SEO - Link Baiting

For those who are not familiar with the term, link baiting is the process in which one uses a bait or a hook to attract back links. In other words, it is something eye catching or exciting on your website that would give others a reason to want to link to it. The bait or hook could come in many forms such as the following:

Resource Hook: Hooks that generally provide useful resources to the audience. People are constantly searching for efficient resources. With this being said, resource hook links act as a strong bait to gain incoming links.

News Hook: This hook is based on providing the latest news first. It could also be a compilation of news stories based on a specific news item. This type of hook works best when its progressed over a certain period of time. One must constantly post things such as interest news articles in order to build credibility over time.

Contrary Hook: A contrary hook does exactly what it says. This hook looks at views which are contrary to a perceived school of thought. It usually takes up the opposing view of what someone has said or written. 

Attack Hook: This hook is quite similar to the contrary hook. The difference here is that this hook is more direct and upfront with its nature. The advantage of this type of hook is that it can attract a generous amount if your content is seen to be credible and authentic.

(In regards to contrary and attack hooks, it is crucial to identify that the information and facts posted are corroborated. If non credible information is posted, it can bring a lot of negative reviews which can initially affect future posts.)

Humor Hook: This type of hook seeks to bring in an aspect of humor into people's daily lives. Many people enjoy a good laugh in the midst of their day and that is exactly what this hook delivers. Since this hook stands out to many people, it is able to bring in quite a few links.

Measuring Return on Investment (ROI)

Whether you are trying to increase sales, generate leads, or drive other customer activity, measuring your return on investment (ROI) is always a good idea. The ROI will help you determine whether the money you are spending towards your AdWords account is reeling in healthy profits for your business.

Understanding ROI

Roi is known to be the most important measurement for an advertiser because it helps the advertiser understand the actual affect his or her advertising efforts are having on their business. ROI is the ratio of your net profit to your costs. The exact method one uses to calculate ROI depends upon the goals of his or her campaign.

The most common way to calculate the ROI is: 

(Revenue - Cost of goods sold) / Cost of goods sold

As far as physical products are concerned, the cost of goods sold is equal to the manufacturing cost of all the items you sold plus your advertising costs, and the revenue is how much profit you will make from selling those products.  Furthermore, the amount you spend for each sale is known as cost per conversion.

Why ROI Matters

As mentioned before, by calculating the return on investment, it it easier to distinguish how much cash inflow has happened by advertising with AdWords. With this being said, you can also use ROI to help you decide how to spend your budget. For example, if you notice one of your campaigns is generating a higher amount of ROI than the others, you can apply more of your specified budget to the successful campaign rather than spend it on campaigns that are not performing so well.

Using Conversions to Measure ROI

In order to begin the ROI process, you must first measure conversions. Conversions are customer actions that you believe are valuable such as purchases, signups, web page visits, or leads. Conveniently, AdWords has a free conversion tracking tool to help track how many clicks ultimately lead to conversions. Conversion tracking can also help you determine the profitability of a keyword or ad, and track conversion rates and costs-per-conversion.

SEO - How to do Branding with SEO

Branding is known to be one of the most crucial objectives of all marketers throughout the world. Many successful companies spent millions of dollars on branding and advertising campaigns before the internet became such a big part within the advertising industry. Ever since the realization was made that search engine listings drive large volumes of traffic to various websites, Search Engine Optimization has become a central online marketing strategy. Many advertising methods have been known to be interruptions to consumer behavior. On the other hand, search engine users actively pin point information which ultimately drive them to the essential source.

Why is Branding Important:

• It helps customers identify  particular business
• "Good branding" helps the brand by  having a specific business bring in loyal customers while maintaining the existing customer base. 
• Branding is an important function of SEO:
• The main aim for search engine optimization is to drive targeted traffic to the marketer's website which results in lead generation as well as online and offline conversions.

The working Mechanism of Search Branding 

1. You index a website
2. Search engines use website's title and description to create the text link (This appears in the SERP's)
3. The title and description work as an advertisement for your business when the users view your search engine listing
4. Each time the viewer uses the listing in the SERP's, it results in branding.

 Search engine optimization aims at increasing website traffic by better search engine listings. This is primarily accomplished by strategically placing keywords in the website content. If keywords that have the brand name are selected, it can do a great job of assisting with the branding process. Hence, promotion of the brand will depend on the selection of relevant keywords and the proper usage of them.