Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Target your audience. Exclude sectors of the population based on language, location and even weather or rural/urban, depending on what you are marketing.

Narrow the field. Make sure your ad is only being shown when the keywords typed in are specific to your site. If you sell dog sweaters, you don’t want the ad popping every time someone pops the word sweaters - you want to clarify with ‘pet’, ‘dog’ or ‘puppy’.

Test your ads, in fact, test several. This will allow you to compare different approaches and find the one that works best. You want the highest click through ratio followed by the highest conversion.

Track your results assiduously. You are the one in control, so take control! Monitor your click through ratio, your conversions and take the time to spot where customers go once they hit your site. Is a particular inner page showing a lot of traffic? Maybe it deserves to be a landing page in its own right.

Include your keywords in your ad for higher visibility. Also use ‘hook’ words like ‘get’, ‘learn’, ‘best’ and ‘new’. If you are having a high click through and a low conversion, make sure you add your price (it can be your rock bottom price, without add-ons, shipping or handling) to your ad. This will cut down on visitors clicking the ad simply to surf, and wasting your pay per click budget.

Use a call to action. Buy Today, Save Now, Download for Free. Encourage people to act on your ad, not simply look at it. Here is where you can sell the benefits of your product or service. Tell them what it will do for them, and make them visualize it!

Explain why you are the best bet among all your competitors. You have to be the biggest or the best; have the highest quality or the lowest price. Don’t get beat out by your rivals simply because they write better ad copy than you!

Link to the best landing page for ROI! This is where that tracking comes into play; if you can ascertain what product people who enter your site through that ad tend to purchase. Then you can optimize a landing page particularly for that item, and promote an up-sell as well!

Learning how to word your ads can make all the difference in the world! The main thing is to keep your eye on the prize, which is to say, sales. You need to optimize for click through first, of course, but your ROI is the main point here and you will need to ensure that all click-throughs are potential customers.

Next you will move on to your landing pages, which we will cover tomorrow!

Happy clicking!

Googlebot will crawl your pages, as long as they have a link that is known to Google. Then Google will update their index, rank you, and include you at the appropriate spot. Sometimes they will crawl you fairly often; sometimes it takes quite a while.

If you have spent considerable time and resources updating and adding content to your site, you might want to consider a Google SiteMap. This won’t replace the spiders’ visits and any other modes of communication, but you can bump yourself up the list to get your improved site looked at.

You want to provide Google with the easiest, clearest route to what you want them to look at, so don’t clutter up your sitemap with stuff they don’t need. Leave off your doorway pages, any duplicated content and of course any pages you’ve blocked off in your robot.txt.

Use clean urls, and make sure to include a <lastmod> tag to let Googlebot get to the newest stuff first. You can prioritize this way, so when you have a large overhaul and a lot of new content you can get your most important pages indexed first.

Your text should look something like this:

<url>

<loc>http://www.PetsStyles.com/html</loc>

<lastmod>2007-04-04T10:04:15+00:00</lastmod>

</url>

If you are not enough of a code monkey to tweak this yourself, you can always go to Google themselves, or various other places on the Web, and have your site crawled and a map generated to submit to the search engines.

You can add a few more tags if you like, such as a <priority> tag if you feel that the <lastmod> tag will mislead the crawler, or a <change freq> to encourage the crawler to return daily, weekly or monthly. Don’t make up a number that’s fake, as they will consider that a reason to ignore you completely!

If you are using a sitemap generator, you will need to download the finished map to your computer and upload it into the “public_html/” folder of your site. Then you can go into your account and add your sitemap’s url.

Once Google has your map, they should crawl you soon and frequently. Just keep in mind that they have thousand on thousands of sites to crawl, and won’t waste time on something they can’t trust to give accurate information. Make sure all of your tags are accurate, and that you closed all of your tags with a [ / * * *].

There are many important things you can follow up on as often as possible, but keeping the attention of Google is a main necessity. Keep accurate, fresh content on your site at all times, and resubmit your site map if you feel you have been waiting too long.

Sitemaps can be invaluable to you when you are first setting up your site, and for years afterward. Whenever you update or change your content, you can rest assured that the search engine will index it quickly and accurately. This will encourage your rise through the SERPs.

An interesting aspect to linking is that you can always get new ideas simply by tracing links to see where they come from and why they linked to you in the first place.

Sometimes you can learn a thing or two! For example, at PetStyles.com I have been focusing on the keywords ‘pet’, ‘dog’, ‘cat’, ‘clothes’, ‘sweater,’ ‘boots’, etc.

Suppose I use one of those nifty programs that lets me see who has been linking to me. They are readily available all over the net, and simple to install; or if you use Google Webmaster you will have easy access to them from that site.

Suppose I see a lot of links from sites having to do with children and their pets? Whoa! I hadn’t thought of that. Kids love to play dress-up, and who hasn’t seen a photo of a little girl wheeling the cat around in a baby stroller with a bonnet on? In fact, there’s probably about a million cutesy videos on YouTube right now.

Maybe I need to add a keyword phrase to my list. I don’t want to add the single word ‘children’ (too confusing when mixed with the clothing terms) - but what about the combination ‘pet stroller’ or ‘pet wagon’?

People who go the extra mile for their pet by dragging it around in a four wheeled contraption are the sort of folks who plunk down good hard cash for baseball caps with holes cut out for ears to poke through, bandanas sewn to collars, and hand-crocheted mini sweaters.

Google’s Tool is my personal fave because it actually tells you what the most commonly used words are being used in the anchor text of these inbound links. Silly me. I never thought of using the word ‘comfortable’ to describe my line - I kind of concentrated on ‘cute’ and ‘four-legged friends‘.

But there ’comfortable’ is, in anchor text originating from several pet sites devoted to pampering your pet. And there’s another good word - ‘pamper’. I’m just learning all sorts of stuff today!

Keeping an eye on your inbound links is a good idea in any case - you want to see who is linking to you in case you end up with some links that would be better no-followed, and it also lets you see if any reciprocal agreements are being honored. (Sorry guys, some people are unscrupulous enough to trade link postings and then renege. What? You’re surprised? Soooo naïve!)

Remember that how someone links to you is almost as important as the fact that they link to you at all.

Happy linking!

***Tomorrow - Deep Linking: How it can increase your site’s value***

Google offers unique tools that allow webmasters to track the progress of their website called Google Webmaster Tools. Apart from allowing webmasters to track the progress of their websites, Google Webmaster Tools are also a great way to control the way Google indexes and caches pages. To better understand how Google Webmaster Tools can be used, lets take a look at the services offered:

Content Analysis

Every webmaster knows content is king, and Google’s webmaster tools allow webmasters to identify potential indexing and caching issues that might be occurring due to improper content. Popular content related problems include:
Title problems: Repetition of page titles and improper page titles can cause Google bots not to index or cache pages.
Meta description problems: Improper Meta tags, repeated Meta tags or meaningless Meta tags can result in non-indexing of content.

Non-indexable content:

Pages that contain Flash content or other non-indexable media extensions are not indexed by Google.
It is important to regularly check the Content Analysis section to look for pages that are not being indexed by Google. In a nutshell, webmasters can make sure their website content is being indexed by Google.

Web Crawl

The web crawl section allows a webmaster to keep close tabs on pages that are not being indexed by Google. Sometimes certain URLs report non-indexing and ‘page not found’ errors to Google bot. Regular monitoring of the Web Crawl section allows a webmaster to search for potential indexing and caching problems. It is always a good idea to upload a site map on Google Webmasters to allow Google bots to index and cache pages much faster.

The Links Section

Link building is still an important part of search engine optimization, and webmasters have to keep close tabs on which links are relevant as per Google. The Links section in Google Webmaster Tools allows a webmaster to know exactly how many incoming link his/her website is receiving. In addition, a webmaster can also carry out a close analysis of the internal linking of his/her website to get a better idea of how the PageRank of his website is being distributed.

Set Crawl Rate

The ‘Set Crawl Rate’ option is available under the Tools link and allows a webmaster to decide how frequently Google bots crawl and download web pages. Apart from offering a lucid graph that mentions the amount of data that is being downloaded from a website, the Set Crawl Rate option also allows a webmaster to decide how often Google bots crawl and download data. It is important to keep in mind that the ‘Faster’ option is only available to websites where Google has decided that a faster crawl rate will make a difference.

Remove URLs

Sometimes webmasters do not want Google to index and cache certain pages, and it is possible to remove a URL from Google’s site index using the Remove URL section in Google Webmasters (even after a page has been indexed by Google).

Rishi Modi is a certified SEO professional, and a leading search engine optimization expert. Rishi is also the CEO of www.submitedge.com.

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