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Sunday, January 6, 2008

Keyword Intelligence

by TIM MCLENDON

Keywords are important part of pay per click advertising programs, whether you are a program affiliate or an advertiser. Essentially, with pay per click advertising programs, you are relying on keywords to bring you success. That is why you should carefully choose your keywords. In addition to carefully choosing your keywords, you should also make sure that the keywords you chose are successful or living up to your standards. You can do this by testing and tracking all of your keywords.

Before examining how both affiliates and advertisers can go about testing and tracking their keywords, it is important that you understand why testing and tracking is important. Pay per click advertising costs money, granted it only costs when one of your ads has been clicked, but it is still money. Any good business owner wants to know exactly where their money is going, as they should. The testing and tracking of keywords will not only help to ensure that you are not wasting money, but it will also let you know if you are making any. Keyword tracking and testing will also let you know if you are wasting your time.

Now that you know why it is important to test and track your keywords, you can better understand how to do so. As it was mentioned above, both advertisers and affiliates are urged to test and track their keywords. Affiliates need to test and track because it will help them determine exactly how much money they are making, as well as how much money they are not making or could be making. Affiliates rely on their website’s content to show relevant advertisements. For that reason, if you are an affiliate, your content needs to contain popular keywords, keywords that would likely be associated with pay per click advertisements. Google Adsense gives affiliates updated tracking information; information that you can use to determine your success with particular keywords.

In addition to using the information that is supplied to you by your pay per click program, you can also perform your own test. You can do so by visiting your online website. Take a look at the advertisements that are appearing on your page. When doing so, it is important that you look, don’t click. You can easily get an idea as to what keywords are associated with those advertisements. To see how much money you may be making, you will want to use Overture’s keyword worth tool, which can be found at http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm/search/tools/bidtool/. The higher the maximum bids are, the more money you are likely to make.

If you are an advertiser, not an affiliate, you can still benefit from testing and tracking your keywords. Unlike affiliates, who rely on content keywords, your keywords will essentially be attached to your advertisements. That is how pay per click programs decide which websites your advertisements will appear on. As for tracking, your pay per click program should also provide you with information, such as information on which one of your ads was clicked. If you are using multiple keywords for multiple advertisements, you can compare them to see which one is the better money-maker.

As for testing your keywords, you will want to perform a standard internet search, preferably with the keywords or keywords phrases that you selected. You will want to examine popular, high ranking web pages. To determine if your chosen keywords are being used to the best of their ability, you should be able to find a few of your advertisements displayed on affiliate pages. If you are unable to do so, it might be a sign that you need to reexamine your pay per click advertising keywords.

Whether you are an advertiser or an affiliate, you are urged to track and test your keywords to see if they are producing results. By taking the above mentioned approaches, keyword tracking and testing should only take a few minutes of your time, but it will be time well spent.


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