Many people misuse and abuse blogs and articles as they are a simple and effective way to get content out onto the internet. But in doing so, they are flooding blog sites with completely non-relevant rubbish using automated scripts in an attempt to boost their search engine rankings.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, people want content that is interesting and relevant and will soon get bored and annoyed with sites that have obviously gone for the quick and dirty approach to providing relevant content.

Another excellent method to submit content is by using press releases.

Why? Because the vast majority of press release websites are manned by people whose job is to scrutinise the submitted press releases for relevancy and allow them to be submitted only if they are deemed newsworthy.

There is a whole industry that exists purely by actively looking for press releases that are worth submitting. Relevant, well written and concise articles are valuable and people will pay good money to read good articles.

So what are the critical things to keep in mind when you’re writing a press release?

1. Start with a brief description of the news, and who announced it.

2. Ensure that the information contained in the press release is relevant and newsworthy.

3. Tell the audience what the information is and why they should continue to read it. Try to keep them interested. Always keep in mind about how will people react to this. Why should they be able to connect?

4. Always try to make sure that you use the first 10 words of your press release as effectively as possible. People are constantly being overloaded with information in this Information Age, so try to grab their attention as quickly as possible.

5. Avoid excessive use of adjectives and fancy language. Deal only with facts and avoid speculations and opinions.

6. Try to supply as much contact information as possible. Remember that you are writing this press release to inform people about who you are, what your business is doing and what you are all about. Always provide several ways to contact you, such as email, mobile, landline, etc.

So how do you start submitting press releases?

There are a wide variety of press release submission websites out there. Some of the well known ones are:

• www.freepressreleases.co.uk
• www.i-newswire.com
• www.pressbox.co.uk

There are many more out there – just do a google search for “submit press release”.

Just remember, make it relevant and newsworthy.

So your PPC campaign is now producing some great results and your website is up and running.

You should have been able to fine-tune your campaign so that you now have a fairly good idea about who you’re marketing to, what they’re searching for and the highest converting and traffic keywords using website tracking. You should also now have been able to slowly reduce your CPC (cost per click) down to a more reasonable level.

But like all good business owners, you are constantly searching for ways to improve on your ROI (return on investment) which in internet marketing speak means higher click rates. But more importantly, you need understand how to monetize the traffic you are attracting to your website. For traffic means absolutely nothing if you’re not converting it into paying customers.

There are a wide variety of free ways to improve your search engine ranking so that your website or blog shows up on the first page (and hopefully first position) on your relevant keyword search results. In this post I’m going to explain some of the most effective ways in which you can do this.

The generic term used to describe this way of generating good search rankings using free methods is SEM (search engine marketing) marketing or SEO (search engine optimisation).

The main goal of any search engine is to provide the user with the most relevant information possible for any given keyword search. Websites that have good quality and relevant information are rewarded by search engines with high search rankings.

The number of unique links the website has from other websites is one of the main ways that a search engine ranks a website. From the search engine’s point of view, a high number of unique links pointing to a particular website indicates that the website must have something of value to other websites.

There are some important key things you must always understand to have an effective SE marketing strategy:

1. Providing valuable, relevant content on your website should always be your top priority.

Try to avoid filling your website with non-relevant garbage.

All articles should be relevant and consistent to what your website is about. Anyone can download hundreds of articles for free and pad out their website with them, but people will soon realise that the information you’re providing is non-relevant and won’t bother visiting. In order to link to your website, people need to be interested in the articles. And if they won’t link to your website you won’t build your rankings. This takes time – as Julius Caesar once said, “Rome wasn’t built in day.”

There is nothing wrong with using free articles – it’s a great way to get content – but at least try to filter out any non-relevant stuff. And as I keep mentioning in my posts, you MUST, MUST, MUST infuse your articles with your own personality. And I don’t mean be someone you’re not, and make the article a Pulitzer prize winning literary piece. Just write the damn thing in your own words.

2. Make a habit of adding content to your website regularly.

Don’t expect to be able to add 1000 articles to your website in one go and expect a 1st position ranking in Google overnight. To get a high ranking using these free techniques takes time. Try to think of your internet business as an organic thing like an oak seed. It might take a while before you see any results, but given a bit of time and attention, it will grow into something massive and long lasting.

Perhaps the most easiest way to add content on a regular basis is by using a web log (most commonly referred to as a blog). Blogs are websites that have been specifically designed to allow for easy and regular posting of articles. Probably one of the best known and respected platforms currently in use today is WordPress (www.wordpress.org).

You can either host your blog at WordPress itself, but I would highly recommend downloading your own copy and hosting it with your own provider.

Hosting your own WordPress instance gives you full control of your blog – you won’t have the worry of WordPress going down and losing access to your blog. In fact, this blog is hosted on my own webspace using the WordPress platform.

When writing your articles, make sure the content is relevant to your website and make sure it will interest whoever is reading it. Make sure that the article has links back to your other websites, be they your personal website or your lead capture pages, so that you are encouraging people to click them and so build up your authority status and keep the search engines satisfied that your website is a source of good information.

I can’t stress enough how important this is – a search engine’s primary objective is to provide people with the most relevant and best quality information possible. If you can provide the search engines with that, you’ll be rewarded with higher search engine rankings.

3. Get your articles published by as many other websites as possible.

It is important to throw your net wide and get a large variety of different websites linking back to your websites. Use syndication sites, reprint rights, press releases and article distribution sites to get your articles published by other websites, so that you can steadily build up your search ranking.

So just how do you do this?

Well, syndication is one of ways to do it. See that RSS icon in the top right column of this page? Clicking this icon allows people to subscribe to this blog so that as soon as I publish an article (like this one for example), they will automatically get notification of the update.

You can also use article submission sites like www.ezine.com to publish articles.

So how often should I try to publish an article or blog?

It’s really up to you. It depends what your website is and what sort of ranking you want. Publishing one article or blog every few days is the minimum, but basically the more often you update, the more often the search engines will visit and so the quicker your ranking will rise.

Ok, so just when you thought you had heard every silly Internet term in existence, you’ve suddenly come across the saying “I’ve been Google Slapped!”.

What the blazes is a Google Slap and does it hurt?

Well, a Google Slap happens to almost everyone at some time or another, and like the real thing, you’ve got to learn to take the pain, learn from the experience and simply get on with life. In Internet-marketing speak, a Google Slap is when Google suddenly wants a lot more money for your keyword. The typical scenario is when a keyword that cost 50 cents a click yesterday is suddenly $5 or $10 a click, and the word is “Inactive for Search” until you increase your bid. That, boys and girls, is a Google Slap. It’s extremely annoying, hurts like hell, and burns a hole in your wallet and your traffic flow.

Now, to really understand what is happening, you first have to take a step back from your perceptions of the real world, and try to understand what Google is thinking. You see, Google is constantly trying to improve the search experience because they know that is the absolute primary goal of what Google does and this is what drives the value of Google. Getting Google Slapped is nothing more than what any Internet marketer will face as part of the cycle of improving the search experience. It is Google’s quite explicit way of telling you their system has detected that your keyword may not be contributing to that experience. They know that the best way to alert you to the fact that they are unhappy with that word is by simply increasing the bid to a pain level that will get your attention. You have to admit that increasing your marketing expense by 10x is an attention getter.

Only a core group of Google insiders really know exactly what triggers this process or what the specific algorithms are but we do know what the general rules are. Google calculates a quality score and shows you a very broad, general view of those results. On your keyword detail page you will see the quality score range.

Google does not actually tell you what the quality score is but rather what broad range your score fits into. These levels are: Great, OK, Poor, and Poor + Inactive. Whilst the specific details of this quality score are hidden deep inside Google, what we can tell you is that quality score and organic page position are very closely related and share many of the same evaluation attributes. What that means is if you improve your quality score you almost always improve your search engine optimization. Google uses its algorithms to determine how well a particular keyword connects to the ad copy and the landing page. If Google thinks that your ad contributes to a better search experience then your quality score will be high. If however, if it thinks that your ad detracts from the search experience, then get your cheeks ready for a slapping!

Ok, you’ve had a good slapping from Google. How do I stop the pain? Well, it’s fairly straightforward. You basically have 5 options: improve your quality score, delete the keyword, raise the bid, pause the keyword, or do nothing. Google never points out the pause or do-nothing option but they do exist.

Option 1: Improving the quality score – this requires rethinking the keyword, ad copy, and landing page. In tests that I have performed it seems that the landing page is the source of most of the quality score. But Google is looking at a whole range of criteria (i.e. keyword, ad copy, landing page) so simply changing the page will not fix the problem. Look at the other keywords in the ad group and consider how this keyword fits with them. If the adgroup is just a random bunch of keywords without a theme then you have to reorganize them.

Option 2: Deleting the keyword – This sounds easy to do but many marketers are reluctant to do this, especially if you need the traffic from that word. If the connection to your business for this keyword is weak then deleting it will improve your overall account. However, if the connection of this keyword to your business is strong you have to think very seriously about how you deal with this. Deleting the keyword is therefore probably not your best option.

Option 3: Raising the bid – This is an option but ONLY if the traffic your generating from that keyword is worth the cost Google are charging for it. If you decide that the keyword is worth paying the extra, then you must also really focus on taking the steps to improving your quality score. As mentioned earlier, this is closely linked to your organic position and Google is blatantly telling you that it does not think your page is related to what you think is an important keyword. Unfortunately, in this case, Google is always right. Raising the bid may initially resolve this immediate problem, but you can’t hide from the fact that you are overpaying for that keyword and therefore hurting your organic traffic by treating the symptom rather than the cause. You can be assured that if you have a poor quality score, you will definitely also have a correspondingly poor SEO position for this keyword as well.

One low impact way of dealing with this is to delete the keyword and start a brand new adgroup focused on that keyword. Then connect that keyword to the best supporting landing page for that keyword on your site. If your quality score increases to ‘OK’ or ‘Great’, then the keyword is good for another period of time and you have, for the time being, resolved the issue.

Also, be aware that quality score problems are often caused by adgroups with too many keywords with weak associations between the words. If this is happening, breaking these into smaller more focused ad groups will often fix the problem and at the same time, save you lots of money.

Most Google Adwords accounts have hundreds or even thousands of keywords. Sometimes I will pause some keywords, and over a period of time let the number of paused keywords grow. Once I have established a common theme amongst these keywords, I’ll try to find ways to resolve several keywords in one pass. This saves a lot of time, particularly as is commonly the case, once the first word gets slapped others soon follow. The approach I like to take to resolve this issue is the pause, accumulate, and act strategy. This strategy is quite effective as a sudden increase in the number of poorly performing keywords normally always precedes a Google Slap. It’s very rare that a word goes from a ‘Great’ or ‘Good’ quality score straight to a slap without at least a downgrading of quality to a ‘Poor’ on the way down.

So, in closing, don’t be offended when you get Google Slapped. Consider it a ‘friendly’ warning that you need to pick up your game and improve the search experience of your visitors. Because this is ultimately what Google is trying to achieve and this should be your ultimate goal as well.