Optimizing Pages for Your New and Improved Search Engine Users

By Mark Jackson , September 4, 2007

SearchEngineWatch.com

A client of mine recently mentioned his analytics show a radical shift in the types of searches sending traffic to his B2B Web site. His primary keywords (those he wants us to focus on in our SEO efforts) aren’t driving significant traffic these days. Rather than the bulk of search traffic flowing through those primary keyword phrases, he’s seeing hundreds of less likely terms that send one or two people per month.

His Web site hasn’t suffered a significant loss in traffic. There has simply been a redistribution of the wealth. It’s not surprising that more and more companies are experiencing this phenomenon. In fact, SEO experts in the know predicted this years ago. It’s not that organic search engine optimization is less effective; it’s just that search engine users are becoming familiar with and educated in more effective ways to search.

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Getting Greedy With Keywords

From: SEO Book

When a page or section is new and you are competing against older sites that have built authority for nearly a decade one of the easiest ways to gain traction is to pick a specific keyword phrase that is not that competitive and go after trying to rank for it.

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Google Rankings Drive Sales - SEO Expectations

By: Barry Welford

searchnewz.com

Google Rankings Drive Sales. Thats what a caller told me this morning. Lets call him Chuck, from Massachusetts, to preserve his anonymity.

A year ago his website was at #1 in Google for an important keyword in a somewhat competitive consumer market and now its dropped to #3. His sales during the same period had seen a 20% decline. He asked me whether I could help to correct this situation.

By coincidence, Sandra Niehaus has just published a related post entitled, Why Isnt EVERYONE #1 on Google? She wrote it for all those SEO professionals who have been asked whether they can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Theres some excellent advice there. It all relates to Setting Client Expectations for SEO and what it can achieve. Part of that included what might be called Reasonable Expectations

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Dodging Google sheriff

theage.com.au

IT MAY now be the most coveted real estate on the web - the top ranking in Google for a competitive search phrase. But even the world’s richest marketers cannot lease this inventory.

Google’s goal is to deliver the most relevant information for any search query, and if it happens to be some teenager’s blog rather than a corporate website, that is how the cyber cookie crumbles.

Relevance is not for sale.

But early on, a small group of webmasters and marketers discovered that search relevance could be altered by exerting control over the hundreds of variables that search engines use to rank webpages.

During the past decade, this effort to improve a site’s ranking has gained a name. They call it search engine optimisation (SEO) and, according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), it was an industry worth $US9.4 billion ($A11.7 billion) in 2006.

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Google Algorithm Update Analysis

By: Dave Davies

www.promotionworld.com

Dave Davies is CEO of Beanstalk Inc. Seo Services and one of the most knowledgeable and successful Seo Providers in the industry.

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend. Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time. We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming. After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

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The Ultimate SEO Strategy is a Useful Website

The biggest challenge an ethical website optimization company must deal with is the expectations of clients. All too often a client will expect the SEO to achieve top rankings on competitive terms for a website that is nothing more than a brochure for the company. Usually this is just a misunderstanding about SEO and how search engines work.The primary job of search engines is to provide quality search results. In other words, when a searcher types in a keyword, the very first results should provide them with the most useful information available on that topic. An ethical SEO is not out to trick the search engines into giving top rankings for a website that provides little more than a sales pitch. Any methods for doing so are merely a temporary solution. Search engines are constantly working and adjusting their algorithms to rank useful, content rich sites above the rest. Once the latest SEO trick is rendered ineffective, you’ll be left having to pay more to try and get your rankings back.While it’s tempting to go the quick and easy route to achieve better rankings, the very best way to dominate the search results long term is simply to provide excellent tools and information related to your industry. You need content that other websites actually want to tell their visitors about – and it’s not as hard as you think.If you hang around the major online forums in your industry for a while, you will see the same questions and problems coming up over and over. A good SEO can help to find the necessary information about what your potential customers are looking for. Once you know what their problems are, develop an online tool or custom application to solve at least part of the problem. Here’s the kicker - then you give it away. That’s right, free of charge.

Real World Marketing: Even Colleges Spam for Top Rankings

From Seo Book

I have recently read up on the US News & World Report college rankings, and to what great lengths some colleges go to manipulate the results and improve their rankings. Rankings are very powerful because they are a signal of social acceptance and appear unbiased. Every important ranking system that displays results to those being ranked ends up influencing those it measures.

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SEO & Link Building Via Blog Comments

www.searchenginejournal.com

I’ve always been an advocate for active blog commenting playing an important role in the online marketing mix for a massive amount of reasons, even beyond SEO.

By taking the time to comment on blogs, even one or two comments per day can lead to extremely positive results such as reputation building, expert positioning, and the building of inbound links, even if said blogs use the no follow attribute in their comment fields (and if they do not, all the better).

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