How to determine best avenue

Typically, businesses rely on stats provided by PPC companies, but usually this isn't good enough. Sure, if you only advertise in Google AdWords or Overture this method may be sufficient, but what if you advertise with more than one PPC company or you advertise on banners, email and pop-ups/pop-unders also?

The solution is tracking. The only way to know if one of your avenues is performing better than another is to track users and determine where all buyers/leads are coming from.

For example, say your candle company advertises in Google AdWords and on Overture for key phrase "scented candle" and you receive, according to Google and Overture combined, 300 visitors, and from your own records 20 orders per day.

Without tracking users at most you know that google gave you 120 visitors and Overture gave you 180 visitors (remember this is an example), times that users visited your website and of course that you received 20 orders for that day.

With tracking you would still know all of above information, however you would also know even more vital information like that out of 180 visitors that overture gave you, 18 of your 20 orders came from them. You would also know (depending on how detailed tracking was) what pages they looked at and if they have previously visited your site, among many other things.

Why Isn't My Website In The Search Engine? If your site isn't found in search engines, it is probably because robots couldn't deal with it. It could be something as simple as not being able to find site, or it may be more complicated issues involving robot's not being able to crawl site or figure out what your pages are all about.

Submitting your site to major search engines: that will help deal with "can't find it" problem. Even having links pointing back to your site can be enough to attract search engine robots. Google, for example, suggests that you may not have to submit your pages; they will find your site if you have a link pointing back to it from at least one other site on web.

If robots can find your site but can't make sense of it, then you may need to look at content and technology used on your pages. Frames, Flash, dynamically generated pages, and invalid HTML source code can cause problems when search engine robot tries to access your web pages. While some search engines are beginning to be able to index dynamically generated pages and Flash (e.g. Google and AllTheWeb), use of some of these technologies can hinder your ability to be indexed by search engine robots.

Text in images cannot be read by search engine robots. Using ALT image text is an important way to help robots "read" your images. Websites with extensive images rely heavily on ALT text to present their content.

How Do I Get The Most Out Of Indexing? If you know what to "feed" spidering robots you will help yourself with search engine ranking.

Having a website full of good content is major factor. Search engines exist to serve their visitors, not to rank your website. You need to be sure to present yourself in your site in way that will be most useful to search engine visitor. Each search engine has its own idea of what is important in a page, but they all value text highly. Making sure that text on your pages includes your most important keyword phrases will help search engine evaluate content of those pages.