• Hamlet Batista , Friday, June 6, 2008 2:31 PM

Hamlet Batista advocates using PPC "guinea pigs" to help identify the best keywords to optimize a site for. "You are finding the best candidates in multiple categories: keywords, ad text, and landing pages," Batista says. "Ad variations will eventually help you title your SEO landing pages and offer meta descriptions that appear in the search results and cause searchers to click on your link."

The three-step plan starts with aggregating as many potential keywords as possible. "Set a low budget per day in AdWords so that you don't spend anymore than necessary," Batista says. "Even if it turns out to be an expensive campaign, you can run it for a limited amount of time just for testing purposes."

Divide the keywords into small groups so that you can send them to specific landing pages. Then test, test, test. Test all the variations of keywords (using broad, exact and phrase matching), and the ad copy, and the landing page performance. You can use free tools like Google Website Optimizer to test your landing pages. The top performers should then be integrated into your SEO plan.

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