30 Day Secret Experiment – Day 4: Search Engine Marketing

Posted by Harmony Rousseau on Apr 4, 2007 in 30 Day Experiment | 2 comments

This post is part of a 30 Day Secret Experiment. Be sure to read the previous posts to follow my progress.

Now that the site is up and running, the rest of my month will focus on creating content for the site and finding ways to market it. My ideal goal is to rank well for a number of keywords related to The Secret and the Law of Attraction, but that’s going to take a lot of time and effort. So, to start generating a trickle of traffic to the site, today I focused on pay per click advertising and submitted my site to a variety of directories.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
I’m not looking to spend gobs of money promoting this site – which is easy to do with pay per click advertising, but I did want to get some traffic flowing to the website and start building my mailing list. I set up a campaign on Google Adwords and a couple of the 2nd tier PPC search engines like Findology and SearchFeed.

Figuring out the right words to bid on can be tricky. With any campaign, you’ll have a handful of keywords that get significant traffic, and then a “Long Tail” of keywords and phrases that are far less commonly searched for – but cost far less and collectively, add up to more searches than the top performing 5-10. But it takes trial, error and measurement to come up with all those keywords.

My goal was not to pay more than $.15 per click for any of the keywords I’m bidding on – with the bulk falling into the $.03-.07 range. That eliminated a few of the top keywords on Google, but I’m ok with that. I’m not looking to compete on price, and I’m content not having the #1 ranking for every keywords.

If you ever manage a pay per click campaign, keep that in mind. You don’t always need to be #1. Those that feel it’s an ego thing to search Google and see your ad at the top will soon find you’re blowing through money. Sometimes, this can pay off. Often, however, it just decreases your return on investment.

With the 2nd tier search engines, I find that the quality of clicks is always a crap shoot. Sometimes, most of the traffic comes from unreliable sources. Sometimes, you get lucky and find a few keywords that do extremely well. It’s all about experimenting, monitoring the results, and testing a variety of ads/keywords and the like.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While I’ll use pay per click advertising in the short term, my ultimate goal is to get ranked well in search engines (primarily Google) for highly trafficked keywords. Unlike PPC advertising, this isn’t an instantaneous process. It can take upwards of 3-6 months to really start seeing results.

Search engine optimization is more than just putting keywords into your site’s content. It encompasses a variety of things – like how well your page is coded. For instance, if you have all your text as Flash animation or images, search engines can’t read it, and therefore won’t index your page. I also find that your ratio of code (like html and javascript) to your text content matters. You want to maximize the content and minimize the code.

That’s why I like WordPress. It’s built with good coding practices in mind, and there are all sorts of plugins you can use to make your site more search engine friendly (which I mentioned in my previous post on building the site).

If you look at the top of your browser window, you’ll see a blue bar. That’s where your title tag goes. This is really important and should contain keywords! Search engines look to this to determine what the page is about, so spend time crafting something coherent. Don’t just stuff as many keywords as possible into the tag, but do use phrases people are likely to search for – and that also describe your page contents.

Other tags that matter include – headlines (h1, h2, h3), bold (strong, b) and the text you include when you link to another page. Don’t just say “click here” but use keywords in your link. For instance, I might say watch The Secret movie for free. Notice, I linked to the page where I have the movie embedded? What I didn’t say was “click here” to watch the movie, and link the “click here”. Why? Because search engines use the textual content of the links to determine what the next page is about. They’re associating “watch The Secret movie for free” with my Watch The Secret page.

The other component to seo is building links back to your website. This is an art. Not all links are equal – those from spammy sites can actually hurt you. What do you want? Well, first, the best types of links come from other sites that have similar content to yours, and they link to your site using relevant keywords in the body of their content.

For instance, since this article is about search engine marketing, I could recommend Aaron Wall’s search engine marketing book and blog. (I do recommend the book, by the way. I purchased my own copy awhile ago. It’s great for beginners and advanced search marketers, alike.) Sadly, my link won’t do all that much good for Aaron’s site (at least not yet) because this site is brand new and doesn’t have much credibility in search engines.

What would give it credibility? If the official Secret site linked to mine – or one of the teachers’ sites linked. Or if any number of high trafficked and credible sites about The Secret or the Law of Attraction linked here. But I can also look for links from coaches or personal development sites or even psychic, paranormal, new age, or spirituality-based sites – there are all sorts of possibilities.

I haven’t gotten that far yet. Right now, I’m working on just using keywords within my site’s content and submitting my site to a myriad of directories. First and foremost, it’s important to submit your sitemap (created with WordPress plugin, Google Sitemaps) to Google’s webmaster section and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Next, you can work on submitting your site to directories. Aaron provides a list of top directories to submit your site to in his search engine marketing book. You can also try here or here for suggestions.

That’s a lot for today. Tomorrow, I’ll focus on analytics – that is, how to analyze all this stuff – and add more Secret related content. I just got Mark Joyner’s Simpleology: The Simple Science of Getting What You Want in the mail today so I’ll review it soon. I’m also signed up for James Arthur Ray’s Science of Success teleseminar tomorrow evening.

Related Posts

• No Related Post