In this (slightly technical) article from SEOMoz, Russ Jones shows us 2 relatively simple methods you can try right now:

Set It and Forget It SEO: Chasing the Elusive Passive SEO Dream by Russ Jones

I have a confession to make. I love infomercials. In fact, I would probably call myself an infomercial elitist / hipster. I liked infomercials before they were cool; before the Billy Mays and Slap Chop Guy made their way into internet memes. I pledge my allegiance to the godfather of infomercials, Ron Popeil, while guys like Anthony Sullivan weep at his alter, asking forgiveness for their sub-par jobs as pitchmen. OK, maybe I take it a little too seriously - I do happen to have a DVR full of Gator Grip, Ginsu Knives, and Flowbees - but I believe there is something extremely motivating about this type of advertising. And Ron Popeil hit it on the head over and over again: Set It and Forget It.

This was the tag line for the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, an amazing success for infomercials. You see, there is an innate desire for us to find solutions to common, everyday problems that do not require our attention. These nagging, annoying problems like making dinner, cleaning up, and in our industry - SEO tedium - tend to suck up our time and attention while bringing only marginal improvements.

Unfortunately, there is this perception, almost bias, against automation in our space: a misbelief that there is nothing that we can set and forget in SEO. Well, I am here today to free you from the reigns of some of your daily miseries of  SEO, all for the incredible price of free.

Strategy 1: Real Time Referrer Indexing

We often joke that "Google knows everything." While we can lament the loss of privacy and liberty, there is one thing that I do want Google to know about - my links. I want them to know about as many links pointing to my site as possible. Unfortunately, Google misses out on a good portion of the web. Well, what if you could find links that Google hasn't necessarily found, and then make sure that Google does index them and count them? Introducing Real Time Referrer Indexing:

If you were go into your Google Analytics right now and export all of the pages that have sent visitors to your site since your website's inception, what percentage of them do you think will have been indexed by Google? 90%, 95%, 99%? Sure, it will probably vary from site to site, especially given how many different sites out there have sent traffic to you, but there are likely to be a handful that Google never got around to crawling. Our goal with this first set-it and forget-it tactic is to find the pages that refer traffic to your site on-the-fly and make sure if they have a link, that Google knows about it.

Ideally, our automated solution would work like this...

1. The script would record every referrer from other sites.
2. The script would spider that site to see if it actually has a real, followed link.
3. The script would check to see if Google had cached that referring page with the followed link.
4. The script would coax Google to reindex that page if it had not yet found the link.
5. The script would continue to check to see if Google had cached the referring page.

This is actually quite easy to accomplish programmatically. The first three steps are done every day by tools regularly used by SEOs.The only difficult part is finding a way to encourage Google to visit the referring pages it has not yet indexed. We can solve this by simply having a widget on the page that displays those referrers, essentially an "As Seen On" bulleted list of pages that had linked to your site, but had not yet been indexed.

Well, I have a treat for those of you who are or know someone with some half way decent programming skills. Here is sample code that does just this on your typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation. A word of warning - it is highly likely that this code is buggy. Make sure that you check it and make modifications before running it on production. All you need to do is install the script on any pages of your site for which you would like to perform real time referrer indexing.

This is exactly the type of set-it-and-forget-it SEO that I love. Simple techniques, simple solutions, long-term results.

So let's move on to another set-it-and-forget-it technique.

Strategy 2: On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery

Alright, so if you haven't heard of PageRank Recovery before, you are going to need a quick little lesson. Whenever someone links to your site, but screws up the URL, the PageRank that flows through that link essentially evaporates. I am pretty sure that it ends up in Matt Cutt's personal PageRank stash, which he has learned to convert into a powerful foodstuff that he consumes prior to mountain climbing and running marathons. But I digress, if you can find where those broken links point to on your site, then 301 those URLs to a real page, you can "recover" that PageRank. Virante created a tool to do just that based on SEOMoz's Site Intelligence API which Rand highlighted a little while ago, but it still requires you spend time going and running the tool regularly. I want to be lazy and have my site recover PageRank for me while I watch The Facts of Life dressed in a Snuggie and downing 5 hour energy shots. So here is how it would work:

Ideally, our program would do the following...

1. The script sits in your CMS right before a 404 is fired. If you don't have a CMS, you would direct your HTACCESS file to pass all 404 traffic through it first.
2. The script captures the URL that the visitor or GoogleBot tried to visit.
3. The script somehow magically knows what URL you MEANT to visit.
4. The script 301 redirects you there.

What's that you say? "But Russ, our programmers don't know magic. They are all muggles. And even if they did know magic, I can't find a USB powered wand anywhere these days." Well, I am bringing you good news from some friends: Mr. XML Sitemap and Ms. Levenshtein.

If you were paying attention to countless blog posts in the SEO world, you should have an XML Sitemap which keeps record of all the URLs on your site. This is a good start to the magic that is On-The-Fly PageRank Recovery, because now we know all the possible URLs your visitor or GoogleBot may have been trying to reach. Now, we simply have to find the most similar URL to the one the visitor came to. How do we accomplish this? Levenshtein Distance.

Levenshtein Distance, also known as the Edit Distance, is a measurement of the minimum number of changes necessary to convert one piece of text into another by adding a letter, removing a letter, or substituting a letter. For example, the Levenshtein Distance between the words "Rock" and "Russ" is 3, because we will have to substitute the O, C, and K with U, S, and S. Below is an example of how Levenshtein Distance could be used to find two similar URLs:

So, the way On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery works is by reading all the URLs in your sitemap and then comparing the Edit Distance between those URLs and the URL your visitor entered. If the server finds a close match, we then 301 redirect rather than show a 404 error. Subsequently, when a Googlebot tries to visit those previously 404 pages, it will instead find that 301 redirect and appropriately pass the PageRank through to the intended page. Plus, On-the-Fly PageRank Recovery is a huge usability win for visitors who now don't have to try and search your site to find the correct page.

Want to give it a test drive? Try any one of these broken links back to Virante and my blog, TheGoogleCache

• Virante's Tool Page: http://www.virante.com/se9-toolz
• Second Page Poaching: notice the dollar sign in the url

Now, It would be hypocritical of me to talk about setting it and forgetting it, and then make you go out and do all the work yourself to get it up and running. So, in the spirit of laziness, I have included a couple of options for you to use as well. Of course, double-check everything before you go into production with any code you ever get on the internet, regardless of whether or not it is on a trusted site like SEOmoz.

• WordPress Plugin
• Drupal Module
• Generic PHP Code

Final Thoughts

There are incredible opportunities in the world of Search Engine Optimization that we have only begun to address. So much more can be done in terms of describing, detecting, and repairing SEO issues all in a programatic, automated fashion. These are just two of them. Good luck, and keep inventing!

About russvirante — I am the CTO of Virante, Inc. I am married to Morgan, who is frickin awesome, and I have a new daughter, Claren, who is also frickin awesome. We live happily in Durham, NC.

PPC advertising is a technique you can use to display your ads on popular search engines’ results pages and content sites. You only pay when someone clicks the link in your ad.

The power in advertising on the search engine results pages comes in your ability to control the placement of your ad by only showing the ad when someone specifically searches for what you have to offer, bidding enough to be competitive with other advertisers, and ensuring your ad is compelling to the person conducting the search.

The words and phrases that people enter into the search box in order to find what they’re looking for are called keywords. Some of these keywords result in hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages that contain that keyword.

When you set up a PPC advertising campaign, you will select one or many keywords that pertain to your business. Once you’ve selected the keywords, you tell the search engine company that you want your ad to be displayed each time someone searches for that keyword.

Where your ad is displayed is determined by how much you are willing to pay every time someone clicks on your ad and how often your ad is clicked. The search engine company ranks all of the advertisers who bid for a keyword and determine the order in which ads are displayed.

Very popular keywords usually require very high bids and may or may not be profitable for your business. It’s essential that you track your PPC campaigns to be sure your income is more than your advertising cost. You’ll need to test and track to achieve a balance. In an ideal situation, you will be able to use keywords that are searched frequently but that cost very little.

The first step in PPC campaign management is to select the keywords you wish to target.

Once you’ve selected your keywords, decide how much you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad. You’ll need to set a maximum cost per click (CPC) for each keyword you’re targeting. The amount you bid determines where your ad will be placed in the search results. Your goal is to be placed near the top of the ads listing.

When you’re just getting started, set your maximum CPC based on the average of what other advertisers are paying. Most of the search engine companies will give you a range when you’re setting up you PPC campaign. Again, you’ll want to be close to the top, but in most markets you don’t want to be at the very top - this is something you’ll need to test as your campaign starts producing.

One way to help with your placement is to take advantage of bid gaps. When there’s a significant CPC increase to move up just one spot in the rankings, you can bid in the gap and be close to the top. For example, if your competitors are paying:

$1.00
$0.75
$0.25
$0.24
$0.23

you might consider bidding $0.26 to try and reach the third position without spending too much money.

Eventually, you’ll be able to determine your maximum CPC by looking at your results.

If you’re selling a $100,000 product and you convert 1 out of every 4 visitors to your site – but only when your ad is in the top position - you’ll know exactly how much to spend to make sure your ad is in that position, and you’ll probably be willing to spend it.

On the other hand, if your product costs $50 and you get 1 sale out of every 100 clicks when your ad’s in the top position, but 2 sales out of every 100 clicks when your ad’s in the fourth position, you’ll definitely want to keep your bids lower so that you stay in the fourth position.

In addition to monitoring and manipulating your CPC, you’ll need to test your ad copy. The amount you bid is only half the equation in determining your ad placement. If no one ever clicks on your ad, the search engine company will stop displaying it. Let’s look at how this works:

Advertiser A pays $0.10 per click and their ad gets clicked 100 times.
Advertiser B pays $0.25 per click for the same keyword and their ad gets clicked 10 times.

The search engine company makes $10.00 from Advertiser A and $2.50 from Advertiser B. Which do you think they rank higher?

The beauty of PPC advertising is you can make changes and they go into effect immediately. When you find that an ad isn’t producing the results you want, you can change it, change the amount you’re paying, and even stop it from running – and you can make that happen in seconds.

As with all of your business endeavors, monitoring and testing is the key to PPC campaign management. To be really effective, you might want to use tools designed specifically for this task or outsource this work to a company who specializes in PPC.

To get help with managing your campaigns, check out PPC Campaign Monitor at http://thebreakthroughmarketer.com/info/ppcmonitor_01.htm.

*FOR DUMMIES® is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc.

PPC ads are posted on websites and advertising networks, but are most often associated with their visibility on search engine results pages. If you use a search engine and see a list of ads titled “Sponsored Links” or “Sponsor Results,” you are looking at PPC ads. Let’s take a look at PPC advertising as it relates to search engine search results pages.

Generally speaking, advertisers pay for the right to have their ads displayed by the search engine companies when internet users search for a particular keyword. A keyword is simply what a person enters into the search box, and it can be a single word or a multi-word phrase. Each time a person clicks on the ad, the advertiser pays a fee to the search engine company, hence the name pay-per-click.

Companies who use PPC advertising compete for specific positioning in the ad listing by bidding on individual keywords that relate to the products and services they offer. They want to be sure their intended audience actually gets to see the ad and, when those who see the ad actually click it to get to the company’s website, a significant number of those visits results in revenue for the company.

There are a lot of rules that govern where an ad is placed in the list of ads, but in general the ad’s placement is based on how much revenue the ad is generating for the search engine company. It’s a calculation determined by how much the advertiser agrees to pay the company for each click and how often the ad gets clicked.

When you are planning a PPC campaign, keep these simple guidelines in mind:

1. Spend most of your planning time researching keywords. Find the most searched-for keywords in your market that don’t have bid prices out of your range.

2. Write ads that convince the person doing the search to click on your link. Try words like:

• Discount
• The name of a celebrity who’s given you an endorsement
• Money-back guarantee
• Free trials
• Free sample
• Free gifts
• Words that illustrate a major benefit ("Lose weight fast")
• Click here

3. Be sure your landing page (the page the visitor will see when they click your ad) is relevant to the keywords you selected and the ad itself.

4. Determine how much you’re willing to pay for each keyword by watching how other advertisers are placed. Bid so that you’re near the top but don’t exceed a reasonable amount

5. Decide on the maximum amount you’ll invest each day, set the budget, and stick to it.

6. Monitor your campaigns to measure your return on investment and know when to change or stop your PPC campaign.

7. Keep your website content up-to-date and professional. Be sure all of the links function properly and the site is easy to navigate.

Using PPC advertising to promote your products and services allows you to launch an advertising campaign immediately. If your topic is a popular one, you will know within minutes whether or not your ad is enticing.

Additionally, advertising via pay-per-click methods ensures that you are getting pre-qualified traffic to your website. The visitors are people who searched specifically for your keywords, and you can begin to see the results of your marketing messages very quickly.

As you can imagine, there is an art to using pay-per-click advertising to its best effect.

In optimizing your web pages for the internet, it’s important that you be aware of what keywords your prospects are search for.  These words and phrases need to be on your web pages in order for you to be found.

•    Title

One of the places you should use keywords is in the title of your web page.  The title is the first thing a web crawler will see about the page.  If your keyword is in the title, the search engine immediately knows what your page is about.

This applies to every page on your website, not just the home page.  Each web page has a title, and each page should be focused on one specific keyword.  You can have more than one page focused on a keyword, but you shouldn’t have more than one keyword as the focus of a page.

•    Subheadings

Your keywords should also be used in subheadings throughout your web page.  These subheadings are called h1, h2, h3 (etc) tags.  With these tags, you can label different sections of your content to make it easier for the reader to absorb.  It also helps the search engine crawlers relate keywords to your page.

•    Content

Additionally, you need to use your keywords in your content.  There is a metric called keyword density, which is the percentage of your content item that consists of your keyword.  Keyword density is calculated as the number of keyword occurrences divided  by the total number of words.

As an example, if you have an article that’s 500 words long, and you use your keyword 10 times, your keyword density would be 2%.  There is a lot of debate on the best keyword density, but somewhere between 3% and 5% is about average.

If your keyword density is too high, your web page might be penalized.  The search engine crawlers are automated tools, not humans sitting and reading every web page.  Keywords that are used too frequently will make your web page seem to be artificially inflated to the software.  Write for your reader, not the search engines.  Your natural language will get you the best results.

•    External Links

There’s another area you should place your keywords, but it’s not on your web page.  It’s very helpful to the search engines to understand your site’s importance if another site links to your site.  This is called an inbound link.

When the inbound link is in the form of your main keyword, that’s even more valuable.  It lets the search engine crawler know that, not only is your site important, but it’s important for this specific area.

How do you set that up?  When you have the opportunity for another site to link to one of your web pages, ensure the link text is not just your url.  The destination of the link should be the url of the page optimized for that keyword, but the link text should be the keyword itself.

Keywords are critical to your success with search engine optimization, but they’re also critical to your clients and prospects.  If you have something that will genuinely help them, it’s your responsibility to make sure they can find it and you.

SEO involves selecting appropriate keywords that relate to your site and using various strategies to let search engines know that your site is a resource for those keywords.  Keywords are simply the words and phrases that people enter into a search box in order to find what they’re looking for.

In order to be one of the top sites returned in the search engine’s results, your web page needs to considered relevant by the search engine.  Search engine companies use specific formulas to determine what sites are relevant, and they don’t share that information because some unscrupulous business owner might take advantage of the knowledge.
To be clear, it’s a good thing to implement strategies and tactics that make the search engines rank your site high if your web page meets the needs of their users.

The important thing to remember is that Google, Yahoo, and MSN don’t want to send people who are searching for something specific to sites that aren’t helpful to them.  Why?  Because they’ll start using another search engine, and advertisers who pay the search engine company will move right along with them.

Besides, what good will it do you as a business owner to get visits from people who couldn’t care less what you have to offer?  Focus on reaching your target market and genuinely providing service to them, and you’ll have taken the first giant step to optimizing your website for the search engines.

Search Engines use tools called spiders or crawlers to find relevant sites.  These tools crawl the web and create huge indexes of sites including all of the links associated with those sites.  Then when someone searches for a keyword associated with that site, the search engine can return relevant results very quickly.

There are many things you can do to demonstrate to the search engines that your site is valuable to their visitors.  Here are seven of the most effective:

1.    Ensure your site has fresh, valuable content.  Along those same lines, only offer products and services that are of the highest quality.

2.    Spend enough time doing keyword research that you have a very good feel for what your ideal client will be looking for.

3.    Set up your web pages so that keywords are used in the title, headers, and links.  It can also be helpful to use your main keywords in the first paragraph of a content item.

4.    Design your site so that it’s easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for.  Navigating through your content, signing up for your mailing list, and completing purchases should be smooth and easy.  If they get frustrated, they will leave.

5.    Monitor your placement in the search engine results so that you’re aware of any changes to how the search engines rank your web pages.  If you need to make modifications, do so.

6.    Use your knowledge and experience to write articles, then submit them to article directories.  This assures your sites visitors that you’re an expert in your field and provides added credibility to the search engine evaluation process.

7.    Place a link to your website everywhere.  Answer questions on forums?  Put a link in your signature file.  Make valuable comments on blog posts?  Attach a link to your name.  Anytime you post something on-line, make sure it’s something that will help people and add value, and create a link to your website.

If you design a website that’s main purpose is to provide value to your visitors, the search engines will find you.  Be sure to consistently add good content, and maintain an attitude of service.

It's best to use unique content to make your web pages. Duplicate content will definitely lower your rankings if used improperly.

Search engines love content, they love unique content and they love simple plain html websites that easily allow visitors to read the content. That's why using simple site design, nothing fancy, no flash, is best for your content sites.

So, here's what you do:

1. Buy a domain name with the keyword you want in it.
2. Put unique content on your site with keyword rich tags and content.
3. Submit articles with your keywords and include a link to your site in the resource box.
4. Submit your site to MSN, then to Google.
5. Get some external links to your site.

Then watch your pages move up steadily in the search engine rankings.