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If you own or manage a website, you are probably already aware of the importance of your log files or site usage statistics. Such data can give you insights about your site’s usability, errors in your HTML code, the popularity of your site pages and the type of visitors your site attracts. But did you know it can also highlight the success or failure of your search engine optimization campaign?
There is specific data about your web site that you should be looking at in your log files on a regular basis. Several variables should be examined monthly or even weekly to ensure your site design and page optimisation is on the right track:
Entry Paths
Most sites can be developed and analysed around the concept of visitor pathways. If, for example, your site is a Business to Business (B2B) site and you service small, medium and large businesses, there should be pathways through your site designed for each class of visitor. An extremely simplified example would be:
Clients coming to the site through an optimised home page:
- home page —> small business page —> order page —> order confirmation page
- home page —> medium business page —> order page —> order confirmation page
- home page —> large business page —> order page —> order confirmation page
The site entry pages for these pathways are often optimised home pages or optimized content pages. The final page of this route is often the action that you want clients to take on your site (e.g., sign up for your newsletter, buy your products online or contact you for further information). You can easily determine how effective your pathways are by tracking the entry paths on a regular basis via your site stats.
You should have some idea of the main pathways that clients take through your site, both for monitoring the effectiveness of your page optimisation and conversions, and for the purpose of subsequent site redesign(s). A good starting point to track the pathways through your site is via the graph or chart called “Entry Paths” in your log files / site statistics.
Top Exit Pages
These are pages from which most visitors click away from your site. Why is it useful to track these? Because exit pages can tell you:
- If there is a technical problem with the page that is causing visitors to leave your site. For example, if there are broken links, or the form on the page is not working properly etc.
- If your site design is breaking the strategic pathway, for example, you may have links to external sites that are inducing clients to click away before buying your product or signing up for your newsletter.
- If there is something on these pages that is encouraging visitors to leave your site. For example, an unprofessional design or confusing layout.
In your log files / site statistics, the graph or chart called “Top Exit Pages” is the place to learn why visitors are leaving your site.
Single Access Pages
These are entry pages that are viewed once before the visitor clicks away from your site. Similar to Top Exit Pages, Single Access Pages can tell you a lot about why people are not staying on your site for long.
Have a close look at the search terms used to find your site. Single Access Pages can often indicate that your target search terms are too broad. For example, you may be getting a lot of traffic by targeting “printer cartridges” but if you only stock a particular brand of cartridge, then people seeking other brands are not going to find what they truly seek when they arrive at your site so they will leave immediately. This can be resolved by narrowing down your search terms to be more targeted and focused on your niche products and services, for example, by changing “printer cartridges” to “HP printer cartridges” and so on.
To see what pages of your site are viewed once, look for the graph or chart called “Single Access Pages” in your log files / site statistics.
Most Requested Page(s) and Top Entry Pages.
Tracking these pages is key to measuring the success of your SEO campaign. If your optimization is effective, the Top Entry Pages and Most Requested Pages should be those that you have optimised for target keywords. The Top Entry Pages are particularly relevant as you consider the pathways through your site. Do the most popular entry pages have any relationship to the start pages for your plotted visitor pathways? Or are visitors entering and navigating your site via ways you didn’t intend? You can use this information to continually tweak your page optimization to guide visitors to the right pathways.
To see your most requested pages, look for the graph or chart titled “Most Requested Pages” in your log files / site statistics. Also look for “Top Entry Pages”.
Referring Domains and Referring URLs
Where are your visitors coming from? Are they coming from sites that are linked to yours? Are blog authors or forum members talking about your site? Referring Domains will tell you what sites are linking to yours, while Referring URLs will list the actual pages where the links are located. These can be little gold mines because you can often find valuable sources of traffic via links to your site that you didn’t even know existed.
In terms of an SEO campaign, these links can all add to your site’s overall link popularity, an important factor in the ranking algorithms of many search engines, particularly Google. Monitoring these metrics can tell you if your site requires a link-building campaign or help you measure the effectiveness of various online and offline advertising campaigns.
In your log files / site statistics, Look for the graph or chart titled “Referring Domains” and “Referring URLs”.
Search Engine Referrals
How many of your visitors are coming directly from search engines? What percentage of overall traffic does this represent? This is a good variable to track to help you keep up with how many search engines are listing your site (both free submission and paid submissions), how much traffic they bring and whether to renew your paid submissions. It can also tell you whether you need to increase the number of search engines your site is submitted to in order to build on your link popularity. As a a very rough guide, you should be receiving at least 30 percent of your site traffic via search engine referrals.
To see search engine referrals, look for a chart or graph called “Search Engines” within your site statistics.
Search Keywords
This topic is related to search engine referrals generally, but gives added insight into what terms you were actually found for in the search engines. Do these terms match what your site was optimized for? Are there any surprising terms that you might want to develop site content for? Some log file analysis programs will even break down what specific phrases your site was found for in which particular search engines. The more detailed the data you have, the more closely you can tweak your optimization campaign to your precise market.
To see the search phrases your site was found for, look for “Search Phrases” or “Search Phrases by “Search Engine”.
Landing pages for PCC Campaigns, etc.
If you run a pay-per-click campaign or dedicate specific pages to advertising product specials, you may use special landing pages or tracking ids to monitor your traffic and conversions. Your site logs can help you track these by showing you how many visitors they each had and what they did after they visited those pages.
Metric values that show dramatic change from developing trends
Any site metrics that show a dramatic change from one month to the next could pin-point a problem with your site or with your optimisation campaign. For example, if your search engine referrals have dropped dramatically, it could indicate that you have been penalised in a search engine (or more than one). Noticing changing trends early gives you the chance to investigate problem areas and make adjustments if necessary.
Please note that all log file analysis and site statistics programs are different and use slightly different terms to describe the metrics listed above. If you’re confused, ask your site admin or hosting provider to highlight these for you.
Remember, your log files are gold mines filled with nuggets of information about your optimized web site. If you keep digging on a regular basis, you’ll eventually strike it rich with success.
Okay, so you’ve hired a search engine optimiser (SEO) to help your site’s rankings in the search engine results. If you’re in a sadistic mood, here are a six things you can do to drive your SEO professional over the edge.
1. Go out and register a bunch of “keyword-rich” domain names. Duplicate the content from your main domain to each of these and link them all back to the main domain to “help” the main site’s popularity. Make sure that you “Forget” to tell your SEO that you’ve done this.
Not only will this not help, but it may prevent even your main domain from being displayed in some search engines. While the search engines don’t actually penalise duplicate content, they will either ignore or eventually filter out the duplicates – and they might just decide that your primary domain pages are the duplicate ones!
If you haven’t yet done anything like this, but you’re thinking it might be a good idea, save your money. You’re much better off spending your time effort and money on optimising your actual site rather than a half hearted effort on lots of sites.
2. Hire a web designer who knows nothing about SEO to produce a site for you. Bring the SEO in at the end of the process, after the site is already completed. Forbid your SEO from making any changes to the on-page display of your site.
Virtually any existing site, no matter how search-friendly it is, will need some changes. If your site isn’t search-friendly already, the changes may be significant indeed.
If your SEO tells you that you don’t need to make any changes to your site and everything can be handled “behind the scenes,” then you should think about getting yourself a new SEO! They’re either clueless, or they’re planning to use sneaky tactics that can eventually get you in trouble with the search engines (or both!). Solid, long-term results come from hard work, not trickery.
Of course, the best tactic is to bring your SEO and your designer together from the start, so your site will be search-friendly from the get-go.
3. Neglect to tell your SEO about previous attempts at optimisation, particularly if they involved questionable practices. After all, there’s no sense in dredging up ancient history.
If your previous SEO efforts managed to get your site penalised or banned, your present SEO needs to know this. There are things that can be done to try to rectify the situation, but those things won’t be done if your SEO doesn’t know they need doing.
Even if the tactics used haven’t yet caused any actual penalties for you, it’s important to let your new SEO know what went before, and what might still be lurking about in dark corners of the Web. This will help your new SEO get things cleaned up and avoid any unpleasant surprises on down the road.
4. Start calling your SEO approximately two days after they’ve first started work on your site, asking when you’re going to see your rankings go up for your favourite key phrase. Call back at approximately two or three day intervals from then on out until you rank number one for your chosen phrase, or the SEO jumps off a bridge, whichever comes first.
Optimization takes time to reach full effect. For instance, it may take up to a year before a new site will rank well on Google for competitive key phrases. Even for less competitive phrases, you could potentially be looking at a period of several months before your site’s natural rankings settle in. In the meantime, Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) can get your site on the first page even for highly competitive terms, as long as you’re willing to pay the cost per click.
5. Focus all your energies on a single phrase. No matter how much your SEO tries to convince you to diversify, or tells you this phrase isn’t going to be all that useful to you, insist on single-minded concentration on this one phrase. After all, your competition’s site ranks at number one for this phrase, and you have to beat them to get bragging rights.
Depending on its size, a well-optimised site should focus on dozens to hundreds of key phrases. There is simply no reason to limit yourself to one, or even a small handful of phrases. If your site doesn’t have enough pages to support all the useful key phrases recommended by your SEO, consider adding additional pages of content rather than shortening the list of targeted phrases.
Follow your SEO’s recommendations about which phrases should get priority. A good SEO will start any project by doing a detailed key phrase analysis to determine which words and phrases are most likely to be used by people who are searching for the kind of stuff you offer. There’s no point in ranking highly for phrases that no one ever uses for an actual search.
Don’t let your ego or vanity limit the potential of your site to rank well for multiple, valuable terms.
6. Check your rankings on a daily basis. Call your SEO to report (and, if needed, complain) about every fluctuation.
It’s a fact of life: rankings vary on a daily basis – sometimes an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis. Checking your rankings daily, or even more often, is simply a waste of time.
Sure, number one rankings are cool for bragging rights, but rankings alone don’t put food on the table.
The true measure of the success of an optimization campaign should not be rankings, or even traffic. It should be conversions – that is, how many people end up doing whatever it is you want your site visitors to do. (Buy your product, subscribe to your membership area, sign up for your newsletter, whatever.)
A good SEO will focus on this metric and will try to help you do the same.
Well, there you have it. Six easy ways to drive any good SEO insane. Now, of course, if you’d rather have a profitable web site, you might want to consider not doing any of these things. The choice is yours.
The home pages of many business websites are suffering an identity crisis. They’re trying to do the job of several web pages, and doing none of those jobs particularly well. This post provides some general guidelines on the types of things you should (and shouldn’t) include on your small business website’s Home Page.
Quick Guide to Writing a Business Website Homepage
Target audience:
Your business website´s home page must be all things to all the people who type your URL in their navigation bar, whether it´s their six-hundredth visit or whether they just happened to catch your web address painted on the back of your car.
Content:
For the benefit of new visitors, a home page must provide a snapshot of who you are and what visitors can do on your website. Your first one to three paragraphs should give a quick overview of what visitors can do on your site. For example, you could include a short paragraph each on “buy widgets”, “learn more about widgets”, and “meet other widget enthusiasts”, with links to your shopping cart, informational articles, and message board, respectively.
For returning visitors, the home page must serve as a touchstone for navigating the site, announcing new developments and pointing out especially popular or useful pages. For these visitors you don´t have to write anything new especially for your homepage. Anyone who’s coming back to your site is already interested and is going to want to jump right into the deeper pages of your site, rather than linger on the homepage wondering whether it’s worth their time.
Your home page should include teasers for the inside pages of your site. For instance, you could have a tip of the week, linked to a web page on your site with an article explaining it. Good navigation (list of links to the four to eight most essential web pages on your site) is also a must.
For both new and returning visitors, always give a prominent place to a featured product or service (or two or three) with a picture, one or two-sentence description, and a link to its own web page or its place in your “products and services page,” catalogue or shopping cart.
You should also probably feature a satisfied customer preferably with a photo. But always include a testimonial quotation, and a link to a case study or customer story on its own web page, which you should definitely find time to write or have written for you by a website content provider.
Title:
Don´t title your home page “Welcome to [name of your site]“. Don´t include that message anywhere on your homepage, in fact. It”s a waste of space. This was normal in the 1990s but it”s pretty outdated now. Everyone already knows they”re on your site. What you need to tell them is what they can do there. Try something like “Buy, Study, and Discuss Widgets”.
Also make sure your title incorporates any keywords you think people might use to search for your product or service on the internet. Search engines decide how to categorise pages largely based on the homepage title and first heading text.
Length:
Ideally, the first few paragraphs of the homepage (the ones aimed at new visitors) should not be more than 100-350 words total. The teasers for inside pages targeted to returning visitors should not be more than about 100 words each.
Making Sure Your Website Has the Best Homepage Possible:
Before your homepage goes live, test it out on a few people. Don’t just ask your volunteers how they like your homepage. Courtesy may prevent you from getting an honest response. Instead, ask them to find how to buy your latest product or if they understand what?s the most important development in your company recently. If they can navigate to the correct page within about eight seconds (the average human attention span on the web), you’ve done well.
You may just want to hire a website copywriter, online copywriting firm, or website content provider to create your homepage for you. After all, you wouldn’t build your own office building, would you? Of course, that´s not an entirely fair comparison; more people will see your business website homepage than will ever see your office building.
What a Business Website Homepage is Not:
- A homepage is not the place to dump a long description of your business. That´s for the “about us” or “company information” page. On the homepage, this information will just bore most people.
- A homepage is not the place where you list and sell all your products (unless you only have one or two). You should have a special products and services page for that, and preferably a shopping cart or catalog. Trying to make people buy right on your homepage is a little pushy. The homepage will also get over-crowded as your offerings expand. Instead, just include a list of product categories with links to inside pages, along with direct links to your biggest sellers.
- A homepage is not the place to include the full text of your announcements and press releases. Just include a teaser paragraph of each article on the homepage, with a link to the web page with the full text. If people want to read the full text, they can. If they don´t, you haven´t bored them to tears.
- A homepage is not your company president´s or owner´s personal blog. It´s OK to rant, rave, or preach the need for world peace. Just don´t do it on wesellwidgets.com
As you´ve probably noticed, a good website has multiple pages. You should have special web pages for special topics: an “about us” page for company information, a products and services catalog, the president´s blog, etc. When you advertise or send out links to your site, you should link directly to the most appropriate page, rather than just the homepage.
Of course, that doesn´t mean you don´t need a homepage, just that you don´t need it to do every single thing you want your website to accomplish.
Has your web site been dropped from Google index and you don’t know why? There are a number of factors that can get your web site banned on Google. In this post, we provide an overview of some of the reasons why your web site could be banned from Google and what you can do to get it re-listed.
Reasons why Google drops web sites from its index
The most common reason why web sites are removed from Google’s index is that these web sites use shady tricks to get higher search engine rankings.
If you use cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages or any other technique that’s put in place for the primary purpose of tricking search engines then you stand a very good chance of having your web site banned as soon as Google finds out. Don’t try to cheat or trick Google, it will almost certainly backfire on you.
Even if you don’t use shady tricks to optimise your web site, your site might be removed from Google’s index if your web site was down, or pages were unavailabe when Google tried to index it.
If you have a new web site, or if you have made major changes on your site, your web site might be put into Google’s sandbox. You then just have to wait until it comes out of the sandbox.
How to get listed in Google
1. Optimise your web page content
Google can only rank your web site highly for your keyword if it can find out what your web site is all about. To tell Google what your web site is about, you have to optimise your web pages for Google.
2. Get good incoming links
Google heavily relies on links to determine the ranking of web pages. The more web sites link to your site, the better your rankings. Make sure that the web sites that link to your site are related to your web site and that the links to your web site contain text that is related to your site.
3. Avoid dirty tricks
Only use ethical search engine optimisation methods to optimise your web pages. Using shady tricks will get you banned sooner or later.
If you used cloaking, doorway pages or hidden text on your web pages before, rebuild your web pages with the ethical methods described above and send a re-inclusion request . Tell Google that you have cleaned up your page and that you don’t use these unethical tricks anymore.
Getting listed on Google is possible. Just play by the rules and make it easy for Google to index your site by optimizing your web page content and by getting good incoming links.
Some years ago, Banner Ads used to be the “flavour of the month” and were very widely used. They went out of popularity, but are still quite common, and can also be very effective when couple with PPC Campaigns. But banner ads are not created equal. Some are effective in conveying your message, while some are ignored. Low click rates are not necessarily the result of the medium but rather, the effectiveness of your banner ads in building brand awareness, generating click-throughs, and boosting sales depends on how it was created.
Better to show a banner than show nothing.
Not advertising at all means no sales at all. People have to get to know about you before they’ll buy from you. Compare banner advertising to a newspaper of 50 pages. There are a lot of ads in a newspaper. Quite frankly, you’re not going to see all of the ads even if you look at each and every page. Most websites are designed in an organised fashion where only a few ads are shown at a time. This gives you a better likelihood of having your banner shown.
To make sure that your banner advertising dollars are spent well, your banners must be designed and implemented with the following characteristics:
1. Keep your message short and simple.
You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of the viewer. Hence, you must be able to get your point across in a few words, as a wordy ad won’t get read. Find the right words and images – including animated GIFs ofr flash that allow short messages to rotate – to trigger action. Too much clutter adversely affects the performance of a banner and negatively impacts on a banner’s ability to brand. Concise ads are successful because they deliver a message or name that the viewer can remember.
2. Provide something interesting to viewers.
It is not necessarily true that people do not read ads. People only read what is interesting to them – and sometimes, it can be an ad. Making the case for targeted placements, your banners will only be successful if you seek out people receptive to your message. You banners will simply be part of the clutter to be ignored if you serve up your ads to viewers who considers your message irrelevant to them.
3. Give people a reason to click.
Viewers will only respond to a compelling proposition. Your banners must be attractive or interesting enough to be successful in generating even the slightest flicker of response. People react favourably to banners that provide them a chance to win something. A banner where they can get something for free or a special discount also gets high click rates. Develop your banner’s message around the most persuasive reason why people would want to go to your site, be it the information you provide, special offers and promotions, or products that can make their life much better.
4. Develop follow-through mechanisms.
Leading users who clicked on your banners to your home page is acceptable if your advertising goal is to develop branding for your site. However, if you offered a special promotion or solicit a specific action from the user, you must create follow-through mechanisms for these users. A special page explaining the promotion in detail, for example, provides visual or messaging clues about what to do next. In addition, having a special page for each of your banners can help you determine which creative is more effective in bringing in traffic or sales.
5. Always test your ads.
Before going full-blast in your campaign, you need to test your banners with a subset of your target audience. You should experiment with various banner designs to gauge the appeal of your promotional offers and the type of message that brings a high-interest customer. Most ad networks now allow advertisers to conduct a test run.
6. Consider using rich media.
Rich media banners, which include animation, sound and other special effects, can increase your response rate. These banners could facilitate e-commerce and may even lead to instant revenues. Some rich media banners have a built-in order area, expandable order forms, and even secure server technology to protect credit card transaction. The drawback, however, is that rich media banners will cost more to produce and place; and they are not available on all web sites. Plus, the banners can sometimes slow down web page loading times. If you have the resources, try incorporating rich media in a banner and test how it performs with standard banners.
Finally…Some Quick Design /Content Tips
- Banner Ads are 468 x 60 pixels in dimension. This is a standard size.
- Banner ads should be 15k or less in size. Otherwise they take too long to load.
- Display your website address on your banner. This way, if nothing else, the viewer sees your website.
- Always include your company name on the banner.
- Include just one main benefit or interest point on your banner. Something that would immediately draw an interested parties attention.
- Use fonts that are easily readable.
- Use colours and designs that are attractive but not gawdy. If you’re not sure, ask some friends what they think.
- Look at the ad and ask yourself if you would understand what this banner is trying to advertise. Don’t assume that people understand what you’re trying to sell. If after looking at it, you don’t understand what you’re selling, please redo the ad. Ask your friends to critique the ad for you.
- Make the best use of ad space. Let’s face it, 468×60 is not a lot of space. You have to get the best value for the space.
- Make a few ads and then test them out to see which ones perform better. Even though you feel you’ve made the best ad in the world, you might find better results with different ads. It happens all the time.
The recently proposed collaboration between Microsoft and Yahoo has the potential to cause a bit of a shakeup in the SEO industry.
 The intent is that Yahoo will start to use Bing for their search results, and Microsoft will start to show Yahoo paid ads on their search properties. It is early days yet and still not clear how many of their overlapping products/services are going to be handled. My guess is that some may be consolidated, some will be retained and some may even be dropped all together.
In most cases optimisation strategies are not search engine specific, but there are some differences between the search engine ranking algorithms, and it is possible to tweak techniques to favour one or another search engine. Because of it’s significant market share (particularly in Australia), traditionally most SEO efforts have been geared towards Google rankings. Spending much time and effort on optimising for Yahoo or Bing was often put into the “nice to do” rather than the “must do” priority list.
With a consolidation of Yahoo and Bing Search Results, it may now be worth taking a closer look at Bing specific optimisation strategies. If your site is currently ranking well in Bing but poorly in Yahoo you should be smiling, but if the reverse is true – then maybe you should be a little concerned.
The following video from WebPro News provides a great overview of the proposed collaboration – including some useful points from Danny Sullivan. It is still early days, and if this proposal goes ahead, it is likely to take some time, so while there is probably no need to get nervous yet – you should definitely stay aert.
So you’ve setup your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, and your ads are up on Google AdWords, but have you created a safe landing for your site visitors?
Do this Now ! Run a search on Google and find your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad. Click on it. Where does it bring you? Your home page? I hope not. If it does you should consider creating a specific landing page for your PPC ads. A landing page is the page you create with the primary goal of converting your PPC traffic into sales or enquiries. This page should encourage your potential customers (that you have already paid for!) to go exactly where you think they want to go.
Here are some tips to create a good landing page:
1) Focus! Focus! Focus!
The landing page should be about your product or service. No links to other sites, no advertisements, no waffle. When people arrive at your landing page, they should already be predisposed to buy (since you wrote such an excellent ad to get them here in the first place) and are trying to either find out more information about your product/service, or click the “Buy now” button.
2) Specialise your landing page
Use a different landing page for each group of keyphrases. If you sell Widgets and Wodgets, don’t use the same landing page for each. Create a new landing page for each product (or each group of products) and send the clients directly to the page they are interested in.
3) Give them information
If they are not yet sold on your product or service, then they are going to be looking for more detailed information when they arrive at your landing page. Give it to them. You have to convince them that you have the perfect product or service to solve their problem. If they run out of information before they make a commitment to buy, then you have lost them. Nobody will spend money until they are convinced that your product or service is the right choice for them. So prove it.
4) Tell the reader what you want them to do
Use calls-to-action. If you want them to buy your product, than tell them often how to do it (“Click here to buy”). If you want them to call you, post the number up with instructions (“Call us now at 1800-999-999″). Repeat it throughout the text, then again in big and bold at the end.
5) Use graphics
Use pictures to sell your product or service. Pictures of the product or pictures of satisfied customers sell. Use them – and use them often.
6) Run tests
Set up two (or more) landing pages to see which ones convert better. You can use Giigles Website Optimiser toolf for tjhis or set up two identical ads and send one to each landing page, then compare conversion rates for each page. Figure out why one converts better and try to improve the other one. Then, run more tests until you are completely satisfied with the results.
Set up your landing pages so that your potential customers arrive for a safe and controlled landing. If all goes well, they will step out of the plane with their credit cards already in hand – and their money almost in your pocket.
Promoting your internet business can be a tough task. The costs of traditional advertising are prohibitive. It can cost as much as $50,000 to run a print advertisement in a prominent publication. It can cost much more than that to produce and run a TV commercial, especially if the commercial airs during peak viewing hours. Online marketing is a problem too, because it is extremely difficult and takes a long time to climb to the top of the search engine rankings.
So, what should you do? Well, you will need to do rely on the same thing all internet businesses do when they first start out. Of course, we are talking about pay-per-click (PPC). By advertising with pay-per-click, you pay a certain price per click to be listed near the top of the first page of the search engines for your chosen keyword or phrase. Every time someone clicks on your PPC ad, you pay for that click.
If you have never used PPC before or do not know what it is, perform a search on any search engine and you will notice that at the top or to the side of the search results you will see a section called “sponsored links.” These are websites that are paying a certain amount per click to be listed there.
PPC can be very expensive depending upon what keyword you want to receive clicks for, but there are ways to budget your money wisely so you can maximize the effectiveness of your PPC marketing campaign without having a ton of money to spend. Some of the companies at the top of the sponsored links section might be bidding up to $20 per click for certain keywords. Insurance companies such as Geico and Progressive often bid up to $25 per click for the keyword “auto insurance.”
However, for most keywords, you can bid relatively low and still get a lot of clicks. Each PPC service has a traffic calculator that tells you how many clicks you will receive given a certain bid price and daily budget. So, if you want to spend $0.50 per click, you can put that bid into their traffic calculator and it will tell you how many clicks you can expect to receive at $0.50 per click and how much that will cost per day. The traffic calculator will also tell you what your position will be (the higher your bid price, the higher your position will be within the sponsored links section for that keyword).
There are several PPC programs that you can use to receive traffic. There is Google Adwords (spans several engines, including Jeeves, AOL, and Google), Overture (Yahoo and other engines), and many others. They are all reliable, and they will all deliver traffic to your website.
The most important part of PPC advertising is knowing what keywords or phrases to bid on. You have to remember that most people using a search engine are only looking for information, and are not seeking to buy a product or service. So, if you are using PPC to get traffic to your website in order to sell something, make sure you bid on a keyword that will bring you customers who are looking to make a purchase and are not there just to glean information.
For example, if you are selling Vitamin A on your website, and you bid on the keyword “Vitamin A,” you are going to receive a lot of traffic from people who visit your website merely to read what is there, because they are probably just looking for information about Vitamin A and do not want to buy it. Instead, you should bid on the phrase “Buy Vitamin A.” In this manner, you will only receive qualified traffic from people that are looking to buy vitamin A, which will increase your sales and allow you to get more bang for your marketing buck.
PPC advertising is the most effective form of advertising on the internet, so you should use it when launching your new internet business. Just make sure that you bid within your budget and use specific keywords or phrases so that you will receive qualified traffic, and you will do fine.
 Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL:
- when it was last updated
- how often it usually changes
- how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site
That information helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site. The Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.
How can the Sitemaps protocol help your website?
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.
The sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the pages on your website. Depending on how your website is structured, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your web pages if you use a sitemap.
How do search engines find my Sitemaps file? What’s new?
The big four search engines Google, Yahoo, Live/MSN and Ask will now automatically index your Sitemaps file if you add a link to your Sitemaps file in your robots.txt file.
All the major search engines regularly check the robots.txt of a website. Just add the following line to your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http:/www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
Of course, you can also actively inform Google and Yahoo about your Sitemap file. This is not possible with Live/MSN and Ask.
Does a Sitemaps file improve your search engine rankings?
Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
A sitemap helps search engines to find your web pages but it does not help you to get higher search engine rankings.
When search engines index your web pages, they must find optimised web page content and good inbound links. Search engines will only give your web pages high rankings if they have both.
The Sitemaps protocol can help you to inform search engines about your web pages. Further information about the new sitemaps standard can be found on the official sitemaps web site.
A social commerce report on online retailers shows that the use of customer reviews will increase the overall sales for your website. According to e-consultancy and Bazaarvoice’s “Social Commerce Report 2007? report, customer product reviews are increasing retail e-commerce conversion rates, site traffic and average order values,
It was found that 28% of online sellers were using customer ratings and reviews. More than half said they were considering it.
Asked about the effects of customer ratings on their Web sites, over half of online retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe said their overall conversion rates had gone up in the past year, compared with only 9% who said they fell.
Nearly eight in 10 online sellers thought a major benefit of such reviews was to increase conversions, while 73% thought improved customer retention and loyalty were major benefits. Nearly six in 10 thought the fact that customer reviews improved search engine optimisation was a significant benefit.
“Tapping into social commerce can be a great way of gaining a competitive advantage, for example through ratings and reviews,” Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research, said in a statement. “But apart from the early adopters, this is something a large proportion of online retailers are only just starting to think seriously about.”
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