Traffic Building

So how do you take advantage of all these almost-unique searches your customers are making?

With shorter (1-2 word) keyword phrases, optimizing a page on your site for each phrase is a productive strategy but you can’t optimize pages for unique searches.

The key to ranking for longer keyword phrase searches is to concentrate on producing as much content for your site as possible. You still want to optimize these pages to make them easy for search engines to index and rank, but sheer volume of content becomes more important than targeting individual search phrases.

What you’re trying to do is produce content that contains as many industry related terms as possible. Things like answering questions your customers are likely to ask, tips about choosing features when buying your products, how to use your product to solve common problems, cautions about do-it-yourself solutions, etc.

The more diverse content related to your products and services that is indexed by search engines, the greater the chance that one of your site’s pages will match enough keywords or a phrase in a unique search to rank highly for that search.

A side benefit to writing content this way is that it naturally produces information that’s valuable for your propects and useful to others in your industry. The more valuable your content is the more likely other industry related web sites will link to yours, further boosting your potential rankings.

In future posts I’ll address other reasons why earning traffic for these longer searches is important as well as a few easy ways to generate content that will help you earn your share of the long tail.

The long tail is a term coined by Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine to refer to the internet’s effect on the demand for niche products and services. Contrary to well established hit-driven offline marketplace, Anderson posits that the real growth in commerce will involve being able to affordably reach niche audiences with niche products online.

From the Wired Magazine article:

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody’s monthly statistics and you get a “power law” demand curve that looks much like any record store’s, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don’t carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

So how does this relate to search marketing?

Just as Anderson has found a long tail distribution in the demand for many physical products online, our search behavior follows a long tail distribution as well. While half our searches each month are for common 1 and 2 phrase terms (”landscaping”), the rest are for very specific 3+ phrase terms (”what trees grow best in wet soil”). What’s notable about these 3+ phrase terms is that they’re practically unique, especially as the search phrase gets longer.

For your business online, there’s as good a chance that someone looking for your product or service online will type “moving company” as there is they’ll type “how to move a grand piano” and there’s an an even better chance that the longer phrase will only be searched for a couple of times per month.

Fortunately, you can take advantage of the long tail of search by changing the way you think about offering content on your website.

The Long Tail - Part 2 will tell you how.

I’m sure you’ve heard about the search data that was released over at AOL. Well, some enterprising soul mined this data to calculate the average click through rate for ranking numbers 1 through 10 in a major search engine.

Results from:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 11-1000 receives 11.3 percent of click throughs.

Search Engine Ranking #1: 2,075,765 clicks
Search Engine Ranking #2: 586,100 clicks = 3.5x less
Search Engine Ranking #3: 418,643 clicks = 4.9x less
Search Engine Ranking #4: 298,532 clicks = 6.9x less
Search Engine Ranking #5: 242,169 clicks = 8.5x less
Search Engine Ranking #6: 199,541 clicks = 10.4x less
Search Engine Ranking #7: 168,080 clicks = 12.3x less
Search Engine Ranking #8: 148,489 clicks = 14.0x less
Search Engine Ranking #9: 140,356 clicks = 14.8x less
Search Engine Ranking #10 147,551 clicks = 14.1x less
Search Engine Ranking 11+: 501,397 clicks

SEO Myth : Your home page should be the most highly ranked page on your site.

Your home page is a throw away page when it comes to search engine optimization. Its purpose is to get your business message across and to provide quick and easy links to the important content on the other pages of your site.

It should act as a guide to tell a search engine what’s important about your site through the structure and text of the links there, not as a entry point for searches related to your business.

Think of your web site as a pyramid with your home page on top and the various pages that make up the rest of your site as the base of the pyramid. Just like the pyramid, the strength of your site comes from the base - from the content that represents the bulk of your site. And, just like a pyramid, many more people will reach the top after a climb from the base than will drop from the sky onto the tip.

Optimize your base to rank for important keywords then direct that traffic to your home page where your visitors will get your business message and see links to the most important areas of your web site.

SEO Myth : A certain keyword density is key to search engine rankings.

In the days when search engines were young and the calculations they used to categorize web pages were primitive, keyword density was an important factor in ranking well for a particular search term. The idea being that the more often a certain keyword (or version of a keyword) appeared on a web page, the more relevant that web page was for that term.

Once this predilection became known, webmasters started to stuff their web pages with multiple versions of the keyword they were trying to rank for in an effort to artificially inflate the value of the page in a search engine’s results.

As with any “quick and easy” path to good rankings, the efficacy of this keyword stuffing approach quickly diminished as more webmasters began using it and aggravating search engines with their attempts to manipulate search results.

So, if including a keyword once doesn’t get your page ranked and including it a hundred times may trigger a penalty from a search engine, what is a natural occurance? Five times? Ten times?

Enter “ideal keyword density”.

For the past few years, the generally accepted value was around 8% of your content. In other words, if you have 100 words in your web page content (the actual text of your site), 8 of those words should be versions of the keyword you’re trying to rank for. Granted, this was simply an educated guess from observation of which pages were ranking well for certain keywords but it was accepted enough across the industry to at least be close to truth.

So why is keyword density now a myth?

Without getting into how a search engine figures out what a web page is about or the other factors that influence page rank, suffice to say that it’s entirely possible that a page can be absolute gibberish to a human reader and still get credit for having a certain keyword density while having no relevance for that keyword at all.

Keyword density is still too easy to manipulate and search engines tend to avoid giving weight to any factors that are easy to manipulate.

The front runner for phasing out keyword density is concept density via latent semantic indexing but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Just realize that optimizing your pages for some magic keyword density at the expense of naturally written content is quickly losing any positive affect it may have had for helping your pages rank well.