I have been doing the job of Search Engine Optimization for a number of years now. I started with the goal of placing my first foray into the internet world, a property MLS for Spain, at the top of the search engine rankings. It was a steep learning curve! but was the sort of challenge I enjoy. Opinions on how to best achieve good SERP, (thats Search Engine Ranking Position) or ‘P1G’ as I like to call it, were varied and ranged from the believable to the obviously absurd.

It took seven months to get my first Google ranking. It was August 5 th 2006. I had diligently been adding my site to directories and e-mailing relevant sites to exchange links. I had also been creating as much new content as I could possibly manage. Spain is a big country and covering all the towns and villages to get exposure across the board was no mean feat.

But we did it. I hit my keyword targets one after another and within eighteen months has climbed to the top of nearly every major keyword that I was told, people used to search for properties in Spain.

After a few months at the top I started to muse at the statistics. There was, and still is, a massive gap between what you would expect from the search results and the actual statistics coming through to the site. The biggest discrepancies lay in the major keywords and the traffic they produced.

As a company that needed to market its services to other businesses, this visibilty was necessary, if not essential. What is there better to put in your marketing than independent statistics from ‘the market leaders’, Google, showing the traffic stats for the most competitive keywords and explaining to your potential clients that’ this is where the traffic is’ and ‘here we are at the top’. It’s what the competition does, so do it better.. and you should reap the rewards.

And to a point we did. In terms of commercial success, the site grew as quick as we could grow it and all in the garden was rosy.

It was under my new hat though, as a well seasoned SEO that I began to have doubts.

The fact was, that on analysis of the traffic from the site, the contribution made by major keyword placement amounted to less than 10% of traffic, yet I had been spending some 90% of my time achieving and maintaining it. Something was wrong and I started an exercise to uncover the truth.

My analysis has led me to some conclusions that have dramatically altered my SEO strategies and begs the question as to whether the information statistics that we get from the Search Engines and take, hand in glove as gospel, are entirely true. In fact if you could get at the entire facts, I think it would be more likely a case that the statistics are true but in a world where algorithms have been developed to the extent that they could filter the Polonium out of Russian tea, the statistics we are fed are at best, so bland and unfiltered that they perpetuate myths that frankly are false.

Not wanting to sound too ambiguious, here’s what I mean.

Take a 100 website owners all of whom have sites for dog food. The statistics from the main search engines tells them that the search term ‘dog food’ gets 1200 searches daily and is the top search term for their industry. Avoiding PPC, they diligently go off to optimize their site for the term, writing articles, building links, all the usual SEO suspects. Like me the 100 owners are ultimately curious as to where they are positioned for the term and at intervals through the day click onto search and diligently type in the term to see how their position is progressing.

Now if all of them are avidly watching their position they will pretty soon be making up the majority of the statistical searches recorded by the search engines and be as confused as I was, as to why the actual traffic they receive from the keyword search, nowhere nearly matched the expectations of the traffic their sites actually got from the term.

In my own sites analysis over the previous twelve month period, I found that with a little over 125,000 unique visitors over the period, visitors had found my site through nearly 52,000 different keyword searches and out of the four major keywords that I had spent time and energy optimizing my site for, I had received less than 10% of my traffic.

Whether this ‘anomoly’ is puposely perpetuated by the Search Engines must be true. They are after all, just advertising comapanies hiding beneath the guise of service providers. Their revenue is derived from the perpetuation of competitive keywords gaining ever increasing revenue as we all chase the dragon. If they spent a fraction of that revenue improving the data they put out about search results, filtering repetitive searches or searches from different IP addresses broken down into geographical location. The sort of information they do give out to us in the analytics data we get from our actual visitors.

Then maybe, the face of competitive keywords would become too blurred to facilitate such high bidding from the PPC fraternity and the revenue bubble would burst. More likely though, would be that the goalposts would keep changing, making it more difficult for any keyword to sustain competitive edge long enough to gain the revenue that they currently do. In any event, any blurring of the marketplace would ultimately reduce revenues which is a good enough reason to keep the staistics vague and the revenue flowing.

From an SEO point of view, it seems that to increase your traffic effectively, you should disregard building links to the keyword ‘red herrings’ and concentrate of building as much intuitive content around your subject matter as possible.

Whilst this has always been the premise of good P1G rankings the smoke screen of competitive keyword placement is an awful lot of energy going to waste!

Neil Ebsworth  writes for SEO Services, a SEO Company in Mt Pleasant SC

If you think you have come across the title of this article before, it is because you may have. I have purposely copied the title from a Matt Cutts article on article content. I will explain later, but for the beginners out there, Matt Cutts is a Google employee that writes a blog on Google issues and addresses some of the little variances of advice that Google offers on how to better understand their guidelines.

I was a little disappointed by Matts article as it addressed the need to produce original article content by focussing on the niches the article should be aimed at rather than addressing the topic that I thought would be of more importance, namely the quality of content production. The last third of the article was also so stuffed with keywords starting with the keyword SEO that I doubt it would have passed most article submission services requirements that filter out articles that stuff keywords in for the sake of search engine placement…shame on you Matt, I really wouldn’t have thought it necessay for you to keyword stuff!

The main objective when it comes to article marketing is the production of quality new content on subjects on or related to, your websites purpose. The aim, if you then distrubute the article through article directories, is to have your article reproduced by other quality sites in your field, effectively gaining reputation, and ultimately a link back to your site from the publishing website which an interested reader may use to discover more about the given subject.

What article writing is not about is getting a thousand article directory links. Whilst you will not be penalised for publishing in a thousand directories, the main benefit of a wide distribution is mainly for the purpose of gaining exposure for your article so that webmasters looking for high quality content will find your article.

As with most things internet related, exposure is king, so article distribution services have there place but if you expect an instant SERPs boost from just the links back from the directories themselves, you will find that only a portion of the reproduced copies of your articles will be taken into account. If however your article is subsequently reproduced by a website in your niche that has a good reputation, ( I think Page rank is still considered a measure of value by most people) then your website will gain points for each article copy found on each valued site.

I recently had a discussion on a forum about quality over quantity. The premise of my opponent was, that you can get articles written for you these days for about $5 a time for a 500 word piece. So why should he pay my charges that were, ( and still are) considerably higher. I tried to explain through that well known saying, that, as with most things in life, ” You get what you pay for” and that whilst his $5 articles may well be written in perfectly good English and be focussed on the subject in hand, he would find that they failed to meet the one criterea that is most paramount when publishing the content. They had nothing to say.

By this I mean that they were ultimately generic using terms and phrases around the issue of the subject matter, but with no comment or opinion on it. For $5 I would not expect any less. If my premise is correct though, that article content should engage the audience first and foremost, these generic unique pieces are destined to sit at the back of the article directory bus, never to be reproduced or read and therefore ultimately of no value.

Writing good quality copy is a professional skill and one that should not be confused with a fifth grade comprehension exercise. If you want your article and therefore your website to be taken seriously, you should treat your article marketing with the respect that you give to your own reading material. Are you a Times reader or a Sun reader. More importantly, what sort of readers are the people you are ultimately trying to attract to your site?

Finally coming back to the title of this article. I copied the title for the article from Matt Cutts article of the same name for one of the reasons that Matt gave in his piece. he said “any time you look for an answer or some information and can’t find it, that should strike you as an opportunity.”

As I felt he had failed to address the more important issue in his article I reproduced the title so that searchers may discover the additional information from this piece which hopefully will sit close enough to Matts article in the Search Engine rankings, filling the void of information that Matt so kindly left open, and sending you to my site for more information…or better still..a commission!

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When you read about SEO. Thats Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated or the profession of trying to put a website at the top of the organic search results for any given keyword.
Having just read the first line of this article I have realized just how much jargon we use in this industry and that for the novice, and we were all novices once, it must be somewhat confusing.

So let me simplify. If you have a website it is normally because you have a product or service that you wish to sell to the public. To achieve sales you need people to visit your website. Your visitors are called traffic. The best way to gain traffic is to appear in the organic search results of Google, (and other Search Engines) for search terms that are relevant to your business. For Eample I own a website for Estate Agents in Spain to list their property on a MLS. The Biggest search term for this industry is Spanish Property, which receives about 10x as much traffic as any other search term. Therefore in a perfect world my aim eventually is to reach No 1 position for this keyword. In the interim you must aim to reach a Page 1 position for smaller traffic keywords which are less competitive and more easily achieved. Think of your keyword goals as a Christmas tree with the most competitive as the fairy on the top. The least competitive and most easy to achieve are at the bottom of the tree. There are many more of them to choose from so be selective, but a wide base of keyword terms that bring you a visitor a day is easier to achieve than trying to rank for one term that will bring you a 100 visitors.

Now most articles that you will read will start to talk about the fact that to rank for any given keyword you need to build links pointing at your site from other sites with the keyword you are trying to rank for in the anchor text of your link, (thats the clickable part of the text that sends the visitor to your site) . This is all true. You will read about the need for Directory submissions, writing articles, reciprocal linking strategies and many more ways to gain links from your piers so that you may build your link popularity and get your deserved place on the first page of results for the keywords you have chosen.

I will leave all those noble strategies to other for now and focus on a method of obtaing as many links as you want for yourself without going outside the remit of your own website. Do not get me wrong. All that you read about in-linking is bona-fide and should be pursued as part of a multi faceted approach that is necessary for successful placement in the Search Engines. This article is designed however to highlight the importance of internal linking strategy of your own site that can make a great effect on your Search Engine position. It is an overlooked subject and often missed by many site owners. It is often the key to out ranking your competition but also should not be confused with a tradition of spamming the content of your web pages to gain position by stuffing the content with meaningless keywords and links.

Those strategies have pretty much been taken care of by the Search Engines in their algorithms.

When linking your pages internally there are some guidelines to consider.
These include,
The percentage of links pointing at any given page with the same keyword anchor text. If the percentage is too high it may be deemed to be spamming, so always keep your link texts varied leaving the most important keyword links coming from the most important pages of your site.

Use your footer to carry links to your most important pages. That way you are linking your most important pages from every page on your site. These can also be used as a baseline link for a generic keyword creating a good number of links to an important page. If you then link in content links with a more specific target keyword from an internal page you will gain good points for the important keyword along with recognition for the baseline links in your footer.

A final example as this subject will need to be extended later.

If you create a hundred pages of quality content about your site subject or product and you have 1 link in the footer to your homepage. Lets say its a site selling property and your footer link is property homepage. In the text you carry a link for Spanish Property for Sale also to the homepage. You now have 200 links pointing at your homepage with 50% of them targeted at your keyword.

If the assumption is correct that Google allows and reads up to 100 internal links on any given page without penalty then you can see that by interlinking your pages in an intelligent manner you could end up in our example with 10 000 links from a 100 good pages of content.

Whilst it is by no means the only thing to consider, it makes a good start.

About the Author (HTML)

Neil Ebsworth is co-founder of AMLAspain.com, TheSpanish property MLS and Villa Rentals Spain. A portal for Rental Properties