First, how much is to much? It is a simple question, but when advertising it turns into a very complex problem. You want your ad to show up as much as possible, and the idea of competing with larger companies is great; but you must have the budget to do so. In trying to compete with others who were advertising on some of the same keywords we were after, our small budget quickly ran out in less than 2 weeks.

The turnover on AdWords, at least in my experience, is very minimal as well. In looking at the dispersion of impressions across the keywords, most of the impressions were served on the AdSense network, which yielded absolutely no hits let alone conversions. The remaining impressions were scattered across our selected keywords, any yielded some clicks but only a handful of conversions (a successful conversion was recorded whenever someone contacted us through the website). In my short experiment with AdWords, I find advertising on the AdSense network worthless, at least if you are offering a competitive service such as web design, the AdSense network just throws your ad onto anyone’s website that has content Google find to match what you’re wanting. With such little control, you’re just wasting time and money displaying ads on sites you don’t even know about.

So, to conclude my AdWords experiment, I must say I was let down by Google’s program. That isn’t to say it may not benefit a site that is selling goods, or targets a specific audience that isn’t currently being served, but if you wish to be found in a market that is already big then AdWords, in my opinion, is not worth it. I get the same exposure through a simple FREE Google search than I was getting through my AdWords campaign.

We officially launched our AdWords Campaign only a couple of days ago on Friday. Initially our ad was to specific, there weren’t enough broad keywords; so after adding some keywords and adjusting our maximum cost per click, we were able to launch the campaign on a much more solid ground. Since Monday, we have received over 1500 impressions. Granted impressions aren’t clicks, and without clicks that doesn’t amount to any more traffic than we had before; but the impressions alone are far more exposure than we got with relying on search engines alone. Exposure like this is great for a small-business that can’t compete with the hundreds of huge websites that hog up the results of popular keywords.

Although it is early in the campaign, it is hard to make a definitive decision on whether AdWords is for us or not; but so far the exposure is great and Google’s interface is simple to use and manage several ads, keywords, and more information all from one website. Once our campaign is able to run longer, look for more articles on AdWords and our success (or possible failure) with this program.

Don’t get me wrong, a flashy website with lots of animation and effects looks amazing, however it is easy to distract potential customers from the main objective of your website. The end goal is to have a site that establishes who you are, what you are providing to them, and do all of that while providing them with a well-designed, easy to navigate, user friendly interface.

These are just a few ideas to think about before you launch a new website.

As for getting to the top of search engine rankings, it takes both patience and knowledge to outsmart the beast Google has become. A new website for example can typically take Google up to a month to fully index, and once indexed that alone doesn’t guarantee that people will find you. The information on every page of your website must be relevant to the site, and at the same time, must also lure customers that do happen to find your site to continue shopping around. Flashy animation and graphical websites also hurt your ranking with Google because GoogleBot cannot read text and information contained within graphics on your website.

Assuming your website is setup properly and you have a good mix of graphics, to make the site visual appealing to your visitors, and textual content, to make the site accessible to GoogleBot. You also need to be known on the Internet to promote your search engine rankings. Having websites that are “known” by Google and the like will help Google to better trust your site. Think of it this way, would you trust someone that you have never seen before trying to sell you random items on the street? Probably not! However, if someone whom you have known your entire life were to tell you that the salesman was legitimate, honest, and trustworthy; then you would be likely to believe what the salesman had to say. Google works on the same principle. When a new site is discovered by Google, it examines if any other sites on the Internet link to this newly discovered website. If there are no links to the site, then Google assumes that the content is not very important in relation to other available websites and your site will not be easily found on Google. However, if your site is linked to from a very well known site, for example Microsoft.com, then Google beings to trust that the content on your site must be more relevant because a very well trusted site is linking to you.

These ideas are just some of the basic concepts that most new website owners don’t realize. Knowing how some of these features work can help you to make better decisions when it comes to your website’s design, features, and content.

So, to try to overcome the monster known as Google, we have subscribed to a number of Google services if it wasn’t apparent from viewing our homepage. One of their services, Google Sitemaps, is supposed to be designed to allow easier submission of your website to their Bot. Another feature within the Sitemaps program, is the ability to remove your website, specific urls, the site in the cache, etc from their index. Being as our site has been completely redesigned, we thought it would be beneficial to request that our website be removed from the cache so that old, expired content isn’t being directed towards potential visitors. However, after requesting that our site be removed, we were presented with a spectacular “DENIED” from Google to remove our highly outdated website from their cache.

So, I suppose the discussion on this post is whether Google necessarily uses any user, subscriber, visitor, customer, or any other person’s input in making their decisions whether to index a website or not.