Today I tried just this with my sites set specifically on home improvement sites. The results were far from stellar and, in fact, quite discouraging.

If you are a brick and mortar retailer that has a website, consider the following situation. Chances are your customers are just as frustrated with your site as I was with the ones I visited. This could be costing you sales and, more importantly, customers.

Where I live there are at least four major building centers that have almost every product under the sun. Whether you want to buy a paint brush or an entire house, these stores are designed to help you.

I have yet to be disappointed when visiting many of these stores as they always have what I want at competitive prices. Today, rather than going into the stores to compare prices, I attempted to shop online to save time (and hopefully money). What I found concerns me.

As an online marketer, I’m always checking out websites to see how functional they are. However, of the four sites I visited today, three received failing grades. And the site that passed isn’t actually a building center, but a store that has a great online and offline presence.

My findings may not be the same as yours as I live in Canada. However, I have found similar results with other sites in the past, so I think my findings and recommendations will apply to many sites in general.

The Scenario

I have been doing some minor renovations in my home. I am in the process of converting a spare bedroom into an office. As one of the tasks, I had to remove a doorway which is no longer needed and fill it in so that it looks like the rest of the wall around it.

The reason I work with computers is that I am trades challenged. Even with all the proper tools, making the measurements multiple times and taking my time, I still manage to have a 1/8 inch gap at the top of my patch job where the door used to exist.

No problem, I thought. I know home improvement stores have textured wallpaper that will cover my construction imperfections and will make the wall look much better than it is now (considering the 40 year old wallpaper of brightly colored flowers).

Rather than hitting every building supply store in the area, I thought I’d visit their websites to see what pricing they have for the wallpaper I want. I know all the stores in question do carry the wallpaper as I’ve seen it advertised quite recently by all of them, or have seen it in their stores recently while shopping for other products.

So I decided to work my way up from the smaller, neighbourhood stores to the larger building centers.

My first stop was Home Hardware, a large Canadian chain which has been around for years. In fact, prior to working in this industry I worked for a few different Home Hardware stores, so I know they carry the wallpaper I’m looking for.

My experience with their site was pretty poor, to be blunt. It was extremely difficult to navigate and when I did find a catalog to view I got kicked out of the site for an expired session even though I’d only looked at one page of the catalog and had only spent at most five minutes on the site.

Technical issues aside, I found the overall usability of the site to be incredibly lacking. There wasn’t any search feature that I could find and the browsable navigation was sub-par.

My next stop was Rona, also a large Canadian retailer and one whose stores are generally larger than Home Hardware’s.

My experience at the Rona site was actually worse than the first site. I tried their site search for “textured wallpaper” and it returned no results. I then broadened my search by using just “wallpaper” and while I did get results, it was all for tips on how to hang wallpaper, how to prep the walls, how to measure for the amount needed and so on, but no product listings.

I grew frustrated with the search feature after trying a few different queries, so I tried to browse the site to find the product.

As I said, I’m 99% sure this store also has this product. After all, I seem to remember an entire 100 foot aisle of different types of wallpaper in the store. Yet, when I did find the “wallpaper” category in their online catalog they only had two products supposedly from my local store. And neither was the wallpaper I wanted.

By now you can imagine my growing frustration. There’s really only one other building center to try so I thought “what the heck.” My next visit was to Home Depot.

Many people are familiar with Home Depot. Where I live it is the largest of the building centers. If it isn’t in Home Depot then it isn’t found in our area. I assumed the store must have it, so the website should also have it.

However, as with the previous two examples, the Home Depot site was difficult to navigate and the search feature didn’t work right.

So, of the three sites so far, the first site didn’t have a search feature that I could find, and navigation was clumsy at best. The search on both the second and third sites was a waste of time in my opinion and the browse feature for both sites was very cumbersome. In addition, both sites seem to be quite limited in the inventory they show.

The final site I visited wasn’t even a home improvement site, it’s a general purpose site similar to Walmart. It’s called Canadian Tire and it’s an institution in Canada. It’s such an establishment here that friends actually meet at the store on Saturdays to socialize and shop (but that’s a topic for another time).

In terms of their website, however, I felt it gets a passing grade all around. Its search feature is by far the most advanced and user friendly, and the browse works much more effectively than the other sites.

The stakeholders for this site have obviously put a lot of thought into what is needed to make it successful. In fact, they’ve done such a good job with the site that it seems as if the atmosphere of the store itself is somehow transferred to the site.

In general, I’ve found that I’ve become frustrated with most e-commerce sites, particularly those that belong to brick and mortar businesses. Its almost as if the stores consider the website as a brochure and not a valid form of commerce.

There are very few retailers I’ve visited online which have come to realize that the website can and should be part of the marketing campaign and not just a line item in the yearly marketing budget.

Really the theme here is similar to an article I recently wrote about Superbowl ads. In the case of the Superbowl ads, advertisers failed to carry the marketing message from the ads into the website. In my examples above the stores fail to carry the most basic of services through the website: customer service.

So, if you are a brick and mortar retailer who also operates an e-commerce site, please heed my advice: Make sure your site has a functional search feature, is easily browsable and is tied to the store so that if someone is searching they are seeing inventory that actually exists in the store. If it doesn’t accomplish these basic tasks, you can be sure you are frustrating customers at best and, at worst, losing them to competitors with more effective e-commerce sites.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

That is, no matter what rankings you achieve or how much you are spending on your PPC in a month, you really should only consider one thing: Your customers.

100% of your efforts must revolve around who your customer is.

In this article I give some tips to ensure that your marketing campaign revolves around your customer.

While I was unable to attend Search Engine Strategies in New York this year (I went last year – it was an incredible experience) I was surprised and glad to hear that there was an over -riding theme coming out of the sessions both from the SEM’s presenting as well as the engines.

That theme is user intent.

That means, one must understand what the user – their customer – wants when they visit the search engine and ultimately click on a search engine result whether it is paid or organic.

I started to think about my clients over the years and some of the things they have said when I ask them, “What are you looking for in this campaign?”

Many of the responses include: “I want to be number 1 for [insert keyword here]” or, “I need to lower my PPC costs by [insert value here]” or, “I need to beat my competitor [insert competitors name here].”

What is the most important element missing from these comments (and, I think, from many clients in general)? The focus on the customer.

In the years I’ve been asking the question “what are you looking for in this campaign?” I think I can count on one hand how many people responded to my question above with, “I need to reach my target audience effectively.”

While it is true that many companies are beginning to realize this now, it hasn’t been that way for some time.

I think what is changing in today’s world is that companies are beginning to realize that search is big business. As such, they have marketers interacting with SEM firms and not IT people. It is these marketing people who are asking the right questions or, in many cases, answering them the right way.

Here’s an example: I recently sat in on a call with a client and one of the first things they said was, “We have devised seven unique personas for our site and need to target each one individually.”

”What? You’ve already done the personas? We usually do those.” But you know what? They did an incredible job. After reviewing their persona information, I could put a face to the persona. I knew what that person looked like, and what his or her intent was with the site.

And that is the most important thing to consider in today’s SEM world – you MUST know who your customer is. You MUST understand their intent if you are going to succeed.

For example, if your customers tend to have completed the research stage and are in the buying stage, don’t send them to a PPC landing page with product specs. Instead, send them to a landing page with pricing and shipping information.

Better yet, send them to the pricing/checkout page and give them free shipping! That will undoubtedly help encourage the sale.

Similarly, if you are finding a product specification page ranking highly for a purchase search term, try and find a better page to optimize for that term and de-optimize the product page so that the purchase page will rank higher.

This is where personas are extremely helpful. If you can put a face to your customer, you can determine their intent. And if you can determine their intent you can effectively create your entire marketing campaign around it.

Generally what you will find out, as you become more intimate with that persona, is that you probably don’t need to rank #1 organically for a highly competitive term. You could probably get away with above the fold visibility and still make an impression.

Similarly, you will probably find that the knowledge of your target’s intent can help you optimize your bidding strategies by cutting expensive terms, performing day parting, or whatever else you need to do to ensure that your site is visible to them at just the right time.

What many search engine marketers are learning is that the user’s intent, derived from an accurate persona, is more valuable than anything.

It’s more valuable than a #1 ranking. It’s also more valuable than an expensive PPC term.

In fact, such knowledge will likely impact the terms you use altogether. While you may think that the searcher will use certain terms, in fact you may find that you are way off base.

But, it’s not just search marketers concerned with intent. The search engines are also investing heavily in technology to help them figure out the intent of the searcher and serve the correct results.

For example, I could be searching for “Manhattan” and the search engine has to determine what my intent is. Am I looking for city information? Am I looking to find a hotel or book air travel? Or, do I merely want a drink recipe.

You see, simple terms like this can mean many things, therefore the search engines are trying to use their technology to figure out what the searcher wants.

And many times, when you perform a search and you see a PageRank 3 site outranking a PageRank 6 site, this is why. It is because the search engine has tried to determine that intent and is therefore trying to match the site that best suits that searcher.

But why would a search engine be so concerned about intent? It’s quite simple. Right now most of us have Google set as our home page. But what does it take to switch that to MSN or Yahoo? A couple clicks of the mouse and you’ve just changed search results providers.

This is what scares the engines the most – that one of their competitors, or a completely new black horse, is going to come along and woo away users with technology that improves relevancy to the user.

So, if you are planning your SEM campaign for 2006, my opinion is go back to the drawing board. First, determine your goals. Then, determine who it is you are trying to reach and why they would want to use your product or service. If you can determine this intent then you can effectively craft an SEM campaign that will be both successful and cost effective.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

It sounds like a great idea. After all, it is much easier to feed the crawler the content then hope it finds it on it’s own.

But is a Google sitemap worthwhile? Is it even necessary? Well, once you realize the incredibly powerful statistics available to you, you might change your opinion. After all, would knowing what terms might be driving searches to your competitors be helpful?

When the Google Sitemap program first started my thought was “That’s kinda cool but what’s the real benefit?”

So, I thought I’d try it out and submit sitemaps for a few sites that I own.

When Google Sitemaps first came out it was very difficult to figure out what all the entries meant as well as how to actually create the sitemap.

Sure, it was XML based, and I could plainly see what they expected but when you have a large site, how do you go about creating this?

Then Google came out with a sitemap generator which is a program intended to help you create a sitemap for your site. This does help speed up the process but unless you are a developer it is a little difficult to implement.

Also, you need access to your server to run the script required to generate the sitemap. If you are unsure you should check with your web host to see if you have terminal access to execute Python scripts.

Personally, I’ve never tried the Google Sitemapper tool but I have used others. For example, on my personal blog which uses Moveable Type, I found a blog post which shows How to build a Movable Type Google sitemap template. And I’ve used Xenu and an Excel spreadsheet which works great as well.

Now that the sitemap creation is covered, let’s get into the question at hand. Is a Google sitemap really worth the effort?

A few months ago I would have said no, but lately Google has been adding features that make me think otherwise.

For example, if you’ve gone through the verification process (which is really just placing a blank HTML file on the site and having Google find it) and ensured your 404 errors are properly configured you can get access to a wealth of additional intel.

One such feature is the “Top Search Queries.” This tells you which queries were used when your pages appeared in the search results but may not have been clicked on.

In other words, these are actual searcher queries that were performed on Google where your site may have appeared but not had click-through’s.

From a keyword research point of view, this is a huge advantage to you. By monitoring your sitemap stats you can easily see some of the terms people are using and perhaps determine what you need to do to rank higher for those terms so you too can get the clicks that your competitors are receiving.

If you don’t have ready access to log analysis or other stats, the Google sitemap can also tell you what terms actually drove traffic to your site.

In other words, these were searches performed on Google that actually generated clicks for your site.

There’s also a wealth of other information. For example, “Crawl Stats” shows you how Googlebot sees your site, errors generated by it, and even a PageRank distribution chart detailing how well PageRank is distributed.

So, if you are like me and wondering if a Google sitemap is worth it I’d say yes, it is. The information provided, while mostly technical, can help you troubleshoot problems as well as provide ideas to help you improve your positioning.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

So I did some checking to see if it still does work and based on my limited test it appears that it does.

What I’m about to explain to you may not only help get sandboxed sites indexed and ranking quicker, it can even make the site owner a little money.

I’ve been blogging for a few years now. I started it as a hobby and the blog I had was actually a blog before there were blogs. In other words I was blogging with a regular website.

Then a friend turned me on to Movable Type. It is a software which allows me to automate the publishing of content on my website.

I was having problems getting my website/blog indexed by Google back then this was about 3 years ago.

It was also around this time that I heard of a new program called Google Adsense in which one could place code on their web pages that would display ads, and the website owner would earn money on every click.

I thought what a cool idea so I immediately applied for an account. 48 hours later I was placing ads on my blog.

Shortly after this while reviewing my server logs I noticed that I was getting Google referrals! That’s right, within days of placing the ads on my site, it had been fully indexed by Google and it was actually ranking quite highly for terms related to the content I was posting.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Here I thought all I was going to do was make a little money on the side yet I found that the Adsense may have actually helped get my site indexed.

Remember, this was before the Sandbox, but it was a time when link popularity ruled the web. But since it was only a hobby I wasn’t worried about building links. Because I already had a few loyal readers, I wasn’t trying to position this site.

Flash forward to December 2005 and a friend asks me to help him set up his own blog. Actually he wants two of them each with their own topics, and both very different in nature.

I consult with him and on February 1, 2006 we register two brand new domains for him.

He proceeds to build out his blogs and as he’s doing this I suggest placing ads on them. At the time I wasn’t thinking that it would help with indexing, just another way to increase exposure of the ads to generate more revenue for me and him.

We agreed to split the money and he placed the ads on the two new sites.

I didn’t think much of it until his visitor traffic started going up. He also placed Google Analytics code on the sites and gave me access to them so I could take a look to see where all this traffic is coming from.

Turns out, he’s getting a few Google organic referrals.

Imagine that: Two brand new sites, both less than one month old, with no incoming links, but somehow they have managed to sneak out of the Google Sandbox in 3 weeks?

Imagine my surprise, considering I have another site that I started over a year ago, and have been dutifully building content and links, yet I can’t get it out of the sandbox. In fact, the current Google cache is of pages that no longer exist, and haven’t for months.

My explanation, however out there it seems to be is that somehow the Google Ads have allowed the site to bypass the sandbox and move into the index almost immediately.

The first Google organic referral came last week, just two short weeks after the site was tagged with the Google Adsense code. Since then, both sites have received a handful of Google organic referrals.

Based on this very small and somewhat limited test case, my gut is telling me that one way out of the sandbox and into the SERPs is to apply for and install Google AdSense onto your site.

At the very least you’ll make some money maybe not a lot, just a few dollars a month (Google only pays out in $100 increments mind you, so it may take a while to get that first Google check) and the best case is that you’ll bypass the sandbox, get indexed quickly and even start driving organic referrals to your site.

Like I said, this isn’t anything near a scientific study but it seems pretty clear to me that what has helped these two sites become indexed so quickly are the ads.

So if you’re stuck in the sandbox, perhaps applying for AdSense is a good idea.

I know I’m going to be placing ads on my other site to see what effect (if any) it has. My guess is that within a few days it too will start ranking.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

How did you go about choosing keywords for your Google campaign?

We got together in the communications department and sat down and and just started searching. We used the words we thought people would use to search for our product and just made a list.

Then we used the Google sandbox to help with other keyword suggestions and from there we put our campaign together.

So you are satisfied with Google. Is that the only paid advertising engine you use? Or have you/do you use Yahoo?

No, we haven’t had time to investigate or anything like that. I’d like to at some point.

How many sites do you look after?

I have 9 altogether that I look after.

And are all the sites you maintain Cancer related?

No. We have a blogging site called quitnowblog.org which is for college aged kids. It helps them with quitting smoking and all the pains they go through to quit. The second site is schoolhealth.info – We’ve just redesigned the site and are ready to relaunch it. With that site it is used to get parents involved in kids schools to get kids more healthy. And then there are a bunch of others.

So how are these sites doing?

We’re getting a ton of response to the quit now blog. It seems to be very popular with the target audience we are trying to reach.

With all these sites, do you do cross promotion?

Yes, definitely. When we do a quitnow blog and print campaign for example, we ensure that and print material such as brochures and ads match the site.

For another site we do, texasgolfpass.com, it too has been redesigned and matched to posters, brochures and so on. We definitely try and do complete campaigns to ensure the themes are consistent throughout. In the future it will be re-designed as we expand the program to offer golf passes in many other states.

So, do you feel they’ve been successful using this branded approach across multiple media?

Definitely. We’ve really stepped it up to ensure that our websites match our print campaigns. It is one of our strong points right now.

What would you like to do differently with your online campaigns?

The main thing would be to investigate Yahoo ads and everyone else out there besides Google but my main challenge is that I don’t have enough time to do that.

I’d also like to investigate search engine optimization but I need to find a way to sell it to management. I need a one page “This is why you need to do SEO” that I can take to them and show them that we need to do more.

Do you think that your management is resistant to SEO?

No, not really. It’s just an education thing.

Thank you for your time David, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. One more thing, if there is one thing anyone in our community can do for The American Cancer Society, what would it be?

Thanks for asking. The American Cancer Society has many programs that SEO could help with. Our core values of Research, Advocacy, Education and Service are what make our organization work. If we can get that message out to more people using SEO that would be great. Also I would invite all your readers to check out our biggest two Blogs: FISpace www.fispace.org and Dr. Len’s Cancer Blog at www.cancer.org/drlen.

This concludes part two of my interview with David Neff from the American Cancer Society.

As he said, if there is anything you can do to help out this worthwhile cause, they could really use it. Whether it’s supplying some links to the smaller sites like the golf pass sites or quit now site, if you can use your SEM experience to help get the word out they would really appreciate it.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

Having been in the industry a while I have a pretty good idea what the going rate is for professional SEM and I find it hard to believe that a non-profit firm would invest in it, knowing that in some cases it’s hard to measure.

What you are about to read is part one of a two part interview with the Director of Online Communications for the American Cancer Society High Plains Division.

Let’s get the formalities out of the way. What is your name and title?

My name is David Neff and I am the Director of Online Communications for The American Cancer Society High Plains Division

What does the director of online communications do?

Basically my job is to manage all the website design and maintenance including any upgrades as well as any email campaigns we do. This includes any e-commerce that we get into.

Do you do any type of search engine positioning on any of your websites?

Not really. Besides submitting to DMOZ and Google we don’t actively pursue any search engine marketing at this point. Most of our promotions are done through print ads, Internet ads like Google Adwords, banners and stuff like that. We don’t proactively go out and position.

Now, we’ve talked before and you mentioned that the American Cancer Society has a few sites, including some which you are more responsible for. Why doesn’t the Cancer Society invest in positioning?

It’s not on our priority list at this point. We are quite busy promoting our sites through the offline promotion that I mentioned earlier.

Is there a reason that SEM isn’t a priority?

Decisions like that are made at a higher level and it’s not well known how it works. There is no real “baby steps” that you can take to get into it.

I’ve dealt with large organizations like yours and I’ve found that usually in order to get an SEM campaign off the ground there needs to be an “SEM Evangelist” on staff. One person that is the spearhead behind the campaign. Has there been anyone in your office trying to push for it?

Not at the moment but I’m seeing results from stuff I’ve talked to you about and the early results are quite impressive. Also, other media I encounter has had me considering it. Maybe 2006 will be the year to start pushing for an SEM campaign.

You mentioned earlier that you do other Internet advertising. What type of Internet advertising do you do for the American Cancer Society?

We’ve done banner advertising on a PDA tool and a ton of the major sites. Finding PDA things that doctors read like WebMD and PDAMD.com. We actually contacted Motricity as well and we’ve done a lot of ads on a whole bunch of partner sites for a free product, yet we had to pay full price for those ads.

Next, we are planning to sell a golf pass to get you discounted green fees no matter where you golf across several states. So we will be placing ads for those soon as well. We will also be placing Google ads for these when the timing is right.

As a search engine marketer I know that Google ads are generally pretty good traffic tools. How effective have they been for you in the past?

The Google ads have been really great for us in the past – lots of clicks over the holidays. They have been better than banner ads in some aspects.

What would those aspects be?

Rate of return. We’ve found that some banner ads generated a lot of traffic and interest in the past. We did notice, though, that during the holidays we got lots of views but not as many sales.

So what you are saying is that you are getting better conversion rates on Google ads?

Yes definitely.

Who looks after your Google program?

(Chuckles) I do unfortunately.

Why do you say “unfortunately”? Is it a difficult job?

No it’s not difficult, it’s just that we only check on it when I get a bill . We just don’t have the manpower to study it in depth.

click here to read the rest of the interview with David Neff of The American Cancer Society High Plains Division.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com. Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

In the most recent “State of the Blogosphere” they have reported that the blogging world continues to expand at an incredible rate.

So this leads to the question: Are you blogging? And if not, why? In this article I look at blogs in general and why they are good for your business.

The first time I heard of the “Blogosphere” was back in October 2004 when David Sifry posted the first State of the Blogosphere on his Blog.

At that time Technorati, a well known, well used, self-proclaimed authority on weblogs announced it’s first report on the blog universe. At that time there were 4 million weblogs and it was “more than 8 times as large as it was in June of 2003.”

Flash forward to March 2005 and Technorati was tracking over 7.8 million weblogs – more than double the number reported just 5 months previous.

Recently Technorati released yet another report on the weblog universe and it continues to grow.

In this most recent edition of the State of the Blogosphere Technorati reports that there are now over 27 million weblogs. – almost 4 times what there were less than 1 year ago. They are still tracking how quickly it grows – continuing to double every 5.5 months. The most impressive point in this most recent article: “The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.”

With growth this rapid, and with such widespread adoption why aren’t more business sites adopting blogging as the new content development strategy?

I guess that’s the point of all this – blogging isn’t just blogging any more. It’s the new form of corporate communication, content development and search engine marketing rolled into one.

Blogging is the long tail searches which will drive the best qualified traffic to your site. It is the link baiting used to drive buzz around your site helping to build your brand. It is one of the best ways to build links to your site as well.

Knowing all this, why aren’t there more blogs?

Before you say “It’s too hard to set up,” or “We don’t have the resources to keep it up,” consider that there are many free blog software packages out there that only take minutes to set up. Then all that you need to do is commit to posting on a regular basis – whether it’s daily, weekly or every couple of weeks.

And really, all you do when you post is report on your industry. For example, if yours is a site devoted to home building, why not post about the latest industry news such as new regulations in your area, new techniques being employed, the latest salary reviews and more?

Anything to do with your industry that will help you build your brand is acceptable blogging material.

In fact, I recently helped a client do just such a thing. They sell houseplans online and their concern was like many I’ve heard, “But what do we write about?” Once I told them to merely report about the industry they were amazed. “That’s all we have to do?”

Since then they’ve been posting 2, 3 even more times every day. Their blog is now referred to by dozens of other builders’ sites on the web and their backlink count has increased by a few hundred.

That’s the other benefit of blogging – the increase in backlinks. This is one of the most natural ways to build links to your site. Not only that but they are the best type of links – those highly relevant, highly related links the engines look for when determining your link popularity.

No longer do you need to spend hours hunting for links. Now the links can come to you provided the blog content is timely and relevant to your industry.

So before you dismiss blogging as an effective organic search engine positioning strategy, take a look at the most recent State of the Blogosphere and look at just how quickly it’s growing. Also consider that while you are dismissing it, your competitors may be considering it or have already implemented an industry blog.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com . Textlinkbrokers is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building. Please provide a link directly to Textlinkbrokers when syndicating this article.

In this article I look at how to most effectively structure your site to take advantage of this.

I read this great article on layering on the SEOMoz Blog and while it does a good job of explaining what content layering is I feel it could be improved, just a little bit.

I’m not saying it is wrong in any way. In fact the tactic outlined will be very effective for a small to medium sized site, however I have also found another way to organize your site which can be more effective if done properly.

In the article, it explains how you use layers to organize your site. Now we’re not talking about CSS layering or anything like that. It’s more of a site structure issue than anything.

According to the article, one can layer their site through the use of sub-folders. By creating layers of sub-folders and then placing all related content within that sub-folder you can layer your site to help specific sections of it rank higher.

This is a great way to organize a smaller site because it allows you to place topical pages together, and promote links within the pages to help improve overall positioning of these sections.

Further, it helps reduce the dilution factor often felt by sites that attempt to cover multiple topics in a flat file structure.

For example, if you sell widgets you could organize the sections by some common element, such as color. That way your site could be: widgets.com/blue/page1.html and all blue widget pages would go in this sub-folder. You’d then organize all our other sub-folders in a similar style.

Like I said, I think this is a very effective strategy for a smaller or medium site. There would be much greater chance of blue widgets ranking highly in a structure like this.

However I feel that for larger sites there’s an even more effective way to organize your content.

Through the use of sub-domains one could further organize this content. This would make it even more relevant to search queries and more likely to rank. So if one sold a larger variety of widgets yet still wanted to organize them by color then the structure of the site would be: blue.widgets.com and all site content relating to blue widgets would appear within this sub-domain.

The reason I say sub-domains would be more effective is because search engines tend to treat a sub-domain as its own site. In other words, a search engine sees blue.widgets.com and widgets.com as essentially 2 different sites.

Keep in mind that such a strategy is of the most benefit to larger sites. If you don’t have a large site, or don’t foresee your site growing to become a large site then I wouldn’t recommend the sub-domain layering tactic.

This is because, as I’ve said, the search engines will treat your sub-domain as a unique site. So if you’ve only got 10 or 15 or even 50 pages in your sub-domain, chances are it won’t rank as competitively as it would have as a sub-folder of a larger site.

Now, to make your content even more competitive, why not combine these two strategies – use a sub-domain and sub-folders to provide you even more control in site organization as well as an even greater chance of ranking.

This is because the broader sub-domain can rank competitively for the broader terms while the sub-folder content can rank competitively for the less broad, more specific terms.

What you are doing by combining the two strategies is getting more bang for your buck. This is because you are covering more area on the web, allowing your site to rank for both broad and specific terms.

Then, with some good strategic interlinking you will be able to even further promote the broad areas of your site by linking all your internal pages to the pages above it.

While I’m not entirely dismissing the layered content theory presented above, I am saying consider your situation. If your site is a smaller site then by all means use the layered content approach. If it’s larger then use the sub-domain approach.

Also remember that there could be multiple ways to organize the same content.

For example, in addition to organizing your sub-domains or sub-folders by color in the widget example, also consider organizing them by features. This way, a chosen widget could be linked to from multiple related categories.

Not only that, but you’ve now bulked up your site with a bunch of additional pages. These new pages are required to help create the sub-domains and navigation required to drive visitors to the individual widget pages.

This type of multi-category linking is common among many large sites. One good example is Ebay. It organizes its top auctions into sub-domains like antiques, art, autos and clothing. Then, within the categories the sub-folder structure is used to further segment the site.

So if you’ve been looking for a way to most effectively organize your site while helping to improve rankings consider these options. Through the use of sub-folders, sub-domains or a combination of both you can effectively organize your site, segment your products and target searchers more effectively.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com . Textlinkbrokers.com is the trusted leader in building long term rankings through safe and effective link building.

In it I look at Advance Web Ranking, documenting the different parts of the program along with my opinion on it.

So by now you’ve read about Webposition and AgentWebRanking and I’ve given you my opinion of the highlights and lowlights of both of these applications.

Well today I’m going to look at the third and final application I chose to review. Remember there are a lot more out there than just these three, but these are the one’s I felt were most compatible with what I needed to do: Namely query the various engines across multiple countries to find the current rankings.

I’ll tell you right now, Advanced Web Ranking is my favorite of the three applications. It sets out to do one thing and one thing only – check rank and return results. No page critics, no forum or blog links, only ranking.

Like Webposition this program has a scheduler – something I found Agent lacked – but unlike Webposition I found this program much easier to use.

Starting a new project is as simple as selecting “Project” and “New Project.”

Much like the other programs you are presented a list of engines you want to chose from, but unlike the others this one has a filter, so you can filter by name.

Only want to check your Google rank? Simple, type in Google in the filter box and you are returned only Google engines. What to look at only US engines? Change the filter type to country and type in “USA.”

Next you add your keywords, either manually entering them or importing them from various sources. You also do the same for the URLs you want to report on. Finally you give it a name and let it go.

This program also allows you to chart progress over time, and lets you see, at a glance, which terms have moved up or down.

A search of about 1000 sources (that means a combination of keywords and engines) took me about 15 minutes – similar to the rest. And you can watch your progress (if you’re really bored) as it tells you the progress for each and every search.

Also, depending on what version you get you can assign custom templates to the reports (For example, if you are a search marketing firm and want to use the tool to report on your clients’ progress) and you can even export the data to multiple formats, again depending on the version you purchase.

The best part of all is that, of the three programs I looked at this one was the most affordable. Both the Standard and Professional editions are roughly ½ the cost of the competitors. Granted, the other programs have a few more bells and whistles but if all you want is a rank checking software then that’s what you pay for.

One other nice thing about this program. If you aren’t tied to Windows and prefer to run a Mac or Linux, you can download versions of this program to suit you.

The site has a product comparison and pricing for the different versions on this page:

http://www.advancedwebranking.com/comparison.html

To download a demo version of the program for various platforms, go here:

http://www.advancedwebranking.com/download.html

In Conclusion

Like all software applications you may or may not agree with me. What I’ve presented in these 3 articles is my view on the programs along with what I like and don’t like about them.

Just so you know, I’m not affiliated with any of the companies I’ve mentioned, I just happened to be reviewing their software for a client so I thought I’d share my findings.

Of course there are other ones out there, both locally run like these three or hosted on other sites. And there are many other features which various different programs incorporate so really, it comes down to personal preference.

If I didn’t have the luxury of using a proprietary software designed by my firm, I know which of these I’d use, the question is, which will you use?

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com

In it I look at Agent Web Ranking, documenting the different parts of the program along with my opinion on it.

As with the previous article, I think it’s important to stress that rank checking is a foundation to good SEO. While Rank shouldn’t be the only motivating factor for you, it should play a large part in your SEM decisions.

Therefore I decided to look at a few of the top rated rank checking tools to give you my input on choosing the one thats best for you.

Agentweb takes rank checking to a different level than it’s competitors. That’s because it offers a few different features that other rank checking tools don’t have.

While Webposition offers doorway builders, and a few other not so useful features, AgentWeb tries to make itself the website owners interface with the SEO world.

When you first launch a freshly installed version of this program, the first thing it does is go through the time consuming process of updating its search engine database. While this is important, I feel this is a step which could have been done later.

Mostly because I’m the type that likes to get in and play with a program as soon as I install it. And with this program I had to wait what felt like forever (when it was really about 5-8 minutes) for the update to happen.

But once the update is done you are provided with a host of features – not just rank checking but other handy items that a good SEO needs.

For example you are shown a series of folders in which you’ll find links to SEO forums and Blogs. You will also see links to search engine news and even other search engine tools. Finally there’s a link to various keyword research tools.

While these are handy, I do find them a bit lacking in some areas. For one thing, some of my best news sources aren’t listed there, but like any other bookmarking system you can add your own.

This program isn’t as intuitive as Webposition was. It took me a bit to figure out how to start a rank checking mission to run. As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, one of the first selections with WP is to start/run a mission. This isn’t the case with Agent.

In fact, even if you use traditional Windows commands “File/New” or “File/Open” you still can’t tell where you should go. Under new you have 2 options – “search” or “browser.”

To save you the time of having to find out in the help file what it is, let me tell you.

In order to start a new keyword ranking report you have to select the “search” option.

A note to the designers/programmers of this program: I would bet most users of it would be like me “Instructions?!? I don’t need no stinking instructions!!”

I’m a guy – instructions are a last resort. So you should make this program a little more intuitive by changing “search” to “ keyword ranking report” or something similar?

Anyways back to my critique of the program.

Another less-than-intuitive part of it is when you are actually creating your reports. There isn’t a lot of help to walk you through this process as with Webposition.

In fact it took me a little experimenting to actually get one to work. I assumed there would be some search engines already populated, but it turns out I had to pick them. And even then it was difficult. Because if you go to the “Selection” tab under “Search Engines” there is no way to add them. Even right clicking doesn’t help.

No, you actually have to use the “Global List” tab and select each and every engine you want to use. Talk about a time consuming process.

So here’s a tip – if you are going to use this tool, be sure to save your engine list so that you don’t have to manually recreate it every time you want to run a report.

Once I got through that, I stuck in a few keywords and the URL I wanted to report on, selected check boxes at random (remember, I’m a guy – I don’t pay attention to this kind of stuff), hit “Run Report” and I get some warning about selecting only Performance or Performance Summary. So I deselected one check box, and still got the same warning.

I tell you, if I was only demoing this program for any purpose other than writing an article I’d have already uninstalled it for these reasons.

The program also offers little in the way of support during this report creation process.

Overall, I found this to be a “middle of the road” kind of package. While it does have some good ideas, like providing many links to various SEO resources, I find the real purpose of it – the rank tool – lacking in usability.

In the end it’s like all the other rank checking tools out there – it automatically queries the engines and produces a report for you, so there’s nothing special there.

There are 2 versions of this application available – Business and Pro – and both offer similar features. However, the Pro version is geared towards professional SEO companies while the business is targeted at the single site owner.

You can compare versions on this page and for pricing and order information check out this page.

Overall, of the three products I’m reviewing this is the middle of the pack version – it’s less expensive than Webposition yet to me it’s not as functional as Webposition.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com