Things You should Know Before Optimizing a Web Site

In order to make your SEO efforts successful, you should get the answers to the following questions in advance:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffíc, more publicity etc.

2) What is the time-frame for this project?

3) What is the budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questíons will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questíons answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScrípt, Flat HTML etc)
2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)
3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g.
www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing "?" symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).
4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?
5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScrípt drop-down menus?
6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?
7) Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps ?
8) What is the current link popularity of the site?
9) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?
10) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?
11) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?
12) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)
13) What are the site's geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?
14) What are the site's demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)
15) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client's target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?
16) Who are my/my client's major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?
17) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?
18) Do I have access to site traffíc logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?
19) How do I plan on tracking my or my client's conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?
20) What are my/my client's expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?

Your Ad isnt shown on Google - Possible Reasons

Here is the list of issues which could be the possible reasons behind - your Google Adwords PPC ads aren't shown on google search network:

1. Your ad has been disapproved.

2. The keyword you used to search for your ad is not performing well and has become inactive for search.

3. Your ad rank is not high enough to allow your ad to show on the first page of search results.

4. Your ad is showing, but in a lower position possibly due to a shift in the competitive landscape.

5. Your regionally targeted ad doesn't include the region (e.g. city, state, or country) associated with your computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address.

6. Your ad is targeting a language that's different from the language you've selected for your Google.com preferences.

7. Your daily budget has been exhausted and your ads are no longer showing for the day.

8. Your daily budget is lower than the recommended amount and Google is spacing the delivery of your ads to ensure you receive traffic throughout the day.

9. You're using ad scheduling and your ads are currently not scheduled to run.

10. Your account hasn't been activated.

Recommendations

Please avoid checking your ads on Google.com since it may dilute the overall CTC and account statistics. Rather you should

* Search the keywords on Ad Preview Page Tool in Google Adwords.

* Use Ads Diagnostic tool which will tell you the reasons of your ads not showing up i.e. approval status, cost-per-click (CPC) and budget price settings, ad and keyword performance, ranking status, geo-targeting settings, etc.

* Google Adwords comes up lots of Reports so run any of the report anytime to check the account statistics or you can schedule to run the reports as per your need.

What is RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.

An RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries i.e. Rich Site Summary allow users to scan the article so that they can decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the topic originating from the website.

Benefits of RSS

1. It gives you the latest updates

2. It saves on surfing time.

3. It gives the power of subscription to the user.

4. It lessens the clutter in your inbox since RSS doesnt use emails to send update.

5. It is spam free.

6. Unsubscribing is hassle-free.

7. Can be used for advertising & marketing


Disadvantages of RSS

1. Some users prefer receiving email updates over an RSS feed.

2. Graphics and photos do not appear in all RSS feeds.

3. The identity of the source website can be confusing. Since RSS feeds do not display the actual URL or name of the website.

4. Publishers cannot determine how many users are subscribed to their feed and the frequency of their visits. Moreover, they would not know the reasons why users unsubscribe which could be important in improving their advertising.

5. RSS feeds create higher traffíc and demands on a server. Most readers still prefer the whole update over a brief summary of the entry, thus they still access the site.

6. Since it is a new technology, many sites still do not support RSS.