Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a couple things in the search space: 1. keyword tools are unreliable 2. PPC traffic can show some valuable search trends. Well here’s the point: PPC and SEO help to inform each other consistently.

There are reasons why SEO and PPC should always be in cahoots: On the SEO side, a simple look at the analytics queries that come through and spend time on site are usually from keywords that are relevant and have a value. If there is evidence that some terms that show up organically on page 2 or deeper in the SERPs are getting hit are are converting, then these are that have value for PPC. We can immediately pay PPC to be seen next to the top ranking organic sites showing for these competitive terms. Of course, because this is PAID traffic, and because CPCs can be so wildly different for each industry or vertical, ROI calculations should be applied constantly.

Now it gets interesting. On the PPC side, and before SEO goes to work creating targeted landing pages, title tags, keyword rich content on the site, etc., wouldn’t it be great if there was an idea of ROI that stood independent of search volume statistics? Well, unfortunately this is the risk of PPC at every turn in the game. Yes there are competitive analysis tools, bid optimizers, keyword research tools, and on and on… These amazing tools, while infinitely helpful for a modern marketer, just do not round out the actual field of search. When it comes down to it, every search is still based on user generated content, and this content, even if sometimes predictable, is just as often counterintuitive.

I propose that while entering an SEO commitment, you should be testing the viability of the keywords you want optimized on your web pages by employing PPC. This way you can build out the particular keywords on the main targeted pages of the website while keeping tabs on the PPC keyword statistics which perform best for your site’s ROI.

Through Google, this should be done in a couple ways:

1. Use your usual keyword research tools to come up with a nice grouping of unique keywords in order to test how they react in the live market. Remember to only use the exact match option for these keywords, be sure to bid them to a desired position, and most importantly, make sure content network is set to “off”. Obviously this could get pricey as you want to ensure that your keywords show up before the fold on page one and keep in mind that you want enough data in order to make decisions, but this method will give you an idea on how often your keywords are currently queried and how well they convert for your site.

2. Set up a separate ad group for testing. This adgroup should be phrase matched and include peripheral keywords that are more open ended. Pull a Search Query Report every week or so. Depending on volume and conversions, this adgroup should yield a bit of information. Use these newly found keywords that have converted for your site in the exact match campaign - overall, you may be surprised by what has brought in revenue.

Remember to continue to test new keywords, and certainly don’t forget to put a good spin on your ads. Don’t forget to test ads and don’t stop coming up with new approaches to test.

After a couple of months you can take your PPC metrics and compare them to your old keyword research tools… odd how PPC traffic and traffic estimate tools seem to vary so much sometimes. no surprise… no surprise… what the f….?!?!?!

Now you can take both statistics into account when optimizing your pages - using PPC to find keywords that are actually profitable for your site can save a tremendous amount of time on the SEO side. There are times when the highest volume keyword that a site could rank for is not the most profitable, and these are the times for which we need to test. Suddenly the PPC advertising budget can become an investment in a long term search strategy.

Okay, the title of this post is a bit harsh but it got your attention didn’t it? This is the first in a series of posts answering some relatively basic SEO questions that people typically get confused by. The questions are actually not that stupid, they are common misconceptions about how search engines work.

Today’s question is: What’s worse…duplicate content from within your own site or duplicate content from other sites?

The person asking this question wants to know if having duplicate content on pages within your own site is better or worse than stealing content from other sites and putting it on your site. This is like asking, what’s worse, a broken radiator or a broken transmission? Obviously, both are equally as bad, in different ways.

Duplicate content within your own site:
If two pages within your own site have the same content or a very high ratio of duplicate content, search engines will typically pick one of the pages and devalue the rest that are duplicate. This type of duplicate internal content is very common.

Duplicate content from other sites:
If you use content from other sites, search engines will penalize your site by devaluing the page on your site that has the duplicate content. But what if I had the content on my site and somebody stole it from me you ask? Search engines will typically know who had the content first because they look at the cache dates of both pages. Whichever site was first to be cached will usually be awarded as the original content owner. There are some exceptions to this rule but this is how it is generally decided.

A question that I get asked a lot is, how do I know if my content is unique enough? Basically, it comes down to ratios and percentages. If a large percentage of your content is duplicate, search engines will either devalue the whole page or the whole site. This is not always noticeable. For example, your site might have 30% duplicate content that has been copied from other sites compared to 70% of high quality unique content. If this is the case, search engines don’t want to throw out the 70% of your Unique content that is valuable to their users. Therefore, the solution is to just devalue the pages that have the duplicate content so that they don’t necessarily rank as high for competitive searches but would still rank for longer tail searches. This might be happening right now to a lot of your pages and you don’t even know it. While its great to rank for long tail searches, you don’t want your pages devalued if you can avoid it, so let’s get working on that duplicate content people!

How fast does your website load? You can test out your pages with this web page speed test tool.

There has been a lot of attention on page load speed lately. There used to be more focus on page load speed back when everybody was on 56k modems, but it seems a lot of the best practices from those days have gone out the window since high speed internet came along. I’d like to remind people that it’s still important to optimize the speed of your pages. It can affect how much traffic your site receives, how many vistors stay on your site after you get them there and the bottom line…how much money your site makes. This is especially true for ecommerce sites that naturally get more browsing and page views per visitor.

To make this as clear as possible: Slow loading pages = Money being lost.

Here are 3 key areas to consider:

Usability - How quickly a webpage loads has always been important for your visitors. Personally, I can’t stand waiting for slow webpages…it’s like Chinese water torture sometimes. I have a super fast computer (3.1 Gigawatts) and a high speed cable internet connection (3.2 Gigawatts), but I would still sacrifice my left arm to further cut that time in half (Ok, maybe not my left arm). My point is that your visitors won’t like browsing your site if the pages load slowly. If they still continue to browse because they really want something on the site, chances are they won’t come back unless they really have to.

SEO - All things being equal, sites with faster loading pages tend to rank higher than sites with slower loading pages. Search engine representatives have never come out and said this word for word but they have hinted at it in various ways. For example, do a search for a keyword that your site ranks for in Google and you’ll find a number under each listing (looks something like this “45k”) that tells you how large the page size is. There is no hard and fast rule for how quickly your pages should load in order to rank higher but if your site’s pages are larger than your competitor’s you should probably look into making them smaller. Of course this doesn’t mean that if you have a slower site you won’t rank at all, it just makes it easier to rank if your pages load faster.

PPC - Google knows how important page load time is to visitors, which is why they recently added page load speed as a factor in your adwords quality score. Making page load speed a part of quality score sends a clear signal that Google thinks this is an important issue. Unless you like to pay more for clicks, you should definitely think about how to speed up your pages. If Google thinks it’s important for their sponsored listings you can bet they think it’s important for their organic listings as well.

So how do you make your pages load faster? There are a few ways that all have varying degrees of effectiveness depending on what’s slowing you down.

Code Bloat - The more code your pages have the longer it’s going to take for them to load. Having a high code to content ratio also slows down the crawl rate of search engines. Moving CSS and Javascript code to external files is highly recommended so that the browser or search engine only needs to download it once instead of every time a new page loads. Also, remove extraneous code like comment tags and unneccessary large amounts of white space.

Images - Having extremely large images can severely slow down your pages. When I say large, I mean large in file size, not height and width. Use any of the free image editing programs out there like Jpeg Wizard to compress your images. Sixty percent quality compression on jpeg images is usually good enough for the web. Also, adding simple height and width attributes to your images increases the speed that the browser can download the images.

Gimmicky things - Try to stay away from gimmicky things on the page such as Flash, audio or videos that play automatically. These are also usually bad for useability, especially audio. Sorry, nobody wants to hear the cheesy background music on your site so get rid of it. Anything that takes extra time to load on the page will slow it down including RSS feeds and widgets.

Analytics - Put analytics tracking code towards the bottom of your pages. If there is ever a problem and the tracking code doesn’t load at least the whole page will load first so that your visitor will see the content. This is more a usability issue than anything else.

File compression - If your site is on an Apache server you can also do some fancy footwork by enabling Apache file compression. That’s probably something that your web developer can implement for you.

In the end it really comes down to usability and the visitor. Improving your SEO and PPC is a byproduct of improving the user experience on your site. Make your visitors happy with speedy pages and everything else will fall into place.