Google is constantly checking your site’s performance and all indications point to this being a ranking factor in future. This was reported a late last year by WebProNews, after an interview with the venerable Matt Cutts from the Google team.

By their own admission Google is all about the ”user experience”, with their prime SEO mantra being; “make websites for users, not for the search engines”. And page load time is one if the most important user experience issues that you’ll encounter when browsing the web.  Google wants to serve it’s users with they what they want.  Do they want slow page websites at the top of their search results?  or do they want a page that loads instantly and gives them the information they’re seeking straight away.    Obviously, the latter.

It’s a well known “statistic” that if a web page does not load in less than 3 seconds a user will ”bounce” from the site, return to the search results and probably pick one of your competitors.  Which begs the question:  how can you speed up a slow site?

Examine your site’s performance

First off, you should analyze all information available about how your pages load using some readily available tools. As a good SEO or webmaster you’ve probably already signed up for Google’s Webmaster Tools.   A recently added feature is the “Site Performance” section, which is found under the “Labs” menu item.

This will give you a general indication of whether Google sees your site as being fast or slow, and provides a few tips on how your pages can be improved for speed.   You can also see over time how your work in improving web site speed is taking effect.

For a more immediate read-out of a webpage’s performance I also use the Yahoo YSlow plugin for Firebug (a Firefox plug-in). YSlow can be run on a live page that you are viewing and gives instant (depending on page load time of course), feedback on what areas you can address to improve load time on your website.   It will also give you an indication of the “emtpy cache” (first time visitor) and “primed cache” (repeat visitor) performance.

For an advanced metric of page load time, Google Analytics can be configured to record a page load time metric and gives a reasonable representation of the issue from the user perspective.   Analytics can be made to track the load time based on internet connection speed in so giving a broad indication of your site’s performance.

Enable GZip Compression

All modern browsers support webpage GZip compression and are able to decompress the data sent from your server.  The less data that is transferred for each page, the less time it takes for a page to load in a browser.  For those site owners who have a restriction on the amount of traffic with their host, GZip compression will reduce the amount of data that you have to serve.

You can use a GZip compression test to check if your pages are currently compressed and if not, this tool will estimate of the size of savings to expect.   If GZip compression is enabled, the actual % of data saved during compression is shown.  This tool can also test CSS and JS files.

Apache and Microsoft IIS web servers both support GZip, and quick and dirty instructions for enabling GZip compression is shown below:

Apache Server

The module that deals with GZip compression on an Apache server is “mod_deflate”. Create an “info.php” file and add the code <?php phpinfo() ?>, upload to your server and browse “/info.php” to get a readout of the Apache modules installed.  If mod_deflate is loaded on your webserver then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip for a lot of file types.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php application/rss+xml application/atom_xml
</IfModule>

If mod_deflate can’t be loaded by your host or server admin (it requires a core recompile for installation) then the following .htaccess declaration will enable GZip compression for php files only. The “gzhandler” is not as efficient at compressing data than “mod_deflate”, so will be marginally slower and the savings will me slightly less but for most sites will suffice.

php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

If your pages are .htm or .html (as opposed to .php) add the following lines at the top of your .htaccess to get Apache to parse those files as .php so that they will be compressed.

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

Microsoft IIS

If you’re running a Microsoft IIS server, the following document will explain how compression can be activated: http://g.www.ms.akadns.net/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/25d2170b-09c0-45fd-8da4-898cf9a7d568.mspx?mfr=true

Reduce Image Size

These days websites are very graphicy, with most sites having appealing header images, product images and so forth.  Unfortunately the more graphics on a site, the more data needs to be sent to the user’s browser leading to longer load times.  This is especially an issue for first time visitors who don’t have the images cached.

Most competent web designers keep this in mind and will try to maximize the Jpeg compression versus the image quality to speed up page loading.  But there are some cool tools out there that can further improve things like this.  Even using gif’s and png’s instead of jpegs will make a difference as they tend to use less k’s is size.

One of the most useful image tools that we use is SmushIt (found in the YSlow plugin that is mentioned earlier in this post). SmushIt is able to examine the images on a web page and compress them even further with no noticeable degradation in image quality. Smushing your header and background images is a must, and the data savings are often surprising.

One of the big no-no’s that we often come across is using the browsers image scaling to fit a large image into a small space.  We often find this is the case in product catalogs, when a large product image is used for the shingle thumbnail on the category listing pages.  In this case, use a small thumbnail in the shingle instead of scaling.

For all other cases browser image scaling should be avoided, as the web browser is slow at scaling, not to mention the extra time spent downloading the large image. Always  ensure images are scaled to the correct size before use on your pages, and you’ll notice an improvement in load time.

If your website template uses a lot of background images, header images and image buttons  then the number of HTTP requests for a webpage will be quite high. Each request takes time and can slow down a page. To reduce this delay combine these template images into a CSS sprite image. This is basically one “big” image that contains all of your template images and using CSS classes you can pick out the correct part of this image that you need for each of the graphic elements on the page.

CSS and JavaScript Code

There are a few strategies for improving CSS and JavaScript file load time.  At a minimum you should externalize all CSS and JS files so that they can be cached by the users browser.  In addition, if you have more that one CSS or JS include file, combine all the CSS includes into one file, do the same with the JS includes, and this will reduce http requests.  For the hardcore guys out there, try to Minify the CSS/JavaScript which will remove unnecessary white-space and line-breaks. Minify can be also found in the YSlow plugin for Firebug.  And no, I don’t sell Firebug or Yslow (based on how many times I’ve mentioned it) – it’s just a cool plug in.

Reduce the amount of database calls in your application

A lot of websites out there rely on an SQL database to store information that is shown to your users.  If your site runs a product catalog or a CMS systems then the odds are that a database is involved.  Every time a page is requested by a browser, the database is queried for the information that the user will see on the page.  This back and forth takes time and can be a bottleneck.

To speed things up, only run the minimum database queries that are required and only request the actual table fields from the database that you need. Avoid “SELECT * FROM” in your SQL queries.   Optimizing things in this way can get quite quite knarly, so be prepared for a lot of hard work. For large sites that get a lot of traffic this can help in page load time tremendously and is worth the effort.

Wordpress

Wordpress is the most popular blogging software out there, and due to it’s flexibility is increasingly being used as a CMS system. Wordpress uses an SQL database to store all your posts and pages.

Hundreds of “plug-ins” are available for Wordpress to help customize it in countless ways.  Unfortunately the more plugins that you install, the slower Wordpress becomes.  The less plugins that are activated the faster your Wordpress blog will be.  You should also go as far as removing all unactivated wordpress plugins from your “plugin” directory.

A useful addition to Wordpress are “Widgets”, which allow for “real time updated” areas within your template. There are Widgets available to show latest posts, most popular posts, dynamic menus and much more.  The problem is that each one of these widgets will poll the database to get the information required, thus increasing the load time of the page.  Try to reduce the number of widgets that you use and if a widget is showing content that doesn’t change too often, try to hardcode the HTML with what the widget would display.

Summary

There are many more things to look at to speed up a website and those listed above are the areas that I initially tend to look at for my search engine optimisation clients. Depending on the size of a site and the amount of traffic it gets, even the simplest change can have a significant effect.

If there are any other ways you have found to speed up a site, I’d love to know of your experiences.

Page ranks can be easily described numerically ranging from 1 to 10 where 10 works as the highest page rank in the whole chain. It has been noted that a very less amount of pages are featured with the page rank of 10 but any number above the ranking of 6 is taken to be a favorable one.

There are a wide variety of factors that helps in proper determining of the page ranks. However, the major variable appears to be actually based on the number of websites that link to your site’s page. Larger the number of popular sites visiting your site, better is the chances to get high position on the known search engines. So to say, take for example a case in which excellent ranking websites such as Yahoo.com or CNN.com links to your site. In this situation, your site will automatically get popular and this linking of the excellent ranking websites is much better than links from a large number of low page ranking sites.

Enhancing the page ranks of your site is not only described by the total number of back links you possess and use. Even article marketing with targeted titles, content and keywords, is an important factor that helps in taking the page ranks to higher heights. Equally essential is the site’s content. The actual content of the website requires to be the details that the users can read and use in the best possible manner. Having the right kind of content that suits the keywords is one of the other factors as well that contributes a lot in deciding the overall page ranks. There are various inquisitions in the minds of website owners about whether there are some ways that can actually help in generating good page ranking and that too without involving any expenses or costs. The exact answer to these inhibitions is actually “yes”. There are a few things, however, that needs to be considered wisely in order to generate great page ranks.

The first and foremost thing that needs to be kept in mind while looking for better page ranking at no cost is that of creating internal back links. It is necessary to make links to your website whenever applicable. Take for instance a condition where you mention the online payment system on the introductory page. In such a case, it is not only good to add the service provided of online payments, it is always a better option to hyperlink the specific payments page so that the customer can easily get to the payments system and enjoy the facilities. By doing this, not only your website is creating another back link for the spiders, it is making it easier for the visitors to get to the specific payments page right there and that too without wasting their precious time.

The second aspect that needs proper consideration is that of avoiding the usage of dead-end back links. In case you have worked day and night on creating around 7 relevant pages. Your page rankings have the ability to be a rank of 7. But if by chance some of those pages are basically not providing any relevant results, they you really need to consider and figure out the main problem. Whenever the search engine spiders crawl on a site, they wish to move from one web page to the other. You may be featured with a really fantastic and informative page but in case it is not equipped with other page pinks, the spiders will take that particular excellent page to be a dead-link one thereby reducing the chances of enjoying high page ranks. It is necessary to ensure that each web page is added with an external door apart from the back button. You can easily add an index link or maybe a site navigator on each page in order to add that extra convenience for your site visitors.

Read the top tips, then follow the explanations below for an understanding into the reasoning behind them.  Information like this isn’t everywhere on the web:

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year.

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year.

Stop using keywords in your URLs.

Stop using keywords in your titles.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page).

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week.  Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone.

Get a text editor like Notepad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less.

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site.  Put it into every forum profile you have created.

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts. Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – The Explanations

Change is the only constant you can count on in search engine optimization.  Although we often say that the fundamental principles of search engine optimization don’t change, pretty much everything else does.  If you want to be really, really good at this, you cannot be inflexible.  You cannot afford the luxury of becoming emotionally bonded to any particular idea.

Redesign your Web site once or twice a year. Why? Because you’ll find things you broke the last time around and you’ll be able to fix them.  Because you’ll finally be able to tweak the optimization for pages you have known could do better but for which you never found the time to do anything.  Because you’ll have an opportunity to improve your visitor experience and make your presentation more competitive (but avoid the “Web X.0 pitfall” — don’t marry your site to any particular concept).

Add 5 pages of content to your site every week. Why? Because it gives you opportunities to expand your search visibility. Because it gives you opportunities for more free links that actually help. Because it gives you opportunities to try out new ideas.  Because it increases the value of your Web site.

Change the titles on your least successful pages twice a year. Why? Because obviously those titles weren’t helping your least successful pages.

Stop using keywords in your URLs. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don’t know how to optimize a Web page.

Stop using keywords in your titles. Why? Because if you don’t know how to optimize a Web page without stuffing your title, then you don’t know how to optimize a Web page. Titles and URLs are options, not requirements, in search engine optimization. Learn to understand and fully appreciate the difference between being able to do something and needing to do something.

Find 3 SEO forums that accept site review requests and write 20 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question. Why? Because looking at someone else’s mistakes and brilliant ideas with an unemotional, critical, helpful point of view will only help improve your own self-analysis.  Keep your ideas and opinions to yourself.  Just share your feedback on how other people’s sites look.  You’ll learn more faster by helping with your honest, gut-level reactions than by helping forum idiots attack people whose ideas they don’t agree with.  You’ll also look more professional, too.

Create your own SEO book by collecting your favorite SEO forum and blog posts, newsletter articles, and tech tips in a .PDF file that you review once a month. Why?  So you have all your favorite advice in one easy-to-read-and-search compendium.  Don’t sell it.  Just use it.

Create a new SEO book once each year, replacing the one you just created in the previous step. Why? Because after a year of using all the advice you put in the previous one you’ll have a far better idea of just how much crap and bullshit you’re getting from SEO blogs and forums.  But that also means your next SEO book will be ten times better than the last.

Optimize your best peforming page for the exact mirror of your targeted keyword expression (turn an ABCD page into a DCBA page). Why?  You can’t do better than to nail the number 1 position for a query, so why not aim for a second query?  If you can optimize a page forwards and backwards, you should be able to handle just about anything.

Find 5 low-traffic blogs or forums that are consistently active and support them through comments, links, and referrals WITHOUT being self-promotional. Why?  It teaches you just how hard it is to build a good community, and maybe you’ll appreciate what “good community” really means before you act like an ass in an SEO forum or blog and flame someone else for disagreeing with you.  But there is another reason.  Keep reading to see if you can find it in the explanations given below.

Write 10 blocks of ad copy (no more than 25 words each) every week. Place them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you can never write too many advertisements. Your audience is always changing. Your venues are always changing. And GOOD ad copy (not the cheap, shlocky crap you see most of the time) makes GREAT meta description tags.  BTW — you should write that ad copy for sites other than your own until you learn to stop using cheap, shlocky crap expressions like “Proudly announces”, “pleased to admit”, “best prices”, etc. Be informative. Be compelling. Be classy.

Write 1 full-page announcement about your Web site each week. Post it some place where it won’t offend anyone. Why? Because you should spend some time promoting your site while you learn how to become a better search optimizer. Besides, practice makes perfect.

Get a text editor like Wordpad (the fewer frills the better) and use it to code one of your Web pages from scratch. Why? Because when you’ve seen just how stupid your templated CSS code really is, you’ll begin to understand why ugly works better than pretty.

Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less. Why? Because you should never write a press release that starts out with, “John Shlock Smith the Shmuck proudly announces….”

Create a 1-page listing of 20 UNKNOWN Web sites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site. Why? Because it’s an opportunity for you to create an honest, sincere resource that no one else on the Web has the ability to create. Because people are actually more interested in your opinion of OTHER people’s Web sites than your opinion of your own Web sites.   Because if you haven’t found 20 sites you wish you had created that no one else has talked about in your regular Web communities, you need to spend less time with your buds and more time with the rest of the Web.

Create a forum signature that does not promote your Web site. Put it into every forum profile you have created. Why? Because it makes you look confident, professional, and less like a shlocky self-promotional shmuck who doesn’t know what forums are for.  More importantly, it will teach you to write compelling content (think of those 25-word advertisements I mentioned above).

Design a 5-10 page Web site about a community project or charitable activity. Promote that site to number 1. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first site. Why? Because you’ll never compete with anyone harder to beat than yourself.

Find a niche directory you have never heard of before that you feel is honestly listing unique, useful Web sites. Promote that niche directory through links and comments on your own sites until you see improvement in its Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa metrics. Why?  Because you need to know what it takes to become an influencer without cheating through social media Web site spam.

Find a friend or relative who has no clue about Web sites and persuade him or her to create a Web site. You must restrain yourself and ONLY give advice on how to build and promote the site. Why?  Because I’ve had to suffer through the frustration of not being able to take the computer away from someone who wants to do it their own way. Misery loves company.  Besides, it teaches us to be humble and appreciate the people who at least listen half the time.

Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and backlink counts.  Use this metric to track five to ten sites you don’t control for six months. Why?  Because you need a competitive advantage that you cannot possibly get from using someone’s backlink checking tool.  Because you need to understand and appreciate that there is more to the Web than links. Because you need to be one step ahead of the other guy, who may very well have his own metrics in place before you even get started.

20 Hard Core SEO Tips – What They Mean:

Let the idiots spend their days arguing in the SEO blogs and forums. They don’t need your help to look stupid.

You can learn from other people by watching them, helping them, promoting their sites, and putting the community ahead of yourself.  They won’t always appreciate what you do.  But you can knock a self-promotional shmuck out of the search results any day of the week if you know more about search engine optimization than he does.

You have to keep moving forward. When you stop learning about search engine optimization the idea of getting back into the game becomes overwhelming. Worse, if you become dependent upon any one tip or technique, you hobble yourself in ways you cannot possibly imagine.

Thanks to Michael Martinez for posting this on www.seo-theory.com

Also known as ‘Spiders’, ‘Crawlers’ and the ‘Googlebot’, these programs scrawl the internet constantly, from page-to-page, site-to-site, reading the content on the page and reporting back to Google and other search engines about what your site is about and what keyword or phrases would be relevant to display your site in it’s results.

Every day hundreds of them go out and scour the web, whether it’s Google trying to index the entire web, or a spam bot collecting any email address it could find for less than honorable intentions.  As site owners, what little control we have over what robots are allowed to do when they visit our sites exist in a magical little file called “robots.txt.”

“Robots.txt” is a regular text file that through its name, has special meaning to the majority of “honorable” robots on the web. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all. For example, you may not want Google to crawl the /images directory of your site, as it’s both meaningless to you and a waste of your site’s bandwidth. “Robots.txt” lets you tell Google just that.

For my readership (because I love each and every one of you), I have included below a generator to create a robot.txt file to upload and use on your own sites:

Robots.txt Generator Tool © SEO Chat™       Allowed User Agent Select user agent or use default for all agents All AgentsAlexa AgentAltaVista AgentAOL Netfind/Excite AgentGoogle AgentHotBot AgentInfoSeek AgentLycos AgentMSN Search CrawlerNorthern Lights AgentWebcrawler Agent Enable All Webpages Yes No – Exclude These URL’s: ¦lt;br /> Enter URLs you wish to exclude /cgi-bin/<br /> /images/ Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

Sometimes called inbound links, backlinks are the lifeblood of Search Engine Positioning.  In order for a website to be on the top of search engines like Google (without the webmaster having to pay big money for advertising), the website has to have a large number of backlinks.  Backlinks are links on one website that lead back to another website.   The more established, high quality, and high Page Rank the website that contains the link has, the more power it has to help the linked website with its search engine position.  If the website that is getting backlinks gets many High Quality and High Page Rank backlinks, the better the chance it has of being in a high position on the Search Engines.

So how does a webmaster go about getting high quality backlinks to his or her website?  There are many ways this can be done – there are ‘right’ ways to achieve this, and likewise there are ‘wrong’ ways to do it.  Some people advocate writing and submitting articles, posting on forums, making comments on blogs with a link attached to the text, that points to your website.  Others talk about submitting their website to various Internet directories.  One directory that has an excellent reputation is called DMOZ, or the ‘Open Directory’.  This directory is probably the most respected directory online today and the largest compilation of succesful sites.  The websites it contains have all been placed there by human editors; there is no automation to this directory unlike others.   The only drawback that’s been discussed about this directory is that it takes so long to have a website included.  It can take weeks if not months, but once successful, your website will have a boost in ranking, making it easier for people to stumble upon your site.

Another way that many people build backlinks for their website is to use Social Bookmarking websites. A Social Bookmark  is a website that usually has a very popular ‘community’ aspect to it. Users sign up and create profiles on the sites that contain photos and information about themselves.  They then can save bookmarks of favorite websites which can be itemized by ‘tags’, which are one or two word descriptions of what the sites contain, and these bookmarks can be saved to a list that’s private or can be listed publicly, so that everybody can see it.

With the advent of what is known as Web 2.0, gaining backlinks is easier now than in any time in the history of the internet. Most sites now have an interactive quality to them nowadays.  Readers can often sign in and create profiles.  They then are often allowed to post comments on the stories or articles on the website or blog.  In many cases, the website or blog owner responds to these comments; thus making this section of the website or blog a conversation.

Backlinking strategies can be easy and fun and the website owner who is working on getting more backlinks for his website can learn new things, meet new people, and have a tremendous amount of fun doing something that was once a chore: building backlinks.

To all my readership, I have taken the opportunity to use a tool to check how many backlinks are currently pointing to your website.  This tool is great, and I use it with every one of my web design clients:

Powered by iWEBTOOL

Ever wondered how you can make money from adverts on a website?  What is Google Adsense and why is everyone raving about it?  How it can help not only create revenue, but market your site?.  Here’s an explanation to yield a little light on it all…

Google Adsense and other banner advertising methods run on a method called Pay-Per-Click programs (PPC) and it is the new buzz in internet marketing. The growth in web traffic generated by pay per click services is growing and a marketing option to be seriously considered when starting or maintaining popularity on your website.

With PPC, the way it works is: you pay each time a web viewer chooses your ad listing link and clicks into your website.  It doesn’t cost anything to actually show adverts on a website as it only costs you when they click on the ad, hence the name.

Pay per click targets a very specific audience reaching up to 85% of all internet users in a cost effective and immediate way.  There can be as much as a $20 return of investment for each $1 spent.  Sounds pretty good doesn’t it?

Exactly How Does Pay Per Click (PPC) Work?

The first step is to select which ad agent to use.

The biggestt PPC agent on the web is Yahoo! Sponsored Search.  Yahoo! Sponsored Search has traffic of approx 200 million searches per month reaching about 80% of all the web users.  They have the largest reach on the Web.  Yahoo! Sponsored Search’s pay per click listings appear on Yahoo Search, Yahoo Directory, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Lycos, InfoSpace, and other search engines and directories, so plenty of streams all across the web to reach your markets.

Although Yahoo has more overall visitors statistically than the mighty Google, Google AdWords is the most productive PPC platform and the place you should start with when you decide to advertise with PPC ads.

Reasons for this, firstly – it is simple to use on the basic level, you sign up, write your ads and manage campaigns with set budgets of what you are prepared to spend per day.  Secondly, in the U.S of A alone, over 80% of all Internet searches will be Google.  With Google AdWords, you can see your ads within a few hours, and you have the ability to start and stop campaigns easily.  You will show your products and services to literally millions of viewers and active shoppers using the massive reach of Google.  Additionally Google AdWords will typically out-perform Yahoo and MSN adCenter when it comes to generating conversions and return on investment.  On Google’s main search results pages?  The ‘Sponsored links’ on the very top and the column on the right are all PPC ads generated by the companies advertising them.  They have paid to be there – some, have paid lots.

The second step is to select your targeted keyword or phrases.

At this point you may want to consider increasing the density of your selected keywords in your website’s HTML code, your site’s description, and title.  However, we have found that you can still experience great returns using PPC without revising your website, as your PPC ads are triggered by the keywords you selected that are tied to your ad and not your web site’s content.  My advice is to spend time thinking of the market you are in and the best keywords to use in your ad campaigns.

The third step is to select your monthly budget.

You basically have to select the very maximum amount that you will pay each month (or day) for click-throughs to your website. How much do you want to appear on users pages?  The higher the budget, the more time you appear.  Simple as. Once the maximum amount is reached, Google will halt click-throughs to your site automatically – basically, they will stop your ad appearing. Additionally, you will select how much you are willing to pay by keyword as well, so you can break it down to £5 per day on the ‘decorating’, £2 per day on ‘painting’, etc.

With Yahoo! Sponsored Search, it’s a little different. With these guys, you will be charged your budget amount on a monthly basis in advance of the ads appearing and then the clicks.  Clicks are then deducted from your account balance on a daily basis as and when people click on them.  Much like a deposit you make, any clicks get deducted form the balance.

With Google AdWords, you can easily ‘pause’ a campaign or change your settings at any time.  There are no minimum monthly spending limits and no contracts or long term commitments, which makes life a lot easier when starting out a new website or company.

Bids and Keywords

There are different costs for PPC between markets and industries.  If you have a popular keyword, in a very competitive market,  be prepared to pay higher than the minimum click amount to get top listing within your category.  The big main players (aka your competition) will have a high budget, so it will be difficult to stand a chance against them.  My advice is to choose keywords that are still within your market, but more of a niche.   Do some keyword researcht to see what’s popular but with less competition.  With both Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Microsoft adCenter, the client with the highest quality score will have their ad shown first.

Google AdWords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, and Microsoft adCenter have great programs that automatically allow you to manage your budget and to plan your bids effectively.  Check them all out and decide which (if not all) are the best suited for your requirements.

Ad Placement on the Page

With Google AdWords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, and Microsoft adCenter, an advertiser who pay less per click than another may have their ads in the top position if the ad content is crafted well and receives more clicks per impressions versus than another and has a closely matched landing page to their ad’s theme and keyword list. The ad rank position on all three platforms is determined by quality score and the keyword bid.

Conclusion

Pay per click programs can pay off in increased website traffic, brand identification through impressions, and most importantly in increased leads, prospects, and sales. In addition to exposing your website to a wide qualified audience, targeted click throughs can turn in to sales, generating more profit for your business.

If you are looking for a great way to drive traffic to your website, you should consider adding a PPC program to your advertising plan.

]]> http://www.theonemanmission.com/marketing/pay-per-click-marketing/feed/ 0 http://www.theonemanmission.com/marketing/search-engine-optimisation-explained/ http://www.theonemanmission.com/marketing/search-engine-optimisation-explained/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:21:48 +0000 Phil http://www.TheOneManMission.com/?p=332 The internet is a big place.  It’s an extremely competitive market as everyone wants to be at the top of search results.  Companies vie for the highest attention from billions of internet users in the search engine results for basically, better revenue. A lynch pin to Internet Marketing is Google, the biggest and most popular search engine.

Search Engines (including Google amongst others) are internet portals where quite literally BILLIONS of people congregate to search for information.  Cheapest places to buy shoes, directions on how to get to their mother-in-laws, all the way to reading about how to remove that big clump of hair growing on their back.  Literally ANYTHING.  The most prominent search engine in the field are search giants Google and Yahoo. The level of traffic these .com organisations receive per hour is well, phenomenal.

So naturally, companies obviously move towards placing their links and sites on search engines as high as possible in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites from these search engines in question.

In order to maximize their ranking on the search engine results and more importantly the placement on the results page,  companies have used tools such as SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation.  Search engine optimization is the method and process of vastly improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing page.   As it suggests, the higher the result in the search, the more traffic you are likely to make, which means the more revenue or return on investment youare likely to enjoy.  Highly competitive markets try even harder as their gains are likely to be far greater than a smaller niche avenue.

Legitimate search engine optimization, practices the focus and goal on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving the actual site’s content, it’s usability and by using legitimate methods of promotion through various web phenomena such as Viral Marketing.  This is covered seperately in my blog, but in essence, it’s a form of advertising that spreads across the internet from person to person and can be extemely effective in the effect is has as well as the cost-efficiency side of it too.

Search engines nowadays, all use the most complex ‘algorithms’ in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering and manipulating their system.  However, what’s known as “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the cheating garbage out.  A cheating example includes hiding keywords within the website page by having the keywords the same colour as the background, so users can’t see it, but the search engines still read the code.  This is naughty, but the site if targeted by Google, can then be banned.  Large reputable brands (believe it or not) have been caught using this method as well, such as BMW and Disney, but they get banned too.   Google obviously takes this very seriously.   

Search engines now actually display different kinds of ‘listings’ on a result page, not just normal ‘results’.  The more common ones are pay-per-click (PPC) adverts, paid inclusion in the listings, and organic listings.  Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself mainly with organic listings for a variety of keywords.  This can increase the quality and quantity of visitors to a desired web site.  This is something I have always been aware of and offer to all my web design clients at OwenDevelopment. 

So which are the most effective?  Well from my research into this for my own project ‘Project X’, organic searches  are the way to go.   A study from Jupiter Mediarevealed that approximately 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases by users,  came from organic searches compared to paid online ads.  Are people becoming ‘blind’ to PPC adverts on sites?  I must admit that I have.  I for some reason, tend to not click on these ads and have even typed into the address bar the link to the PPC ad, rather than actually just clicking on it.  Why?  I don’t know, but it’s a habit I have just developed from somewhere unknown.  I have a few sites with these ads on, but still I just do it.  Yes, I’m a freak.

Anyway, this overall result from Jupiter Media has made traditional SEO far more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad method, but a method of intrinsically improving the sites content.

From everywhere I have scanned on the internet, here are a few tips I think are useful on improving content on your site for an  improved result in traditional organic searches:

• Expertise - Develop your strengths.  Sites you get involved with or own, must be on subject that you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away (they smell like a crusty sock left in the back of a cupboard).  But if you are knowledgable, people will stay and view the other content and are also more likely to come back to your site regularly.

• Plan -  A good layout that is easy to navigate and view (in web-friendly colours!) can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser and make it easier to accomodate any user on any browser.

• Research - Check out your competition and see what they have set up. My advice is find the biggets player in the market and see any improvements that you can make that let their site down.  See what works and implement the same, and likewise, what doesn’t and improve it.  If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get useful feedback on what should or can be improved further.  I also found it useful to find complaints in review sites on your market.  Find out what people hate about the main players and shout out on your site how you guarantee to make that aspect easier and more effective. 

• Keywords - Decide which are the most important keywords to use for your sight.  Include these keywords in the metatags in the header of your site, use in the content of the page, within the page title, and also in file names if you use them.

• Remember that the Search Engine is your best friend - Get best mates with your search engine, send him a birthday card and don’t give it a hard time.  Definately don’t cheat on them. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.  It will make you more money period.

• Keep Focussed – Concentrate on the topic in question and nothing else. The rule is one topic per page.  Confusing content by swapping from one thing to another won’t help your site.  It’s hard to follow a physical conversation when this happens, let alone on a website.

• Get added on directories - Directories are pools of knowledge made by a human, while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods.  The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may cause huge increases in rankings if they are the right directory for your market.   Avoid joining loads of less-known directories, as a only few directory listings on the big main ones will help more.  

• Links - An effective Optimisation method used as SEO 101.  Ask your networks, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances business parnerships to place your site’s website link on their sites.  With a short description this can draw huge amounts of traffic from other sites and increase your sites’ exposure on the web.  For example, Google ranks the importance of its sites by the sheer number of sites that are linked to it, and the better tand more reputable the site that links to you, the higher you will rise in the listings automatically.

• Repeat all the above - Keep repeating all the above tips over and over again, maintaining the optimisation and marketing of your site will keep you at the top of listings and the ££ coming in.  Doing a simple one-off campaign may see you hit the top, but not for long.  You will notice that by not treating this as a constant routine, you will gradually slip down the ranks because I GUARANTEE your competitors will be consistently applying the above. 

Meta Tags are the most basic of information every single website needs: without it, your site will never be read or found by search engines.  Meta tags have two possible attributes:

• <META HTTP-EQUIV=”name” CONTENT=”content“>
• <META NAME=”name” CONTENT=”content“>

META tags should be placed in the header section of the HTML document, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

Robots

Controls Search Engine Web robots on a per-page basis. E.g.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,FOLLOW”>

Robots may traverse this page but not index it.

• INDEX allows the page to be indexed by the spider
• NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
• FOLLOW allows all links on the page to be spidered as well
• NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages.
• ALL is the same as INDEX,FOLLOW
• NONE is the same as NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW
• NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed.
• NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page.

Keywords

Keywords used by search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title and document body. E.g.

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”fresh oranges, cool autumn scent, living room furniture, IT solutions”>

• Think Key Phrases instead of keywords. Key Phrases will provide you with a much greater volume of internet response.
• The primary words that appear in your title and description should also appear in your keywords, plus the primary words and phrases used on the page. Also, the primary words in your title and description should also appear somewhere else on your page.
• Insert your pages keywords into at least 1 of your images ALT tags. This helps for those search engines that read these tags, but don’t overdo it.
• It is best if you keep the number of keywords, commas and spaces below 800 characters.
• Many search engines only index the first 10 to 20 keywords, so be sure to have the most relevant keywords and phrases listed first.
• Using the same word more than three times, even if used differently within a phrase, might be considered Spamdexing by the search engine and your page might not be included.

Description

A short, plain language description of the document. Used by search engines to describe your document. Particularly important if your document has very little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top. E.g.

<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Citrus fruit wholesaler in North Wales. 40 varieties of mixed fruit drinks and wines available 24/7, from as little as £2.50″>

Keep your description below 250 characters.  This is SEO 101 and should always be included on every page of the site as a minimum.  Why spend on building a nice looking and informative website, when no-one will ever find it?

Summary

Remember, in the multi-coloured world of SEO, content is king.   Applying appropriate content on your site with effective keywords will do more than anything.  Keep it clear and concise, and you will have all the high rankings you will ever need.