What's Up With Google?

In case you haven't heard, some major changes took place at Google late in November, 2003. What is being referred to as the "Florida update" has apparently turned out to be a major change in Google's ranking algorithm. Since then, the "Austin" and "Brandy" updates have added to the confusion.

Search engine experts say this was a major shake up, as many sites that previously had very high rankings have dropped precipitously, and sites that seem to have no relevance at all to certain search terms are suddenly at the top of the rankings for those terms.

All of this prompts us to ask, "What's up with Google?" Frankly, nobody outside of Google seems to know, and SEOs are hard at work trying to figure it out. The change is a major concern, since Google apparently controls a very high percentage of search engine traffic.

This prompts us to consider alternative action for getting traffic to our mini sites. Many "super affiliates" have long been fans of the pay-per-click (PPC) search engines, and swear by this strategy for generating targeted traffic. A little simple math demonstrates why. Let's say we're selling a product on which we make a $20 commission per sale. It stands to reason that if we pay less than $20 for the traffic necessary to generate one sale, then we are showing a profit (not taking into consideration our monthly cost for hosting our site, and the original development cost).

Suppose we had signed up at a PPC search engine, bidding 10 cents per click on a number of search terms and phrases relevant to our product. At 10 cents per click, $20 would buy us 200 clicks (i.e., 200 people who clicked through the link in the ad and actually visited our mini site. At that rate, we need to "convert" (i.e., sell to) only one half of one percent of our visitors to show a profit.

Now our problem becomes one of making sure that our site effectively "sells" the product(s) we feature, at a conversion rate of 1% or better. It appears that most internet marketing experts consider this an attainable goal. While conversion rates vary widely based upon the product and how well it is presented, it appears that conversion rates of a fraction of a percent on up to about 5% are typical for many sites and products.

Carefully selecting the product(s) to represent, effective "pre-selling", and monitoring traffic logs and conversion rates allow us to be independent of how well our mini-sites rank with the conventional search engines.

To learn more about how to create a site that effectively converts your visitors, check out Ken Evoy's Make Your Site SELL !

To learn more about how to most effectively use the PPC search engines check out this cool e-book written by a guy who makes a nice income this way.

This handy program will help you to semi-automate the task of finding key words and key phrases to bid on at the two major PPC search engines. The first time I used it, I found over half a dozen key phrases to bid on that I would probably never have thought of without this software.