This month our newsletter will focus on Google Adwords help, and our September special offer, which is a Google Adwords Healthcheck for just £40.

One of the things that we find a lot of when doing these healthchecks is that people are often getting thousnds of clicks on their ads per month, but no sales from their site. Obviously this could be for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons we come across a lot is that thy simply haven’t thought their keyphrases through properly, and haven’t made sure that they’re not getting clicks that were meant for some other product or service.

To illustrate this, Mike came up with 2 cartoons – and we love them. The first one is below, as although it makes me (Nikki) giggle every time I look at it, I have the feeling that some of our more staid readers may not like to see it in their inbox

We’ll probably go with the other cartoon (sign up to the newsletter if you want to see it!) but I think the above one does a great job of showing just one of the mistakes you could be making with Adwords – it might be worth having a Google Adwords healthcheck to find out if you’re making more!

Before we talk about whether it matters, for those of you not so sure, here’s the Wikipedia definition of PageRank:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

Put in a simple way, PageRank is a number assigned to your web page by Google – it goes from 0-10 (officially), and in the past it had some weighting towards your search engine positions.

Opinions differ on whether or not it matters – I’m of the opinion that it’s not worth obsessing over. To my mind, i you have a PR of 8, but your website languishes on page 55 for the phrases you want to be found for, life isn’t good. If you have a PageRank of 3, yet you’re on the front page of Google for the phrases that matter, then all is well with the world

I was challenged on my “Oh dear, not the PR debate again” stance with the comment “But PageRank matters when I’m buying or selling links. Links in from higher PageRanked sites matter more”. And the chap in question kind of has a point – if you have links from higher PR sites, then it can help your search engine listings, and is a GOOD THING. That said, to my mind it’s still not worth obsessing over.

Worry about your positions in the search engine results (SERPS), not some random number on a Google Toolbar.

As an aside to this, and just in case you were all rushing off to buy links from PR9 sites – here’s Google’s official stance on buying links that pass PageRank in order to help search engine positions:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

(From http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

If you read the rest of that page, high PR sites CAN sell links, but are forced to use the ‘nofollow’ tag, which stops any ‘Google juice’ being given and so makes them practically useless when used in that way.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – rather than worrying about PageRank when approaching sites for links, worry about whether or not they get the types of visitors that would be interested in your site.

2. How to add my site to Google
http://www.jaxey.com .. You can now how to add your site to google for more info visit us

3. Creating a Google Sitemap
Quick basic lesson in how to create a sitemap using online tools, and upload it straight into Google Sitemaps.

4. How to use Google Search like a professional user
Google Secrets

5. How to get high rankings on Google (SEO)
Detailed information on how to get high rankings in google. How to get high Page ranked sites to point back to your site.

6. How to set up Google Analytics
http://www.thirtydaychallen… Learn how to use the Google Analytics we analyzer for web tracking: http://www.thirtydaychallen…

7. How to improve your Google Ranking
Ever searched your name on Google? Did you come up on page 1 or 17? What about your web site or blog? Are you showing up for the ideal keywords? Watch this Daily Idea and learn how to improve your Google ranking in a few easy steps.

8. How to get a first page ranking on Google
Download the software that I used to get a first page Google ranking

“Google Wants To See You Naked” Covers most of what we already know, but it is quite amusing and always bears repeating.

The basics are:

1. Provide fresh, new content on your site so that other sites link back to it

2. Match your website’s blog headlines with the keyword phrases that people are searching on

3. Write articles for other sites that have links pointing back to your site

4. Distribute press releases that include links to the content on your site

Watch the video and subscribe to their mailing list – their articles are always informative and don’t waffle!

So it was lovely to wake up on Sunday morning to a stream of emails about the web marketing feature in the Sunday Times. It’s already resulted in business, and we think we’re going to be in the second part next Sunday too!

An extract from the article, which you can read in full here:

A common mistake many firms make is creating a website and expecting visitors to come to it, said web-marketing expert Nikki Pilkington. “A lot of people still expect visitors just to find their website. Making your site visible to search engines is vital if you want to attract traffic.”

Before you spend money paying search-engine-optimisation (SEO) experts to get your site high on search-engine listings, there are simple things you can do yourself, free of charge, said Pilkington.

After you hit the ’start labelling’ button, you will be given an online partner. Now you and your partner will see same images. You need to provide as many labels for the displayed images. You will receive points when your label matches your partner’s label.

We know from our overflowing inbox that lots of you have questions about Google Adwords.

It seems so easy – sign up, post some ads, get traffic, make money.

But as everyone who has tried it soon finds out, there’s more to it than that!

This FREE e-book will help you through the process of setting up and making money from your Google Adwords account – download it now with our compliments

See below for a full chapter list:

• “Are You Prepared To Profit From Instant Web Traffic?”………………………….4
• “10 Minutes To Instant Web Traffic”…………………………………………………..10
• “Keyword Research Basics”……………………………………………………………..23
• “How to Write Ads that Attract Clicks”……………………………………………….33
• “Tracking Ads and Landing Pages”……………………………………………………45
• “Adwords Keyword Strategies”…………………………………………………………55
• Bonus Chapter – Finding Profitable Markets……………………………………….63
• Bonus Chapter – Finding High Paying Adsense Keywords……………………..72
• Bonus Chapter – Finding Profitable Keywords…………………………………….78

So what are you waiting for? It’s here, it’s fab and it’s FREE

I seem to recall I once attended a ‘virtual’ Ecademy meeting in Second Life too – I’ll say nothing about how queasy that made me feel

However, it caught on and people loved it – people are doing business on there and selling virtual and real things, and all power to ‘em I say!

News comes out today though that Google are launching what might be a serious contender to the Second Life throne – Lively. I’ll be sure to put it on my list of things to try, but I’d love to here from those of you that decide to use it

A New Morning blog says:

Google just launched “Google Lively“ which is a free, browser-based virtual environment with tight integration to social networks like MySpace, Facebook and OpenSocial, as well as Google gadgets like Picassa and YouTube. You can create an avatar and chat with your friends in rooms you design with Google Lively.

 More here