Step Wise SEO

If your Task journal isn’t yet filled with dozens of fascinating ruminations, here are some ideas to get you out there and investigating:

• Is there a site that offers an award for your organization’s product or service? Can you get your site in the running? Try search for “[your product] web award” or “[your industry] web award”.

• Can you search for your site in a way that causes your meta description tag to show up on the search engine listings?

Try searching with your URL only or with text that appears only in links to you hut isn’t on your site.

Is your meta description tag showing up the way you expected? Do you see any funny characters? Did it get cut off earlier than you expected?

• Similarly, try to find searches that make your Open Directory or Yahoo! Directory listing show up in the results.

• Are you unintentionally spamming the search engines? Search for old pages on your site that are still live and displaying the same content as your new pages.

Check to make sure your pages aren’t doing something silly and spammy, like displaying text that’s the same color as the background.

• One of our favorite mysteries to investigate: Exactly which page on your site does Google think is your “official” page?

Search for your organization’s name and check the URL that Google returns for this search.

It may be your home page, or it may be an alternate domain, or it may something else deep within your site.

Are you surprised? Dismayed? What’s the reason that this URL is displaying? Is it the number of pages linking to this page? Is it that the “official” URL is the only listing your site has in the Open Directory?

• Do you know how to search like an expert? Try using advanced search operators on your favorite search engine.

For example, Yahoo! allows you to build your own search shortcuts. You can define a shortcut so you can type just “!pix” into the search box and Yahoo! will automatically search for “pictures of ethanol vehicles” or whatever you prefer.

Or, try one of the numerous built-in shortcuts, listed here: http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/. Are there any that your target audience might be using?

• Are your competitors tracking their conversions using Google Analytics? Peek into their source code and look for the Google Analytics tracking tag. Just search for the text string “google-analytics” in their code, and you’ll see the script.

• Are there any additional domains that your organization should own? For example, do you own a .org domain name but not the com?

If a searcher had to guess at your site’s URL, what do you think it would be? And, when is your current domain set to expire? Make sure you don’t inadvertently let it run out.

• How’s your spelleng? Search for misspellings of your product or service and see what comes up.

• Do a little volunteer work for the search engines by helping them clean spam out of their listings.

Every major search engine allows you to report spammers; Google’s spam reporting tool can be found at www.google.com/contact/ spamreport.html.

• What are people saying about your organization on discussion boards? Look to Lycos Discussion Search at http://discussion.lycos.com to find out. Or, see where you stand on the blogs at www.blogpulse.com.

With a little sleuthing, you can determine which search engine robots have visited your site and when.

To scope out robot visits to your site, do the following:

• First, find the name of the robot that you are interested in monitoring. Table 1 lists the robot identifiers for the four search engines, but be prepared for some variations.

Table 1 Robot Identifiers for the Four Major Search Engines

Search Engine Robot Name
Ask Teoma
Google Googlebot
MSN msnbot
Yahoo! Slurp

• Then, review your website stats program. Look for a section called “User Agents,” “Robots,” or “Browsers” (servers interpret a search engine robot as a type of browser).

• Depending on the sophistication of your stats program, you may be able to specify a date range and view robot visits. You might even be able to see exactly which pages within your site were visited.

If this all feels a bit too tedious, you may wish to look into software that provides simple yet detailed reports on robot visits. One such program is Robot Manager, available here: www.websitemanagementtools.com.

Keywords: Sitemap, Google Sitemaps, indexing,

In thiws article we’ve chosen four open-ended hot topics for you to explore. We selected these topics because they’re either a little too close to the cutting edge of today’s SEO or require a little too much individualization from you for us to give you specific instructions.

So you’re going to do the research yourself, with guidance from us! The goal is for you to come away with an approach to use whenever you need to learn something new about search.

If you’re a naturally curious person, and if you find it easy to surf from site to site while staying focused on your goal, it should be a snap.

If you aren’t yet confident in your advanced searching skills, or if you generally don’t trust an answer unless you get it in writing from a paid expert, it will help you stretch your abilities and save your money in the long run!

In this article you’ll start to get a feel for how to pursue your own SEO tactics and plans:

SEO News and Trends
SEO moves fast! It might seem that every time you go out for a cup of coffee, you come back to a whole new set of important players, rumors, and must-haves that weren’t there before.

You’re busy, so nobody expects you to keep up with every little twist and turn along the SEO highway.

In fact, staying a month or so behind the times can prevent you from crowding your brain with unnecessary SEO rumors and speculation.

We recommend keeping up at least a passing knowledge of SEO current events and stashing some solid SEO researching skills in your tool belt. When it comes time to do SEO on your own, you’ll need them! Here’s where to look:

• SEO News Sources
• SEO Forums
• Blogs and e-mail Newsletters

SEO News Sources
The Web is the only way to keep up with the latest SEO news and trends. Unfortunately, not every site is reputable, so you’ll need to wear your heavy-duty BS filters. You can’t go wrong if you stick with articles on the following sites:

Search Engine Watch, www.searchenginewatch.com Danny Sullivan, editor and world-renowned guru of search, offers reviews, updates, tips, and advice with mind-boggling attention to detail, helpful context, and insider information that nobody else comes close to.

HighRankings.com, www.highrankings.com Jill Whalen offers cheerful, no-nonsense, often low-tech advice that’s perfect for do-it-yourself SEOs of all stripes.

ClickZ News, www.clickz.com A little heavier on the marketingspeak, this site offers an impressive gamut of expert advice on all avenues of Internet marketing, not just SEO.

SEOmoz, www.seomoz.org Rand Fishkin’s articles and tips speak to beginners and experts alike. An assortment of page analysis tools are available too.

Information Overload
A recent thread on a search forum asked SEO professionals how they spend an average day on the job.

Looking at the responses, you would think that SEOs are paid based on the number of search engine blogs they read, how many SEO podcasts are filling their libraries, and how many thousands of forum postings they’ve racked up.

Reading SEO info online can make even a seasoned Internet researcher hyperventilate. There are so many acronyms, rumors, and arguments and so much conflicting advice that even if you understand what’s being said, you probably shouldn’t believe it at first blush.

Follow these words of warning as you get your bearings in the overstimulating world of SEO news and advice:

• Always check an article’s date before you read the article. Some sites are better than others at letting you know whether you’re reading something brand-new or a two-year-old history lesson from their archives.

• Beware articles posted on the websites of SEO firms. Many companies publish web articles and tips written by their in-house staff in an effort to improve their linkable noncommercial content and prove their worthiness in the SEO arena.

These authors may be knowledgeable, or they may not be… it’s very difficult to tell if you’re new to the game.

And these kinds of articles are often undated. Some of these authors may have moved on from the SEO company years ago!

If you’re inclined to follow the advice from an SEO firm, do a search for the author’s name to help you determine if they are reputable in the SEO community.

• Lurk! There’s no harm in checking out the SEO forum(s) of your choice, but don’t post-or believe what you read-until you’ve gotten a feel for the competence of the regular posters and the moderators.

Here are some indicators that the advice you’re reading is reliable: Multiple people on multiple sites seem to be giving the same advice;

you can corroborate this advice via an article written by a recognized SEO expert; or you can find your own evidence (using the “I wonder why that’s happening” method) to back it up.

• Pace yourself. Unless you’ve got a life-or-death situation, take in a little information at a time.

SEO resources on the Web are great for researching specific questions on a need-to-know basis.

Just do your best to tune out arcane details like which Google search tab moved where or how many pages Yahoo! says it has in its index today.

In a short time, you’ll have enough SEO expertise that you’ll be able to choose a few sources that you trust and stick with them.

SEO Forums
Forums probably aren’t the best place for beginners. They should do a lot of reading from more focused sites before diving in. As for advice, be wary of everything and always remember that nothing should be taken as fact.

To begin your own SEO forum research, start with these tried-and-true sites:

• forums.searchenginewatch.com
• www.highrankings.com/forum/
• www.webmasterworld.com
• www.searchengineforums.com

Jump in on the forums whenever you have a burning question that needs answering, but don’t count on them for your regular SEO news fix.

Blogs and E-mail Newsletters
One of our favorite ways to keep up-to-date on SEO news is through blogs and e-mail newsletters.

Here, seasoned and uncommonly generous SEO professionals distill the latest happenings into easy-to-read content.

If you trust the source, you can trust the advice. Here are our favorite SEO blogs and newsletters:

• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/
• Aaron Wall’s blog and newsletter at www.seobook.com
• www.mattcutts.com/blog (for Google-centric information)
• www.problogger.net (for those with blogs)
• www.jimboykin.com

As you continue surfing SEO sites, you’ll probably see other premium content or regular e-mail updates; consider signing up for a subscription from sites you like.

Then do what we do: let them pile up in your inbox, and set aside a time once a week (you can even get away with once a month) to pour yourself a cup of coffee and browse the SEO news.

Explore Local/International Search
Would your site benefit from a geographically targeted campaign? Whether it’s Paris, France, or Paris, Texas, today you’ll choose the area that interests you and determine whether you want to move forward in either of these:

• International search
• Local search

We’ll give you an overview and point you in the right direction for further research.

International Search
The Internet knows no borders, but unfortunately, your SEO campaign does. If your target audience includes an overseas component, you need to learn strategies for international SEO and put a focused effort into your international visibility.

Ask yourself, Which country are you targeting? Is your international audience composed of English speakers?

Which languages do you want to target? Answer these questions for your organization, and then start your research on international SEO with these general guidelines in mind:

International PPC Google AdWords and YSM make it easy to add new campaigns and set them up for different countries and languages.

If your international ads are in English, it’s very simple to edit the targeting preferences on your current campaign to include additional countries.

You should custom-write your ads for non-U.S.-based site visitors, even if they are English speaking, to address their different terminology or needs. Separate sites or landing pages will also improve localization.

To target additional languages, you’ll need to create new PPC campaigns with their own language and country settings.

Google AdWords also allows you to target specific regions or cities within many countries.

So, for example, if you want to sell to Ontario in English but to Quebec in French, you can specify which provinces will see which campaign’s ads.

If you are marketing to a European audience, you’ll also want to look into a PPC campaign with Miva, at www.miva.com, formerly espotting. This company has a large PPC presence in Europe.

International Organic Optimization Let’s say you want your chic boutique website to rank well for searchers in France searching for the French words “parapluie Jaime.”

One approach would be to choose this term as one of your top target keywords and optimize your landing page accordingly.

Good start, but there’s more you can do to optimize for the geographic audience you desire. Here are a few tips to help you sell more of those yellow umbrellas:

DO make sure your landing page is written in the language of the country you want to target.

And your page titles and meta description tags should be in the target language too. Even though there’s an HTML meta tag that allows you to specify which language your web page is written in, the search engine robots will probably ignore it and look at the web page text to make their own determination of language.

Don’t confuse the search engines by sticking substantial portions of several different languages on the same page.

DON’T use your home page for the sole purpose of selecting a language. If you are creating several subsites or site sections in different languages, don’t waste precious home page real estate on choosing a language.

Instead, include quality content in your most important language, with links to other language choices.

DO use a country-specific domain. Your site will get a lift if it has the appropriate country domain:

This is a big clue to the search engines that the site should be shown to a searcher in your target country.

And major search engines often allow their users to request only documents from their own country, so having the right domain will put you in the running.

DO consider building separate sites. Some sites redirect their international domains to their com domain.

Of course, it would be better-for your site and for your user-to create separate sites in separate languages, especially since key content like pricing and contact information may be different for each country.

DO seek inbound links from sites that are in your targeted countries. And be sure to request links in the appropriate language.

DO explore locally popular search sites. Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask have a major presence worldwide, and if your site is in their indices, it will also show up on the international versions of their search sites.

So you could focus on those four search engines and let it go at that. But there may be smaller search sites that play an important role in your country of interest.

For instance, Voila.fr is a major search engine in France. Your soggy Parisian seeking a “parapluie jaune” is just as likely to go there as fr.Yahoo.com, and perhaps more so.

It’s a little heavy on the exclamation points, but www.searchenginecolossus.com has a long country-by-country list of international search engines.

It may even involve a major web development effort, creating unique sites for each of your targeted countries.

Local Search
Been waiting in line for coffee too long? Pull out your wireless PDA and search for another cafe in the vicinity.

Sitting at home on a Saturday night? Order pizza and a video directly through the Web (and while you’re there, join a social networking site!).

What’s good for the searcher is even better for the search-savvy local business owner. If your organization has a brick-and-mortar component and you’d like to use the search engines to gain walk-in customers, begin tackling local search today.

Local search, such as local.google.com and local.yahoo.com, to name two, is changing fast as additional searchers and businesses flock to it.

So keep a sharp eye out for new products and procedures. As a general rule, you will want to approach local search optimization from two angles:

• Finding out which sites are feeding into the local search engine of your choice and submitting to them
• Creating your own local listing

Here’s how to get started:

Who’s feeding whom? Local search listings are usually compiled from a variety of sources, some of which you have control over and some of which you don’t.

Some local searches are fed by partner sites that focus on local listings, such as www.citysearch.com and www.insiderpages.com.

There are a couple of ways you can check to see which sites are feeding into a search engine’s local listings.

First, you can check out the local search engine’s frequently asked questions (FAQs) or review the Webmaster or Business Owner information that many of these services publish on their sites.

You can also search for your competitors and see which sites are listed: Your competitor’s actual site? A review from a content partner?

Once you know which sources are included in the local search engine of your choice, you can go to them directly and attempt to get or improve a listing.

Make your own listing Yahoo! and Google provided easy-to-find links for business owners to submit their own company data to local search.

It’s free or cheap (”enhanced” fee-based options are available)…and worth it at almost any price, in our opinion.

If local search is important to you, you should make it a priority to create your own listing because if the information doesn’t come from you, it will probably come from someone else who doesn’t have a personal stake in the listing’s accuracy or success.

They may not make it easy-yet-but it is possible for you to exert a little control over your local listing.

Explore PPC localization. It’s easy to test-drive a local PPC campaign. Just follow your PPC engine’s instructions for selecting your targeted geographical areas, and assign a budget for testing.

For many sectors, the national players will be the dominant players in the local search marketplace.

They have brand names and this gives them an advantage in the hybrid PPC auctions. Dominos and Pizza Hut can coordinate locally targeted campaigns and have significant resources.

The local pizza place many also advertise, but there is only room for half a dozen pizzerias in the search result. So, the number of local players involved in an area doesn’t increase revenue to an engine.

Kinkos, Sir Speedy, and AlphaGraphics can also coordinate aggressive localized campaigns, making it difficult for the local business owner to break into the results profitably.

For professional services, there are not many national companies, so local players will be active. However, once again, there -will only be two or three Atlanta divorce attorneys who pay enough to be at the top and get most of the clicks.

Shopping and Media Search
These highly specialized segments of search are being built out as the major engines follow the trends of available media and website owner practices and preferences.

The specialty search can be found predominantly as components of the major search engines. They include the following:

Shopping search Sites such as Froogle, Yahoo! Shopping, MSN Shopping, not to mention large shopping engines such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com, allow merchandisers to submit frequent updates of product details and prices.

Image search Sites such as http://images.google.com and
http://search.yahoo.com/images allow you to search strictly for images.

If one of your site’s differentiating factors is its images, don’t overlook image search as a way to snag some targeted visitors.

Depending on the search engine, optimizing for image search may involve writing optimized image ALT tags and adding keyword-rich text immediately surrounding your images.

Video search Upload your video, set up your feed, or wait to be crawled! Any way you slice it, video search is taking shape at sites like http://video.google.com and http://video.yahoo.com, not to mention media search sites like singingfish.com.

Since video in general is difficult for search engines to crawl, some video search engines are currently giving site owners an uncharacteristically high level of control over submitting, including metadata that you can include in video-specific RSS tags.

Like local search, these specialty search areas are still being developed and refined. So rather than give you likely-to-be-obsolete steps for getting yourself optimized and listed, we’re going to give you our methodology for finding out how. Here are the steps:

Search as if your site depends on it. First, go to the specialty search engine and start searching.

You want to get the full picture of what the listings look like. Try searching for your own organization, your competitors, product names, and commercial and noncommercial sites.

Get a feel for listings that seem compelling and listings that look skippable, and try to put your finger on why they’re coming across that way. Also, keep an eye out for sites that are partnered with the search engine.

Uncover the FAQs. A search engine’s FAQ or Webmaster Information may contain a submittal form, or submittal guidance, and it may even give you some hints on how you can optimize your site and/or media components.

Use your research smarts. After you’ve got a handle on what the submittal process and the listings look like, read up on submittal or optimization tips in the SEO info sources. It may be as simple as going to searchenginewatch.com and typing in “video search” or “shopping search.” Don’t forget to check the dates on these articles!

With so many SEO elements-organic, paid, on site, off site-in the works for your website now, you’ve built up a holistic approach to SEO that you can be proud of. But don’t rest on your success yet. SEO is never done!

In this article, you’ll find SEO-friendly solutions for expanding your site’s content, and you’ll learn how to get more out of your starter pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

You’ll smooth out any rough edges on your website’s visibility, and you’ll take reporting a step further.

Build Content
Have you been slacking on link building because you think your site has no linkable content?

With more and better content, your search engine visibility will benefit in two ways: more people will want to link to it, and the search engines will find more unique pages to index.

But building quality, linkable, preferably noncommercial content is easier said than done.

You’ll uncover opportunities that you may never have realized existed and scrub out obstacles, all with the goal of making your site more linkable. To make this happen your assignments are as follows:

Discover Content You Already Have
Develop New Content
Optimize Non-HTML Documents
Content Thieves
PPC Quick Check and Link Building

Discover Content You Already Have
You know how great it feels to find a twenty in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a while?

Today is the day you’ll look for linkworthy and search-engine-friendly content that you didn’t know you already had.

Here are some likely hiding places:
On Your Website What could you already have on your site that’s linkable? Here are some possibilities:

• Product comparisons
• Research reports
• Industry news
• Free downloads
• Case studies
• Games
• Photo galleries
• Forums

You may - have content on your website that just needs a little tweaking-perhaps a reorganization or a minor rewrite-to become linkworthy.

What Makes Content Linkworthy?
Everyone is talking about getting inbound links. Some SEOs are even focusing on strategies specifically geared toward building linkable pages, called linkbait. For the best chance of gaining inbound links, content should be:

• original
• unique
• useful
• noncommercial (or subtle in its sales pitch)
• timely
• accessible without a password
• free of charge to view

And at the risk of stating the obvious, to be linkable, each page must be linkable-meaning it must have its own URL!

Perhaps you do have some of these elements on your site but they’re intertwined with your less linkable, commercial content.

If so, your site may benefit from a simple reorganization of materials. You can cluster this content, or links to it, within a new section of your site, aptly named “Resources,” -”Fun”. Or something similar.

And remember, your goal is conversions, not lust inbound links, so be sure to provide a clear path from this new section to your landing pages.

Sometimes, even a simple title rewrite can dramatically change the linkability of a page.

For example, one type of content that often draws inbound links is a product comparison. Perhaps your site has a page that compares features of your product with your competition’s.

The only thing stopping it from being linkworthy is the title “Why Choose Us?” which strikes a commercial chord.

Give this page a new, industry-specific but neutral title like “Compare Medical Imaging Products” and suddenly the exact same chart becomes potential linkbait.

By the way, consider this: Anything not free is just plain not linkable.

So you should separate out freebies such as freeware downloads or clipart onto their own page, for a linkability boost.

Your Sales and Promotions Everybody loves a bargain, and next to “free stuff,” a sale or promotion is a strong contender for links.

Trouble is, most websites move their promotions around, showing them temporarily at whatever URL seems to suit the moment.

Take the smart approach: If your site runs promotions, make one specific URL for all promo materials!

That way, linking sites will have an easy time sending you their bargain hungry traffic-and you’ll gain inbound links.

If your organization runs promotions but somehow doesn’t manage to get that content up on the website in a timely manner, put linkability on the list of reasons to turn over a new leaf.

Tools, Worksheets, and Sample Documents Are there any tools, worksheets, presentations, or documents that your organization is using in-house and might be willing to share?

For example, countless SEO firms offer keyword assessment tools or other useful gadgets for free on their websites.

Think they’re doing it out of pure altruism? Nope. More likely, they’re trying to attract links and repeat traffic.

Offline Marketing Materials You can add offline marketing materials, such as brochures and sales presentations, directly to your website in whatever format they were created in.

However, from an SEO standpoint, HTML is still the best format for your web content. Here’s why:

Other websites might hesitate to link to non-HTML documents because viewing them may disable the “back” button.

Also, many searchers will skip over links to non-HTML documents because they don’t want to wait for a separate program to launch and they may not be in the mood for a long download.

So, if your organization has a large amount of linkable content in non-HTML documents, see what it would take to re-create it in HTML.

If that isn’t possible, be sure to optimize your non-HTML materials. We’ll show you how later this week.

E-mail Newsletters If you’re already writing and sending out e-mail newsletters, why not add them to your site too? What appeals to your customers or opt-in readers may also appeal to linking sites.

Press Releases Press releases are excellent potential landing pages, naturally text based, keyword rich, and often linkworthy because they’re news!

If your organization hasn’t been posting its press releases online, start now. But make sure the press release is linkable news before asking for links. New products fit the bill. New hires probably don’t.

Click Here for guidelines on optimizing press releases.

If you didn’t have any luck finding usable content, you will work on some easy strategies for creating new content below.

Develop New Content
If the previous explorations didn’t unearth any unique, linkworthy, and search-engine friendly content for your website, you’ll need to create some new content instead. Here are two approaches:

• Develop new content in-house.
• Use other people’s content.

Develop New Content In-House
Of course, you could hire a staff of professional writers and set them to work full-time building fascinating, linkworthy content for your website.

Here are some ideas for building out your website content with limited resources:

Monthly Columns Is there anyone in your organization that might be interested in running a regular monthly (or weekly, but we won’t hope for daily!) column on the website?

Perhaps an “Ask the Expert” or “Helpful Hints” type of column, with no marketing agenda in mind.

Once these columns build up steam, you might even begin sharing them with other websites through syndication or simply by contacting other site owners and requesting inclusion.

Industry publications and e-mail newsletters are always looking for new content. But if you’re going to be generous with your content, make sure you get as much SEO benefit as possible: articles posted elsewhere should always link back to your website.

Corporate Blog Many organizations are finding that the easiest way to keep a fresh presence on the Internet is through a corporate blog.

This type of blog might allow contributions from many employees or just one. A blog can even be a great format for posting press releases.

The Need to Feed
Blog-specific search works differently than standard search. If your content-building effort is taking you in the direction of blogs, pod cast, vidcasts, vlogs, and so on, read on for tips to get your voice in front of the masses:

Ping me, baby First and foremost, make sure that your blog or ‘cast is set up to send out a ping to an updating service (such as Weblogs.com, blo.gs, BlogRolling.com, or Ping-0-Matic, which will ping a number of services for you).

Most likely, your blog creation tool is already configured to contact an updating service (also called a ping server) automatically when your blog changes. Check your blog settings for this option.

Submit Luckily, these submittals are generally quick and easy. There are no titles and descriptions to carefully craft, just a URL to submit. Pay special attention to specialty lists.
Tag yourself Set up accounts with social bookmarking systems, searchable sites that allow members to save and classify, or”tag,” URLs (del.icio.us, digg.com, and BlinkList.com are examples). Then make sure to tag each of your posts with keywords.

Get in the news If your website or blog contains regularly updated, unique, original content, it may qualify to be included on a news search engine such as Google News.

Your site will be reviewed by an editor before inclusion, so don’t waste your time or theirs with a submittal unless your content truly is news!

Blog your ‘cast Some podcasting tools include creation of a blog that goes along with your podcast.

This is a great opportunity for you to write accompanying text for your audio or video’ cast files (by the way, ‘cast is just a trendy term for all sorts of podcasts).

Potential subscribers will appreciate being able to read a description before downloading your podcast, and search engines-chronically allergic to audio and video content-will enjoy the tasty text treats you throw them in your synopses.

Compiled Resources You know your business, so you know the kinds of things your customers always seem to need help finding or figuring out.

Resources such as useful links, FAQs, reviews, and a reference table or glossary can be good draws for inbound links (not to mention bookmarks and repeat visits!).

Interviews Interviews with bigwigs in your industry, or anyone else who your target audience finds compelling, can be a great way to fill out your website.

For instance, if your company sells home furnishings, an interview with an interior designer could provide content of interest to your target audience while giving the designer a publicity boost.

Look for experts or service providers in fields similar to your own, and pick someone with a little flair.

Free Tools If your company has the technical chops for it, there’s nothing like a free online tool for drawing inbound links.

Translate dollars into yen; calculate shoe size in the European standard; figure out how many tablespoons of ground coffee it takes to brew a pot.

As long as it’s potentially useful to your target audience, it’s a great idea. And you can gain even more linkage if you allow your tool to be used on others’ websites.

Just imagine: Suddenly your “teaspoons to quarts” conversion table is on every recipe website on the Internet-and each one includes a link to your site.

Use Other People’s Content
We’re not saying you should go out on the Web, find some great content, and cut and paste it onto your website.

There’s this little thing called “copyright infringement” you’ll want to watch out for. But there are some ways to use other people’s content on your website without the Feds beating down your door. Here are a few ideas:

Articles Featuring Your Company Does your PR department keep a record of articles that mention your organization or include interviews or quotes from company representatives?

See if you can get permission to add these articles to your website. It goes without saying that you should stick to the complimentary ones.

Syndicated Content It’s quite easy to incorporate feeds onto your website-for instance, industry news or blog posts.

It’s not unique content, but providing a group of topical links may add freshness and a sense that your site is up-to-date, thus increasing your linkability.

Forums or Classifieds One of our favorite ways to increase content is to let your users build it for you, with posts in message hoards, classified ads, or product reviews.

This is content that constantly updates itself and is eminently linkable. But it also sets you up for abuse, such as people submitting meaningless content (a practice called comment spam).

So be sure you have a moderator or other system in place to protect your site if you’re thinking of offering these features.

Guest Contributors Many talented writers and artists would love to have space on the Internet to display their work.

Your contributors don’t have to be professional writers. Many websites are nicely filled out with the free expressions of regular folks, from birth stories to bedtime stories.

Copyright-Free Content Copyright-free articles on subjects ranging from wedding etiquette to tax advice can be added onto your website, usually in exchange for a link or a courtesy notice.

However, since this content is not unique, it’s of little value for your search engine presence and may even annoy your site visitors because they may have seen the same articles on other sites. So use it with caution, and only if you are certain it improves your site offerings.

An alternative to copyright-free content is Creative Commons (CC) content. The Creative Commons, at www.creativecommons.org, is a new type of copyright-you might call it a “some rights reserved” copyright. Explore CC content by searching for it using Yahoo!’s or Google’s advanced search.

We’ve given you a pretty long list of possible ways to add content to your website; not every one will suit your needs or abilities.

Today, choose which technique you’ll try first. Set a goal for yourself, perhaps adding one new page of unique content, and get started today.

Optimize Non-HTML Documents
There’s no harm in posting documents on your website in non-HTML formats such as Word, Excel, PDF, or PowerPoint.

All of these formats are indexed by the major search engines, and sometimes they rank well.

However, good old HTML still has the upper hand in search. Non-HTML content can be a turnoff to searchers.

Nevertheless, it can be optimized and serve you well, especially for the long tail of search.

For example, while your home page might rank well for “model cars;” your product PDF could have a better chance of faring well for the term “die-cast model car assembly instructions.”

Here, you’ll learn a little bit about what makes non-HTML content work on search engines. Then you’ll make any needed changes to your own docs:

• Metadata for compelling titles
• Content optimization
• When to remove

Metadata for Compelling Titles
Search results for non-HTML documents can be downright ugly, because the folks who wrote them never considered how these documents would be presented in the search engines.

For example, take a look at this page of PDF search results for the term “umpire whistles.”

Here are possible places that search engines will look for a page title for your document:

• The document title as specified in metadata, which is extra information you write to describe the document (and is stored in a file’s properties but is not visible in the body of the document)
• The first 60 or so characters of the document’s text
• The filename
• Any text in the document that you happened to format in a larger font.

Search engines will generally look for metadata first, so defining document metadata is the easiest way to improve your listings.

In Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office applications, metadata such as Title, Author, and Keywords is very easy to define by selecting File > Properties or File > Document Properties.

If you are using other programs to author your documents, look to their help pages for guidance.

Open up one of your non-HTML documents and review the metadata. Insert an optimized page title if possible.

You can also define a description in the document metadata, but the search engines will generally gather a snippet from the document content anyway.

Content Optimization
Non-HTML documents are basically thrown in the mix with all the other documents and websites in a search engine’s index.

So, in addition to inserting metadata as described in the preceding section, you should follow the same SEO guidelines for non-HTML documents as you would for your regular web pages:

include your target keywords in text, link to the document from other pages on your site, make sure URLs in the document are clickable so the search engine robots can follow them, and modify the content for improved snippets if desired.

We know it’s not always realistic for non-HTML content to be edited based on SEO principles.

And even if optimized, it’s hard for non-HTML documents to rank well against HTML pages for competitive search terms.

You may wish to skip optimizing the document content beyond basic metadata and hope for good results with the long tail of search.

Make a determination about whether it’s worth your time to attempt to optimize the visible content of your PDF files. If so, get started.

You can get a sense of how search engines see your non-HTML content by viewing the HTML alternate page created by Google. Click Here for more information.

When to Remove
You may be surprised to learn that keeping non-HTML documents-even if they rank well-can create disadvantages for your site. Consider the following:

• Files like PDFs and Microsoft Word documents are stand-alone entities, so they’re not likely to be integrated into your site’s navigation.

If a visitor clicks on one of these files directly from a search engine, they may never even look at the rest of your site.

You may want to weigh whether making your non-HTML content available to the search engines is worth the potential loss of traffic to the rest of your site.

• Since non-HTML documents will often be downloaded onto searchers’ hard drives, it’s possible that your content could be used in ways you don’t condone.

If you’re concerned about this, don’t put them on your site. At the very least, be sure that every document is clearly marked with authorship information, copyright notice, and your web address.

• Non-HTML documents may contain confidential information hidden in the metadata that you don’t wish to make public, including things like tracked changes, comments, and speaker notes.

It’s always a good idea from a security standpoint to review metadata for your documents before posting them in public view.

Workshare’s free software, Trace, available at www.workshare.com/ products/trace/, can help you weed out potential problems.

If you feel it’s for the best, remove non-HTML files from your website or exclude them from indexing using your robots.txt file.

With metadata in your pages and content rich with keywords, your non-HTML documents may turn out to be healthy sources of targeted traffic for your site!

Content Thieves
You’re starting to develop a lovely collection of content on your website, but is somebody else nibbling at your piece of the pie?

Unluckily, the Internet remains something of a Wild West for copyright law. Other websites might steal your content simply by cutting and pasting.

Or they may use scraping, a more sophisticated technique of automatically grabbing content from your web pages, to steal material from your site and put it up on theirs.

You want to be aware of content thieves, not just because they are using your content to compete with you for search engine visibility, but also because they may be damaging your brand.

If your content is stolen by a similarly pathetic character, unwitting users might actually think that they are visiting your website, and that’s something you certainly don’t want.

There are several ways to check if your material is being repurposed elsewhere on the web. Here are a few:

Search for text. Using the search engine of your choice, search for a likely-to-be-unique text string (a sentence or two will do) from the body of your website, using quotes around the text. If the search engine finds sites other than your own, something fishy may be going on.

Your competitors may be using your company name or proprietary product names in their PPC ads. Click Here to learn more.

Use a page comparison site. Copyscape is a website specifically designed to help site owners find copies of their content online.

A major limitation is that it searches only HTML content, not PDFs or other document formats.

Search for media. Stolen media such as images, audio, video, and Flash content is considerably harder to find than copies of your page text-for the very same reasons that search engines struggle with these formats in general.

If media content is a significant portion of your site, you’ll need to become an expert at using the media search options to help protect your rights online.

It’s often easier to prevent media theft than react to it. If you’re concerned about this, check in with your design team to make sure they’re savvy to copy prevention options such as adding watermarks to images, building your Flash files in multiple pieces, or embedding your server information in media files.

Review your server logs. Other websites can display your media content such as images, audio, video, and Flash and make it look like it belongs to them.

It’s not uncommon for these nefarious nerds to point their links directly to your content on your servers.

Not only does this infringe on your copyrights, it also puts an unfair burden on your servers, which are forced to serve up the content for someone else’s site!

Your server logs can help you find this sort of hijacking-yet another reason to make a habit of reviewing your stats.

You now know how to look for misused materials on the Web. But what will you do if you find any?

With any luck, a simple communication with the content thieves will clear things up. If not, you may need to contact the website host and request that the page be removed.

Detailed advice and links to sample “cease-and-desist” letters can be found at www.plagiarismtoday.com.

Site Structiore Improvement
Assuming that you took care of basic site optimization and knocked down obstacles to robot indexing of your landing pages, you’ll here delve a little deeper into some techie decisions that can improve your site’s optimization, indexing, and overall visibility success.
You will involve a range of SEO skills, from PR-style communication to serious server geeking. You will definitely want your team queued up and clued in to your needs and reasoning.

The Spider’s-Eye View
Have you ever seen those photos that show what the world looks like to a dog? Or maybe you enjoyed the kaleidoscopic fly-cam scenes in the 1950s movie The Fly.

You’re going to learn how to take a search engine spider’s-eye view of your website. Viewer discretion is advised: what you are about to see might be surprisingly scary.

A search engine spider is simply software that goes through the Internet looking at web pages and sending information back to a central repository.

It doesn’t view content in the same way human site visitors do. Since spiders are an important-although by no means the most important-audience for your website, you want to know how your website appears to them.

You will use a tool called a spider emulator to put on your spider’s-eye view glasses and do exactly that.

There are lots of spider emulators available on the web. We use http://searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi often because we like
its simplicity and its built-in link checking feature.

Another of our favorites is: http:// tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/. You’re going to view each of your landing pages through a spider emulator today.

Here’s how to do it:
• Starting with your home page, go to http://searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/ sim_spider.cgi or the spider emulator of your choice and enter your page URL into the emulator.

• Once you see your page as it is seen by spiders, ask yourself some questions: Does this accurately represent the information I expected to see on my site? Is it readable and in the correct order? Are my target keywords present?

• For any noted problems, consider possible solutions. For example, if the well crafted, keyword-rich content you added is not showing up, it may be that it’s not rendering in standard HTML text.

Print out this page and bring it with you to your web developer to track down the problem.

Or, are you seeing the same nonsensical image ALT tag (for example, ImgFile01) repeating multiple times on the page?

Make a note to have it removed or revised with appropriate keyword-rich descriptions.

• Perform this check for each of your landing pages.

Shape Up Your Site Map
It’s important to create a site map to help search engine robots navigate your site. If your website doesn’t have a site map, today you’ll consider creating one. If you already have one, you’ll optimize it today.

Why Build a Site Map?
We think that just about every website can benefit from a site map, especially websites that contain more than 10 pages.

Most people know that site maps are good for the user experience: they orient your site visitors and help lost visitors find their way to the right page.

But there’s even more benefit when you consider SEO. A site map can improve the search engine visibility of your website in several ways:

• By providing search engine robots with links to navigate through your site

• By pointing search engine robots to dynamic or hard-to-reach pages that might not be accessible otherwise

• By acting as a possible landing page, optimized for search traffic

• By providing ready-to-use content for the File Not Found page where visitors are automatically taken if they try to go to a nonexistent URL within your domain

If your site is small enough that links to every page are included in your global navigation (navigation provided on every page of your site)

or absolutely every page on your site is available within two clicks from the home page, then you may not need a site map.

But if your site is larger, and especially if it contains pages that may be hard for search engine robots to find, we highly recommend a site map.

Site Map Design 101
Simply put, a site map is a page that links to every page on your website. If you’re like many web surfers, you visit a site map as a last resort when you can’t find what you need or if there’s no in-site search function.

You’re happy to forget it as soon as you leave it. But if a robot visits your site map, it’s not going to forget what it saw, and it will be pleased as punch to come back on a regular basis.

Here are a few pointers for treating both robots and human users well:
Include the most important pages. People will get lost if your site map contains too many links. That means, if your site has more than, say, 100 pages, you’ll need to choose the most important pages and exclude the others. Here are our suggestions for pages to include:

• Product category pages

• Major product pages

• FAQ and Help pages

• Contact or Request Information pages

• All of the key pages on your paths to conversion, the pages that your visitors follow from landing page through conversion

• Your 10 most popular pages (To learn how to find these Click Here on server stats).

• Top pages clicked from your internal search engine, if you have one (For more information on internal search engines Click Here, “Extra Credit and Guilt-Free Slacking,”).

Go easy on the autogeneration. Some content management systems will automatically generate a site map.

As in so many other areas of SEO, we prefer the human touch. If you, or your tech teammates, are leaning in the automated direction, be sure you review the outcome carefully to be sure your site map has these characteristics:

• The layout is easy on the human eye.
• All links are standard HTML text that can be followed by spiders.
• The important pages (included in the preceding list items) are easy to find.

Look at other sites for design inspiration. Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel. There are hundreds, thousands, nay, bazillions of site maps out there on the Web. Use one you like as a starting point.

Optimize your site map. We don’t mean you should think of your site map as one of your top-priority landing pages.

But if done tastefully, your site map can actually contain a fair number of your target keywords, not to mention compelling text.

For example, instead of a link simply labeled “Fungicides,” your site map could contain more keywords:

“Organic fungicides to eliminate lawn disease,” with the most important keywords, “organic fungicides,” as the anchor text.

Similarly, why use a title like “Our Products” when you can say, “Our Earth-friendly herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides?”

Link to your site map from every page. Users have come to expect a link to your site map in the footer of every page on the site, so make use of this spot.

If your site has a search box, you may also wish to add a link to the site map near the search box and even make a link to the site map a fixture within the site search results page.

Design your new site map or shape up your existing site map using the preceding guidelines. Deliver your requested changes to your web developer or make the changes yourself.

For more site map design hints, see usability guru Jakob Nielson’s website at www.useit.com/alertbox/200201 06.html.

By the way, your site map isn’t the same as your Google Sitemap. Google Sitemaps is a service designed to allow webmasters to submit URLs and additional page information directly to the Google index. Click Here for ideas on how to get started with Google Sitemaps.

Clean Up Ugly Listings
During your site visibility assessments, you probably found at least one listing in the search results that made you cringe.

A broken URL from your domain available to the searching public? An out-of-date press release announcing the hire of a long-gone CEO? Here you’ll take steps to clean up some of these brand-busting uglies.

Here are some of the more common problems we’ve observed and how to deal with them. You probably won’t face all of these problems, but we expect you’ll see at least one:

Broken links The search engines don’t want broken links in their results any more than you do. They will eventually figure out that a page doesn’t exist and remove it from their indices.

But why let a perfectly good search engine ranking go to waste? Try one of the following approaches:

• Since the URL is already indexed and may already have some good rankings, inbound links, or bookmarked traffic, consider creating a new page and saving it at the missing URL.

However, do this only if it makes sense to create a new page with similar content-it would be awkward if your cabinet hardware products were listed at a page called “floral-arrangements.html.”

• Talk to your IT people about setting up an automatic redirection, called a 301 redirect, that carries traffic on this page to another page of your choosing.

But don’t make the common mistake of pointing the redirect to your home page! Choose the page on your site that best matches the one that has gone missing.

• Sometimes, broken links linger in the search results because your server fails to mention that the page is missing.

That’s right; it’s possible for a server to return a “Page Found” message even if a page is missing! It’s a riddle wrapped in a conundrum, but luckily it’s an easy fix for your IT folks.

Out-of-date content You don’t want your potential customers seeing outdated product descriptions, promotions that are no longer active, or last year’s price list in the search results.

The best and fastest approach to this problem is to update your site’s content while keeping the file in the same location so that it doesn’t lose its search engine status.

In some cases, a simple update may not be so simple. For example, suppose you have found a well-ranked search engine listing for your web page featuring the Snackmaster 2003 but your company no longer sells this older model.

Your website now has a new page featuring the Snackmaster 2007. If you rewrite your 2003 page to describe your new product, your site will contain two pages with identical content, which is a search engine no-no as well as an administrative headache.

Instead, it’s best to edit the 2003 page content to include a notice that a new model is available and link to the 2007 model page.

A 301 redirect would be another option, especially if there’s no customer support or archival reasons to keep the old page live.

Private or inappropriate material There it is, staring out at you from between listing #5 and listing #7:

Your company’s holiday gift list, with addresses and phone numbers of all your best clients! You need to clean up your act, and fast. Here’s how:

• Remove the page from your site. Or, leave the offending file live, but immediately remove the offending content.

• Then request removal from the search engines

By leaving the file live but changing the content, you may benefit from a quicker update than if you took down the page altogether.

However, you should be aware that a search engine’s cached pages may retain a snapshot of the content for longer than you’re comfortable with, and there are historical web archive sites that may display the content forever.

If you have serious legal concerns-for example, if you posted a disclaimer that said, “All information on this site is medical advice” rather than. “…not medical advice”-you can use the copyright search methods to search for instances of your content throughout the Web and seek removal.

While these are all positive steps, in truth there’s little you can do to prevent robots from indexing pages that are live and accessible. If you really do not want pages to be found, secure them behind a password!

www and non-www URLs in your listings In the eyes of the search engines, these two URLs are different pages:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/
• http://yourdomain.com

Now, you know and we know that these are actually pointing to the same page, and we figure that soon enough the search engines will get it right.

But for now, most search engines have what industry insiders call a canonical URL problem (canonical is a programmer’s term for “standard,” so a canonical URL would be the standard or preferred URL for your website) and it can have a significant effect on your SEO success.

If your website is listed under more than one version of a URL, your ranks can suffer.

If your inbound links are distributed among different versions of your URL, the strength of these links can be diluted. You’ll need to take these steps to deal with your canonical issues:

• Ensure that all internal links within your site point to the same URL. Choose a format and stick with it. You might even consider using absolute links (which include the full address of your website, starting with http://) rather than relative links. This will eliminate all canonical problems caused by internal links.

• Set up a 301 redirect that always points the “bad” URL(s) to your preferred URL. That will help search engines know which one is your preference.

By the way, this could be a tricky one for your webmaster, so don’t suggest it without some sort of bribe in hand.

• If there are inbound links from other websites pointing to the wrong URL format, write to them and ask for an update.

Other sites stealing your mojo Is there a listing on the search engines that looks like your website at first glance but is actually the website of one of your affiliates, vendors, or partners?

Often, the best way to address this situation is with a direct phone call or e-mail requesting that the page be removed.

Click Here for more information on searching for other sites that use your content without permission.

Your Robots.txt File
A robots.txt file is the first file that a search engine robot visits on your website. Like a snooty nightclub bouncer with a velvet rope, the robots.txt file decides which robots are welcome and which need to move on to that less-exclusive joint down the street.

Robots.txt can admit or reject robots on a sitewide, directory-by-directory, or page-by-page basis.

SEO folks often feel a special affection for the robots.txt file because it provides a rare opportunity to communicate with a search engine robot.

However, its capabilities are really very limited. Robots.txt files exist only to exclude indexing.

Just as a bouncer can keep people out but can’t force anyone to come in, the robots.txt file can’t do anything to entice a robot to spend more time or visit more pages on your site.

Also, compliance with your robots.txt file is voluntary, not mandatory. The major search engines will generally try to follow your instructions, but other, less-reputable types might not.

This is why you should not rely on your robots.txt file to prevent spidering of sensitive, private, or inappropriate materials.

Do You Need a Robots.txt File?
You may not need a robots.txt file. Without one, all robots will have free access to non-password-protected pages on your site.

To decide if you need a robots.txt file for your website, ask yourself these questions:

• Are there any pages or directories on my site that I do not want listed on the search engines, such as an intranet or internal phone list?

• Are there any specific search engines that I do not want to display my site?

• Do I know of any dynamic pages or programming features that might cause problems for spiders, like getting caught in a loop (infinitely bouncing between two pages)?

• Does my website contain pages with duplicate content? (These should not be indexed or you may be penalized.)

• Are there directories on the site that contain programming scripts only, not viewable pages?

If the answers to these questions are no, then you do not need a robots.txt file. If you have any yes answers, you’ll prepare your robots.txt file.

Create Your Robots.txt File
Robots.txt files are very simple text files. To find a sample, go to just about any other site and look for the robots.txt file in the root directory. The robots.txt file usually looks something like this:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /private-files/
Disallow: /more-private-files/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-scripts/

In this example, Google’s spider (called Googlebot) is excluded from indexing files within the two directories called private-files and more-private-files, and all robots (signified by a wild-card asterisk *) are excluded from indexing the directory called cgi-scripts.

There are numerous websites that will walk you through building and saving your robots.txt file. A very clear tutorial can be found here:

www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm. Answers to just about any question you could think of about robots are here: www.robotstxt.org. ´

And we are particularly fond of the regularly updated listing of robot names, available here: www.jafsoft.com/searchengines/webbots.html.

Create your robots.txt file and save it in the root directory of your website, or request that your webmaster do so.

If you are feeling any doubt about whether your robots.txt file is written properly, don’t post it.

The last thing you want to do is inadvertently shut out the search engines.

Here’s a fun experiment-what do your Big Five competitors have on their robots.txt files?

Robots Meta Tags
A robots meta tag serves a similar purpose as the robots.txt file, but it is placed within individual pages on your site rather than in your root directory.

A robots meta tag affects only the page it resides on. Chances are you don’t need to use this type of tag, but here’s a quick overview in case you do.

You might choose to use a robots meta tag rather than a robots.txt file because you have only one or two pages you wish to exclude on the site, or maybe you only want to do a brief, temporary exclusion.

Another possible reason is that you do not have access to the root directory on your site.

To exclude the robots from a page using the robots meta tag, simply include the following code in the HTML head of the page:

<meta name=”robots” contents= “noindex, nofollow”>

This will prevent search engine robots from indexing content or following links from the page. 

PPC Quick Check
This Quick Check will ensure that your campaign doesn’t go dramatically out of whack over the course.

Here are the steps to include in your PPC Quick Check:

• Log in to your PPC account.

• Check your total campaign spending. Is your campaign on track to spend your monthly budget on schedule?

If you’ve set your daily budget appropriately, it’s difficult to spend too much-but bugs on PPC engines are not unheard of.

You should also keep in mind that spending too little can be just as bad as spending too much; you want to be right on target.

If your campaign is low, you may wish to add more keywords or increase some of your bids. If your campaign is high, reduce bids or remove or disable keywords.

• For each keyword category, figure out how to sort the list of keywords by total amount spent.

Some keywords are going to be naturally more popular and costly than others, so it’s probably not realistic to expect that your spending will be distributed evenly among the keywords.

If one or two keywords are using up too much of your budget and you don’t think they’re converting well enough, you may wish to temporarily disable them or lower their bids.

Some keywords with extremely high click-through rates may need to be checked on a daily basis.

If you’ve found a keyword that is gobbling up your entire budget, consider moving it into its own category so that you can watch and manage it more closely.

• If you are testing multiple ads for some keywords, review which are performing better. Click Here for more information on running a multiple-ad test.

• PPC engines are often so good at reporting that you won’t need to do much documenting elsewhere.

But until you get the hang of PPC, you may want to make a note of any changes to your account in your Task Journal.

This article is not just about producing a report, although certainly that’s important. It’s really about the thinking, planning, reviewing, and analysis that you do while you are gathering the information for your report.

Without a period of time for review, reflection, and prioritization for the future, your SEO campaign can go off track very quickly or just get lost in the busy day-to-day shuffle of the average workplace.

A smaller SEO effort will have a high documentation-to-”work” ratio. If you increased your SEO activities, this ratio would probably decrease: many of your reporting tasks would stay nearly the same.

Regardless of the size of your campaign, a commitment to tracking and documentation will always separate the pack leaders from the also-rans.

Check Organic Status
To learn more on how to establish a baseline level for your site’s visibility on the four major search engines, Click Here.

But at this time, you’ll find out how your standings have changed. We’ll ask you to check two values:

• Search engine rankings
• Indexed pages

Search Engine Rankings
For this task, you will perform the manual rankings check on the four major search engines for all of your top target keywords. To learn more on this, Click Here.

With your ranks for last month and this month (the month in which you made the optimization tasks) side by side, it’s easy to see any changes. We’re going to guess that there hasn’t been a whole lot of improvement to your ranks yet.

Don’t be alarmed-this is perfectly normal! After all, your basic site optimization has only been in place for a couple of weeks, and you may only have a few new inbound links.

If you were starting from zero or you had some easy fixes in your optimization, you may have noticeable improvement in ranks this month. If you already had decent levels of visibility, you’ll need to be patient.

Now it’s time to go beyond the numbers, but first you’ll need a document to do it in. Start with the “Site Visibility” section, and in a sentence or two, summarize your standings this month as compared to last month. Here are some examples:

• We gained top-30 listings on MSN for three of our target keywords.
• We have a new #2 listing for the term “novelty napkin holders” on Ask.

Next, put on your thinking cap and flesh out these bare-bones facts with some juicy analysis.

Why do you think that these changes occurred? What could be done to improve any less-than-pleasing situations?

You’re still getting your feet wet in SEO, so you might not feel as if you know how to do this, but we recommend you try. Possible analysis might look like this:

• We gained top-30 listings on MSN for three of our target keywords. Our text optimization probably had something to do with this.

• We have a new #2 listing for the term “novelty napkin holders” on Ask. However, since we already have top-10 listings on the other search engines for this term, I don’t expect significant rank changes on those.

Over the next couple of months you will become more and more adept at this sort of SEO rumination.

Indexed Pages
In addition to monitoring search engine ranks for your top keywords, we recommend checking in on the total number of pages indexed. To learn more about this, Click Here.

Now: Check the total number of pages indexed on your site in each of the four major search engines. Record the value on a Worksheet.

Why record the total number of pages indexed on a regular basis?

For one, if you previously had obstacles to robot indexing on your site, you’re likely to see a great deal of improvement here once those obstacles are removed.

And, if you monitor this number, you may be able to catch and resolve any indexing problems before they result in a major drop in traffic.

If any of your landing pages were not indexed when you checked last month, be sure to look back again and see if your efforts have made a difference.

Now: Check the indexing of any landing pages that were not indexed last month. Document status on your Rank Tracking Worksheet.

Looking to cut down on your workload? You can skip checking indexing if your landing pages were already indexed last month and you haven’t made any changes to your website in the interim.

Or skip checking the total number of pages indexed and focus only on your landing pages.

With a little sleuthing, you can see which search engine robots have visited your site. For more information, Click Here on “Extra Credit and Guilt-Free Slacking,”.

Check Links
Here, you’ll follow up on the link-building campaign that you may have started before. To learn more on link building, Click Here.

If you keep up with link building, each month you’ll be faced with an increasingly long and gnarly tracking worksheet that will be nearly impossible to assess at a glance.

That’s why it’s important to keep track of your link-building activities and accomplishments in a monthly summary report. You’ll document the following in both words and numbers:

• Link campaign activities
• Google PageRank

Link Campaign Activities
Most likely, you’ve already had some correspondence, possibly even several back-and-forth e-mail communications, with possible linking sites.

You may have also made directory submittals and explored many other linking opportunities.

Today, review your e-mails and your Link Tracking Worksheet and briefly summarize these activities. Here are some examples of this kind of commentary:

• I contacted 14 website owners seeking new inbound links, and requested updated URLs from four others. Of these, our site received two link updates and one new link.

• On (date), I submitted our website to the Yahoo! Directory in the category:…

• Surfing the Web, I found a long list of sites that may wish to link to our website. Links will be requested after our new landing pages are complete.

• Three site owners stated that they would not link to us because…

If you received useful feedback from any site owners, such as a rejection letter that stated specifically why you were turned down, consider quoting it in your report so that the idea doesn’t get lost in your e-mail inbox forever.

Google PageRank
Despite our misgivings about the usefulness of the Google PageRank value, we recommend that you track it for your landing pages on a monthly basis.

Why? It’s an easy way to gather “at-a-glance” numbers that can help you see changes in your status over time.

You can see Google PageRank just by browsing to your landing pages and reviewing the Google Toolbar if you have downloaded. Google PageRank is good to know, but it’s not essential.

Check Conversions
Conversions, especially if you’ve defined them properly so that they match the overall goals of your organization, are truly the bottom line of Your SEO Plan.

If you don’t have a conversion tracking method in place, you may not have much to write in this section.

Make your best estimate-next month you’ll devote an entire week to establishing conversion tracking.

If you have made a conversion tracking, take a look at this month’s conversion data as compared to last month’s.

If there are differences, what caused them? Separating out all of the different factors that contribute to your bottom line-SEO efforts, seasonal effects, even regular month-to-month fluctuations-is almost impossible.

Your mission over the coming months will be to separate out the effects of your SEO campaign as well as you can.

If there are any results that you can attribute directly to your SEO efforts today, make a note of them in your report. Here are some examples:

• Listing our site in the Outdoor Lifestyle Directory has resulted in a branding boost and a 7 percent increase in page views.

• Since we succeeded in getting the Quilting Supplies page indexed in all four search engines, we have seen a 27 percent increase in cotton batting sales.

• Four hundred click-throughs on our PPC campaign resulted in 16 sales of wine gift baskets.

Monitor PPC ads
Your report need to include important information about your spending and accomplishments with your PPC ad campaigns. Be sure to touch on these points:

• Campaign setup info
• Monthly PPC performance data
• Top performing keywords
• Changes to campaigns

Here are some guidelines for making the most of the data you get from your PPC engine.

Campaign Setup Info
The first month that you have a PPC campaign, you will have a lot to say. Which service did you choose and why?

Are you focusing on a small number of popular keywords or going with a longer list of less-popular but more targeted terms? What is your goal for this campaign?

Monthly PPC Performance Data
You have a lot of flexibility to create comprehensive, customized reports using your PPC service.

Later you’ll use these to monitor, finesse, and drop the duds in your campaign. But for this Monthly Report, you just want to boil down the most important data for a 2-minute scan. At a minimum, this data includes the following:

• Total number of click-throughs
• Click-through percentage
• Total cost
• Average total cost per click
And, if you’re able to track conversions using your PPC service:
• Total number of conversions
• Conversion percentage
• Average total cost per conversion

We left the information brief, but you can go into a lot more depth here if you desire. Adjust your spreadsheet to suit your needs and preferences.

Top Performing Keywords
Looking through long lists of keyword data should be banned by OSHA! Whether it’s a large PPC campaign with hundreds or thousands of keywords or a smaller one with a couple dozen, your keyword performance data can give you a major migraine.

That’s why we like to pull out some of the top-performing keywords for an eye-pleasing review.

First, you need to decide what you will consider good performance for your keywords. Some options are highest number of click-throughs, highest total number of conversions, best conversion percentage, best click-through percentage, highest total dollar amount spent, highest profit (dollar amount spent minus cost per click), and even a combination of multiple factors.

Once you have chosen your preferred performance measure, browse through your PPC service’s campaign report and pull out the top 10 or so keywords based on performance.

You will list them, along with their performance values, in the Monthly Report. See anything interesting or striking, like a new or unexpected performer? This information may lead to new strategies in your ongoing campaign.

Campaign Analysis
Here is the place to record any changes that took place in your PPC campaigns: keywords bumped up or down the totem pole or changes to ad copy.

This is also the place to make your recommendations or plans for future changes: “Based on the success of our Purple Lampshade promotion, we will add a purple lampshade ad starting next month”

or “Thirteen keywords with high click-throughs but low conversion rates will be dropped from the campaign.”

With your PPC campaign monitoring complete, you’re ready to finalize your Monthly Report with some forward-thinking analysis and action items.

Action Items
Here is the section that everybody on your team will turn to when they get this report. And even if you’re working alone, this to-do list will be an indispensable reference as you move forward into the next month.

One of the challenges that we’ve faced time and time again in our SEO efforts is writing reports that are complete and meaningful, readable, and most important, actionable.
Yes, actionable-it may be a made-up word, but it sure is an important idea in SEO.
Pearl of Wisdom: The best reports are not just repositories of information, they are also tools to guide your team through the next steps.
To assemble your action items, review each of the previous sections of the report. How is your organic search engine status?

Do your pages still need basic optimization? Are there keywords you want to drop or add to your PPC campaign?

And what are the next steps in your link-building campaign? Try to cover all activities, even the mundane ones like “Continue gathering inbound links.”

You’re a professional, so we’re betting you’ve seen an action item list or two in your lifetime.

We bet you’re used to seeing the following columns: Action, Person Responsible, Target Completion Date.

Now, here’s a curveball for you: We want you to add a column called Reason to your action items list.

The Reason column will be the hardest one to write. This is where you must provide a concise explanation of what good this action is going to do for your company.

It hearkens back to what you learned in Chapter 5, “Get Your Team on Board”: Educate your team for best results in SEO.

Giving your team a quick explanation of the reasoning behind your requested change will eliminate the “Why in heaven’s name am I being asked to do this extra work?” or “Why should I allot this extra budget?” reaction.

And, being forced to write a reason for every action item will help you keep your own ducks in a row as well.

Since you’re not a full-time SEO professional, sometimes other work obligations will get in the way and you’ll need to give your campaign a little less attention.

Other times, your website’s unique problems or your own curiosity will inspire you to dig deeper. In this article we’ll help you sort it all out by defining a range of reasonable slacking and extra credit behavior.

The Slacking Spectrum
The Extra Credit Continuum
Day-by-Day Extra Credit Tasks

The Slacking Spectrum
Have you been planning to do the bare minimum from the get-go? If you expected us to disapprove, you’re wrong. Let us reassure you:

Any amount of properly executed SEO that you can muster will bring about some positive effect.

And this is especially true if your competitors are doing absolutely nothing in the way of SEO.

Slacking, as we’re using the word here, simply means taking an honest look at your time and abilities and determining whether you can put off, or even blow off, a task or a group of similar tasks.

Slacking can be the result of a simple judgment call. Or slacking can be a path you’re forced to take due to a lack of time, budget, or manpower.

Take heart: There’s really nothing wrong with having a slacker mentality as long as you follow these important Dos and Don’ts about slacking and SEO:

DON’T beat yourself up. Periodic dips in SEO activity are to be expected for busy people in dynamic organizations.

An occasional bout of inattentiveness to your campaign is common. Dropping the ball every once in a while is no reason to abandon your SEO efforts altogether.

DON’T slack if your competitors aren’t. If you are in an extremely competitive market, there’s probably no easy way to shirk.

You will have to work harder on your SEO campaign to see changes for the better. Likewise, if one of your sleepy competitors wakes up to SEO, you’ll need to step up your efforts accordingly or suffer the consequences.

DON’T blame it on the budget. Just as you don’t need a big SEO budget to be an overachiever, you don’t need to slow down on SEO just because you’re low on funds.

Site edits, link building, landing page A/B testing, and competitive analysis-to name just a few-are tasks that most organizations can do at no extra cost.

DO be realistic. If you anticipate that you never will be able to devote an hour a day to your SEO campaign, it’s time to think about sharing the load with a coworker or hiring a consultant.

Some Slacking Is Not Guilt Free
Priorities will vary from organization to organization, but there are a few tasks you should never slack on because they form the foundation of your entire SEO campaign:

• Defining your conversion goals
• Identifying your audience
• Researching your keywords

And there are also certain red flags that you should not ignore because they can cause all of your other efforts to be wasted:

• Problems, such as coding errors, that block the search engines from indexing your landing pages

• Problems, such as broken links, that dump your audience into dead ends instead of delivering them to your site

Here are some ideas for bringing your SEO Plan in line with your own less-than-perfect reality, whether it’s related to your time, your budget, or your team’s willingness to help:

Cut out early. Choosing your keywords and getting them onto your site using sound SEO methods is a substantial step forward and may - help you realize a positive change.

Cut out PPC activities. This is a no-brainer if you have no money to spend on it. Unlike PPC, organic SEO will continue to deliver improvements long after you’ve quit devoting time to it.

Cut out organic activities. Cutting organic SEO and focusing only on PPC may be a smart strategy if you are short on labor and have a healthy budget to work with.

With PPC, you can expect quicker success than with organic SEO alone. But proceed with extreme caution:

If your site isn’t optimized for your target audience, it may not be an effective destination for PPC visitors.

Cut reporting loose. If you seriously don’t have the time, consider delegating your site visibility check to someone else in your organization.

This will seriously handicap your ability to analyze and improve your campaign. But asking an administrative assistant to gather numbers for you is better than not tracking at all.

After all, if nobody’s collecting information about your site’s performance, how do you know whether you’re wasting what little time you do have to spend on SEO?

Do it all, but with a smaller scope. If you’re low on time, do your slicing the way the SEO consultants do: by limiting your campaign to fewer conversion goals, audiences, or landing pages.

For example, focus on only one product line or one landing page, whittle down your top-priority keywords to just a couple, or focus on only one segment of your potential audience.

In this way, you’re still working toward increasing your targeted traffic using a holistic approach to SEO.

Be a dedicated dud-dropper. We’d love to be able to list SEO tasks in order from the best to worst effort-to-results ratios.

But these factors vary widely from organization to organization-one website’s success story is another’s sob story.

So, you will need to track your own results and figure out for yourself which SEO tactics are working for you and which are wasting your time. Once you have some data under your belt, feel free to slash and burn.

You may have the big idea to strip down Your SEO Plan to just focus on Google ranks and nothing else.

While this is a common sentiment expressed by clients we’ve come across, it really isn’t a reasonable slacking mindset.

A well-rounded approach to SEO is the only kind that will improve your website’s ranks in Google. You can’t really strip out all but the Google-related tasks and have less work to do.

The Extra Credit Continuum
Extra credit in SEO doesn’t require as much soul-searching and premeditation as slacking.

Usually extra credit is just a natural extension of what you’re already doing with your site.

SEO encompasses a wide variety of disciplines and activities, from creative writing to coding. You may just discover one aspect of it that grips you and run with it.

If you’re going full bore on the technology side of SEO, make sure it’s balanced out with a fully developed organic approach too. We’ve said it before: A holistic approach is best.

And, one more thing: Keep your perspective. There is a difference between extra credit and wasting your time.

Checking ranks every day, logging daily unique visits unless you have a short-lived or time-sensitive campaign, and spending all your time trying to decipher Google’s algorithm are not worth the effort.

Turn your attention instead to more reasonable tasks like researching new keywords and gleaning new ideas from competitors or legitimate never-ending tasks like link building.

Day-by-Day Extra Credit Tasks
The internal search on your website can teach you about your site visitors, giving insights into who they are and what they need.

If you already have an internal search engine on your website, don’t let its data go to waste! Data from your internal search engine can help you determine the following:

What are your site visitors searching for? If you sell shrimp deveiners and your internal search function is logging a lot of searches for “shrimp deveiners,” that might be a good thing.. .

Or it may not. It’s certainly nice that your visitors seem to want your product. But why do they need to search for it in the first place?

Why can’t they find it by navigating your site? Finding a large number of searches for your top-priority keywords in your internal search means that you need to make this content easier to find.

What’s the (key)word on the street? When you were choosing keywords, we were supposed to try to get into the minds of your potential customers.

The in-site search engine is a great tool for doing just that. Are they searching for “shrimp de-veiners,” “shrimp deveiners,” or something unexpected, like “shrimp cleaners”?

Keep in mind, though, that this audience, having already decided to visit your site, may not behave the same as your general search engine audience.

Who’s coming to your site? If most of your site’s internal searches are related to finding a job in your organization or some other activity that doesn’t relate to your intended conversion, it may be an indication that a substantial portion of your site visitors are not your target audience.

Are they getting where they need to go? Find the top 10 phrases entered by users of your internal search engine.

Then, take each of them for a spin. What results came up? Were they your preferred landing pages or some crusty press releases?

Depending on the technology behind your search function, you may be able to improve the results by adding your own metadata usually in the form of keyword tags to your website’s pages.

Before you try to go extra-extra credit, take note: These tags are not recognized by the search engines.

For example, for your Sale Products page, you can assign keywords like “discount” or “clearance”-even if these words don’t appear on the page-and your internal search will then be able to show your Sale Products page to anyone searching for those terms.

Of course, you should never manipulate your internal search results to be irrelevant; you don’t want to display your Sale page when someone is searching for “returns,” for example.

But it’s your site, and assigning reasonable synonyms and related concepts to your search function’s metadata may be helpful to both your visitors and your conversion goals.

If you do this kind of extra-credit analysis, your internal search will be much more than a helpful feature for your visitors.. .it will also be a marketing tool for you!

PPC and ROI
Return on investment (ROI) is one of those fancy terms for a very simple concept: how much are you getting back compared to what you’re putting in?

Everyone wants a bigger, better ROI, and the best way to achieve one is to work within a framework that we like to call the ROI loop:

Let’s say that over the past several weeks, you’ve invested both money and time in your PPC campaign. This won’t be enough. You need to move on to the next steps. We’ll get you started on some new endeavors even as you take stock of older ones:

PPC Sanity Check
Organic Apples and Oranges
A/B Testing
Close the PPC ROI Loop

PPC Sanity Check
Do you know about “algoholics,” those people who obsessively follow the organic search engine algorithms?

We see two new SEO disorders: obsessively cutting out low-performing keyphrases because you can’t stand the clutter (we call this PPC-OCD) and the inability to stop making little campaign changes (this is PPC-HD).

The purpose of this article is twofold: First, to give you some guidelines on how to “read” your PPC data like an expert, and second, to encourage those of you with itchy trigger fingers to make changes to your campaign without sabotaging its success.

Your PPC Sanity Check starts with lining up your PPC keywords from best performing to worst.

Here we assume that you have identified your top performing PPC keyterms based on your own criteria.

Probably you chose to order them by click-through rate, conversion rate, or some combination of the two.

Using the same criteria, you’re going to take a look at your entire PPC keyword list and decide whether it makes sense to delete any keywords.

As you look through your data, you may find that there is a fairly even spread of clicks or conversions throughout your list of keywords.

Or more likely, you may find a nice group of performers at the top and a steep drop-off thereafter. Perhaps you even have a disturbingly long list of zero-performers.

But is it really time to prune your PPC campaign? Probably not. Before you give in to your slashing instinct, take the time to apply some solid analysis.

Here are the most common performance failures and possible ways to improve them:

• Keywords with low click-through rates
• Keywords with low conversion rates

Keywords with Low Click-Through Rates
Higher click-through rates will influence your rank on both Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), so you may be tempted to start slicing and dicing keywords with low click-through rates.

But while you may find these keywords bothersome, you’re paying for clicks, not ad views, so they aren’t costing you extra money.

Ask yourself a few questions that may help you turn these low performers around:

Is my ad text doing its job? Take an honest look at your ad copy to make sure it addresses your low-performing keyterm, and your audience, in a meaningful and compelling way.

If the keyterm doesn’t have its own custom-written ad, perhaps it should. Consider inviting another writer on your team to give your ads a tune-up.

Or you may want to experiment with an A/B split (Click Here to learn more on this), which is an experiment that can help you get the most from your ad text.

Does the term have enough impressions for me to make a judgment call? Make sure you’re getting enough ad views for your doubts about the keyterm to be valid.

Sometimes, the number of impressions for an ad is so small that it’s really not getting a fair shot at success.

This is especially true if the keyterm is related to a seasonal or cyclical topic. Terms on the “long tail” of search, are naturally only going to get a very few impressions.

Did I start out with realistic expectations? This is a great time to reassess your trust in your PPC service’s traffic prediction tool.

Low Conversion Rate Keywords
Much more worrisome than the ad that isn’t bringing in traffic is the one that actually is bringing in traffic but not resulting in conversions.

You’re going to hold these terms to a much higher standard than the low-click-through performers because every one of these clicks is costing you cash.

But you may wish to give these underachievers a second chance before you dump them.

Here are some questions you should ask:

Is the landing page a good match for the keyterm? You may be about to drop a keyterm when you should instead be planning to add a new page to your website to better accommodate it.

At the very least, consider pointing a keyterm to a more appropriate landing page that already exists.

Exploring different landing page options with an A/B split may also be in order.

Did I get caught in a word-matching snafu? If you are using a broad matching option, is it possible there’s a broad match to your term that’s drawing in the wrong audience You can fix this with a negative match, a type of matching that excludes words you specify so that your ad doesn’t show up for those terms.

For example, you may want to sponsor the term “shredder” for your snowboarding site but you probably don’t want to pay for clicks from people who are looking for those paper-eating office supplies. In this case, you’d want to exclude the words “paper” and “document” for this keyword.

Am I inadvertently using bait-and-switch tactics? If you owned a bike shop in Santa Cruz, California, you might think it’s perfectly reasonable to sponsor the search terms “santa cruz bikes.”

Unfortunately, this is also the name of a popular brand of mountain bikes! Many of those click-throughs are going to be disappointed by your site.

If you’re in a situation like this, you’ll need to review your ad text to eliminate ambiguity. Make sure your ads clearly represent your offering.

Determining the value of a conversion is anything but straightforward. Let’s see two perspectives.

One says, if you’re paying for advertising, you need to have a way to determine if it’s worth the cost.

That means giving a numeric value to your conversions! For larger organizations, your marketing department probably already has a concept of the lifetime value of a new customer or client.

For example, the PPC visitor who buys a digital camera online today may come back in a year for spare parts, and then recommend you to a business partner for a large purchase three years down the road.”

The other perspective says, if your type of conversion is less tangible-for example, a visit to your Map and Directions page or downloading a white paper-you’ll probably be hard-pressed to place a numerical value on it.

This may be a case of’ I know it when I see it’-your gut will tell you that $10 per conversion feels like too much but $5 feels OK.

If you can’t place an exact value on your conversion, the best approach is to manage your campaign diligently so that you stay within your PPC budget and strive for the lowest cost per conversion possible.

Organic Apples and Oranges
Here, you’re going to look for stand-out successes and unexpected disappointments among your PPC keywords so you can use that knowledge to adjust future organic SEO efforts.

Why use PPC data to inform organic SEO? Because PPC provides data in a much more tangible form, quickly, and with less investment of labor than organic SEO.

With a quick scan of your PPC keywords reports, you can gain broad-brush insights like these:

• Your original keyword research led you to believe that a term is popular with searchers…but is it really? The number of PPC impressions it gets can help you confirm your suspicions.

• A keyphrase seemed targeted when you first assessed it …but is it? The number of click-throughs/conversions a term receives can give you a clearer understanding.

• A keyterm didn’t make the cut for your organic top-priority list…but maybe it should have.

If a term is a standout PPC success, you may have underestimated its organic potential.

Even with reams of PPC data in your hands, you may not arrive at any one finding or number that will make you say, “Eureka! I should change my organic approach in this way!”

But you can still just say, “Eureka!” for fun if you want. It’s good for morale. Factors such as low rank, less-than-stellar ad copy, or landing page problems can throw off any of the preceding “broad-brush” judgments.

Today, you’ll use your PPC campaign data to judge the keyword choices, looking for over- and underperformers that may need to be reprioritized. Here’s what we look for:

• keywords Clusters
• Standouts and Disappointments
• Net Steps for Your Organic Campaign

keywords Clusters
Your PPC keyword assessment starts with reviewing the performance of clusters of related keywords.

You can define a cluster as a group of stemmed keywords “hangover cure,” “natural hangover cures,” “curing hangovers”.

Or a group of conceptually related keywords e.g., a “preventing hangovers” cluster vs. a “curing hangovers” cluster.

This can give you an idea of the context in which your target audience is most interested in seeing those keywords.

You need to develop a suitable PPC Cluster Worksheet then follow these steps to assess the performance of keyword clusters:

• Sit down with a list of your top-priority keyphrases and your PPC report spanning the life of the campaign.

• Go through your report and decide how you want to group your keywords into clusters.

It might help to highlight different clusters in different colors as you go. You can define as few as two clusters or as many as you’re interested in studying. It’s OK to have leftover keyphrases that don’t fit into any cluster.

• For each of the keyword clusters, copy total clicks and overall click-through percentage on a keyword-by-keyword basis into the PPC Cluster Worksheet you prepared.

Or, if your conversion tracking has been in place long enough for some real data, enter total conversions and conversion percentage. See the tables below for examples.

• Use your PPC service to find the campaign-wide total number of clicks (or conversions, if that’s what you’re reviewing here).

And the PPC Cluster Worksheet will calculate the percentage that each cluster is receiving. ???

Keep in mind, an accurate apples-to-apples judgment along these lines depends on the ranks for these terms being similar.

Standouts and Disappointments
There are lots of variables that get in the way of comparing PPC to organic performance. PPC and organic keywords are shown in different screen locations, in different contexts, and with different advertising messages and levels of keyword matching.

Since the majority of searchers do not click on PPC results, you’re not getting a full picture of the search population. But there are some things that PPC cluster data can tell you about your organic campaign:

Did you optimize for the right keyphrase variation? If you weren’t sure whether you chose to use the right variation of a given keyword (e.g., “silk screen” vs. “silk screen printing”), this might give you enough data to convince you to make some edits to your landing pages.

Did you focus on the right user scenario? Personas and scenarios are just ways to structure your thinking about your targeted audience and what you want them to do on your site.

Looking at the data from the PPC keyword clusters, you might be surprised to see that one cluster is much more effective than the others (for example, the “monogram” cluster is getting more clicks or conversions than the “embroidery” cluster).

Next Steps for Your Organic Campaign
Now that you’ve gained some fresh insight on how your PPC keyphrases are performing, you’ll use it to “close the loop” and adjust your organic campaign accordingly.

Did you find any keyterms outside of your original organic top-priority list that have any of these characteristics:

• Have a high conversion rate, even though they may have only a moderate number of impressions so far

• Are slightly more focused versions of your top-priority keywords, and are coming through with noteworthy clicks and/or conversions

• Just appear to be logging a promising number of impressions

On the other hand, were there any terms from within your original organic top-priority list with these characteristics:

• Logged few or no impressions

• Had plenty of impressions but no click-throughs

• Brought in lots of clicks but had a low conversion rate

Does a place exist for these new terms on your site right now? Maybe they’re already well matched with a landing page and it’s just a matter of inserting them into the text and meta tags.

As you incorporate new keywords into your organic efforts, you may want to drop underperformers from optimization and tracking.

Whether you start modifying your organic efforts today or put it off until your entire team reaches consensus will depend on your personal and organizational preferences.

A/B Testing
Civil engineers know that the best kind of earthquake testing for a building is this: a real earthquake. A/B testing is a way to get that type of real-world information for your SEO campaign.

Commonly used in the direct mail industry, A/B testing (also called an A/B split) is a practice of sending out two different advertisement designs and comparing their sales.

On the Web, A/B testing can be used to compare the conversion rates for PPC ads, for landing page designs, or even for two different “Buy Now!” buttons.

There are several ways to approach an A/B split. Read through the following options and determine which one best fits your campaign.

• A/B Testing: Proper
• A/B Testing: Practical
• A/B Testing: Page-Based

A/B Testing: Proper
A scientifically robust A/B test would follow these steps:

• Create two identical PPC ads.

• Point both ads to the same landing page.

• Let both ads run for a while. The period of time (be it a day, a few days, a week, or even longer) before they are both showing approximately the same click-through or conversion rates is your testing period.

• Keep one ad the same throughout the test this is called the A ad).

• Make one edit to the other ad (for example, change “Purchase low-cost dental insurance” to “Purchase discount dental Insurance”).

• After each edit, wait one testing period. Did the change increase or decrease the ad’s performance (either click-throughs or conversions? Don’t forget to keep records!

• Try again with another edit.

• Lather, rinse, and repeat. With each testing period you learn whether the edit will help!

The scientific approach is great, but we know the real world rarely presents the opportunity for ivory tower-style research. And that’s why we’re hoping you’ll look into the approach described next.

A/B Testing: Practical
If you’re using Google AdWords, A/B testing for PPC ads is easy! Just write one or two additional ads for each of your Ad Group’.

As clicks come in, Google automatically judges which ad is more effective and will increase its prominence for you automatically.

If you have Google Analytics in place, you can use a ready-made A/B testing function for comparing the effectiveness of two different ads.

AB testing on YSM takes a little more determination because you can’t run two different ads for the same keyword at the same time.

Instead, try testing your AB split over consecutive testing periods rather than simultaneous ones.

A/B Testing: Page-Based
If you have a conversion tracking system in place, you can pursue a landing page A/B test. Here’s how to compare the effectiveness of two landing pages for the same PPC ad:

• Find a PPC ad that’s been running long enough to gather meaningful performance data.

• Build a new landing page for use with the ad. This should be an “orphaned” page, one that doesn’t have any links to it other than from your PPC ad.

For meaningful testing, you don’t want this page to be indexed by the search engines, so exclude it using your robots.txt file. (To learn how to do this, Click Here.)

Let your designer have fun with graphic text; this page doesn’t need to be robot friendly.

Since you know that the audience for this page is a little more “qualified”-that is, they clicked a specific PPC ad-make sure the copy is tightly focused to that audience.

• Now, sit back for a testing period and assess: Is the new PPC landing page delivering more conversions than your original landing page did for the same ad?

Some campaigns find that the extra level of targeting that is possible with a PPC-only landing page translates into more conversions.

Does A/B testing have its limitations? Of course it does. You may figure out that one ad is doing better than another, but unless you interview your target audience, you’ll never know exactly why.

And if you’re only measuring click-throughs, and not the outcome of the visit, A/B testing sure won’t tell you what those clicks are worth.

In addition, your tests are limited to your ideas for edits, so unless you’re a master at thinking outside the box, there may be big improvements that you miss.

Nevertheless, A/B testing is one of the few ways of getting real data on the persuasiveness of your SEO message.

Close the PPC ROI Loop
You’re going to start a new “invest” cycle in your PPC ROI loop here. You’ll drop the duds-unsalvageable low-performing keywords-from your PPC campaign.

And you’ll line up some promising new PPC keyterms and adjust bids based on performance data so far.

Add New PPC Keyterms
Adding a few new keyphrases to your PPC account is a fairly flexible process. You can do this in any number of ways:

• Use your PPC service’s keyword tool to suggest additional terms.

• Grab some more terms from your preliminary organic keyword list that didn’t make the cut for top-priority optimization.

• Go for the “long tail” and add some longer, highly focused versions of existing terms.

Adjust Bids Based on Performance
If you have PPC conversion tracking in place, you can adjust bids based on conversion performance.

If you found any unexpectedly high or low conversion rates among your PPC keywords, you may wish to increase or decrease your bids for them today. Adjust bids for keywords with unexpectedly high or low conversion rates.

Drop the Duds
At this point, you have a good sense of which keywords are pulling their weight in your PPC campaign.

You also know which ones may deserve a second chance. Now you’ll drop any that are working against you. Here are the keyterms we call “duds”:

• Low or zero click-through-rate terms that are costing you more in administrative work than you think they’re worth tasks that eat up time include appealing an editorial decision, closely monitoring aven- expensive term, or just performing routine management on a campaign that has grown too large over time

• Terms for which you’re paying more per conversion than your estimated conversion value

• Terms that don’t accurately represent your offerings

If any of these factors are true, then go ahead and slash. You can always add them back later if you regret your choice.

Keywords: Copywriting, inbound link, Bookmarks, page redirect, inbound link, Internal Links, link validator, snippet,

Basic Site Optimization
Before you’re going to work hard at finding site owners and convincing them to link to you, you’ll need to