PPC is an acronym for Pay per Click, and refers to the cost per click of an advertisement such as Google Adwords. The cost per click generally depends on the competitiveness of the keyword or phrase. Prices start at around £0.04 and some companies are prepared to pay in excess of £5.00 per click because it is worth it to get the searcher to their site and be ranked above their competitors.
PPC advertising can be a very cost effective method of marketing your company or website (like all aspects of Search Engine Marketing), as if done properly you can qualify all of your visitors, ensuring you only get relevant / targeted traffic.
While explaining and demonstrating the importance of Page Rank to a client this morning, the first question they asked was:
“Are there any websites with a Page Rank of 10?”
Initially, I was unsure - I thought Google Search would be ranked quite highly (!) and I knew the BBC website had a page rank of about 9 last time I had looked. After a bit of research, I have found out that there are in fact 5 websites that have a Page Rank of 10 (based on the 31st December 2008). This list was compiled just one day after a Page Rank update in which a number of Page Rank 10 websites dropped to a Page Rank of 9. Google has now switched from monthly Page Rank updates to Quarterly updates, so there should not be another change again now until the end of March.
So here’s the list:
- Google Search
- The W3C CSS Validation Service
- US Goverment website
- Adobe - Adobe Flash Player
- National Portal of India
So as you can imagine, the next question was:
“How do you get a Page Rank of 10?”
Well the short and simple answer is though link building. For a Page Rank of 10 you would need a large quantity of good quality, relevant inbound links to your site. Every link to your site has an associated quality score based on relevance and the quality of the site. Links from .edu and .gov websites are deemed very high quality as these are difficult to obtain, as are links from human edited directories such as DMOZ. As the client currently had a Page Rank of 0, I said it may be some time and a lot of work before their Page Rank increases. Google will notice sudden spikes in the amount of links to your site if your purchase links or automatically sign up to 100’s of directories. The best way to naturally increase the quantity and quality of links to your site is through article submission.
The landing page is the first page a visitor arrives on after clicking on a link or an advertisement. In most cases this will often be the homepage of the website. For example, the Elevator SEO homepage is:
http://www.elevator-seo.co.uk
The URL above will be the landing page for a large percentage of our users. If a PPC (Pay per click) is used, ideally you should have a homepage setup that is specifically related to the search term, such as a service or product that you are offering.
Other pages can also serve as landing pages i.e. a blog entry might be a landing page if someone has found your site from an article or post you have written.
If a user leaves your site after only visiting the landing page, this is known as ‘bouncing’ and will contribute to your ‘bounce rate’.
This is a little off topic, but I thought that the information in this blog could be very useful to other people with the Acer Aspire 6920G laptop (pictured above). The laptop is basically great, and very good for client meetings with the 16″ HD screen, NVIDIA graphics card and Blue Ray player. An interesting feature is the multimedia controller to the left of the keypad. This allows you to perform some basic tasks quickly using the touch pad, such as changing / muting the volume, controlling windows media playback etc.
Recently the multimedia controller will unexplainably lock up. All the lights are on but it does not respond to the standard touch as it should. This can be particularly embarrassing during a demonstration with the client. The controller on my laptop was frozen for a number of days before I found a solution. Sadly it wasn’t a simple case of changing a setting on my machine, I had to reboot it by turning the laptop off and taking out the battery for 10 seconds. When I inserted the battery back in and started the latop back up it worked as normal.
This hasn’t happened since, and I’m uncertain as to why this even occurred in the first place. However, the laptop is still a great piece of kit so I can tolerate a few small techinical problems!
