Google™ Analytics 2.0

Chapter 19. AdWords

If you have a web site, you know it’s not all that difficult to get your site listed in search engines such as Google or Yahoo! For the most part, especially if your web site URL and title are the same, all you have to do is put the site up and wait. In many cases, within a few days a potential visitor can type the name of your web site into a search engine and it will appear in the search listings. Give it a little more time and you might even make it to the first page of the results.

That’s the only easy part of search-engine marketing. If you have a service or product that you want to market by search engine, landing good placement in search-engine results is like catching electric eels by hand. Not only is it slippery and unpredictable, but if you do manage to catch it, there’s a very good possibility that you’re going to get a serious shock.

To help combat the difficulties of creating web pages that actually land on a relevant search-term result, an entire discipline of marketing is targeted at optimizing search-engine results. It’s called Search-Engine Optimization. At the heart of this marketing strategy are keywords and keyword marketing.

Lumped together, this all adds up to search engine marketing — the art of gaining prominent placement in search engine results. And if you’re trying to improve your search engine results, you’re probably using some kind of keyword marketing.

Keeping up with the results of that marketing can be a difficult task that leaves ...