DOES PAY PER CLICK PAY OFF

Question

Top site placement on search engines seems to be dominated more and more by groups like homeslocal etc. who are able to pay the high price for top spots.Are there any agents out there who have mastered the art of SEO ing themselves??
mike

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Most of my clients aren't happy with the results. It is costing them too much money for too little return.. just one viewpoint... many others have been happy & successful!

Dani

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Thats not a bad idea disco kid

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The one theing you dont want to do is get in a bidding war for "city real estate."  That phrase is to popular and to many people are desperate enough to overpay for it.  Not only that, it si so generic that you might not be offering the services the consumer is looking for.

My ppc strategy is to build very specific internal pages and advertise to them.  An example would be "condo's upder 200,000."  You then creat an internal page focusing on low level condos with quick searches to these properties.  This way you are getting targeted traffic and getting them into the home searc ASAP.  Works for me, prices are dirt cheap and leads are that much better. (just not a ton of them)

Vegas- Kid

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Pay per click absolutley does work but you have to target the right words. My company uses a system that tracks analytics and PPC ads literally down to the T.

You can see a flash video of the report viewer I use here:

http://webmastermydomain.com/trainingvideos/report-viewer/navigatereportviewer.swf

I work with a company that designs and does SEO on RE sites. Take a look and let me know what you guys think.

http://webmastermydomain.com/

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I guess the long and short of it is that PPC can pay off if you know what you're doing.

I'm on Perry Marshall's mailing list and I found his free mini-course pretty good.
http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/

Also, a place called Google Adwords Made Easy(not an affiliate link) has a free ebook about adwords. Near the end of it, they sell a tool to help you run your adwords campains, but the rest of the book has some decent information.
Direct download link for the book:
http://www.googleadwordsmadeeasy.com/AWMadeEasy_signed.pdf

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TN-Apprentice,

Nice :)  I've learned CSS and SEO. My parents site(that I am working on as we speak) ranks on page #7 out of 3+ million results under the keyword phrase- Berkshires Real Estate.

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Hi,

I'm currently using searchbiddaddy.com to help promote
my sports related website. The above site listed in my signature
is for my parents website.

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I used to do web designs and occasionally would have to get into the SEO business for clients. The most useful information I found out there was at a forum at a site called seo-guy:  (www.seo-guy.com/forum/).

I never mastered the art, but I did have some good success with some tough keywords. They have a section about PPC, but most of the discussion focuses on things that don't cost money (just time -- like how you design your page).

Deborah Beeksma · Answer

There's a new search engine in which they are giving away $50 in PPC.  They're climbing on Alexa pretty fast, and I personally have been getting around 75-100 search result clicks coming in from them every two weeks.  When I make some time and get serious about using this search engine, I'll probably see even more traffic.

You can get your own "search portal" totally free, plus the $50 PPC gift.  You can also build your PPC dollars beyond $50 by conducting searches on your own search portal (pretty wild...I felt weird and somehow "cheating" when I did this, but it is totally acceptable through the service) and by giving away search portals.

The service is called Big Daddy.  I was pretty skeptical at first until I started seeing the incoming traffic on my server logs.   The key to using it is to keep building up your PPC balance by running searches and giving away sites.  You can use your PPC balance to bid on keywords or, if you get it to a certain level (I can't remember the number off hand), you can "buy" a sponsorship of a certain keyword or key phrase.  Basically, this is a free way to dominate a search engine market for the keyphrase that you want.

One thing that I've been finding is that some of the keyphrases that I am now sponsoring through Big Daddy are showing up as backlinks in the major engines (Yahoo, MSN and Google).  So it's been a win-win without having to spend any money.

Since it's free, there's really nothing to lose.

Links:

http://www.bigdaddypays.com (non-affiliate)

According to an email I received from them today, they're ranking in the top 10,000 sites on Alexa right now.  People are learning about this and grabbing keywords, so the sooner you can get the keywords, the better.

Anyway, it might help with your promotional efforts...My own experience has been favorable, but I can't predict for anyone else how good it will be.

Deborah

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Like biggerpro said, it can be cheap if there is little competition or expensive if it a large, lucrative market.  SEO is the same way, but in terms of time not money.  We're starting to get top placement for about a half dozen search terms targeted mostly by geographic area, and with some more work we should be able to diversify our standings for more and more terms.  SEO isn't rocket science, and with a little HTML knowledge and a lot of time - you make vast impovements on where you are in the SERP's (with little or no expense).

PS-easiest way is to add a link with anchor text to your signature on this site:

See mine below->