Determining the value of each keyword, and in turn each visitor, is vital. The simple formula goes like this: Divide the average number of new customers each month (a long enough period to be statistically significant) by the average number of monthly visitors to get the percentage of visitors who actually become customers. If you multiply this percentage times your average profit margin on sales to new customers, you get a good idea of how much a visitor is worth to you on the first visit.

For example: If I average 10,000 visitors per month to my website and sell 150 of them a product with a $20 profit margin, then I can easily calculate the percentage (150/10,000) to be 1.5%. Multiplying the 1.5% by $20 yields a $0.30 value for each visitor.
It’s interesting to look at the bigger picture of this example as well. While making $0.30 per visitor doesn’t seem like much, the dollars get big quickly when you multiply pennies by thousands of visitors. My profits for the month with 150 sales would be $3,000 if I had no advertising costs. If I can generate the visitors for a cost of $0.10 each for a total cost of $ 1,000, then I have a profit of $2,000.

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Submitting an extended list of keywords may be not be useful. In fact, you won’t get as many potential customers to your website with an extended list of keywords as you would with focused and targeted keywords. Besides, you would also end up paying more without any benefits.
Targeted keywords would ensure that only those visitors who are actually interested in your product or service click on the search listing and visit your website. Thus, there are more chances of a visitor becoming a loyal customer.

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When the search engine user gets the result of a search, they’ll see the highlighted titles for each listing followed by a short description. You should think of this just like a classified ad with a headline and short copy.
Here are some tips for formulating effective titles and descriptions:
• Use an attention getting headline to get as many people as possible to read the description. Here’s where you want to be sure to use the important proven successful terms like “free” and “you”.
• Write a description that succinctly tells the reader why he or she would be a fool not to click on your link. For most keywords this is the best plan because you’re only paying a penny or two for the click-through. But, you’ll want to be more selective about the copy for the more expensive bids. If you’re going to pay a quarter for each click through, then you may want to have higher quality traffic. You don’t want just anyone to click through. You want people more likely to buy.
• You should have the ability to track each keyword so you can determine the success ratios of clickthroughs to sales. All programs discussed above will allow you to use their system to track clickthroughs.

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If you determine that the traffic generated by a specific keyword is more valuable to you than other keywords, you can go online and immediately raise your bid for that term. You will instantly increase your traffic.
It would be a good idea to even track the patterns of which days and times generate the most sales from Search Engine traffic. During this prime time, you should raise your bids to increase traffic. As soon as the slot ends, you should lower your bids to the old levels.

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The cost of a top position with any of the big PPC’s depends upon the keyword you are bidding on and how many people search for it. If you have to bid on a popular word such as ‘Internet marketing’ be prepared to pay around $2 – $4 for a decent position. But what if you went for “Internet marketing articles” it costs less than a quarter of the price, it will produce far less visits of course, but is much more cost effective. Imagine doing this on a wide scale basis, securing lots of low-cost positions, the combined traffic from these positions will add up to the level produced by a popular keyword – but at a fraction of the cost.

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Costs
The primary disadvantage of paid inclusion is the cost, although this factor naturally depends on your means. Typically, submitting to a few paid programs would cost anywhere around $1000 a year.
Reach
A second disadvantage, perhaps more accurately described as a limitation, is that Google does not offer paid inclusion (and maintains that it never will). Since Google currently provides the primary results for three of the top four engines (Google, Yahoo, and AOL), engines that offer paid inclusion may only account for a fraction of your overall site traffic. Google typically updates about once every month, and there is no way to add your pages to their index any faster- which means that you will be waiting for Google to index your new (or newly optimized) pages regardless of which paid inclusion programs you use. Only after Google lists your pages will they appear in Yahoo and AOL results.
ConsiderationsThere are many factors to consider when examining paid URL inclusion. The following five are some of the most common:

Are my pages already in the index?

Just because you can’t find your pages when you enter search terms does not mean that your pages haven’t been indexed. To see if your pages have been indexed, go to the engine and search for each of your exact page URLs in quotes. If each page shows up for the URL search but not for a search of any key phrases related to the page, paid inclusion will not help your rankings (your pages are already in the index and have been ranked according to their perceived value). It would be much more beneficial to invest some time and/or money in optimizing your pages for better rankings (you can still consider paid inclusion afterwards if you don’t want to wait for the spider to revisit).
Is it a good investment for me?
Naturally, budgetary constraints can be a primary consideration. If you can’t afford paid inclusion, then it obviously isn’t an option. However, simply because you can afford it does not mean it is a good investment. For example, a business that sells a very inexpensive product online that is counting on volumes of traffic may not see a good return on their investment (again, 3 of the top 4 engines do not offer paid URL inclusion). On the other hand, if your business has a high average dollar sale and you put a high value on each quality lead, you might consider immediate paid URL inclusion a no-brainer.

Do my pages change frequently?

If your web pages are subject to daily or weekly changes in content, paid inclusion may offer some additional benefits. When your pages are spidered frequently, all new content is indexed by the engine soon after it is added to your pages. This means that your pages will begin to appear in searches for terms related to the new content much more quickly.
Are my important pages dynamically generated?
Some search engine spiders have a problem finding and indexing pages that are dynamically generated (such pages often have a question mark somewhere in the URL). By paying to include the important pages of your dynamically generated website, you can be sure that they are in the engine’s index, even if the “organic” spider would never find them on its own.

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The effectiveness of your efforts in submitting your pages for listing on search engines can be monitored and evaluated by two methods: spider spotting and URL check.
Spiders from search engines that visit your site and crawl pages leave some unique trace marks in your access log. This can tell you whether a spider has visited or not, what pages they have visited and also the frequency or duration of their visit.
The best way to identify spider visits is by finding out which visitors asked for the file robots.txt from your site. Only spiders make such a request, as this file is an indication to them to avoid covering the page in question. So the first thing a crawler would do is to check for this file. If you see the access log and analyze it using some convenient software, you would be able to spot all the visits that were initiated with this request. Then one can spot the host name and relate that to major search engines. Host names are related to the search engine company’s name (it is the name of the site that hosts the spider). Another name that is used to identify such visits is the agent or browser names used by respective search engines. Get a list of host names and agent names from available resources (these names tend to change often) and also develop your own intuitive list by searching your access logs for all occurrences of known engine, host or agent names. Concentrate only on the top engines; though you may find several other smaller and less known search engines visiting your site.

Pay attention to not only the total number of visits but to the activity pattern for each of the recent visits to actually judge how many pages they covered. This is a very good way of ensuring if submissions have worked or if other inducements such as links from other sites have worked or not. This also helps you to distinctly evaluate the effectiveness of submission, indexing and page ranking characteristics of your site.
Some examples of hostnames and agent names are as below:
• AltaVista: hostname may have altavista.com within its name; agent is often called Scooter
• Excite host name may have atex or excite.com and agent name is Architextspider.
• Inktomi agent and host names have inktomi.com and Slurp is often used as the agent name.
• Lycos uses lycos.com within its host name and Lycos Spider is often part of the agent name.

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One can use specific search strings in most search engines to find if your URL is included in their index and also to see how many pages are thus indexed. These search strings have been identified and compiled by some useful resources on SEO.
For searching the pages from your URL in Google for example, insert the following search string in Google search:
allinurl:yourcompanyname.com/webmasters/meta.html (this depends on the index pages of your site). In the Yahoo directory use the command u:yourcompanyname.com to find the listings for this URL. There are similar, but specific search strings applicable to each search engine.
Again checking the search engine for your URL is a good way to check what that search engine has indexed. Thus through spider spotting and URL checking you have evaluated and confirmed the effectiveness of your actions on submission and indexing activities.

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The final step in your search engine optimization campaign is web log file analysis. The value of raw web logs are often not understood, but the truth is that your web log files are one of the most valuable resources you have as an Internet marketer.
Here are just a few examples of what your server logs can tell you:
• Measure the effectiveness of banner ads and PPC search engines.
• What search engine spiders have found your site?
• What keywords are people using to find your site?
• What search engines brings you most traffic? »
• How many have book-marked your site?
• How well do people like your site?
• How many people visit your site?
• What pages are most popular?
• Why do people leave your site?
• Who is linking to your site?

Web log files tell you if search engine optimization and other marketing campaigns are working. They will show you exactly in what areas you have success and where you need to put in more work. So, if you run a site but haven’t seen your servers web log files, get a hold of them right away. They will teach you things you’d never expect about how to make your site better, not just for you, but also for the people who matter – your customers.

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Logs are the best tool available for understanding your customers. Know how your customers find your Web site and why they are looking for it. This info will give you an idea about the mindset of your arriving visitors.
Log files ca tell you not only what sites your visitors originate from (whether your visitor arrives via a Search Engine or from a “regular” site), but also what keywords they enter (in the Search Engines) to find you. The keywords give you an idea of your prospects’ level of interest, as well as the kinds of benefits they seek.
Are you successfully drawing visitors through your site? A quick look at your log files will tell you. Of the people arriving to your site, how many are pulled through your page joint to the next page (or stage)? Once you know how visitors act on your site, you will understand how to change your Web site in order to improve your Conversion Rate (CR).

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