1. Content

Good content is what people are looking for whenever they search on Google. If your page is optimised for a certain keyword, but your content is not up to scratch, then you will still be faced with a high bounce rate which I will touch on further down in the article. Your content needs to be good quality and also unique. Duplicate content, as we all know, is something that Google hates and you do not want to see your site get penalised for this.

2. Title Tags

Title tags are usually the first thing people will see when they are looking at the results pages and it also draws people to click on your site. A title tag for a SEO website that just has your company name in e.g. “seoexample.com” will not get as many clicks as a title tag like “Search engine marketing company – seoexample.com”. Some general rules for your title tag is to keep it under 70 characters to avoid it being cut off with “…..…” in the results page.  Basically, your title tag should consist of your brand name and keyword, with the keyword coming in front of your brand name.

3. User Friendliness

The layout and usability of your site is a critical factor to keep in mind. If a user has come to your site and they can’t find their way around it, they will leave and try to find a better site that is more user friendly. If a person leaves your site because of this, then you will have an increased bounce rate and low time on site figure in your analytics. This will give Google the impression that your site is not really all that valuable. Try to make sure your sites layout is easy to follow by adding breadcrumbs and good menus that won’t leave visitors frustrated.

4. URL Structure

Something that looks messy and also gets frowned upon by the search engines is a long and untidy URL structure.  A URL structure like this www.url.com/jshyh%%20abcdefg66%%, will lose every time when compared to www.url.com/neat-url. Having a keyword in the URL will increase your CTR which automatically tells Google that the page is important for the keyword the user searched for – and hence helps you in the rankings. This is also effective for when you are link building and somebody offers you a link to, what I call, a naked link. This is a link that is just the URL of the page and no specific anchor text. Your link will still be of some value if the keyword is present in the URL.

5. Internal Linking

The best place to start a link building campaign is at your very own site. Internal links are the easiest links you will ever gain. These links will help you mostly with ranking deeper pages on your website, or just getting them noticed in the first place. In link building, you may find it extremely hard to get somebody to link to a deep page so internal links should be your first option.

6. H1 Tags

A great title tag coupled with a H1 heading that is just is good will give you excellent results. The H1 heading is the next thing people will see once they click through to your website. Even though people only look at this H1 for probably 2 seconds, the search engines look at it for a much longer time.  A page about vehicle tracking should basically have the words vehicle tracking in the H1 heading as well. This might seem like common sense, but many sites have overlooked this in the past or failed to create a suitable and effective one for their pages. It is bestthat your H1 and title tags differ slightly, even though they have the same keyword.

There are many other factors which Google could take into account, but I feel that these are the most important to start off with for your website.

Article credits: Darren Vrede

Webmasters are now looking over their shoulders more than ever. They can no longer get away with copying other writers’ content then publish them in their websites as original works. Google sent out Panda also known as Farmer to stop content farmers from continuing their dirty copycat game.

It is a fact that the web is populated by what is termed as “content farms.” These are pages containing text that may be relevant to a searcher’s query but when the searcher views the page, it’s all fluff and copied material. With Google Panda’s new algorithm, Google is able to identify which sites and pages are of low-quality and not relevant to the search at all.

Google Panda’s latest update targets not only large websites that get more traffic and have more links but also the smaller websites. The company only wants high-quality results when responding to a query and not a list of low-quality websites and pages. In the past, some websites received high rankings even if their sites only contained fluff and plagiarized material.

So what does this mean for website owners? It’s time to really get serious and produce only original content. With Google Panda patrolling the web, website owners must focus on putting out content that is unique to its site yet relevant to its target audience. Website content should not only be informative and useful but it should contain information that is true and well researched, not well copied.

If you are a website owner who produces a lot of content-based pages, check the keyword strategy of your site and make sure whatever you put out aligns with this strategy. Make it your goal to create content that your website visitors can share in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media channels.

Remember, when you start writing content for your website, the quality of what you put out is more important than the quantity of articles found in your site. Google’s goal keeps the searcher’s positive web experience in mind. It wants the searcher to only find sites with relevant, original and trustworthy content. If you have made it a habit to copy other people work, beware! There’s a Panda watching!

Article credits: Darren writes on many topics including technology, free people search, social media and social networks.

Below are three elements of social media campaigns that could help establish your online channel.

Customer Interaction

Social media promotes a two-way interaction between you and your customer. Therefore, doing it right will gain you a more engaged audience; while doing it wrong can damage your brand. Keep this in mind: customer and non-customers can answer easily and in a very public forum in social media. Hence, it’s recommended that you identify your most loyal customers. Feel free to ask for their suggestions about the most ideal content that you could share in your social media campaign.

Maintaining Online Presence

Initially, having a dedicated Facebook or Twitter page for their brand makes business owners excited. But they didn’t know is that social media campaigns require constant update. Although it can become a chore, a regular update is a surefire way of attracting your audience’s attention. Social media campaigns are not an instant and a winning marketing solution. It will take weeks, months or even years to build up an established and loyal fan base who are really interested with your brand. If you can’t devote enough man-hour time per week on your social media campaigns, the best thing you can do is focus on just one channel first. Additionally, plan what content you’re going to share in advance.

Informative and Entertaining Content

While the goal of creating social media campaigns is to attract customers and revenue, the content that you’ll generate should not depend solely on that objective. People choose to be a fan or a follower of a particular brand in order to be informed or entertained. Using social media only to highlight your business’ latest deal is impractical for acquiring loyal, interested and relevant followers. Unless you share informative and entertaining content to your fan base, you have a slim chance of engaging your target market.

Social media enables owners of small businesses to interact with their clients at a very personal level. However, reaching your target market and keeping them hooked to your products is not an easy task. Bottom line: knowing your customers’ needs and how you can deliver it is definitely a rewarding and cost effective addition to your business’ marketing strategy.

Article credits: Maricris Libo-on

To start with, a long tail link building strategy centers around driving a small share of link volume per page on a site, while using 3+ phrases as the anchors. The other element of my long tail link building strategy, is that instead of driving links into the top level pages, I would drive them to tighter match, sub category pages.

How Do I Work on the Long Tail Links?

So take for example an affiliate site that deals with Insurance. Typically, you would have some top level categories like:

• Car Insurance
• House / Home insurance
• Cheap Insurance
• Pet insurance
• Health Insurance

The typical traditional exact match anchor link building.

However, my long tail link building is more about building out each one of those categories into sub categories.

A very small sub set of Car Insurance would look like:

• Car insurance for Young Drivers
• Car Insurance for women
• Compare Car Insurance

I would then use google suggest to gauge the really long tail versions of queries that match these pages:

• car insurance quotes for young drivers
• car insurance quotes for your drivers us
• car insurance quotes for your drivers online
• car insurance quotes for your drivers cheap

Why The Long Tail Link Build?

I have 5 reasons for building links in this manner:

1. It look more natural than exact match anchors
2. It’s easier to get these links than your typical one word or two word anchors
3. You use googles own data to pick out long tails
4. There are knock on effects to the rest of the site
5. You build a link profile that is varied, and strengthen the base of the site

Effects Of Long Tail Links

But to give you a more detailed view, when we build links to long tail phrases, we talk about the 4 fold effect:

Effect one

Directly improving the pages relative import to Search Engines for the phrase and its minor variations for that Key phrase, thus ranking well for long tail keywords.

Two

Indirectly affecting that pages ( the long tail page) importance for shorter versions of the hyper link – so where “car insurance quotes for young drivers” is the anchor, both, Car insurance Quotes, and Young Drivers, get affected as other possible key phrase combinations and rank for them, such as “Car Insurance for drivers”, Insurance for Young drivers”.

Three

The page gains authority and can potentially rank for some of the related content on the page, for example if that page had a section: “Risks for Young Drivers”, chances are that the sites ranking for that phrase may go up, and as a result should be correlated with rankings / traffic before the link building was carried out

Four

Over all site authority goes up. As we build a large number of long tail links to deeper content, this has a pyramid effect, where the high base is holding up the tip (in this case the home page) which strengthens for its own content, which then causes a flow of strength through the whole site

Proving the value of a Long Tail Link Building Strategy

Convincing clients used to traditional link building to use this approach may or may not be easy, but you still need to justify that it works. The best way to do this is to:

Take two time points:

• Before the strategy started
• At the end (or current point in) of the campaign

Next, isolate all the traffic to your end target pages from search engines and extract all the referring keywords to those pages for each given time point.

Now compare three things:

1. Volume of traffic, then and now

2. Keywords variations driving traffic, then and now

3. Keywords targeted, vs kws NOT targeted, then and now

SEO Understanding

If you have a good or even decent understanding of search engine optimization, then creating a viral marketing campaign will definitely be easier for you. The SEO principles of “link baiting” are similar to what you should use when putting together your viral content. If you don’t know much about SEO, it would be worth your time to devote a few hours to research online.

Search for Trends

The most important thing about a viral campaign is discovering an idea that will actually go viral! In most cases, trends are the best thing to go for as they will gain lots of fast interest. Don’t just go for the first trend that comes to mind; instead, do some brainstorming for an idea that actually involves your product or campaign, and try to determine which niche trends are most likely to go viral.

If you are unable to come up with any trends or ideas that are not already being used by others, then simply choose something which is popular and has proven successful among your targeted market. Make sure that you choose a topic which is something that you know about or are interested enough in to devote hours to researching. As long as you can take a popular idea and change it to be original and more appealing to the public, you can go with whatever trend you choose.

Be First

Although it is possible to take a currently trending idea and make it original enough to stand out as your own, being first always gives you a head-up on the competition. For instance, if you are marketing beauty products, then you might do well to watch the news for any updates related to your product; as soon as something shows up, have an original and informative post written about it, then publish it like crazy using the social networking system. Although you didn’t come up with the original news story, by taking it and changing it into your own before displaying it to the public before the competition, you are putting yourself first as the company that readers will remember.

Always Make Sure it Shares

If you want your content to become viral, then it is imperative that readers will be able to share it with ease. No matter how exciting I find an article, I’m not going to take an hour trying to figure out how to share it with my friends. As the marketing leader, it is your job to make sure that those who read your content can pass it onto their friends with as much ease as possible; if you don’t, your campaign will be what is hurting. By taking the time to understand and implement the many ways of sharing content, you’ll be on the path to success in no time at all.

All Roads Lead Home

When you are trying to make content go viral, remember that you are trying to market or gain interest in a product. No matter how popular your trend, it won’t get you far if it doesn’t lead customers back to you. Every time you create an article, make sure it has a link that leads back to your home page.

Be Patient

Although it can be easy to throw a fit if your content isn’t viral the day you put it online, don’t allow yourself to fall into this trap. Many marketing campaigns take a long time to get going and it make take months after publishing before your content starts trending online. Do what you can to get exposure from the start, and then try to be patient during the long wait.

Try as hard as you might, some viral campaigns just don’t happen to go viral; however, by implementing the ideas in this article, you are definitely pointing your marketing campaign in the right direction. Remember: Devote the time into research, go for an idea that seems like an easy trend, link your content to a main page, and make it easy to share.

Author bio: Alex Petrovic, Advanced SEO strategist – Dejan SEO company.

The key is knowing how to obtain all of this vital information without having to hire a PR firm, an FBI agent, or an undercover spy. Luckily for us, all we need are a few online tools to find out exactly how are competitors are running the show.

1. SpyFu.com

The first tool you should add to your arsenal can be found at SpyFu.com.

SpyFu.com is the long-awaited sequel to Googspy.com, a free competitive research tool that allows you to research your competitors marketing campaigns. SpyFu.com, however, stands head and shoulders above its predecessor, providing over twenty times more data.

This website monitors nearly 4.5 million domains, showing you exactly how much your competitors are paying for search advertising on a daily basis, the total number of clicks they are receiving, and their average ad position. SpyFu also reveals the exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for in organic search and who their top 100 competitors are.

2. Internet Archive

The next spy tool will enable you to explore a website’s history and how it has changed over time. You can find all of this information at http://www.archive.org.

Many of you have probably heard of the Internet Archive. However, you may not realize that it is an extremely powerful tool for spying on your competition. Using this free and simple tool you can discover:

- How often a website has changed their copy?

- Whether or not a website is split testing? (This alone could show you years of data on what type of copy works best. Testing your own website copy is extremely important, but you should also be checking to see what your competitors are doing as well. You can learn volumes just by looking at what their sales page looks like over time.)

- Find out if your competitors have made any big changes in their offer, including price, bonuses, guarantees, etc.
If you’re just looking to have a little fun, then look up Google in the Internet Archive and see what their site looked like in 1998. You see, competitive intelligence can informative as well as amusing!

Next up is one of my favorite search tools.

3. Search Status

Search Status is one of the best SEO tools around. It is a plug-in for the Firefox browser so it comes completely free of charge.

You can use this tool to:

- Highlight no-follow links

- View any page in Archive.org

- Show all Whois information. This is especially useful if you want to find out who the owner of a website is. (great for setting up a joint venture)

- Show robots.txt file. This feature will show you exactly which pages and directories a website does not want listed because they want to keep them private. (can be quite informative.)

- Show Indexed Pages. Find out exactly how many pages a website has listed in all 3 major search engines.

- Show Backward Links. This feature will show you exactly which sites are linking to the current page or website that you are visiting. This is especially useful for finding link partners and affiliates.

The next tool will allow you to find out which web host a company is using. This information can be found at:

4. WhoIs.sc

Once you arrive at this site, you simply enter the domain name into the search box. You will then be taken to a page that will give you a wide variety of information on that domain. Scroll down to where it says “name servers”. In this column you will often find the exact URL for the web hosting company they use.

Our final spy tool comes straight from Google, allowing you to keep full-time tabs on the Internet without the hours of research it would normally require.

For many years, companies paid lots of money to PR firms to provide news items and updates on their competitors, often referred to as a “clipping service”. With the onset of the Internet, these tools are now automated and free.

One such tool is:

5. Google Alerts

Using Google Alerts, you can easily monitor what is being said online about you, your company, your products, and your competition.

Google alerts shows results from the Web, Google News, and Google Blog search. All of this competitive intelligence can then be sent directly to your email inbox.

Simply enter the terms you want to track and Google will scour the Internet on a daily basis to keep you updated on your particular industry.

These alerts can notify you of when new links start pointing to your website, when someone uses one of your articles, or when the blogosphere mentions your name.

If you want to keep up with your competitor, simply enter the company name or their product and you can begin tracking what people are saying online about them.

Google Alerts is an indispensable tool for market research. Start creating your own Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts.

Keep in mind, however, that these are only tools. Some of the most powerful competitive intelligence comes from actually surfing around your marketplace, visiting the forums, and buying your competitors’ products. This is the only way to get a complete picture of what is happening in your industry.

If you want to win in your marketplace, it’s time you go undercover.

It is the intent of this article to teach an effective method of keyword selection that will enable you to land more keywords on the first page with less work.

Getting Started: Know the Site

To create a great keyword list, you will need to know your website backwards and forwards. You should know what the site features, and just as importantly, you should know what it doesn’t feature.

The first step is to brainstorm a list of somewhat generic keywords. For example, if you are a shoe store in Poughkeepsie, the temptation will arise to try and rank number 1 for the term “shoes.” Well, that’s a start, but ranking for the word “shoes” is probably aiming a little too high for a mom and pop shop in Upstate New York, which is why it’s very important that you know the site well enough to come up with a good list of pseudo-generic “modifiers” for your keyword:

- Location (Poughkeepsie shoes, shoes upstate New York, shoes 12601)
- Price (cheap shoes, affordable shoes, quality shoes, comfortable shoes etc)
- Types (running shoes, walking shoes, jogging shoes etc)
- Industry specific (anti-pronation shoes)

Lengthening the List

At this point you should have a good list of pseudo-generic keywords. The next step is lengthening that list using your favorite Keyword tool (I will be using Yahoo! in this example).

Each time you plug a keyword into your tool of choice, it will return the number of searches conducted for that term over a given period of time. It will also suggest keywords from the tool’s database that are similar to the one you entered.

The basic idea now is to go through the list returned by the keyword tool and copy any and all similar terms as well as their corresponding search values, which relate directly to the site you’re optimizing. Then, paste them to a spreadsheet program so that they can be further edited later.

Once you have copied and pasted, just go through the list row by row. Delete keywords that don’t have to do with the website you’re optimizing (which is why it’s important to know what the site doesn’t feature) and repeat with the next pseudo-generic keyword on your list. The idea is to identify as many keywords as possible.

Narrowing the List

So you have a long keyword list; it’s time to narrow it down. I narrow my lists by deciding if the potential gain for a keyword is relative to the competition. In order to make that decision, I need to know three variables:

1. The number of searches on a particular keyword (already got those from Yahoo!)

2. The Amount of Competition (I’ll show you how to find your competition in this section.)

3. Will the keyword lead to conversions (this is up to you)

Below is a method for thoroughly determining competition for various keywords:

1. Do a search for one of your keywords

2. On the first SERP find the last listing with the keyword in the title tag that is either a homepage of any kind or is a sub-page which is not associated with a domain whose Pagerank is greater than 6. (This is the page you will need to beat, if one does not exist, ranking will generally be easier)

3. Find out how many unique links with the keyword in the anchor text whose linking page has a Pagerank of 1 or higher for the competitor (This is how many quality backlinks you’ll need to acquire)

The aforementioned is a meticulous method for determining the competition for all of your keywords, and unless you’re planning on building a tool that will automate this process, I would suggest taking a more general approach by using advanced search strings in the search engine of your choice.

The technique that I am about to demonstrate uses the following string:
intitle:”Keyword Phrase” inanchor:”Keyword Phrase”
This string will return the total number of pages with, largely, the two greatest factors contributing to ranking for a keyword:

- Having the keyword in the page title
- Having the keyword in anchor text pointing to the page

It’s a down and dirty method for assessing competition. This is how it’s done:

1. Go to http://www.startlaunch.com/research.

2. Copy your list of keywords into the box, click “submit”.

3. Click on each link.

4. Find and copy the number of pages that the search engine returns for this query from the top right of the SERPs to a new column next to the corresponding keyword in your keyword list spreadsheet (this is your competition).

5. In another new column, divide the number of competitors by the number of monthly searches for each keyword.

6. Sort the table from low to high (ascending) using that column.

What you have done is created a ratio of competitors to searches. When determining competition, you generally want the keyword to be searched on more times than there are competitors for that word. So the closer the ratio is to 0, the better the keyword.

These techniques will point out which terms have the most competition, but competition alone should not dictate which words make the final list.

Keyword Layout

Remember when selecting keywords: words on a higher competitive level should be placed on pages that will receive deep links in groups of 2 or 3 where all of the keywords are very similar like:

- Running shoes, Shoes for running and buy running shoes online
- Web design in Atlanta, Atlanta Georgia web design, Atlanta web site design

This way, you won’t have to remove highly competitive, but potentially lucrative terms from your list, provided that you make a concerted effort to perform link-building for the pages on which those terms reside.

For smaller terms, in my opinion, the more the merrier. They can be given their own pages or be mentioned on other highly trusted pages of your site.

That’s it. You should have all the information you need to select a strategically viable keyword list. Remember, keyword research is the cornerstone of a successful SEO campaign. Knowing the competition for your keywords will aid you in site layout, as well as focusing effort on SEO only where it is necessary. Ultimately, it will make your optimization process more efficient, allowing your sites to rank for more keywords with less work, which is a goal that all SEOs strive to attain.

However, the truth of the matter in nearly all cases is that most of these products are expensive and endorsed solely by the gurus who get paid for every item they sell. Real testimonials are rare and the pressure you are under to purchase these products is enormous.

Let’s make a two-fold pact for now:

One – We will not be swept away by all the hype on the Internet.

Two – We will primarily use tried and tested, successful Internet marketing techniques that won’t cost us a fortune to use.

To help you off to the right start in launching your own cost-effective marketing strategy, I want to share some valuable ideas that I’ve used to grow my own business. These marketing concepts are genuinely affordable, truly simple to implement and have honestly helped me gain generous exposure, which has resulted in new clients and increased sales. My top fifteen favorite effective and inexpensive Internet marketing tactics are listed below:

1. Article submissions to online e-zines, directories and newsgroups, and off-line magazines and newspapers (don’t worry about the duplicate content issues … just get as many one-way links to your site as possible to boost your Search Engine ranking). Writing and submitting free reprint articles is a resourceful way to generate increased exposure and will drive traffic to your web site.

2. Create and market your own affiliate program using low cost tools on the Internet, which incidentally, there are numerous tools on the web that are very affordable. Offer affiliates your articles for reprint and allow them to use their affiliate link in your byline. But don’t stop there … submit your program to affiliate program directories so that prospects can find it readily.

3. Write and submit press releases to both paid and free press release sites. Let your target audience know about your company, new products and services you’re offering and also about special company events or promotions. If you’re concerned that perhaps your writing talents are a bit rough yet, hire a ghostwriter to draft your release for you. And yes, there are many talented, professional writers who work on a freelance basis and accept both one-time and ongoing projects at an affordable rate.

4. Register with and actively participate in forums that target your ideal client or customer. Check in at least once a week and offer helpful advice to other forum participants seeking assistance and information in your area of expertise. Be sure to craft and use a compelling signature that will get added to your posts. With just a small investment of your time, you can establish yourself as an expert within your industry, which can result in generous exposure.

5. Offer legitimate comments and articles to blog owners who cover your topic area and target your audience. Create solid and productive relationships, offering to make blog postings for them in return for a byline with a live link to your site. The fact that you’re willing to offer blog owners something of value upfront will make them eager to reciprocate.

6. List your teleseminars, e-zines, live events and books on Craigslist in cities and sections that have appeal for your target audience. Sign-in and repost your listings on a regular basis to keep them current.

7. Research opportunities to be a guest on teleseminars, podcasts and webinars. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the number of opportunities available if you simply take the time to look for them. Keep a list of questions and potential topics ready for your pitch. Keep track of your guest appearances and promote them on your web site.

8. Actively participate in online social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Write compelling copy for your profile and be sure to have a good picture and logo to add where permitted. Including your photo allows people to feel a connection to you, simply because they can put a face to your name.

9. Join and participate in associations and non-profits that attract your perfect client. Find relevant associations by searching for your keyword + association in search engines and visit the American Society of Association Executives. Involvement in organizations such as this, as well as local civic organizations, offers valuable networking opportunities.

10. Place paid advertisements in e-zines that target your audience. If possible, purchase the advertisement when the publisher is running one of your articles in order to gain maximum exposure with this strategy. There are three types of common advertisements available in e-zines: classified, sponsor and solo. Chose the most inexpensive position with the greatest exposure.

11. Write or hire a ghostwriter to create a short e-course that you can give away so long as people provide you with their e-mail address. Make certain that your e-course is relevant to your target audience and not full of fluff and fillers. By offering solid value in your e-course, you can benefit from readers who take notice of your other work/articles and will often seek out additional work you’ve written. Be sure to include a privacy policy and notify those who give you their e-mail address that they will be subscribed to your e-zine.

12. Downloadable white papers are usually longer versions of articles and often include graphics and links to resources. As with your e-course require people who want the white paper to register for your e-zine. Encourage people to send the registration link to their colleagues, friends and family who share a similar interest.

13. Create your own blog, update at least every other day and include links to your web sites. Ping blog directories and Search Engines every time you make a post for verification that your blog is turning up results.

14. Sponsor contests and submit them to contest directories. Give away a book a month or an hour of your services and encourage people to register for your e-zine. If your business involves selling a product rather than a service, you can offer specific products for prizes with contest entry automatic when people signup for your e-zine. Be creative with your contests, but always make the winning prize something of value that is relevant to your business.

15. Testimonials and referrals can be obtained from the same people. Offer to include a picture with testimonials and a live link to your client’s web site. This strategy is a win-win marketing tactic for both you and your client. No satisfied client would refuse such an opportunity! Instead of e-mailing referrals send a professionally written letter via postal mail with some of your most popular articles and invite recipients to call you for a free fifteen minute consultation.

There are dozens of free marketing techniques in the online and off-line world. These fifteen are not the only ones I use but they are my absolute favorites and have been used successfully by thousands of people, including Internet gurus. Don’t fall for every new marketing scheme; instead, spend your money selectively on marketing products. If you are pressed for time hire a virtual assistant to handle the free and low cost marketing techniques listed here and carve out some time in your schedule every month to research and evaluate new techniques.

Along with Yahoo and Bing, Google provides information at Sitemaps.org regarding how to create an XML file that will feed information to the search engines about a site. Google is committed to assisting webmasters with their sites, even going so far as to enable comments on the official Webmaster Central blog, the only official Google blog that has done so.

Statistics for Unverified Sites:

There are two ways to take advantage of the Webmaster tools – site owners can remain unverified and be given a limited look at their site through Google eyes, or verify and receive a more complete look. For sites that are not verified, there are three tools to learn to love: Site information regarding Sitemap details and errors, basic indexing information about your site, and a page for robots.txt analysis and correction where site owners can test their robots.txt file against several user-agents to ensure search engine comprehension.

Upon adding a site to your Google account, you are given a look at the My Sites page, which shows all the sites represented under your Google account. If you only have one site added, you will be immediately taken to the Diagnostic Tab for that site where you can get information about the last crawl date and the site’s index status (whether it is included in the index or not). From this page, you can also test your robots.txt file and discover if Googlebot is able to spider your site without encountering problems. Improperly written robots.txt files can block the search engines from indexing relevant content.

From the Sitemaps tab on the My Sites page, you can view information about the Sitemaps you have uploaded to Google and view any errors that the spiders have encountered. Information includes the date that the sitemap was last submitted, as well as the date it was last downloaded by Google. You have the ability to delete any Sitemap and resubmit an updated version of a current Sitemap. Pay attention to the section that lists error codes, some of these could hinder the indexing of your site. Remember the goal of the Sitemaps protocol is to get your site indexed–errors in the document will get in the way of that.

When presented with these powerful tools and data sets, many webmasters are simply overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin or how to leverage the information to their advantage. The most asked questions are about the XML feed. What is it? Do you have to have it? Will your site be indexed without it? As with most things Google, the answer is multipart.

The Sitemaps protocol, which is supported by all three major engines, is merely an XML feed designed to help the engines discover and index all the pages of your Web site. The feed gives information about page creation, updates, and importance. If a page is very important to your site and is not indexed, the feed can help in getting that page spidered. The XML feed will not make your rankings better, except in that it might help the search engine find pages supporting your theme that it didn’t previously know about.

The Sitemap isn’t a requirement for being indexed, it just makes it easier. Google states:

“A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace our normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are never penalized for using this service”.

If your site is already being crawled and included in the index, you probably don’t need a Sitemap, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t still be using the webmaster tools to get a better idea of what Google sees when it crawls your site. Each tool is targeted to a different area.

It should be emphasized that even if you do have a Sitemaps file, it does not replace the need for a physical site map on your Web site. Despite the similarity of names, each serves a distinctly different purpose. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines suggest that you include a site map on your page for both users and search engine spiders.

Statistics for Verified Sites:

To get the most value out of these tools, your site must be verified. Viewing your site the way Google sees it is often an enlightening experience and will alert you to errors Google has encountered while crawling your site. The problems most commonly found are often also easy to fix, such as 404 errors that redirect to return 200 Okay pages and confuse the search engine. Using the webmaster console can help you identify these problem areas and facilitate the spidering and indexing of your site.

Query information and site analysis is available, giving you a brief snapshot of what Google finds your site relevant for, as well as how (and if) visitors are finding you. The entire console is very user–friendly, even for the most novice of site owners. Using the Webmaster tools can help your search engine optimization campaign by enabling you to make the most out of the vast information Google stores about your site.

One of the reasons that webmasters love the console is that Google shows link data. Digging through the internal links that Google knows about can assist you in strengthening your site’s architecture, ensuring that every page can be reached by a spiderable text link. Even more exciting is the external link data the tools provide. Want to know how many links to your site Google actually knows about? The tools allow you to get a much better look at your backlinks, though Google Engineer Matt Cutts warns that you shouldn’t assume that every link you see reported counts for your site. Before this feature was included in the console, the only way to get a glimpse at known links was to use Google’s link: search operator but that query was notorious for returning just a sampling of links and no one could say how large or small that sample might be. It’s now possible to be much more accurate about back links and that kind of knowledge is vital to the success of your SEO project.

If you haven’t already incorporated Google’s Webmaster Tools into your search engine optimization strategy, now is the time to do so. Google has made it clear that they want webmasters to pay attention to these metrics and there has never been a better time for you to get involved. For more information, tips, tricks and developments, check out the Official Google Webmaster Central blog.

One rarely discussed marketing secret (except amongst rabid direct marketers or online marketers), is the arcane art of tweaking. Tweaking your marketing is literally the key to getting more response to any marketing activity you attempt.

Tweak means to adjust or fine-tune.

And this is exactly what people fail to do when it comes to their marketing. In fact, most do the opposite: They develop a web site and never change a pixel for years; they settle on a marketing message and never try anything new; or they give a speaking engagement and don’t try various “pitches” to get cards from participants.

The Science of Tweaking

Tweaking is what scientists do. They test something using an experiment. They get a certain result. Then they change a measurable variable and see what new result they get. They keep at this until they get the desired result (or not).

Good marketers are like scientists, but they have more fun.

Instead of experimenting on rats, they experiment on prospects. They try one marketing tactic at a time and measure the result. Then they change a measurable variable and see if the prospect responds differently.

Good scientists, if they are persistent, get grants to keep experimenting. Good marketers, if they are persistent, attract more clients and often get rich.

Let’s look at a few marketing experiments you can tweak.

1. Ezine signups from a web site.

Growing a big eZine list is a great way to grow your business. Let’s look at the two main variables: a) home page of web site and b) eZine sign-up page of web site.

To conduct this experiment you must know:
a) how many people land on your home page in any given period
b) how many people click onto the sign-up page
c) how many people actually sign up

Using a simple web tracker that counts visitors and subscribers, you can get these statistics very easily.

So let’s say in a week, 100 people go to your home page. Of those, 40% click onto your sign-up page. And then 25% of those actually sign up for the eZine. That makes a sign-up rate of 10%.

Now you start tweaking.

You work at making changes to your home page so that more visitors click through to the sign-up page. You might improve the design, the graphics, the headline, the offer for the report you get with the eZine, etc.

Several tweaks might increase the number of people who click on the sign-up page to 50%. Now your total sign-up rate is 12.5%

Next you tweak away on the sign-up page. Perhaps you change the name of the report (more results-oriented), and you change the sign-up form (by making it simpler) and the placement of this form (you put it higher on the page).

Several tweaks of this kind may increase the number of actual sign-ups to 40%. Your total sign-up rate is now 20%. You’ve doubled your sign-up rate. And that’s how tweaking pays off!

2. Getting cards after a speaking event

What I used to say was, “I have a report that covers most of the material I discussed today. If you’d like a copy, just leave me your card and I’ll send it to you by email”.

That pitch got me 30-40% of cards. So I tweaked my pitch.

I now say: “Here is a report that covers most of the material I discussed today. Who would like a copy? (and I get a show of hands) Great, please give me your card with a current email address and I’ll send it to you by email.”

That pitch gets about 80% of people in the room giving me cards. The tweak is that I got people to raise their hands saying they wanted the report. It more than doubled the results.

3. Your Audio Logo

When I use a problem-oriented Audio Logo: “I help Independent Professionals who are struggling to attract clients,” I get about five times the response than a solution-oriented Audio Logo: “I help Independent Professionals attract more clients.”

Go figure.

You don’t have to know all the reasons your tweaking changed the results, you just have to keep tweaking until the results improve.

What are you currently doing in your marketing that isn’t working as well as it could? Time to start tweaking.