InspiredByYou.org, an ecommerce website that sells ponytail hats for women, teens, and children suffering from hair loss, due to chemotherapy, radiation, cancer, alopecia or any other illness is now live! These hats for hair loss are a perfect solution for hair loss.

The site features an interactive flash hat builder, options to participate in fund raising to help fight cancer and the inspiring story of owner Angela Lemkes’ own fight with the deadly disease. A portion of every purchase is donated to cancer research and cancer support programs.

Congratulations InspiredByYou.org!

You’ve taken the time to research keywords, set up your bids, create your headlines and ads, and then you put your homepage as the url to send all of those clicks to. Oh, and by the way, you’re selling the most incredible couches ever made, they come in 2 sizes, leather or fabric and if you choose fabric, 4 different patterns, if you choose leather, 4 different colors and that you’re offering free shipping and oh yes, your homepage mentions nothing about this but it does have cool flash. Guess what? You might as well throw your money out the window since it’s being spent about that effectively by sending all of your traffic to your homepage.

I think you can see where this is going; you should use a landing page or pages to help turn those clicks to purchases. The idea is simple, if the visitor initially searched for brown leather couches and you had the top result and he clicked on it and landed on your homepage that:

• had no mention of the term brown leather couches on it
• had a cool flash presentation about what a great company you are.

What do you think the visitor is going to do? Studies show he’s probably going to hit his back button and go to the next result.
So what is the right way to address this? Send the visitor to a page that has what he’s looking for. He told you up front he’s looking for brown leather couches so put him on a page that:

• has the phrase “brown leather couches” somewhere in a prominent position on the page
• Show him pictures of your brown leather couches
• Let him know it comes in other colors and in fabric as well
• Show him a price
• Give him the opportunity to purchase it
• Let him know that free shipping is available

Now what do you think the visitor is going to do? Probably pull out his credit card and buy that great brown couch you have for sale.

Landing pages don’t need to be stand alone pages created specifically for the campaign (although you should use that approach if your current site doesn’t have pages that can support your keywords), they can be an existing page within your site but they need to properly address the needs of your ppc campaign.

Spend your money wisely and support that spend by being smart throughout the ppc process and that includes where you send your visitors.

Congress is considering enacting a law that will give internet service providers un-regulated control over what content is available to their subscribers. In essence this law will allow the isp’s to dictate what is delivered to your computer, or what you can see or can’t see.

The thought is that a premium service will push content ahead of a 2nd tier service so if you pay for the right, your website will be delivered to the viewers, if you don’t well you’re regulated to some sort of tier two delivery that is not very well defined right now. Folks, this will take away your basic freedom to choose what you want to see.

I don’t have a problem with the concept of having “Premium” delivery but let the free market establish if that is a option consumers want… don’t make it law.
React here.

When we began The Info Group, in the fall of 1997, search engine optimization was not a term that had been coined instead the few people involved in the field were calling it search engine ranking and pay-per-click was literally a baby as GoTo had just launched and the only buzz I recall was that no one would pay for a click they received from a search engine. So the only real game in town was search ranking and with algorithms the way they were at the time, getting top rankings was almost a cinch so why would a firm like ours push an unproven product? We didn’t but that philosophy lasted about 90 days until we tried pay-per-click ourselves and found it to be a very cost effective supplement to regular rankings. We were getting clicks from an engine that our competitors weren’t listed on (they hadn’t figured it out yet) and the cost was a nit since you could bid pennies for terms. Now the appeal wasn’t overwhelming since the listings were limited to GoTo (they hadn’t formed any partnerships with other engines) and since GoTo was not the big daddy (Yahoo was the gorilla of the day) not too many people were using the engine. Yet it provided another lead source that generated some business but more importantly it set into motion what became our core philosophy of utilizing both aspects of search marketing, paid and organic.

Let me try paint a simple picture to illustrate the point in today’s search world. Say you have a brand new site, unfortunately you are coming out of the gate at a disadvantage in organic search in both Google & Yahoo as they have aging filters in place and getting great rankings on competitive terms in the short term is next to impossible. Well, then the obvious way to boost your site to the top or front page of Google & Yahoo is to take advantage of pay-per-click. I posted on the benefits of pay-per-click earlier.

So immediately you get a presence on the top two engines, great now what? You carefully analyze your traffic and conversions and begin to identify what keywords are working for you in ppc. Often times you can find less competitive terms with very high conversion rates that with tweaking of ads and/or landing pages you can increase your conversion rate even more and suddenly you’re not so dependent on your top level keywords within ppc to generate results. Taking that analysis you also address those words on your site as these are the types of terms that will pick up in Google & Yahoo much quicker than your top level terms and once again you have a better chance at generating results. Using a simple strategy like this can make a dramatic difference in an overall campaign, not only financially from a spend point but also from a bottom line profit increasing point.

Effective use of search engine marketing is what you should be looking for not just #1 rankings.