It's #1 for "Nigritude Proudleduck"! So what?
(Glossary
of terms)
Page 1: Analysing the site's SEO - too much spells disaster
This page:
Understanding what is and what isn't worthwhile ranking
Page 3:
Recognising long term, long haul SEO
Page 4: Bad link buying and how to avoid it
Understanding Search Engine Rankings
Identify some search terms that you think relate to the site in question. Compile a list
using your imagination and tools like Wordtracker. The site, and its competitors'
titles and meta-tags, are useful other starting points. The anchor text used in
Incoming Backlinks (IBLs) should also be useful. A webmaster wouldn't ask for a
particular anchor text unless he felt it an important ranking term. Then, using
your list of key search phrases, run some searches in your favourite search
engines and record where the site ranks.
#1 is useless unless it's on a competitive term/keyword
#1 on a competitive term is still useless if nobody searches for it.
#1 on a competitive term that people do search for is still useless if that
traffic doesn't translate into the sales/signups/money you're looking for.
#1 on a competitive term that people do search for is useful if it helps you
achieve your sales/signup or other goal.
Getting to #1 for "Feline Immunodeficiency Virus" is a
lot easier than being #1 for "web hosting services". How to tell how
popular the term is? Most search engines disclose how many documents were found
for the term. Compare this:
to this:
Note the "about 1,150,000,000". Over one billion results for the
word "free" i.e.
whoever is #1 achieved that in the face of very stiff competition. The greater
the competition overcome to achieve a top ranking the higher the value of that
ranking. Usually...
"Free", however, doesn't conjure up images of a lot of money. To state
the obvious, being
#1 for "free" likely means your visitors are looking for something
that costs nothing. These visitors are probably students, or broke, or under
privileged, or down and out, or simply cheapskates. Like you. Like people who
read this page with no regard for how much the bandwidth is costing us! Getting
back to the topic...
Just because there are a lot of web pages on a topic doesn't mean that it's
searched for often. It's entirely possible that it related to a news story that
was hot a year or two in the past. No too long ago everybody + dog was talking about the
superbowl tits. Then it er, deflated (the interest that is). People moved
on but the web pages are still up. Thousands of them. Maybe millions of them.
Who knows how many idiots got excited enough about the tits to comment on them?
And create pages about them? And to actually use the words "superbowl
tits" in their pages? And to keep repeating "superbowl tits", "superbowl
tits" - and find tenuous other reasons to use the term "superbowl
tits" - in a futile attempt to increase the word count for "superbowl
tits" and thereby perhaps
rank higher for "superbowl tits"? Loads
of them, presumably. Stooopid. Anyway, even if you did rank #1 for that term it doesn't bring any
traffic anymore.
Trust us. And therein lies the rub (Pay attention at the back!).
What you want to know is how much of traffic that high ranking attracts.
There is no accurate way of determining this but you can get a rough idea of how
many people search for that term. Tools like Digital
Point's, or Wordtracker
(subscription service) provide some hints and there are some more ideas in the
SEO book we mentioned earlier. Note the disclaimers on that info.
It's gleaned from Overture and excludes searches done in places like
Google....or anywhere else for that matter. Also, there's a lot of extrapolation
involved so it may not be very accurate. You could also open a Google Adwords
account and - without actually committing to any ad spend - run the search terms
through their estimation
service (login required).
Page 1: Analysing the site's SEO - too much spells disaster
This page:
Understanding what is and what isn't worthwhile ranking
Page 3:
Recognising long term, long haul SEO
Page 4: Bad link buying and how to avoid it
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