Traffic Building

Good search engine rankings have long been the preferred source for generating free website traffic. In fact, many search engine optimization companies concentrate solely on achieving high rankings in search engines as the be-all end-all to successful online marketing.

But, recent articles in Network World and the Wall Street Journal highlight the need to diversify your marketing efforts so as not to be overly reliant on search engines for traffic.

In short, Google is using automated techniques to flag websites in its rankings that may potentially infect web surfers with malware. If Google flags your site (and they’re being cryptic about the criteria for this flag), potential visitors will be warned that your site will potentially infect their computer and they’ll be required to manually type your website address into their browser to visit your site.

You can read the article for specific details, but what Google is doing illustrates how little control you have over how search engines decide to categorize your website. From day to day, search engines are changing the way they evaluate and rank sites to improve the experience for the majority of their users, often at the expense of individual sites. While achieving high search engine rankings is certainly important and the risk of being blacklisted by Google may be remote, putting all your marketing eggs in the free search engine rankings basket just isn’t wise.

As for Microsoft, their new Internet Explorer 7 browser will recognize security certificates attached to websites that identify them as legitimate and verified and highlight the website address with a green bar in the visitor’s browser. The problem with this system is that many small businesses are not eligible to receive these security certificates and thus not able to qualify for the “safe site” green bar. If surfers begin to associate the green bar with legitimacy and not having the green bar with unsafe sites, this will put small businesses at a severe disadvantage compared to their larger competitors who do qualify.

Undoubtedly, Microsoft will eventually even the playing field for small businesses, but these articles highlight the need to earn legitimacy for your website from sources other than search engines and security certificates.

How?

You need to build relationships with other websites in your industry or niche on the internet. You need to get your legitimacy from the opinion makers in your market and stop simply relying on generic listings in search engines to drive traffic to your site.

How to effectively do this is what modern search engine marketing (and our business) is all about.

Hidden text is one of the oldest tricks webmasters try to use to fool search engines into ranking their pages higher than they may deserve.

These tactics are designed to show different content to users (who don’t see the text either because it’s hidden in the content (white text on white background for example) or hidden outside the viewable area of the page using CSS) than what is shown to search engine spiders.

Search engines have long been able to detect hidden text within a web page, but many webmasters thought trying to hide text using CSS was “safe” and that search engine spiders have no way to detect this.

But, a recent forum discussion at Cre8asite introduces the possibility that Google is indeed checking included CSS files for rules that could be used to hide text.

The lesson here is that trying to manipulate your natural rankings in search is a losing game.

You’re much better off creating new unique content for your site (what search engines want) than trying to stay one step ahead (and invariably falling behind) the latest technologies search engines are using to index sites.

Yahoo! charges $299 for a link in their directory - is it worth it?

In my opinion, no.

For most small businesses, it would be much more cost-effective to use that $299 to buy AdWords or other ads for your site. At even $0.25 per ad, that’s almost 1200 qualified visitors to your site for the price of that Yahoo! directory link.

Not that a link in the Yahoo! directory isn’t worthwhile, but its primary value is not in the traffic it sends to your site, it’s that it provides a quality backlink to your site that can help you rank higher in the Google rankings.

If you’ve implemented other search engine marketing techniques and have reached the point of diminishing returns, the link from the Yahoo! directory could provide a boost but it wouldn’t be first on my list of tactics.

It’s tempting to save a few dollars when you’re registering a .com domain name and not register the .net, .org, .biz, and .info versions of the name as well. After all, you’re not going to put any content there right?

First, the main issue is not what content you might put there but what content a competitor may put there once your site becomes popular.

Imagine you spend a year creating useful and relevant content for your industry and branding a particular .com domain name only to have a competitor register the .net and .org versions of the name and redirect them to their site. It may not hurt your search rankings as visitors almost universally go to the .com version by default, but it will certainly dilute the value of that branded domain name and, at best, confuse some potential customers about who they’re actually dealing with when they think of your brand.

In addition to preventing potential poachers, these secondary domain names can be useful for publishing other content that doesn’t fit on your .com domain. If your .com domain is focused on bringing in new business, you may not want to dilute that message with company news or pages of information that only applies to existing customers. Use one of those secondary domains as your support site, one as your blog site, and one as a strictly informational site for potential customers. That way, you can focus one message for one target audience and not worry about trying to address all issues for all people on one domain.

Another benefit to multiple domain names is that it’s difficult to get inbound links to a strictly commercial site. If you want to earn backlinks, it’s much easier to get them for a strictly informational or blog site than it is for a strictly commercial site. Use one of your secondary domains to answer questions, provide information, or otherwise act as an industry resource. That domain will earn backlinks and you can easily provide appropriate links to your main commercial domain from it.

When you’re moving your business online, it’s tempting to save a few dollars and only register a domain name for one year. That way if things don’t work out on the web, you’re only out the $15 or so dollars you spent to register the name.

Search engines are thinking the same thing.

Information on for how long you register a domain name is readily available to search engines and they use that data as a factor in ranking the pages in your site for relevant search terms.

Which site would you rank more highly, one that has its domain name reserved for the next five months or for the next five years?

Which scenario says “We’re here to stay” and which says “We’re really not serious about this web thing”.

If you had to recommend a business to a customer, would you choose one whose business license was expiring next month or one who had already printed up next year’s Christmas cards?

Search engines don’t stay in business by linking to temporary or low quality web sites, they stay in the business by providing relevant and quality results for their customer’s web searches.

If you act like you’re not serious about offering a quality web site for them to recommend to their customers, they’re not going to treat you seriously and rankings for your web pages will suffer as a result.

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