Step Wice SEO

You’ll be researching the following elements to determine whether there is any evidence of SEO in your competitors’ sites:

• Targeted keywords
• General characteristics of the site In the following sections, we’ll go into the finer points:

Targeted Keywords
First, try to determine what, if any, keywords your Big Five competitors are targeting.

Sometimes a competitor’s targeted keywords will make themselves clear if you simply review the text on their site.

It’s a fair bet that your competitors are targeting many of the same keywords that you are, so you can glance through their page content and look for those terms or for similar terms that you may have considered for your own site.

But are they actually targeting these terms for SEO, or did their copywriter just get lucky with word choice?

The quickest way to get a read on a competitor’s SEO schemes is to view the meta keywords tag.

You’ll need to look into the source code to do this. Inside the tag, your competitor’s keyword list might include 500 words, it might be ridiculously un-optimized (formatted as a sentence or full of words like a, an, the, and quality), or it might seem to be a tightly focused, relevant list from which you can glean a hint of a strategy.

While you’re in the code, look for keywords in the HTML title and meta description too.
By the way, if you’ve never stepped through someone else’s HTML code, it can be a little disorienting.

It can help to use your browser’s find function (usually Ctrl+F, or Edit > Find in the browser menu) to search for the words meta or title. These should land you in the general vicinity of the tags you’re looking for.

For each of your Big Five competitors, open the home page and at least one other page on their site to scan the copy and view the tags.

You aren’t looking to record the top 50 terms here, just the ones that seem to be in direct competition with your own conversion goals.

As you’re sniffing around your competitors’ page content and tags, you may find a keyword here or there that you hadn’t thought of.

General Characteristics of the Website
Give your competitors’ websites a spin and try to identify anything that’s important about their sites’ structure as it relates to SEO.

Are important pages hidden behind a login or locked inside a database? Is their entire site developed with Flash, or is too much of their message presented as graphical text?

(To determine whether website text is graphical or HTML, try to highlight it with your mouse.

If you can highlight one letter at a time, it’s HTML. If you can only highlight the entire word plus some of the background, it’s graphical.)

Is the site particularly text heavy? Does the site have useful, unique, or constantly changing noncommercial content that might increase its linkability?

You’ll naturally be curious about lots of other, not-just-for-SEO factors as you click around your competitors’ sites, like fun features that you covet for your own site.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping track of those elements somewhere, too (Task Journal entry, anyone?).

But for our purposes, we’d just like you to jot down your general impressions. Here are some examples of General Site Characteristics notes:

• This site has a tendency to overuse graphical text.
• Not once on this site was the long form of the acronym AMC spelled out!
• There’s a ton of text, which is good for SEO, but it causes their design to suffer.

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With your site structure improvements in place and your PPC campaign purring, you’ve never been more ready to get some serious conversion tracking underway.

Conversion tracking is a simple concept to grasp:

You count how many people are performing a desired action, you determine where those people came from, and you figure out what keywords they used if they came from a search engine.

Here’s the simplest scenario:

Your goal is to get more unique visitors. You use data from your servers to tell you how many unique visitors came to your site and what search terms they used.

But tracking online activities like making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading a file, not to mention offline conversions like phone sales and walk-in business, requires a more sophisticated tracking system.

In this article you’ll develop a plan for tracking the conversion goals. You’ll find the tools you need and some ideas for tracking even the most challenging types of conversions. Here are your tasks:

PPC Conversion Tracking
Let’s assume your starter PPC campaign has been running for a few weeks now, and you have probably already have seen a nice influx of click-throughs.

But do you know which, if any, of these click-throughs has turned into a conversion? For example, let’s say you sell left-handed guitars.

Your PPC reports can tell you the number of people who came to your site after searching for “left-handed guitars,” and your server logs or sales figures can tell you how many people purchased a left-handed guitar, but to tie together those two actions requires some additional steps.

Both Google and YSM offer built-in conversion tracking that can connect the dots. Their systems keep it simple by answering only one question: which PPC click-throughs turned into conversions for your website?

How it works To implement the built-in conversion tracking on Google or YSM, you’ll need to define a page or pages on your site that indicate a conversion has been completed.

Very possibly, this will be your transaction completion page or confirmation page-it’s wherever you say thank you to your customers for a purchase, download, registration, or form completion.

You will put a tiny piece of code or image (also called a tag or tracking pixel) on that page to communicate with the PPC system.

On Google, you can also assign certain variables like a dollar amount for conversion value.

You will then be able to view information such as total conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion in your admin interface and reports.

Benefits Since you already have a PPC account, there is no easier way to monitor conversions from your SEO efforts and expenditures!

The process requires very little technical intervention on your part and nothing in the way of server setup.

Google, always wanting a bigger piece of your organization’s pie chart, also makes it possible for you to track campaigns you’re running on other PPC services. Yahoo! offers a similar capability, called Marketing Console, for a fee.

Limitations As much as you may wish otherwise, your site visitors aren’t going to march in lockstep through your site from entrance to conversion.

Much more likely, they’ll browse around your site, go to other sites, and then come back minutes, hours, or weeks later.

When they return, they may perform another search or type in your site URL, or perhaps their web browser will remember your site address and fill in the URL for them.

Whatever the case, you may have lost the link between the original keyword search and this conversion.

Your PPC service may hold onto visitor information for some period of time, perhaps 30 days, using a cookie. This feature will save you from losing at least a portion of your wanderers.

Another obvious limitation of the PPC tracking systems is that they only track PPC visitors, not people who came in through organic search results.

Hey! Where’d Everybody Go?
Let’s assume that you have a 1 percent overall conversion rate from the moment someone views the keyword on a search engine to the point at which the purchase is completed.

That means that 99 percent of the visitors are not converting. This is great data, but you need to get to the next level of detail to take action and optimize the conversion rate.
Where are the trouble spots:

• Is the user not clicking through the ad [on a PPC sponsorship]?
• Is the user getting to the site and immediately exiting?
• Is the user engaged in the product description but not buying the product?
• Are they dropping off in the checkout process?

Through further analysis and experimentation, you need to work to discover exactly why users are leaving the site.

For example, …let’s say that 80 percent of the users exit when checking out. This clearly identifies an issue with the checkout process.

You can conclude that the visitor is engaged, they found the product they were interested in purchasing, and were ready to buy, but somehow had a problem with the checkout process. This issue could be

• the checkout process is too tedious and time consuming;
• the checkout process has a bug that prevents people from checking out;
• the visitor continued shopping and somehow got distracted and never came back to check out.

The good news is, if you can reduce this drop-off by even a few percent, it will greatly increase your conversion rate.

Finally, tracking tools provide so much data and you can easily spend hours per day viewing it.” For a streamlined approach, focus on the highest-priority metrics:

• ”Am I driving visitors to the site?
• ”Are they converting?
• ”What are my ad costs?
• ”What are my revenues?”

Before you set up a PPC conversion tracking tool, be sure your organization is comfortable giving the PPC engine access to potentially sensitive information about your conversions.

Some in the SEO industry have expressed concern that sharing this information will lead to security breaches or a rise in PPC prices.

Get to Know Your Basic Server Stats
You have a website, which means you have a server, which means your server is probably making server logs.

Like a good computer, it logs and logs and logs: who came to your site, where they came from, what browser they were using, and more.

Each time any action is taken on your website, your diligent server log file makes a note of it.

We hope, for your health, that you never look at a server log file. Doing so can cause headaches, dizziness, and a desire to escape to the water cooler.

What you want to see, instead, is output from a web log analyzer-software that takes the raw server log file ingredients and whips them up into an easy-to-digest serving of meaningful traffic data.

Don’t confuse the web log we’re talking about here with the other kind of weblog, the one called blog for short!

The area of web analytics, the measurement and analysis of online activity, includes products ranging from simple to sophisticated. We’ve boiled it down into an at-a-glance table so you can get your bearings.

We’re going to look at data that is available from the most simple, and often free, systems using information from your server logs.

These include Webalizer and AWStats. Most commercial web hosting packages include at least this basic level of web log analysis.

Maybe you already have something like this available. If you’re not sure, talk to your IT department and find out. Here is the information you’ll want to regularly see from your server logs, at a minimum:

Unique visitors Knowing the total traffic to your website doesn’t tell you much. It won’t tell you whether your visitors are the ones you targeted, what path they took through your website, whether they made a purchase, or how happy they were during their visit.

Nevertheless, it’s one of those little numbers that you, just, need, to, know. Your log analyzer will do its best to determine a total number of unique visitors based on IP addresses and any other info it can gather.

Admittedly, the number is not perfectly accurate. But it’s a good tool for tracking trends. After all, what does it really matter if you had 1,000 or 1,035 unique visitors this week? What matters most is whether you’re up or down from last week.

And while you’re at it, banish the word hits from your vocabulary. Hits describes the number of times a request is made to your server, and page views describes the number of times an entire page is called by a browser.

So if there are dozens of images on a given page, there will be dozens of hits recorded for each page view.

Depending on your conversion goal, you may want to focus on the number of page views or unique visitors, but never hits.

Traffic to key pages Traffic to your landing pages, or other key locations on your website, can be a lot more meaningful than overall traffic to your website.

Any web log analyzer worth its salt will be able to show you how many visitors are browsing the landing pages that you worked so hard to optimize.

Referrers After all your link-building efforts, wouldn’t you love to know which sites are actually sending you traffic?

After optimizing for the search engines, wouldn’t you love to know which search terms your visitors used to find you?

This is where your stats start to become truly useful to your SEO campaign. Your web log analyzer can tell you where your site visitors came from, and even more important, for those that came to your website from search engines, it can tell you the exact keywords they searched for.

This can be a good source of ideas for finding new keywords to target. It may also help you identify inbound links you didn’t know existed!

Keep in mind, referrer data is limited to folks that clicked to your site from another site on the Web.

Users that typed your URL directly into their browsers, or clicked from a bookmark, or clicked from an e-mail, are harder to track.

Exit pages If it’s good to know how visitors found your site, it’s even more telling to know where visitors exited your site.

Exit pages can be used to diagnose a whole host of problems, from poor navigation design to poorly targeted traffic.

Don’t be surprised if your home page is high on the list. It’s common for people to arrive at your site and immediately realize it’s not what they’re looking for.

Don’t always assume that exit pages are the “bad guy.” Some websites are set up so that when users click to make a purchase they are taken to a different site. If this describes your site, then exiting your site may be the best thing a user can do!

However, for most websites, exits represent your conversions walking out the door. If a large proportion of your visitors are leaving after viewing just one page, either you’re inviting the wrong crowd to your party or there’s something very unappetizing greeting them at the door.

Errors Among other things, your server will log a 404 error (“File not Found”) every time a user tries to access a nonexistent URL.

This can help you find inbound-or internal-links that are using incorrect or out-of-date URLs.

Your server logs will record a 404 error every time a search engine robot comes looking for a nonexistent robots.txt file, which may be reason enough for you to add one to your website.

The list of useful server stats could go on and on, but you have limited time, so we stuck with the basics.

If you already have access to your server stats through a web log analyzer, congratulations! You’ll look through it for the information just listed.

If you do not already have a way to view server stats, you’ll figure out how to make it happen.

You have several options, including the basic server stats discussed today as well as more comprehensive tracking described in the next sections.

You probably won’t need to use a basic program if you are also implementing a more advanced system because the more advanced systems incorporate all of the info a basic program provides and more. Consider them all, and choose which is best for your organization.

Tracking Online Conversions
We’re going to talk about options that allow you to take your basic server stats to the next level for your organic SEO campaign.

Instead of recording separate chunks of data (like the number of unique visitors and the number of people entering your site for a specific term), you can set up tracking so that a visitor is “followed” from the time they enter your site until they perform your conversion goal.

Setting up a comprehensive tracking system for your site is usually much more time intensive than the PPC conversion tracking. So, think of today as a day to learn, compare, and get the ball rolling on one of these options:

• Advanced tracking systems
• Implementing your own solution
• Band-Aid methods

Advanced Tracking Systems
Major providers of advanced tracking systems include Omniture, Web Side Story, Web Trends, ClickTracks, and Coremetrics.

Free or inexpensive options for smaller businesses are Google Analytics, measuremap for bloggers, and GoDaddy, a website hosting provider that bundles a tracking service with its hosting options. Consult their websites for more information.

How it works Advanced tracking systems come in two flavors: client-side tracking (also called hosted, tag-based, or on-demand tracking) and server-side tracking.

Client side tracking generally works like this: You add a tiny piece of code or a tiny image to every page of your site.

This little code communicates with a tracking system located on the vendor’s server and the information is used to build detailed reports about activity on your site-for a monthly fee.

Server-side systems provide similar capabilities but stay on your own servers, are purchased like software, and must be set up by your IT team.

You don’t need to know the details of how these systems work. You just need to know how much they cost, what reporting options they provide, and whether your webmaster will let you add the little scripts to the page.

Benefits Both client-side and server-side tracking systems give you much more information about your site visitors than basic server log analysis or built-in PPC tracking will provide.

What paths your users took, where they lingered, where they exited your site-the options are almost endless.

Client-side systems provide the additional advantage that your part of the setup generally doesn’t require heavy-duty IT involvement. If you know simple HTML, you may be able to do this part yourself.

Limitations Got time on your hands? It takes a serious time commitment to review and act upon the data you receive using this method.

But consider implementing an advanced tracking system even if you don’t see yourself cozying up with the data on a weekly basis.

It’s possible to review data on a monthly, even quarterly, basis and collect some fascinating and helpful information.

Client-side tracking also brings about the same security issues that PPC conversion tracking does.

If data security is a major issue at your organization, server-side tracking will be the better option for you.

Another limitation is that both tracking methods are likely to undercount your visitors for various reasons, including the fact that users can disable the JavaScript or cookies (small pieces of text that are saved temporarily on the user’s computer) that these techniques rely on.

Implementing Your Own Solution
If you’ve got the will and the IT firepower, creating your own tracking solution may be an option you find yourself considering.

How it works Your own tracking solution will be limited only by your time and programming capabilities.

We recommend that you start simple: all you really need to do is count conversions and trace the conversions back to search engine traffic.

For instance, it could be done like this:

• Every time a visitor came to the website, you set a cookie that recorded the referring URL, including searched keywords for those that came from search engines.

• Nothing else would happen while the user surfed around the site.

• And then, in the occasional event that the visitor submitted a request for information form, the cookie text was included along with all the other form information submitted directly to Sales.

Your own solution could include a wide variety of techniques to store important visitor data, including setting cookies, adding tags to pages on your site, and creating special tracking URLs. Your choice will depend on your specific needs and abilities.

Benefits There are a couple of advantages to building your own tracking system. One is that it can be customized to your needs and you won’t get bogged down in data overload.

Another is that it eliminates the security and privacy concerns that third-party systems cause.

Limitations If you have relatively few conversions, a basic do-it-yourself system might be feasible for you.

However, the amount of programming you’d have to do to get close to the flexibility of a third-party solution is probably prohibitively high.

Building your own tracking tool is serious work, so you should seriously consider other options before traveling the do-it-yourself path.

Band-Aid Methods
Depending on your business, you may feel that the conversion tracking methods described previously are overkill.

Or, you may not have the time, money, technical ability, or support to gather conversion data behind the scenes.

The only thing left for you to do is to ask your visitors! Sure, it’s not a perfect method, but it’s something. Here are some suggestions:

Bust the “e-mail us” link. Replace any “e-mail us” links on your website with a “contact us” form. This will allow you to ask your visitors how they found you (but don’t hold your breath for any details).

Don’t miss an opportunity. Every form on your site has the potential to ask your visitors how they found you.

If your site has a store component, you could provide a small incentive, like a discount on shipping, for customers who fill out a brief survey prior to checkout.

Look through your site and make sure you’re taking advantage of every opportunity to get your visitors to volunteer this important information.

Try an opt-in. If your website includes highly desirable content (for example, research papers, articles, or high-res imagery), you may be able to convince your site visitors to provide their contact information-and the all-important information about how they found you-in exchange for a download.

However, proceed with caution on this option: web searchers as a rule cherish their anonymity.

We are always dismayed to see businesses insist on a name and phone number before sharing product information. That’s like expecting people to pay to see your advertising!

Tracking Offline Conversions
One of the more challenging areas to track is offline conversions like phone calls or walk-in customers.

To track your offline conversions, you’ll need to be creative. Here are a few ideas for some of the more common scenarios:

Set up a special phone number. If a large percentage of your sales take place over the phone, it may be difficult to show that the website, much less your SEO campaign, had anything to do with them.

But there is one way: Set up a unique phone number and display it on your website-and nowhere else.

Then, have your sales team monitor and track how many calls come in to that line and how many of those calls turn into conversions.

For a greater level of detail, you can sign up with services (such as ClickPath or Who’s Calling) that will generate unique 800 numbers and dynamically display them on your web pages, linking each call to a keyword and ad source.

Run campaigns on things nobody else is promoting. You can get an inkling of the effects of your SEO work by promoting a specific event or product that nobody else in your organization has taken the time to promote.

For instance, if you put your SEO efforts into promoting Tuesday Night Half-Price Pickles and there is no other marketing for it, you can relish the thought that most of the people who show up found out about the event as a result of your SEO work.

Include coupons or promotion codes on your website. How will you know if walk-in customers used your website to research your products or services?

One way is to create coupons or promotion codes on your website that these customers can print out and bring into your store for a discount.

Sure, it won’t tell you whether they used a search engine to find your site, but at least you’ll have something to link your real world traffic to your online traffic.

Cultivate communication. If your site goals fall into the persuasion category, give your users an opportunity to tell their stories with “Post your success story here”

or “Share your smoking cessation tips” links. An increase in the number of postings can indicate your SEO success.

Simply ask. When all else fails, simply ask your offline customers or clients how they found you.

It’s not the most accurate information, but it’s better than nothing. Be sure that your traditional marketing, sales, and PR team put out the question in print, on the phone, or in person whenever they have the opportunity.

Brainstorm with your team on options for tracking your offline conversions and finalize a plan.

Tracking the Intangible
Many organizations report that branding is a primary goal of their SEO campaigns. But how do you track these less-than-tangible factors?

Whether you call it Branding with a capital B or just ‘keeping up appearances,’ the image that your organization projects through the search engines is important.

If the top-ranked website for your company name is a rant by a disgruntled former employee, or if half of your inbound links mention an outdated product name, you’ve got an image problem that SEO can help fix.

Branding improvements may be a fringe benefit of your SEO campaign, or they may be a central goal.

Either way, make sure you document outcomes like improved search engine listings; inbound link updates; cleanup of outdated, private, or inappropriate content; and mentions in other web media such as blogs or review sites.

Keep a diary or log it in your Task Journal, and pull out these accomplishments when you need some good news in the analysis and interpretation sections of your Monthly Report!

Things like eliminating references to nonexistent products and services and monitoring blog references, media mentions, and hate sites are so important that they need quantitative measurement.

Try to quantify your image-improvement accomplishments in some way. For instance, Eight out of 14 of our misspelled listings have now been corrected,

Our company name has been mentioned on 63 blogs this month, up from 24 mentions in the previous month, or

Our specially designed landing page now outranks the ‘hate site’ listing for the keywords ‘I Hate ZappyCo,’ a phrase that approximately 250 people per month search for.

Companies like Buzzmetrics and Intelliseek work to measure activity in this arena, known as consumer generated media (CGM).

Numbers will help provide a clear baseline and measurable change. You’ll be glad to have facts and figures at the ready when you need to justify another round of SEO spending.

PPC Quick Check/Link Building
Some people spend the majority of their SEO time on these two tasks. As advocates of the holistic approach to SEO, we don’t recommend focusing most of your energy on just one or two activities.

But, in general, you can benefit from spending more time on links and PPC campaign tweaks.

Do you really want to get into the business of building and maintaining a tracking tool rather than focusing on your core business?

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Welcome to PPC with training wheels. Here  you’re going to develop good habits and a firm grasp of how the PPC system works, using a small-budget starter campaign.

We can’t tell you what “small” means, but whether you choose to invest less than $100 or more than $1,000 a month, we’ll provide you with tips and pitfall-avoidance techniques that will help you spend your money wisely.

Your SEO Plan makes provisions for you to set up your PPC account and monitor it over the course of three months.

This should give you enough time to judge cost effectiveness, learn what you can expect to get for your money, and decide whether you have what it takes-both financially and administratively-to manage an ongoing PPC account.

Even if you’re skeptical about PPC’s place in your long-term marketing plans, we still hope to nudge you into trying PPC for the short-term:

PPC can tell you a lot about your audience and your keywords in a relatively short period of time, which makes it an excellent research tool for your organic SEO efforts.

How Do I Choose My PPC Budget?
This is one of the hardest-to-pin-down factors of SEO, and one that has as many variables as a high school algebra fair.

We’d love to put on our little green visors and help you arrive at the perfect number, but instead we’ll have to give you some general guidelines and let you do the thinking:

Ask your boss (or whoever holds the purse strings).
Whether you like it or not, somebody may already have a number that you’ll have to roll with. Let’s hope your PPC campaign pulls in enough conversions to convince them to up the budget when your trial period is over!

Look to your current cost per conversion. Perhaps you already have an idea of what a conversion costs your organization based on tracking for existing online or offline marketing programs.

The preliminary research you do this week may help you make an educated guess about how much you’d need to spend on PPC to meet or beat your current cost per conversion.

Consider your competition.
You already know whether or not you’re in a highly competitive online space. This week, with the help of the PPC engine of your choice, you’re going to attach some dollar figures to your top-priority keywords.

Will you need to spend $0.15 or $15.00 per click to wrestle into the top three PPC ranks for most of your keywords? The answer will inform your budget-making process.

Think about your own level of enthusiasm. Even though it’s likely that your PPC campaign will run smoothly, proper campaign management takes continued interest and effort.

Campaigns with larger budgets often have more keywords and more ads, taking more effort than smaller campaigns.

If you don’t foresee yourself having the ability or time to keep up a large campaign, scale down your budget, along with your expectations for clicks and conversions.

Because it helps you tune into your most productive keywords, a relatively small investment of funds can increase the effectiveness of your organic SEO campaign enormously. Here are your tasks:

Study Hall
Getting familiar with a new interface, not to mention specialized terminology and guidelines, is an important part of a smoothly run campaign.

You’ll do your homework and learn about the PPC engine you want to use so that you can be a more effective advertiser in the long term.

If All Else Fails, Flip a Coin
Having a hard time choosing which PPC service is right for you? “How the Search Engines Work Right Now,” there are bigger players and there are smaller ones in the PPC arena.

The current big guns in the U.S. market are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords.

We won’t tell you whether to use Google AdWords or YSM. We can say that unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, you should stick with one of the top two services for your starter PPC campaign.

If you are the kind of person who needs to scrutinize the techie details before making a choice, put on your eyestrain glasses and check out the user documentation provided by the PPC services themselves.

Yourseoplan.com has links to these and other resources that will help you compare PPC services.

Use these resources to learn about YSM and Google AdWords-and any other PPC provider that interests you-and decide which is the best match to your needs. The key elements that you’ll want to research are outlined in this section.

Finalize your choice of a PPC engine and sign up for an account.

Spend the rest of your time today familiarizing yourself with the inner workings of your PPC service of choice.

The following are the most important elements for you to understand as you attack your PPC learning curve.

Editorial Guidelines Any respectable PPC service has a list of rules with which your ads must comply.

Things like limiting obnoxious SHOUTING CAPITALIZATION or limiting the use of certain terms.

Limitations on adult content and affiliate sites are also common. You should also know their editorial procedures:

Do they publish your ad right away and review it later? Is there a waiting period before new ads can go online?

Do they warn you before they take your advertisement offline, or do they just yank it for violating the guidelines?

Spending Requirements This probably won’t be a major issue if you are planning to use YSM or Google AdWords; they both offer very low minimum spending levels.

If you are considering another PPC service, be sure that you are willing to cover their minimum spending or activation fee requirements.

Keyword Matching Options If you love to micromanage, this section is for you. PPC engines, including Google and YSM, offer a variety of keyword matching controls:

• Broad matching causes your ad to display if searchers combine your keywords with other terms. For example, your ad for “wedding bands” will show when the term “platinum wedding bands” is searched.

This may include plural forms of the term, misspellings, and synonyms.

• Keyword exclusion allows you to exclude searchers who use certain words from viewing your ad. For instance, if you’re targeting “wedding bands,” you can exclude people searching for “wedding jazz bands”).

• Keyword grouping may allow you to show one ad for several different keywords, rotate multiple ads, or manage keywords as a group.

Ad Display Options It’s important to understand exactly where and when your ads will be displayed.

If you’re interested in a PPC service other than the two Biggies, make sure they’re up front about who they partner with for ad displays.

You don’t want to discover your ads unexpectedly displaying in annoying pop-up windows that may be detrimental to your branding. Many PPC services also offer these types of display controls:

• Contextual vs. search engine display. Contextual advertising displays your sponsored ads on a wide variety of websites, not just search engines.

Your service should give you the choice of whether you want to include contextual displays.

• Geotargeting allows you to display your results to searchers in a particular location.
• Dynamic Keyword Insertion places the searcher’s keywords directly into your ad. You’ll learn more about this later, when you write your ads.

Bid and Position Management Options Some bid and position management features vary among PPC services. Learn the answers to the following questions about yours:

• Adjusting bid prices: How do you change bid prices for individual keywords? What about for groups of keywords?

Can you set parameters so that your bid automatically increases or decreases based on what your competition is bidding?

• Budget caps: Can you set daily or monthly budget caps? Can you set limits so that certain bidding or cost parameters are not exceeded?

• Controlling position: What kind of control do you have over your listing position? Bid prices may not be the only factors at play in determining the position of your PPC listings.

Tracking and Reporting Options You will probably be pleased with the detail and flexibility of reports you can generate with whichever PPC engine you choose.

Your role in PPC reporting will be less about compiling data and more about finessing the report parameters to get at the information you really want.

Here are some things to look for: How recent is the data that is included in reports? Is conversion tracking an option?

Is there at-a-glance information in your campaign management interface so you won’t have to run a report to see how your PPC day is going?

You’ll be creating monthly reports with the following information at a minimum: top performing terms, total campaign cost, average cost per click, click-through rate, and total click-throughs.

Be sure you know how to find this information from your PPC services reporting screen.

Account Services Some PPC services will help you get up and running. YSM and Google both offer setup assistance services for a fee.

We generally don’t recommend paying for such services, and anyway, you won’t need them if you follow the procedures in this article.

However, if you are destined to be a big spender with a PPC service (on the order of $10,000 or more per month), you may be able to get the free services of an account rep who can smooth over some of the bumps in the process.

Your PPC service may ask you to input your keywords and bids before you can complete the sign-up process. You can just enter in your company name as a keyword for now.

Prep Your PPC Keywords
Here you’ll compile a list of keywords for your PPC starter campaign. Your top 10 or so target keywords are a starting point, but any terms on your long list are fair game.

Targeting the Long Tail
Perhaps you’ve heard of the “long tail” theory.

It describes how our culture and commerce is moving away from a small number of very popular products (or movies, or dances, or even ideas) toward a very large number of niche products or activities.

For instance, not terribly long ago there were only three television networks that everybody watched (a short head).

Now, there are hundreds of specialty networks, each with a much smaller audience (a long tail).

How does this apply to Your SEO Plan?
In SEO, a short head search is something like “motel,” while a long tail search might be “baltimore pool motel airport.”

The short head search is very broad and is used commonly, while the long tail search is very specific and is used much less frequently.

Compared to organic optimization, PPC makes it much easier for you to target long tail searchers.

Here’s why: In organic SEO, each keyterm you target takes a certain minimum commitment of time and energy, so it wouldn’t make sense to put hours of effort into rewriting your site for once-a-month, ultra-focused queries.

In PPC, on the other hand, you can add your long tail keywords to your account for free-and pay only when they receive clicks.

Why sponsor long tail searches? For one, they aren’t likely to have much competition, which means lower costs per click.

For another, by the time a searcher is using a long tail term, they are probably closer to the end of the buying process.

This makes long tail searchers a very desirable group. Look again at the example: “motel” compared to “baltimore pool motel airport.” Maybe you’d get 15,000 clicks for “motel” and only 100 clicks for “baltimore pool motel airport.”

But if you run a motel near the Baltimore/Washington International Airport with a pool, you’re likely to get more reservations from those long tail visitors.

Experiment with some long tail terms in your PPC campaign and you may discover some top performers that become candidates for future organic SEO efforts.

PPC engines have their own tools to help you figure out which terms you want to add to your campaign and how much you want to spend on each.

However, we’ve found that it’s often better to use our own simple spreadsheet, especially for small or new campaigns.

Using a spreadsheet to record your keyword choices cuts down on the PPC interface learning curve, since everything you need is together in one document rather than partitioned in various PPC reporting or admin screens.

And spreadsheets allow you a little more flexibility in manipulating parameters that matter to you, like maximum bid price or predicted click-through rate.

Below is a worksheet that we think will be useful to you in the planning phase of your PPC campaign, called the PPC Keywords Worksheet.

The PPC Keywords Worksheet contains the following columns: Keyword, Category, Bid for Top Position, Estimated Click-Throughs, Estimated Cost, Conversion Value, and Landing Page URL. See the table, for an example of how a company of Babyfuzzkin might fill out his worksheet.

Here’s how you’ll fill in your worksheet:

Keyword In the Keyword column, add your top-priority keywords and any additional keywords you’re interested in testing.

Review your long list of keywords. Were there any terms that caused a lot of debate but didn’t make the cut?

Were there two terms that seemed equally promising? Results of this test PPC campaign will be a great tiebreaker.

How many keywords should you have in your PPC campaign? That depends on two things: your budget, and your desire to stay within the hour-a-day time frame.

But we’ll throw you a bone with this vague suggestion: somewhere between 10 and 50. For the purposes of this PPC trial period, it’s best to keep your campaign smaller so that you can give proper attention to the details.

Landing Page URL For each keyword, note which landing page you want to send the visitor to.

Category Displaying the same ad for a group of related keywords helps reduce campaign management time.

Considering your limited time to work on campaign creation and maintenance, it would be reasonable to have from three to five categories of keywords. (Category names are not displayed to searchers. They are for administrative use only.)

Even though more categories require more management and more ads, it’s probably better to err on the side of too many categories than too few. Here are possible ways to group your keywords:

• By landing page: For example, an animal feed distributor may want to create categories for its Pet Care Tips page for terms like “overweight dogs” and its Horse Care Tips page for terms like “preventing colic in horses.”

• By target audience: For example, a category called Pet Products for terms like “dog food” and “cat food” and another category called Livestock Products for terms like “bovine feed supplement” and “equine grain mix.”

• By concept: You can categorize based on the needs your product or service fills or the concerns behind the searches.

For example, a category called Low Cost for terms like “cheap dog food” or a category called Pampering for terms like “dog treats” or “dog rewards.”

Bid for Position In the Bid for Position column, use the PPC engine to research the amount of money you would have to pay to get into the top spot for each of your keywords.

The PPC Keywords Worksheet doesn’t make a provision for bidding lower than first place.

This is for the sake of simplicity and not necessarily because we think you have to keep your ads in the top positions.

You can always add a lower cost to the Bid column, but if you do, assume that the PPC engine’s estimated click-through rate-and by extension, the estimated cost-is shooting high.

Estimated Click-Throughs In the Estimated Click-Throughs column, use the PPC engine to find the estimated click-throughs your ad will receive for each keyword in a “IN ell period of time (month or day).

Conversion Value In the Conversion Value column, enter your estimate of the value of the coil conversion in dollars.

If a monetary estimate doesn’t make sense for this conversion, give it a low/medium/high value based on how important a conversion for this term would he for your business.

For example, a tree-trimming service might rank “large estate grounds maintenance” as high while ranking “cheap arborist” as low because a larger tree-trimming job means more green for them!

The Estimated Cost column has been programmed to calculate automatically. But if you’d prefer to use the number provided by your PPC engine, feel free to replace this column with that data.

Write Your Ad Text
Depending on your talent with words, today may be a fun little excursion into copywriting, or it may be as frustrating as trying to bait a fishing hook with mittens on. If you have writers on your team, this is a great time to include them.

For each of your keyword categories, you’re going to create a succinct, compelling ad that is substantially more interesting than your competitors’.

You may want to write two or three ads for each category if your PPC service rotates ads for you.

If your PPC service allows or requires a separate ad for each keyword, feel free to customize to your heart’s content, but you can also do well with just one well written ad for each keyword group.

Your HTML title and meta description tag for each landing page are a good starting point, but you’ll probably need to edit them substantially for PPC use, in part due to editorial guidelines and character limits.

You can read your PPC service’s guidelines for lots of advice on writing ads (after all, they make money on your click-throughs, so they have every interest in your success!).
Here are some additional tips that we think will help you:

DO use keywords in the text. Studies show that people are more likely to click on your ad if the exact keyword they searched for is incorporated into your ad text.

DO be true to your landing page. Make sure that you write each ad with its intended landing page(s) in mind.

Does the ad mention a specific product or solution? The landing page had better contain a clear path to it.

Does the ad set up a need? The landing page should tell your visitor exactly how to fulfill it.

DO snoop on your competitors. If you’re stumped, and even if you aren’t, enter your keywords into the search engines and see what you’re up against in the PPC venue.

If everyone’s ads are mentioning a certain topic, such as their low, low prices, you might not want to ignore it in your own ad.

Then again, if you notice that you’re competing against a clutch of nearly identical ads, you may want to describe yourself using language that will help you stand out.

DO use dynamic keyword insertion if it’s available… If a searcher enters the term “halogen bulbs” or “chandeliers,” you may want to format your ad to say, “Halogen Bulbs and other lighting inventory”

or “Chandeliers and other lighting inventory” to match the search. This can be a powerful way to attract the attention of your targeted audience.

…but DON’T insert the wrong keywords. If you’ve ever seen what appear to be inappropriate PPC ads, you can probably blame careless dynamic keyword insertion.

It can create almost comical messages like “Tonsillitis: Buy Now at Shop-n-Ship.com.” Likewise, if you’re using broad matching, you might end up inserting nonsensical

or misspelled words into your ads, so think through each keyword carefully in the context of your ad before using this feature.

DO include a compelling message. What makes your audience tick? Is it price? Is it the hope of succeeding at something or the fear of failing at something?

Is it convenience? A desire for quality? A need to fit in, or to stand out? Use your ad text to speak to this need.

Enter Your Data into the PPC System
Now the task is to transfer all of your keyword and cost preferences to your PPC account without making it “live” yet.

For each keyword or group of keywords, you’ll assign the attributes required by your PPC engine of choice, like cost per click, maximum bids, and daily/monthly budget cap.

You already have these numbers in your PPC Keywords Worksheet. You’ll categorize your keywords and insert the ads you wrote.

You’ll also assign appropriate landing pages for each keyword or ad. (And, to avoid wasting your money, make sure each landing page URL is working properly!)

At this point may be a simple cut-and-paste job, or it might be a little more complex
as you get used to navigating the campaign setup and management screens.

Turn On Your PPC Campaign
If you’ve finished optimizing your website, your landing pages will be clearly relevant to your PPC ads and targeted users will be able to find what they need.

Don’t flip the PPC switch until your site is ready. If your site content doesn’t match your advertising campaign, it will confuse or annoy your visitors, and it may be removed by the PPC service for noncompliance of editorial guidelines.

Assuming your site is ready for the trick-or-treaters to come ringing the bell, let’s get started.

It’s best to start this task early in the day so you can check that all is well before you go home for the night.

Rather then spend a continuous hour on this task, we recommend you block out two half-hour segments of time.

The first half hour you will use to turn on your account, which is probably as simple as changing the attribute “paused” or “offline” to “live” or “online.”

Later in the day, you’ll spend another half hour checking in on your account to make sure all is well.

Here are things to watch out for:
• No impressions. Don’t expect miracles, but do make sure you actually turned on the campaign.

• Too many clicks. If you’re already close to blowing your budget after a few hours, something is out of whack.

Either you underestimated the number of clicks your ad would receive (you could have worse problems!) or you entered your bid price incorrectly.

• The wrong ad showing up for the wrong keyword. It would be a fairly easy mistake to, say, place an ad meant for your Industrial Products category into your Home Products category.

Enter some of your keywords into the search engine and view your ads to make sure you haven’t made this kind of error.

We do not recommend micromanaging your ads on a daily basis; the PPC engines’ bid management tools should make this unnecessary.

Regardless, today is a good day to monitor them closely to make sure you haven’t made any boneheaded mistakes.

Also, seeing your PPC ads online is a moment for celebration in your SEO campaign! After you turn on the account and check for mistakes, send out an e-mail to your team!
Enlist them to help you catch any glitches that you may miss over the next few days.

You will also want to record some of the basic setup information about your campaign in your PPC Keywords Worksheet.

We know from experience that once you start running multiple PPC campaigns, or if you decide to share or hand off campaign management responsibility, it’s great to have this information in an easy-to-find location:

• Date campaign was turned on
• Maximum monthly budget
• Total number of keywords
• Account login information

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Here you’ll play “spot the PPC ad” to get a sense of your competitors’ activities in the PPC arena.

It can be challenging to find competitors’ pay-per-click ads. Even if you go looking for a particular ad, there’s no guarantee that you’ll find it.

Some PPC services “rotate their inventory” so that you might not be able to view a certain company’s ad if you happen to be looking at the wrong time of day.

Or your competitor may have an ad with such a low bid that you’d have to spend too much time trying to unearth it from 20th-page results.

And, of course, your competitors can turn their ads on or off at any time, so you may never know if there’s really a PPC campaign with your competitor’s name on it.

Regardless, it’s worth it to look because if you do find something, it can give you great insight into what matters most to your competitors. Here’s how you’ll do it:

• Moving one by one through your Big competitor list, perform a search for each competitor’s company name on Google.

• Scroll through the top two or three pages of results. If you find an ad for your competitor, mark “yes” in the PPC column.

• If you don’t find your competitor’s ad, search for a specific product or service that they offer.

If that turns up no ads, broaden your search to a general term related to what they offer.

If you still don’t find your competitor, you can feel comfortable marking “none found” in the PPC column.

• Repeat with Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.

Remember to look at sponsored listings only, not organic search results! If you do find something that looks like a competitor’s ad, click on it to make sure it actually goes to your competitor’s site.

There are lots of PPC ads put out by affiliate sites and resellers, and if that’s the case with the ads you find, then it’s not really your competitor’s ad.

For example, do a search for any well-known brand-name medicine, like “Claritin” (or, if you don’t mind your colleagues seeing what you’ve got on your monitor, “Viagra” or “Rogaine”).

There are lots of ads with that brand name, but only one is for the company that actually makes the product.

If you have time, you can learn a lot about your competitors by checking to see if they have directory listings.

Do you have any other thechniques where by you get a sense of your competitors’ activities in the PPC arena?

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Put on your PR hat-or get your team’s most talented communicator in the room-and get started on your SEO link building campaign:

Surfing Is not Slacking
If there are no actual restrictions on web surfing in your company but you just feel like a slacker when you’re surfing the Web, just remember what surfing does for your company:

• Surfing helps you find and assess the quality of sites linking to you and locate new sites that may want to link to you.

• It helps you find new search products and opportunities that may be useful for promoting your organization.

• It helps you to think like a searcher, using a variety of techniques to find important information.

• And it helps you get familiar with the wide range of available search engine and directory listings.

Every SEO expert has a favorite generic search term to use for testing, one that’s broad and popular enough to be represented by the full gamut of paid and unpaid listings,

directory listings, and text snippets, not to mention official sites, unofficial sites, and misspellings. Ours continues to be “Britney Spears.” Have fun finding yours!

Your Existing Links
First, you need to assess your website’s existing listings and links with an eye toward improvement.

To learn hoe you could  determine the total number of sites linking into your landing pages, Click Here.

But now you will take a magnifying glass to these sites and document them in your Link Tracking Worksheet. Here are the steps you’ll take:

• Document inbound links.
• Assess existing link quality.

Document Inbound Links
You need to identify the URLs of the first 10 or so sites that are linking to each of your landing pages.

Ten should be plenty to work with for now-you will build on this list throughout your SEO Plan.

Find the URLs using one of the following three methods:

• On the search engine of your choice, perform the special search for finding inbound links.

• If you have access to a website statistics program, review it for referring URLs.

• Use a backlink analysis tool, such as the Neat-O Backlink Tool built by the kind people of We Build Pages, www.webuildpages.com/tools/.

This tool provides backlink URLs and also the text that the linking sites are using to link to you. Like the title says, the tool is neat-o!

Perform this step for each of your landing pages, ignoring links coming from your own site. If your site has no incoming links from other sites, you can skip the rest of today’s task!

Assess Existing Link Quality
Search engines care about the quality as well as the quantity of inbound links. And you care, too, because a link is a direct pathway for potential customers to get to your site.

Now, you’ll ask a few key questions about your linking sites that will help you determine if each link is going to help the right audience find the right page on your site.

The following key questions will help you assess the quality of your inbound links. It may seem like a lot to think about, but once you get a feel for it, you won’t need the checklist.

In fact, you’ll probably be able to assess each link within 30 seconds of opening the page.

Starting with the first inbound link URL on your list, open up the page and think about the answers to these yes or no questions:

• Is this site in the same topical community as mine?
• Does the linking page content speak to my target audience?
• Are my target keywords included in the text that links to my site?
• Are my target keywords included elsewhere on the page?
• Does the link work?
• Does the link go to the best landing page choice?
• Is the link up-to-date?
• Is the link flattering, or at least noncritical?

While there are numerous factors that can contribute to the quality of an inbound link, these are the most important.

The more yes answers, the higher-quality link you have. If there are any no answers, flag this URL with a note of the problem.

Obviously, some problems (like a link being from an irrelevant website) can’t be fixed.

And if a link is coming from inside a forum post, it’s good to know about, but there’s no point trying to modify it. But others, especially links that don’t work, are red flags that need to be addressed.

Get into the habit of asking these questions anytime you review a website and it will serve you throughout your campaign especially when you are looking for new links.

Submit to Directories
Ah, directories…the dinosaurs of the SEO era. Once upon a time, getting into human edited directories was one of the most important elements of an SEO campaign.

Nowadays, directory listings have fallen out of prominence. But they represent a chance to describe your site in your own well-researched, well-targeted words, and that’s good for your site (and for your inner control freak!).

Here, you’ll learn about human edited directories, discover the ones in your niche, and decide whether they’re worth your time and energy.

Think of a directory listing as just another inbound link with a slightly different link request process (usually there’s a submittal form to fill out, and specific editorial guidelines to follow, instead of a free-form e-mail correspondence).

If you happen to have a nonprofit or noncommercial website, you have greatly increased potential for free links on directories.

Your directory requests will be accepted or rejected based on the judgment of human editors, and part of what they judge is whether your suggested title and description match your site’s content.

So if you have substantial optimization that needs to take place before this is the case, use the task just to gather submittal information. You can perform the actual submittal when your site is ready.

We’ve boiled down the wide world of directories into three areas for you to review:

• The Open Directory Project
• Yahoo! Directory
• Paid or niche directories The Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project (ODP), at www.dmoz.org, goes by many names, including Open Directory, DMOZ, and Netscape Directory.

Unfortunately, getting your site listed in the ODP can take, quite literally, forever, and its importance as a linking site has diminished greatly over time.

However, your ODP description is still used by the Google search engine as the description that displays in some search results rather than a snippet or meta description.

For this reason alone, we think that your ODP submittal is worth the time. And for sure, it’s worth the price (thankfully, this submittal is free).

First, determine whether your site has a current listing in the ODP. Go to www.dmoz.org and search for your URL.

But watch out; sometimes the ODP misses URLs. If a URL search shows no results, follow up with a search for your company name.

If you find a listing for your company, assess its quality with these questions:

• Is the link functional and current?
• Is the title and description accurate?
• Do the title and description contain my target keywords?

ODP listings are so rarely updated that it’s likely your listing needs some fixing. Click the “update listing” link near the top of the page and submit your edits.

The ODP provides extensive guidelines within the update submittal screens. We won’t bore you by repeating the guidelines, so promise us you’ll read and follow them as you go!

If your site doesn’t have an existing listing on the ODP, you’ll follow nearly the same steps to submit a new listing.

However, first you must choose a good category for your site. Here are some tips to help you make the choice:

Cluster with your competition. Search the directory for your top business competitors. If they’re all in the same category, you want to be there too.

Get specific. Browse the directory, starting from the biggest, top-level categories and working your way down to the one most specific to your organization.

For example, if you provide tennis lessons, you don’t want to be in a generic category like “Sports.”

You want to be in a more appropriate category like Shopping – Sports – Tennis – Training or a local category like Regional – North America – Canada-Ontario Localities – T – Toronto-Recreation and Sports – Tennis.

Use category tiebreakers. If you are faced with two categories that seem to fit your site equally well, choose the better-quality category page based on the link quality factors Click Here to See for inbound links in general.

If all of the page quality factors are equal, choose the category with more editors listed at the bottom of the page.

The editors are the people who review and approve your listing, but they sometimes go missing or permanently vacate their posts, so the more listed per category, the better your chances.

Once you have found your category of choice, click on the “suggest URL” link near the top of the page and follow the guidelines to proceed.

Most likely, you will want to submit your home page, but it’s possible that a different landing page will also work.

In rare cases, if your site has landing pages with unique content, directories may include multiple listings for your site.

Use the HTML page title and meta description tag (To learn more about HTML page title and meta description tag, Click Here) as a launching point to write your title and description.

Make sure to consider what your competition is saying (or not saying) about themselves when you fine-tune your suggested listing.

Now, and here’s the important thing: once it’s filed away in your worksheet, forget about checking up on this submittal for the next six months. It’s just not worth it.

Yahoo! Directory
There’s plenty of debate among SEO professionals about whether the few hundred dollars for a Yahoo! Directory listing (oh, wait, it’s not the price for a listing, it’s just the price to be reviewed.. .no listing is guaranteed) is worth it.

We’re going to stick our necks out and give our own answer to the question: If spending a few hundred dollars (or more for adult sites) per year is going to be a significant portion of your SEO budget, don’t do it.

If, on the other hand, a few hundred bucks is a small drop in your online marketing budget, a listing may be worth the cost.

And here’s some good news for nonprofits: If your website belongs in a noncommercial category, you can submit for free.

However, keep this fact in mind: Once you have a listing in the Yahoo! Directory, the directory title and description, rather than snippets from your website, will be displayed on the Yahoo! search results pages.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Possibly more bad than good because, even though you suggest your own listing, it’s ultimately the Yahoo! editor’s call and you have no control over this text.

On the other hand, a complete sentence rather than a snippet might read better in your listing description, especially if for some reason you weren’t able to put text on your website during your basic optimization.

You will have to make the judgment based on your own website’s characteristics.

If you choose to submit your site to the Yahoo! Directory, start by selecting the best category for your site, as described earlier in the section “The Open Directory Project.”

Click “suggest a site” near the top of the page. Follow the instructions to submit your site and payment information.

Paid or Niche Directories
Niche directories are small, but they can be powerhouses for targeted traffic. You know your company, and you know your niche.

Now it’s time for you to find directories that speak to it. Here are ways you can go about it:

What are your competitors using? Check links to your competitors and take some time to read through the listings.

Are there any directories listed? Click them and see if this may be a good directory for you too.

What offline opportunities do you already know about? Many publications, such as Sweets (http://sweets.construction.com) and Thomson Local (www.thomweb.co.uk) have online directory components.

Check to see if your company is included in any such publication.

What comes up for your target keywords? Are there any directory pages among the top search results for your target keywords? You could benefit from their ranks by getting listed.

Last but not least, be sure to search the search engines for relevant niche directories. For example, if your organization is a day spa located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the search terms “day spa directory” and “Albuquerque directory” will both turn up many possible niche directories.

But watch out for these pitfalls as you consider niche directories:

• Many of the directories that will come up in your searches will be repurposed versions of the Open Directory.

If a submittal process starts to feel a little too familiar, look to see if you’ve been taken to the dmoz.org domain. If you find it, you’re smack dab in the middle of an Open Directory submittal.

• Don’t believe the hype: If a niche directory wants a payment for your listing, you need to carefully check the link quality factors before you pull out your pocketbook.

As we mentioned earlier, your directory listings are really just like any other inbound link and should be assessed accordingly.

You may decide that there are so many opportunities out there that the paid or niche directory listings aren’t worth your bother.

Surf for More Link Opportunities
In the previous section of this article, you began building the list of potential linking websites.

Here, you’ll surf the Web to expand your list of sites. First, you need to know what makes a link worth chasing:

• Quality links defined
• Expanding your link requests list

Quality Links Defined
As you surf for potential linking sites today, you may be tempted to build the longest list you possibly can, with dozens or hundreds of sites.

But every one of these link requests is going to take a 5-minute chunk of time out of your life-why, that’s only 12 per episode of Survivor!-so you need to be choosy.

Quality Link or Time Sink? An Expert’s Opinion
We asked blogger and search marketing expert Aaron Wall of www.seobook.com how to assess the quality of inbound links. Here were his thoughts:

“I love organic SEO, which currently is primarily driven by link building…. Many factors go into measuring link quality-to be honest, it is not entirely measurable.

I like to think of a document or site as having signs of quality. Some examples:

• ”Page or site is well cited from resources like educational institutions or major web companies.”
• ”Page links to quality related resources.”
• ”Page ranks well in related search results.”
• ”You keep running into the page even outside of search.”
• What about finding signs of poor quality linking pages? Here are Aaron’s ideas:
• ”Page will sell a link to any off-topic site.”
• ”Link price seems far cheaper than it should be for that kind of page….”
• ”Page is hard to find in search results.”
• ”Site is of low quality and there is limited reason a human would want to go there or link at that site or page.”

In case you didn’t notice, Aaron never even mentions Google PageRank in his assessment.

Google PageRank may be an at-a-glance measure of a page’s significance to a search engine, but it simply doesn’t give you the full picture of what a link can do for you. Thanks for the advice, Aaron!

Between Aaron Wall’s factors to consider in the sidebar “Quality Link or Time Sink? An Expert’s Opinion” and the link quality factors, you’ve got a lot of tools for analysis.

But there’s one more angle to consider: whether the site makes it possible for you to do your link-gathering job. Make sure to take these administrative issues into account:

• Is contact information available on the site? Without it, you can’t request the link.

• Does the site appear to be regularly updated? Do a quick scan for the “last edited” date or other signs of life. If nobody is manning the store, there won’t be anybody to add your link.

Now that you know what you’re looking for in an inbound linking site, here are some ideas for where to look.

Expand Your Link Requests List
So far, you’ve only scratched the surface of your potential high-quality linking sites. Here are some places you can look for additional opportunities:

Sites linking to your competitors By now, you’re a seasoned pro at finding inbound links using the search engines.

Do this now for your Big Five competitors. Who is linking to them? Can you get a link there too?

Any sites doing well for your top keywords Go through the top listings for your target keywords-both organic results and sponsored results-with a fine-tooth comb. These would be great places to get links.

Your clients/customers/fans Do you have a client base that is pleased with your service? Do they have websites that speak to a segment of your target audience?

If so, they may be happy to provide a link to your site! Bonus points if they put your link alongside a glowing recommendation.

Your service providers/vendors Are you a major client of any organization with a Web presence that has a tie-in to your target audience?

Maybe they would like to link to your site. Maybe they’d even like to list you as a “featured” client!

Your partners Corporate partners are likely to include links on their websites. Check and see if there’s one for you.

Sites that already include your company name Perform a search for your company name in quotes.

You may be surprised to find many websites that include your company information, maybe even a URL written in text, without making it a link! With a flick of the mouse, those could become inbound links for you.

Local and regional directories Any site that includes listings of local businesses will probably be happy to have their information updated-preferably with your organization’s web listing!

Business associations and accreditations Most professional and trade associations include lists of their members. If your organization is accredited in any way, there may be a link in it for you.

Sites that are “related” to yours. One of Alexa’s database of information tastier tidbits is Related Sites, other websites that draw the same audience as yours. Take a look at your related sites for linking potential.
Sympathetic sites If your site has a religious, political, or philosophical theme, there is likely to be a large circle of similarly minded folks on the Web.

These people will likely be enthusiastic about supporting one of their own. Ditto for specialized hobbies and enthusiasms.

As you surf, be open to wandering down unexpected paths-sometimes that’s the best way to find new opportunities.

And be sure to make a note of the site URL (location of potential link), name of site, and contact information in your Link Tracking Worksheet.

The Art of Link Letters
If you own a website, surely you’ve seen them: annoying requests for links. Usually they go something like this:

“Dear Webmaster. I reviewed your site and feel that it would be appropriate for a link trade.

Please add the following HTML code to your home page…after your link is added, we will add your link to our links page.”

Most of the time, this type of letter goes straight into the Trash folder. Follow these Dos and Don’ts to craft link letters that do get results and don’t annoy their recipients:

DO include key information. At a minimum, your letter must include the following: the URL from which you would like a link, your landing page URL, your landing page title, and your landing page description.

Remember to choose the best landing page on your site, which, depending on the nature of the linking page, may not be your home page.

DON’T offer a link trade. If your site is appropriate for a link, you should be able to get it without a reciprocal link agreement.

DO explain the benefits of the link… Website owners want to link to sites that their site audience will like. Specifically describe how your site relates to theirs.

…but DON’T write a novel. We’re talkin’ 25 words or less.

DO write from a company e-mail address. Webmasters want to know that you really come from the company that is requesting the link.

DON’T mass-mail. Figure out the name of the person you’re writing to, and use it. Then, sign with your own name and title.

And finally:

DO say Thank You.

Nowadays, there are blogs on every subject, from lost socks to lost souls, and surely there are some in your industry.

At some point in your link-building campaign, you’ll probably want to approach one. Keep these guidelines in mind when you do:

• Get to know the blog first. Read it for a while before you approach its owner.

• Remember, it’s less about selling your site to the blogger and more about convincing them that your site would be interesting to the blog’s readers.

• If you really want a blogger to review your product, you’ll have better success if you send them a freebie.

Likewise, if your product is on a page that requires a login, consider offering login information for the blogger’s sole use (but don’t send out login information in your first correspondence!).

And, finally, imagine your e-mail posted on the blog for the whole world to see. Would this be embarrassing in any way to you or your organization? If so, you need a rewrite.

Submittals and E-mails
You now have the two elements in place that you need for your link-building campaign: a list of quality sites that might be interested in linking to your site and a sample link request letter.

Now, step through the list on your Link Tracking Worksheet and, one by one, personalize and send out your link request e-mails.

If you encounter a site with a “Contact Us” form, it’s perfectly kosher to paste your link request e-mail into that so long as you dutifully enter your contact information into the proper fields.

As you go, record the date that you requested the link, and who you e-mailed, in your worksheet. You will want this information later if you wish to send a follow-up request.

Step through your list of potential linking sites and send link requests to as many as you can.

Finally, let’s take one last look at the niche directories you began reviewing previously. If any of them include a free submittal option, go ahead and do it now.

However, if a niche directory requires payment for a listing, take a step back and evaluate it further before submitting:

• As you were searching and surfing related sites, did the site pop up regularly?

• Are your competitors listed there?

• And, does the directory have a PPC or other advertising campaign of its own?

Websites are so easy to create that there are thousands of directory sites on the Web that aren’t worth the virtual paper they’re printed on.

Unless you can get a several month free trial, you should be very cautious about paying for niche directory listings.

Now: Submit your site to niche directories.

Now that you’ve gotten a strong start on the organic side of your SEO campaign, it’s time to create a pilot pay-per-click campaign. To learn more Click Here.

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Suppose you’re a real estate investor, looking for a good money-making opportunity. You see two homes, both the same size and price.

One home has been totally renovated and looks pristine. It’s got a few recent add-ons and it fills up its lot nicely.

The other home has some ugly carpeting over wood floors, chipped paint, and kitchen appliances that have seen better days.

There’s plenty of room for expansion on the lot. Clearly, you have a better chance of adding big bucks to the value of the second house after some investment of your time and money.

The same principle applies to your website. If your site is already well optimized, looking for big conversion increases from your SEO campaign may be a challenge.

On the other hand, if your site is missing basic optimization, you can probably expect some good improvement in performance.

This is why a site assessment is important: to identify areas in which your site is deficient, but also to set realistic expectations for results.

Indicate yes or no for the following statements about each of your landing pages:

? This page has a unique HTML page title.

? The HTML page title contains my target keywords.

? This page contains 200 or more words of HTML text.

? HTML text on this page contains my exact target keywords.

? This page can be reached from the home page of the site by following HTML text links (not pull-downs, login screens, or pop-up windows).

? The HTML text links from other pages on my site to this page contain my target keywords.

These quick answers provide a basic estimate of your current optimization level. And don’t forget: Lower optimization just means more room to grow!

With your basic site assessment complete, you have a good picture of the current status of your website:

current conversions, site ranks on the major search engines, inbound links, and your current site optimization level. This baseline assessment will serve you throughout your SEO campaign.
 

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Poking and peeking into other people’s business is part of Web culture and one of the more entertaining aspects of an SEO campaign.

When you open up a browser and look there is a great deal more information available about a site, ranging from data on who owns the domain to the scripts used on the page.

Here are a few tools and techniques that we have found most useful:

• The Google Toolbar
• Viewing page source
• Alexa data

The following sections include the details you need to make these methods your own.

The Google Toolbar
This is a very popular tool with searchers and SEOs alike! If you already have it, you know how useful it is. If not, get ready for a treat.

The Google Toolbar, which can be downloaded from http://toolbar.google.com/, is a free add-on to your browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox) that contains several features to enhance your web surfing experience.

The toolbar feature that we’re most interested in utilizing for our SEO efforts is a little green bar labeled PageRank.

This bar displays the Google PageRank value for the web page being viewed. The PageRank value certainly has its limitations.

However, viewing it in the toolbar can give you a quick and easy estimate of how important Google thinks a certain page is.

You can also use the “backwards links” feature to determine how many pages are pointing to a specific URL, but you should be aware that Google doesn’t show all of the links that point to a page; some are omitted.

If you would rather not install the Google Toolbar, you can see PageRank information, and lots of other fascinating tidbits of data, at www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/.

Go to http://toolbar.google.com and download and install the Google Toolbar.

Viewing Page Source
Anyone who’s put together a website already knows how to view page source. But if you don’t ever touch your site’s code, this may be a new experience for you.

Viewing page source is a simple way to see the inside workings of your competitors’ (or anyone else’s) website.

Source is shorthand for source code, which is the HTML content that tells the browser what to show on the screen.

In the source code, you can see all of the invisible text elements, such as meta tags and ALT tags. You can also view the HTML title tag and other behind-the-scenes information on your competitor’s page.

It’s easy to view source in major browsers. Here’s how:

• In Internet Explorer, select View > Source from the Explorer menu.
• In Safari, select View > View Source from the Safari menu.
• In Firefox, select View > Page Source from the Firefox menu.

Practice viewing page source by opening up your own website and viewing the source code on a few pages.

Alexa Data
The Alexa database, located at www.alexa.com, provides interesting tidbits of info about websites:

a screen shot of the home page, traffic data, inbound links, site owner contact information, related links, and even a link to old versions of the website on the Internet Archive (aka the Wayback Machine).

Most addictive of all, Alexa estimates your website’s traffic rank among all sites on the Web.

Many in the SEO community have serious doubts about the accuracy of Alexa’s numbers and believe that Alexa’s stars are easy to manipulate, so take them with a grain of salt.

But if you are looking for quick answers to general questions about a website (Is this some crazy spammer or a legit business?), Alexa might be a good place to start.

To see a website’s details, search for the full URL in Alexa’s search box. If you fall in love with Alexa, you can even download an Alexa toolbar to add to your browser, similar to the Google Toolbar.

Go to www.alexa.com and search for your own website URL. See what comes up!

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A very basic fact of SEO is this: Before your website can rank well on the search engines, it must be indexed, or present, in the search engines.

Is your website there to be found? You are going to find out by answering these questions:

• How many of my site’s pages are indexed?

• Are my top landing pages indexed?

Total Pages Indexed on Your Site
Follow these steps to find out the total number of pages within your domain that are present on the major search engines:

• Starting with Google, perform a search to find pages from within your domain only. Search engines have a special syntax for finding all pages in a site;

for example, on Google you would type site:yourdomain.com (using your own site address in place of yourdomain.com) in the search box.

• Make a note of the number of pages returned. This is the total number of pages indexed from your domain. There are about 61,500 pages indexed within the domain mudcat.org.

• Repeat for MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask. This search can be tricky on some search engines.

Keep in mind that there are limitations to this value. The total number of indexed pages may include broken links and old pages on your site. Think of it as a “big picture” number for watching trends or catching big drop-offs.

Landing Pages Indexed
In addition to checking the total pages indexed, you’ll want to determine whether each of your landing pages is indexed.

After all, you wouldn’t want to put a lot of time into optimizing a page that the robots can’t see. Perform the following steps for each landing page:

• Enter the full URL of the landing page into Google’s search box. If you get a listing for the exact page you were seeking, your page is indexed!

• If the exact page you’re looking for doesn’t show up for the full URL, double-check to make sure it’s not indexed.

Find a unique string of HTML text on your page-one that is not likely to exist on another site-and search for it in quotes.

Searching for a unique term like “Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues. Rumors and Tales swirl with the name” isn’t likely to bring up anyone’s site but the one you’re looking for.

• Perform the same check with Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.

My Site Doesn’t Have Typical Landing Pages!
For most SEO campaigns, and especially for the SEO plan, it makes sense to focus your efforts on optimizing and tracking a small number of landing pages (no more than 10) on your site.

However, there may be some of you who do not follow this system. For example, bloggers should consider every posting to be an equally important landing page.

Large catalog sites may follow a shallow-wide approach, with the expectation that users can enter the website via hundreds of product pages.

And for some businesses, the choice of landing pages will shift with the season.

When your situation calls for a large or changing number of landing pages, you will have to adjust accordingly:

You may wish to track more pages, or just your home page, or a select group of sample pages chosen from different areas of your site.

You may wish to do separate SEO campaigns in sequence, or even scale up Your SEO Plan.

Yes, this SEO plan is scalable. Give it 10 hours a day, and you can multiply your number of landing pages accordingly.
 

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How the Search Engines Work Right Now, the number of inbound links (other sites linking to your website, also known as backlinks) is an important part of the search ranking algorithm.

Having plenty of inbound links will actually help your site in two important ways: indirectly, by improving your search engine ranking, and directly, by bringing visitors to your site through the link.

In short, inbound links are valuable, and that’s why Your SEO Plan will include some serious efforts in that arena.

Search engines are looking at not just the number of inbound links, but their quality too. Does the hyperlinked text say, “Click here for Computer Equipment Deals” or “Click here for Overpriced Junk”?

Are the links buried deep within a domain, among millions of other outbound links? Search engine algorithms take these things into account-and so do your potential customers.

Here you need to stick to gathering the numbers: How many links are pointing to your landing pages?

Finding the total number of other sites that are linking to your landing pages can be quite simple:

many search engines include search shortcuts that allow you to view a list of other sites that the search engine knows to be linking to specific pages within your domain.

For example, on Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search for “link:http:// www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html” (using your own site address in place of yourdomain.com/yourpage.html) to find links to your page of choice.

You only need to find inbound links using one search engine, so choose the one you care most about. And a warning: these numbers are not exact. Just use them for trend spotting.

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Here, we’ll ask you to use your memory and a couple of new tools and techniques-to dive all the way in:

Identify Your Top Five Competitors
Snooping Tools and Techniques
Assess On-Page Factors
Assess Off-Page Factors
Paid Competition

Identify Your Top Five Competitors
Here you need to choose which competitors to review in depth. To keep this week’s tasks manageable, we recommend that you limit the number of top competitors you examine to five.

If one of your biggest competitors doesn’t have a website, then give them an honorary mention on your list. But we want you here to choose five competitors with at least some Web presence.

Your review will be the most meaningful if you select your “Big Five” from the following categories:

Business Competition Even if you know who the major players in your field are, you should check with your sales and executive team members to get the back story that you may not be aware of.

For example, there may be different competitors for different products or target audiences.

There may be a “new kid on the block” who’s poised to enter a space that you’re currently dominating.

Or your company may have just lost a big job to someone in particular. Ask your colleagues to prioritize their competitors based on current issues, goals, and grudges.

Search Competition You should have an excellent grasp of who’s who in the top spots. Who did you see in the top ranks frequently enough to make you take notice?

Whose listings were not only visible, but also well written? Whether these companies hold a candle to your organization in real life isn’t relevant here.

Even if they’re just a blip on your business radar, if they’re attracting the eyeballs that you want, you need to find out how they’re doing it.

Pay-per-Click Competition Even though PPC and organic listings are different animals, they are displayed in direct competition to each other in the search engine results.

So if there is a company out there who is showing up in the sponsored links for your targeted keywords, you may want to add it to your Big Five.

As you’re going through your search and PPC competition, be on the lookout for “left field” competition. These are listings that are displayed for the same keywords that you’re targeting but have no connection to your organization’s focus.

For example, the directors of the Green Acres Day Camp in Toronto are going head-to-head with trivia sites about the old Green Acres TV show.

Whether you choose to review one of these sites is up to you. But if you’re finding a lot more “left field” competitors than you expect, you may need to rethink your keyword choices.

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