We feel that this will permit us to bring more quality content, information and new tools to you in one concise and clear website. We are trying to make this move as easy as possible and we welcome your feedback. If you find a broken link or missing post, please let us know by contacting us at info@seomoves.org. Needless to say, maintaining all of the website structure and content on LilEngine and moving it was a massive project; we have completed about 85% as of now. Over the coming week we should be able to have 99% of the move completed.

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Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend you are the webmaster of www.reallyawesomeflannelrobes.com and you have a supply of awesome flannel robes. How do you plan on selling your flannel robes? I guess you’d want to do some SEO, right? So you optimize your website for the phrase “buy flannel robe”. You hire some hot-shot SEO firm (or maybe you do it yourself!) and they do a great job! After a short while, you’re kicking butt on all your primary keywords. You’re even ranking #1 for your best keyword, “buy flannel robe!”.

…almost.

Because when you do a Google Search for “buy flannel robe”, what do you find listed above your #1 ranking? A little box that says “Shopping results for ‘buy flannel robe’” and a listing of products from Amazon.com, L.L. Bean, Plow & Hearth, and Vermont Country Store. What’s more, these listings have prices, pictures, and a description of the item. Worst of all, these listings have reduced your CTR to a dismal percentage for your coveted #1 ranking. What’s going on here?

Back in mid-2007, Google made a major change in their search algorithm called Universal Results. This update integrated Google’s regular search functions with other pieces of Google’s search database, most prominently images, videos, and yes, shopping results. When a user searched for certain keywords, Google began returning results from other realms of its search database if it deemed them to be relevant. These integrated results could appear organically, or they could be tripped by certain flagged words. The words ‘pictures’ or ‘photos’in conjuction with any other search topic are highly likely to return results from Google Images. The words ‘video’ or ‘clip’ or ‘movie trailer’ in conjunction with any topic is likely to return results from Google Videos. And yes, the words ‘buy’, ‘purchase’, or ‘cheap’ in conjunction with any topics are likely to return results from Google Shopping (formerly Froogle).

So that’s it. You’re doomed right?

Not necessarily.

Let’s take a look at these results. clicking on the first shopping result in our flannel robe example brings us directly to the amazon.com listing for the State O’ Maine Men’s Big and Tall Plaid flannel robe. This makes something immediately clear. Google Shopping is not a vendor, but a comparison shopping database. When you search for something in Google Shopping, the database evaluates its listed products and returns results that, based on an algorithm, have been determined to be the most relevant. So where does it get this knowledge of listed items?

The answer is Google Base. Google Base is an archive of information submitted by users from across the web. Almost any kind of data can be submitted in almost any kind of format. The most widely used portion of the Google Base platform, however, is the Google Merchant Center. In the Google Merchant Center, vendors like Amazon (and you too!) can submit a data feed of product listings that comes directly off their websites. The data feed keeps Google Merchant Center constantly updated on what products are on your website and the Google Merchant Center powers Google Product Search (Shopping).

So what about this data feed that comes off your website, hmm? This feed is a service provided free by many popular e-commerce platforms or as a paid service from independent developers. You can think of it as a kind of RSS feed for Google Merchant Center to ‘read’ your products. In addition to the Merchant Center, you can submit this feed to a variety of comparison shopping engines like Shopzilla, Nextag, Bizrate or Price Grabber. All of these comparison shopping engines use your data feed to power their search results. If your data feed has provided information that the comparison shopping engine thinks makes your product highly relevant to a product search query, your product will be listed first. So how do we make sure that our data feed is providing the right type of information? This process is called Data Feed Optimization, or (DFO). It is also commonly referred to as shopping feed management. DFO is the process of ensuring that your data feed is being comprehended by a comparison shopping engine like Google Product Search to the greatest of its potential and serving up your products as search results when they are most relevant.

So how do you do this?

Basic data feed optimization can be split up into a few specific partitions. When embarking a data feed management campaign, the first thing you should do is establish some kind of evaluation metics. Whether you use click counters on your website, with the comparison shopping engine or with a third party doesn’t really matter; you just need some way to evaluate the results of your actions. The nextand easiest thing you can do is make sure your tax and shipping costs are updated for every product you list. If you don’t believe me on the importance of this, do a Google Product Search for ‘digital camera’ and click on the first link. You’ll see a list of vendors where you can buy that exact camera (at the time of this writing, it’s a Canon Powershot SX20). The prices seem to be pretty uniform across the board, and it becomes immediately obvious that you can get this camera with free shipping (several vendors are offering it). Now look down at Sears. Sears has this camera for sale. Does it offer free shipping? Maybe. You can’t tell, however, because Sears hasn’t updated its data feed to ensure its shipping and tax info are being listed. What do you suppose the CTR on that listing is? That’s a rhetorical question, because off course it’s just about nil.

In DFO terms, accurate and updated tax and shipping info are equivalent to meta-tags in SEO. It’s a super easy fix that there’s absolutely no excuse to get wrong. Seeing shipping info compels a consumer to click in the same way a meta-description with a powerful call to action does.

Also east to fix are the listing title and listing description. This is an area of DFO that has no hard and fast rules; it’s best to just play around with a few different combinations until you find something that fits. All DFO experts agree, however, that the listing title should be optimized with both consumers AND the Google Product Search algorithm in mind. What is the primary keyword associated with your product? What IS your product? Does it have a significant brand name? At the time of this posting, I made a search for “calvin Klein Dress Shirt” in Google Product Search. The #1, #3, and #6 results all used the phrase “Calvin Klein Dress Shirt” in the listing title. None of those listings were calvin Klein’s product website. Calin Klein’s highest listing for its own product on its own website was #8. This listing did NOT use the phrase “Calvin Klein Dress Shirt”. While not being decisive empirical evidence, these results strongly indicate that the usage of the search keyword in the listing title can affect ranking. DFO industry experts recommend trying a variety of title combinations and evaluating the performance of each. Some of the ones you can try from our example are:

[keyword][brand][feature]—ex.: Men’s Dress Shirt, Calvin Klein White

[brand][feature][keyword]—ex.:Calvin Klein White Men’s Dress Shirt

[feature][keyword]—ex.:White Men’s Dress Shirt

Now that the easy stuff is out of the way, we can tackle the real meat of DFO: feed mapping. The goal of feed mapping to provide information in your feed that categorizes every single product in your product portfolio into a corresponding category on a comparison shopping engine based on attributes. When I said every single, I meant every single. You should aim for a 100% listing rate on your products in the CSE’s. Every product you DON’T get listed might be your best-selling, high-margin, high competition product you were anticipating major sales on. This is easily checked by comparing the number of listings on your website and the number of your products listings showing up in the shopping engine (should be available from the marchant login dashboard). When you submit your data feed to say, Google Merchant Center, you’ll notice that you have options for setting your attributes. These attributes are split up into 4 categories, being required, recommended, optional and custom. You want to use them ALL. You need to categorize every single product in your product portfolio and map it with the attributes available on your comparison shopping engine. Google Product Search is not the only CSE you need to worry about and each website (e.g. Shopzilla, NexTag) uses different attributes. That means you either need A. a different data feed for every CSE you submit to, or B. one very fat, very comprehensive data feed that organizes all the needed attributes together.

Nothing portrays illustrates data feed optimization better than heading to the ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘other’ pages in a CSE. Here, you’ll find dozens of incorrectly attributed items languishing unsold, such as children’s sheet sets that should be in the Home Bedding Category or remote controlled cars that should be in the Toys or Electronics Category. When a consumer searches for “chidren’s bedsheets”, the first thing they’re going to do is begin filtering with the sidebar, and the first filter they apply will be the tab that says “View 234897 Results in Home Bedding Category”. With that first intuitive filtuer, your sadly misplaced product loses all chances of ever being seen.

For a data feed going to Google Product Center, GPS recognizes a product_type attribute that can be added to the data feed that can be mapped to the dozens of categories GPS has. Other shopping engines use other protocols to map the feeds into categories. Every shopping engine needs to be accounted for. To keep data fresh, it’s suggested that you submit your data feeds every day. Google Product Search in general is recognized as having a preference for fresh feed data. To test your data feed optimization efforts, you can try splitting up your products into several different feeds with different attribute methodologies. If you list 200 men’s wool blazers on your website, will they rank better on on a Comparison Shopping Engine in the “Jackets and Blazers” category or the “Businesswear” category? Will they rank better as “Wool Men’s Blazers” or “Men’s Wool Blazers”? Is it advantageous to list them as “Ralph Lauren Men’s Wool Blazers” or “Men’s Wool Ralph Lauren Blazers”? To test these questions, you could create two feeds, one for each, and test them over a two week period, submitting every day. Then try a a few weeks with no data feed optimization (or use your e-commerce platform’s default XML feed) and check your metrics for a difference.

Now it should be obvious that if you are a vendor and you haven’t optimized your data feeds for the Comparison Shopping Engines, you should be. I’ve outlined the starter steps here, but there’s plenty more detail to investigate as far as DFO goes. I know this has been a long and potentially confusing article with a lot of thick material to get through, especially near the end. I anticipate plenty of questions and invite any inquiries in the comments section.

-David Fishman, blogger and search engine marketer lives and works in Atlanta, GA. He is an employee at Response Mine Interactive, a digital marketing agency offering online marketing solutions to new customer acquisition. his hobbies include link building, SEO, and blogging about how to make sushi. Much thanks to Lilengine.com for this guest-post opportunity.

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Google Ad Innovations was launched at the end of March as a lab for ad products it is considering. It’s designed to help AdWords account holders experiment with ad technologies and get their feedback about the new products. They may or may not be released for real in the future, depending on how they test out among AdWords users.

Search Funnels was launched a couple of weeks ago. It slices and dices your search, conversion, keyword, and number of steps preceding conversions so you can figure out which ads are getting the most conversions and why. It’s actually pretty complicated, but there’s a video at the official AdWords Blog that gives you a good overview.

Google has long been known for text-based CPC ads, but have been busy coming up with ad models based on these text ads. The new ad models are product listing ads, comparison ads, and ad extensions, which consist of sitelinks, product extensions, video extensions, location extensions, multiple addresses for location extensions, and click to call phone extensions. Let’s go through each of these.

Product Listing Ads are in limited beta release right now. They include more product info, like images, prices, and merchant names without requiring additional keywords or text. So when someone enters a search query relevant to something in your Google Merchant Center account, Google may or may not show the most relevant products with the associated price, product name, and image. These are only charged on a cost per action (CPA) basis, so you only have to pay when someone actually buys something from your site.

Comparison Ads are also in limited beta release. These let users compare several relevant offers and work on a cost per lead format. With these, the users do not have to fill in forms, and Comparison Ads doesn’t send advertisers any kind of personally identifiable user stats. Right now this is being used for the credit card and mortgage loan industries in select locations. Comparison ads should let advertisers target offers more accurately in order to get more leads.

The suite of Ad Extensions lets users make ads more relevant and more useful. They expand on the concept of standard text ads, letting viewers have the option of getting additional information right in the ad without leaving the search page. These extensions work with existing text ads without requiring changes to bids, ad text, or keywords. Following are the types of Ad Extensions offered.

Ad Sitelinks lets advertisers extend the possibilities for existing AdWords ads, providing links to specific content deeper within your site’s sitemap. So rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will offer up to four more destination URLs for potential customers to choose from. You can use ad sitelinks to direct visitors to specific parts of your site, such as promotions, store locators, and gift registries. Early users have reported improvements in clickthrough rates of up to 30%.

Product Extensions are in limited release and allow you to add more to your existing AdWords ads with specific product information on the merchandise you sell. It uses your existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight products relevant to the user’s query. They can also show pictures, titles, and prices of products. In the first screen shot, you’ll see the “plus box” under the ad indicating the product extension. When a user clicks on that plus box, lots of products, along with thumbnail pictures show up, as you can see in the second screen shot. You’re charged the same CPC whether the user clicks on your main text ad or any offers in the product extensions box. But if a user  simply expands the box without clicking through to the site, you’re not charged.

Video Extensions are in limited beta release and allow you to engage prospective customers with video content. The video extensions are in an expandable plus box under the standard text ad. If the user watches the ad for 10 seconds or more, you’re charged based on your maximum cost per click bid of your text ad. After vieing the video, the user can click the URL link in the ad or go directly to your site with no extra charge to you. These are great for movie trailers and product usage instructions.

Location Extensions attach your business address to your ads. Your ad can also contain your business’s name, phone number, and address, promoting your business and its products and services with a specific location that’s of interest to the user. It’s good for drawing in local customers.

Multiple Addresses for Location Extensions, also in limited beta release displays a plus box under ads at the top of the page. Whenever a user clicks on that plus box, he or she sees a map that shows store locations near them, plus a search box for moving the map around. This feature shows as many stores as are relevant to a given search, increasing the chance of picking up local customers.

Click to Call Phone Extensions are for people searching for products and / or services from their smart mobile phone (like the iPhone, Android, or Palm Pre). This feature has been fully released. If someone finds your business on a search and would rather call you than visit your website, they can use a click to call phone extension they’ve found in ads on their mobile devices that have full internet browsing capability. You’re charged the same for a customer’s call as you would had they clicked on your website.

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The nofollow tag is used to tell some search engines (*cough*Google*cough*) that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s search engine ranking. It was originally intended to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam. Spam comments were the nofollow tag’s original targets: spam comments on blogs were used to get back links and try to squeeze a few drops of link juice from as many places as possible. By making comment links nofollow, the webmaster is in effect saying, “I am in no way vouching for the quality of the place this link goes. Don’t give them any of my link juice. Maybe it’s a good site, but I’m not taking chances.”

Nofollow links are not meant for preventing stuff from being indexed or for blocking access. The ways to do this are by using the robots.txt file for blocking access, and using on-page meta elements that specify on a page by page basis what a search engine crawler should (or should not) do with the content that’s on the crawled page.

Nofollow was born in 2005, and since that time, in the SEO arms race between the search engines and those who want to game them, websites started selectively using the nofollow tag to “sculpt” page rank for pages within their own site. In other words, a link going to an internal page that was ticking over nicely could be made into a nofollow link in an attempt to “conserve” PageRank juice to give to another internal page that was just starting out, or struggling, and needed some help.

Well, Google frowns on this, insisting that you’re better off in the long run to use links to your site’s pages but not to selectively use the nofollow tag in an attempt to juice up the pages you think need a boost. According to Matt Cutts, the only time you should use nofollow is when you cannot or don’t want to vouch for the content of a site. An example would be a link added by an outside user (say, in a comment thread) that you don’t trust. Cutts suggested that unknown users leaving links on your guestbook page should automatically have their links nofollowed.
Right, so what does this have to do with paid content?

The nofollow tag was supposed to squash paid links, which Google hates.

Paid content companies take advantage of Google’s emphasis on domain authority, by buying up trusted sites like eHow (purchased by the seemingly insatiable Demand Media) and dumping lots and lots of esoteric content into it. Why do they do this? They get the domain authority, and the esoteric content helps ensure that when someone, somewhere searches for an article on, say, how to make a butterfly shaped cake, the content that they paid a content writer a couple of bucks for will show up at the top of the search engine results. In other words, they’re targeting the proverbial “long tail.”

How do these sites know what content to buy? They have algorithms that comb through keywords and keyword combinations and determine where there are gaps in information. Then the content buyers commission writers to write content specifically to fill those gaps. You may have heard the statistic that 20 to 25% of queries on Google have never been searched before. That’s a huge, huge number of queries. The more of those queries you can anticipate and answer, the more hits your site will get over the long term.

While link spam and comment spam were clear attempts at short term efforts for sites to claw their way to the top of the search engine rankings, and were relatively easy to squash using nofollow tags, paid content is more of a long term strategy, and it’s not clear what, if anything Google can do about it.

What seems to be happening is that sites like Twitter are kneeling down before their Google overlords (as one side of the story goes) and automatically making even the most harmless links (such as your own link to your own website on the “Bio” part of your Twitter profile) nofollow links. That has seriously ticked off a lot of long term Twitter users who legitimately poured in lots of very real, original content and can now no longer get any link love from that Bio link, even though it’s from them, to their very own site. When this happened, the metaphors about Google and Twitter ran rampant: “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” “shutting the barn door after the horse gets out,” “cutting off its nose to spite its face,” etc.

The strategy seems to be that if nofollow links are being used as they were intended (well, as Google intended anyway), sites that are all promotion and no content would have a harder way getting to the top of the search engine results pages. Google’s fear is that paid content will game the system when it comes to odd or unusual searches, and the person who really does devote his life to making the world’s best butterfly-shaped cakes will lose out to the paid content sites who had writers or videographers hack together a 5-step instructional page or video.

Whether it will work or not is yet to be seen. As for now, paid content sites are doing pretty well for themselves. And the search engines that cater to them, like Ask.com, which wraps a few “real” sites in with sponsored results, are doing pretty well too. From February 2010 to March 2010, Ask.com’s share of search engine traffic went from 2.84% to 3.44%, while the traffic for the other (and admittedly much larger) search engines stayed relatively flat. Have a look at the screen shot of Ask.com’s results for “How do I bake a butterfly shaped cake” to see for yourself the influence of paid content on this search engine.

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Most of us have noticed the new and improved Google search results pages by now. The biggest thing (in my opinion) is the new left hand column you get when you click the new “Show Options” link at the top of the results page. Whereas before if you wanted to search from a certain time frame, or make other refinements to the search, you had to go to the Advanced Search options page, now you can do a lot of those refinements right from your original results page.

And there are a bunch of other nifty goodies in the left hand column, too, as you can see in the first screen shot.

One great option is being able to choose from “Visited Pages” and “Not Yet Visited” pages. This is great if you know you found a good site the other day, but you can’t quite remember its URL and didn’t bookmark it. It’s also great if you try a search several different ways and keep getting results that you’ve already visited but are not interested in. It seems to me that this could actually help bring a little more attention to non-first page results, though it probably won’t be revolutionary in that regard.

The “Related Searches” option is handy if you don’t quite know how to phrase what you’re looking for. For example, I was recently trying to find one of those rolling laundry organizers with a bar across the top to hang up clothes, but I didn’t really know what it was called. So I put in the keywords I did know: laundry hanger rolling organizer, and with related searches I was eventually able to find what I wanted.

Maybe you’re wondering what all the fuss is about because, after all, it doesn’t look significantly different from before. But it actually is a pretty big deal because Google tends to make changes to its search pages in tiny, homeopathic doses, and only after researching and considering them from every angle.

Something I’ve recently discovered even though it’s been around for almost a year is the Wonder Wheel. It’s another of those left hand column options. As you can see in the screen shot, when I searched on “smart phone” then clicked on “Wonder Wheel,” I got a visual representation of a bunch of topics related to smart phones. If you see a spoke of the Wonder Wheel that interests you (I chose “shoe phone” because, well, what could be cooler?), click on that spoke, and it will spawn its own Wonder Wheel, as you can see in the next screen shot.

Had I been interested in the history of the smart phone, I could have chosen “Timeline” and been presented with a handy, searchable timeline.

Another pair of options that can be extremely useful, particularly if you don’t have time to waste, is the “Fewer Shopping Sites” and “More Shopping Sites” choices. Look at the screen shot of the search I did on “fabric dyes.” If I wanted to learn about how they work, how they’re formulated, and stuff like that, I don’t necessarily care about the shopping sites and local sellers of fabric dye. I want to know about it, not buy it. So I can choose “Fewer Shopping Sites.”

On the other hand, suppose you needed to get an anniversary present for your girlfriend – say a cashmere bathrobe – and you needed to get it ASAP because you forgot it was your anniversary this weekend. You probably couldn’t care less that cashmere is made from the soft belly hair of a certain breed of goat from the Himilayas. You just want to know how to get your hands on a cashmere bathrobe as soon as possible. So you can click “More Shopping Sites” to refine your search in that direction.

You can also click on “Page Previews” which is another handy tool if you’re trying to find your way back to a site that you should have bookmarked but didn’t. They’re little snapshots of web pages displayed in the right hand column, as you can see in the screen shot with Page Previews on.

So there’s a lot going on in the left hand part of your search results page real estate if you want it. The middle column looks pretty much the way it always has, but incorporates some of the newer types of results Google tosses out there, like Social Media results. The right hand column looks pretty much the same, too, unless you have Page Previews turned on.

What does this mean in terms of SEO?

Since many of the new left hand column choices are time sensitive, the use of fresh content appears to be somewhat more in demand. It also means that your efforts at using social media like Facebook and Twitter to promote your site may start paying off more, since there’s a “Social” choice in the left hand column for refining your searches.

One thing that SEO pundits are on the watch for is the impact of YouTube’s auto captioning feature that creates captions for videos using voice recognition software. If you don’t want to take chances with the captioning, you can edit your video captions or upload your own transcription for your videos, ensuring that your keywords aren’t just tags, but are found in text directly corresponding to your video content as well.

This new search results design from Google may not hit you over the head with its new features. It took me a while to use the ones that I used to have to go to Advanced Search to use, and a little while longer to figure out what some of the other options were. But though the changes are fairly subtle, and even though you can turn the new options off or on, they’re worth checking out, because they really do help make your searches as relevant as possible. With this in mind you’ve got all the more reason, as a webmaster, to optimize your site’s content, both on-page and off.

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Have you opened up Google Webmaster Tools recently? If not, you should, because you’ll find a bunch of new features. Your webmaster tools dashboard shows top search queries, links to your site, crawl errors, sitemaps, and more, as you can see in the screen shot. From the dash, you can get more information on any of these. The next screen shot shows all the webmaster tools options that show up in the left hand column of your dashboard.

If, for example, you’re looking at your top search queries, which is located under the “Your Site on the Web” menu, you can go down to the bottom of the list where it says “more” and click. You’ll be taken to a page with a graphic representation of your queries by date, and a breakdown of individual search terms, and where you rank for them, as seen in the next screen shot. Also under “Your Site on the Web” you can find links to your site, keywords, internal links, and subscriber statistics.

You used to only be able to see your site’s top 100 search queries, but now you can see many more. If your site ranks for more than 100, you’ll see page buttons at the bottom of the “Top Search Queries” list. And the graphic that appears of your top search queries used to be something you had to download and make into a chart yourself, so this new feature is especially handy. You also get a date range selector like what you have on Google Analytics so you can narrow down your data for a particular time period.

Under the “Site Configuration” menu, you can visit sitemaps, crawler access, sitelinks if any. These are the internal links that Google sometimes puts in search results, as you can see in the screenshot. There is also a “settings” section, in which you can set geographical targets, view your crawl rate stats, and parameter handling, which some webmasters use for more efficient crawling with fewer duplicate URLs. You don’t have to set any of these, because there are defaults, but some webmasters may want to. Some people have raised concerns that having country-specific sites will cause duplicate content issues, but this isn’t the case, so setting geographical targets will not harm your rankings.

Diagnostics is another handy set of features. From the Diagnostics menu, you can check for malware on your site, crawl errors, crawl stats (which gives you Googlebot activity over the preceding 90 days), and HTML suggestions. The HTML suggestions page tells you if there are any problems with malware on your site, and a breakdown of title tag information, which includes duplicate or missing title tags, short title tags, non-informative title tags, and long title tags. It also alerts you if there is non-indexable content on your pages. Just FYI, the Malware diagnostic used to be under the “Labs” menu, but late in 2009 it “graduated” to the Diagnostics menu.

The Labs menu lets you play with new tools that may or may not stick around. One thing you can do is see what your site (either the homepage, which is the default, or a specific page, whose URL you type in) looks like to the Googlebot by choosing “Fetch as Googlebot” under the Labs menu. Once you click on “fetch” you’ll get a listing of your site and under Status, you should see “Success” and a green check mark. Click on “Success” and you’ll see the source information for your page as it is seen by the Googlebot.

You can make a Sidewiki for your site under the Labs menu, too. It may not be something you’re interested in, but a Sidewiki is a browser plugin for IE and Firefox that adds a universal commenting system for any and every page on the internet. To use it, you have to install the Google Toolbar for IE or Firefox, and Google says they’re working on a version for Chrome. When you install the toolbar with the Sidewiki in it, you go to a landing page telling you how to use it. Sidewiki entries are displayed with the most useful and high quality entries first, based on running the Sidewiki information through an algorithm to determine this. Toolbar haters will probably want to skip this one.

The Site Performance option under the Labs menu basically leads you through installation of the Page Speed browser add-on for Firefox that helps you figure how fast your site loads and what you can do to maximize load speed. Page Speed runs a bunch of diagnostics against a page and analyzes various performance parameters based on things like resource caching, upload and download sizes, and client-server round trips. You’ll get a red / yellow / green grading scheme for all the parameters, plus specific suggestions for making your page faster. It also does some automatic optimization such as compressing images and “minifying” JavaScript code.

This is very valuable information, and there are even suggestions and hints on how to do things like speeding up your site by installing a Firefox add-on called Page Speed. Honestly, you could spend half a day going through the data you now get from Webmaster Tools and probably come up with a dozen tweaks to your site that will fine tune its performance. Initial reaction to the new tools – particularly the top search queries – has been very positive.

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You’ve probably heard that site speed is now one of the more than 200 factors that Google is using to rank search engine results. The reactions range from, “Everybody panic!” to “This will make it easier for the big sites to stomp the smaller ones,” to “Well it’s about time.” I actually don’t think that most smaller sites are going to suffer because of this change. Sure, the big guys can afford to have their sites hosted on faster, dedicated servers, but some of the worst sites when it comes to speed are sites of big cheeses, particularly those who sell expensive things. You can see in the screen shot the yawn-inducing graphic you have to sit through before you can actually do anything on one such site (a luxury watchmaker). If anything, it will be the sites that are electronic monuments to big egos that are going to suffer most. There are a lot of users like me who see that “Loading, please wait” widget as the perfect reason to click the “Back” button.

If you read Matt Cutts’ blog post for April 9, you’ll learn the reasoning behind Google’s decision, and why Cutts doesn’t think it’s going to be that big a deal. Here’s a recap.

Why Matt Cutts Doesn’t Think It’s Going to Be That Big a Deal

• Your site will depend much more on factors like reputation, relevance, and quality of content, and compared to these factors, site speed will be a relatively small factor in your ranking.
• Less than 1% of queries will change now that site speed is incorporated into the ranking algorithm. In terms of search results, there shouldn’t be a noticeable difference because the average SERP only shows about 10 results.
• Google actually launched this feature a few weeks ago and few people even noticed.
• Google has a whole mini-site dedicated to speeding up your site with plenty of resources and teaching videos about how to do it.
• Small sites are often quicker to respond to this kind of change on the theory that it’s easier to turn around a tugboat than the Titanic.
• And finally, most websites can be made faster with fairly simple fixes, which improves conversion rates and ROI.

Why Some People Say, ‘Oh Yes It Will Be’

Actually, a lot of the hand wringing over this is being done out of not precisely knowing things like how “site speed” is measured. Google isn’t terribly forthcoming about telling people how site speed is figured and weighted, so there are still questions surrounding this new ranking factor, such as:

• Is site speed the time it takes the entire page to load, or is site speed how much time per KB loaded? (Actually, code.google.com pushes their open source tool called Page Speed, which you’ll read more about below. Page Speed evaluates speed as page load time: the time elapsed between the time a user “requests” a page and the time the page is fully rendered by their web browser.)

• How will non-commercial, “passion”-based sites ever make it onto page 1 if they can’t afford a fast server or a web designer with mad skills?
• Will this give the big guys more stomping power since they can afford faster hosting and SEO services?
• Will overseas websites be penalized since their servers are in other parts of the world and may load slowly in the U.S.?
• Will this spell the end of small web hosting companies as sites rush to the big hosting companies with the fastest servers?
• Is this a form of “double jeopardy” where sites that already get less traffic and fewer back links due to their slowness are penalized more?
• Google Analytics code can measurably slow down load time – will webmasters be indirectly penalized for using Google Analytics?

What Should Webmasters Do?

Google wants you to speed up your site. They did some experiments where they deliberately slowed search results page loads to see how users would respond. They found out that slowing down a page by 100 to 400 milliseconds produces 0.2 to 0.6% fewer searches. Not only that, searches dropped even more over a period of weeks, and, even if the page loads returned to normal, it took users a couple of weeks to return to their normal search habits!

And sure, Google wants you to do lots of searches because the more you search, the more money they make. Therefore Google likes sites to load quickly so you won’t become frustrated and stop searching.

The first thing webmasters should do is to use some of the official tools for measuring site speed that Google offers. Go to Google’s Webmaster Central blog post on the topic of site speed (also see screen shot) and try out some of the speed measuring tools they suggest, including the Google-approved Firefox / Firebug add-on called Page Speed, the Yahoo! tool called YSlow, and WebPagetest to show your page’s load stats and generate a checklist for optimization. Google’s Webmaster Tools, under Labs, then Site Performance will show you how fast your website loads to users around the world.

Tips for Speeding Up Site:

Add a cache plugin to your site. It creates static versions of posts so that the pages don’t have to be recreated every time from scratch. Instead, an HTML file, perhaps with javascript for dynamic elements is displayed, which is faster for users. Other suggestions for speeding up your page, which you can read more about at code.google.com, include:

• Reducing size of responses, cached pages, and downloads (minimizing payload)
• Reducing upload size (minimizing request overhead)
• Reducing the number of serial request / response cycles (minimizing round-trip to the server times)
• Improving your layout (optimizing browser rendering)

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Local search engine listings may be little more than an afterthought to some webmasters, but they are a source of business that you shouldn’t ignore. Optimizing your site for local searches and making sure you’re listed in the local versions of the major search engines is a smart move, and doing so is fairly quick and easy. The three biggies in local search are Google Local, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local.

Google Local

Google Local listings show up when the user types a search phrase and a geographical location. Google Maps shows up right at the top, along with 10 local businesses, their URLs, phone numbers, and any reviews they’ve picked up. This screen shot shows the results for a search on the keywords coffee, madison, and wi. You see a map, right at the top, with seven coffee shops listed. Below are other relevant results for the search terms.

Imagine you sell used books, or home coffee grinders or espresso machines. You’re not exactly going head-to-head with the local coffee shops, but you’re in a complementary business. The local listings that show up next to the Google Map are all worth checking out for potential back links. In return, you could offer a coffee coupon to that business with the purchase of each book / grinder / espresso machine.

In addition, be absolutely sure you list your business on Google Local by going to this link. How would you feel if your competitor’s website was showing up in hundreds of local searches, complete with phone number, map, and URL, and yours wasn’t? Don’t be left out. Optimizing for local search includes all the traditional optimization techniques, but for local search it can include things like a local blog and printable coupons. With Google Maps, you get a 200 character description field where you can state what makes your business the one people should prefer. You could include something like, “The area’s first Fair Trade coffee shop,” or “Open at 5 a.m. weekdays.”

With your Google Local listing, you’re allowed 10 images and 5 videos, and you should definitely take advantage of this. Creating a Google Local listing and optimizing your site for local searches takes nothing away from your site’s overall optimization, and can result in a real improvement in your traffic numbers.

Yahoo! Local

Now that you have your Google Local information listed, you might as well claim your Yahoo! local profile as well. You can use much of the same information for all your local listings. Yahoo! has two levels of local listings: one free, and one “enhanced.” The enhanced listing lets you add your logo and / or tagline, photographs, a more detailed description, coupon links, and inclusion in up to five categories. The screen shot shows the same search (coffee madison wi) as the Google Local search. You get a map, local listings, and reviews.

It’s easy to add your business to Yahoo! Local by going to http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php and filling in the form. For Yahoo! Local to accept your local listing, you have to show the name of your business and contact information on every page of your website. And you have to provide contact information whether or not you have a bricks and mortar store. It can take several days for your listing to show up, so give it a week before resubmitting (or giving up).

Enhanced listings on Yahoo! Local give you more potential for showcasing your business, and you also get reports showing how many times your listing was viewed and clicked. Enhanced listings cost $9.95 per month.

Bing Local

The screen shot shows the coffee search on Bing Local. Very similar results appear on all three of the big local search engines. It’s easy to add a local listing to Bing. You can’t do it using Google Chrome, however. You’ll have to use either IE or Firefox because Chrome isn’t supported, and you have to have a Windows ID to sign in. If you don’t have a Windows Live ID, you can go to this link to set one up. Then, go to https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx to add your listing.

Listing on Bing Local is free, and you can update your listing at any time. You can make your listing accommodate multiple locations if your business has branches. And there is a verification process you can use to protect your listings against unauthorized or malicious changes. Listing on Bing Local includes filling out a rather long form that includes things like your company’s tagline, brands, etc. It’s to your advantage to fill in as many of these as possible. You can also pick six categories to place your listing in. Go ahead and choose six, because Bing’s local search refinement is reported to be top notch, and you want to take advantage of the situation.

Adding your business to local listings, even if you don’t have a physical store, can do your site good. There are plenty of shoppers who prefer to shop locally when possible, and you want your business to be in the running. Don’t miss out on local searches by neglecting to list on the big local search sites. If your competitors are listed locally, and you’re not, then they’re getting clicks and calls that you aren’t. There’s really no downside to listing on the big three local search engines, and it only takes a few minutes (a little longer with Yahoo!).

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Paying for irrelevant clicks in your pay per click (PPC) ad campaign is frustrating, but is there anything you can do to minimize the chances of this happening? Yes, in fact. Three of the biggies are the use of negative keywords, exact match, phrase match, and broad match.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords have a major impact on your click-through rate (CTR) and therefore, your campaign’s return on investment (ROI). When you use the “phrase match” and “broad match” options setting up your AdWords campaigns, you should include negative keywords as well. It’s easy to do. Go to your AdWords account and click on the “Keywords” tab. You have the option of adding new keywords, as you can see in the screen shot. Notice at the bottom of the screen shot, how you can designate keywords as:

• negative keywords – don’t match this term: -keyword
• exact match – match exact term only: [keyword]
• phrase match – match exact phrase: “keyword phrase”
• broad match: keyword

Setting up negative keywords by placing a minus sign in front of them lets you filter out identical terms that can have very different meanings. For example, suppose you sell photographs of foxes (Work with me here, OK?). Well, if someone searches on fox photos thinking they’re going to get pictures from The Simpsons on Fox television network, you’ll be paying for their irrelevant clicks. Therefore, you want to use negative keywords like “television” and “network” to limit the number of times an ad for your photographs of foxes appears on a page when someone wants pictures from the TV network.

Judicious use of negative keywords can help improve the quality score of your keywords. A number of factors influence your keywords’ quality scores, including its general performance. Bottom line: a higher quality score makes your keyword trigger ads at a lower cost per click and positioned higher. Your CTR is the most important aspect of your quality score. A lot of “accidental” clicks on your ads can lower your click through rate. By using negative keywords, you’ll have fewer ad impressions, but fewer “false positive” clicks on your ads.

Finding the right negative keywords is a very important parts of a PPC campaign, but it can be complicated. One way to select negative keywords is to use your regular keyword research. The Google Keyword Tool will show you the keyword phrases that are more relevant and less relevant to your products and services. But relevance doesn’t always mean they match the searcher’s intent, and that’s what negative keywords help you with.

You’re not charged for negative keywords, and there isn’t a penalty for having a long list of negative keywords, so it’s worth your while to do some hard core keyword research and compile a list of negative keywords. You can have up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign, so you’re not likely to use them all up. (Yahoo lets you have 250 negative key words and phrases, and Microsoft AdCenter limits you to 1024 characters worth of negative key words and phrases.)

Google’s Keyword Tool isn’t the only place that can help you come up with negative keywords. You can use server log files to find info on queries that lead people to your site. Heck, you can even use a thesaurus if that helps. Sometimes common sense helps you think up good negative keywords. Suppose, for example, your products and / or services are only available in certain geographic areas. You can use names of places your stuff isn’t available as negative keywords. For example, if you paint houses in Portland Maine, you don’t want to be paying for the clicks you might get from people in Portland, Oregon. Therefore, you can use “Oregon” as a negative keyword to keep out some irrelevant clicks. So the takeaway from this is that even though negative keywords will cause you to have fewer ad impressions, the CTR and quality score will go up, and so will your return on investment.

Exact Match

It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you want your ad to show up when someone searches on “baseball caps” but not on just baseball or just caps, then you specify your keyword in brackets when you choose your AdWords keywords: [baseball caps]

If you choose [baseball caps], your ads might show up when someone searches for baseball caps, but it will not show on searches like “baseball cap,” “blue baseball caps,” or “buy baseball caps.” Now, while this will cut down on the number of ad impressions, clicks, and conversions, those clicks you do get will likely be highly targeted toward your service.

Phrase Match

Suppose that you chose “baseball caps” as one of your keyword phrases for your ad campaign. Your ad is eligible to show up on searches such as “buy baseball caps,” “baseball caps giveaway,” or “green baseball caps.” They will not show up on searches like “caps for baseball,” “baseball cap,” or “baseball hats.”

This is a more targeted approach than a plain broad match, but it’s more flexible than exact match ([baseball caps]).

Broad Match

Broad match is the default option. If you used the phrase baseball caps with no bracketing, no quotation marks, no negative sign, your ad could show up on searches for “baseball,” “caps,” “baseball hats,” or “caps for baseball.” You’ll get more click throughs, but you’ll get more erroneous click throughs as well. Now it’s possible that someone will be searching the term “baseball” wanting to find certain statistics, click on your ad, and be smitten with it enough to buy one of your baseball caps.

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The Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Guide is a PDF guide you should at least bookmark, or maybe print out for reference. Conversion tracking works like this. It places a cookie on the computer of the user who clicks on your ad. If the user then reaches one of your conversion pages, the user’s browser sends the cookie to one of the Google servers. A conversion tracking image will be shown on your website. When this match is made, it’s considered a successful conversion. For example, see the ad for Klogzilla.com in the screen shot? If someone were to click on that ad, Klogzilla would have to pay Google a certain amount based on what keyword brought the person there. Some percent of that money would be shared with the website owner. If Klogzilla had the requisite tracking code in their website HTML, they could track these things.

To do conversion tracking, you place a few pre-written lines of code into your website’s HTML. With AdWords, you need access to your website’s code and your Google AdWords account. The Tracking Guide referenced above offers instructions for the insertion of the lines of code into these web programming languages:

• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• eBay – PayPal
• Macromedia DreamWeaver
• Microsoft FrontPage
• PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
• Sun Java Server Pages
• Yahoo! Stores

One hour (give or take) after you’ve successfully installed the code into your site, you can see your conversion tracking reports from your AdWords Campaign Summary page and Report Center. You can look at conversion reports for individual keywords and key phrases too. Statistics on users who click one of your Google AdWords ads and completes a specified conversion, such as a sign-up, a page view, or a purchase, can be seen in your AdWords reports. You get the snippet of code when you sign up from the AdWords Conversion Tracking Page, under the Campaign Management tab.

There are all kinds of AdWords metrics you can track, but here are some of the most popular ones:

• Average Value – the aggregate value of all conversions divided by the number of conversions
• Conversion Types – any of various types of conversions recorded in the code, such as sign-ups, purchases, leads, or types of conversion you define yourself
• Conversion Rate – total number of conversions divided by total number of ad clicks. Conversions are counted on Google sites and some of their ad network sites. The conversion rate only reflects ad clicks where Google can track the conversions
• Cost Per Conversion – total cost divided by number of conversions. This tells you how much each of those conversions costs. Google can track these on their own sites and some ad network sites, so this number will only reflect the cost per conversion that Google can track.
• Transaction – one single conversion event. After someone clicks on your ad, there can be multiple transactions. Suppose someone clicks your ad, then makes a $10 purchase on your site, then makes another $15 purchase on your site. Your reports will show one transaction from the click on the ad, and two purchase transactions, with $25 total value, for a total of three transactions.

As Magnum, P.I. used to say, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. This can rapidly become complicated. As if you weren’t spending enough hours running your business and updating your website, now if you want to figure out where your AdWords dollars are doing their best, there’s all this tracking to deal with.

Well, there are search engine marketing firms and AdWords account management consultants that can do this stuff for you. The idea is that they know how to manage your AdWords campaigns so that they reach the people who want to buy your product or service. The Google Advertising Professionals program certifies those who pass a qualifying exam and meet other qualifictions.

If your budget doesn’t run to hiring consultants yet, Google also provides its own software for AdWords account management called AdWords Editor, which you can see in the screen shot. Access it at http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/. You can also sign up for something called My Client Center, which is part of the Google Professionals suite, but which you can use even if you’re not a certified Google Advertising Professional. It’s a shell account that links up all your AdWords accounts in one location, so you don’t have to log in and out to switch AdWords accounts. This is great for the advertising professional who manages AdWords accounts for several clients too. You can generate multiple accounts at once, invite new clients to have their accounts managed by you, and generally have dashboard access to your or your client’s AdWord account(s).

To be able to use this, go to the Google Advertising Professionals sign-up page at https://adwords.google.com/professionals/ and sign up for free. You’ll be given a My Clent Account setup as soon as you enroll.

In fact, if you have time (I know, fat chance, right?), signing up with the Google Advertising Professionals program and gradually working your way through it will make you an expert on pay per click management of AdWords accounts and help you use your AdWords dollars optimally.

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