The goals of an advertisement can be increased number of customers, higher dollar value of sales, requests to subscription of a service or just sharing personal data. The advertiser should be clear about the goals he/she sets out to achieve. Properly articulated goals, followed by well-crafted advertising campaign and periodic measurement of the result would complete the loop of an advertising campaign.

The metrics for measurement are Return-on-Investment (ROI) at the business level, cost per acquisition (CPA) and click-thru-rate (CTR). ROI measures the returns on the advertising budget; CPA measures the cost of converting a viewer/user to a customer; and CTR measures the number of visitors to the website. With increasing bidding prices for keywords, along with the heightened competition to remain at the same ranking, the numbers derived from these metrics become significant for the advertiser to take action upon modifying the campaign, etc.

There are software tools available to track the number of visitors clicking through. ROI and CPA can be measured from the actual sales figures and the advertising dollars spent. A word of caution to the advertisers: it would be myopic to look just at the numbers and miss the whole picture. For instance, a high click-thru-rate may be due to various reasons like fraud, etc and hence CTR has to be correlated to other metrics like CPA and ROI in order to get the real meaning.

With an average online conversion rate of around 2%, an online advertiser has to tightly utilize budget by continuously taking action on the measurements without which, the advertisement would be pulled off the portal where it is hosted, resulting in the loss of business.

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Its a lot more systematic and efficient than random crawling, where there are no guarantees that the web crawlers will pick up on the most important pages. So even if it requires an additional step for web developers, its greater assurance that all the hard work you put into your content actually shows up in the searches.

Google Sitemaps was developed partly to resolve the problem encountered by big websites, wherein web crawlers would skip over some pages and fail to index some of the content. Considering the effect this can have on your search engine optimization efforts, that glitch can have a big impact on your ranking. And for websites that regularly change content (like product sites), youd want your new stock to actually registerespecially when youre promoting a hot, trendy item.

So in short, to get your site into Google, youve got to make it easier for Google to find youvia their map. Its not as complicated as it sounds. You just need to use a software tool to create a sitemap in Googles chosen XML format, upload that to your site, and then send a URL notification to Google. And since youre doing that anyway, make an HTML sitemap for the other search engines (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) and then include a link to it in an unobtrusive corner of your website. Many of those software tools can do that for you.

Is it expensive? Not really. For smaller sites (less than 500 pages) you can find several free Google Sitemap Generators. Look for those that allow you to restrict the directories that are being searched, and give instructions as to which files to index and which to avoid. This can be programmed through the filters and settings. For your convenience, youll also want one that lets you include PDF, .doc, .xls, and .zip documents.

Larger sites may require a trained webmaster, who can install a program on the site to help you index it and generate a sitemap. Of course, you can do it on your own (and again, youll find many XML sitemap tutorials and software on the Internet), but with 800 pages to handle you probably have other web administration worries to think about. Its just easier to pass it on to a professional. Or at least, invest in a very efficient XML software that will take care of most of the details and has several tools and functions at its disposal.

Once youve chosen a program (or hired someone to set it up for you), youll have to create a Google account. They dont charge for the service, and youll want to get features like tracking the status of your Sitemaps and reviewing the diagnostic information for your sites.

Now, youre ready to conquer Google.

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What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being expounded, by all and sundry, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and the software tools were being actively marketed still. Search engine positioning software was still being heavily marketed and is still today; keyword density was a buzz term being branded around as if it were an essential science to be practised by all good Bristol SEO conscious webmasters.

What I did was to go back to marketing basics. I had received my marketing training back in the 1980’s and had practical marketing experience with my own business from the mid 1990’s. I was not born into internet marketing alone, so could still see outside the blinkers and the hype.

A very basic but important aspect of marketing is to know your market place. When it comes to search engine rankings, then clearly a major part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the clear leader then, and a year later today.

I started to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking went, it was becoming a spammers’ zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google did not really want to rank a web site highly just because the web master had the tools and the time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It just did not make sense. And the same was true of buying links. Why should a web site rank highly because they have splashed out on buying links?

What Google, and the others, really wanted was to rank the best web sites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a matter of time before they sniffed out and extinguished the abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Blog spam, scraping and extreme Bristol SEO’ing.

A year ago, I started two new web sites without any real thought of Bristol SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what search engines wanted: original content on what people were searching for. While I did provide title and description tags, everything else was just written on a go with the flow basis. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. I could just write to my heart’s content without using any tools checking keyword density.

The first of those new web sites 13 months ago was in the self improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting to be Sandboxed by Google because of that, and so it proved. But I just kept plugging away, sticking to my no-Bristol SEO principle. Of course, none of us outside Google knows for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a waiting time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking melting pot.

In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able see whether my no Bristol SEO approach was to yield any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1 position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.

Now, this is early days for that particular site, and there is much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident that Bristol SEO is infinitely more simple than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you believe.

Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is convert all my web sites to CSS. Providing a content rich site that is easy to crawl for search engine robots is the most important aspect of the new, simplified Bristol SEO. In fact, following Google’s advice to webmasters is about all you need to do, and that is free.

Of course, those with software products to peddle will argue that I could do even better with their software. But if Google decides to blacklist that software as a manipulating tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to chase shadows with ranking software, and just enjoy writing content. After all, that is what basic marketing told me to do.

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