Good SERP Ranking is NOT Enough.

You've done your homework and worked hard. Finally you get your site on the first page of results from Google for your keywords. But the flood of traffic you expected is not showing up.... What should you do now?

For those just joining the SEO arena, here are some terms you must know:

SEO = Search Engine Optimization: the science and art of getting a web page to rank well in the SERPs for a particular Keyword or phrase.

SERP = Search Engine Result Page, or, the pages that a search engine returns when someone searches for something. You obviously want your web site/page to be at the beginning of the results vs. on the 100th page, otherwise no one will ever find you.

Keyword = the word or phrase that you want your site to rank well in the SERPs when people search. For example, if you're selling butterfly shoes, then your keyword phrase would probably be butterfly shoes.

You may have read the first paragraph and said no way, that can't happen. Everyone thinks that when you get your site on that magical first page of results that you've hit the jackpot. Nope, not always.

Here are some reasons you may not get the traffic bonanza you expected:

1. Your web page title and description are not humanly appealing. Maybe you strung some gibberish together to rank well with the search engines, but to a human it just does not cause them to click on the link to your site. Remember, a person reading your web page is the end result you're looking for. Make your web page titles and descriptions appealing and make them a call to action so that you will entice people to click, click, and click.


2. You're towards the bottom of the first page vs. the top of the first page. I don't have any hard numbers, but I think it's pretty much common sense that the first organic result on the first page receives an order of magnitude more clicks than the last result on the first page. In English please! The closer your page is to the top of the first page of results, the more clicks you'll get.


3. You picked the wrong keyword(s). This is an easy mistake to make, and also an easy mistake to avoid. You must research your keywords before you start optimizing your pages and building your link campaign. It's easy to think you know what people are searching for and jump into action tweaking your pages and requesting links, when in fact you just might be entirely wrong on what the best search terms are for your web site. It's easy to change your web pages at anytime; however, getting the links to your web site updated can be hard to practically impossible. Why do you care about the links to your web site? Search engines, especially Google, put a very high value on the anchor text and/or title tags in links to your site. In English please! You've spent months getting links to your site using the term "butterfly shoes" because when you searched for "butterfly shoes" on Google, it showed 2,420,000 results so you figured you were onto a good thing. But, you finally go to WordTracker and check how many people actually search for "butterfly shoes" and you find that practically nothing shows up in their database for that phrase. You need to find a better keyword phrase that people ARE searching on to find a product like yours, and THEN you have to either get your inbound links updated (hard to do) or start building links to your site with your new phrase.

Here's a real world example. I helped a fellow blog owner with some SEO problems for one of his sites. In this example, I've left out the site URL and keyword terms. I did this analysis using the free version of WordTracker, the paid version gives much more data. He is targeting 3 keyword phrases, here's my quick analysis:

Keywords currently used on this page:

1. Keyword phrase 1
• Wordtracker showed 0 entries in its database, 0 predictions for 24 hours


• Google returned 2,490,000 sites


• Site is on the 3rd page of results on Google (near the top of the 3rd page)


2. Keyword phrase 2
• Wordtracker showed 23 entries in its database, and 4 predictions for 24 hours


• Google returned 77,100,000 sites


• Site is on the 3rd page of results on Google (near the top of the 3rd page)


3. Keyword phrase 3
• Wordtracker showed 21 entries in its database, and 3 predictions for 24 hours


• Google returned 67,100,000 sites


• Site is on the 5th page of results on Google (near the bottom of the 5th page)

Based on this quickly assembled data, I suggested that he had selected the wrong keywords. I played around with WordTracker and found a different mix of phrases that work much better. Here are the numbers for the 3 keyword phrases I suggested:

My suggested Keywords to use:

1. Keyword phrase 1
• Wordtracker showed 590 entries in its database, and 94 predictions for 24 hours


• Google returned 397,000,000 sites


2. Keyword phrase 2
• Wordtracker showed 12 entries in its database, and 3 predictions for 24 hours


• Google returned 2,470,000 sites


3. Keyword phrase 3
• Wordtracker showed 0 entries in its database, 0 predictions for 24 hours


• Google returned 2,490,000 sites

The first two phrases I suggested are new, and my suggested 3rd phrase is actually his old number one phrase. The first two phrases should do the trick, and even though the 3rd one shows no results I kept it in the mix because it's exactly what his site is about and just makes sense.

One thing to keep in mind: I did this with the free version of WordTracker which only gives data for MSN; the paid version gives data for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. The number of predicted searches would be higher in Google because more people use Google to search than use MSN.

Accuracy of the keyword phrase is important. I'd rather get a handful of very interested visitors than a hundred or even a thousand uninterested visitors. If in the above example, If I had suggested a keyword phrase that was not relevant to his site, what would happen? He may be able to get traffic using that term, but they would not stick around, it's also doubtful that they would purchase anything.

I also suggested some changes to the HTML for his web pages. It'll be a few days before he makes the changes to his site. It'll take longer to see the resulting changes in search engine ranking, usually a week or two, sometimes three. It'll take longer to get links built using the new terms.

Summary:

1. You MUST select keywords that people are actually searching with.


2. You need to rank high on first page of SERPs to get massive results.


3. Your site or page needs to actually be related to the keywords you're using.

Suggestions:

1. Use a tool such as WordTracker to research your keywords.


2. 3WayLinks.Net seems to work well. (That's how he was ranking on the 3rd page of results without any optimization to his pages.)


3. Subscribe to my mailing list using the form below (beside my photo) to receive alerts from me when I post new blog entries and release new products. The example above, is based on content that will be in an upcoming SEO course/product that I'm creating. It will include step by step examples using the tools I use and the code changes that I suggest making to a site/page.

Until Next Time,
Fred

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