Here’s why.

When running Google Adwords campaigns, Google calculates a Quality Score for your ads.  One element of the Quality Score is how relevant your ad is to the URL you’re linking to.  In order to determine that relevance, Google needs to visit your site.

When running Adwords campaigns, Google will visit your site more frequently than if you were not running ads.  Frequent visits ensure that your site is indexed completely, which can mean improvements in your organic ranking.

A good Quality Score helps your ad ranking as well, and can reduce what you pay for for clicks.  Working to improve your Quality Score, by making adjustments to your landing pages, will make your landing pages more relevant to the terms you’re buying, which can also improve your organic search ranking.

So there you have it.  Running PPC advertising on Google has the potential to improve your organic search ranking.

It’s much easier than you might think.

There’s a service on the WWW, provided by Spyfu where you can learn all that and more.

The free version is mostly adequate for getting a good idea of what your competitors are doing with PPC, but the subscription service has many more features and extended capabilities.

Give it a try!
Click the banner below to visit Spyfu.

Here are some links to some of the tools I use when trying to determine how well a site’s content is indexed by a search engine.

1. Start with Google. Run an ‘advanced’ query against your domain, omitting the www. It might look like this:
site:yourdomain.com

The results of this search is essentially the list of all the pages Google has indexed from your site.

2. http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/ is a tool that gives you a bares-bones look at how the engines see your homepage. This tool is incredibly helpful for diagnosing issues w/ Flash indexing.

3. This last one is a bit arcane, but can give you a good idea as to how your content is seen by the engines. The URL is http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php , and it simulates the text-only browser Lynx.

Knowing how your site looks to the engines is the first step toward identify how to improve it.

Please give me a call if you’d like to learn more about how I can help you make your site more findable.

Cheers!

So what’s the problem with Bing? It too has webmaster tools, and a submit sitemap function. Here I am 3 WEEKS after submitting my sitemap and Bing has yet to index all my pages.

Maybe I’m spoiled. But if Google is setting the bar for service when it comes to webmaster tools, Bing has long, long way to go.

The effective submission of sitemaps is critical to achieving the highest possible degree of findability for your site and content.

That wasn’t so bad.