Search engines now have to decide which of these URLs are important and which ones are not. In some cases, it may split the PageRank between URLs – and that’s not a good thing. In others, the bot makes up its own mind based on various parameters. However, Google and other search engines recently came up with the “canonical” tag. Using this, webmasters can specify which URL is the “primary” URL and Google will pass the PageRank to that page.

All you need to do is use the tag like this: <link rel=”canonical” href=“primary url here” /> . Insert this tag into the head section of your pages and whenever Google accesses the page through another URL, it will know that the real and most important link is the one you have mentioned. Just another example of fine tuning your site to get the most juice!

To start off with “index, follow” is the default behavior. The “index” meta tag on a page means that the search engine will include the page in the SERPs. “noindex” means that the page will be dropped from the results only! However, the search engines will crawl it and follow links out of it. It also means that a “noindex” page will accumulate PageRank.

“nofollow” on the other hand means that a search engine will not follow the links on that particular page and will also not allow PR to flow out of it. The page can still be included in the SERPs though. So if you have a blog which say has a lot of archive pages, you might consider using “noindex” on those pages, but not “nofollow” because you want the Search Engines to follow links to to other pages from the archives for easy indexing.

You can also use “nofollow” on individual links to pages like the “Contact us” page where you don’t want the search engines to go and waste link juice. This is a perfectly acceptable practice and Google has publicly stated that “PR sculpting” as it is called is quite ok.

However, in PPC campaigns, the overriding concern is based on just two factors. The most important factor is – “Will this keyword be used by people who want to purchase/sign up/view a particular page?”. In PPC you pay by the click. So it’s not just visitors you want, but those visitors who will do what you want them to once they’re on your site.

For example, suppose you’re selling computer hard drives. You’re not interested in people who merely want information and want to learn about hard drives. That’s what the organic results are for. No, when someone clicks on your PPC ads, you want to be damn sure they want to buy a hard disk! So you need to target keywords that such people will use – perhaps “hard disk dealers”, “xyz brand hard disks” or the like. Such keywords indicate that the searcher wants to purchase your product.

You need to refine your selection as much as possible to focus on your particular products. For example, if you’re a physical shop without an ecommerce store, then your keyword should be “hard disk dealers in xyz location”. The more certain you are that that particular keyword will be used by your potential customers, the better the keyword is.

The second parameter is the price you pay for each click. It goes without saying that highly competitive keywords cost more. It is precisely due to this reason that the first step of selection is so important. You can lose a lot of money everyday by simply choosing keywords that will not be used by your customers.

Depending on your budget, you need to select a mix of cost effective and relevant keywords, but the latter is more important than the first. I’m assuming that the final goal of your website would be at least a hundred times over and above the cost per click of a given keyword.

These are the basics of choosing PPC keywords. In the coming sections, we take a look at the next stage – preparing your website, bidding, pruning your keyword list and tracking.