Search engine optimization (SEO) and link building are two of the most important things that determine the success of your website. You may wonder if you should work the SEO in house, or if you should outsource it from the start. There are a couple of situations in which you would be better off outsourcing from the get-go:

• You know little or nothing about web page design and outsource that so you don’t have to deal with it
• There is no time to waste on trying out things that might or might not help

But for many website owners, doing SEO and link building in-house is a good first step. Sometimes it can be done perfectly well in-house, but if not, you can always hire an SEO expert if you need one. If you know the general ideas behind SEO and the importance of link building, there is a ton of free guidance online, much of it provided by Google, the search engine that much SEO is directed at.

Link Building Basics

Link building is one of those things that can’t be rushed too much. You don’t need loads and loads of links, but you need a few high quality back links that have no association whatsoever with spammers. Search engines do not take link spamming lightly. They will either demote your site in the rankings or kick it out of their indexes altogether and make you basically start over and prove to them that you’ve reformed your ways before letting you back in.

The sites that provide links to you give search engines context about your site’s content, and can give the search engine algorithm indications of its quality. The links have to be relevant, however. A link from a great website that has absolutely nothing to do with your site’s content won’t do you much, if any, good. Link exchanges and partnerships that are developed strictly for the sake of providing back links – relevant or not – dilute the quality of the links and violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. Your search engine rankings may drop drastically as a result of using these schemes. Links need to be obtained the old fashioned way: by earning them with good, unique content.

But while back links are important to your search engine ranking, they aren’t everything. After all, a brand new site may contain great, original content, but may not have had time to get any back links yet. If this is the case, there are many other things the site owner can do to boost search engine results while those back links develop organically.

Keywords are very important. If you are not sure which keywords you should use, then Google has a keyword tool that can help you. Suppose my website was about “green” energy products. That’s a hot topic these days, so keywords are going to be competitive. How can I choose the best keywords? As you can see in the first screen shot, I used the Google keyword tool to research the three keywords “windmill,” “green energy,” and “alternate energy.”

The second screen shot shows just part of a huge list of suggested keywords for my site. Now, if I choose keywords that have enormous monthly search volumes, I’m going to be competing with a lot of other sites, and with those keywords, I’ll probably inch my way up the search engine rankings at best.

The “sweet spot” I’m looking for is keywords that are relevant to my site that have search volumes in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands per month. The keywords “windmill energy” and “windmill electricity” look promising. They come in at around 10,000 searches locally and globally, so I have a better chance of competing, and yet they’re keywords that are relevant and could eventually become competitive, hopefully after my site has worked its way to the top of the search engine rankings.

Another way to use the keyword tool is (looking at the first screen shot again) is with website content I like. I would search for a high ranking website about green energy and feed that site’s url to the keyword tool. The keyword tool will then use the content of that site to generate a list of keywords.

There are a number of other things you can do to get your SEO process going in-house. Submit a sitemap to the search engines so that their bots will be able to crawl your site easily. Make sure your site has an understandable hierarchy and that each page is reachable from one or more static links. Use relevant keywords in your image metatags. And ensure that your title elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate. Fix or remove broken links. Make sure each page has a reasonable number of links. One hundred or more links are too many. Keep it down to 10 or 20.

These practices won’t take an inordinate amount of time, and Google has a lot of webmaster tools that show you exactly what to do to improve your site’s search engine rankings. If you try the basics and your site does not improve in the rankings, and you have fresh, original content, then it may be time to call in an expert on SEO. But in a lot of cases, if you approach it methodically you can do wonders for your site’s search engine rankings (and Google PageRanks) in-house. In fact, if you have summer interns, it would be a great project for one of them.

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Lil Engine Announces OSC Certification for SEO Companies

Lil Engine, an established resource of information on SEO and internet marketing, is excited to release OSC, Organic Search Certification, as a way to verify and recommend professional SEO companies.

January 27, 2010 Winston-Salem, NC Furthering their ongoing effort to provide useful information and tools to site owners, Lil Engine now offers a certification for SEO Companies. OSC, which stands for Organic Search Certified, is a vetting process to verify the professionalism and quality of a company’s SEO techniques. Unfortunately, in the SEO industry there are a significant number of businesses that either knowingly or unknowingly are not performing quality SEO work. Concerns when choosing an SEO company range from whether or not they can achieve the results you need at the price they quote, or worse that they will engage in ‘black hat’ SEO tactics to achieve short term results that can often lead to a negative outcome in the long term . The challenge in choosing a reputable search engine optimization company is compounded by the fact that many are required to keep their client rosters confidential, making it difficult to publicize case studies and references.

An OSC certified company has been independently analyzed and examined to provide an additional level of reassurance that the company offers value, quality, and ethics. In order to receive Organic Search Certification from Lil Engine, top SEO companies must pass a thorough company analysis including complete on-site and off-site examination of client referrals. OSC companies have:

• Provided 3 confidential client references that confirm their improved search engine rankings and significant increases in targeted traffic over a specified period of time.
• They have demonstrated a history of quality SEO work on their client’s sites, as evaluated by multiple industry veterans.
• Have kept up to date with the latest SEO developments by attending conferences, industry networking, and participation in SEO forums and blogs.

SEO companies benefit from the certification by being given a company listing on Lil Engine, and by being able to display a verifiable banner in their own marketing materials. A company can apply for certification at http://www.lilengine.com/seo-certification-evaluation-criteria/.

Contact:

Jen Thames

admin@lilengine.com

Lil Engine is a free comprehensive resource for webmasters and site owners sharing internet marketing information. Offerings include useful SEO tools, an SEO blog, a database of expert guides, forum, and directory.

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Face it: even if your website is a personal blog on a topic that you are passionate about, and isn’t an e-commerce site, it’s still dispiriting to look at your stats and find that only half a dozen people have visited. Everybody wants their site to get noticed. And there are enough web users that no matter what the topic of your site, there are plenty of people out there who are interested in it. What your site needs is probably some search engine optimization (SEO) to bump the numbers up and get more eyeballs on your page.

Ultimately, the success of a site depends on your ability to effectively communicate with readers. There is no substitute for content that people like, though there are things you can do to tip more traffic your way. A lot of people with blogs (whether they are designed to drive traffic to e-commerce sites or not) discover that there are a number of SEO plugins that can automatically do some of the SEO work for them. These plugins, such as Google XML Sitemaps, help the major search engines index your site better. With a sitemap, the crawlers have a much easier time “seeing” the structure of your site and retrieving it efficiently. Google XML Sitemaps notifies all the major search engines whenever you post new content.

With plugins, however, there can be too much of a good thing. More than four or five plugins and your site may slow down, and in some cases plugins can crash each other, in which case neither is helping your site. Not all SEO tools are plugins, however, and there are a number of SEO tools that help you do those things that you may not be so sure about doing, like generating meta tags.

That said, since so many new webmasters use WordPress for hosting, here are a few of the more popular plugins for WordPress SEO and what they do.

SEO Smart Links automatically links the keywords in your posts to corresponding posts and pages. This is awesome because it provides a way to keep visitors on your site and clicking those page views. In addition to the automatic functions, you can specify custom keywords and the URLs you want them to link to.

Robots Meta is a simple plugin that lets you ad meta tags to hide comment feeds from the search engines, hides internal search result pages from search engines, and hides admin pages from search engines, thus keeping your SEO info from being “diluted” by these things.

HeadSpace is a popular plugin that is capable of automatically generating post tags from a post’s content. This is terrific for people who have a hard time categorizing and tagging posts.

All In One SEO Pack is the most popular of the WordPress repository of plugins. It allows you to optimize parts of your site like the site title, the keywords, and the page titles. It can also generate keywords based on content of the current post. As you can see from the screen shot, this is extremely popular – at times being downloaded over 40,000 in a day!

One thing you need to do to be able to optimize your site is to see how it looks to the search engine crawlers. You also want to be able to generate meta tags with some help for optimum results. It is good to see if you have duplicate (or nearly duplicate) pages on your site (which can harm your search engine ranking), and to see if anyone else out there is stealing your content (and readers). Here are a few tools that you might consider.

Similar Page Checker, by webfconfs.com helps you determine if your web page content is too similar to another page on the same website. Search engines will ding you for having pages that are too similar on your website. All you do is enter the URLs and Similar Page Checker compares the content.

Webmaster Toolkit’s Web Page Analyzer checks your page to ensure that you have keywords in bold text, header text, link text, document titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions. This is considered an “entry level” tool, but it may be perfect if you’re just starting out with SEO for your site. As you can see from the screen shot, it couldn’t be simpler: you enter URLs and keywords and Web Page Analyzer checks for optimization.

Code to Text Calculator by Stargeek tells you the ratio of text to code. The higher the ratio of text to code on a page, the better. You enter URLs and it calculates the code to text ratio.

Copyscape is a workhorse tool that helps you find websites that are ripping off your content. It also finds websites that quote you. The copyscape website has information about what you should do if you find another site taking your content without permission.

If you find out that one of your URLs is banned by the Google database, you’ll probably be angry about it, but it’s better to know than not to know. Google Banned Checker Tool 1 lets you know if your URL is in the Google database. Keep in mind that if your site is new, it may not show in the Google database, but that doesn’t mean you’ve been banned. This toolkit is primarily for people who think their site has been punished by the Google gods.

Cache.it by cached.it shows you a lot of information you probably don’t know about your site, like your IP address, meta tag text, Alexa ranking, ping time, and PageRank.

Meta Tag Generator by SearchBliss does exactly what it says, creating up to nine meta tags.

Another “spider-view” tool is Search Engine Spider Simulator by webconfs.com. It shows you what your site looks like to the web spiders.
SEO isn’t just in the purview of big web companies. You can use SEO tools for whatever kind of site you have, whether you’re selling fishing tackle or reviewing movies. There are a lot of tools available to help you get your site indexed and seen by a lot more people, and these tools are worth your while.

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Submitting articles to article directories is what is known as “off page optimization.” Off page optimization is doing what you can to drive traffic to and create back links to your actual web pages. The best search engine optimization involves both on page and off page optimization. Submitting articles to directories won’t help much if your pages have little or no useful content, or if your pages themselves have not been optimized through the use of keywords, meta tags, and anchor text links. But once you have your pages in top shape, submitting articles to directories can definitely give your website’s traffic a boost.

Articles promoting your website should soft sell your site. In fact, many article directories have strict rules about how many so-called self serving links you can include in your articles. That’s because people don’t look for articles in order to be sold a piece of software or a new nutritional supplement: they read articles to gather information. Your job is to provide that information and also provide a way for the article reader to get to your site if he or she so chooses.

Even the article directories that are quite strict about links to your website in the content do provide “about us” boxes or “resources” boxes where you can include links to your site, and you should definitely do this. Anyone interested in the article content enough to want more will be looking to the resources box to link to more information. Because there are so many free article submission directories, you have plenty of outlets for articles about your site. You won’t have a huge influx of traffic overnight, but over time, your PageRank will increase, as will your traffic. Below are several of the advantages and a few disadvantages to directory submission of articles.

1. Directory submissions help paint you as an expert in your field. If your site sells woodworking supplies, then articles about specific woodworking techniques or projects will help you gain a reputation as an expert, particularly if you submit articles to several directories. As your reputation grows, so will your site traffic. As an additional benefit, many of your readers may create links from their website to yours, meaning you end up with more back links than you put into the articles themselves.
2. Most article submission directories are free. In other words, a good article is cost-free (except for the labor of writing the articles) advertising that reaches a large audience.
3. If you are a writer and want to drive traffic to your blog, then writing and submitting articles will help you continue to improve your writing skills. Well-written blogs have much more long-term potential for traffic and a good reputation than do poorly written ones. Article submission is another way to polish your writing skills.
4. The extra traffic you pick up is targeted traffic. In other words, the links from your articles to your site will be clicked by people who already have an interest in the topic, so they’re primed for your site’s content as soon as they get there. You will also slowly but surely build up back links, improve your search engine results rankings, Alexa ranking, and Google PageRank.

As helpful and useful as article directory submission is, there are a few downsides to it.

1. Somebody has to write the articles, and they have to be good. Pounding out a few words between sips of coffee and sending them to a bunch of article submission sites won’t do it. Your articles don’t have to be long but they do have to contain decent content, not aggressive sales pitches or half-formed ideas filled with links.
2. Sending the exact same article to many article submission directories won’t do you much good. Why not? For one thing, many article directories require unique content and will kick off any non-original work, even if you’ve ripped it off from yourself. For another, if you manage to send the same article to ten directories and somehow come to dominate the first page of search engine results for a given search phrase, people who see that all top 10 (or even 5 of the top 10) slots are held by the same content on different sites will (fairly or not) conclude that you’re an article spammer.
3. Articles with poorly researched keywords won’t get read as much. Just as you optimize your web pages with keywords, so should you optimize your articles. It isn’t hard to learn how to do, but it does take some time. The Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal is a great way to find those keywords that are popular but for which there isn’t a lot of competition.

As an example, look at the first screen shot, where I have entered three woodworking terms into the entry box: woodworking tools, sanding blocks, and table saws. In the second screen shot you see just part of a long list of suggested keywords along with their relevance and search volume. At first glance it looks like the terms “woodworking hand tools,” “antique woodworking tools,” and “woodworking tool” could be good keyword candidates because they’re highly relevant, and the search volume is high, but not so high that I can’t work my way past the competition.

The moral of the story is: when you’re writing articles for submission to articles directories, ignore keywords at your peril. And, just FYI, the top five articles directories, according to vretoolbar.com and based on Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking are as follows: ezinearticles.com (Alexa=131; PR=6), articlesbase.com (Alexa=451; PR=5), buzzle.com (Alexa=1305; PR=5), goarticles.com (Alexa=1601; PR=6), and helium.com (Alexa=1872; PR=6).

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There’s an old adage in international marketing circles that says to go global, businesses really have to think local.

Apple recently launched its ubiquitously popular iPhone in China and after more than two months, it had shifted a mere 5,000 handsets. Whilst it is a product that will be unaffordable to many people in China, in a country of more than one billion people, most conservative forecasts of iPhone’s two-month sales figures prior to launch would be at least fifty times that.

Apple failed to consider a number of factors when launching the iPhone, namely Chinese consumers prefer not to sign long-term contracts, opting for charge cards instead, allowing a greater degree of flexibility for the user. This isn’t the only reason it hasn’t taken off, but it’s a factor that Apple really should have considered prior to launch – they should’ve properly researched the market.

At a micro level, it’s easier than ever for the smallest of home-built businesses to network and trade on the international arena. But the first step towards doing so is to build a fully localized presence in your key target markets– and the process begins with adapting your company website for each country you plan to tap into.

Like Apple should’ve done with the iPhone, you need to fully understand your target country, know what excites them and what, ultimately, is likely to encourage them to part with their hard-earned cash.

The only way businesses should communicate with their international markets is in the native language of the local consumers. Even though English is the most commonly spoken second language in the world, the fact remains that people prefer to communicate in their mother tongue. Furthermore, three quarters of the world’s population speak no English whatsoever.

Contrary to what many people think, fluency in a particular language doesn’t qualify someone to translate into it. To provide convincing translations, the translator requires first-hand knowledge of the culture of that language which is why most translators will only ever work INTO their native tongue from another language in which they are fluent.

Furthermore, many linguists will specialize in a particular subject – such as marketing, engineering or agriculture. If your company’s products or services involve highly technical terminology, you will probably want to consider checking with the translation company that they have suitable candidates with the right level of experience.

The important thing to remember when translating your website or any other marketing material is that what works in one country, might not translate the way you want it to in another. What’s clever and witty in one country, might be offensive in another. This is something only a native-speaking translator will know.

It’s also important to be wary of dialects within languages. If you translate your website into French, it doesn’t mean you can use it for all French-speaking countries.

In France, a ‘post-office box’ is a boîte postale, but in Belgium and Switzerland it’s a case postale. In France, ‘lunch’ is déjeuner, but in Belgium and Switzerland the word for ‘lunch’ is dîner which, incidentally, is the word for ‘evening meal’ in France. There is a whole host of linguistic nuances between the French, German and Portuguese dialects of the world. Even closer to home, the English in the US and the English in the UK are significantly different…not to the point of requiring an entirely different website, but certainly to the point of requiring significant care and attention when writing the English text.

When marketing internationally, the words ‘language’ and ‘local’ should always go hand-in-hand. Failing to do so can lead to a very costly global venture for businesses where funds may be limited.

About the Author

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of translation services provider Lingo24. With operations spanning four continents, Lingo24 translated 33 million words last year, covering over a hundred different language combinations. Their turnover in the twelve months to September 2009 was $6.1m USD.

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Press release websites can be one of many search engine optimization tactics for your website. They give you back links, and will reach people that you wouldn’t reach otherwise. There are a number of paid websites like PR.com, Marketwire, and PRweb. Just as an example, PRweb (shown in the first screen shot) offers two levels of visibility, high visibility, which costs $199 a year, or platinum, which costs $499 a year.

Are these services worth it? Only you can answer that. It will depend on your budget and on whether you think the investment will pay off in terms of higher ad revenue on your site or better conversion rates. Paid PR websites offer company profiles listed in various directories, plus paid and free press release distribution, and anchor text links.

When you write press releases, whether for paid or free PR sites, always write for your audience. Targeted traffic is what you want. Have you ever found blog posts with very provocative titles that turn out to be about something else completely? That’s not what you want to do with press releases. You have to be genuine. After all, if you have great content, the people who visit are more likely to stick around, bookmark your site, and generate lots of page views.

That said, use the anchor text and headline in a press release to focus on your targeted keywords. Use the headline to focus on one of your primary keywords, and use links sprinkled throughout the press release. If the PR site you’re using gives you a resource box, an “About Us” page, or a profile, these are all good places to provide a link to your home page. Use the links within the press release to link to more specific, relevant content.

A Few Free Fress Release Sites You Might Want To Check Out

Theopenpress.com (see second screen shot for some of their guidelines) is a free service as long as you follow their guidelines to the letter. They don’t edit free press releases, so if the ones you submit don’t meet the guidelines, they simply delete them.

PR Leap has free and paid services that kick out your press release where it can be seen by bloggers, consumers, and journalists, reaching all the main search engines, news websites, and newswires.

PR Inside is another free press release service. You create a free account to submit press releases. The home page is a repository for the latest press releases, which are not catagorized. It’s free, and no doubt has a lot of readers, but the right person seeing your press release appears to be largely a matter of coincidental timing, so this shouldn’t be your sole press release outlet.

i-newswire.com allows free press releases to be submitted as long as they aren’t spammy (“Buy Our Awesome Software Today!” and the like). Free press releases are not allowed to have any graphics or links in them. This site also has paid accounts, which offer more perks.

betanews.com is a tech-oriented news site that you can join for free and submit content to. It caters to IT professionals, programmers, site designers, computer security, and relevant legal issues.

If you’re interested in comparing several paid and free press release websites side by side, Star Reviews has such a comparison here.

The general idea behind using press release websites is that you should exhaust all the free possibilities before going to a fee-based service, unless you just have a generous budget to begin with, which most people don’t.

Perhaps the most important rule for writing press releases is to make them newsworthy. People and press release sites are good at filtering out the so-called press releases that are actually sales pitches. You might have something they’re interested in, but if their first impression is “spam press release,” they’ll scroll right on by it.

If you don’t know how to write a press release, or don’t think you’d do a good job, there are plenty of copywriters out there willing to do it for you. You may be able to find someone who has written for the very sites you want to send the release to.

Since most free press release sites require you to create an account, go ahead and register with several of them at once – at least 10 or 12. That way when you have your press release ready to go, all you have to do is copy and paste it properly for each press release site. Proofread press releases meticulously before submitting them. Some sites won’t let you change press releases after they’ve been submitted, and you don’t want to be the guy advising software buyers to “be perpared.”

If the site allows graphics, audio, or video, and if you have it, be sure to include it. Keep track of the places you submitted your press release to and whether or not people read it. You can do this in a spreadsheet if you’re the organized type, or you can use a simple pen and paper to keep track, but you need to do this so you’ll know which sites give you the most exposure for your time and effort.

Learn when to hold back. Once or twice a month is a good frequency with which to send out press releases. Once a day is overkill and people will rapidly come to recognize your press releases and ignore them. Once you find the sites that you like best, it’s a good idea to stagger your releases. If you submit to ten sites in one day, it will scroll off of ten sites pretty much at the same time. If you stagger your press releases, you’ll have them on at least one site at all times.

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Google Merchant Center is for those who want to submit products and sell them through Google. It used to be called Google Base. Google Merchant Center is where you upload feeds, check item status, and get information about how well your listings are doing. Your products uploaded to Google Merchant Center feed the searches that other people do for products they want to buy. For example, suppose someone wants to buy some dog toys. Starting at Google’s home page and clicking on “Shopping,” they’ll see a page like in the first screen shot. After typing “dog toys” into the search box and hitting enter they’ll be taken to a listings page like the one in the second screen shot.

Google Base still exists, but Google Merchant Center is optimized for product listings, and it is where Google will concentrate on adding features and improving the tools needed for uploading product listings and managing them. If you already used Google Base for listing products, your existing data feeds, FTP settings, and other items will still be there. Your account will have already been transferred to the Google Merchant Center, and you will sign in using the same account you used on Google Base. For most users the transfer will be transparent. There are, however, a small fraction of users who have been uploading product listings and other items on Google Base. They will need to sign on to Google Base to create new FTP settings to be able to upload non-product feeds to Google Base.

Google Merchant Center has a new dashboard page that contains an overview of your product listings, and feeds, and performance graphs, making them more accessible than before. There is now a blog you can visit, googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com for news and tips for using Google Merchant Center effectively.

If you sell items over Google Merchant Center, the Google Checkout is the secure web application that lets you process orders, which includes tasks like charging credit cards, specifying carriers and tracking numbers, canceling or refunding orders, reviewing payout summaries, and updating Google Checkout settings.

To process orders in the Google Merchant Center, you sign in, review the order, and charge the buyer’s credit card. Google will then authorize 100% of the order amount. You are required to charge the order within seven calendar days to be guaranteed the funds. After the order is charged, you automatically initiate the payout process. You have to ship the order within a specified time frame that you agreed to when you confirmed an order so that you will be eligible for the Google Checkout Payment Guarantee. You’ll notify the buyer that their order has shipped. There are ways of automating order processing using the Google Checkout API.

If you sell services or goods that don’t need to be physically shipped, you have to mark the order “shipped” in order to send the buyer a confirmation email. Some transactions involving digital goods might not be covered under the Google Checkout Payment Guarantee policy.

In processing orders, Google uses automatic fraud risk modeling to alert them to possible fraudulent transactions. If a fraudulent transaction is detected, it is immediately cancelled. In order to protect you and other Google Merchants, active orders from the same fraudulent credit card will be cancelled. Google Merchant also uses industry sources like worldwide fraud blacklists to block fraudulent shoppers from using Google Checkout in the first place.

For example, if Google detects suspicious activity related to one of your orders, it will flag the order with “customer review in progress” status and will perform fraud detection tests on the order to keep your risk as low as possible. Google usually completes their reviews in four to six hours.

You, as a Google Merchant, are able to review credit verification information on each order you receive. You just sign in to Google Checkout, click the order in which you are interested in your “orders” box. At that time buyer credit verification information appears below the buyer’s shipping information, including whether the transaction is covered by the Payment Guarantee, the Address Verification System check, the Card Verification Value, or CVV, and Account age shows how long the buyer has been qualified to buy through Google Checkout. If you are concerned about an order, you do have the option to cancel it to avoid the risk of a fraudulent transaction.

Fees for Google Merchants vary by the dollar amount of monthly sales and are reset every month on the 5th. For monthly sales under $3,000, the fee is 2.9% + 30 cents / transaction. For sales between $3,000 and $9,999.99, the fee is 2.5% + 30 cents / transaction. For $10,000 to $99,999.99 per month, the fee is 2.2% + 30 cents / transaction, and for sales over $100,000 per month, the fees are 1.9% + 30 cents / transaction. Orders that ship to buyers in a country different from the Merchant’s country will also have an additional 1% processing fee.

If you plan to sell apps in the Android phone market, your transaction fee is 30% of the application price. In other words, if you sell your app for $10.00, your transaction fee is $3.00 and your payment will be $7.00.

Google Merchant Center is an answer to those who want to sell products through Google Products searches. This can be a real sales booster for those who have shops online at places like Etsy. Google Merchant Center is now split apart from Google Base, with the goal of making online product searches more fruitful and online sales easier for merchants and shoppers.

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Google Website Optimizer is a free Google tool made to help you get better conversions on your website, whether that means signing up for your email newsletter, or buying your product or service. You test different versions of your content to determine what is going to attract the most users and get them to stick around long enough to convert. Suppose you are using click tracking and conversion tracking to try to figure out what visitors are doing when they visit your pages. Maybe you’re getting visitors a-plenty but very few buy products or subscribe to your newsletter. This is where Website Optimizer helps.

You choose what parts of a web page you want to test, whether it’s promo text, a headline, or whatever. Then Google runs an experiment on part of your site’s traffic in an attempt to figure out which content on your site is most attractive to visitors. Once Google has amassed enough data on your site’s experiment, they will send you reports and suggestions for optimizing your site.

If you’re not the webmaster or administrator, you will need that person’s help to put the experiment code onto your site to enable the optimizer to track traffic to different versions of the page. You’ll end up with two kinds of reports from Google. One is a combination report and the other is a page section report.

The combination report shows results for all page combinations that were made from the variations in page section you created when you set up your experiment. This report will show how well a particular combination does compared with the original site and other combinations. The estimated range of conversion rates gives you the main snapshot of overall performance. You’ll get the actual numbers, in case you’re into hard statistics, but you’ll also get simple bar graphs that show red for underperforming content and green for better performing content.

Google advises that website owners not make major site changes unless a large quantity of data has been collected, because the more data gathered, the more likely the results are to be accurate.

Your page section report is focused on the variations on each page section that performed best. It is possible, however, that by your simply picking the best-performing variations may not be optimal, since there may be interactions among certain variations that the algorithm cannot capture. In other words, the page section report is not a magic bullet that you can use to get rid of all the bad pages and implement all the good pages, so that suddenly your site will take off.

You’ll also get relevance ratings on each page, which tell how much impact a particular page has on the test that Google Website Optimizer is running. The higher the number for a given page, the more important that page is for getting conversions.

Conducting Tests With Website Optimizer

When you go to the Google Website Optimizer page, you’ll see something like what is in the screen shot. When you click on the “+” sign, you’ll be taken to a page where you’ll be asked what type of testing you want done: A/B testing or Multivariate Test (See second screen shot.). A/B testing is simpler and works best with new sites and sites that don’t get much traffic. The multivariate tests let you test multiple sections of a page simultaneously, such as the headline, a picture, or promotional text. In order for multivariate tests to work well, they need to be done on sites that get plenty of traffic.

Suppose you have more than one conversion page. Google Website Optimizer tests can track more than one goal. All you do is place the conversion code from your experiment on each of your conversion pages. The caveat is, Website Optimizer only reports one conversion per visitor. Suppose you get a really enthusiastic visitor who buys something and signs up for your newsletter. Website Optimizer will only count one conversion. That way you see which test page gets the most conversions regardless of conversion type.

If you’re doing an A/B test, you’ll make different page versions. They can be totally different if you want. The Optimizer will test their performance to see which one works best. If you’re doing multivariate testing, however, you won’t be able to change the layout of the different sections on your page.

If you already use Google Analytics, you can use Analytics and the Website Optimizer together. If you have customized your tracking scripts for Google Analytics, you’ll most likely want to customize your website optimizer tracking scripts in the same manner. The help center for Google Analytics will show you how to change your Website Optimizer tracking scripts.

There are a few other things to know before using the Google Website Optimizer. For one thing, you have to set up  a Google AdWords account. This does not mean that you have to create an AdWords campaign or buy advertising. It’s just that the Optimizer is part of the AdWords interface. You can set up AdWords with a few keywords and some random ad text. When you get to the part where you enter payment details, leave it empty. At this point, you’ll have an AdWords account and will be able to do Website Optimizer tests without buying AdWords ads.

With the A/B test, you are not limited to only two test versions of a page. You can test almost an unlimited number of versions at the same time. The actual number will depend on how many sites you’ve already set up Google Analytics on. All you do is specify more alternative pages when you set up the test. And though you technically can test very different web page designs at the same time, this isn’t recommended. Suppose one page clearly out-performs the other. You won’t know what caused the big change: was it a graphic? headline? something else? You won’t know what to do to other pages to get the same jump in performance. If you take the time to test one-by-one changes, you can see which changes are going to make the most difference.

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Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google to help new and experienced webmaster check on their indexing and raise the visibility of their website(s). Among the tools in Google Webmaster are those that check the crawl rate, list sites linking to the user’s site, determine what keyword searches on Google bring the user’s site into the search engine results pages (SERPs), determine click-through rates of SERP listings, show statistics on how Google indexes the user’s site, create a robots.txt file and submit sitemaps.

The range of tools offered on Google Webmaster Tools can help webmasters significantly raise their profile by search engine optimization (SEO), and traffic generation. To make Google Webmaster Tools work with your particular site, you have to install a snippet of code into your site. Google Webmaster Tools make a great partner to Google Website Optimizer as far as getting your website as prominent as possible.

If, for example, your site has a page in which you offer your visitor some free report or software in exchange for their email address, you could use the Google Website Optimizer to test two versions of that page to see which one converts best. This lets you streamline your SEO efforts and cuts back on some of the trial and error part of it.

Google Webmaster tools was launched in 2006 to help webmasters create sites that are friendlier to search engines. There is also the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program. It lets domain hosts use Google’s application programming interface (API) to get their customers up and running with Google Webmaster Tools.

There are many steps you can take to help Google find, rank, and index your site.  They can be classified as Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines.

Design and Content Guidelines

Every site needs a clear hierarchy and text links. Each page needs to be reachable from one or more static text links.
The sitemap should give visitors links to the important pages of your site.

• Make sure your site has good content, and make sure pages accurately describe the content.
• Think of the words visitors probably type to find your site and include those actual words in your content.
• Important names, links, or content should be in written text rather than pictures. the Google crawler doesn’t “see” text contained in images.
• Have <title> elements and ALT attributes that are accurate and descriptive.
• Look for dead links and improper HTML
• Keep links per page under 100
• Give images descriptive filenames and surround them with descriptive text.
• Text embedded in images is “invisible” to the image bot.

Technical Guidelines

• Try out a browser like Lynx to look at your site. Most search crawlers “see” your site like Lynx does. If your site is overloaded with JavaScript, session IDs, Flash, or cookies, the search crawlers may not find your site very navigable.
• Check that your web server allows the “if-modified-since” HTTP header. It lets the web server tell Google whether or not content has changed since the last crawl. It saves you valuable bandwidth and overhead.
• Make sure the robots.txt file on your server is current so it doesn’t block the crawler. You can test your robots.txt file using the robots.txt analysis tool in Webmaster Tools.
• Check your site’s appearance in different browsers to familiarize yourself with what your visitors might see.

Quality Guidelines: A List of Don’ts

Before listing the specific practices to avoid, don’t assume that just because a particular practice isn’t listed that it’s OK. If you’re using trickery like registering common misspellings of popular sites, Google might well penalize you in the search engine results pages (SERPs) or ban you altogether. Ultimately, looking for loopholes and technicalities may not serve you well.

• Don’t use cheap tricks that might improve your SERP ranking. How would you feel about your competitor doing the same?
• Don’t participate in paid link systems or link farms in an attempt to increase your SERP ranking or PageRank. Avoid
• links to “bad neighborhoods” on the web. It could adversely affect your ranking.
• Don’t use hidden text, hidden links, “cloaking” practices or questionable redirects.
• Don’t use automated queries with Google
• Don’t cram pages with keywords that aren’t relevant to your site.
• Don’t create a bunch of pages, domains, or subdomains that all have basically the same content.
• Don’t create pages with malware like viruses, trojans, and phishing.
• Don’t make doorway pages just for the search engines that have no real content.

When you believe your site is ready and follows all the design, technical, and quality guidelines (especially the latter), then you can submit it to Google at www.google.com/addurl.html. You should also use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. A sitemap helps Google cover your webpages more effectively.

Starting up a website can be hard work, particularly if you’re new to the world of style sheets and HTML. It isn’t enough to simply create a great looking site filled with interesting content and wait for people to discover it. Particularly if you have an e-commerce site or a blog from which you want to earn money, you need to make your site as friendly as possible to search engines. Google Webmaster Tools are specifically for this purpose: getting your website the notice that it deserves.

While it may be tempting to take shortcuts like buying a bunch of back links, it can be bad for your site in the long run. The best way to build your site’s following is to submit a sitemap, and follow the guidelines listed above for proper ways to promote your site. And, of course, the ultimate “tool” for getting your site popular and keeping it popular is to provide fresh, rich content on a regular basis.

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Statistics from early 2009 claimed that iPhone users accounted for some two-thirds of all mobile browsers. Now, while that particular statistic has been questioned and debated, there is little doubt about the effect of the iPhone on mobile browsing. The advent of the Google Android phone will only make mobile web surfing more mainstream than it already is. When it comes to optimizing your web content for Google Mobile Search, there are a number of things you can do.

Some people say that you should make a mobile version of your regular website, while other say that you should optimize your existing site for mobile browsing. But whether it’s your normal site optimized for mobile, or a new mobile version of your site, there are steps that anyone wanting to rank high in mobile search results should do.

Step one is to make sure that your website is mobile compliant. This means that your pages are formatted for people browsing the web with their phones. Mobile browsing implies a lack of time to complete a search. Perhaps instead of mobile “browsing,” the term should be something more like mobile “hunting.” But since mobile users are also short on screen space, the pages should be designed to cater to this reality. Do you know what your site looks like on a mobile web platform? If not, do a mobile search to see. You’ll notice that a lot of your site’s goodies are unavailable. But this makes some choices all the more obvious.

• The most important information on your site should be at the top.
• Your site needs to be easily navigable from a mobile platform.
• Font sizes need to be usable
• Your page should look attractive on a mobile phone browser screen.

If these things don’t check out, then you need to make some changes to get your site ready for what many experts see as the coming tsunami of mobile searching.

Why should you go to the trouble? The current industries seeing the most growth in mobile searches are business, entertainment, and travel. According to the Mobile Optimization Association, mobile searchers tend to be young, high income professionals with promising careers, or, to put it more bluntly, people with more disposable income than usual.

Web pages for mobile browsing are created in XHTML or WML. They must be W3C compliant. W3C stands for “World Wide Web Consortium” and sets guidelines about how a web page should be structured. They publish best practice design principles for webmasters. Without going into the nuts and bolts of getting your site to be W3C compliant, you should know that there is a W3C Code Validator at http://validator.w3.org/ that anyone can use to ensure that your site renders on all the major browsers and platforms in a similar manner.

Before deciding exactly how to optimize your site for mobile, there are a few things to know about the people who use mobile browsers. First of all, they tend to use the same search engine on their mobile device as they use on their PC. Even though there are 234 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., only 10% use mobile search (which is still 23 million people). Adoption rates of mobile browsing are much higher in Europe. Finally, mobile searchers are goal-oriented: they want to get the info and get out. They don’t tend to browse or surf.

A few general practices for optimizing your site are:

• Keep your content brief
• Use brief, custom titles
• For mobile stats, check out MMetrics.com
• Mobile sites need to be as simple as possible to ensure compatibility among all mobile browser software.

There are two main opinions when it comes to optimizing your site for Google Mobile: 1) Optimize your existing site; and 2) Create a new mobile-only site. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, which we’ll go into next.

Optimization of an Existing Site

If you want to optimize your existing site, make sure that in mobile search your pages are independent of device. Search results on mobile devices use a different data set than web browsers do.

Use external CSS style sheets because they limit how much code has to be downloaded and are helpful in scaling up or down for different screen sizes. You can have a separate style sheet for hand held devices.

Use text links rather than images. Images may not download at all and will increase page loading times. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for optimizing an existing site for mobile search.

• Put navigation buttons below content. People don’t like having to scroll down every time a page loads.
• Don’t use flash or frames on your pages. They’ll either be unsupported by mobile browsers, or they’ll slow everything down.
• Avoid pop-ups
• Advertise your site as mobile compatible and get links from directories and mobile sites
• Put the prefix tel: before a phone number in a link so that the mobile device can call it with one click
• Put your business into your Google Local index so it will automatically be listed in Google Voice Local Search.
• Since most users don’t scroll on mobile browsers, ranking in the top three results is a very big deal, so do what you can to optimize your site in the result listings
• Google allows you to submit a separate XML sitemap for mobile. It’s a good idea.
• Optimize for mobile ASAP to get into the results early on. One report says that a search for “McDonalds” on Google mobile has a mobile-friendly page from the BBC as the top result.

Creating a Mobile-Only Site

The argument for doing this is that mobile users are goal oriented rather than simply browsing. Some sites have taken to using a subdomain approach rather than using a separate domain like .mobi. That would give your mobile site a name like mobile.yourdomainname.com. It allows you to retain the “brand” of the top level domain rather than having to rebuild branding for a new domain name. Here are some tips for optimizing a mobile-only version of your site.

• Information should be three clicks or less from the home page.
• Organize navigation logically for mobile users: place likely popular buttons first, using text links. Put navigation buttons underneath content to keep users from having to scroll each time they click a new page.
• Make word links short to keep them from taking up too much valuable screen space.
• Have a sitemap for your mobile-only page.
• Use optimized heading tags, just like with your standard web pages.
• Test and validate your mobile site using simulators like Skweezer and validators like .Mobi Validator or W3C Mobile Web Validator.
• Have a link-building campaign specifically for your mobile-only website.
• Have social book marking and tagging functions on your mobile site.
• Use the tel: prefix in phone number links so users can call the phone number in one click.

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