302′s are the first I’ll talk about since they are “Temporary”. This is used if you are working on a page lets say your “about us page” and you don’t want people or search engines to go there, but want them to come back later. You can 302 a page to a temporary page, and later stop forwarding it. For everyday users this really doesn’t do much, but for Google etc. This tells them come back later an re-index the original page you attempted to get too. So it’s very useful if you are developing a site and have links to a page and Google finds you.

But the more important one is a 301 redirect. This is a permanent forwarding, and tells search engines. “You found something that is now over here forever —-> Don’t index me, index the new page, oh and also if the page you were looking for had page rank, the new page should have it now.” This is very useful if you are pushing a new website out that will replace an existing one. A 301 can be from one domain to another or from one page in a domain to another. So if you are creating a new search engine friendly url and want to make sure any previous page that was indexed is now recognized as the new page you would use this.

example: http://www.dannycoburn.com/signup.php might get forwarded to http://www.dannycoburn.com/viri so any thing that was indexed on signup.php is now pushed to the new /viri directory.

The most IMPORTANT use of 301′s that you can possibly use for search engines is to ensure that all pages are viewed the same by the search engines. Did you know that http://dannycoburn.com and http://www.dannycoburn.com are 2 different pages? They don’t look like it but for some reason search engines will treat them differently. So what do you do? You need to make sure you 301 all non-www pages to their comparable www page. Want to see an example? Click this http://dannycoburn.com. You’ll see it adds the www.

If you are on an apache server (if you are on a linux host you probably are), here’s the code you put into  your .htaccess folder

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Until next time.

Let’s do a little math. If you figure there are 100 people competing to sell 1 product on Google. Let’s assume there’s 100 sales created, 1 sale per person selling it. Since Google makes up 75% of search lets say it also is 75% of the sales, so there would be a total of 133 sales. Of the 100 people competing on Google, about 25 would most likely be advertising on the other search engines. So that 33 sales will be split among 25 people, so greater than 1 sale per person. Therefore making more $ per advertiser. Are these hard figures? No, they are based on several years of SEM experience and from conversations I’ve had with many people in the industry. Google tends to cost more per click (Yahoo is expensive too), and other places are far cheaper.

The real lesson for this do not count out the other search engines, play with them if you are going to do PPC. I ran a campaign on Yahoo, Google and Ask. My least competitive market was Ask, and my lowest CPC was Ask, and guess what my highest conversion was Ask.

So just take a look at everything else around you. Google is great, but when you’re trying to sell remember do not overlook any possible customers.

Let’s take a look at those services. First, you don’t know where or how they are generating the traffic. In most cases, the traffic is not targeted, meaning that it is possible that not a single one of those thousands of visitors has any interest in the topic of your niche. Finally, you can’t really be sure that the traffic is ‘real.’

But, there is a way to purchase real, targeted traffic. You can use Pay-Per-Click advertising, through a service such as Google AdWords. When you purchase traffic using this method, the traffic is targeted – and real. You don’t pay for a certain number of traffic, you pay for each click, as the name, pay-per-click, indicates.

Now, if you don’t know what you are doing, Pay-Per-Click can be expensive, and ineffective. It is important that you make sure that you write a targeted ad, first and foremost. It is also essential that you select the right keywords, and that you bid the right amount on those keywords.

Google AdWords really makes this very easy. You can type in your main keyword, and they will give you a list of other related keywords that apply as well. Next, when you set the amount you are willing to pay, per click, for each keyword, you can use the traffic analysis tools in Google AdWords to see where your ad will be listed, based on what you are paying per click, and how much traffic you can expect from it.

Raise your bid price until you see that you will be listed where you want to be (preferably the first page of search results). Again, PPC can be very expensive. Make sure that you know how much you can afford to spend on these ads each week, divide it by seven, and set a daily budget up in your AdWords account. Also specify how you want those funds spread out through the day.

There are entire courses written on the topic of Google AdWords. I advise that you take one, because there are a lot of elements and tricks that need to be learned to make AdWords work out well for you.

Again, don’t waste your traffic! Make sure that you are capturing first names and email addresses from the people that arrive at your website through PPC advertising!

Homework Assignment: Determine whether or not you want to purchase traffic or not, and if you do, find a good pay-per-click service, such as Google AdWords, and get set up.

New figures out on search advertising spend from Efficient Frontier show Google continues to dominate the market, stats that will no doubt complicate the company’s goal to gain approval of its deal with Yahoo on search ads. However it is interesting how in Japan, it’s a much more 50/50 market split with Yahoo, showing that Google does have weaknesses.

For the second quarter of 2008, Google had 77.4% of the search advertising spend, according to data tracked by Efficient Frontier, which manages ad campaigns for a wide variety of large advertisers. The data covers 23 billion ad impressions and 390 million clicks. Google’s share includes a small percentage of contextual ad spend (which is not search), as does Yahoo’s. You can see these broken out in the share chart below for Q2 2008

Read the full article here: http://snurl.com/30bxy

If you’d like to learn more about searchengine and generating traffic head over here: http://snurl.com/2zcr6

But enough about the research, how do you start to rank?

1. Use key phrases multiple times in your content
2. Use internal site links to that page using your term
3. Get links for quality external sites to your page
4. Use basic HTML formats like H1′s and title tags to emphasize phrase

When you are writing your article/page/blog make sure you are aware of what you are looking to be ranked for and use it a few times in the body. Also make sure you use it in the title and header of the article. It’s important that Google knows that the content is the primary reason for sending some one to this page. One of the most important things to understand is that you should not over stuff the phrase onto the page. If you use it every other word, the search engine will throw it out knowing that it’s simply being put there for ranking. While there’s debate of the % the phrase should be used it can be anywhere from 3% – 7% of the content. I tend to lean towards the lower side to prevent spamming penalties.

When you are creating your webpage you can feel free to link to your own pages using key phrases to pass it along to other pages. So if you want to rank for “best noodles in vegas” create a link on your home page that points to that article with that term as the clickable text. Also repeat this on other authority web sites. One way to find them is simply go to Google and type the term in and see who comes up. Contact them and see if you can get a link exchange with them. Some will want to charge you, but be weary as Google’s getting smarter about purchased links!

I mentioned headers and titles but wanted to stress how important these are to Google. With everything on the web being pretty, it’s important to realize Google is a color blind dog, they don’t care what the biscuit looks like, they only care if it tastes good. A trick I was once taught was to remove the style sheet and see what the page looks like to Google and the other engines. If you use an H1 the text is the largest on the page and is therefore more important to the read (stands out). Same goes for Google. But only use 1 per page. If you feel you need more start using H2, H3 etc. The higher the number the more you can have on the page. The title which should be one of the first pieces of HTML will define part of how you show up on Google as will the meta description. Use these as they also add weight to your page for those terms.

Is this all you need to do for SEO? Of course not, but it’s a great start for a first timer and is a base understanding. Feel free to leave a comment, I’ll try to answer anything I get.

Today’s focus will be on Articles and other methods to drive traffic to your site. While social networking could fall into this article, I’m going to dedicate more time to it in a separate one later.

What are some of the methods to drive free traffic to your site?

• You can ask friends to show up
• You can post links in directories
• You can create articles
• Add signature and post in forums

Can asking friends really help?  Yes in someways it can.  If you are running a site that contains forums, the more people you get to sign up and post the more likely new members that come across your site are to join.  Nobody wants to go to a forum to talk to no one.  There are services out there that will accept payment to fill your forums with seeded posts.  I have never used one but they are out there, just search some on google and you’ll find a few.

Posting links in directories will allow you get start getting some inward links to your site.  It is important to understand that google doesn’t always favor some of these directories, but several it does consider authoritative.  It is important to do  your research, see what googles PR is for the directory and choose wisely.  If you have a site on pets it doesn’t make sense to get a link in a computer directory, and the more of these little “mishaps” you have the more likely Google will penalize you for those actions.

Creating articles is a good road, but a pain.  You might want to promote yourself but the best sites are very particular about what you are allowed and how many links you can have etc.  I’ve learned that the hard way.  It is important to make sure you have plenty of keywords in your article that you are interested in having people find you under.  So if you want people to find you for “internet marketing” make sure you have that phrase a few times in your article.  If you are not looking for internet marketing, but online marketing make sure you use that phrase often as well.  It is important to understand that these short tail phrases are more difficult to rank for an phrases like “home based internet marketing” are easier for you to show up on Google.  The reason “home based internet marketing” is called long tails is because it has at least 3 words, usually 4 words in the phrase.  They are less often type, but much more targeted.

Adding links in your signatures on forums.  If you are a pet site and you have a pet site you want to promote get active with pet communities.  Don’t go off pandering your goods from day one, but become a known expert in that field.  This way people get used to you, and you are not spamming the forums.  After you post several posts feel free to make a comment about your site, or simply put it in your signature.  Now depending on how the forum is set up, every time your signature is viewed by Google you have some links from that post going to your site.  So again y our are building authority in the eyes of the community, but also in the eyes of Google.

Let me know if you have any questions on this one!