PPC can give any SEO campaign a big boost in the right direction. With the use of some PPC tips you could see a big increase in revenue, create a bigger brand and possibly help your SEO.

With PPC (pay per click) you can find out which keywords give you the best conversion rate and can mess about with your sites design and structure to see what works best for CRO (conversion rate optimization).

Here are a couple of PPC tips that will help you with your PPC campaign :

• Use the Google Adwords keyword tool; Using this can help you find an unlimited number of relevant keywords that you probably wouldn’t of thought of before.
• Try and target low CPC keywords, by doing this you have a bigger room for error and will not feel the effect if the keywords you choose don’t convert.
• Be specific, don’t go for keywords that are very generic. For example for your car parts shop, you should have car parts rather than cars as your keyword. Sounds obvious, but you’d be suprised by the amount of campaigns I have seen which have not done this.

You should always go for keywords that have a growing trend aswell. You can check this with the Google Trends Tool.

Google Adwords and Google Adsense go hand in hand with each other, a very brief introduction  to how it works is : People will advertise their product or service with Google Adwords on a PPC (pay per click) program. Publishers will then post advertisements on their websites and receive a cut of the money made by every click on an advertisement. Simple.

Google Adsense is a great way of monetizing your blog without destroying your readers trust. The ads that Google display can be extremely relevant and I would even go as far as to say they can be helpful to visitors.

With the ads being so relevant you can get a good CTR and a greater amount of money per click than you will with any other advertisement publisher network.

The only downside that I can see to having ads on your blog is that it may take away potential sales if your blog promotes a product or service you sell.

If your blog is mainly giving people information, or telling them how to do things then I think Google Adsense could be a great addition to your website. If you read the Adsense case studies then it will probably get you all excited that you are going to make thousands of pounds by just adding the advertisements to your pages.

By adding the advertisements to your blog posts, in my opinion it will be very beneficial to your SEO, it will give you the motivation to write more quality content and update your blog more frequently. If you’re lucky enough to get lots of visitors to your blog, you may also see another impressive revenue stream.

This doesn’t mean that you still can’t promote your product or service, granted your CTR might be a little bit lower, but you may see greater revenue coming from your main website. Having spoke to some publishers who are now earning most of their revenue from Adsense, I can’t praise the program enough.

The robots.txt can prove a useful tool if you use it correctly. Here are some pointers on to exactly what you should include to help search engines index/ crawl your site more efficiently.

Sitemap Reference

When you submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tools, your sitemap will only get indexed in Google. For your sitemap to be indexed in every search engine your website is indexed in you can add the following snippet to the top or bottom of your robots.txt file :

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml (must be absolute and not relative eg not /sitemap.xml).

This will tell search engine bots who use the robots.txt file exactly where your sitemap is for them to index.

Disallowing Files / Directories

Only recently I found out exactly what blocking files / sub-directories in your robots.txt does. If you block some files / subdirectories in your robots.txt, your files could still potentially get indexed by Google, however Google will not crawl the files.

The syntax for allowing / disallowing files is :

User-agent: *
Allow: /sub-directory or Disallow: /sub-directory

The default action for a site with a website without a robots.txt is to allow all, but at a bare minimum I would tell bots to allow all and include a sitemap reference. Just to be sure!

Blocking Domain Tools

Domain Tools, quite conveniently crawls your pages and lets their own versions of your pages get indexed in Google. This can cause severe duplicate content issues and can be harmful to your rankings. However I did some digging and found by adding the following snippet to your robots.txt you can stop them from doing this.

User-agent : SurveyBot

Disallow : /

Problem solved! You can always check in your webmaster tools under site configuration -> crawler access to make sure there are no errors in your robots.txt and your sitemap reference has been read correctly.

ODP Data

If you’re lucky enough to have your site listed in DMOZ (the open directory project) then you might find that Google will take your title and description and use them on SERPs. This can be annoying if your are trying to optimize them for CTR’s.

Lucky enough for you guys, you can add the following code into the <head> part of your document to make Google ignore data from the ODP :

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

I often use the following :

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp,noydir” />

This will block data from both the yahoo directory and DMOZ.

Snippet Searches

If you are searching for a snippet of content rather than a keyword then your meta description might be replace by the snippet you searched for with the included phrases in bold for example :

That is not my meta description but it is highlighting the search term. When your keywords are highlighted in bold like that it works wonders for your CTR! Check this read on SEOmoz on why Google doesn’t read your meta description .

Thankfully, if your that picky about your meta description, there is a solution to this, here it is :

<meta name=”robots” content=”nosnippet” />

This piece of code will stop Google from displaying relevant snippets of your page to longer tail search terms. I would probably advise against this as your CTRS may fall completely because these longer tail search terms may not bold any text in your meta description snippet on the SERP.

SEO changed massively throughout 2011. This has probably left a lot of webmasters confused to where there priorities should lie with their SEO. I thought it would be a good idea to give you my opinion on what are the top seo tips which will help improve your websites rankings.

Meta Tags

Let’s go back to old school SEO, not only will these little gems improve your CTR on the SERP page, but the title tag will help you rank better for your chosen keywords. It might be worth having a play with your meta description tag to find your optimum CTR rate.

Content Is Still King

Good content is still king in SEO, not only will it want your readers to read more and return to your site, but they if they find it useful enough, they may link to it from their own websites as a valuable resource.

Article Submissions

Again an old school SEO tactic, this works time and time again for me as a source of high quality targeted traffic and a easy way of building in content, one way quality backlinks. Websites such as ezinearticles have 1000’s of visitors every day, if your article appears on the home page and you have a link to your site, prepare to watch your traffic soar. I have noticed on these article sites, that the articles you write are often heavily linked to from other sub pages, not only do you get a link, but if you’re lucky then that link might have quite a lot of authority. Articles I have written before now have jumped up to a PR4.

Get The Social Media Bug

Since the introduction of Facebook and Twitter and other popular social media platforms, it has done the world of good for growing traffic to your website and SEO. Every post I write gets sent out to twitter and if I’m lucky, some of my nice followers will then re-tweet it to their followers. Imagine the traffic potential if you have 1000’s of followers!

Get Local.. If Your Lucky

You may have noticed that certain search phrases trigger a new type of search result. These results are called local results and normally rank above the organic results. If you’re lucky enough for your keywords to trigger these results, then I would definitely try and include your site in these. I have seen sites with no optimization at all outrank the big players. This in my opinion will grow dramatically in 2011. See my article on GPO.

Have you ever heard of the first link rule? This is when Google only follows the first link to a page, for example : if your page has a link to the home page in the topnav with the anchor text “home” and a link in the footer with the anchor text “your keyword”. The anchor text that appears first in your html will be followed and then the other link(s) to the page will be discarded.

Case Study

Here is Michael Gray’s SEO Blog :

Here I have copied the header and the footer, just to show you an example of how you can avoid this. Using the search status tool bar, I used the function that allows me to highlight all of the no followed links. Notice that the home page has been highlighted, but the other link to the home page with the anchor text “Graywolfs SEO Blog” has not been nofollowed. This is because he is choosing what anchor text he wants to link to the home page with, this makes sense because a lot more people would search for “SEO Blog” or “Graywolfs SEO Blog” than they would “Home page” or “Home”.  By nofollowing the first home page link, Google will not follow this, so effectively the first link back to the home page will be the one in the footer with your chosen anchor text.

Michael must be doing something right as he is well known and respected throughout the industry, his blog has mass traffic and he ranks number 1 for the competitive term “SEO blog” as well as having a strong brand.

Also I noticed by nofollowing links to pages that you are blocking with your robots.txt , you will reduce the amount of “restricted by robots.txt” errors in webmaster tools. By doing this, it could give your page more authority and you could see better rankings, for your chosen keywords.

One piece of advice I would give to get more traffic to your website is to have a regularly updated blog. By updating it regularly it will attract focussed visitors who can leave comments and get involved with your website.

SEO Benefits Of Having A Blog

One of the main benefits of having a regularly updated blog is that Google loves websites that are updated regularly. So if you include snippets of a couple of your latest posts on your home page, it should also give you a boost in rankings.

If your content is good enough, you may also find that users link to your site as a reference. It also gives you a fantastic opportunity to link to lot’s of subpages on your website using the anchor text of your choice, helping Google crawl your site easier and more efficiently.

Keeping Your Readers Interested

If your good, you can get subscribers to your RSS feed. So every time you write a post on your blog they will be notified and they will probably come to your site to have a look what you have written.  Imagine the marketing potential of this if you had 1000’s of subscribers to your RSS feed and you wanted to promote a new product / service.  You could promote it pretty much instantly. However it is important not to abuse your blog by using it solely as a place to advertise your products, this will probably just annoy your readers and they won’t return to your site.

The Power Of Social Media

I am going to use twitter as my example here, set up a twitter profile for your company and then you can post shortlinks (such as bit.ly) to your blog posts. You can have a massive amount of exposure if you have lots of followers on twitter. If you post a link to a blog post on twitter and you have 1000 followers, say 50 of them re-tweet your article, then 5 of their followers then re-re-tweet it, those figures are a bit optimistic, but could you imagine the traffic potential if you used twitter as well as different social media platforms to market your website.

All these tactics go hand in hand and work well for you to grow traffic to your website through the use of a blog. Just remember your community of readers (big or small) will all be targeted and be interested in your product / service. Subscribe to my SEO blog !

Back in the day you could keyword spam to get good rankings, this is certainly not the case anymore. Keyword density in my opinion is not longer a factor in Googles algorithm, I could be wrong, but my experience as an SEO tells me that you don’t get any benefit from having a keyword mentioned a certain percentage of times on a page. As the web becomes more semantic, I would definitely try and avoid any spammy looking content that reads incorrectly because you are trying to fiddle your keyword density.

However on pages that I optimise, although I try not to concentrate on the amount of times I repeat a certain keyword, I try and mention them at least once in a heading tag and at least once or twice in the body of the content. About 400-500 words is sufficient to see some SEO benefits from your content.

Some search engines (older ones), may still rank you really well if you spam your keywords, but with Google having such a big market share in the search industry, I would definitely try and avoid this tactic. If you are going to use keyword density in your SEO strategy, I would try and ensure the keywords you are optimising for have a density of less than 1% , this will help make the content look more nature and well written to Google when it indexes it.

Well structured content is great for your SEO, you should also include some internal links to sub pages using the anchor text you want, this will help Google find and index deeper pages on your site.

Just to add if your keyword is a more generic term such as SEO, don’t be scared to go over the 1% threshold, for example : SEO, SEO tips and SEO blog are 3 different keywords, but SEO is mentioned 3 times.

What are your thoughts on the optimum keyword density?

At last, many webmasters have reported a PageRank update as of 20th January 2011. The last one we seen was the beginning of April 2010.
We have seen easyseotips.net jump from a Pagerank 1 to a Pagerank 4. It shows that Google is taking note of my hard work. I am a little bit sceptical about writing this post as this site is the only one that I know of lucky enough to have its PageRank updated. However after reading numerous tweets on twitter, and reading a post on search engine round table, it also states that Google has rolled out a PageRank update.
Even though PageRank doesn’t mean anything (in my opinion), webmasters still take pride in their PageRank and I am over the moon that my site has jumped up to a PageRank 4.
Has anyone else seen a PageRank update in their site?