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There are some really easy steps to improving search engine rankings that are often over looked. One of the big ones is actually putting keywords in your title. How often do you see a title that simply offers the brand name? Quite often! In fact, lets take the Pepsi challenge! Both Coke and Pepsi have their brand names as their homepage titles. However, Coke gets bonus points for using Cola because it can help them rank for more than their brand name. The simple truth is that Pepsi and Coke’s page titles could be anything they wanted to and they would still rank for their brand names. Why? Because the URL takes care of ranking for their brand name. As an added bonus, sites that link to Coke or Pepsi probably use the brand name as the anchor text. You will notice though, when you search for pop or soda neither Coke or Pepsi show up.

What does this have to do with toilet paper? Nothing and everything. Searching for ‘toilet paper’ brings up another one of those missed oppurtunites. There is one brand that ranks for the keyword toilet paper, Charmin. What’s in Charmin’s page title? You guessed it, toilet paper! Guess what, Charmin still ranks for ‘Charmin’ too. It’s good to protect your brand name, but if you’re looking to gain more traffic from search engines, consider placing the actual product or service in the title.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign you are probably very concerned with how much money you spend per click. It should be a goal to target to your audience instead of just putting in a few keywords and setting a budget. To help PPC managers achieve targeting most PPC programs allow for ‘negative keywords.’ That is, words that will not bring up your ad when searched for. Here is an example of why this should be done.

If you use Google reader you have seen the following style ads:

Served up by Google these ads are displayed based on the content of the blog post. It’s clear what is happening here. The PPC manager for Del Opticians is advertising on Google’s Content Network and probably trying to target the keyword ‘glasses.’ There is a slight problem here. The article talks about 3D glasses, not glasses to correct vision. From the consumer perspective, someone who is interested or search for 3D glasses probably isn’t interested in vision correcting glasses or contacts. Adding ‘3D’ as a negative keyword to their PPC campaign could help reduce costs without affecting conversion.