In other news, a new free Clinic
Search Engine Journal today opened free SEO Clinic for sites in need of optimization or with specific challenges that have not been overcome.
A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).
It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences. If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse. I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see. That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).
To participate, simply contact the team here.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 02/27/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, General, HTML Optimization, Link Building, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Site Structure, Spiders help, optimization, review, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO-consulting, SEO-critiques, website-design
To Use Sitemaps, or Not To Use Sitemaps, That’s the Question
It was really great when Google launched its Sitemaps (recently renamed to Webmaster Tools, as part of their Webmaster Central utilities) – when that happened it was a really great indication of a new time where technicians who wished to help make their pages findable would not automatically be considered “evil” and the SEs might provide tools to help technicians disclose their pages directly. Yahoo soon followed with their own tools, named Yahoo! Site Explorer, and surely MSN will bow to peer pressure with their own submission system and tools.
Initially, I thought that there wasn’t significant advantage to me for using these systems, because I’d already developed good methods for providing our page links to the search engines through the natural linking found in our site navigation systems.
Why should I expend yet more time and resources to dynamically produce the link files?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/19/2006
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Filed under: General, Google, Site Structure, Yahoo Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, Sitemaps, URL-submission, yahoo-site-explorer
Optimizing your search engine advertising
DoubleClick’s Smart Marketing Report in a recent interview of Jamie Crouthamel, president and CEO of Performics, were treated to some words of wisdom on how to launch and optimize a paid search advertising program.
Here’s some of the takeaways I got out of the interview:
- Build out your keyword portfolio. Incorporate product names, product numbers, relevant adjectives (colors, sizes, etc.), and occasions for which products could be sought. A number of linguistic exercises for the agency and client exist that can help with this process. A SEM program can encompass a keyword portfolio of as large as 50,000 keywords with varying ROIs. Although “belt” might not convert well as a keyword, it has many related terms that may convert much better, such as “leather belt,” “men’s leather belt,” “brown belt,” and “men’s brown leather belt.”
- Collect an adequate amount of data before you begin optimizing. Don’t alter a keyword until that keyword has received at least 100 clicks.
- Constantly improve your keyword portfolio by adding new search terms and improving/removing keywords that don’t produce a good ROI.
- Experiment with reducing bid prices to improve ROI.
- Optimize your search ad copy to make it as compelling and relevant as possible.
- Make the landing page as relevant to the user’s keyword as possible.
- If your products are seasonal, bid on the keywords during the season when your target audience is in need of them rather than year-round.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 08/17/2004
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Filed under: Paid Search, Site Structure
