This is a short video by Google’s Matt Cutts. In the video he offers tips on basic things you can do to optimize your website for Google:

When optimizing your site for traffic, you will need some means to see where you are, track your progress (or your lack there of), and help identify mistakes.

Here are the core elements I recommend:

1. Sign-up for a Google Analytics (GA) account, it’s free and it some if the best information you can get about visitor activity and how they got to your pages. If you do PPC marketing on AdWords and don’t have Google Analytics installed you can add it under the Analytics tab in AdWords. If you already have Google Analytics and your GA and AdWords accounts aren’t linked, be sure to select “link to existing” in your AdWords account so your Google CPC traffic will be properly tracked. If you made a mistake here and wound up with two GA accounts you can get Google to unwind the mistake, but it can take several carefully worded emails to get it fixed. (more…)

I just ran across this article on Website Magazine titled SEO Your eBay Store . Its a great article and offers some critical insights on getting picked up by the serach engines.

Website Magazine Article

Bot herding, sometime referred to as ”sculpting,” is the act of shaping what search engines sees, and therefore what content you are ranked on. The idea behind bot herding is to keep the search engines off the content you didn’t want to be known for.

One of my clients has a consumer reports aspect to their business and actively blacklists companies who don’t provide good customer service. As a service to their customers they listed other services

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