We see your seo efforts for your website, as being like a magnet where your aim is to make that magnet as powerful as possible so that as much of your target audience as possible is attracted to it and continues to be attracted to it.
Google uses page rank as a way of perceiving how important a web page is from the point of view of the rest of the web. So for example if you have many high quality, high traffic, relevant websites linking to pages within your site then the page rank of those pages should benefit. However on the flip side, googles algorithm shares the earnt page rank of a page with the pages that are linked to, from that page. By using internal linking across your site carefully, this means that you can make sure the most important pages on your site get te most page rank. But because outgoing links leak page rank away from a page you might feel that you want to not include them. This would be a very dangerous tactic to employ as google will recognise this as you trying to hog page rank and will penalise you for it. Their rationale for this is fair enough. As you may have great content on your site but once a user has read it all you are not giving them the opportunity to go off elsewhere to find out more - google will perceive this as giving a poor user experience. The key is to include relevant external links but where possible, to sites that are going to provide you with some reciprocal benefit. So if you link off to the number one authority site in your sector, maybe they will just see you as a small fish and not bother giving you anything in return. Whereas on the other hand, if you link off to growing relevant sites then they are more likely to want to reciprocate the good deed in some way. i.e. be happy to start developing an ongoing business partnership of sorts.
SEO is easy, find out which websites are reaching the top of the search listings in your sector, find out what they are doing and do it better. If they are sitting at the top then they must be doing something right in terms of SEO. What key phrases are they optimising on, how have they structured their site, how well connected are they on the web, where are they getting their links from, what are the quality of those links etc, etc. With the right tools and the right method, you can not only learn from your competition but learn to beat them.
The long tail is important for a number of reasons. First of all if your sector has a relatively high level of online rivalry then unless you have a strong established online presence in that sector, building your campaigns around the most popular keywords is not likely to deliver any value. It is better to target the longer tail relevant key phrases where you will have a better chance of achieving strong rankings in the natural listings and also pay a lower but still effective cpc in your paid search campaigns as well. Developing this further though is an even stronger argument to take the long tail very seriously. You see the people who search using 3 or 4 word keyphrases are generally further down the buying cycle and therefore those keyphrases should deliver a higher conversion rate. So as long as your upfront research to drive your internet marketing is thorough and well thought through you will see the results you want.
Percentage of clicks per natural listing position
AOL did some research on their own search results a couple of years ago which illustrates some very interesting results for businesses investing time and effort in SEO. First of all unsurprisingly the first page of ten results generates 90% of all the clicks for any search - hence the drive to get on the first page. But also, that if you look at the percentage of all the clicks associated with any particular search then on average 42% are generated by the listing at the top position. This is a huge difference from the second position which is 12% and really illustrates the importance and value of attaining and maintaining that top position.
Many companies going online spend a bit of time deciding which of the numerous internet marketing vehicles they are going to use to drive traffic. It is easy to get lost. There’s seo, paid search, online display, affiliate, blogging, email, viral to name but a few.
The key is to find where the low hanging fruit is, that is going to get you off the mark the quickest and deliver you the most value in the soonest time. Well it does depend on the businesses, your business model, your existing client base etc. Because if say you have not had an online presence before but you have been established offline for years with a large installed base of customers and prospects. Then judicious use of email is likely to be very beneficial to develop more value from your existing customers.
If however you don’t have a large pool of customers already or you want to expand your market presence then a strategy around search is going to teach you so much if you give it some proper thought upfront. As long as you have got a half decent website, paid search is so targeted that you are quickly going to be able to find out which key phrases are driving you traffic and delivering you sales. Obviously there will be most clicked on terms for your sector which are unlikely to be profitable for you initially, but the idea is to determine keyphrases that deliver moderate amounts of traffic with less than average competition. Do this and you’ll be away. It’s not going to be perfect initially but it will be useful. Then in parallel to tweaking with the existing pages to improve conversion you can use the knowledge from your paid search campaigns to drive your seo efforts which in turn is going to start pushing you up the natural search rankings for relevant terms. But search is the key - get search work for you and you will steam ahead and the knowledge will help non search related campaigns succeed and add further value downstream.
Now this is interesting. If I am selling a product off my site, should I bother with dishing out for paid search ads for the keyphrases that I am coming up #1 on the natural listings. Well Atlas probably the largest digital advertising agency in the world did some research which is very interesting. They found that on average for every sale made via a top natural listing, 2 sales would be made for a paid listing! And it doesn’t stop there, they also found that if both were pointing to your company then that would generate an additional sale. A pretty good argument for paid search.
This has to be such a common question among clients. The thing is there are a huge number of parameters that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com etc use to work out where your pages are going to appear and for what search terms. Now the problem is that the exact list of parameters that any search engine uses along with the algorithms they use are known by only a small groups of search engineers on the planet. And to reverse engineer their algorithms is near on impossible especially because they are evolving all the time. So where does that leave us. Well although we cannot predict the models they are using there are a few things that we can do. The first is to listen to the advise of the technical specialist evangelists within each of the engines. So for example you’d have Matt Cutts for Google etc. From listening to them you can get a feel for what they are striving for in terms of the experience they are striving to give there users. They give you clues as to the onsite and offsite factors that you should consider. Then you can look at other popular seo bloggers and see what there take is and what they are finding works and if they are finding the balance is changing. Finally you can do your own testing based on your research. Ultimately common sense is going to take you a long way to where you want to get. Know your audience, understand their mind set and build your website and online networking strategy around that.
Page rank is dependent upon a number of factors associated with the websites that are linking in:
- Type of websites
- The number of different websites
- Their page rank
- Their IP Address
- Whether the sites that are linking in to yours are rated by Google as a subject authority
- The page titles of the the pages that are linking in
- The anchor text which is used in the links that are pointing to your page
- How many links does your site have pointing to the linking in pages?
- The type of links that are points to the linking in pages
- The number of outbound links on the website that is linking to you
- The number of links on the website page that is linking to yours
If you want to get a new website listed on the search engines as soon as possible don’t use the url submission forms on the various search engines. This will delay your site getting listed. Instead get other sites who are listed to link to yours.