Last week, I was speaking at the seminar which covered Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics, one of the misconceptions that came up was that of the explanation of Organic v Paid Search.

It was black & whitely explained that websites listed organically were optimised, while paid listings were lazy & unoptimised!

Rather that the two methods competing with each other, I find they actually compliment, and I’d always recommend a PPC campaign to assist SEO.

Here’s my  5 reasons to utilise PPC & SEO

1. Wider Reach – PPC allows you to target searchers which may not be possible to do with SEO, as it’s impossible to optimise for every search term in every country.
2. Conversion Optimisation – PPC traffic allows you to control the landing page for search phrases, this is extremely useful when analysing your conversion process, you can test a page which is only available to your PPC visitors. Tools such as Googles Website Optimiser or Crazy Egg are great in this scenario, this can then feed back into your main website.
3. Brand Protection – with the recent changes to the trademark policy on Google Adwords, your competitors may be bidding on your trademarks. As you own the brand, you will most likely have a maximum quality score, with a minimum cost per click for those terms. It also allows you to correctly use the ‘Official Site‘ or Copyright / Trademark symbols in the ad text, increase click through rate and lower costs.
4. KeyWord Research – Currently the best keyword research tool for traffic in Ireland is either using googles keyword suggester, or creating an adwords campaign with exact/phrase match on a group of keywords and using reports to determine the search pattern. The keyword placement report in Adwords should should additional search terms that have triggered your ad. All this information can be used to feed back into your SEO efforts, as well as lower your PPC costs by looking closer at the long tail searches.
5. Instant Results – PPC can be turned on/off within minutes, and allows you to instantly get listed, while SEO results may take a long time, and even then may not get that coveted page 1 listing.

PPC advertising obviously isn’t for lazy websites, and in many cases is vital to creating a great web marketing strategy.

Damien blogs often, many times a day, so knowing that his content is indexed so often allows him to be able to respond very quickly to topical issues (Something I’m sure he takes advantage of), but this can also be useful for sites that are indexed at a slower rate. By knowing the frequency of Googlebot’s visit, you can make an informed decision to push out content.

An example of this may be a Press Release or News Item on your website, if your site is being indexed at a slower rate, say every 7 days, getting that fresh content out before Googlebot can be hugely important to see it being returned in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

Of course creating fresh and interesting content, will mean Googlebot likes you and will come back more often, like a freeloader to a beer sampling party.

Measuring when Googlebot comes, and it’s frequency is possible by analysing your web logs, or a much easier method (and more productive) is by creating a sitemap and uploading it for use with Google Webmaster Tools

A sitemap allows you to tell Google when you have new content, and creates a readable file containing links and information about the pages on your site.

Creating sitemap files, ensures Google knows all about what pages are on your site, with Webmaster Tools, you can also see lots of other cool information about your website.

Using these bits of information can give you a better insight into how Google views your site, and after all isn’t that what it’s all about?

What is the message center?

The message center provides a way for us to communicate important information to you regarding your Google webmaster tools account and the sites you manage. Our intent is to make it easy for you to receive important information associated with your sites.

More info from the Webmaster Blog

Initially the messages will refer to search quality issues, but over time we’ll use the Message Center as a communication channel for more types of information. Here’s an example: informing the site owner about hidden text, a violation in our webmaster guidelines.

Good news for anyone who is having issues with content not being indexed.

Further Reading – Search Engine Land

To avoid this, you can redirect all traffic to one standard URL, a canonical URL. Canonical means ‘standard’ or ‘authoritative’

I’ve implemented two simple methods around this.

1. Mod Rewrite in .htaccess

This is apache server specific, create or amend your .htaccess file with

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^barryhand\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.barryhand.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This enables the Rewrite Engine (line1) while a condition on line2 comes into play when people access barryhand.com , this is also case sensitive [NC]

The 3rd line redirects to www.barryhand.com using a permanent 301 redirect

2. Google Preferred Domain

Google allows you to control your preferred domain from their excellent webmaster tools section. A whole host of goodies and stats are also available once you verify your site ownership.

Enabling both these methods will assist in search engine optimisation , for more information see here -

• A Summary of 301 Redirects
• MSN’s Google PageRank of 2 and Canonical URL Problems