If you have decided to do Pay Per Click Advertising for your company, products or services you ought to know the ways to create Ads that will attract relevant leads. The Ad you create will play an important role in the success of your advertising campaign.

In PPC advertising, Keywords play an important part mainly because of the contextual importance they carry. But merely this isn’t enough. The Ad should also be good for the potential customer to notice it.

Here are a few pointers you should keep in mind when creating ads-

Effective Text Ads

Keyword Usage

The Title should contain the keywords you are targeting. When the user sees the same keywords he searched for in the Ad Title, the likelihood of the Ad being clicked increases. Again, its good to have the keywords in the display URL and the description as well.

The most important information should be written in the first line of description. Users are going to throw a cursory glance at your Ad and hence you would want them to see the important text first.

Call to Action

You need to specify what should the user do after he reads your Ad? You don’t want the user to keep guessing the next step.

Examples are: Call Now, Apply Now, Enroll Today, Book Now etc.

Landing Page

The page which the user lands on after clicking the Ad, should be very relevant to your Ad, else it can turn off your lead! If your website doesn’t have such a page, create a new one or even better, build a Microsite for your campaign.

Simple example: An Ad promoting cameras should not have a landing page featuring only mobiles!

Punctuation

Don’t use too many exclamation marks. Apart from Google’s restrictions, the Ad will seem too loud to the reader.

Few effective methods to frame the ads

Ask questions in the ads like:”Looking for a house? or Do you need an expert advice?”

Offer solutions or Tell your story: People can relate to real life situations better.

Compare with competition: If you have a great differentiating factor, why not flaunt it?

Effective Banner Ads

The key element in Banner/Display Ads is the visual impact it creates. Adding too much text will take away this very advantage. Images, colors and very short and appealing text is what the Ad should be composed of. You should experiment with colors and Action Buttons to see which one appeals the best.

Keywords

These are significant only to determine the theme of the Ad.

Ad Position and Ad Size

Certain positions of the Ad on the Site and certain sizes of the Ad work better than others. Leaderboard  (728 x 90) is one of the popular sizes.

Site Target Audience

The Ad Placement is one of the important factors in Display Ads. Care should be taken that the site where the Ad will be displayed has good quality traffic and a target audience relevant to your Ad.

When to use Banner Ads?

Banner or Display Advertisements should be used ideally for achieving the following:

Build Brand Awareness: With the use of CPM bidding, you can aim to reach a good volume of target audience. The visual impact of Display Ads is sure to attract the attention of the visitors of the website where the Ad is placed.

To increase the search volume for a Brand or Product: When a new brand or product is launched, there wouldn’t be an existing search volume for the same. Display advertising is a great way of building the search volume in such cases. This is useful when creating a complete new category also.

These are some basic tips to help in effective Ad creation and eventually in your advertising campaign. Each one should be tested for different variations to better the results.

We’ll never know how exactly Google’s page ranking algorithm works. But we definitely know the important factors that decide how the search engine ranks your page or website.

Data available from a lot of research suggests the following are the most important factors and are essentially the main components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm.

• Trust/Authority of the host domain
• Link popularity of the specific page
• Anchor texts of external links to the page
• On page keyword usage
• Traffic +CTR data
• Social graph metrics

The optimization process to improve your page/website ranking is done in two ways: On-Page optimization and Off-Page optimization. On-Page is the first step towards SEO and involves optimizing the content of your webpage and is something you can directly influence. Off-Page involves influencing the external factors to improve the page ranking.

Let us examine some of the On-Page SEO ranking factors which can help your website get better rankings on search engines.

> Accessible Quality Content is an absolute must. How you ensure this depends on few things like -

-Unique quality content- Search Engines don’t like copied content. A SE would always aim at showing search results that users will like. Hence if you have a great unique quality content on your website or blog, you are likely to score more. This has to be both at page level and across the site.

-URL structure - An SEO friendly URL will have the appropriate and relevant keyword placements in the domain, subdomain, folder and path. Keyword effectiveness in the URL decreases with increase in URL length and the position of the keyword. Hence URL depth should not be more than 4 or 5. URLs should be static and not dynamic

-Internal Link Structure - All pages should be accessible from the home page. Anchor text can be used to connect the pages internally.

Internal linking is useful especially to promote a new page added on your site which would take some time to get indexed. You can send links from popular pages to this new page or to even a poorly ranked page.

Also, include only relevant outbound links as too many of them will take away the link juice from your page.

-Spider Accessibility

This is important so that your pages get indexed. Proper site structure and navigation is essential so that spiders can access your pages. The robots.txt file will define what the crawler can access.

-Sitemaps

The sitemap.xml file will have location of the pages on your website. It will guide the spider how to crawl the website.You can submit the sitemap file to the webmaster if you are having any indexing issues.

-Server Response Codes

Reducing the number of 404 crawling issue is important.

It helps to have a useful 404 page. 404 is basically the server response code for page not found. The user will land on this page if he tries to access a non existent page (case of broken link or typing a wrong URL). In such cases, it would help if the 404 pg provides a link back to your main working page or provide relevant links related to your site. Such customization is possible by Google’s 404 widget that can be embedded on the page itself. This can definitely improve user’s experience.
Google webmaster tool can be used to check for sources of, page not found errors for your website

> Keywords & Content

Nothing can beat the importance of optimum keyword usage for a successful SEO of your website. An appealing content interspersed with well researched keywords relevant to thetopic is the ideal scenario.But excessive use of keywords will overwrite this advantage. It’s more like spamming.

The page titles, headings and sub headings on the page should have the combination of your main targeted keywords.

Keyword rich meta-data i.e using keywords in the Meta titles and description helps extremely in SEO.

It also helps to have keyword presence in the URL and having a keyword as the anchor text placed internally in the content.

Google AdWords is the popular tool to get keyword ideas. Its good to know more on How to use Google Keywords Tool for best SEO results

If you have done your On-Page optimization right, you have set a strong base for a successful SEO of your website.

There are two ways of performing SEO. On Page optimization and Off Page optimization. Off Page technique typically means ensuring more backlinks to your website and consequently link building is a very important part of the same. The link popularity of a specific page is the second most important parameter of Google’s ranking algorithm (according to a survey by SEOmoz). One of the advanced SEO techniques for link building is the Link Wheel optimization.

What is Link Wheel?

Link Wheel is essentially a SEO strategy aimed at improving the page or website ranking. Its main purpose is to build more but relevant backlinks into your site, as quality links from sites with authority referencing to your site improve the ranking of your website.

It is a process wherein, first you register yourself on the popular sites (like blogs and social bookmarking sites) you would use to build the link wheel. Then you post unique content on each of these sites containing a link to your main website as well as a link to one of the other sites/blogs you have posted content on. This way each of the sites featuring your content gets linked to atleast one other site. It helps in bringing in more link juice to your website by building more targeted backlinks.

How to use Link Wheels Technique?

Highly ranked blog sites and social bookmarking sites like WordPress, eblogger, StumbleUpon, Digg etc are used for building the link wheel strategy. For example, consider these four popular web 2.0 sites (they are free too!) to make the link wheel. You will have to write distinct and unique articles which are also pertinent to your focus area on all these sites. Each of these articles will have reference to your main website or blog and additionally a link to one of the other remaining 3 sites. And this way you establish a link wheel. This wheel structure should be unique to your website and not scraped from other websites.

The wheel can always be expanded by adding more linking sites to it. However there are two issues in this method. One, you will always be required to generate newer content for all the websites in your wheel which can mean a lot of writing and being innovative over a period of time. Second, Google or any search engine is smart enough to recognize a linking pattern over a span of time. And this will lead to it being tagged as spam!

However to tackle the first issue, you can pick short subtopics from an area and then write about a variety of them on each of the web 2.0 sites. This way it gives you more meat to write. Moreover there are even keyword or article spinners and tools like SENUKE available to help you in this. But its advisable to use them only when required on a large scale.The second issue can be avoided by introducing randomness in the wheel structure. For e.g. if A->B->C->D->A-> is the original linking pattern, you can introduce additional links like A->C, D->B also.

Thus in link wheel strategy, by actually utilizing the authority of the established blog sites/bookmarking sites, we are sending the link juice to the main target site. But the same favour is returned to these individual sites as well since these referring sites also get linked in the link wheel process. Hence, if used intelligently, link wheel can be a great way for optimization of your website.

For achieving good SEO results, there are a lot of factors to be considered like the keyword usage on the pages, original content on the page, the URL structure, Internal Link structure, Pagination and Link Juice. Getting the site in the top ranks of SERP is the priority of every company. For e.g., if I Google search for ‘mobiles’, I’ll get 198,000,000 search. results. Now if you are dealing in mobiles, you don’t want to be lost in these results. Out of the above, using good keywords is one of the most important factors to tackle the issue of too many.

What are good keywords?

Keywords should be such that a search query on those would not only show your site or page on the search results page but also put the page in the top of the search results. The keywords can be a single word or combination of words in a phrase. There are tools available for finding out the right keywords for your articles. Since Google is the best search engine so far, the most effective and commonly used is the Google Keywords Tool or the Google Adwords Tool.

How to find good keywords?

On the Google Adwords tool, you can find keyword ideas either by entering a word or a phrase or even a website URL to your article/blog. There are options to refine your search as relevant. Under Advanced Options and Filters, you can refine by Location, Language and Mobile or Desktop search. And you can also filter by the relevant categories list available on the left side of the page.

Once you hit search, the tool will show the average monthly number of Global Searches and Local Searches (which should be used in the regional context) for the keyword. It will also show against it what the proportion of competition for the search item is, the box against it if full green, it means strong competition and vice versa.

Further below the tool will also suggest keyword ideas around the search item you have typed in. This data is a gold mine because here you can compare which are the best keywords for your purpose. The thumb rule is the keyword with the maximum or highest search volume but very low competition is the best one to use. But also, the keywords should essentially be relevant in your articles context. The more competitive the keyword is costlier the average cost per click.

The sort by relevance option is also very useful and must be used when you are basing your judgment upon a specific factor e.g. Local search results and then correspondingly look at the other factors like competition.

An important option in the tool is the ‘Match Type’. It helps in finding the exact match or a combination of words. It’ll help in knowing the variations of keywords also. It is useful to look at both the Broad and Phrase match results because it will give better insights for judgment.

Broad Match - This is the default option when you start the search. It’s a broader criteria and the words searched under this can appear anywhere in the query. This type is not very useful for getting focused results and the traffic driven in this case will be generic.

Phrase Match - Here the order of the phrase is important and is like searching keywords in quotes. The keywords would appear in the same specific order as given in the search box.

Exact match – This allows for very specific targeting as it limits it to the exact words/phrase typed in. In this case the number of impressions received will be limited as compared to broad match but it allows for focused targeting and sticking to a specific context

The results from the tool can be amazingly surprising; you may notice that a plural form of a certain word has received much more search volume than its singular form. So, it’s important to test for various combination and formation of words and not just singular forms. In the end best results can be achieved only after some number of trials for the search of good keywords.

Digital Media, Internet marketing and a lot of discussions around the traditional vs the new media are doing the rounds these days. And rightly so. Television, Radio, Outdoor media like billboards and print media like newspaper, leaflets are all what you have been experiencing traditionally and are referred to as the Traditional Media. Whereas Digital encompasses the Internet (incl. social media, Email, Video), Mobile and DTH.

If unsure about which media is better for your purpose, a quick glance at some of the main differences as a first step might be of help.

• Providing instant feedback is the magic of Digital Media. In traditional media there is lack of customer engagement and the feedback mechanism from customers is only limited to the surveys that may be conducted. Whereas social media (like Facebook) gives companies instant and direct access to their customers and enables the feedback process this way. For e.g., if you visit the fan page for Nokia on Facebook, the number of likes and the user comments on various features of the handsets is definitely a picture of the brands popularity.
• Digital Media makes very focused targeting possible. A definite profiling of the consumer base based on parameters like gender, likes, dislikes, age, and history is possible. So finding the intended audience becomes easier. Traditional marketing cannot precisely achieve this. Beyond gathering certain demographic features, it has limitation to get to the specifics.
• Digital Media gives accountability as its effects are measurable. Hence it is better at measuring the ROI with relevant statistics available. Factors like how many people visited your website, how much time did they spend on which page, which links they clicked etc are easily measurable with digital media and hence it helps in making informed decisions rather than based on some premises.
• Digital Media enables the visibility of the advertisement anytime of the day, unlike the Television or Radio ads which offer a very short attention span. Even print media ads would get discarded eventually. Digital Media can be searched or accessed as long as you are online. This also means global reach with no time lag and manageable costs.
• Digital Media facilitates audience engagement and their response making it a two way communication process. Social Media Marketing enables companies to have personal interactions and hence helps build relations with its prospective customers. On the Nike Facebook page, an interesting contest is posted; some pictures are uploaded and users need to identify which Nokia phone was used for that. Awareness, engagement, feedback all are simply achieved through this.
• The results or the effects of digital marketing can be visible within a shorter span of time. While traditional marketing offers no such advantage. For e.g., take an ad aired on radio, you will never be sure if it has reached your set of targeted customers and of those who did actually listen it up, how many got influenced and buy your product?
• Digital Media scores again over Traditional in customer acquisition. But Traditional is better for branding purposes.

Digital Media is thus setting the track to reform the way marketing was done traditionally, like direct marketing, customer profiling and customer interactions. 
It definitely is the way forward to create a buzz and amass a critical customer base. Speed of response, low advertising costs, high customer engagement rate, ease of measurement are all essential factors working in favour of Digital Media paving the way for it to be the future face of marketing.