Aside from the glaring monetization prowess of “The Digital Juggernaut” known as Google, just remember “your clicks equate to revenue”.

Let’s take a peek behind the numbers from Google’s 2010 profits to answer any questions about how profitable search as a viable business model is.

From: BusinessMBA.org

From Humble Beginnings to Market Dominance

Who would have thought that two college students (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) attending Stanford University 14 years ago would create a content-devouring search engine that re-purposes crawled content (yours and mine) and then makes (others) competitors or yourself bid on related keywords using display / pay per click (PPC) advertising or SEO in the interests of commercial intent / “relevance” would grow to such epic proportions.

Fact: “88% of online search dollars are spent on paid results, even though 85% of searchers click on organic results”

- Vanessa Fox, “Marketing in the Age of Google”, May 3, 2010.

In closing, I believe Google is one of the most brilliant and profitable websites (that wrapped an empire around itself) ever created. But the double edge sword is, Google also has their own agenda!

At the end of the day, what will they do with their power and wealth to make the world a better place?

With power comes responsibility and while Google has an 80% stake in search / market share, perhaps Google could think less about “making others conform to their terms of service” or “penalizing them” if they fail to comply and more about giving back to those whose content they are overtly “borrowing” and leveraging for the sake of profit.

And a profitable market it is indeed, as we can see above… Share your thoughts below or pass this along to others if you enjoyed it.

-Jeffrey

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Top Local SEO Blogs

Real local SEO heroes know what it takes to rank local businesses at the top of their competition – it’s their business to know.

If you’re looking to up the ante in your local search strategies you need to take a closer look at the following local SEO blogs. Before you head over to these blogs here is a word of warning. Chances are that you’ve never heard about any of these bloggers before. Especially if you’re a die-hard Internet marketer. You are more likely used to reading SEOmoz and similar sites to keep yourself in the SEO loop. Make no mistake, these bloggers really know what they’re writing about. Not subscribing to their updates will put you behind the game.

1. Solaswebdesign.net

Owned by Mirriam Ellis, a web designer and local search engine pro, SolasWebDesign is a hive for local search tips and strategies. Mirriam speaks from experience. Once you start reading her words of wisdom it soon becomes clear that she knows her game. If you want to know yours you need to tune in to her blog. Her post How Many Place Pages Can Your Local Business Have will get you started on the right track.

2. DavidMihm.com/blog

David Mihm’s blog is one of the most valued and read in the local search industry. As an industry leader, David is first and foremost a web designer with oodles of experience in the local search field. His expertise can help anyone get better ROI for local search. For an insightful tip that still applies today read the post Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link.

3. DevBasu.com

Dev’s Search Marketing Insights prove to be priceless for local SEO knowledge-hungry readers. A major player in the industry, Dev can also be found as a guest blogger on various other blogs, spreading his wealth of knowledge far and wide. I love this post How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages because of some timeless tidbits.

4. StayOnSearch.com

Owned and managed by Mark Thompson, StayOnSearch is a blog that mixes content production to include a range of things; SEM, local search and social media marketing. Mark owns his own Internet marketing company Search Creatively and brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. Read Making the Most Out of Google Places.

5. Blumenthals.com/blog

Mike Blumenthal personified is the Google Maps man. Head over to his blog for anything Google Maps. His blog is the best source of information for Maps. No arguments. He has a huge database of local search blog posts to help you smarten up your marketing strategies. Head over there now and start with this post – The Review Economy – What is a Positive Review Worth? $3.22.

6. LocalSEOGuide.com

Andrew Shotland’s blog is loaded with good, sensitive search information for anyone. You can start your journey by reading his Top Local SEO Posts of 2010 to get your heart all warm and fuzzy. I’m confident you will be hooked to want more.

7. GeoLocalSEO.com/blog

Steve Hatcher, a self-proclaimed Internet geek bedazzles his readers with the occasional local SEO chatter. With his knowledge in the industry it’s a shame he doesn’t update his blog more often IMHO. You can also find his posts on David Nihm’s blog which is solace for his avid fans. Read Google Places and Service Areas.

In Retrospect

I want to close this post with a reflective view on the chosen search blogs. By now you will have gathered that each of the above local SEO search experts have years of experience under their belt. These guys (and ladies) are not your typical fly on the wall. They are knee deep in the thick of it through their daily practice and respective businesses.

It just goes to show that running a successful blog doesn’t require fame and madness. It requires one thing above all else: Expertise!

This was a guest post by Lior, a marketing consultant for 123 neon signs.

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The new feature, which works by showing the results of a search as the user types it into the search box, will undoubtedly have many effects on SEO over time, but there is one change that Google has made very clear and that is webmasters will see an increase in the number of impressions they will get in Google’s results and, in turn, will likely see a decline in their CTR.

The reason for this is that Google is changing how it counts what constitutes an impression in the SERPs. Previously, an impression was a fairly straightforward metric, meaning every time a link to your site appears as a result on a Google SERP. However, with Google Instant, a single query can now produce multiple pages of results and, according to Google, that can create multiple impressions.

Under Google’s new system, an impression is anything that meets one of the following three criteria:

1. Your site being displayed as the result of a completed query (the only method possible previously).
2. Any time your link is on displayed on result the user interacts with, either to click an ad, related search or another link.
3. Any time your link is displayed on a result that the user stays on for three seconds or longer.

For example, if your site ranks well for “Streetcars” and “Streetcars in San Francisco” and a user searches for “Streetcars” and then pauses for a few seconds to read the results, it counts as an impression. If they then continue typing and  say “Streetcars in San Francisco” and then click a link, it counts as a second impression.

Impressions and Click Through Rate

This means many things, first and foremost that the understood CTR for each position in Google will change and almost certainly will be much lower. Though the proportions of clicks for each position will likely remain about the same, the number of people who click no links at all on a page will rise as more impressions are counted that don’t result in a click.

Fortunately, the effect of this will likely be somewhat muted by the fact that Google Instant is only for users searching on Google itself, at least for right now. Currently you have to be on google.com, logged in to your Google account, in a country where it is enabled, in a browser that can access it and not using it on a mobile device to see it.

Considering those using the address bar in their browser and those not meeting the above qualifications won’t see Google Instant at this time, the number using it percentage-wise is likely very small. However, as browser plugins come on line and reach is expanded, that will change.

Still, this will give SEOs a chance to adapt and adjust to the new numbers Google Instant creates. Eventually a “new normal” will be established though it will look different from the existing one, at least in terms of CTR, and will likely have many other effects elsewhere in the industry.

All in all, SEOs should be aware of the changes and cautious of them, but not overly stressed. The major changes are still in the distance and the shifts will almost certainly be gradual, making this more of an evolution than an earthquake.

This blog post was written by Lior who works for Producteev, one the of best productivity tools on the web.

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Without Traffic, There is No Conversion

Not anymore, as the deluge of information overload rests of the precipice and an abundance of information on every topic forces people to be more selective with how they “SPEND” their time, conversions are far more important.

Conversion implying that people take action in some track able way, shape or form such as (1) requesting more information (2) taking a poll (3) proceeding through the checkout process to buy a product or (4) picking up the phone to ask questions, engage your business or buy something.

Without these critical milestones, there is no monetization, without monetization, your website is a hobby. Regardless if you are using SEO, PPC, CPA (cost per acquisition), CPM (cost per thousand impressions), word of mouth sales, social media or any viable traffic source, what happens after that visitor arrives is equally as important as getting them to your website. This is conversion optimization and without it, it won’t matter how many visitors slip through the cracks and move on.

Your website is not a hobby, not that there is anything wrong with hobbies, however, chances are, if you don’t take your own website seriously (and run it like a business), then neither will anyone else (which means your site is essentially a doormat for a savvy competitor) who DOES understand the cues of monetization, conversion objectives and places cues above the fold.

While many webmasters are too close to see the writing on the wall, what YOU want and what OTHERS want from your website are the definitive factors that sculpt the outcome of the user experience.

We are not talking about a Myspace page or a Facebook profile here, we are talking about your website serving as a living, breathing, changing canvas designed to stimulate thought, emotion and most of all “ACTION”.

To bridge the gap, you will need to imbue the power of persuasion by (a) understanding the needs of your audience (b) catering to their questions, concerns, fears and surfing patterns as well as (c) remaining objective enough to be flexible and “let go” when something is not working.

For the love of split testing, just creating a variation of a page and then using Google Website Optimizer to change variables (such as buttons, images, headlines, text blocks, offers, etc.) allows you to determine which combination has the lowest bounce rate (approval rate determined by how long people stay and how many take the desired conversion objective).

The health of your website boils down to two things (1) getting new visitors to it and (2) ensuring that the visitors you do attract are relevant from relevant keywords or sympathetic traffic sources.

What happens next is obvious, if you have (a) placed the appropriate cues above the fold (above the scroll line on the page), (b) de-cluttered visual cues to allow a person to settle their attention on the critical problem, solution or subject (c) have a compelling value proposition, benefit, clout and trust and (4) are speaking to them at the appropriate time in the sales cycle.

Obviously depending on who the audience is, the price point, the type of conversion element required and the amount of traffic should allow you to create a seed set. That seed set of data from analytics such as 50 visitors per day per page allows you to refine performance benchmarks and determine if your page is lackluster, sliding into supplemental oblivion (with a bounce rates above 60%), fair (with a bounce rate around 50%) or tuned, performing and profitable (with a bounce rate below 40%).

Once you have assessed (1) your primary keywords (2) their primary landing pages and (3) how your sites navigation lends itself to the process of conversion, you can always “make changes” to improve conversion rates, increase cues and priorities by highlighting critical actions and removing any unnecessary text, images or elements that do not serve the simple purpose of “taking the preferred action” and generating more leads, sales or word of mouth brand awareness for your business.

-Jeffrey

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Should You Advertise on Your Website?

Despite the taboo like pretentiousness and the past prejudice business owners blatantly assumed in consideration to advertising on their websites, in the face of opportunity, many online properties are monetizing their traffic with alternate revenue streams such as affiliate marketing and advertising.

Depending on your core business model, popularity of your niche or market, post frequency of content, the type and depth of content and whether or not you have a sales funnel and monetization model, advertising is one way to recuperate a ROI for all the time you invest into blogging.

I have said in the past that “SEO is only one type of traffic”, and there are two ways to convert visitors into customers. The first is intentionally, through presumptive positioning in the search engine result pages through targeted keywords and key phrases using SEO or SEM.

The other method is through mastering how and where your brand appears through using other sympathetic web properties to entice tangential traffic (where people swing from link to link or rather site to site on a whim until they land on your pages).

Your website represents an opportunity to act as that vine to others or be a destination based on what they need at the time and what your online property has to offer. The connection that ensues can either result in conversion for your website or conversion for an affiliate, depending on how you manage your upstream and downstream traffic.

Who would have thought that search engines would turn into rich-media billboards for the highest bidder? Much to my surprise while using Yahoo yesterday, I could not help but notice their new format for display ads above the fold on the top right portion of the page.

Yahoo Monetizing Tangential Traffic

This is one clear example of one of the oldest sites online that currently enjoys hub status as a web portal that finally decided to make money through tangential traffic as people spin-out or rather,  “surf” the web.

There is a clear and decisive benefit to strategic alignment with web properties that are conducive and sympathetic to your subject matter. Just look at the recent unique visitor trends per month as tracked by compete.com for Google, Yahoo and Bing and what percentage of increases in traffic they are engaging as a result of overlap for top referrals and top destinations.

Upstream and Downstream Search Engine Traffic Stats

If you have a potential audience that could benefit from the type of visitors your website receives, then experimenting with advertisements to offset overhead costs and generating an additional revenue stream is something which you should investigate.

Since our expertise is focused mainly on SEO, which is only one piece of the online marketing pie, by far one of the most complete and all embracing guides I have ever found on advertising and monetizing your website is a smashing post by Daniel Scocco from Dailyblogtips.com with his stellar post called 28 ways to make money with your website.

It’s not really a matter of should you advertise, but more a matter of how you advertise? It’s not just that everybody is doing it, it boils down to two things (1) traffic is fluid and (2) visitors are eventually going to leave your website anyway.

The key is to leverage this simple fact and use it as a means to introduce potential sales funnels like a door prize as visitors leave.

Gargantuan entities such as Google understand this premise and have monetized it based on the fact that they know the value of function eclipse and transcend the temporary impulses of search behavior.

In other words, even though you click away to follow a search result, click a PPC advertisement (that was contextually matched to your query), you will be back to use their site again and again and again, as long as it continues to deliver what people need – more targeted sites based on those queries…

The simplistic “what’s in it for me” action / reward modality that is enough to fuel a multi billion dollar empire from the webs most trafficked properties can also represent a great opportunity as an asset for your online property. Being a traffic broker that can benefit from people coming and going without having to sell anything yourself is a great monetization model.

By using that model as a benchmark, you can (a) determine which potential upstream sites could benefit from your visitors, reach out through determining which affiliate programs exists and how you can introduce a funnel or (b) where you can send downstream traffic by way of advertisements or sponsors.

The possibilities are limitless in scope and only fixed based on your effort to generate a buzz, find the appropriate audience and give them something worth reading. The rest is history as long as your message is aligned to your sales funnels and your support system sympathetic to the visitors original intent.

-Jeffrey

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Sure, piece of cake, right?

In case you ever wondered what a search engine algorithm was like, just take a look at some of the proposed information retrieval models that could very well “be the engine” behind your next search.

Just as my fellow optimizers are trying to stay afloat, brilliant advances in search engineering ranging from query expansion, static scoring, query expression, taxonomy edge weights and more are making their debut to throw yet another curve ball at those who would try to breach the barrier to entry of the top 10 results.

Aside from competition (which can be equally as fierce), search engine optimization requires that you observe shifts in algorithms so you can make adjustments or fine tuning on the fly.

Some might say “write good content, build links and be patient”, but we prefer to look under the hood to understand the science behind SEO in addition to adhering to basic principles of search.

We know that relevance plays a part, but to really grasp search engines or search engine optimization, you should dig deeper to scratch below the surface to comprehend some of the fundamental processes involved in document retrieval models if you are ever going to appeal to those same algorithms.

Here is a glimpse of a day in the life of SEO research and in this instance observing how hierarchical document taxonomies, location taxonomies, social media or meta data can re rank documents based on who searches, where they are searching from, which medium is prominent (such as inverted indexes or what degree of relaxation/ variance is present).

A fascinating read courtesy of Sergei Vassilvitskii of Yahoo research.

Here is an excerpt

“Typical examples are local search, in which the user is interested only in geographically proximate results [10], multifaceted product search, in which product meta data is effective to restrict search along many dimensions [36], and social search, in which an endorsement by another user may alter the ranking of an object based on the relationship between the user and the endorser.”

The complete PDF is here…

Enjoy!

-Jeffrey

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You've Got Traffic, Now What?

Although the notion is admirable, the reality is, each keyword represents one piece of the semantic pie that corresponds to structuring the value of user intent.

Practical SEO works under the premise that if they type it, you will be there; and not just any page, but the page most suited to solve their query / dilemma. However, it is a timely endeavor, so traffic for traffics sake it not the objective, sales and conversion are…

The following collections of hand-picked documents are based on the notion of what happens next, or what happens after the visitor arrives; which is equally as relevant as why they searched to begin with.

• SEO is Great, But Conversion is Even Better
• SEO and Intent: Where Search Meets Results
• Impulse Surfing, Click Triggers and Keywords
• The Psychology of a Click-Through
• What is Your Click Style?

Each page is a destination, but just because you put a page in front of and end-user does not ensure success. Just as SEO takes planning to coordinate, optimizing a keyword that is a dud, is a moot point and should be avoided at all costs.

You’ll need to decipher user-intent based on the tone of keywords searchers use and collaborate your websites content and positioning to intersect relevance with demand. What happens next determines if your page is a hit or miss which can be measured by bounce rate, engagement time and conversion paths or objectives.

People are enticed easily to click on impulse and investigate offers, websites, images and links based on curiosity.  Call it human nature to be curious about the outcome of opening door number 1, 2 or 3 to see what resides behind them.

Search engines provide users with the same ability to express that curiosity in a healthy fashion. They are easy to use, most of the time they do a great job in determining which websites have the most to offer based on the keywords or topics queried.

That still does not remove the website / destination from marketing their wares, so, just because you have traffic, if you are not measuring that traffic against some form of tangible conversion or evaluating the reasons behind those conversions, then how can you expect to segment traffic and provide the ultimate user experience?

SEO is great at delivering traffic, but once they arrive, there must be equal emphasis on matching their expectation with some form of continuity. Otherwise you are working for your competitors by driving more business to those who have figured out that its not about the volume of traffic as much as it is about the quality of traffic SEO produces.

-Jeffrey

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Chronology and relevance reside at the core of search engine optimization and frankly, a website that has remained dormant for weeks or months without an update is not that appealing to search engines. Search engines reward fresh relevant content, or content layered with existing context to reinforce relevance.

On the contrary, once you reach a particular stage of on page and off page relevance for a series of keywords and terms, allowing your site to percolate ranking factors is just fine. Once you exceed the base level ranking criteria for a keyword, you can remain buoyant for extended periods. The point is, you must first cross the tipping point or your website and its rankings will be subject to volatility and receding in the index.

The primary objective is, to get a website into a favorable position if you intend to decrease post frequency. Since relevance is a two way street (based on the synergy or information and people looking for information), one metric search engines use to assess relevance is how frequently you add of modify content.

In fact, there is even an HTTP/1.1 status code to summarize if your content has changed or not, it is known as the 304 HTTP status code. The 304 status of a page translates into – not modified – and in a sea of gigaflops of information being skimmed, crawled and indexed on virtually every topic and website online, the website / page freshness factor counts when it comes to how your page is evaluated in the index.

Aside from relevance, and the volume of competition on each subject in search engines, you must first mirror that relevance within your website, then receive validation from other websites in order to exceed others targeting the same keywords and rankings.

I have seen this aspect of optimization countless times. If you neglect a website before reaching a particular relevance plateau, a website can flounder and remain dormant and essentially fizzle out in contention to SEO.

One tactic we utilize to overcome such stagnation is to go back and edit similar pages in the site that share a topic or have an overlapping frequency of terms which can be used to strengthen the internal linking of a website.

For example, if you wanted to increase your search engine positioning for Keyword A, then you (1) find all pages in your website that have context for singular and plural versions of Keyword A (2) edit those pages to link out to your NEW page (based on Keyword A) and then when those old pages get crawled and indexed you already have relevant links to reinforce and communicate topical relevance for Keyword A.

Link reputation also known as the link graph (a metric that looks at the links in and links out to each page in your website) is responsible for sculpting the way a page communicates intent and how it is valued in context for the keywords appearing in the links. 50% of the ranking factor is under your control with on page optimization and layering through methods described above (uniting co-occurrence for a favorable concentration of context).

These two attributes on page continuity and off page link reputation are some of the primary metrics search engines use to determine where to put your page in the index (relevance score) as well as the degree of trust and authority your website can gain regarding the topical context of the subject matter.

The idea is, to concentrate your content as much as possible through revisions, deep links and creating fresh content based on keyword research to preserve the rankings you have, while simultaneously scaling the heights of new / relevant keywords that can benefit your website and ultimately your business model.

-Jeffrey

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One of the primary ways to impact your websites ranking factor is broken links. Essentially, broken links can leech vitality from your most cherished landing pages (by affecting their support system) and negate the trust your website has established with search engines.

Things like plug ins conflicting or getting reset, 301 redirects or .htaccess files getting corrupted of overwritten accidentally, a typo on a robots.txt file could leave your website with a plethora of errors or deindexed or penalized as a result.

Things like borrowing legacy code (for new segments of a site) without making links absolute, a broken parameter in a naming convention or some seemingly harmless change can set off a chain reaction. If you change the infrastructure of a page, the template, the CSS, etc. you take a fair chance that search engines will set you back until they can ascertain if the weighting mechanisms they use approve or disapprove that change.

Sure, there is a 50% chance that nothing will happen and rankings stay buoyant, but what happens when that 50% probability results in something breaking, then what?

First SEO Tool – Google Webmaster Tools:

If you don’t have Google Webmaster tools, now is the time. From the dashboard there is a section that tells you if the crawlers experienced any errors once you log in.

In addition to seeing if any redirects are not resolving, you can download a link listing in excel for all of the site errors (broken links) present in your website. From there, you can either implement redirects to the real pages or fix the html code to represent the proper naming convention / page and eliminate the error.

You can also view content analysis and determine which pages are being treated as duplicates and consider using a canonical tag to correct link flow or changing the meta data or duplicate shingles on those pages.

Second SEO Tool: Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a nifty stand alone tool that quickly assesses the link structure of your website. Just download a copy, unzip it, add the URL and stand back as it spiders your website and looks for broken links. This is particularly useful if you have implemented and content management system and have a higher percentage of link locations which could go awry.

On a side note, it is common for a content management system (CMS) system of shopping cart configuration to allow you to use a prefix or suffix in tandem with dynamically extracted data (such as product numbers, tags, etc.) that are similar across many pages.

If each page has enough distinction in the body area at least 70% difference from the normal cookie cutter template then leave it indexed and active as a page that can be harnessed for SEO. Otherwise, consider using a noindex, follow tag in the meta data to pass link weight to more crucial areas of the site, without cannibalizing your other more pertinent pages.

Say for example if the only real distinction is a mfg. description (which will only suffer from duplicate content penalties unless it is unique) and less than 400 words or a tag page with a snippet, both are great for ballooning your website for topical relevance, but without enough link flow can work in reverse.

We will be introducing a suite of plugins for Wordpress to rival the All in One SEO pack, there will be over 40 SEO modules for everything from structuring internal links, finding broken links, adjusting all aspects of meta data, a dashboard to structure canonical tags, distinct ways to implement tag functions, and more.

Stay tuned for the upcoming release and in the meantime, we hope you enjoyed the SEO tips and tactics from the SEO Design Solutions Blog.

-Jeffrey

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Hence, the premise is, to have as many pages and keywords (semantic clusters) systematically wired to capture a specific type of consumer or prospect through researching search behavior to funnel them back to your most optimized page. That page of course is designed to deliver them to a specific conversion objective which is quantifiable with analytics.

When mastered, it is one finely-tuned example of pull marketing in peak performance and sublime simplicity. In this case, the opt-in mechanism is the search engine and the search terms used to siphon a prospect to visit your website.

Consider topical relevance as co-citation for a common goal. Each themed page contributes to the topics saturation ratio within your website. Once a keyword threshold is reached, the ascent occurs for the given keywords till it reaches a plateau. The key is knowing how to create and manage the conversation with search engines to build relevance across multiple phrases or semantic islands of keywords simultaneously.

For a more detailed breakdown on keywords and co-occurrence, visit Dr. E. Garcia’s website for the blueprint of this formula. Though 3 years removed, I can assure you this type of technological computations are at the helm of the algorithms that shape the way search results are rendered. Forget keyword density, it is all about co-occurrence and continuity as PaIR (phrase based optimization), block segment and shingle analysis have now replaced antiquated formulas that equated word volume with relevance.

Stuffing a page with keywords or building a dozens or hundreds of off topic links with multiple variations will fall on deaf ears in search engines unless the semantic threshold has been communicated to the spiders that crawl your pages.

Criteria such as grammar, proximity, co-occurrence and relevance score are calculated instantaneously every time a search is conducted. As a result, search engines are savvy enough to pull the right page from the data cloud and serve up the most relevant result. So, if your still relying on meta data or content that lacks structure, don’t expect your pages to hold up against someone who truly understands real optimization.

Conversion is based on identifying and catering to the mindset of that prospect through blanketing terms in the SERPs (search engine result pages) that they would use to find a website. A simple supply and demand relationship, when they search, “viola”, your website is there, the rest is systematic. One contingency that SEO’s tend to inflate is the number of competing pages.

From the standpoint of difficulty or time to the top 10 for the optimization, sure this metric matters. But to a consumer, they could care less if there are 1000 or 100,000,000 competing pages, as long as what they typed in a search box finds what they are looking for.

This essentially opens the floodgates since we know that semantic relationships in search engines carry a tremendous amount of weight through inherent continuity. Through harnessing those relationships, it is possible to systematically devour entire semantic slices of the web (so that your pages constantly gain relevance or ascend to the top 10).

If your content does not reach the given threshold to be labeled a resource, then its time to go back to the drawing board and rethink your tactic as well as make revisions and fortify your website with additional layers of supporting data (i.e. content and link popularity).

Semantic root phrases with less competition fall like hollow trees when challenged from an optimized page carrying link weight or relevance in search engines. Think of it like momentum, once started, the velocity from creation time, time into the index and time it takes to start ranking and climbing all decrease with each additional page on a related topic.

As an example, here is a page that was recently created in our blog. The title was deliberately skewed to capture a large cross section of related topics, as a result (since the blog already had gained authority on various offshoots of the topic) the pages were indexed quickly and went straight into the top 10 with ease.

The keywords optimized for this page were: unique, search, root, keyword, phrase, so any combination entered in pairs dials in the appropriate semantic gauge that identifies our site as a vital source of information.

As a result you can find the page ranking for terms like unique search, targeting root phrases, unique semantic keywords , targeting root keywords, searching unique phrases, etc…

The concept is, to perform this same feat deliberately for the keywords that have proven search volume. By understanding their threshold (competing pages, domain authority and popularity) you can overcome them through superior relevance to the semantic root phrases from developing multiple pages or a page or website with authority on the subject.

In order to implement this in any true capacity you need (1) unparalleled market research tools (2) a team for content development (3) custom plug ins or optimized site structure and the know how to implement, link and promote each page to create a ranking chain reaction, or you can just poke around and hope you get a few of the criteria right.

The only difference between a page that ranks for multiple keywords and one that does not organically is exposure, the support system and reputation. If you grasp the collective points of this post, then ranking is only a matter of time supported by the right fundamental components.

There is no penalty for creating content, there is no penalty for internal links, there is no penalty for creating relevant content users enjoy. Under this premise, volume is in fact your ally (just use wikipedia as an example).

If you truly understand that it is possible to rank for obscure terms and popular keywords and phrases alike though focusing on co-occurrence, link flow, relevance and link popularity, then no keyword or phrase is beyond reach.

-Jeffrey

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