track online ad results is to measure click-through rates (the number of people who clicked on your advertisement). There are other measurements such as conversion ratio (the number of people who click through and buy), but measuring click-through is a fine way to get started. There are two methods of tracking click through rates mentioned below:

CGI Scripts.

You can download CGI scripts at plenty of websites, and you can place CGI scripts in your CGI directory if your web host supports it. Try to find a small but powerful CGI script that tracks clicks on your site do it invisibly, so your visitors dont know youre tracking them. LinkinLite is one free CGI script you could try, as an example, or you could have one made specially for you. Getting a custom script can be great, as long as you dont pay too much for it.

PHP and ASP Scripts

Some CGI scripts are better than others. Basically, CGI seems to be dieing slowly but surely. It is being replaced by ASP and PHP both of which have scripts available to perform these actions. PHP is emerging as the preferred language for server side scripting and is therefore the most accessible of the group. Depending on what your hosting service offers you should be able to find free tracking software simply by Googling for the software in the particular scripting language that you need. If you are unsure as to whether your hosting service allows a particular server-side scripting language, dont hesitate to ask. Most of these providers want all of their services used otherwise they feel as though they have wasted time and/or money implementing the service.

Online Tracking Services.

Online tracking services count click-throughs using own servers. This is usually free, although most require you to upgrade to paid versions before theyll let you do anything useful with the statistics. The upgrades are worth while, but you should try out the free version before upgrading to make sure that you are comfortable with the user interface. Once youve decided on a software to use, shop around. See if there is a similar interface on something cheaper. Your money can go really far on the internet, and if youre lucky you can take advantage of special offers.

If youre interested in a free online click-tracking service, try Hypertracker, Statmuncher, Adminder or Roibot. These services are all relatively straightforward. They are all pretty much equal in quality. The differences between these free services are more or less personal preference. But remember, a comfortable user interface goes a long ways. If you dont like the look and feel of the program, you wont enjoy using it and will eventually stop using it all together.

Banner ad click-through rates are usually between 0.5% and 5%, although for e-zines it can go as high as 10%. Thats about average compared to offline marketing methods, which average roughly 2%.

If you provide a service to a niche market, you are more likely to see higher click through rates. Professionals in the area of online marketing often settle for no less than a 7% click through rate. These rates can be done and should certainly be shot for.

Regardless of which tracking methods you use, you need to be tracking your keywords and advertising results somehow its essential, and it takes you a step further in the SEO marketplace. Every set of statistics lets you get to know your sites market position better and better, and gets you one step closer to where you want to be.

Many SEO experts will tell you that they have specific ways of choosing the right keywords for a website. Some do it using SEO tools software that compares possible keywords to see which are used the most. Some will give you DIY methods with spreadsheets. We say, however, that you should try every method you can in the search for keywords. Here are some steps that might help:

Identify and create a list of keywords from meta tags, research on your competitors, your highest-converting products and biggest current traffic sources. For each term (typically between 30 and 50 terms overall), narrow the field down to about 15 or 20, choosing the terms you feel are most relevant to your website. Your higher ranked competitors are probably up there for a reason so take a look at what they are providing. Make sure that everything is directly relevant and try to stretch yourself out into some unchartered water. The less common that your key words are, the more likely you are to get the search engine results for these key words.

We would recommend a piece of software called WordTracker to find out how many searches have been done on a certain term. You can choose to work with this information however you want spreadsheets are good, but you can use anything that will make it easy reasonably easy for you to track these keywords. Youre trying to find a popular word that has a low competition rate. Although this is easier said than done, its very rewarding to find an area where your site can succeed because of the lack of competition. You should remember, though, that these search databases are relatively small, and should be used for comparing keywords against one another rather than for estimating their true market sizes.

This keyword selection research should then be compared with client experience of which keywords may be most profitably optimized, as well as any current ranking on the target keywords. Data from PPC campaigns can be helpful for this. The outcome should be a focused list of, say, 15-20 keywords that are both strong performers in terms of search volume, as well as solid candidates for successful optimization.

When determining how profitable your key words are you should look into your web sites statistics and see what key words were used for what number of sales. This is called your conversion rate. The more sales that are associated with a certain key word, the more valuable that key word is. It is important to account for all of the variables, however. If ten people come across your site through a certain key word but only one of them buys an item this key word isnt as profitable as a key word that one person finds your site through and still orders a product. It is important to work percentages into your decision of worth of a key word. Your conversion rate is the number of sales divided by the number of visitors.

You probably know who your competitors are, so go to their site and open the source code of a few of their pages (select View Source from your browsers menu). Look for the tag to see which keywords theyre aiming for. Their keywords are often garbage, but if you look around at a few sites then you can often find keywords you hadnt thought of. It is not good practice to simply copy and paste a list of key words. It would even be concievable that you would be charged with copyright infringement for such activities. Whether or not you get charged, it is morally wrong. Looking through and coming across a few extra relevant key words is one thing. Steeling an entire list is something else completely.

Another approach is to type in the keywords you have in mind and look at the current top results. Analyze their pages for keywords, descriptions and content this will give you some idea of what kind of keyword density you should be looking at for your keywords. If the sites that come up are a different kind of business to you altogether then youve probably chosen a dodgy keyword remember that youre trying to get relevant traffic, not just any traffic.

The general rules that you need to keep in mind when selecting key words are:

1. Try to select unique key words that your competitors have not thought of.

2. Optimize for your most profitable key words. How many sales does the key word generate? How much profit is made for each of these sales?

3. Make sure that the key words are very relevant to your site so that people who find your site through your key words will not immediately leave.

4. Try to assemble a list of key words that covers your site very will so that you arent leaving anyone or anything out.