Small
Business Advice
Using Google to Promote Your Business

Using Google to Promote Your Business
Here's how you can use your favorite search engine's cool tools
to market your online busine
Get Ranked
1. Web Search: Just showing
up in your potential search results is the easiest way to use Google for
free advertising. To show up in the first page or two of results, you'll need to
optimize your website to achieve the highest ranking possible. You may already
be aware that you need to spend some time getting the right keywords on your
website and increasing your "link popularity." But you might not have known that
Google looks at the first block of text it encounters on your web page and uses
that for the few lines displayed about your site on search result pages. So if
you want to get listed and also catch the eye of your customers, make your first
paragraph of text count: To be most effective, it should be roughly 300 words
with about 8 percent of them being keywords.
2. Sitemaps:
<http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps> Google's spiders
constantly index web pages, and it's impossible to predict accurately when
they'll visit your site. If you've paid attention to optimizing your site for
search, then they will crawl your pages. However, you can't be sure that
they've indexed all your web pages--they might index just part of your
site during a single visit. And since they start at the top of a page and work
down, they might not even index the entire page before moving on!
One thing
you can do to increase the likelihood of your entire site getting "spidered" is
to submit your site to Google Sitemaps. (There are several ways to do this; for
an overview, <http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/overview.html>.) After submitting your
site, Google creates and stores an XML file that allows for instant updates and
indexing whenever your site's content changes. This is like having your own data
cable running from your computer directly to Google!
3. AdSense
<http://www.google.com/adsense>: AdSense is one of the two kinds of
advertising avenues Google offers. The ads generated through AdSense are
third-party ads that sit on your website. The program is free for you to use and
you make money each time someone clicks on an ad and moves off your site. In
other words, these ads entice your visitors away from your site (bad thing), but
you're compensated each time that happens (good thing).
Google matches the
ads to your site by finding similarities in the keywords of each. The good news
is, you can set a filter to prevent your competitors' ads from appearing on your
website, and you can customize the appearance of the ads so their
background
<http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,323023,00.html> is the same as your
site's, making them look more like informative content than sales
pitches.
Try testing Google AdSense on your site to see if it negatively
affects your traffic and sales. If it doesn't, then you've just found a new
revenue stream. How much will you earn? That depends partly on how much the
advertisers are paying Google for the keywords and partly on how many people
click through the ads on your site. But realistically, you could earn anywhere
between $0.03 and $15.00 per click--and as much as several hundred dollars a day
if you have a well-optimized site that draws lots of targeted traffic.
4.
AdWords
<http://www.google.com/adwords>: The second of Google's advertising
opportunities is AdWords. These are ads that you create to promote your business
and that Google places on other sites for you. There are three main places
you'll see AdWord ads:
? On the right side of the page next to Google's "organic"
search results
? On other sites as AdSense ads
? Alongside your e-mail
messages in Gmail
When you
create your AdWord ads, you're in control of how much they cost. You decide how
much you're willing to pay for specific keywords in your ads, and each time your
ad is clicked, you pay that amount. The amount ranges from a minimum of $0.05 to
a maximum of $100, and you can set a daily budget that won't be exceeded.
Google uses the keywords you chose to help them place your ads on sites that
have content relevant to yours, so you can be assured the traffic you're paying
for is highly targeted. AdWords reach 80 percent of internet users, and you can
define their target region and language. If you're wary about using AdWords
because of the possibility of your ads appearing on sites that don't convert to
sales for you, you can apply a "negative filter" when creating your ad to
exclude specific sites.
As with AdSense ads, it's a good idea to test whether
your advertising investment is making money for you. If the click-through
traffic isn't converting to sales, if your traffic drops off, or if a particular
keyword is not drawing the traffic--and sales--you'd hoped for, it's time to
rework your ads.
Monitor Google--and Your Site's Google Ranking--With Other
Tools
We
shouldn't always take a company's word for it when it comes to what they offer.
It's wise to get a second opinion or look to the experts to see what the buzz is
about a company's products. Using Google is no different, and there are a large
number of ways to discover who's saying what about Google's products. There are
also a lot of people who provide tools and services that supplement Google's,
and these, too, are worth knowing about.
Let's look at a few
examples:
1. GoogleAdvisor.org <http://googleadvisor.org>: This is a blog that
focuses on AdSense, AdWords and PageRank strategies. (PageRank is the Google
tool you can use to gain an instant sense of your website's importance--you're
assigned a rank from 0 to 10 based on how many other sites link to you and how
"important" they are.) For information, tips, tricks and strategies related to
Google, this site is a good first stop.
2. GoogleRankings.com
<http://www.GoogleRankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php>: This site gives you a
free tool for checking your keywords. You can enter your site's URL and get a
report about your keyword density. You can then check how highly Google ranks
your site for each of those keywords.
3. GoogleGuide.com
<http://www.googleguide.com>: This site offers guides for both novice and
experienced users. Experienced users can find out more about creating a website,
including tips on PageRank, getting listed and advertising revenue.



