In the beginning, Google AdWords system was applied on the MySQL database engine. But later, the management chose Oracle which was a more commercial option to apply its system on. But the company had to return to MySQL because the system slowed down with Oracle.

MSN ad Center or Microsoft ad Center as it has been rechristened recently is the PPC service from the Microsoft Network. Microsoft is the latest search engine to develop this system. Before 2006, ads displayed on MSN browsers used to come from a company called Overture. In late 2006, MSN bought DeepMetrix Company that makes web-analytics software and based its own PPC on the technology on the technique designed by them. In late 2007, company released the Beta version of its Pay per Click campaign.

Just like Google AdWords, MSN ad Center also has two types of tariff systems – bidding system that awards an ad space to the person pays the highest price on every click and special rates on advertisements which get good amount of clicks. These systems not only motivate advertisers to create good ads but also to advertise only at spaces which are important for their advertisement.

The next line to top PPC advertising platforms is Yahoo! Search Marketing. This is a PPC campaign by Yahoo and has all the features which you will find in Google AdWords and MSN ad Center like keywords bidding and Pay per click search engine advertising. Yahoo started PPC Campaign Management when it bought Overture Services, Inc. in 2003. Slowly, Overture was phased out and it has now come under Yahoo! name.

These three PPC Ad Platforms are ruling the roost in PPC industry today with Google AdWords in clear lead.

PPC or Pay per click search engine advertising is an online advertising model that is used by search engines, content websites and advertising networks. In this model, advertisers pay for their ad according to the number of clicks on it. These advertisements are quite short and have one line as title and not more than two lines for the content of the ad. Images and videos can also be added to these ads.

Search engines use this model by asking advertisers to bid on keywords relevant to them. Bidding on keywords ensures an advertiser that whenever a user searches that keyword, his website’s link twill appear in the sponsored link category. Content websites on the other hand, charge according to clicks instead of bidding system.

There are many PPC advertisement platforms which provide different kind PPC services. The most popular one of them are Google AdWords, MSN ad Center and Yahoo! Search Marketing are most popular ones.

The first and probably the most popular Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign management tool is the Google AdWords campaign. Even though Google has many innovative features in its kitty, Google AdWords is no doubt the most innovative and successful campaigns by the company till date. It allows advertisers to advertise their websites and pay for it according to number clicks on the advertisement. This campaign is distributed on the basis of region and compliments your search engine marketing strategies.

Social networks, blogs, online communities and many such tools are the best carriers of social media marketing. Search engine marketing can be well conducted through social media marketing which involves lot of user interaction. Through social media it is lot easier to create brand awareness among the users and also get more information about one’s product in the form of feedback and reactions.

SEO and social media complement each other very well and the combined tactics of search engine optimization and social media marketing can work wonders for the company and its products. Useful social content can only be discovered through better search to reach out to wider audience and this can be achieved through effective SEO. Social interactions among the users of social networks improve the chances of brand visibility and hence awareness is created thus getting more traffic to your website.

Search engine marketing plays a vital role in building the image of the company and its products. The best way to place one’s brand is through successful social media marketing with four basic steps including,

• Listen- Listening is the foremost and basic step which forms base for the success of other three steps. Without listening to one’s customer one cannot build and sell a brand. Customer is always interested in knowing about product and the value which he can derive from the given product.

• Interact- Let the customers interact with the product or service to have proper understanding about its features, use and its worth. Customer’s interaction is essential part of social media marketing and it can be best achieved with the help of efficient SEO.

• React- After comprehending the product and service, customers will react to it in the form of opinion and feedback. Feedback becomes extremely important for effective and successful social media marketing. The customer reaction can be good, bad or neutral and accordingly products can be modified if required.

• Sell- The customer’s reaction to product or service will determine the chances of selling product which can be positive or negative. If negative reactions are perceived, then it becomes essential to interact with the customers and try to find out the reason in form of their reaction towards a specific product.

By incorporating SEO insight in social media marketing strategy, advertisers can also increase value for their investment. The social media content should be interactive and well optimized through effective repeated keywords for improved search results. Engaging all these four steps to enhance search engine optimization will speed up the way to successful social media marketing.

All search engine marketing investment is futile if we do not come to know whether they were converted into real customers and revenue. Therefore, the aim of every SEO marketer and any pay per click program is to have a way to measure the output per click and the amount of conversion of their clicks to actual viewing so that they can leverage their PPC investment.

A new tool by Google in Adwords allows users to see those pay per click ads that were displayed, were not clicked but were rather viewed by users and converted after some time. This is called the view-through conversion tool and it allows the advertisers to track not only those pay per click ads that were seen by users that particular day or even those whose conversion were made a few days or perhaps month after their viewing.

The earlier method of conversion was to take into account only those PPC ads on which a viewer clicked after reading it; but the latest concept is that there may have been ads that were seen by the viewer but not clicked on. In this scenario the viewer may click on it later on or take some action like e-mail subscription or saving the landing page. Both these routes of action show that there is a potential of that ad being clicked in the future and hence the person is a potential customer.

It is this view-through conversion that the new tool from Google aims to measure. All PPC clicks that are converted and viewed within 30 days from the time the ad was seen on the network are taken account of.

It is this view-through conversion that is most useful in seeing that the investment of the advertiser on ppc or pay-per-click ad is optimized.  This tool is most useful in case of several simultaneous ads being run online. It helps an advertiser see the effectiveness of a particular PPC campaign and help make several cost saving decisions in order to maximize the PPC ad campaign expenses.

It is very easy to activate; in fact if an advertiser already has an AdWords account, then all he needs to do is to activate the view through conversion tool given under the Accounts campaign tab. This, in conjunction with search engine optimization, will help you get better ROI and boost  your online business activities.

The Google system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of the pay per click keyword and for doing this it takes into account the relevancy of the PPC keyword to the ad text and also to the user’s search query.

A PPC keyword’s Quality Score is updated periodically and is closely monitored and related to the overall pay per click management system. This means a high Quality Score will make it possible to get better ad location, higher SEO rankings and lower pay per click costs. All the different PPC keywords have different quality scores and these can be viewed in the account statistics, the Keyword Analysis field, and in the account report details and information related to these can be of great advantage to you.

Quality Score is a great way to leverage any ppc campaign management and ensures you can get maximum value out of any PPC effort.

If you want to have an excellent PPC program the three elements of the Quality Score must be understood well. These are keywords, ad text and landing page.

Keywords

The keywords are first and foremost the most important aspect of your PPC program and you must ensure that these keywords are clear, relevant and have good click through rates. Ratings for any pay per click keywords are determined on a scale of 1 to 10 and can be as poor as 1 or as good as 10 (although both are rare scenarios)!

All keywords have a minimum bid but to get the lowest bid the overall quality score has to be high for any particular pay per click keyword or phrase. The PPC keyword has to be properly and extensively used in the landing page and in the adtext to get high quality score and ensure great pay per click management.

Adtext

Great importance is attached to the adtext in order to get a good quality score and a high click-through rate. Relevant, crisp and well written adtext can leverage the PPC program like never before and give you amazing SEO investment returns.

Landing Page

The page on which the users land after surfing through the organic search engine results is your website’s landing page. The keywords you are targeting should be easily found out on the landing page. The site should be well written for the success of any pay per click program and for getting high PPC returns. The ad links you are using should give the most useful information about the product or service and should be easy to navigate as well.

However, these are just the basic blocks for achieving a good quality score in order to leverage any pay per click management system and get the best ROI. The work on these features has to be continuous and unremitting for the best returns on your PPC programs.

The Google camp is known to keep the ball of innovation rolling and hence keep webmasters on their toes. Google has now come up with nine new tools in its ever increasing features of the organic search engine results ; these tools are a consequence of its search related enhancements to get the best of organic search results. Another impetus could of course be the stiff competition it is facing from rival Yahoo! in the past couple of months. Hence, Google now has nine new filters which can be used for search engine optimization. The organic search results can now be filtered by the hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, news and blogs. These search options are available after the initial organic search results are given by the search engine, by simply clicking on the show options tool bar on the left top corner of the page. This is what these search tools can actually be used for;

Past hour and Specific date range – This option allows a searcher to funnel down the search to the latest results within an hour of the search, ‘oven-fresh’ results if you like! There is also the date specific result that filters down the search engine results according to the dates specified.

Visited pages and Not yet visited – As the name suggest this option allows a searcher to tone down the results using the option of not seeing all the pages already visited or those not yet visited. It helps save time and refines the organic search results.

More shopping sites or fewer – The option of more sites puts in more commercial pages in the organic search results and also gives the prices of the pages right in the beginning. But in case you choose ‘fewer shopping sites’ then it filters out many commercial pages.

Books, Blogs and News – This is yet another interesting tool that brings down the scope of the search giving pages only from Books, Blogs or News pages ; just as required.

How you use these new tools for SEO or for your search engine marketing strategy is up to you.

It is seen sometimes that a site is seen in the top 10 sites on the organic search engine results yet it is actually not such a strong site and has lack of good content, weak back links and is low on search engine optimization. How does this come about? It is not mere coincidence ; there is a good theoretical explanation and many SEO marketers call it the theory of Blended Search.

Blended Search

In order to give any searcher a wider meaning and a greater choice about what the user is searching organic search results page uses a technique of blending various listings from a cluster of meanings. This means that the scope of the search is widened by the search engine, in order to improve organic search engine results. Also it means that all possible combinations of the search can be seen by the user. This is a boon on one hand and can also be annoying to someone searching for something very specific.

Now this blending is done by the search engine in three different ways:

Way 1- In this the search engine optimizes the search by forcing new results to the existing organic search results page

Way2- In this method the search engine mixes navigational pages with informational pages and gives a search engine optimized result.

Way3- The third way is to add some pages with the abbreviations or synonyms of the keywords that the user is looking for.

This blending technique results in throwing up amazing results in the organic search. If webmasters are not aware of this blending technique then they cannot answer the question – How do weak sites get high SEO rankings?

Well sometimes a result is forced by Google onto the first page although it is may have been taken from another more diverse keyword cluster and logically it would not have got such high SEO rankings.

Such additions are possible because

• search results can be blended with other different clusters of keywords and get high SEO rankings;
• Every search phrase is associated with clusters of other web pages each having several other search engine optimization keywords and phrases.
• Each one of these clusters also includes some other phrase, in addition to the requested keywords.

A very common example is when a person is looking for a celebrity, then the top 10 pages would be the ones containing the name of the celebrity and along with it there will be some pages that crop up in the organic search engine results which the same name would be mentioned but not of the celebrity, this is because of the SEO blending technique of Google.

Ever since its inception YouTube has taken the world of video optimization by storm. On an average, 16 billion videos are watched in a single month on YouTube, hence making it a potent tool for video optimization. Recently Google AdSense joined up with YouTube to promote YouTube promoted Videos which boosted search engine optimization. Even without this tie-up, YouTube videos would actually show up on the organic Google search, but this is definitely icing on the cake.

Video optimization

However these videos are not the same as the YouTube videos and will be appearing in a regular AdSense ad format and not as image ads.

A YouTube video that has been optimized can outrank sites such as Amazon and eBay. Video optimization is still in its nascent form and is every SEO marketer’s dream tool.

Keep the videos precise and short

For the best video optimization whether on AdSense or on the YouTube, the formula is to keep the videos short, sweet and to the point.

Clean, crisp and clear videos get the highest rankings and get the best optimized results and move up the video rankings to give maximum advantage for any SEO investment made.

Get the maximum video optimization

As search engines cannot read videos it is important to write video specific text for getting maximum video optimization. For this one has to ensure that the keywords related to the video appear in the title, description and tags of the video.

More precise the text, the higher are the chances of the video being optimized in the search engine optimization results. Use original titles and descriptions .The more the originality, the better the chances of the video getting high SEO rankings. Most of the promoted video will be featuring movie trailers, product demos and other videos that will be promoted by AdSense so as to reach a wider audience.

Each YouTube promoted video will be having three or four lines of text along with a thumbnail image which when clicked by user will bring them to YouTube to watch a video or view a YouTube channel.

Promoted videos will be auctioned just like AdSense’s other ads and the highest bidder will get the chance to run his promoted video through Google AdSense. These video optimized ads will compete in AdSense’s standard auction and only those who win the auction for their promoted videos will appear through Google AdSense.

For AdSense it is an additional opportunity to promote videos and also earn AdSense revenues. All the videos that are run on AdSense are done so on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis and are contextually targeted to the websites’ content. It is a great way to get high SEO rankings and attract wider audience. This ensures better search engine marketing.

Google Webmaster Updates are basically a free service provided by Google for all webmasters allowing them to check the index status and increase the visibility of their websites to the optimum and enhance their organic search engine rankings

Recently the Google Central Blog announced the updating of this feature so that the webmasters find it easier to verify their sites’ SEO worthiness and how it can actually maximize the organic search engine rankings of all sites. By announcing these updates all webmasters have been given a chance to update their sites to get maximum search engine optimization , visibility and traffic.

Google calls it the “Summer Shine project” and the main changes that webmasters can expect are:

File verification easier

The Site Selector option will list all the verified sites and will allow the webmasters to search for the sites while typing.

The File verification process has been made simpler and easier because some webmasters had been complaining that they were not able to verify. To makes things easier Google has now allowed verification without a 404 status code process.

Block non-page links

Webmasters can now block all those non-home page site links on their sites that they do not want. Previously this was not allowed and sub directory links couldn’t be blocked. It is a great advantage to all webmasters in enhancing their SEO rankings and in generating greater traffic to their sites.

View removal requests

In case other viewers or rivals may have given a “removal request” for the sites; Google will allow the webmasters to see the URL from where the removal request has come.

Not only this, the request can even be revoked by the webmaster if required. This prevents the misuse of this facility and also helps in search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Easier webmaster tools Homepage

The tools page for the webmaster has been made easier to navigate thus offering maximum visibility and enabling good SEO rankings.

The process of updating also allows the webmasters to change the e-mail and operate from an e-mail which is not registered. Earlier if the registered e-mail was not verified the site could be de-verified but this has been removed with the updating allowing for better and faster SEO optimization by the webmasters.

If you have made pay per click program a part of your search engine marketing strategy then you know the crucial role thorough understanding of Google AdWords will play in making your plans successful. In fact the Google AdWords Qualified Professional is desirable for any company involved with PPC campaigns. This is one status that can be obtained at individual level as well as company level depending up on your own requirements. Also, always bear in mind that once you get this status don’t think that you‘ll have it forever. This is valid only for 2 years and after that you’ll again have to take the test and qualify.

For the effectiveness of your search engine marketing campaign and also your PPC strategies you will have to ensure that at individual level or at company level you must always have the Google AdWords Qualified Professional status. If you are worried as to how to qualify the Google AdWords Qualified Professional Exam then following are some tips which will help you through;

• AdWords Learning Centre is the Key: Don’t skip the Google AdWords learning centre as most of the questions in the exam are actually taken from this centre only. The reading material and tutorials that you’ll find there will make your job easier.
• AdWords Ad Text Policies: The exam usually asks many questions from the Google AsWords ad text policies sections. So, if you prepare well in this section then you can be sure of getting many questions right.
• Situation Based Questions: One of the very common types of questions is related to situations especially in the case of as text. To best prepare for such questions is to think about the possible scenarios and the questions which might be asked from them. Such practice will be very helpful in getting the questions right in exam.
• ROI is more important than you think: ROI is critical for every client and understanding what it is and how to calculate it is crucial for you too if you are planning to sit in the Google AdWords Qualified Professional Exam. There are many questions related to ROI in the exam.
• Understand Basics: This is a crucial factor in qualifying the exam. The questions you may be asked include information on from where you can access conversion tracking codes or some other information.

These tips will surely come handy in qualifying the Google AdWords Qualified Professional Exam and eventual success of your pay per click program. Many search engine optimization firms offer ppc campaign management as well.