Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

291

And beware the affiliates you never knew you had—and probably never wanted!

Is your product name showing up in the ad for a shopping site? If so, does that shop-

ping site actually sell your product? We’ve seen it time and time again: Due to haphaz-

ard use of dynamic keyword insertion, shopping sites create ads for a specific product

but deliver only a landing page saying that the product isn’t found on their website. It

doesn’t benefit you or the shopping site to let this practice continue, so if you find that

you’re in the middle of a bait-and-switch PPC ad, contact the shopping site and politely

request that they remove it.

Your SEO Plan, Week 12, Monday: Checking Additional Keywords

Starting with your baseline report, and for every monthly report thereafter, you checked

your website’s search engine presence for your top-priority keywords. There may be

legitimate reasons for checking additional keywords outside of your 10 or so top-

priority terms on a quarterly basis. Here are some examples:

• Your site contains a laundry list of keywords for which you can reasonably

expect good ranks without a formal optimization plan. An example of this situa-

tion might be a movie fan site with a good representation of several celebrity

names or a product review site with multiple instances of several product names

or brand names.

• In past SEO efforts, additional landing pages on your site were optimized for

keywords outside of your current top-priority terms.

• You have been using an automated rank checker because you scaled up Your SEO

Plan for several additional keywords. Consider checking rank manually once a

quarter, at least for a portion of your keywords (see the section “Week 2: Baseline

Assessment” in Chapter 6 to review the benefits of a manual rank check).

Whether you’ve followed Your SEO Plan to a T, had to make some tough

choices to cut out some tasks, or have earned yourself an A for extra-credit effort, be

proud of yourself! You’re an SEO pro!

c10. 8:10 291