Adwords is the component of Googles advertising programs that allows web masters or SEO professionals to advertise web sites via links from other web sites. Adwords is used in conjunction with adsense in such a way that your links are placed only on the most relevant web pages. You are given a good deal of traffic at a very reasonable price and the conversion rate from adwords is higher than that of any other pay per click advertising system on the web.

As I just mentioned, Google Adwords is a pay per click service. This means that you must pay Google a certain amount for each click that you receive via your adwords links. The best part about this is that you never have to pay unless your link is clicked so every payment that you make to Google was in exchange for a real, live potential customer.

When advertising with Adwords, it is crucial that your advertising links go to pages that have high conversion rates. You don’t want to send traffic to a page that doesn’t make money. If you have one page that absolutely blows the other pages out of the water in the way of conversion rates, setting up an adwords program that links to this site can give your profits a huge kick.

Once you have decided what pages you are going to link your ads to, you must decide what you are going to place in your ads. Google Adwords allows you to place a headline, two descriptions, a URL to display, and a destination URL. The best way to configure this is to put the title of your destination page into the title, use the two description lines to inform your visitors of what they are going to see, list your domain or root directory as the display URL, and use a high conversion page as the destination URL. This combination of information will provide your visitors with the best idea as to whether or not they are going to find something that they want to purchase on your site.

Remember that there may be a page with a high sales rate that doesn’t stand alone well if you send traffic directly to it. If you have pages that build up the products sold, these may be the places that your links are better spent. You may want to provide your visitors with a brief description or several pages of information regarding your product before sending them to the order page.

Google attempts to enforce its standards so that you do not pay for clicks that are made merely in an attempt to boost an adsense users profits. This is crucial because there are so many web masters out there who will continually click on the ads on their own pages in an attempt to boost their profits. These clicks do nothing for you as the web master probably doesn’t even look at the page before exiting it and clicking the links again.

Google’s anti-fraud system is a match for that of any advertising agency on the net. It is, however, possible that you will pay for an click here and there that is not honest. This is the risk involved in Google Adwords. It is so easy to think that you have come up with a powerful solution with no possible downside, but the possibility of fraud is always there when it comes to online pay per click ads.

The best way to combat fraudulent clicks is to keep close tabs on your statistics. If you are getting hundreds of visits from a particular web page each day and each of the visits is under twenty cents in length, there is more than a slight possibility that it is a fraudulent attempt to inflate that site’s adsense earnings. If you encounter such a practice, report it to Google immediately. This will save you and many other web masters a great deal of money. The fact that there are dishonest people in this world will not change, but the dishonesty of pay per click advertisement is diminishing and will, hopefully, continue to do so.

When using adwords, you will increase your traffic, but that isn’t the goal. The goal of advertising is to increase profits so if your profits do not increase when you begin to utilize adwords, you may want to reevaluate your usage of your ads. You may decide that you need to change the destination page or you may find that you want to display your ads on pages based in different countries. Whatever you decide, the fact is that if you plan carefully, adwords is bound to increase your sales opportunities.

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

In the online marketing world, it’s 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.

Don’t 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. They’re 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 don’t know you’re 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 don’t 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, don’t 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 they’ll 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 you’ve 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 you’re lucky you can take advantage of special offers.

If you’re 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 don’t like the look and feel of the program, you won’t 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%. That’s 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 – it’s essential, and it takes you a step further in the SEO marketplace. Every set of statistics lets you get to know your site’s market position better and better, and gets you one step closer to where you want to be.

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In order to tap into the power of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) elements, you first need to know what they are. In HTML, elements are bits of markup that tell a web browser to display or format parts of web pages. For example, <p> means paragraph, and <b> means bold – there are plenty more. These elements are used constantly when writing web pages. You should basically think of your HTML elements as the organizational and visual formatting of your HTML document.

By learning HTML, you can tap into the power of HTML elements and create a more interesting website as well as tipping off search engines as to what the most important information on your web page is. Many people starting out on the web just use ‘easy editors’ (also known as WYSIWYG for what you see is what you get) that show the page as it will appear, without ever looking at the code that the page is actually made from. This is fine if you intend to distribute and are only interested in the look of the page. Visually artistic people are often drawn to using WYSIWYG (pronounced wise-ee-wig) editors when creating their web pages because it allows them to see exactly what they are doing and frees them from the time consuming task of learning HTML.

The structure of HTML is based on logic, order, and syntax and is, therefore, relatively simple to use. To make a heading, you use the heading elements (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and so on up to <h6>). To start a new paragraph, you use a paragraph element (<p>). To format a list, you use a list element (start with <ul> then use <li>). In order to learn HTML it is a good idea to go to www.w3schools.com As XHTML is gaining more and more popularity among web masters (and search engines) it may be a good idea to learn that instead. XHTML is basically a more standardized version of HTML and it is worth learning. If you learn XHTML along with CSS, you will have be able to make extremely powerful web pages.

Once you understand that all you’re doing is providing these simple structures, you realize the understated power of HTML. You see, once your HTML structure is in place with the appropriate markup, you can add CSS (Cascaded Style Sheets) for visual presentation, using a graphics design program. Good elements provide meaning and structure to your content, making it simple to add whatever design you want afterwards.

That said, the most important HTML elements (also called tags) that you will run into are <title> and <h1> (through <h6>). Whatever you put between <title> and </title> is what appears in the blue margin at the top of the browser. This is also what search engines use as the link text to your site. Your title should be relatively descriptive and include as many key words as it can without becoming abrasive. Seven or eight words is generally a good length for the title of a web page.

Next are the <h1> tags. Generally, when you are trying to optimize a web page for the search engine you will use this as a subheading. Header tags (h1-h6) are all weighted by search engines as more important than regular text because the search engine assumes that you will only make text larger if it is important. This is a good rule to live by. If you place your subheading within a header tag you will probably get slightly better search results for the key words in this subheading. Remember that the difference between the way that a search engine sees an <h1> tag and an <h2> tag is minuscule so set your header numbers based on visual preference rather than search engine standards.

Another tag that is very important is the <a> tag (or anchor tag). This tag is used to link to other web pages and it is invaluable to your web page because search engines like to see relevant links on your web site. Make sure that you only link to relevant sites, and while your at it, try to get a return link so that your page rank increases.

Other tags such as <b> (bold) tags and <i> (italics) tags will also help out. You can put these around your key words or less important subheadings. These won’t do quite as much for you, but they will definitely help to some extent and should be utilized when practical.

The difference between your site and other sites of equal page rank and similar material will be how well you utilize HTML elements to exemplify your work. You can very easily modify your web site so that things stick out where they should. Solid knowledge of HTML is your best friend when you are performing SEO activities. Remember, “If you build it, they will come.”

Some Guidelines for Using HTML Elements.

While the BLOCKQUOTE element is intended for longer quotations and Q is intended for shorter quotations, the Q element causes all sorts of problems because it’s not very widely supported. You shouldn’t use it at the moment – hopefully next-generation browsers will support it.

The BR element is one of the more abused ones. If you understand how HTML works, you should realize that its use is rarely justified: use the P element for paragraphs instead of using the BR element to provide paragraph-like breaks.

Now that you’re armed with some simple information, you should consider learning more about HTML and how to use it. You used to need to learn HTML before you could create a web page, and that gave a lot of people the edge when it came to more advanced web design and development later on. If you want to catch up, you need to know what you’re doing on the technical side of things.

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