The only small comment I would make is that I believe the price paid is actually 1p (or $0.01 in the US) higher than the bid that’s been beaten rather than exactly the beaten bid price as Hal says. See more detailed info on the Google Help page about what you pay on Adwords.

There can be a couple of reasons for the Lost IS due to rank; one of which is that the ads are being displayed on a partner site that doesn’t display as many ads as Google’s homepage so effectively the ad drops off the bottom. This is logical.

However, in the above example the advertiser is only distributing their ads on the Google search results page, so it will never be displayed anywhere other than on the Google.com/.fr/co.uk/com.au etc.

A second (and more relevant) reason for the Lost IS (Rank) is that the advertiser is missing opportunities to display ads against long tail terms. Let’s assume that the advertiser above is targeting the term “curly wigs” (phrase match type). They’ve set their CPC bid and daily budget high enough to display an ad to 100% of the people searching for “curly wigs”. But only 93% of the people searching for “curly wigs” plus a modifier e.g. “brown curly wigs” see an ad. This probably means that their website isn’t optimised for all the possible long tail terms (“curly wigs that make me look like Michael Knight just when he gets out of Kitt” anyone?).

The more content they add to their site, the more keywords they target and the more they bid the lower their Lost IS (Rank) will be. But at over 90% I reckon they’ve got the curly wig market pretty well covered!

Image: Glenn Pebley

Greg’s High performance SEO

Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t insert some common meta tags in your pages. Although the importance of these (specifically keywords & description) has been reduced since the early days of SEO, they still hold some value and it is just general good practice. This plugin has a wealth of features (and documentation) to help make your site a bit more Google friendly and to get it set up properly took me about 15mins. If you only have time to install one plug in, this is the one – it really is superb.

Google XML sitemap generator

To make sure that Google (and Bing and Yahoo!…) knows where all your pages are, you can submit an XML sitemap. However, editing the file manually every time you create a new post is a major pain. This plug in does the editing and submits the new sitemap to all the search engines automagically! Make sure that you take a couple of minutes to configure the plug in to get all the categories and tags that you want into your sitemap.

Wordtwit

There are a whole host of ways to integrate your WordPress blog with Twitter but this plugin gives you a couple of powerful features that are really slick. Once installed, you can create your own url shortening structure (now, that looks pro doesn’t it!) and you can track clicks from Twitter in your Google Analytics account. You can also restrict the posts that are tweeted by including or excluding a specific tag/category.