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.