Create Content With Purpose

The first short-term purpose is to generate a surge of present-tense traffic. Even if your new page or post generates 25 new visitors to your website in one day, reaching 100, 200 or 500 visitors per day is scalable by the introduction and syndication of new and / or relevant content.

The second long-term purpose content creation serves is the ability for each page you create to age and transform into a powerful hub page (replete with PageRank, link-flow and ranking power) which can funnel link juice to more critical (spoke in the wheel) commercial pages with the express intent of getting those pages into the top 10 spotlight.

As traffic and mileage may vary from website to website depending on the subject/topic, demand and/or authority of your website; in the instance of SEO Design Solutions, I know that I can generate additional 300-400 fresh visitors per day from one blog post over the average ambient traffic we receive to our website from the aged legacy content it houses.

The other added benefit is the more content you have the more PageRank and authority you develop. The takeaway is that creating qualified, rich, engaging content not only wins you points from search engines, but will insulate your website from vacillations (rising and falling) if minor algorithmic changes threaten the relevancy and ranking landscape (if you were relying on off page backlinks alone).

A proper SEO campaign should always involve the introduction of fresh/relevant content. Not so much to obfuscate links or link building as much as the on-page justification of giving search engines a reason to rank a website higher (from being a genuine resource).

Search engines are based on a basic principle (1) crawl, index and store content and then (2) use that content to query against (with 200+ relevance and recency filters) to determine which group of websites are (a) trusted and (b) authoritative enough to rank in the “authority set” – the top 10 results.

Aside from the two points made above about creating more traffic and leveraging pages eventually to foster additional buoyancy for landing pages. Content (and the quality and relevance of the content) is truly one of the more prominent metrics that search engines use when deciding who wins the click (as a result of where they are positioned in the search engines index).

On page internal linking opportunities are also a side benefit of strategic content creation. By spanning the topical nodes of synonyms and other related phrases that pertain to the topic, you can sprinkle phrases in landing pages and / or supporting pages which you can use for internal links.

These internal links carry more weight in the algorithm than links found in common areas like the footer, sidebar or navigation and a page that is a PageRank 3 internal page (for example) passes equally as much weight through a link as a link from another website/page from outside the website. This means the more pages in your website that have trust, relevance, PageRank/Link-flow or authority, the less you need to depend on backlinks to get ranked.

When you understand the premise of theming your content (creating a main topic and nesting supporting keywords, articles and / or pages), your own website becomes a powerful on-page dynamo that is capable of fueling less competitive keywords through tactful internal links.

Also, when considering that your website is only as strong as its weakest page, leaving no page behind and giving it a function to act as a supporting page that links to more commercial landing pages or sculpting that page as a destination is a great alternative to each page fending for itself with no continuity or links from contextual linking or navigation.

In either case, the entire corpus of documents benefit (as the whole becomes stronger, more relevant and more interdependent) if you are leveraging the premise of tactful content creation and keyword occurrence. The occurrence of a phrase can become a link to the appropriate landing page.

Once you cross the tipping point for on page internal links, the page becomes buoyant. Don’t believe me, just think about the cohesiveness of Wikipedia and it’s no surprise while they are one of the most dominant websites in Google’s index ranking for millions of keywords as a result of their on-page structure and internal links.

While you may not have a website the size of Wikipedia (most don’t), you do have the ability to create fresh content and also syndicate that content to social media sites, article directories, RSS aggregators and more to (a) generate more traffic and (b) cultivate relevant internal links which boost page level trust and PageRank and eventually domain authority for the entire website.

In closing, here is an alternative to content creation it’s called content curation and our friends at Network Empire are teaching a course “Premium Content Curation” for those of you who are interested. Pass it along and as always, I hope you found this post useful and informative.

-Jeffrey

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Authority and The Window of Opportunity

Authority transcends the measurement of content or links alone and cultivating algorithmically tangible authority in your market is an imperative blueprint for long-term search engine success.

This cat and mouse like dynamic exists regardless of the keyword and is the condition that spawns action (from those in assault mode) or recess (for those who can rest on the laurels of domain or page authority).

Creating Bigger, Better SEO Rankings

Creating rankings that can stand the test of time, virtually unshaken by competitors for months on end (with minimal effort) requires understanding how search engines weight different types of content. Getting to page one or the #1 position is challenging enough, staying there is mission-critical to yield traffic.

Rankings can be created through (1) on page optimization (2) citation and links or (3) trust and authority. Rankings created from the trust and authority are far more difficult to push aside than either 1 or 2 (on page SEO of off page SEO) alone.

Consider the authority set or (the group of documents identified as “the best set of documents on the topic”) as a finite number of critical pages. Based on the metrics that are deemed significant enough to reach the apex of a search engines algorithmic equivalent of “it factor”, it becomes exponentially more difficult to uproot those results as they are technically “grandfathered in” as the most relevant result.

Getting Past Link Dependency

Having created this “authority effect” enough times with enough keywords to know, that once your webpage or website is deemed a trusted authority on a topic, the web mimics you by pushing your content to the top 10 in minutes or on the contrary can defends it from others attempting to push you aside on auto-pilot.

If you are on the other side of the coin and making a push to displace a competitor and / or pages in the search engine result pages, your approach needs to resemble a methodical, layered approach that supersedes typical campaigns that rely on backlinks or link flow to position your website (without addressing authority).

In fact, this is the main reason why using supporting content, i.e. a blog or topical articles as a content development strategy and using multiple supporting / overlapping layers of relevance is an effective SEO tactic, a website needs to be considered an authority in order to gain weight (algorithmically as a ranking equivalent).

While those relying on backlinks or off page ranking factor are constantly in a state of flux, what remains is domain or page level authority that you can harness if you only change the way you think about and apply SEO.

Using Your Own Pages to Rank Other Pages

Instead of looking for more links, why not use your own pages to rank other pages? All time and chronology aside, if you create hundreds of staggered pages,  fast forward 3 months and have a series of links built both within a site and from other sites for each of those pages theme-relevant keyword, each of those pages eventually will becomes a hub (pivotal page) that can rank 5 other pages when they bud authority.

Sites like Wikipedia started like this and you can see just how powerful and virtually unstoppable the are to search engine algorithms. The authority set is the objective and its not about links, its about the quality, candor and tone of the content and how favorably the algorithms determine your content as “the it factor”.

This logic suggests that the ultimate, genuine objective of SEO is to (a) create as many topically aligned / themed pages as possible and (b) get each page to produce more ranking factor than it consumed to get ranked and (c) stagger links from each themed page in the  website to provide tiered ranking factor as you see fit for other pages.

For example, a website with authority can rank in minutes for keywords that a less relevant or less trusted site would take links, supporting articles and months to achieve. The question becomes, what is the topic (or topics) and how can you build enough trust, ranking factor and authority over time so that when you are trying to create laser-targeted rankings, you only need to create a landing page and a few internal links?

The answer, try this tool at Web Content Studio for starters for a stint of semantic structure to give Google and other search engines the semantic cues they are looking for. What happens next is reciprocity as those search engines reward you with traffic and rankings for your contribution as a benchmark in their index.

Download Your Copy of Google Authority Sets

While this is an older document from Dr. Andy Williams Ph.D, it is still relevant to this day. Do yourself a favor, find out what “Google Authority Sets” are and how you can cultivate your website to become one in your industry, market or niche.

-Jeffrey

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5 Internal Linking Errors to Avoid

Below are 5 common on page SEO boo-boos to avoid when optimizing your websites internal link structure that can sap your websites performance.

1) The Open Loop / Lack of internal links

The metric which determines the amount of link flow a page has a direct correlation to how many internal links are supporting a page. While you can assume that a search engine will simply “know” where your pages are and “what” they mean; without taking the time to cultivate the internal links, then each link not placed strategically is a lost opportunity to rank a preferred landing page.

In other words, if you have 10 pages which could all be consolidated through a common keyword to link to a preferred landing page (the one that ranks for that keyword), then you should have all 10 pages linking to the page in question from a contextual (editorial) region with an optimal keyword “anchor text” on the page (preferably above the fold as location implies importance) to the ideal landing page.

Consider this your web pages lifeline or irrigation system which allows link flow to be shared and directed. Without this, pages can suffer from link attrition or lack importance within the entire site schema.

2) Too Many Outbound Links on a Page

This is the easiest way to suppress ranking factor within a website. Having too many links on a page (over 100) is like having a bucket with 100 holes in it. Regardless of how much water you pour into it, all the water still ends up on the floor.

This falls under the category of template optimization and site architecture, but the internal link structure is part of this process for segmenting the user experience while allowing the site to appear for the keywords the page was commercially crafted to appear for.

You can do 2 things to minimize this (1) determine which links are absolutely necessary and either consolidate links from an entire segment to a new page (like instead of having 50 links on a page, link to a new page that has 50 links on it as a hub page) or (2) remove them and instill a more segmented user experience and sort the site into make, model, brand or categories that are more conducive to a proper SEO structure “instead of mixed fruit” place the apples in the apple bin, peaches in peaches, bananas in the banana bin, etc.

3) Wrong Anchor Text

When it comes down to one of the worst things you can do for internal linking is to use generic keywords like “click here” or using entire sentences or groups of words as links. The impact only diffuses the target pages ability to rank for any specific keyword.

Remember, search engines are constantly asking you (a) what does the page mean to you and (b) how should I rank or emphasize it? If you have not thought out your keyword link allocation for on page SEO, then how can you mirror those fundamental choices will deep links (links from other websites) later.

If you ignore this vital process, you can spend more time making up for the inefficiencies of the site architecture and require far more links than an optimal allocation of consistent on page and off page anchor text via selection.

4) Different Anchor Text Linking to Same Page

Another common mistake is over optimization of pages or linking to the same page from multiple keywords on the page. While there are some situations where this is unavoidable, ideally, you should have a clear road map of which pages are intended to rank for which keywords. If you do not, then picking a champion page that serves as the primary landing page is your first step.

Once you decide which primary keyword a page it designed to rank for, there is no problem using keyword variations as internal links on multiple pages (as long as they are semantically related or relevant). The real consideration is not to have more than one link on a page (contextually) if you can avoid it (overlap in navigation regions aside).

5) Orphaned Pages

If you want a page to rank, then don’t be stingy with your links. Think of link flow as a cascading flow of water (like a waterfall) and the 10 champagne glasses all of them being filled from the overflow of champagne poured from the top glass.

Orphaned pages never get out of the gate or get filled enough with link-flow to resonate their worth back to the sounding board of the rest of the pages within a site. A page needs to be linked from at least 5 locations within a site to carry any significant weight and the quality, strength and market focus (topicality) of the page providing the link also has great impact on the amount of link equity transferred to the new target page.

The idea is (1) to keep the hops for competitive keywords (the two word competitive mid-tail key phrases) close to the root folder of at least one sub folder away and (2) make sure the pages are linked from pages higher in the hierarchy or serve as hub pages (category pages with sufficient internal or inbound links) which can supplement ranking factor for pages that may not have enough link flow or deep links.

In closing, keep yourself out of the penalty box and ranking strong by using the 5 SEO tips for optimal internal linking above.

-Jeffrey

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Feeding Search Engine Spiders

Aside from all of the strategies, methods and tactics, tweaking pages and waiting for spiders to re-index those changes on your web pages is 50% of the SEO process.

With that in mind, here is a simple but effective way to increase crawl-frequency and feed the search engine spiders…

What is SEO aside from:

• Creating Relevant Content on a Solid SEO Friendly Platform using Relevant Titles, Meta Data and Internal Links
• Developing Trust, Domain Authority and Link Popularity Over Time and
• Revisions and Fine-Tuning

On the last point (revisions and fine-tuning) is often where many ranking battles are won or lost. If at first you don’t succeed, then refine the page; add more pages to augment your preferred landing pages or build links to gain additional traction.

Addressing crawl frequency and indexation issue directly implies that the more pages you have, the more page rank you can have working to deliver more traffic through a broader array of keywords.

After you make a change to a web page, you have to wait for spiders to re-crawl the page and the search engines repository and index (which is what queries hit) to update their cloud data before your rankings rise or fall based on the revisions.

In an interview with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of web spam team) confirmed that PageRank equates to crawl priority crawling the web from the top-down Page Rank model from both (a) in the collective repository of Google’s cached data and (b) using PR as an indicator of page priority to determine the depth of the crawl.

So, aside from (1) looking at stagnant pages and considering if they rank or need revisions or deep links to provide buoyancy you need to (2) make revisions to the on page and (3) get spiders to revisit those pages.

This brings me back to an old school tactic to (a) pull pages out of the supplemental index that haven’t changed or been linked to in a while and (b) get pages re-indexed after making changes. The technique is simple – just link to them from a high PR site that allows you to post your link.

Who would have thought that something as simple as linking from a website like Craigslist.org, Folkd.com or any website with a PR7 or higher (ensuring it is within the top tier seed set of authoritative domains online) is all it takes to expedite a re-crawl to pages nested deeper in a website.

All most pages need are 3-5 links to those individual pages (to distinguish them from the millions of pages that have zero links) to improve search engine placement for something specific keywords nested in the content. Getting an authoritative link does two things (1) it improves the link citation of your link profile and (2) helps spiders dig deeper to re-index changes and gain more contexts about your website, its theme and where it belongs in the search engine index.

So, the next time you tweak a page, make sure to drop a few links from a website with a high crawl frequency that has do-follow links to get things out of the supplemental index and ranking on your behalf.

-Jeffrey

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Are You Getting Qualified SEO Advice?

There are two reasons for this, the first and most obvious is that if something really works, do you really think they would just give it away to breed more competition? And the second consideration is that search engineers can read as well, and the last thing they want is someone gaming their latest algorithm through a loophole and broadcasting it for all to exploit at will.

So, the real SEO conundrum of trying to find the “needle in the haystack blogs”, gain access to elite SEO communities or forums where real SEO’s share practical and proven techniques provides the highest ROI on engagement  time. There is no time to waste clicking would-be random snippets of a rehashed SEO techniques from 1995 that you can find in any shallow scraped re-purposed article or 400 word condensed teaser post.

Real SEO strategies and tactics are based on meticulous planning, competitive intelligence, unique circumstances and incorporate domain authority, page strength, the volume of content within a site, page relevancy and citation from outside sources into one cohesive execution plan.

An effective campaign can take months to implement and with so many variables (with each introducing a plethora of alternative or asynchronous metrics) the selected SEO tactic selected will have to offset the individual needs for that site at that time in order to overcome competition, considerations of trust and authority as well as metrics known for creating inertia or generating momentum.

For example, no amount of link building alone will supplement poor site architecture and lack of on page elements, just as a “one page website” or a site lean on content or authority will offset a virtual knowledge base (with hundreds or thousands of pages) on a topic. Similarly, on page SEO alone will topple a competitive keyword without some type of citation from outside sources through acquiring relevant or authoritative links.

The key here is to understand the infrastructure of information retrieval just enough to know that SEO is an virtual ecosystem with holistic implications and variables. The more themed, relevant and precise your content is the more relevant search algorithms rate your content.

While you could go on indefinitely about individual SEO metrics, each website is unique and every circumstance is different, so finding the appropriate solution still relies on using a strategy aggregated on proven best practices in order to be effective.

It takes a lot of trust to take others words for things, particularly for SEO implementation. In closing, while the opportunity to learn from others mistakes as well as breakthroughs is always a motivating factor for seeking out “SEO know how”, there is nothing like trial and error and learning things based on your own experience.

While there are no magic bullets, the most successful campaigns are based on (1) understanding your own foundation – such as your programming platform (2) assessing your competition and the barrier to entry for the market (3) gauging the depth of their expertise – based on the keywords, rankings and traffic they have acquired and (4) creating a tiered strategy to offset the tipping point (whether that involves content, links, creating a buzz or building a platform with superior SEO Web Design).

-Jeffrey

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How to Pack an SEO Punch

One of the main discrepancies we find during consultations is either (a) inefficient use of content resources or (b) inefficient use of link equity and deep linking. Both are correctable, however having a distinct page for each topic and more importantly each predetermined page is a prerequisite to offset competition and establish relevance.

Search engines parse pages as a vector, meaning that the entire body of documents is seen as one master document acting as one unified organic document.

You ever wonder what happens when you conduct a search?

The query space echoes nodes of relevance from the search engines’ repository (a cloud based data aggregation containing all of the crawled and indexed pages in the index). By matching the query, keyword snippets are calculated with numerous conditional correlations, such as frequency, proximity…

• scope; i.e., whether the words behave as broader or narrower terms in a given context.
• type; i.e., whether we are dealing with nouns, verbs, adjectives, stems, etc
• synonymity; i.e., whether we are dealing with synonyms.
• architecture; i.e., whether the documents reside in a horizontal, topic-specific vertical, or regional directory

This frequency of keyword co-occurrence serves as a measure of term weight, which can be calculated, parsed by inverse document frequency (IDF) and algorithms determine which pages from the index are delivered as the most relevant, retrieved result.

If you wish to augment the prioritization process, i.e. ranking for specific keyword queries; the easiest way is to (1) create enough contextual content to cross the keyword tipping point and (2) consistent internal linking to promote a champion page.

A champion page, implies creating specific “exact match” / optimized pages (where the keyword is reflected in the URL), the H1 tag mirrors the title, and then additional keyword modifiers are used in the meta description to showcase alternative second and third choice variations for that page.

By using exact match keyword naming conventions, titles, URLs and content and creating a solid base of content for topical relevance (based on the keywords competitiveness), virtually, any keyword is attainable.

After the on optimization has settled, the off page factors (such as how many links are referencing the page from qualified / relevant sources), the trust of the sites referencing the page and the sites own trust and relevance score are the missing ingredients that play into how high in the SERPs a given keyword / landing page combination ranks.

-Jeffrey

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Building SEO Links with WordPress

A WordPress blog is arguably the most SEO-friendly platform for content creation. Not only is it simple to use, but with the addition of the right SEO plugins, you can basically set it on auto-pilot. It’s important to note, however, that you must still understand basic linking strategy in order to effectively utilize your WordPress blog.

Starting with blog content, you must thoughtfully plan your approach. Write a blog post with your keywords in mind and be sure to mention the exact keyword approximately 1-2 times throughout the post. Aim to write at least 400 words in each post and mention the keyword(s) within the first 100 words – this helps spiders to identify them as important. Additionally, create co-occurrence by including a keyword in the title of your post.

Once the post is written, it’s time to upload it to WordPress and create your links. The following guidelines are essential to remember when building a link.

• Always use a keyword as anchor text for your link.
• Link to the first occurrence of the keyword (which should be within the first 100 words of the post.)
• Make sure that you consistently link to the same url from a given keyword across all blog posts.
• Linking from multiple keywords is okay but only if each link leads to a unique url.
• Try not to link excessively – a minimum content:link ratio is 100 words:1 link.

By following these guidelines, you can skillfully mold your blog into a content-creating, internal link-building machine. If you haven’t already, build a blog on your site and start today!

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Back to SEO Basics

Toppling a competitive keyword means understanding the balance of (1) on page term frequency (how weighted the keywords are within the copy) both on individual pages and globally within the site (2)  trust – how long the site has been targeting a specific keyword or key phrase and (3) the off-page SEO ranking factors such as the amount of collective external / deep links required to overcome lack or relevance or inertia.

Typical results depend on the competitiveness of a keyword and can be fine-tuned over time. These thresholds are often measured in metrics that search engines use known as allintitle, allinanchor and allintext (which parse and calculate the respective quantities of present ranking factors).

By mastering each of the respective thresholds, one is capable of closing the gap and overcoming competitors who in some way, shape or form have similar earmarked references within their website.

SEO Resources for Allinanchor, Allintext and Allintitle

• 3 Imperative Search Engine Ranking Factors
• Google Optimization: Using Search Operators
• SEO Basics Using Allintitle, Allintext and Allinanchor
• Competitive Keyword to Relevance Thresholds
• Using Google Search Operators for SEO
• Use SEO to Take Control of Rankings
• SEO Tips to Optimize a New Website
• Synchronizing SEO Metrics

The suggested reading list above digs deeper into the topic of Google Search Operators and how you can use them to polish your pages for top 10 dominance.

SEO often starts with a realization that competitors have an upper hand, then out of that competitiveness (and business savvy) the notion to conquer a coveted keyword and plant your page in the top 10 is the next impulsive realization.

What may not be obvious is the method used to overcome the various obstacles and milestones of relevance along the way that produce the effect of rankings.

The posts above will help to demystify the process or at least the understand the algorithmic guardians of relevance that protect the threshold from a perspective of quality control. Remember rankings are by the page, if you cross the tipping point, the search engines elevate your content as a preferred destination.

However, without a roadmap, its hard to determine where you are in the process, which is why having a tool to measure on page metrics such as allintext, allintitle and allinanchor ratios is an invaluable asset to your Ultimate SEO Toolkit.

If you found this post useful, then follow us on Twitter or pass it on… For other useful SEO tips, visit our blog or subscribe to the SEO Design Solutions RSS feed.

-Jeffrey

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Title Tags and SEO

This is one more reason that you don’t want to leave it up to them to determine what the topicality of your pages are really about. If you use the main keywords in “exact match” first in the title, this indicates to them through a hierarchical method called proximity, that these keywords “in this order” are more important than those that follow.

Also consider, the more keywords you add to the title, the less effective or diffused each one becomes as it is interpreted as a mixed signal or relevance.

This means that less is more when it comes to titles. You are better off creating addition keyword-specific pages and using exact match titles to summarize what that piece of the semantic puzzle means and how it fits into your website, than stuff the keyword full or irrelevant keywords that sparsely appear on the page.

If you consider the web from a top down approach, you will find that term frequency, title tags, co-citation from other websites and the websites internal site architecture are responsible for providing cues of topicality.

A great title and enough links from authoritative sites that are also theme-specific is one sure-fire ranking tactic from most SEO’s playbooks. However, in order for a title to be effective, it should be based on a solid premise of contextual information you would expect to find ON THAT PAGE.

This also means selecting which pages have the highest degree of relevance within a website and creating a structured taxonomy of tags and / or links to serve as indicators of ideal destinations. As a result, there is a clear definitive page assigned to each specific keyword, but also serves to produce relevance for different layers of the user experience and indexing for search engines.

This premise is known as theming and siloing and is a very effective tactic to use for creating content-rich articles or pages, then passing that link flow and ranking power to landing pages closer to the root folder (where the tendency to rise is more prominent).

In other words, you may create a category called search engine optimization, then within it discuss keywords, title tags, internal links, optimization tips, link building etc. Then, somewhere on each page you link the keyword “search engine optimization” since it is the topic (and should appear as a reference “on each page” to a specific landing page called “search-engine-optimization” to funnel link flow and ranking power from each of the subsequent pages to the ideal preferred landing page.

Also, the closer those subsequent pages are to being semantically relevant for their main keywords, the more link flow/ranking power they can pass along. Think of SEO as a daisy chain of scalable referential proportions. Each page passes along its vote to other pages for the keywords the target page is optimized for.

Simultaneously, the page being linked from is also receiving link flow and relevance from other themed pages based on the occurrence of the “targeted keyword” as it appears in the context of conversation in the body copy.

Wikipedia has mastered this fundamental formula and has more top 3 rankings than any other website online. If you can mirror a fraction of this type of taxonomy and site architecture for your group of semantic clusters and keywords, there are very few websites who can challenge or stop your ascent as you dial in the on page and off page metrics that produce authoritative rankings.

From theory to practice:

For those of your running WordPress as a CMS (content management system) or blog, the possibilities are immense. SEO Design Solutions is proud to offer a new upgrade to our SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin which features a mass title rewriting function from one central dashboard.

Now you can literally optimize all of your titles for pages or posts from one easy-to-use interface. This feature allows you to fine tune  the most powerful metric “the title tag” to capture a broader array of targeted keyword driven traffic. For more information about SEO Ultimate or to download it, visit our plugin information page.

SEO Ultimate Allows You to Optimize and “Mass Edit” Pages and Post Titles

Suggested Reading:

• How to Use Consistent Naming Conventions to Increase Relevance
• SEO Basics: Techniques for Optimizing Titles and tags
• Catchy Titles have Higher Click Through Rates
• The Power of SEO Friendly Titles
• Optimizing Title Tags and Descriptions

-Jeffrey

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The Trinity of Relevance SEO, Traffic and Conversion!

Search engine rankings are to websites what the stock market is to businesses, they are a metric which others use to measure the degree of peer review, acceptance and impact they have on the collective marketplace as a whole.

In many instances, the position of your website in search engines communicates the degree of authority your website has vested within it about a particular keyword or topic. Yet, despite the topic, if the visitor fails to see the value in that authority or does not take action, then it will not matter what keyword they used to reach your site.

Aside from relevance, search engine positions are based on a moving target of criteria. These criteria have specific thresholds and demands that require a seer like intellect to divulge the source of which variables are more important than others (titles, supporting pages/links, domain age, pecking order within the site, accessibility, etc). Get them right and you remain intact, fail to impress search engines (or visitors) and metric will not matter as that visitor will simply move on to find a better offer.

In addition, with newcomers challenging established search results in every competitive vertical online market, it is no secret that Google is shaking things up and re-weighting the SERPs and changes the face of business as we know it each week with new updates and tweaks to their algorithm.

Consider it an extended update where stability has taken a backseat to the authority sites with new found focus or new kids on the block who finally figured out that title tags really do work….

Whatever the reason for the new entries (the old sites had stale metrics, the market is expanding or the relevance weights have changed) all we know is that the SERPs have been displaying a unique array of results for the past couple of weeks.

The trend, authority sites with link weight and popularity to spare taking a bite out of other markets when sparsely mentioning a keyword in the title, description or sparsely throughout the site.

I would rather not get into name calling, but, let’s just say that if you have been resting on your laurels for the past few months, that may not get your website the first page exposure you became comfortable with in the past.

The new algorithms are looking for new and exciting metrics to deduce the signal to noise ratio online. Your website really has to emphasize an authoritative position and reinforce it from multiple angles (web 2.0 / social media engagement, videos, press releases, RSS directories, Unique RSS Feeds, Article Syndication, and more).

In essence, you need to be visible in Universal search by being universal in scope to reach a broader cross-segment of where markets, users and attention are all intercepted by your website or websites. A successful online business requires a trinity of metrics in order to gain traction in a maket place; SEO (for visibility), search engine traffic (for qualified leads or visitors) and conversion (from visitors finding what they are looking for).

Keep in mind, there is no shortage of competition, if you do not own your space, then you will not occupy it very long. Just call it the law of averages which can work for or against you, depending on how you embrace the metrics of search engine positioning and engagement from prospects.

Any lapse in any of the fundamental areas search engines use to assess relevance could mean slipping off the grid of organic search and being upstaged as a result of temporal differences or thresholds for relevance or engagement being challenged by competitors.

Managing your sphere of influence:

So often we get caught up in the vanity plate keywords or ego boosters’ vs. expanding baseline traffic. This is where analytics comes into play and really digging deeper to see significant trends in regional or local keywords, bounce rates and engagement times or specific advanced segments or goals.

As a result, we can do more with less effort by seeing what signals search engines have already earmarked for your domain so that you are essentially not going against the grain when it comes to expanding on keywords already handing close to the top results.

Taking a month for example to examine keywords on the fence and push them from dangling by a thread in the 20’s into the top 10 is a far more beneficial practice than starting on an entirely new campaign or new organic keywords. The notion is to promote keyword stemming then broaden the range and scope of topical synonyms.

From there parse your contents highlights that receive consistent traffic and start looking for affiliate programs to generate income from a friendly referral from your website or funnel that traffic back to your preferred landing pages to propose an offer for engagement and conversion.

The simple takeaway is, you never know which metrics will gain or fall out of favor with search engines which is why you must thrive to re-create your online relevance model in order to stay ahead of the bell curve.

The more flexible your approach is and the ability to scale content or reinforce older pages with authority, the higher probability of maintaining or acquiring a larger percentage of organic search engine traffic.

Also, remembering that conversion optimization is just as important as search engine position and conversion is the real yard stick that measures was it all worth it at the end of the day. Increasing traffic without being as astute with analytics or layering your offers in context to the purpose of your website or web pages will only leave you scratching your head when your competitors have mastered the art of the squeeze page, PPC landing pages or solid organic content.

Here is our suggested reading list (to stay ahead of the curve) as well as emphasize potential areas in your website you may have overlooked while inadvertantly obsessing over rankings. Online marketing is holistic and diversity is the key to longevity and depth to offset dependency on any one metric.

The Following Posts are to Assist The Triad of SEO, Traffic and Conversion:

• Uncommon SEO Metrics
• Create Traffic or Optimize Existing Traffic
• How to Use Action Words to Increase Traffic and Reader Response
• Internet Branding – Brand Imaging & Brand Identity
• Assessing Competitors with SEO Market Analysis
• SEO is Great, But Conversion is Even Better
• SEO Delivers Traffic, But What Happens Next?
• Increase Conversion Not Just Traffic
• SEO Visibility and Conversion
• Facilitating Value Based Conversion

-Jeffrey

Related Posts

1. Conversion Optimization – “Increase Conversion” Not Just Traffic
2. Keyword Research: SEO, Traffic and Conversion
3. The Trinity of Traffic, Credibility and Conversion
4. SEO Tips to Double Rankings, Traffic and Conversion
5. Alternative Traffic Sources: Diversity and Conversion