My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
I talk a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with respect to earning top placements in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Basically, you optimize your website and external links in such a way for the search engine spiders to pay attention to specific keywords that you would like related to your site. [...]
I talk a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with respect to earning top placements in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Basically, you optimize your website and external links in such a way for the search engine spiders to pay attention to specific keywords that you would like related to your site. Of course, we do not know exactly what the search engines want to see, but through observation we can make some very good educated guesses.
So how do you know if your SEO is producing any results? One way is to continue searching for keywords to see if you exist in the SERPs and if so, where do they place. And that is a good idea! But what about the other keyword terms and phrases that the search engines associate with your website? I suppose you can just start typing random keywords into search engines for the rest of your life, but that is a poor use of time.
There is, however, a little tool built into the Google program called Sitemaps. To join Sitemaps (it’s Free!), you need a google account (I believe your gmail account or Adwords account will work). Once you are signed up, you need to add a dummy file to your website’s root directory so Google can find your website. Creating a text or xml sitemap is essentially the last step. You upload this into Google Sitemaps and you are good to go! (This all sounds complicated, but it is very easy and Google Sitemaps goes over this in great detail.)
Here is where you will find tons of interesting information about your website.
- How often is it spidered?
- Which URLs are bad or stale?
- What information are the robots finding?
- What are the most relevant content words on your website
- Current lists of backlinks.
- Page Rank and comparisons to other internal pages.
- Top 20 SERP results and Top 20 clicked SERP results.
The last bit of information I find the most interesting. Here, I find great data telling me not only what keywords are appearing in the organic results, but their average position and which ones are clicked most often. From an SEO standpoint, this provides us with an extraordinary peak at the effectiveness of our SEO strategy as well as possible terms and keywords that we should be focusing more time on.
Personally, I have discovered keywords that I would not have ever thought to optimize with extremely high ranking click-through rates. This may prompt me to focus more time on optimizing this keyword, spend money on this PPC keyword or even consider using such an keyword as the cornerstone to an entirely new product.
SEO is about observation. The Google Sitemap tool is one of the few (and FREE!) tools available that will provide direct results from your SEO efforts. Basically, it gives you a brief glimpse into the mind of the Google Search Engine robot itself.
- Matthew Bredel
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