For guys advertising on the web
T Chap
Posts: 4,223
This info may or may not work for everyone and their keywords and placement, but I am really happy about a discovery I just made this week that I wanted to post in case there were guys here advertising on the web. I recently started promoting a product I have been working on, and have been trying campaigns on google adwords. I get calls from google but the thing is my budget is much smaller than it needs to be for me to be visible all day long, which would be thousands a month to be front page all day.
I discovered a while ago that if I put a certain unique keyword in an advertisement on craiglist, I could google that word and it would show up very soon near the top of google, often withing 30 minutes. So I started running ads in the home improvement section of craigslist this past week, the title containing my company name and basic keywords that someone would search on google for my product. I also stumbled across this website and weekly paper called backpage. This site is similar to craigslist, and you can post for free also. They have a feature however that allows you to post your ad in any city you want, and you pay around .50 cents to 2.00 depending on the city, but it is a one click deal that puts you in as many cities as you want. I do not know if it puts you in the paper version. backpage is huge though, and has been around a long time.
OK, so after running my ad with company name and keywords in craigs and back page, I now can google my basic few sets of keywords and have these ads show up in the first 2 to 4 organic (unpaid) slots. In many cases I will see two of my ads in google on the first page. What is great is that it shows the company name and keyword phrase identical to how I posted the ads on the sites. I do not have ANY expectation of a response from these websites directly, as they are not even really where my audience is. That's not the point. The point is that I have my ads showing up in the first page of google all day long now, when my pay per click ads are only there occasionally. The newyork version of the backpage seems to always be very hi, as well as miami craigslist. Not sure why some cities do not show up so that why I mention that the city does seem to matter if it is to show on the front page of google.
Anyways, hopefully some of you may find this of interest in marketing your stuff or services. I have seen my ads all day long now for several days and it is very exciting to be up front. Keep in mind that there are many many pages of the exact same keywords below my ads, identical phrases. I see companies that are advertising the similar products with same names far down the list. There is something about these large sites that get preference on google with your keywords, they have a high rating.
I discovered a while ago that if I put a certain unique keyword in an advertisement on craiglist, I could google that word and it would show up very soon near the top of google, often withing 30 minutes. So I started running ads in the home improvement section of craigslist this past week, the title containing my company name and basic keywords that someone would search on google for my product. I also stumbled across this website and weekly paper called backpage. This site is similar to craigslist, and you can post for free also. They have a feature however that allows you to post your ad in any city you want, and you pay around .50 cents to 2.00 depending on the city, but it is a one click deal that puts you in as many cities as you want. I do not know if it puts you in the paper version. backpage is huge though, and has been around a long time.
OK, so after running my ad with company name and keywords in craigs and back page, I now can google my basic few sets of keywords and have these ads show up in the first 2 to 4 organic (unpaid) slots. In many cases I will see two of my ads in google on the first page. What is great is that it shows the company name and keyword phrase identical to how I posted the ads on the sites. I do not have ANY expectation of a response from these websites directly, as they are not even really where my audience is. That's not the point. The point is that I have my ads showing up in the first page of google all day long now, when my pay per click ads are only there occasionally. The newyork version of the backpage seems to always be very hi, as well as miami craigslist. Not sure why some cities do not show up so that why I mention that the city does seem to matter if it is to show on the front page of google.
Anyways, hopefully some of you may find this of interest in marketing your stuff or services. I have seen my ads all day long now for several days and it is very exciting to be up front. Keep in mind that there are many many pages of the exact same keywords below my ads, identical phrases. I see companies that are advertising the similar products with same names far down the list. There is something about these large sites that get preference on google with your keywords, they have a high rating.
Comments
Thanks,
-Phil
I put red arrows for the relevant info. Will probably take these down soon.
Links on the right side of page are pay per click.
There are numerous other pages containing the same keywords. I created a twitter account, myspace, and facebook that all link to my site and the youtube channel. Other than that I just submitted my site to the main search engines this week.
Post Edited (Todd Chapman) : 11/15/2009 5:12:22 AM GMT
In my testing, I had gone into my google account and removed web history, plus logged out of the google account. I use firefox in private browsing mode but also checked to delete any old cookies as well. I can't seem to make any difference whether logged into google, or whether cookies are stored. Same results. I don't know enough to say that google doesn't do other tricks on your computer with scripts, but it seems that would require a timely scan of your computer on each new set of keywords searched.
I rarely ever google on my blackberry but had tested it a few times and get the same results.
-Phil
Fortunately for my most logical keyword phrase, I show the YouTube Video link and thumbnail now on the first page every search, plus at least one Craigs ad. However, after lots of tinkering, my site is now on the front page of google as organic (unpaid)! This is very cool.
I had friends in other states (opposite coast) do the same keywords and see my same results. I did notice some of the CL ads drop off after a few days for me so maybe that is what you were experiencing, I don't know. My cell phone show same results.
Realistically, I think even if you don't see the ad if you are trying this, I believe that placing your ad with your link in multiple cities does in fact affect your organic placement because you are being linked by a high ranked site(s). I am no expert on it, but I find it interesting that I have the site on front page of google after a week of messing with it. Links to my site are on my company facebook, myspace, twitter, youtube, and wordpress blog. I think all these are factors in getting higher organic. These sites are high ranking sites and carry weight with organic placement I assume.
I did this service with godaddy that generates meta tags and inserted them into my index page, then submitted the site to all the main search engines. The meta tags are highly debated as to whether they work for ranking, but it takes about 5 minutes to do so who cares.
With youtube, once you get a few views it seems google picks it up, or maybe they just scan google weekly, as I only had my youtube vids up a week, now they are showing in the first page as thumbs for serveral sets of keyword phrases. The thing is, the keywords in the title of the youtube vid is what gets it show up per keyword (phrase) in google. If I change the youtube title, within a half hour the video no longer shows for the same phrase search. If I put the keywords back as they were, then google sees it again after an hour. I think I will in the future put multiple videos with different titles to fit what different people might be trying, as I have seen that google will track it by keyword phrase. However, I did see that google will not work by putting a title with multiple phrases like Title: phrase one, phrase two, phrase three as in trying to trick google into having multiple keyword phrases in the title and have it puck up all the variations. With google and youtube, different vids show up based on the keywords seached and the video TITLE containing the phrase. It is probably best to upload the same vid several times and give it different keywords phrases in the title, or maybe upload a variation of the vid.
So the conclusion for me is:
1. Put in a Meta title for your site that is descriptive and has a few words that will show on the first line in google
2. Make sure robots is allowed on your site (do a search on how to do this)
3. Put in good Meta description that people can quickly digest at a glance in a search if the site appears, plus have your keywords phrases in the
meta description
4. Create meta names (tags) for the words you want to search, but don't spam your meta names
5. Submit site to the search engines, mostly free , I think yahoo wants money just to submit though
6. create twitter, myspace, facebook, youtube accounts for your company, put links back to your site with keywords on your site and a little info
about you product
7. create a wordpress blog that contains keywords and link to your site and stick it on your site mysite.com/myblog example ( i see the blog showing several pages into google )
8. post ads on craigslist in the larger metro, ny, miami, la, OC, atlanta, with a title that contains your company and keywords
(probably needed weekly or biweekly)
9. run ads on backpage in the larger cities, if not multiple cities for very cheap (probably needed weekly or biweekly)
10. Put a minimum 5$ per day on google adword, maybe even 1$ a day will benefit. Maybe google helps those that kick in a few bucks [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Also, my entire site is in a single flash SWF file. I did not think that google would read into the content of a flash file but it does, as it is displaying the content of some of my page text into the google search return. So I think that whether using flash or html site, it is a good idea to make sure the first few lines of text per page are clear and concise, containing relevant words, because the public sees these words first thing after the main line that gets returned in the search. Make these first lines of text on each page have impact to the viewer in a line or two.
The point being is that I am far above a lot of sites with the same keywords. You get out of it what you put into trying to enhance your position. I couldn't be found over a week ago, so the proof is in the pudding that something in the above formula worked well.
Post Edited (Todd Chapman) : 11/16/2009 2:00:49 PM GMT