Now, there are landing pages built for search engines as well, you primarily see this happen with local search terms.  A company will make identical landing pages for each state, city, or zip code with the same information otherwise.  The effectiveness of this has decreased quite a bit with the introduction of universal search, with the blended results from local business listings often providing more accurate results.

So tonight as I was going through a clients site and checking which pages were indexed, I noticed all of the landing pages for his campaign are not indexed, and they could provide him with some additional traffic.  These specific pages are targeted towards specific services rather than locations as I discussed above.

Here are a few examples:

Basement Projects

Custom Homes

Decks and Porch Builder

Kitchen Projects

Landscaping, Patios, & Walkways

Outdoor Kitchens

Swimming Pools

You will notice that all the pages are very similar in nature.  The thing is, these pages do not add much overall value of to a search, you would be better off concentrating on building links to your primary service pages for each of your services, rather than worrying about these landing pages, in my opinion.  With that said, every page in the search engines index can help your site in some way.

Of course a sitemap can help the search engines find your landing pages if you choose to include them, or you can link to them from within your site, but I don’t see the latter taking place very often, and I have never seen it pulled off in a clean way.  That is, the users often find no value in these pages once they enter the site, so why include it in the site design at all?  It’s pointless, except for the link that would help the search engines find the page.

I’ll leave it to you how to use this information, I am sure making sure your PPC landing pages are indexed could have some benefits, but for some sites the extra effort and time involved may not pay off in the end.

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At first Twitter will seem like you are talking to yourself, and it could seem silly or pointless. However, if you work the system a little, the way it is supposed to be used, you will start to gain “Followers” (people who subscribe to your tweets) in no time.

The best thing you can do to gain followers is to search for people that might be interesting to you, and click the “Follow” button below their profile picture. Often times people will follow you back.

Once you are being followed by someone, you can send them messages by adding a “@” before their name, anywhere in a message. “@seeber what time are we meeting today to work on your website?”

Once you get used to the flow of things, each person will find their own way to try and monitize their tweets. I know many pro bloggers link to their stories in their tweets, and get hundreds of visitors as a result. Of course you have to be quite popular for this effect, so don’t expect the same results.

I will also mention that twitter offers an opportunity for people to communicate with industry insiders and other less accessible people who happen to have a twitter account. The conversation is pretty much out in the open and if you say something worthwhile, people are bound to notice.

All this leads to more traffic to your website (if you work it right) and in turn, more potential business for your company.

Check me out over at Twitter: ditojim’s twitter page

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There is a great deal of business to be done over social networks. MySpace & Facebook are two that are currently working for me. LinkedIn comes to mind as well as a few others. I found Pownce.com today and something about it really appeals to me, I am not quite certain what though. That remains to be seen. I would like to leverage the possible marketing power of a site like this. If not, my fallback is to use 43things.com to remind me of my goals and to track any progress I make.

See more progress on: leverage the power of a new social media site like 43things.com or pownce.com

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Here let me give you an example, let’s assume for this post that these links point to another page on this website (they don’t):

Visit our SEO Page

Dito’s SEO Services for Small Business

Both links point to the same page, but the anchor text matters, just as it matters with external links pointing to your site, the same rule applies for internal links.

In short, use keywords with your internal links, they matter to search engines.

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There are 3 major search engines in the game, Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft Live Search. By making sure your website is being looked at by these 3 search engines, you are opening yourself up to the majority of traffic on the web. That is, your page is now in the mix with the rest of the pages on the web, and you may now show up #1 in Google, Yahoo!, or Live.com when someone searches for “little yellow ribbons for basket weaving”, or whatever your website’s specialty may be.

Enough with the examples, here are the links:

• Add your URL to Google
  
• Add your URL to Yahoo!
• Add your URL to Live
• Add your URL to Gigablast

Follow the directions on each of the pages above and the search engines should start indexing your site within a matter of weeks. You can take things a step further and submit a sitemap to the search engines, which I will cover in a later post.

Submitting your website to the major search engines is a easy first step in your SEO campaign.

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