Google Adwords & PPC - Should you use it?

Ok so I have been at this for some time now and if you have managed to get through my rambling and can handle another 10 minutes of reading then this is where I share my experience with Google Ad words.

Pay Per Click (ppc) Now many will say it's not worth it but I believe everyone needs to decide for themselves.

Ok so I set up my Key words my Meta title and even my Meta description, as already stated earlier. Then I started an account on Google ad words and began using that to generate some business. So I set up the account run a few ads and wow I am getting traffic, not a lot but over 200 and out of that I seem to be making sales, nothing I can retire on but it's sales. this goes on for November December and yes every click costs me money but I figure I spend two hundred dollars for some traffic and after all the expenses I make a few thousand dollars, good return on the investment. However by December 28th 2009 I start getting what they call charge backs and before I know it over 75% of all my sales for November and December were fraudulent and I had to give the money back. OK no problem however my payment gateway doesn't pay back the fee they charged me so that has to come out of my pocket not to mention they charge me another fee to dispute the claims. (Which buy the way I lost on all accounts)? But that's part of doing business what I need to do now is find out why my site has so many fraudulent card uses and where they are coming from.

WHERE TO START: I decide to start with my web host and they tell me to look for multiple attempts at a purchase, actually to take a look at the card used for the attempts as their site has the ability to show the last 4 digits of the card that was used. So I start looking at this and HOLY cow there are some attempts for purchase that are 15 tries. Well I don't know about you but I don't want to sit here for 8 hours a day just checking all these attempts. So I call my host and they tell me I can block ip addresses one by one or I can do a range so that anyone with that ip address range will not be allowed onto my sit. Yep you guessed it I spent the better part of two days going through my logs and writing down all ip addresses that have multiple attempts. then I go the admin section of my site open settings and then go to IP Firewall and proceed to add the ip addresses, then I discover that I can limit the attempts per each user, So in settings I go to IP ADDRESS SECURITY RULES AND SETTINGS, there I limit the amount of attempts a person can make per day. Now this should eliminate any fraudulent use RIGHT? WRONG although the sales from stolen cards are down I notice there is still a vast amount of fraud ATTEMPS going on. Now I need to find out where they are coming from as I am not on the first page of any search ending....YET....., after watching the activity of my site as the activity on any of my other sites I use to advertise I notice that the only thing I have not changed is my Google ad words campaigns, OK well I will suspend them for a month and see what happens. Well low and behold the fraud attempts come to a halt, now being a thinker I figure it may be coincidence that that happened so I start my ad word campaign again and in less than 24 hours my site is busy again but with about 90% of it all fraudulent purchase attempts. I suspend my campaign and guess what happened, YEP the fraud attempts came to a crawl.
No Ad Words, Now What?

So Now with Ad Words out, my traffic has come to a halt, not to mention my so called page rank went from 78 to 0. So now what do I do? Well I will have to work on getting good Organic Search Results. So back to my meta description and meta tags, load them up and see what happens, and let me tell you when you read other blogs that say DON’T SPAM your KEY WORDS trust me and DON’T , I did and my site fell of the face of the map with Google and alexa traffic rank. Now I have to figure out how to get it all back and to do it the right way.

Back to the books (so to speak) and get it right this time. So I start by looking for somewhere I can get some insight as to what I need to do (as there are lots out there) and I found Hub Spot and it has a great grader that tells you what you need to do to improve your site. After running a scan on my site it said I needed to shorten my title (as it was to long), I needed to set up a blog and a twitter account not to mention I needed to have a de.li.cious book mark. So I shortened my title, changed my key words and set up a this BLOG then I proceeded to set up my Twitter account. After I set them up I had to link them to my site and that I did.

Next I wanted to find somewhere that could draw some traffic to my site and I found linkreferral, now this has actually turned out to be a great help in my learning and growth because not only does it get traffic to my site but in the forums I can ask questions and there is all kinds of people to help and they do help. So I’m on there now for a few months and I am getting all kinds of help but there was one that took the time to explain to me and give me some examples on proper use of title, meta description, meta tag . So I spend the next 2 weeks back at the drawing board. I needed to start that section all over again but didn’t want to use the same sites I have already used so I start searching for a new key word/Phrase program and I come across WEB CEO, and it makes finding key words and phrases much easier as it shows the monthly search traffic and the competition that there is for such word and phrase, another great feature is it also shows your KEI (Key word Effectiveness Index). The higher the KEI is the better but you want to make sure that you pick the high KEI with the lowest competition. This tool is great and has made a huge difference in how my site is graded and looked at now that I have done some of the proper steps in SEO.

With all the current changes from the above my site has started showing up in searches.

So what now do I just sit around and wait for all these tweaks to start working? NO, I need to track what's going on with my site so I did some digging around and found go stats that will track exactly what's going on with your site, including page turns average time per visit and of course the all important return visits. All I have to do is install this little (invisible) snippet on my site and then sit back watch. Now I will make some adjustments one at a time so that I can see the results from each action, if I advertise on a site I can sit back and see if it has a positive or negative effect on my traffic.