SeoBlackhat.co.uk

I shared this recently with a colleague and he suggested I pass it on. Often, when you are looking to get into a market, you get in without doing some quick math in your head and a few searches to determine if you should do that $500.00 ad spend in AdWords as a test. When you find a potential market, spend ten minutes to determine if it can be profitable. If it can be, then turn on the PPC test to see if it can convert well for you. Sometimes, a great market just wont convert well for you it happens and it is best to know as soon as possible if the market is a dud. But make sure you do these steps first:

In this example, I will use ClickBank, which sells mostly eBooks. You can apply these steps to any affiliate program or network.

Step One: Write down the industry, exact eBook name and author.

Step Two: Write down the commission per sale.

Step Three: Based on a conversion ratio of 3%, project revenue. (while I realize that 3% seems high, it is what you should expect with the right targeted keywords, the right product and the right landing page).

Step Four: Write down your break even point in terms of Cost Per Click (CPC).

Step Five: Open the Keyword Tool in Google AdWords

Step Six: Enter the main keyword or the merchants site

Step Seven: Show Estimated CPC, Search Volume Trends and Highest Volume Occurred In (drop down Choose Columns to Display)

Step Eight: Change Match Type to Exact (we dont want non-qualified clicks)

Step Nine: Sort by Estimated CPC (highest first)

Step Ten: Scroll down to the range of the break even point you wrote down in Step Four. You must have at least 300 in Search Volume from the month prior to consider using the keyword phrase. This will give you ten potential searchers per day.

Step Eleven: Verify that at least 100 clicks per day can be had with the keywords which match the above criteria.

Step Twelve: Re-run Traffic Estimator and target the actual product name and the authors name and look for traffic estimates of ten clicks or more.

Lets do an example together:

1. Dog Training. Kingdom of Pets: SitStayFetch by Daniel Stevens

2. $31.23

3. $93.69 ($31.23 x 3) 3 sales is based on 100 visitors at 3% conversion (most will state that this conversion ratio is too high, but because we will focus on the keywords that sell, this is the minimum that you should expect).

4. $0.94 ($93.69/100) Paying $0.94 per click would break even on the campaign.

5. N/A

6. I prefer to target the merchants site, as it often gives me a faster pull of effective keywords. I can also use SpyFu as outlined in yesterdays edition. So I put in: http://www.kingdomofpets.com/

7-9. N/A

10. The first section are keywords related to how to train which is the focus of the site and the keywords we want to focus on to sell the guide. Here are the ones that I selected:

how to train dog ($0.96) 74,000. Yes, this is above the range, but just barely and it is highly focused.
how to train my dog ($.90) 3,600
how to train a puppy ($0.80) 27,100
how to train puppies ($0.56) 3,600

The other sections? You can target them, but you will need to create a new landing page for each because each has a different market and we want to keep our conversions as high as possible.Here are some ideas:

dog training collar – this would be an eCommerce product sale rather than an informational eBook.

dog trainer – with the slumping economy, many could be looking to moonlight to help make ends meet. This could spur you to create your own product on how to make a career out of being a dog trainer. There is plenty of information to pull from on the web and being the merchant often is the ticket you have been looking for.

dog bark – this is a problem. By targeting your landing page to show how the problem can be solved quickly, easily and affordably is what the prospect is seeking.

This is where out of the box thinking comes in. Business opportunities can come anytime and anywhere, but you must seize the opportunity.

11. Verified. On the conservative side, 3,000 searches per day should result in at least 100 clicks.

12. Searching for kingdom of pets, sitstayfetch, sit stay fetch and daniel stevens did not return results which were usable.

With the above, it can be assumed since we can get over 100 clicks per day at around the break even point that this would be a product worth pursuing. A $50-$300.00 PPC test would be worthwhile.

PPC Tip: I learned this one from Dan Thies over at SEOFastStart.com and StomperNet Faculty member. Make your bids half of what the top bid is, so if you do this, then you can target keywords at DOUBLE your break-even point to gain more qualified click throughs.

Note: Please understand that this information is for Google AdWords Landing Pages – not Landing Pages in general.

Affiliate marketers know that Landing Pages are the best weapon they have. Those who do not use it either do not understand the concept or are just plain lazy. More often than not, it is the latter. Affiliate Marketers see that others do not use it and so, they dont bother with it too. You see, laziness is contagious.

To have an effective Landing Page, we need to understand what the Landing Page is for. A Landing Page is not just a duplicate of your sales page. It is not a page renamed to run a PPC campaign. It is, on the other hand, a page that focuses on selling the product or service. This is why all the elements of effective design are usually stripped out on this page.

When visitors come to your site, your Landing Page should give them only two options: To Buy or To Leave. There shouldnt be any other option aside from that. Do not distract them and make the mistake of giving more options to choose from. If you want them to subscribe for more information, create a name squeeze page. Keep your focus and remember that Landing Pages exists for only one reason to make a sale.

Below is a list of what I do when I create a Landing Page:

Webserver/Configuration – You do have a good host, right? The domain has its down IP address? A clean domain, clean IP address, with no ties with link farms, spamming, etc. is vital to your success.

Headline – This aspect is often greatly misused. The thought of, I must cram as many keywords as possible into my Headline for maximum performance is a thought process hooked on failure. Here is a tip that makes absolute sense, but so many people do not do it. The headline on the page should match (somewhat) to the keyword phrase being targeted.

Example: The keyword discount widgets could have a headline of: This is the Place for Discount Widgets. That alerts the visitor that they are indeed in the right place. Just by changing the headline to one that is relevant to the search causes a drop in CPC and can cause an increase in CTR. Or worse, you can get Google Slapped.

Font Face, Color & Size - Avoid having a distracting and cluttered look on your Landing Page. Having four to five different fonts on your page create a messy look that people would love to hate. While having different fonts for your headlines are fine, having different fonts in your body text is distracting. Do not even think about doing this. Use only one font for your body text.

Test results show that Times New Roman is the best offline print font and because of this, it has become the default font on the internet. This, unfortunately, is a big mistake. It turns out that Times New Roman causes rapid eye fatigue which makes it one of the worst fonts online.

The best fonts for online use are Verdana and Arial. Of the two, I would recommend that you use Verdana as it consistently outperforms every font. It reduces eye strain and increases readability. Remember to use a standard font at all times. Also keep in mind that not all computers may have the font that you use. If you want a standard headline font, it is best to create it as a graphic so it will look constant on every computer. You definitely want your message to have the look that you intend it to have.

You should always aim to make your text readable. The standard size for text is 2 and it is advisable to put dark text on white background. In fact, black text on a white background is preferred. Landing pages arent supposed to show off how cute you can be. Landing pages are supposed to sell. This is serious stuff and requires you to put on your best face.

There is a reason that the top companies choose dark text on a light background. It isnt by accident, it is by design. Follow their lead.

Dont Let Search Engines Crawl Your Landing Pages – Many marketers want as many pages in the search engine indexes as possible. Dont do this as I mentioned above.

Amit Singhal, from Google, did a 50 slide presentation back in 2004, regarding the Challenges in Running a Commercial Web Search Engine.

Why am I covering it now? First, a member sent this to me to comment on, and I think it is rather interesting to see where things were then compared to five years later. Heres a hint: Not much has changed.

Question: How many queries are unique?
Answer: Over half

At first glance, you would look at that and think I have to do a better job of getting more keywords since users search patterns are not consistent.

Wait. After looking at the data from about 60 sites, here is an example from one of my typical sites.

108k visits from 28k keyword queries. Looking at it this way, it looks quite diverse, however, looking at the Top 100 queries, 56,656 visits came through. Which means about 52,000 visits came through the remaining 27,900 queries.

Am I optimizing for 28,000 keywords? Not even close. So how do you improve your chances of coming up for many of the phrases which may never come up on an analytics report or during keyword research.

If I can quote Dan Thies, Use modifiers aggressively.

What are modifiers? You already know them, but probably by a different name.

Examples of common modifiers are:

• best
• buy
• cheap
• discount
• wholesale
• online
• accessories

Modifiers allow you to expand your keyword set. So instead of having just blue widgets, you would have discount blue widgets, blue widget accessories etc. Geo Targeted (San Francisco, bay area, Chicago, etc.) would also be classified as a modifier.

Simply put, Video SEO is the art and science of ensuring that your video content attracts as much traffic as possible.

You have basically two options: You can host the videos on your own site or use Amazons S3 servers, or you can post them on YouTube and embed them in your pages.

Important Tip: If you post your videos on shared service like YouTube, make sure you read the Terms of Use. Often, by posting the video on their server you are transferring ownership of the video to them.

Where do viewers discover video online?

44% – Discover Randomly
43% – Via Sharing
43% – Via Video Websites
39% – Via Search Engines
27% – Via Marketing Email
4% – Via RSS & MRSS Feeds

Fact: 38% of users who search Google in 2008 were served VIDEO as part of Universal Search in the SERPs.

First Generation Video Search Engines:

• Depends primarily on Metadata and on-page text
• Most are moving to Second Generation
• Examples: Google Video, AOL Video, TruVEO, Yahoo! Video, Live Search

Second Generation Video Search Engines:

• Use Metadata, on-page text, UGC (User-Generated Content: Comments, Annotations, etc.), and advanced recognition technologies (speech, visual, facial, OCR, etc.)
• Examples: Blinkx, ClipBlast, VideoSurf, VideoCrawler

SEO Tips and Tricks for Video

• Search Engines cant read the video content, so it is recommended NOT to do a full transcript of the video, but rather a Cliff Notes summary of the content. Why? Instead of just having someone read the full transcript, which could be boring without the visual support. Plus, the summary can be an enticement to view the video, which could lead to conversion.
• Video search engines need to be told what the video is about using Metadata and On-Page text, just as you would a normal page with a few wrinkles.
• If possible, have multiple video formats available: flv, mov, mpeg, mp4, etc.
• Include the word video at the end of the filename along with your main keyword phrase. Use hyphens to separate words.
• Use In-File Metadata which will include: Metadata Title, Author, Date and Description.
• Keep in mind that video search engines arent real good at indexing Metadata right now, but they are getting better at it.
• Use only 1 video per URL and use unique URLs
• Place your videos in a folder just off the root, dont place them many levels deep.
• If you you have a lot of videos, you may consider using a subdomain (i.e. http://videos.yourdomain.com/).
• I dont recommend .tv extensions right now. You may want to register them, but dont use them for video just yet. The brandability is still poor.
• If you want a new domain for your videos, you might consider using your keyword term with video or media
  at the end. (Example: IndiaTravelMedia.com).
• Use embedded players, dont use pop-up players, they are annoying and many have pop-up blockers.
• Make sure your navigation includes a link to your video content.

Tips to Make Your Videos Viral

• Allow visitors to grab your embedded code to use on their sites or blogs.
• Include social bookmarking tool links (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
• Enable comments to invite conversation.
• Allow users to subscribe to your videos (so you can get them back with future video releases) via RSS/MRSS
• Use internal linking to promote your videos
• Use MRSS Feed Syndication

http://www.blinkx.com/rssupload

http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/submit

http://www.reelseo.com/submit-videos-rss-mrss

Google Video Sitemaps & XML Feed

Google has XML Sitemaps for Video. eMarketer projects that 87% of the total U.S. Internet audience will watch videos online by 2011. Guess who dominates in the video search market? Yeah, Google.

If you use the XML function, which I highly recommend, make sure you provide a thumbnail URL so you increase the likelihood your video is included in Googles video index.

• If you want your users to be able to watch your videos on Google video, make sure to set the player to Autoplay so that users will be shown the video after they click on the result.
• When you submit a Video Sitemap to Google, it isnt only searchable in Google Video, but on other Google products as well. This can help you DOMINATE the video landscape.

How can you dominate? Well, think of this. We have all seen the famous eye tracking study of the SERPs, but have you seen the one when video thumbnails are presented to the user?

Now, if that isnt an eye opening experience, I dont know what is. Check out how much more of the page is getting the users attention. This drives the point home that people are heavily attracted to images. This is why you need video to dominate the SERPs.

A Page Layout Example

1. There is plenty of text around the video to give SEO support so the engine will know the theme of the video content.

2. Write an effective and compelling Title

3. The description needs to work hand-in-hand with the Title to gain interest from the visitor.

4. The video should be embedded with Social Bookmarking icons, rating option, Email to a friend, the link code and embed code to allow for the video to go viral.

5. Include a transcript, but not a full transcript. Keep it to a Cliff Notes summary.

6. Allow comments to bring life into the video posting.

7. Use cross linking for other related videos or related content on your own site or network of sites.

8. An option would be to include Vertical Channel Content, but this is optional.

9. Contextual ads can be used to monetize the site, but it is a good idea to have them tucked away to not distract from the real reason they are there – to watch your video content and become hooked.

10. Tag cloud. Keywords are placed here to raise awareness more for the video search engines indexing the page.

More Video Tips

• If you have a long video, break it up into many shorter videos. Visitors are more likely to click the Next button than they are to sit through a long video.
• Adobe Premiere Pro and OnLocation are solid desktop solutions for video editing.
• Link to your video from your site
• Send the link to your new video to your subscriber list on YouTubew

1) If youre an affiliate, and you are directly linking to the merchants page with your affiliate code, change the CTA to /yourdomain.com/buy/ and do a 301 redirect to the merchant.
2) Make sure your Title tag is unique and contains the targeted keyword phrase.
3) Ditto with the Meta Description.
4) Ditto with the H1 tag.
5) Get the Privacy, Contact Us, About Us, Terms, etc. on the page if they arent already there.
6) Put the keyword phrase at the bottom of the page, just above the footer links. But dont link it to anything.
7) Use it at least twice in the body of the page.
Get some good solid links 5-10 or so to your landing page. As strange as it sounds, getting links from pages that are cached and it gets spidered by GoogleBot has helped in the slap – but not consistently.