Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

Competition between PPC services has resulted in some significant advances

in campaign tracking, click fraud prevention, and geographic targeting, and these

improvements are expected to continue. The bad news is that there are so many prod-

ucts out there—even within the same PPC service—that the potential for confusion is

very high. With more and more site owners adopting PPC, the online help systems are

rather robust. But there are lots of people who choose to outsource PPC management

because it can be a real headache. It

can

be done in-house, though, and it doesn’t have

to be that difficult if you start small and focus on the basics.

PPC is really unmatched in the power it gives you over your listing: what it

says, who sees it, and when. We also love PPC as a tool for studying the response to

your keyword choices. So in Chapter 8, with our guidance, you’re going to set up a

starter campaign and get to know the basics while you get yourself some tasty tar-

geted clicks.

Paid Inclusion

As you learned in Chapter 3, robots aren’t perfect, and there are plenty of reasons

that a robot may not be able or willing to index every page on your site. Paid inclusion

is a service offered by some search engines that provides a workaround for these imper-

fections by allowing you to submit a list of URLs that you want them to index and

recrawl on a frequent basis. Usually these services also allow you to submit your own

dolled-up description of each page and to view basic statistics of the traffic that flows

from the search engine to your paid URLs. Paid inclusion does not guarantee a boost in

ranks, but it often does guarantee more frequent spidering and, in some cases, the very

attractive possibility of having your own description used in the listing instead of a text

snippet.

Paid inclusion in this form is currently offered only by Yahoo! (MSN and Ask

dropped their programs in 2004). Google, which never offered a paid inclusion service,

now offers a

free

version of paid inclusion, called Google Sitemaps. You can learn more

about how to set up Google Sitemaps in Chapter 10, “Extra Credit and Guilt-Free

Slacking.”

Whenever the subject comes up, the general consensus of the SEO community

is that the death of paid inclusion is imminent. One reason is that the search engines’

ability to index pages has improved steadily over the years. Combine that improvement

with the pressure of Google’s free Sitemaps service and who knows? Maybe paid inclu-

sion will be nothing more than a memory soon.

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