• Submit your site to the search engines - Yes, some people forgot this step! Unless the search engines know about your site, there is no SEO. If you have a new site (or an old one) make sure that you are listed in all major search engines. Next look for speciality search engines to might fit your market. Then do a search for your own domain name in each search site and make sure you show up. The top 3 search engines right now are Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com (Microsoft's search engine).
• Think Marathon, Not Sprint - SEO is a process. It isn't a set-it-and-forget-it Ron Popeil machine. Your competitors aren't standing still and you shouldn't be either. If you optimize your web site and manage to get on the first page for a specific keyword today, there is no guarantee you'll be there tomorrow. In fact, fresh content is one of the ways search engines determine relevance. Understand that you need to keep tweaking your site and adding content to stay at the top. Don't worry if you're not seeing dramatic results on day one just keep at it and build a great content library over time.

• Boosting traffic might not mean more sales - It sound crazy but more traffic doesn't always mean more sales. What you need is targeted traffic. If you sell women's bathing suits and you get 100% more visitors who are all men, you probably won't see an increase in sales. Make sure that you are targeting keywords which will bring qualified leads to your site. Make sure that you have a good understanding of who your customers are. There may be one than one segment and you may need to create separate SEO landing pages and campaigns to target the different groups. If you can put yourself in the mind of your customers you'll see opportunities for keywords, articles and advertising that will bring in more sales!

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have all agreed on a new HTML tag called the canonical link that will help your search engine optimization efforts.

Search engines have a hard time differentiating between similar links to the same page. For example, http://www.bvsoftware.com and http://bvsoftware.com go to the same page but Google may index them as two separate pages. Also, UNIX is case sensitive to search engines may treat BVSoftware.com and bvSoftware.com as two separate locations too.

If the same page on your site is considered two separate pages in a search index your page rank may suffer. Let's say the 10 people link to www.bvsoftware.com and 10 people link to bvsoftware.com. That means that each page in the index has 10 inbound links instead of 20 inbound links. Your inbound links are cut in half.

Until now, the most common solution was a 301 redirect. This is a special HTTP response code that tells a web browser that a page has permanently moved from one location to another. We use a 301 redirect on bvsoftware.com to www.bvsoftware.com. This helps keep our page rank high but it can be time consuming and almost impossible to create 301 redirects for every variation on a url.

That's where the new Canonical Link tag comes into play. The tag allows page authors to tell search engines which URL is the preferred one for a given page.

<link rel="canonical" value="http://www.bvsoftware.com/" />

  The tag goes in the HEAD section of your page. The tag is self closing so make sure you have a "/>" at the end. 

A couple of notes:

1) This tag is a suggestion to search engines and is not guaranteed to be used. 301 redirects and good link strategy is still important

2) You can not use this tag to redirect between domains. We can't redirect Domain1.com to Domain2.com using this tag

3) You CAN suggest SSL urls as the preferred format. https://www.domain.com

4) Don't abuse the tag to redirect users to non-similar content. The search engines are smarter than that now.

5) Try and use absolute URLs instead of relative ones. Point directly to the final destination because a chain of canonical links may not be followed.

Other links about the tag:

http://blogs.msdn.com/.....aspx

http://ysearchblog.com/....

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

There is an interesting discussion going on in the forums about URL formats for Search Engine Optimization. We're talking about balancing the application's need to effeciently parse out product information like SKU or ID number with the merchant's desire for the cleanest URL format that has the most information for Search Engine Optimization.

What do you think about URL formats? Chime in on the forums.

Google has a keyword quality score that determines how much you pay for a given keyword, how frequently your ad appears, and in what position your ad appears. Few people realize that the speed of the landing page counts. That means that whatever page your Google keyword ads link to should be as fast as possible.

If you think the cheapest web host around is the best deal just consider how much you could be paying in extra Google advertising costs because your landing page is slower than your competitors! Optimize your landing page images, cut out graphics if you don't need them and certainly don't add Flash or Videos unless you really, really need them.

I'm probably very late to this party but apparently the Meta Keyword tag is all but useless to modern search engines. I had a chance to meet Nathan Buggia from Microsoft's Search team yesterday and he was gracious enough to answer a lot of questions for me.

Nathan explained that all major search engines pretty much ignore the keywords tag and instead generate their own keywords directly from your page content. The meta keyword tag is a really great way to let your competitors know which words you think are important but aren't going to impact search rankings.

I also asked him some common questions that our customers ask us about. It's great to talk to the people that actually know the answers instead of guessing which SEO guru is right.

Does it matter that the extensions are ".aspx" instead of ".html"
The short answer is "no."  The only expection is that Microsoft Search will actually read some .aspx pages more intelligently than non .aspx pages so there could be a slightly benefit to using ASP.NET in general.

Is it okay to use non-latin characters in domain names? I've heard they can flag your site as a phishing page.
Nathan says that it is 100% fine to use non-latin characters in URLs as long as your page content also contains non-latin characters. A 100% us page with all latin characters that uses non-latin characters in the URL could raise some alerts on filters.

Any other buring search engine questions? Email me and I'll try and get Nathan to answer them if I catch up with him again.

In my last post I talked about how Google ranks ads based on what you're willing to pay and how effective the ads are for given keywords. This time I'll shed some light on what you actually pay for each click which is different than what you're willing to pay. It's based on auction rules.

 First, let me go over some basic types of auctions:

1) English Auction - Most common for art auctions, on TV shows, etc. The bid starts low and bidders "raise paddles" to signify they will pay the next highest amount. It ends with a "Going, Going, Gone" statement where the last person to bid the high amount wins and pays that amount.

2) Dutch Auction - The price starts really high and keeps getting lower until someone decides to buy at that price. The first person to "jump in" at a price wins the item and pays that amount.

3) Vickrey Auction - Everyone bids in secret. All bids are compared and the person with the highest bid pays the SECOND highest bid amount.

 Google Adwords uses the Vickrey auction style. This means that the person with the highest bid pays the amount of the second highest bid. The person with the second highest bid pays the third highest bid amount, etc. The reason this auction style is great for adverisers is that no matter how high your bid, you only pay what you actually needed to bid to beat out the next bidder.

From the examples you can see that if your competitor bids $0.45 it doesn't matter how much above $0.45 you bid. You'll always end up paying just $0.45 per click.

So what's the best way to bid? Easy, bid the highest amount that you're willing to pay. You'll never pay more than your max bid and you may pay less. Figure out what value a click has to your company for a given keyword and bid that amount.

When working with the Google adwords program you may wonder how Google decides which ads go in spots 1,2,3 and which ads get pushed down the list. As it turns out it's a pretty simple formula that benefits both advertisers and Google.

Step 1: Google looks at how much you are willing to pay per click for your ad on a specific keyword. You may decide that for the word "Widget" you are willing to pay $0.25 per click.

Step 2: Google looks at how effective your ad is at getting people to click on it for the word "Widget." This is known as the click-through-rate and is the number of clicks that your ad received divided by the number of times it has been viewed. If your ad is viewed 100 times and 5 people click your ad has a 5% click-through-rate.

Step 3: Google figures out how much money it will make if your ad is displayed 1000 times. This is known as CPM or cost-per-thousand-impressions. To calculate CPM you take your click through rate and multiply it by 1000 and then by the amount you're willing to pay per click.

1000 x 5% X $0.25 = $12.50 

So now Google knows that for every thousand views they will charge you $12.50.  Now Google has a way to compare your ad to others and determine which ad deserves the best positions.

Based on this example Google would place your ad in the #1 position and the competitor in the #2 position. Even though the competitor is willing to pay more per click your ad has a higher click through rate which means that Google values your ad more than the competitor.

If you're trying to raise the position of an adwords ad you have two options. 1) Pay more per click or 2) write more effective ads so that your click through rate goes up. Writing more effective ads is the better option but takes time and practice. If you need a quick boost you can always spends more money.