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. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »

I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires far fewer hours, with much of the time spent adjusting spend for postion. However diligence and attention are important as results should be fed back into the website to improve landing pages and improve organic results for top performing phrases.

It is interesting to see how people charge for this service (most of my clients are hourly). There is an excellent article about PPC management options here