Crash Course in Organic SEO

Sure, there are a million and one ways to accomplish the same task, but despite the fundamental differences in approach there is a sequence that is repeatable, evergreen and transcends topical search engine algorithm revisions and works time and time again regardless of the topic, market or competitors.

All techie SEO jargon and nomenclature aside, I will attempt to keep this as straightforward as possible to ensure that there is something for everybody from newbie to SEO expert.

These are the annals of tried and true methods I have used over the past 14 years to conquer competitive verticals time and time again.  So, I hope you appreciate them as they represent years of testing and over the years, these methods have made millions for us and our clients, and it can do the same for you.

Preface

You should put as much work into finding your market or niche as you do building it out. Neither should be taken lightly since time, energy and money are at stake and ROI is the ultimate objective.

Remember, you are creating a potential long-term asset for passive recurring revenue. So just keep in mind, based on what you put in, you will get out. The key is efficiency and repeatability and to work smarter not harder on the way up.

Realize that nothing happens overnight for a new domain. Search engines are programmed to ignore websites that lack the proper ingredients of trust, citation or relevance.

However,(on the contrary) if you give search engines what they want (content, strong site architecture, internal links, deep links, citation from multiple sources), the respond in kind with keywords rising on the horizon sprouting into the top 10 results (which is the proving grounds for continuity, message match, user engagement and conversion).

But first, you have to build it, so here are the steps involved.

1. Keyword Selection: the language of conversion.
2. Site Architecture: Mapping the Nodes of the Website Silo Architecture.
3. On Page SEO: Determining on page internal link thresholds.
4. Off Page SEO: Determining off page backlink / deep link thresholds.
5. Timing: Allowing for website theme synergy, trust and buoyancy.
6. Analytics: Observation, tracking, testing, refinement.
7. Content Development: Staggered content creation and content syndication.
8. Evolution: Finding lucrative effective keywords and integrating them into additional branches.

Keyword Selection:

Keywords aside from being the language of conversion and are the gatekeepers traffic from search engines.

Keyword or vertical online market analysis / research is the most critical step which can either make or break any of the following steps. If you fail to comprehend the language your prospects are using when engaging a search engine, then you may miss the boat entirely when it comes to crafting expert solutions, pre-sell pages or authoritative industry solutions that differentiate your web property from your competition.

Similarly, if you fail to understand which keyword phrases have semantic connectivity and share a high citation or relevance score to search engines, then your website will never truly enjoy the cohesion or develop the authority necessary to rank competitively against other websites that do understand this vital keyword DNA.

There are different types of keywords or rather as Russell Wright from Themezoom has coined them, “the 9 species of keywords” which you can use to entice your audience and facilitate conversion.

Once you grasp the function of the different species and what they represent to your business, you won’t have to guess which phrases to use, you will KNOW which types of keywords fit in their respective segments of your site architecture and how to maximize them for both (a) destinations and (b) supporting articles to chip away are the more competitive lucrative traffic-bearing behemoths that are the apex, i.e.  Industry-defining keywords, that all competitors in the space seek to capture and wield as their own.

While markets differ, the approach is very similar. The way I view this is simple. I use competing pages and daily search traffic as a barometer to assess (1) the barrier to entry and (2) a rung in the ladder on the way up the vertical.

Also, each phase of your website’s roll-out represents certain thresholds that you can feasibly tackle. For example, while we have conquered top 10 results in 6 weeks or less for keywords with 1.5 – 2 Million competing pages in “exact match” in competitive markets, it is not always the case and may take months to accomplish the same (depending on the market, climate and competition).

The solution involves using a more tactful approach. Rather than targeting keywords outside your reach (which is only temporary) on the contrary, you have to build the topical base of your web property through creating a solid semantic foundation (content) using both educational and commercial queries while paying attention to whether they are long-tail queries, mid-tail more competitive popular queries or industry defining keywords (as they take more time to get ranked).

Those primary phrases are what we call the low-hanging fruit or less competitive keywords and that is where you start using intelligent, cohesive content creation coupled with on page and off page optimization (more on that later).

Regarding the first steps of keyword research and how to implement cohesive site architecture, you can read more about this approach here in a post called “how to SEO your website” which I wrote previously, but the gist is simple.

Start with less competitive keywords you can rank for using citation (these are keywords that rarely require links, but just the presence of other similar keywords in a cohesive category structure). As you create those primary articles, blog posts, etc. you sprinkle in the more competitive keywords (from the rung above it) as secondary, tertiary phrases so you can augment them with internal links from those “supporting articles” by linking from those supporting articles to the more competitive keyword / landing pages.

The supporting articles serve a dual purpose (a) to increase spider activity to your website and (b) to provide internal linking opportunities for your “big picture” keyword/ranking objectives.

Once you have conducted your research and understand the hierarchy, then you take that data and map your site architecture to augment the ascent through assigning tiers based on competing pages, search volume and time to rank/ barrier to entry and ROI.

The more competitive the keyword, the more supporting content, internal link citation and deep links (backlinks) you will require from other websites to cross the tipping point. However, the more keywords you work on simultaneously exponentially expedites the entire process to toggle what we call keyword stemming where the website gains its own momentum and starts to rank for dozens, hundreds and eventually thousands of keyword variations based on the synergy of signals gleaned from the methods we are about to share.

Site Architecture

Using the analogy of tiers simply envision a cascading progression of champagne glasses stacked on atop the other with one on the top, two under that, three under that row and so on.

Tier 1: The first tier represents your websites theme. This is the homepage and often will serve as the apex for your most challenging industry keyword. There is a reason for this (1) the homepage will garner the most link-flow and link-equity naturally as a result of being included in any other URL for any other page (yourdomain.com/page.html) as a result of being in the root or rather being the root of the website, it naturally has the potential to magnify any of the topics stacked under it.

Page Rank and link-flow always move up from sub folders into the root folder, so, you will always want to keep your tier 2 pages (primary landing pages) in or as close to the root folder as possible.

Tier 2: Tier 2 pages (as mentioned briefly above) are your category / silo landing pages. They serve as the designated landing page for your most competitive keywords. Each competitive keyword should have its own landing page. This way, when the website becomes an authority site, you can have a specific page ranking for the keyword of choice rather than something generic (like your home page ranking for it).

Since rankings are by the page, it is much easier to develop dozens of tier 2 landing pages to capture keyword-specific rankings from internal links and deep links from other websites.

To provide an example of a tier 2 page for a website about health that houses multiple topics would be domain.com/diet-tips where there may by multiple topics in the site like domain.com/sleep-disorders or domain.com/healthy-eating-habits in either case, the landing page in the root folder would be the recipient of any internal links for the keywords (diet tips, sleep disorders or healthy eating habits) from any other page in the site.

Then, since each of those phrases is competitive, they will still require layers of nested supporting articles. So, while they are landing pages, they also represent categories for nested content such as domain.com/diet-tips/5-foods-to-avoid.html domain.com/diet-tips/4-healthy-meat-alternatives.html, etc. By adding this nested content in layers under the category/silo, then buoyancy occurs for the more competitive apex / terms the silo is based on. That silo landing page (in the root) then using contextual links and navigational links to tie itself to the tier one primary home page and the home page reciprocates by linking to the tier 2 landing pages either through navigation of contextual links.

Once you break away into a category/silo, those page can have their own navigation structures that are more conducive to the topic (health, diet, exercise, etc.) and then they are all tied back through the home button in primary navigation, sitemaps or contextual links (so getting to any category from any other category is possible within 3 clicks).

Tier 3 pages: Tier 3 pages are unique articles (in the case of a content rich site), blog posts, or products in the case of an eCommerce site. While you can create additional cascading tiers of relevance and site architecture, keep in mind that the further you go from the root, the more diffused the ranking factor becomes.

This is ideal if you want to tactfully create more buoyancy for your more competitive keywords, then keep adding nested content in the category and build internal links contextually (link from the editorial portion of the page) instead of through navigation, sidebars, images, etc. while accruing deep links from other websites to those tier 2 silo landing pages with a mixed semantic theme of anchor text.

If you have control over your link building (which you should or will need to in order to compete) you may want to limit the  use of the primary anchor text to 60% so 60 out of 100 links and then vary the other 40 links to include some shingle of the primary phrase (an overlapping keyword variation).

By doing this, you make your link building efforts appear more natural and will avoid tripping any filters and getting punted back several pages in search engines as a result of over optimization.

Aside from mapping each category according to its purpose, and for all of you visual types, feel free to read more about that here in a post called how to easily create silo site architecture, you will need to understand simple on page requirements such as:

• Put your keyword first in the title.
• Keep titles short
• Use the H1 tag for the keyword that page is designed to rank for.
• Use H2 tags for close cousin synonyms
• Mirror the keyword in the URL (so if the page is about diet tips, don’t call it page1.html name it domain.com/diet-tips.html ).
• Create at least 400-750 words of “unique content for each primary tier 2 landing page”.
• Limit the number of outbound links on pages to 50 or less, the less links leaving the page (internally or otherwise) the more concentrated each link becomes.
• Vary navigation on themed categories to avoid boilerplate templates.
• Remove navigation on pages with less content and use contextual links to get link flow in or out of those pages.

Aside from this, you should understand what internal link thresholds keywords have and how many deep links you need to provide buoyancy for that keyword.

On Page and Off Page Link Thresholds

While you could guess, I prefer using a repeatable systemic approach. Aside from the tools we use, I am not aware of any other tool than Domainwebstudio that can accomplish this objective.

For the record, we helped collaborate on the formula for the metrics inside the rules engine by sharing our secret sauce for 14 years (which I had to map out for clients and this used to take 40-50 hours per month).  The interface works wonderfully and the results are spot on every time for mapping out how many internal links and deep links you need to get ranked. So, I won’t tell you to go get it, since that just means more people competing with us, but it is available to the public and you can follow the link below for more information about it.

The project is called network empire and thanks to the team (Matt Da Cruz, Sue Bell & Russell Wright) you can gain access to that same algorithm and tool and get the same data in 20 minutes from a brand new drill using traditional keyword research tools (like market samurai or heavy hitting vertical online market analysis tools like the Krakken).

Timing

Like anything, quality takes time, so, invest in your websites and understand the matrix of frequently asked questions you should address, should ask questions you should have covered and span commercial and educational queries to garner social media engagement to “get more shares” rather than using dry, lackluster content to build out your website.

Remember, after the Panda update, Google can read and it knows quality (algorithmically to some extent) as a document classifier. If your pages score a dud as far as quality score and relevance, the game is over before you even get started.

As a rule of thumb, you can use this guide as a barrier to entry for exact match typing a keyword “in quotes” in a Google search to determine how many competing pages you have in phrase match to compete with. From there, the timeline looks like this (using competing pages as a barrier to entry).

Content Development

Content development and managing content development is an ongoing endeavor. Try to drip at least one page or post a day for new sites for the first 4-5 months 120-150 posts. This will help the site to (a) increase spider and ranking activity and (b) gain more trust and authority.

Once you have trust, you can see posts get indexed and rank in minutes rather than weeks or months and all the while, each internal link aid on page and each new page is a new opportunity to syndicate and gain new backlinks with.

Evolution

Evolution is the goal and by using analytics, seeing which keywords convert and staying active with content development, syndication (such as RSS aggregation, social media and editorial links) ROI will eventually start to roll in.

Building sites in this manor will ensure that authority is the result and it is scalable, hence the bigger the budget, the more nodes you can fire at the same time to devour your market or niche.

If you like what you read, pass it along and share with other. As always, we appreciate you taking the time to stop by the SEO Design Solutions Blog where you will find SEO tips, tactics and strategies to define your website in search engines.

-Jeffrey

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Put simply, if your pages lack verve when a visitor arrives (regardless of WHAT keyword they used to get there), then you are only asking your audience to jump ship and:

1) skim, leave the page and go back to search engines to find a more appealing offer.

2) find a website with a more appealing visual flow or design that pulls their emotional purse strings or -

3) find a more informative or interactive website that implements a clearer, or ironically more simplistic message and call to action for them to engage.

The good news, there is a solution; read this post for insights to what you could be doing wrong…

In closing on this brief intro, keep one thing in mind about the current climate of online marketing, it’s not always what you say, it’s how you say it that either converts or is simply ignored by users.

With advertisements, false positives and blatantly manufactured problems and solutions (i.e., three foods you should never eat…  Mom from Illinois used this trick to whiten teeth…  3 things your car insurance company doesn’t want you to know) impacting the masses at a mind numbing pace, your on page copy needs more than SEO to survive, it needs easy to interpret benefits laced with action-words to get users to “take action”.

This post from the past summarizes it well, so I encourage you to read >>> “How to Use Action Words to Increase Traffic and Reader Response” <<<.

-Jeffrey

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No related posts.

In my 14 years of doing SEO, nothing even remotely compares to the power of the Krakken for literally entering and dominating markets using the same types of algorithms Google and other search engines use to score your pages, content, links and websites (aggregate relevance score).

Sue brings profound concepts to light is a simple, easy-to-understand format to demystify the differences between keyword and market research. Click the spreadsheet image below to read a post I wrote a few days ago that highlights one of our most coveted SEO methods that involves taking Krakken data and building it into a powerhouse website using silo site architecture.

Don’t ask me why I would give something this powerful away for free (considering we have been using it for years to silently crush markets). Just consider it a parting gift from the SEO service model to work on our own in-house projects…

Click image to learn “How to SEO Your Website” using website silo architecture…or visit ThemeZoom for more intriguing information on the topic.

Theme Cluster for Dental Insurance

In the meantime, Enjoy the video…stay tuned for more updates!

-Jeffrey

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How to Map Keywords in Content Silos

Today’s post will provide a very simple method for determining where a keyword fits into the hierarchy of a website and how to integrate it into a theme to create a self-perpetuating ranking juggernaut in no time.

First of all, what is a theme? A Theme is a cluster of keywords targeted around a topical semantic base that reinforce each other (like rungs in a ladder).

Based on those rungs (also known as silos) as they can penetrate deep into other related semantic variations of the primary or secondary keyword; each page serves to provide ranking factor primarily to the apex (the theme) and other supporting rungs (pages or posts) with the anchor text they are aiding in ranking.

Where to Put Competitive Keywords

Logically, the more competitive the keyword (300K-1,000,000 competing pages or more), the more time, content and links you will have to dedicate to that keyword in order to gain traction.

Hence, those keywords should be emphasized though co-occurrence frequently within your website and what better way to accomplish this than weaving it into your primary site navigation structure.

We call this the tier 1 pages which reside flat in the site architecture in landing pages that are /in-the-root-folder not domain.com/category1/nested-folder2/landing-page.html

Once you have identified your tier 1 pages, you can reinforce them by integrating them with the most competitive keywords in the primary navigation.

As a result, you ensure that primary page garners link-flow as a touchstone for every indexed page (as it provides a link to your primary landing page).

Naming conventions are important and so is the anchor text selection “the text in the link”, therefore, you should keep both as succinct and “exact” as possible to ensure that the key ingredients are transferred and reinforced.

Where to Put Mid-Tail Keywords and Category Pages

While most mid tail keywords (keywords that are 100-300K competing pages in phrase match) that may not be the cat’s meow for your industry, they still have substantial search volume (en masse) and represent opportunities for conversions.

While this species of keyword is more common, getting them ranked still requires two critical components (1) links from above (from the tier 1 flat pages) to throw them a line using theme relevant pages that which are topically aligned and (2) links from below (to push link-flow up) from “child” a.k.a. supporting articles or posts (which are modeled after the parent mid-tail keyword) by incorporating some semantic shingle (phrase or group of words) into its title, link flow or content.

Building the Support System

The next part of the process is to identify how many supporting articles are needed, how many category pages (mid-tail keywords) are needed (to push up your primary tier 1 keywords) and how to selectively cross link them all using a coherent structure.

We use tools like DWS/Themezoom Revolution to accomplish this (as we collaborated and shared our most guarded ranking metrics as the engine for the keyword decisions screen for DWS).

How to Theme and Silo Your Content

There is more to this than meets the eye, such as template selection, link flow allocation and mapping out the number of inbound or outbound links leaving a page, however the primary function is to create a strong base of topical content (with supporting articles via a content management system) that you can drip content daily, a solid mid section of category / mid tail keywords (which you build links to) and a primary keyword / phrase at the top that gets ranked from inbound links and link flow moving up through the site architecture.

To simplify:

• Keywords under 100K competing pages are supporting articles (just place the keywords “in quotes” in a Google search to determine how competitive they are.
• Keywords 100-300K are mid-tail keywords (which need siloed pages to boost them up a bit) like rungs in a ladder.
• Keywords 300K or more are candidates for primary navigation (depending on your market).

While variables exist, the idea is to use the internal information architecture and flow of page rank and link flow to link to each page with the primary keyword THAT page is trying to rank for.

Do this enough (like a daisy chain) or what is considered “ring fencing” and the PR and ranking power naturally rises up in the site to become more buoyant and each page begins ranking the other pages “without backlinks from other sites”.

Observing the data below, for a market we mapped recently “Dental Insurance“, within minutes we were able to identify lucrative long tail (tier 3/ supporting articles – highlighted in light green) and mid-tail (tier 2/ category pages – highlighted in dark green) and Tier 1 keywords that were themes (highlighted in olive) which we would easily implement into a tiered site architecture and capture the entire vertical market.

long-tail articles (light green), mid tail (dark green), tier 1 theme pages (olive)

After you build a themed site using this methodology, then start the off page optimization and sprinkle in selective links from theme relevant sites gradually using a variety of anchor text and IP diversity.

Over time, this synergy provides enough internal link flow and enough off page citation and referential integrity to punch a hole in the SERPs and produces leaps and bounds for all of your collective keywords simultaneously (like the buddy system) .

In Closing

In case you haven’t noticed the lapse in posts on the SEO Design Solutions Blog, this will probably be one of the last for a while, as we are changing our business model and moving away from the service industry to focus on more internal projects.

The benefit to the SEO community is,  we plan to share our new WordPress (WP Ultimate) shortly…to complement SEO Ultimate (in our opinion, one of the most powerful WordPress SEO Plugins out there), so, I hope you all enjoy the pearls shared in this post as we wind things down.

The tactics are scalable and we have used them to conquer every market from 200,000 competing pages to 200,000,000 competing pages without fail.

There is a great deal of Chicken little syndrome thinking that the sky is falling fear of Google algorithm changes as of late. The only thing you should take from this is “not to build flimsy sites”.

The only way to insulate yourself is to (1) focus on quality content and (2) know how to structure that content for users and search engines alike. The second part was laid out above, I leave the first part for you to manifest.

If you are seriously considering theming your website, then you will need a serious tool, such as Themezoom to drill into vertical online markets and discover missed keyword opportunities.

Enjoy!

-Jeffrey

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How to Theme and Silo Your WordPress Blog

Siloing involves creating a process of selective categorization to create a topical website within a site to collectively concentrate ranking factor to a specific page (as the apex of the silo). This apex is the new preferred landing page for the theme / “primary keyword”.

As a preferred page, it should only contain the primary keywords you intend to rank the pages it links to in the anchor text. For example, a typical category page in a properly optimized e-commerce site will have a category and then feature brands of that type of product.

Once you select a brand, then all of the makes and models of products from that mfg. are presented, or should be presented in links to the respective internal faceted pages.

By the webmaster mirroring intent and using modifiers buyers use in combination with the brand, make or model in the title, h1 tags, contextual content and internal links (from page to page), a webmaster can create nested pages in that silo that correspond to the most popular searches.

When you augment the primary category landing page (theme) with a series of semantically aligned make, model or product pages (using the brand/mfg. name as the primary thread) this layering of pages create a very distinct type of ranking factor.

This compound effect resulting from the body of documents is a powerful ranking arsenal against competitors and works like a self-supporting algorithmic daisy chain using the buddy system to catapult keywords and their respective landing pages in to the spotlight in search engines.

While the example below is based on a simple theme using 5 siloed posts, you can see how this could be applied on a larger scale (such as Wikipedia or Amazon) by implementing a few simple rules in the site architecture, URL / naming conventions and internal links collectively.

How to Easily Implement Siloing

Example of a Simple 5 x 5 Silo Site

STEP 1: Permalinks

Set up the permalinks using /%category%/%postname%/ in the permalinks settings page using the custom option.

STEP 2: Category Selection

Create your categories (which should be keywords you want to rank for that have over 2,000,000 competing pages or more.  For example, if you wanted to rank for best affiliate programs, then you would create a category called “best affiliate programs” (then build nested content in the category as silos) to reinforce the keyword.

Ideally, you would use at least 5 other related or synonymous keywords or keyword variations as part of the semantic cluster such as:

• best paying affiliate programs
• top affiliate programs
• best affiliate networks
• review affiliate programs
• best affiliate software

The critical thing is that all of the keywords used for posts under the main category are (a) related preferably with the shingles (group of words) based on the target phrase using modifiers and other popular search terms and (b) that each of those pages in the silo all link to the primary preferred landing page (more on that next).

STEP 3: Create Landing Page and Links

Since WordPress is automatically programmed with pages to take precedence over posts, create a page named the exact same thing as your category – i.e “best affiliate programs”. This page will now override the category (which would have been a cyclical page with the nested posts on it).

Now, as a result of the supporting content in the silo, this new page is a powerful landing page which you can showcase your primary keyword, the value proposition, sales copy or conversion objective to facilitate rankings and sales.

Over time, as a result of the internal links from the nested (siloed) pages, the theme (best affiliate programs) a.k.a the category will start to develop authority as a result of the pooling link flow bubbling up from the internal “related” pages.

To create continuity you could (1) build links to the internal siloed pages or (2) build links to the preferred landing page (with the variations of keywords found in the siloed post).

Over time, the landing page will rank for its primary “more competitive” key phrase and any possible variation that is passing on its ranking credit as a result of being linked within the silos.

Ideally, on the siloed pages, you can create a custom page that omits the primary navigation, this way it forces the link flow to move a certain way throughout the site (through the contextual links on the page).

Your website scales relevance while gaining traction as a semantically themed keyword cluster and using a simple plugin like SEO Ultimate and the Deeplink Juggernaut, you can add autolinks automatically within content based on any occurrence of a keyword on any page within the silo. You can download SEO Ultimate from WordPress.

In this instance, any time the word affiliate program is mentioned, you could have it auto-linked to the preferred landing page.

To summarize, rinse and repeat this up to 15 themes per website and ensure that the silos are at least 5 posts deep. Make sure you have a new “Page” to create a capstone for the category and make sure you are building deep links from other websites to augment the pages in the theme or silo.

That’s it. Enjoy the power of nesting topical content in categorized silos and leveraging the power of internal links to funnel link-flow throughout your posts and outrank your competition using the power of on page optimization and site architecture to your advantage.

-Jeffrey

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Get to the Root of Organic Search Modifiers

Instead of haphazardly targeting nebulous keywords or competitive rankings; since ranking for the wrong keywords costs you time, missed opportunity and money. Organic search is based upon 2 simple nodes (1) quality and (2) relevance;  by using the proper modifiers to “qualify” your traffic,  you can make higher conversions with fewer visitors by eliminating the tire-kickers and increasing traffic from “buyers in need”.

Finding “the right keywords” to drive relevant visitors that convert to your website is a science and an art form. This document explores the fundamental SEO strategy of structuring your website for optimal organic search engine positioning through using themed modifiers (keywords that translate specificity as a prefix or suffix to primary keywords) that convey relevance to search engines.

In this E-Book we will cover:

• Common modifiers & their uses.
• GEO modifiers for local markets.
• Modifiers affiliates use to get paid
  “regardless of the market” and more!

Grab a Copy of this 16 Page E-Book Below…

Click Link or Image To Download!

Download Organic Search: Top Modifiers Revealed – FREE!

-Jeffrey

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How to Use SEMRush to Increase Conversion

The correlation between the manifesting the preferred rankings for lucrative keywords that yield ROI vs. the keyword duds that drive traffic, but to less favorable pages that are not suited for conversion is a problem.

Timing and Conversion Funnels

This is where understanding which point of the conversion funnel a visitor is at, whether there is commercial intent for the keyword or phrases driving traffic or whether or not the page in question should even be indexed in Google in the first place (taking potential visitors away from your groomed landing pages) is the concern.

Fortunately for you, there are choices, such as:

1)      Implementing noindex, follow on the page to prevent it from getting indexed (yet the links on the page still pass link flow to preferred landing pages).

2)      Use 301 redirects (which allow you to harvest pages which have acquired rankings and redirect that organic traffic to pages more favorable for (a) affiliate marketing opportunities or (b) on site conversion from your own corresponding products or services.

How to Find High Performance Keywords

Now, all you have to do is determine what those keywords are that have traffic, then sort them out, give them a purpose, then make adjustments to the content, noindex, follow or use a 301 redirect.

One SEO tool that is great for identifying keyword / relevance thresholds is SEMRush. In just a few clicks (with the paid membership) you can enter your website and export all of the keywords driving traffic to your website and it uses a click through algorithms to estimate the percentage of traffic a website receives from certain keywords.

Screen Capture from SEM Rush

Naturally, you should always use more than one method to determine the accuracy of any metric (such as Google analytics) but in this case, the key metric to view is % of traffic in SEMRush.

Which SEMRush Metrics are Most Important

Export the CSV data so you can analyze it with emphasis on three critical metrics.

1.       Position

2.       Search Volume

3.       % of Traffic

While the first 2 may be evident, the third % of traffic is the one we are interested in initially. By why? The reason is simple, if we can take traffic with high click through rates and then funnel that traffic to a page that could make you money, then that is a blessing in disguise (rather than trying to target and acquire keywords).

3 Critical SEM Rush Metrics

Under this assumption, the keywords and pages with the highest % of traffic to your website are the first places to start when pruning the user experience. I will typically stop looking at keywords that fall below the 1% of total traffic mark (or keywords that have less than 1000 visitors per month). Anything below these metrics are essentially the low hanging fruit that yields marginal ROI and are better left on their own (unless they cross the tipping point).

I know the owner of the site used in the screen capture and I know they are trying to rank higher for “guitar lessons for beginners“, but the majority of their traffic comes from “stratocaster neck”, which is not as clearly defined as a key phrase with commercial intent. Remember the educational vs. commercial content quandary mentioned above. Using the redirect or re-purpose method, you can still have educational content, but segment the funnels, ads, links, etc. to other websites or pages in your site that make the most sense (from a business standpoint).

The next metric I may use in another sweep is the keywords that are on page 2 in the search engine result pages sorted by search volume. So, if there is a keyword with 5,000 or more searches per month and my site (or the site assessed) is at #14, then hypothetically getting that keyword from #14 to page 1 above the fold is not a difficult endeavor.

It only requires (a) more internal links (b) more content (c) more deep links from other sites or (d) all of the above blended well over time. This is only on example of SEMRush and how you can use it to benefit the bottom line.

There is no reason to waste click throughs, if you have traffic, then it is your decision on how you want to coral it within your website. Using the three simple tactics from above, finding out what they are and what to do with those extra clicks is a cinch.

-Jeffrey

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How to Segment Traffic and Landing Pages

Additionally, beyond traffic segmentation, creating continuity through message matching “pairing their interests with the action item for the page” can determine how effectively that page converts.

What you have to ask yourself from an SEO perspective is (a) which page is the best and (b) how to I optimize a page to appear for the specific keywords and not others?

This is a matter of internal and external link selection, page authority (which occurs after the links pass weight) content and conversion. Three out of those metrics are well within your control, the last however requires tweaking.

Considerations:

• Internal Linking (anchor text selection).
• External Deep Links (anchor text selection).
• Page Authority
• Conversion

First up…

Internal Linking:

Whether than go into detail in this post, a post from the past (SEO Rankings and How to Create Them) which summarizes this strategic SEO technique in great detail. Suffice it to say that the gist of the tactic is simple. To create a dominant catch-all landing page that ranks for multiple keywords, then link to a page with multiple anchor text from multiple pages.

To create a targeted / preferred landing page in a website that only ranks for specific keywords, then only link to that page from semantically relevant themed pages (which already rank for some variation of the keyword in the anchor text being passed along) to pass on the appropriate anchor text through link-osmosis elevating the selected page as the preferred landing page.

Do this properly and you can replace the need for PPC (as the designated landing page ranks for the designated keyword as a preferred landing page).

External Linking:

Once you implement a systematic approach using the internal linking tactic above, the percentage of deep links (links from other sites to pages other than your homepage) diminish. In other words, you can rank a page on a fraction of the links opposed to not having enough internal link weight concentrated on a specific landing page.

While this percentage varies, depending on circumstances such as (1) the age of the domain (2) the trust of the domain (3) the authority of the page (4) the thoroughness of the site architecture (5) how much time has elapsed for all of the on page and off page metrics – determines how each keyword ranks in search engines.

Page Authority:

Page authority is developed over time, but once a page has all of the necessary on page and off page ingredients, you will see ranking appear on the horizon for broad mid-tail or long tail keywords and the more you nurture that page (with additional content and internal links or deep links) the page grows in its dominion for all of the semantic keyword clusters (the process known as keyword stemming).

If cultivated properly over time, this is one of the most powerful SEO techniques which is virtually undetectable (aside from monitoring link flow percentages) which can catapult an internal page with a website which exhibits the ability to fire on multiple cylinders (rank for multiple keywords) to the top 10 results for keyword specific targeted keyword clusters, modifier combinations and phrases.

Conversion:

While conversion requires getting the visitor to take the appropriate or desired action it requires they receive the fundamental transactional benefit to engage your offer.

Those benefits can be framed by the A.I.D.A (attention, interest, desire, action) or merely looking at three benefits such as:

• Assessment (why should I do it?)
• Value (how much does is cost and what’s in it for me?)
• Action (is the action emotionally charged or driven by inherent aspects of the psyche?)

While this is another topic in its entirely, you can see than by breaking the visitors action into stages and isolating each portion of a benefit by what is important to them and why.

This requires fine tuning and preferably split testing with multiple offers and variations to achieve optimal results. Coupled with the ability to drive keyword specific traffic to your landing pages with a strategically placed offer can create hundreds or hundreds of thousands of dollars with the proper conversion funnels.

The takeaway is; its starts with links, prominence and semantic connectivity, what happens next is trust, authority and search engine result page ranking for targeted keywords based on which tactic you apply from above (the wild card inbound link strategy or specific exact-match linking to preferred landing pages).

-Jeffrey

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Opt-In Web 2.0 Affiliate Marketing Strategies

I will save you the opt in form and provide a free “how to” post on this simple, “get free stuff” affiliate marketing strategy.

With this simple and effective technique, you can leverage the power of authority sites that allow you to post content to deliver visitors to your satellite sites (test sites)  to screen prospects across multiple keyword variations that would take you months to acquire on your own with a budget and SEO strategy.

This method involves using prominent web 2.0 properties which have the capability to rank on a title tag alone to test the waters of conversions which you can then funnel to your authority site.

If the traffic yields a response and you achive conversions, then you know the keyword is worth optimizing for your primary web property.

1. write an article and submit to ezinearticles and use an exact match 3 word key phrase with substantial traffic.

2. Set up concern-qualifying, bullet-list rich, benefit / solution  oriented Squeeze page that slices, dices and even works on Sunday.

3. Build a few links to the page (from social bookmarks to get the page indexed quickly) while providing suitable citation for that page to remain buoyant over time.

4. Give away something free in exchange for a name and email address (you can find tons of free digital products online that have resell rights) or create your own value proposition as an action / reward modality.

5. Set up auto-responders with email messages to “drip” on prospects who opted in (send messages to coerce you into clicking and /  or purchasing).

6. Incorporate affiliate links into offers in the autoresponder messages sending traffic to other affiliate offers.

7. Rinse and repeat.

Is this something I would do? Not really, as I consider this parasite SEO, but it is an effective method for testing the waters of conversion and generating traffic which is just as important as search engine result page positioning (which creates traffic on the target domain).

Both are a means to an end, so depending on your resources or morals, you could replicate this tactic across multiple aggregate keywords to carve out a lucrative number of mini sites and auto pilot squeeze pages.

Personally, we prefer building authority sites (such as seodesignsolutions.com) which can rank for keywords as a result of a post or two with millions of competing pages.

As a matter of fact, by the time you read this, we should be ranking for the key phrase “affiliate marketing strategies“, which was the point of this 509 word exercise – to bump a hollow page from the SERPs using this very tactic.

Not to say that strategies like this are not cashing and making people money day in and day out (which is the objective for most), its just a matter of viability, content quality and moral turpitude, or what you consider testing the waters of conversion.

-Jeffrey

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Starting an Online Business with Affiliate Marketing

For anyone who has wondered how to start an online affiliate business there can be a lot of people who will try to answer the question—and at least half of them are charging money for the solution.

The best way to learn how to start an online affiliate business is through trial and error and seeing what works best for you. Naturally many people who want to get into internet marketing don’t have the luxury of making huge mistakes along the road to success, so what’s the alternative to just diving in and learning it all yourself? To learn how to get started with your own affiliate marketing business online, read on.

Firstly, what exactly is an affiliate business? Building a business online as an affiliate is the practice of promoting other peoples’ products or services and making a commission off each sale. Through marketing online as an affiliate you can earn money promoting high quality, high priced products that will earn you big commissions.

The catch is that you need to turn this into an actual business to remain profitable and live off of the wealth that can be accumulated with online internet marketing. Treat your online affiliate business as a real business and not just as a hobby or experimental stream of income. Let’s take a look at the basic steps required for starting a successful affiliate business.

Step #1.) Identify what you want to promote and how large you want to grow your business. Try to find out what you want to promote and decide how serious you are about building the business. Is this something you’re doing for extra income while you’re going through college or is this your new sole source of income? Outlining how large you want to shoot for will help set your goals and give you a better chance at succeeding.

Since you’re reading this I’m going to assume you agree with the phrase “the sky’s the limit.” Once you establish how your business will work and profit there’s really no limit on how large you can grow it. Do you want to promote weight loss products, internet marketing products, real estate courses or programs? Try to find out what you’re interested in selling and make sure there’s a market for it as well as decent commissions to be earned.

Step #2.) Consider how you plan to promote the affiliate products or services. Do you want to simply send traffic to a small blog or do you want a large authority website that will eventually have thousands of pages? The advantages of going small with a blog or static HTML site will be that you can rank easier and target less competitive keywords. An authority site is a lot more like a long term internet marketing business plan. If you want to start off with an authority site you’ll have a significantly more difficult uphill battle but the reward is often well worth it. That being said you can also go the safe route and build more modest sites that can fund future projects like authority sites.

Step #3.) Learn how to drive traffic. Traffic generation is literally the blood of your business. If you can’t get new traffic to your sites you won’t make sales and you stand no chance at growing your business into a successful one. This being said, try to learn everything you can on traffic generation. Learn about search engine optimization (SEO), video marketing, article marketing, email marketing and other ways to generate traffic.

It’s always important to remember to never put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to traffic. Try to diversify where your traffic comes from so in the event of an emergency you don’t lose all your traffic at once. Additionally you can always drive paid traffic through Google Adwords or Yahoo’s Small Business Network but this requires a bit more knowledge and experience.

Step #4.) Identify what works, repeat, reinvest. Once you begin making sales from your website and marketing efforts you’ll be well on your way to building a “true” business. The only step left is to identify exactly what is making you sales, repeat that method and then reinvest the profits to either ramp up your efforts or to create new sites. You can reinvest by outsourcing the workload of traffic generation and marketing your sites.

Over time the more you do this the more you’ll be able to easily start up a new website, make it profitable and then move onto the next one. Depending on your growth goals you can eventually have several sites (or one main “authority” site) that generates all your income needed. Reinvesting and monitoring your results is extremely important though so always keep tabs on what exactly is creating the sales. Split test landing pages and begin to track your traffic through programs like Tracking202 when you feel comfortable with it.

Step #5.) Remember you are a business. Businesses pay taxes, often have employees and sometimes have offices where they work from. If this is where you aim to go with your affiliate business make sure you keep in mind that you need to function like a true brick & mortar business. Keep track of financial records, keep tax records for any employees and make sure you write off appropriate expenses like an office or transportation.

Once you grow your affiliate business to your desired size and profitability you have a lot of options to expand even further to make more money. If you find one product you’re promoting does extremely well you can research that product, purchase it and make a similar product that fixes the same problem and targets the same niche. Now you have your own product where you can keep 100% of the commissions and actually recruit your own affiliates to do the legwork of promoting it.

This is often what “super affiliates” do after a certain period of time profiting from a niche and it’s a great way to scale the business quickly. However this isn’t necessary at all and you can still make more than enough money through promoting other peoples’ products as an affiliate.

This guest post was written by Jason Acidre, a Marketing Consultant for Affilorama, an affiliate marketing portal. They provide affiliate marketing education and advanced affiliate marketing tools for beginning and advance affiliates. 

-Jeffrey

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