Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

What if there is an easier way? We touched on this briefly in ‘niche marketing’, but it deserves a more in depth look.

When our budget is limited, and our field is competitive, we have an uphill battle just to rank anywhere near the front page. However, there are ways to maximize our exposure and our dollar value!

The first is to find undervalued keyword phrases and optimize pages for them. If you type in a phrase and only get back limited results, look deeper. If the results that do show on the top of page one are not really on topic, and by the bottom of the page bear no resemblance to the keywords searched for, you might have stumbled on a gold mine.

For example, if you type in dog hoodie, you get quite a few pages that are actually for dogs. It’s actually a term with quite a lot of search queries. If we do somehow manage to optimize enough to rank, we are going to have to split the traffic, and our ads will be in a highly competitive market.

Cost per click is a hefty $0.77! And even if we have a good budget, our chances at the volume of clicks we need is slim. Say we get 100 clicks out of the of 10,000 per day. That’s only 1%, and is costing us $77! Our conversion rate is low, too; with so much competition, people will shop around.

Don’t be afraid to run trials and see what sort of results you can get; it will cost practically nothing and might pay off beyond your wildest dreams! Making the most of a limited budget requires the ability to think outside the box, so put your cap on, look long and hard at your options and get started!

When it comes to landing pages, there are two different needs. One is for landing pages that are designed from the beginning when you first set up your site. Your home page, of course, and a few secondary pages. These are search engine optimized to get on the SERPs; they are part of your full out range of tactics for ranking which includes content, keywords, and linking.

You want your home page to be the epitome of your whole vision - when people land there they go “Oh, yes, this is where I need to be.” It needs to be clear and concise, and have a distinct layout that tells the window shoppers where to go next as well as a call to action for the eager to snag the instant sale.

You can achieve the best results with your home page if you use it for click through from the SERPs and optimize accordingly for your search terms. Don’t clutter it up too much, and make sure you have a way back to it from the other pages on your site.

Your secondary landing pages are helpful if your listing contains information from your site map, so people can go directly to an inner page for instance, on the famous pet clothing site it would be ‘cat clothing’ or ‘dog clothing’ or even ‘the sale barn’.

These are optimized as well for specific keyword search, and can help your rankings rise. The visitors to these pages will almost always have clicked either ion your SERPs listing or on a link out there on the web.

The other type of landing page is usually associated with an ad program, and is more specific. For my ‘Home Dawg Hoodies’ line I will definitely want ads specifically targeted to my niche market, and consumer traffic they generate will be clicking straight through to this landing page. I can do the same for my other main pages for my categories; ‘Kitty Kapes’, ‘Doggie Duds’, and ‘The Animal Outfitters’.

As my site expands, I may have specific landing pages tied to very specific products. These may be very similar (such team oriented or color specific searches) and I may start having trouble coming up with new and varied content for all these very similar pages.

The good news is, I don’t have to. “What about duplicate content?” you say. Not a problem. I simply include a note in my robots.txt file to disallow these pages. They aren’t for SEO, they are for ad conversion, so I don’t lose anything by putting them in another room to do their job.

Once I have optimized my visible landing pages and disallowed my ad oriented ones, I can start searching for under-utilized pages further down in my site that get a lot of traffic even though I haven’t optimized for their keywords as aggressively. I can pinpoint where my next point of concentration should be, to grow any small, available corner of the market into my personal money maker!

Tomorrow: When Ten is More Than a Hundred - Playing the Odds

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!

Now however, as search engines have shifted their attention to other avenues and methods of proving relevance, the meta tag is widely ignored.

This is a mistake; meta tags still can have a great value to your site if utilized properly. They might not be the catapult to the SERPs they once were, but once you finally get there meta tags can be an incredibly useful tool.

Some major search engines will be displaying the meta tag descriptions of the search results, which is why it is still so important to pay attention the wording of your meta tag. This doesn’t mean stuffing it with keywords; this looks like spam and doesn’t encourage consumers to click on your result.

Nor will simply repeating your title tag do you any good. Your title tag is automatically displayed as a hypertext link, so why waste your chances to attract attention on boring repetition?

Try providing a secondary keyword phrase that might define your site a little better to the searcher. This could be a localized piece of info, an intuitive guess at what searchers are really looking for, or even just a ’Best’ or ’How To’ hook.

You can also use the meta tag top include your call to action, but the important thing is to compose a sentence which is short enough to not cut off mid word and which delivers a valid reason why the searcher should click on your site.

Various search engines have slightly different methods of awarding relevance and ranking your site, but the same thread holds true no matter where the search for your product originates. Search engines want people to be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

If you set up your site, your SEO and your tags to provide the most accurate description of your company as possible, you will be hitting the most important goal. That is not to say that your site will simply sell itself, but if you have a great site that just needs some interest then pointing people in the correct direction should be enough.

Meta tags can hurt you or help you. Your job is to make sure they improve your chances of getting the consumer’s attention, not the search engine’s. Once you have made it up the SERPs, it is a battle among the top spots as to who can present the more convincing argument for a click through, and hopefully a sale.

Utilize your meta tags for the correct purpose - for consumer information, not useless courting of the search engines - and you may be surprised at the sharp increase in traffic you can receive!

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.

 Subscribe in a reader

• Email Subscription by Feedburner