7 steps to a perfect pay per click campaign
by Rachelle Money, 3 September 2008
Pay Per Click can be a little daunting, especially for small businesses who don't know the tactics to use in this type of advertising campaign. Wordtracker's very own PPC expert, Ian Howie, takes us through the seven stages of Pay Per Click, including how to use keyword research to refine your strategy.
What is Pay Per Click?
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an online marketing and advertising formula, where the advertiser does not pay a fee to place an advert, but rather pays a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on their ad and is taken to their website.
In PPC you can choose the keywords or phrases you want your website to be associated with when a search is performed. This means you have to decide how much you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on the search result - but the upshot is that you are advertising to people who are already interested in you.
PPC expert
Ian Howie is a leading expert in Google AdWords and PPC. For 12 years he has worked in web creation and online marketing. He now works for 1UpSearch in London, helping businesses large and small create new marketing opportunities online.
Seven steps
So - you know your customer, you know what your approach is going to be, you know what you want to promote and you have a clear marketing message - now Howie is going to reveal the seven step strategy he applies to all his PPC campaigns.
1. Identify the product you are selling
Let's say you are selling iPod cases. Look at your range and decide which ones you want to promote. Look at what you're offering in terms of price, and how competitive you are in terms of price, customer service and delivery. Do some searches on Google to see which ads come up, and which offers your competitors are focusing on.
2. Keyword research and PPC
Use Wordtracker for keyword research, and you'll find it's particularly good for finding negative keywords. SEOs are mainly concerned with keywords they can include in their copy, but in PPC you have different match types - broad, phrase and exact.
If this is your first PPC campaign you can use broad matches to try and see what the market is doing and what people are typing in. Use exact match when you are sure they are the best keywords to go for. Another very popular technique is to use broad and phrase matches with a lot of negative keywords.
For example, if we entered 'iPod nano' with a broad match, the results would include ‘MP3 nano’ or even ‘iPod classic’. To prevent this we can add negative keywords into our campaign to stop ‘MP3’ or ‘classic’ coming in: this will eliminate a lot of wastage. It's hard to believe that people don't use negative keywords.
3. Build your PPC campaign piece by piece
Let’s say your iPod cases site has sections for Nano accessories, classic accessories, and one each for iTouch and iPhone etc. Each one of these sections is a campaign and each has its own ad group - so you will have many ad groups, and each ad group is really just a collection of keywords and adverts. Each type of Nano accessory would have its own AdGroup - furthermore, the AdGroups for iPod Nano cases can be broken down by color and by style.
A good PPC campaign should start with at least 10 AdGroups, and ideally (if you have time) 50 or more. For iPod Nano Accessories you may have over 20 to 30 groups just on Nano cases. The more relevant the keywords and the ads in each AdGroup, the better the Click Through Ratio (CTR). CTR is the ratio of clicks to impressions – it is the measurement of response. The better the CTR (ideally 1% or above) – the more likely you are of getting rewarded by Google by lowering the amount you pay for a click and increasing your ads position on the page.
If a customer is looking for a Black iPod Nano case specifically and they see an advert for a Black iPod Nano case, they are more likely to click on this one, rather than on a generic iPod Nano case advert with no mention of color. It's one of the most common mistakes people make - building generic ads doesn't mean you are targeting the widest possible range of people. The opposite is true - what you should do is dig into the long tail keywords - and the way we do that is by breaking down the ad groups into tightly themed groups of keywords and ads.
4. Build specific landing pages
Each of your products should have their own page, with a very clear 'buy button' and a nice description. Amazon do this very well. Link the ad straight to that page – the keyword should mirror the ad, which should mirror the landing page. It only takes people three to four seconds to make their decision so you have to make sure the page is quick to load.
5. Ad variation
PPC campaigns allow you to have different ad variations, so you can have text ads which can increase your CTR. By producing different kinds of ad you can monitor any patterns showing which ad is being clicked, and which aren't.
6. Report and analytics
Use Google Analytics or Yahoo Index Tools to help you look at your SEO and PPC keywords. Pay attention to your bounce rates because that is a very important indicator in PPC. If you are getting a high bounce rate of over 50%, but a high CTR rate (ie 3% or more), then you need to work on your landing pages.
Questions to ask – does your copy match the PPC ad? Is your copy above the fold? Is it clear what the user should do next? If you are getting both a high bounce rate and a low CTR rate – then you need to look at your PPC campaign. Look at your Ad text and ask yourself - does it match the Keyword Query? You may need more negative keywords so that you can get more relevant traffic.
7. Refine Your Campaign
Keep looking at your campaign, keep studying it, learn from it and keep refining it wherever possible. We apply the 80/20 rule. Out of all the keywords, only 20% to 40% may give you real value - ie sales. So never be afraid to pause Keywords or AdGroups that are not delivering a positive ROI.
It's a very interactive process with the end-users – use PPC to get people into your Landing Page and use Analytics to learn what they do after they get there.
Following this step will really help you make the most out of your PPC campaigns. And the great thing is that all the lessons you learn from PPC can be taken into your SEO campaigns.
For more help on PPC, have a look at Ian Howie's Trinity of PPC Success.
Friday, November 27, 2009
10 SEO Tips
The Top 10 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation with a half a dozen websites, mostly those of our clients who insisted they should be on the first page of the search engine results pages. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable. For an in-depth study of everything we know about search engine optimization, please read our eBook.
SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords
It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.
Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.
Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.
You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.
SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors
It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:
• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information
Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:
Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.
SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title
The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.
SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title
There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.
Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:
This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.
SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags
META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:
1. description
2. keywords
Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.
The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.
However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:
e.g.
The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).
SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:
SEO Tip #5: Use Headings
In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.
Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:
Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.
SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes
More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.
Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:
SEO Software
The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:
SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures
Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.
More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).
SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page
PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.
It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.
Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.
SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File
By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".
Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:
SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google
Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.
For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.
Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.
http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly
0.8
The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:
SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code
There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.
Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.
Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.
The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.
One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.
Other SEO Tips
If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.
Resource from http://www.top10seotips.com/
SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords
It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don't be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.
Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you'll get when doing a query for "putter". Notice that "golf putters" has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you'll be able to see that "custom putter" would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.
Here's a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for "putters". The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.
You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint's Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.
SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors
It's a fact and one of my top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
My tool of choice is SEO Elite, which digs through the major search engines by keyword to not only tell you who your competitors are, but also provides you with an in-depth analysis of each competitor. The analysis includes these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:
• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• % of links containing keywords in the link text
• The PageRank of linking pages
• The Alexa traffic ranking information
Here is a screenshot of their SEO software that shows the search results and the module that has the email functionality:
Stats, such as the above, play a critical part in determining what tools your website will need to compete in the Internet marketing competition. SEO Elite also offers you the ability to see who the website owner is and even send emails to all websites discovered to have quality link potential.
SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title
The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert's have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don't click off this site until you've read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I've discovered works best for search engine optimization.
SEO Tip #3: Optimizing Your Website Title
There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 10 SEO Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.
Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines. Here is an example of good Title:
This one excercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.
SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags
META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:
1. description
2. keywords
Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.
The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.
However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, my Top 10 SEO Tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. It may be a coincidence, but I've also noticed ranking improvements when I put my keywords at the beginning of the description. Here's the syntax:
e.g.
The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).
SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here's the syntax used on this Top 10 SEO Tips page:
SEO Tip #5: Use Headings
In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C's guidelines as well as commonly accepted "best practices" for organizing a web page.
Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Using cascading style Sheets (CSS), I was able to make my h1 at the top of this page more appealing. Here's a piece of code you can pop into your heading:
Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 400+ words on each page.
SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes
More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.
Using the Title Attribute is an direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It's also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads Title and ALT attributes. The syntax is:
SEO Software
The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:
SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures
Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.
More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).
SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page
PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.
It use to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.
Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.
SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File
By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".
Here's one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html". Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:
SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google
Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you'll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.
For Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop. Open the file with a text editor such as Notepad.
Effective 11/06, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.
The equivilant to the sitemap.xml file is the urllist.txt for Yahoo!. Technically you can call the file whatever you want, but all it really contains is a list of every page on your website. Here's a screenshot of my urllist.txt:
SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code
There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.
Start by analyzing broken links. One of the W3C's top 10 SEO tips would be for you to use their tool to validate links. If you have a lot of links on your website, this could take awhile.
Next, revisit the W3C to analyze HTML and CSS. Here is a link to the W3C's HTML Validation Tool and to their CSS Validation Tool.
The final step in the last of my Top 10 SEO Tips is to validate your search engine optimization. Without having to purchase software, the best online tool I've used is ScrubTheWeb's Analyze Your HTML tool. STW has built an extremely extensive online application that you'll wonder how you've lived with out.
One of my favorite features of STW's SEO Tool is their attempt to mimic a search engine. In other words, the results of the analysis will show you (theoretically) how search engine spiders may see the website.
Other SEO Tips
If you liked the SEO tips above, you're going to love my popular SEO eBook, entitled: The Four Layers of the SEO Model, How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines. It's packed full of more tips and tutorials, was well as some great ideas for developing incoming links.
Resource from http://www.top10seotips.com/
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