Matt Cutts recently gave a talk at WordCamp 2007 on Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers. There’s some great information in here. The video is a bit long (over an hour), but well worth watching. You can also download the presentation. Thanks John Pozadzides for taping the presentation.

People often have a general idea of what is involved in SEO, but they tend to focus on one or two particular variables. The truth of the matter is there are a lot more. Some are more important than others, but singling out specific ones ignores the long tail effect. The little things add up and can make a huge difference.

Here are all the things that can POSITIVELY impact your positioning, in no particular order:

• Domain name
• URLs
• Content and keyword density
• Number of pages
• HTML formatting
• Title tags, meta tags
• Internal linking
• External linking
• How long the site has been active
• Competition
• Frequency of updates

Conversely, here are things, exclusive of blackhat practices, that NEGATIVELY impact your positioning that can be easily avoided:

• Duplicating content within sites
• Duplicating entire websites
• The same title tag on every page
• No sitemap
• No custom 404 error pages

In general, we’d recommend sticking to GREAT content, clean code and healthy flow of relevant inbound links.

For my last article I did a search for the Ron Popeil website.

As you can see from the results above, Ronco, the official Ron Popeil website comes up as #2 out of 109,000 results. Now, you are probably thinking to yourself “how could that not be good?” See SERP

Take a closer look. The title of the link says it all - “Ronco Ecommerce Administration”

The only result on the first three pages is to the administrative login to the Ronco ecommerce site. Not good. Click on the link and the only thing you see if a login box asking for a username and password.

Moral of the story:

• Be aware of what Google has indexed on your site (search ’site:www.yourdomainname.com’) and the results displaying for various searches (branding keywords, topic keywords, etc)
• Create a robots.txt ahead of time to prevent indexing of pages that are for internal use only

Don’t worry, there are short term and long term solutions for these circumstances.

Ron Popeil and his Rotisserie Cooker are famous for the catch phrase “Just Set it and Forget It.” While this approach may work wonders for perfectly cooking a nice juicy chicken, it will leave your pay per click budget dry and the results unsatisfying.

A successful PPC campaign requires constant monitoring and adjustment. Many companies setup PPC campaigns on their own and don’t touch them for months. Over time things change, like ad serving algorithms, searching behavior and most importantly competition. If you are setting up a campaign and plan to just let it run on its own, you are better investing in Google stock, the ROI is probably higher.

If you are prepared to do the ongoing work, here are some things to keep an eye on:

• Top performing keywords - what is driving the most traffic and ultimately the most conversions?
• Budget allocation - are less important keywords using up all of your budget?
• Click through rate - how well are your ads doing? do you need to write more compelling ads?
• Ad distribution - search results vs. content networks - are the content networks eating up your budget?
• Keyword bids and ad position - how has competition and ad performance affecting these?
• Average cost per click - is it going up? down? why?
• Conversion rate - which keywords perform the best?
• Geo-targeting and the long tail - can you refine your keywords to be more specific?

Welcome. Simple pixel is a blog dedicated to online marketing. Our goal is to make things simple for you; to discuss and explain the complicated and ever changing world of online marketing.

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