I receive a lot of questions about those must-have, low-cost tactics. Up at the top is always search engine marketing (SEM) because it is typically the most cost effective with the best return. I am still blown away at the lack of competitiveness for some lines of business on search engines. You key in a basic phrase for a product or service, and there literally could be no one marketing through search.

If you are new to search engine marketing, 2010 is the year to have a search engine marketing firm like CSG Interactive do a quick assessment of both your site and competitors. You may be pleasantly surprised.

I am also big on single-themed search engine marketing campaigns. What is a single-themed SEM campaign? It is a tightly focused campaign about a specific business area or subject matter. You deliberately favor one part of your business and amplify it through search.  When I say amplify, I mean blow it out with specific keywords and ad groups. And you expand your reach by looking at and joining with the chorus of related news, events, and other contexts.

For example, say you sell paints. You may be thinking about “who you are” (paint store) and “what you sell” (paints) when you start a typical SEM campaign. With a single-themed SEM campaign, you take something specific like environmentally friendly paint (e.g., low VOC) and build a campaign just around that product line and the context for search engine users’ interests (“painting a child’s bedroom”, “green paint products”, etc.).

Don’t think this kind of tactic starts out as a shot in the dark. Firms like CSG Interactive have the keyword research tools to measure keyword search volumes, usage trends, user demographics, high peak volume periods, and geographic hot zones. For example, we saw a huge trend building when running a general SEM campaign for Mr. Waterheater. Interest in “tankless water heaters” went through the roof a few years ago. In fact, search numbers for “tankless water heaters” surpassed queries for traditional water storage units! This posed an opportunity we could not ignore, so we created a special single-themed SEM campaign.

For the year of perpetual planning, I suggest buckling down with a website poised for search engine marketing and running some lean, mean, focused campaigns. Get those leads you need now to build confidence along with the bottom line.

Google was able to establish itself as a search engine behemoth because of its ability to display the most relevant search results, and that relevancy applies to its sponsored results as much as it does to its organic results.  Google rewards PPC advertisers whose ads are most relevant to the keywords they are targeted at, and Google does this by giving every Adwords ad a Quality Score: the better your Quality Score, the less you have to bid to have your ads rank well.

There are two major factors that affect the Quality Score of an Adwords ad: (1) the relevance of an ad’s content to the keyword being searched, and (2) the click-through-rate (CTR) that the ad receives  i.e., how well it performs.

PPC Ad Content

There are several elements of an Adwords Ad that affect how relevant it is to the user’s search query. There is the title, ad copy, and the URL displayed in the ad. The more relevant that each of these are to the user’s search, the higher a Quality Score the the ad will receive.

For example, imagine you bid on the keyword “car wash,” and the title of your ad is “Car Wash USA,” your ad text is “Find your neighborhood car wash,” and the URL is “www.CarWashWebsite.com.” Your ad will receive a higher quality score because all its elements (title, ad copy, and URL) feature the keyword that you bid on (and that the user searched for).

PPC Ad Performance

There’s an additional criteria that Google uses to measure the Quality Score of PPC ad, and that’s by monitoring how many people actually click on it. This is Google’s way of rewarding advertisers who contribute to the overall quality of the Google search experience. After all, the more often that an Adwords ad is clicked on, the more relevant it must be to users’ search queries.

The thing about your ads’ CTRs is that they also affect the overall Quality Score of your entire Adwords account. So the CTR of a specific campaign or individual ad is also counted against all other campaigns and ads. This is why it’s important to have the right resources to properly monitor the CTR of ads across all campaigns, and make sure that no individual ad or campaign has an adverse effect on your other campaigns.

One example of a reliable resource to help protect your Quality Score is Acquisio SEARCH. Among other things, Acquisio’s software (1) helps quickly identify poor performing keywords, and (2) notifies when keywords have poor Quality Scores.

Adwords Strategy

Just like any other marketing campaign, the way your Adwords campaigns perform depends largely on how well you target them. It’s for this reason that getting your PPC ads to the top of Google’s sponsored listings takes more than just out-bidding the competition. Google wants even their sponsored results to be relevant, so they reward advertisers whose ads are better targeted by letting them bid less to rank well.

So if you have PPC campaigns that involve dozens of ad sets and thousands of keywords, you might want to invest in an SEM resource (such as a PPC agency like CSG Interactive or automated enterprise level software) that can help maximize your Quality Score. As well as helping you bid on the right keywords, such resources can help you monitor and protect your Quality Score on an ongoing basis.

Acquisio develops PPC management software and advanced bid management tools.

For all of you cynics and pessimists, this is not a rare opportunity to validate your glumness. Sorry. Getting negative in search engine marketing world means refining keyword lists to weed out unwanted searchers who aren’t really looking for you in the first place. You are simply subtracting words and phrases that don’t belong.

Adding negative keywords is similar to the process of adding keywords. The only difference is there is a minus symbol before the keyword.  For example, say you are in higher education and looking for prospective students for a new graduate studies program in Art Therapy. An ad group may have these keywords:

art therapy program
art therapy graduate program
- pictures
- employment
- supplies

The negative keywords help keep the ad group targeted. So, in this example you are working to limit your ad impressions and your important click dollars to those leads focused on obtaining an education—not those looking for pictures, jobs, supplies, etc.

There are web analytics tools to show actual search queries and help flush out negative keywords. Good common sense goes a long way, too. The key is to look back after getting negative to see if click through rates and overall performance have improved.

First, I like to look at the competitiveness of the search engine space. Even though a client’s website is a dead-on match for a keyword phrase, he or she can be going up against high-ranking giants. A little research can show:

• Number of search results
• High volume periods
• Competing websites
• Competitiveness scoring

Data can help us see what is highly competitive as well as some gems that have promise.

The other exercise I like to run through with a client is a semantic drill. We critique different keyword meanings and audiences. For example, a client that sells industrial riveting equipment may see “riveting” as natural keyword choice; however, after a semantic breakdown, we see other applications of the term and a lot of noise on search engines. (We could be attracting a lot of the wrong people with the right keyword.)

I also like to move up and down a ladder of key terms, going from general to specific. This exercise is done with both the competitiveness scoring and the semantic drills. We end up answering questions like:

• Is this keyword used by real people on, say, Google?
• Is the keyword too general? Too vague?
• Can we realistically compete for this keyword? Any goliaths?
• Is this keyword phrase a good fit for us? Is it relevant?
• What are the other connotations for this keyword? Is the keyword search space noisy?

All of this effort helps sharpen assumptions, but ultimately SEO takes patience and practice—tracking, reporting, and evaluating. The fun never stops.

Mobile phones have become one of the fastest growing sources of Internet access. There are over 250 million cell phones in the U.S. alone. Add this reality to the growing usage trend of smartphones like iPhone, Blackberry,  and Google Phone, and you have millions of people with mini laptops ready to search for you over a data connection.

The common drill is for users to look up business addresses and phone numbers. “411″ info calls are not cheap, so everyone has the incentive to use their data connection to retrieve numbers. They could be less pragmatic about it, too. Smartphones are great for browsing the Internet. All of this adds up to a whole new channel for website traffic generation.

When you think about this opportunity, search engine optimization takes on a different light. How ready are you for mobile SEO?

Make a list and at the end of the week, see how that list jibes with your website and any search engine marketing campaigns.

To start, search engines read. It’s that simple. If there’s more content, they are more likely to understand what your site is about. If content is organized and thematic, they are even more inclined to understand your site and know it’s relevancy to their searchers.

So, the challenge is two-fold:

1. How do I edit and write with good keywords?
2. How do I organize existing and new content to support good keywords?

So, SEO copywriting requires a person who can appreciate the architecture of a website and organization of content just as well as the on-page edits needed for optimization.

Let’s look at the second challenge first. What I like to do is categorize keywords so I can manage my copy optimization process more efficiently. So, with a running list of keywords, I group them into categories that map to user search needs. For example, look at this breakdown:

• Brand / Company Name – “Furniture Store Extraordinaire”
• Business Type – “furniture store Pittsburgh”
• Products / Services – “eclectic dining room set”
• Best Practices – “choosing a good dining room set”
• Related topics – “throwing wild dinner parties”

I find clients receive more qualified referrals from search engines when we prioritize with keywords from the top categories. And this reality usually dictates copy optimization priorities. If the prior SEO assessment work reveals that the search engines favor competing sites with a lot of additional supporting content, we then can build out new content with the lower categories and keywords.

Back to the first challenge… there are some general formulas for how to edit and write optimized copy for pages. In general, I like to have a minimum of a couple of paragraphs on a page with a tight keyword focus.  The title, heading, body copy, and hyperlinks all dance with targeted keyword phrases.

The real art of my craft is blending in keywords without sounding too artificial. I am a writer by nature, so I favor good content that is user-focused. My tip here is to write for the target audience but for two different views – search results and the actual web page. I anticipate her search, her click, and her arrival. If I can keep this top of mind, I find that the search engines see the relevancy and reward my clients with higher listings.

One more tip… Content needs to be compelling and useful.  With Web 2.0, users are likely to link to good content with social media tools, providing much-needed inbound links. Link building (and baiting) is important for any SEO campaign.

I’ll touch on linking techniques and Web 2.0 strategies in another post.  Stay tuned!

I like to start by asking clients some questions:

• Who are we trying to reach through search? Describe her to me.
• Why are we trying to reach her? How does she bring value?
• What is she trying to find? What information is valuable to her?
• What do we want her to do? How can we help her while helping us?

When we get through the big questions, I like to put together a searcher profile. I describe the person, note what motivates her, and list her three or four important search needs. I also like to place the client’s goal in with this profile.

A majority of the time I find that clients aren’t that in tune with their users search patterns or needs. We spend some time role playing, discussing different customer segments, and working through product search scenarios.

Whenever budgets allow, I like to push for a more direct way to find out what is in the heads of target audiences. An online survey is a wonderful way to get good data. A simple tool like SurveyMonkey and an incentive to participate (receive a _____ [fill in the blank]) can work.

What does this survey look like? That’s fodder for a new blog post.

Google has dominated the space for quite a stretch. The search engine giant, on average, owns 60% or more of the share of U.S. searches.  Microsoft is typically in the single digits. It’s a steep climb.

According to an article in today’s New York Times:

Still, Bing remains a distant third in the search race. It would have to triple its audience to catch Yahoo — and grow eightfold to tie Google, which accounts for 65 percent of searches in the United States.

The same article is praising Bing for its ambitious effort to start the climb. Responses have been positive in general, and I feel Microsoft’s team has generated some buzz on a product that people use and like.

So, let’s get back to the numbers game and the question about optimizing for Bing. Microsoft has moved up a couple of points.This move is good. Is it news that has me rethinking my search engine marketing strategies and optimization efforts? No.

I recommend–on this day and with Bing in its infancy–to look at pay-per-click on Bing. Costs are attractive and there are more eyeballs, generating buzz and clicks. For organic search,  I still keep my eye on Google and that fat share it has of all U.S. searches.

For me, the fun starts when we track leads from the engines. With a simple, free program like Google Analytics, we can observe some important metrics.

• How many visits do I receive for these keywords? Are people clicking on my listing?
• When they arrive at the website, do they stick around or bolt?
• If they do spend time on the site, are they spending enough time to engage with my content?
• Do they perform a desirable action? Do any leads from search request information, purchase something, etc.

The key is to dive deeper and look at the keywords from search engine referrals and how they react to your site.