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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I recently went through a pre-launch design study with a client. The client is launching a new division of an existing company and after hearing me speak at a local business group, wanted to be sure he was starting with the right stuff.

First let me say this is a great approach. Its much easier to fix problems on the front end than to try and undo mistakes that have your site identified for the wrong things. However, when you work on an existing design you do have some history of what is working and what’s not. When starting from scratch, it can be difficult to evaluate the words and phrases you will need. If there are other business in the same space you can examine what they are doing, but in this case a head-to-head competitor didn’t really exist.

So I started reading through the companies marketing materials, technical papers, et cetera, making a list of industry specific phrases. Then I took that list and began googling each phrase to see which ones returned results for businesses in a similar vein. The problem was virtually none of the phrases I was working with were getting my anything but research papers of .edu sites (can you hear the crickets?).

So what’s the problem, you say??

People research before they buy, getting more and more specific with their searches as they become more educated to the jargon of the industry and the desirable features and functions of the items they are researching.  Anyone searching on these phrases will quickly find this company and be set - right? 

I don’t think so, if prospects are googling and not finding what they are looking for, they alter their search.  To use a “bricks and mortar” analogy, this is why restaurants successfully locate next to other restaurants, car dealers reside next to other car dealers and so on. 

Like the bricks and mortar world, when people are searching the internet for goods and services you want be where the traffic is. However, you need to be near the right kind of traffic. You don’t want to locate your paint store next to a research institute. If you cater to the home owner, your paint store would be better off near a Home Depot, or if you cater to contractors, in an industrial area where where contractors go for building materials.

And yes, you do need to educate buyers and incorporate technical content and jargon into the content of your site, but if your selling paint, I wouldn’t create the structure of site around the petrochemical phrases used to produce it.