Well a rule of thumb, if you cannot measure it don’t do it!  Simple as that.  If you have online ads, and offline ads, have different ways to measure it.  Of course you cannot control all offline, but you can control a vast majority of online.  If a person clicks on something you know what they clicked on, how many pages they viewed, and if you are advanced enough you can tell what phone number they called and all sales associated with them.

Don’t think that an online marketer isn’t aware of this, make sure you are smart about your money spend and understand that every lead going to your website should be counted as revenue from an online lead so you can analyze your ROI and make educated decisions on what really works and what doesn’t.

As always more later.

Now the trend will show you 1 year of historical word trends.  So if you were to use a keyword like “ski trips” you would see that during the wintertime (in the U.S.) you’ll have a higher amount of search and in the summer a lower amount.  This will allow you to set a level of expectation for your business.  If your keyword is steady throughout the year than you can expect a level of steady success, if it’s cyclical plan accordingly, or find the words that trend the opposite to market towards during their peaks etc.

All page link to your home page, so the home page of a site typically gets more rank since more pages both internally and externally are pushing rank to it.  While pages that should also be considered are category pages etc.  Many of these will be part of your universal navigation so they will also get rank pushed to them.  It’s important that you use appropriate keywords were possible to allow search engines to know the phrase that is important to the page you are pointing too.

You also want to have links to your contact us page etc since you do want to allow customers to get there, and you need them for better ranking in Google, but instead of use <a href=”contactusurl”>contact us</a> use a no follow <a href=”contacturl” rel=”nofollow”>contact us</a> this will prevent you from passing rank from a page to that un “wanted” page.

It is important to understand exactly what is search engine optimization.  I believe the easiest way to state it is that it is a method to make your website readable by search engines in such away that the pages you want to be displayed are for a given keyword.

So some major portions of it:

1. Site needs to be spiderable
2. Pages need to be unique
3. Proper use of basic HTML tags (i.e. Title, H1, H2 etc.)
4. Proper use of internal links
5. External Link Building

These are some of the very basics, the things I call SEO 101!

Your url’s need to be search engine friendly / safe.  In other words do not use query strings if you can avoid it for telling the server which page to serve up.  An Example of what not to  do: www.website.com/page.php?id=123  now if you have 10k pages you would have id= 1 -> 10,000 and Google will not like that. so instead do something like www.website.com/page/1.html where you tell the server that the 1.html is actually = page.php?id=1  this makes the pages “unique” from the url perspective.  This also makes the site more spiderable and has the ability to be completely indexed.  Also on the topic of spiderable all of the pages should be linked.  (ok well not all of them, I’ll write about page rank shifting later)  Also you need to use a sitemap.xml file!  That will make sure all of the pages are visible to the different search engines.

More in my next post.