Keywords, AdWords, Overture and Your Commerce Site

I spent this week in North East Texas with my parents, they live relatively (no pun intended) close to my daughter. This means I can go visit my daughter during the day and, if not too exhausted at the end of the day, visit with my parents. My mother runs an e-commerce site devoted to eyelets and other scrapbooking supplies. On a whim, I decided to try to Google her site for the basic keyword eyelets. Her site did not show up in the top 1000. However, a search for eyelets and extras (the name of her e-commerce store), she ranked 5. Well being the computer geek I am, I decided to investigate a little.

I explained a little about Page Rank and meta tag keywords a little about how they work. We debated a little about how people would search for things, and generally agreed that a search would normally end up being more than one word. So up to this point I had been explaining the benefits of higher listings in search engines. In the trade this is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO, there are positions in many companies sole devoted to this endeavor.

However, during this discussion, I also realized that the net effect of this is more visibility for increased hit count and ultimately better sales. That's where the discussion turned to AdWords. Basically, AdWords are like traditional advertising. You sign up for an initial nominal fee, $5.00 in AdWords case. Then you bid on a particular keyword, lets say eyelet. Each time a search is performed on Google with the keyword eyelet, each keyword bidder for that keyword is considered for display in the sponsored links area of the search. Now let's say I bid $0.95 and you bid $0.05 for this particular keyword. That would mean that out of 20 searches for eyelet, my link would be displayed 19 times to your one time. However, it doesn't stop there, AdWords can also appear on sites other than Google. Take a look at the top of this page -- AdWords. Yahoo does not itself, run an AdWord program, rather it out-sources its sponsored links to Overture as do many other search engines such as MSN and CNN.

I'll attempt to get her search ranking up on Google and Yahoo, but she'll have to decide on AdWords and Overture.

Spiff