TKG SEO Blog

It’s been only 4 days since my last update of Google’s index - but I wanted to document the small spike in the number of pages being seen by Google. Over the last 80 days, I’ve seen minor increases in the number of pages being indexed over several weeks; however, in the last 4 days Google has indexed 24 additional pages - so far, the largest spike and in such a short amount of time.

Guest Blogger: Chad Henderson
Now that you’ve completed the initial site review, you should have a pretty good picture about what challenges you are faced with. You should also come away from post # 2, Initial Website Analysis, with a good idea of what you need to work on from a usability, layout, design, and of course search engine optimization perspective.

Concentrating on the latter, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is typical to most SEO campaigns: increase natural results position and increase conversions for the site. AKA, getting qualified, interested users to where they need to be.

So, with that mission in mind, we have to start initial SEO keyword research to ensure that you are going after the correct phrases. This step is an extremely important in the overall process, so don’t be afraid to spend a little extra time on it. Here are a couple of keyword targeting guidelines that I try to follow:

1. The number of phrases you target should depend on the size of the site.  Obviously, the bigger the site the more opportunity you have to target more key phrases.
   
2. Spend some time on the site, putting yourself in the position of a potential visitor. What terms would you be using if you were looking for this information? Most of you will know your business fairly well, so it may be pretty easy for this initial run-through. Document your results in a separate document for tracking purposes.
3. Although there has been some recent debate on whether you should invest in long tail phrases, I wouldn’t be really quick to abandon the idea. For example, a client in the custom carpentry business,  may be interested in going after the term “legs” in association with a table part, but that may be just a little too general and way too competitive. While you may have the desire to go after some of these more general terms, unless your sole mission is to bring in traffic to your site with no regard for the visitors qualification to convert, it probably will not result in a ton of sales or contacts.
4. Consider the competition and popularity of sites you are trying to go after. Automated tools can help here, (including Trellian, Google AdWords tools, etc.). The goal is a popular (often searched), non-competitive phrases.
5. Target key phrases that can be currently supported on your site.
6. Document your findings, so in the future when you are adjusting your keyword strategy, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Once you have narrowed it down, do some benchmarking so that you can compare what impact your SEO efforts has had on the rankings for your core list.  As a general SEO strategy, TKG relies heavily on our ability to compare site trends through benchmarking, including a great post on benchmarking online conversions that may give you some ideas about the strategy.

About a 1 month ago, Google was only indexing 115 pages of TKG.com

Today, Google is indexing 40% more pages! Google is still about 300 pages from indexing all of TKG.com, but this is trending in a positive way, so I’m not overly concerned at this point; I am getting a little anxious though…

Guest Blogger: Chad Henderson
As it relates to the recent discussion about the use of the long tail theory,  I’m nowhere close to abandoning the strategy as an important component in keyword targeting.  I thought it might be helpful to spend a couple of minutes expanding on my “yes” vote for the continued use of  long tail keywords.

Web traffic is unlike typical business models where 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients.  Most qualified web traffic is the reverse of that, where 20% of your business comes from your “top” key words, with the remaining traffic being generated from the remaining 80% of your key phrases.  What it boils down to is trying to figure out the multiple variations of key phrases, and choosing key phrases that capture the market share.

The long-tail concept is demonstrated in the following graph we use at some of our SEO seminars .

Here are a couple of other examples of choosing long tail optimized keywords to give you a better idea about the concept:

• An online auto parts store choosing “ford mustang exhaust system” versus “auto parts”, or
• A dog training service choosing  “dog obedience classes” versus “dogs”

In both of these examples, the selection of the “longer” key phrases will most probably result in more targeted traffic to the site, and thus more conversions.  The moral of the story… don’t be afraid to use 2-4 word key phrases as your target key phrases, it may end helping your overall objective.

The theory of The Long Tail, created by Chris Anderson, has recently been challenged by Harvard professor Anita Elberse. Anderson describes the Long Tail theory:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The Long Tail is something that has benefited our SEO clients, many of which are small business owners. Anita Campbell explores the Long Tail and Elberse’s criticism of it from a small business perspective in a recent article that can be found on Small Business Trends. Campbell’s article has great insight, so check out Is It Time to Chuck the Long Tail Theory?

Back on April 30th, I benchmarked the last 3 months of online conversions.

There’s been a decline in our conversion rates over the last few months. Since traffic is actually rising, it appears that the decline in conversions isn’t necessarily attributed to our new domain!

Even though we held our Columbus SEO seminar earlier this month and had a great turnout, our online conversion rates are still below what we normally experience during the Spring months. I’ll update on this again at the end of summer to see if our conversion rate trends continues to decrease…

The SEO world is buzzing about the recent news that Google, Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to make Flash file format content easier to find, index & rank. Google’s blog states that:

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog provides detailed Flash Indexing Q/A along with several comments that provide informative information as well.

As for Yahoo!, they will have the same capability once they update their technology…I’m hearing it should be soon.

Guest Blogger: Megan Jeffery
As I make my way through the natural SEO world, occasionally writing news pieces for the newsletter, creating copy for our site and those of our clients, I have learned that there is a fine line between a naturally optimized page, and one that is just spammy. Sometimes that line is a judgment call.

There are certain elements on a page that need to be addressed when it comes to optimization. Most tend to agree that Meta tags are still a good idea (they certainly can’t hurt), so they should be optimized to reflect the theme of the page. The page titles should also clue your reader (and secondarily, the search engines) in to what they will find on the page. I personally feel that these items should represent exactly what is on the page, and that the phrases used to optimize should serve the user, not the search engines. If you serve your users, you will ultimately serve the SEs anyway.

Many people feel that the copy itself should have the key phrases sprinkled throughout the copy for the purpose of ranking for certain terms. This is where things can get a little tricky. I am sure that many of you have seen copy on a page that goes something like this:

“We sell hockey pucks, blue hockey pucks, green hockey pucks and yellow hockey pucks. If you really need hockey pucks, you should buy our hockey pucks because they are the best hockey pucks in the whole world.”

I am sure that most would agree that this is a little bit spammy. When you are using your key phrases so much that it even borders on annoying or difficult to read, or changes the meaning of your copy, then you have gone too far. A more appropriate approach is to write what you want your readers to know about your product. A few pointers:

• Be descriptive, especially when writing for the web, because your customers want to know what they will be getting if the decide to buy from you.

• Make sure they know why they should purchase your product, as opposed to someone else’s.

• Read it through. Make sure it sounds good, the meaning is clear and the product or subject is well described.

• Then, go back through and find the places where your key phrases will fit into the copy naturally. Many times the key phrase is better than the word you used, especially if you have copy such as “Try our new product line!”. A sentence that includes the phrase you would like to optimize for such as “Our Green Hockey Pucks are now available!” would be a better choice. However, watch how many places you decide to plug in your key phrases. Too many and not only will your piece make no sense, but it could be considered spam.

So, that annoying paragraph about hockey pucks should look a little more like this:

“The Pucks are Us Company has a long standing tradition of producing only the highest quality, best performing hockey pucks. Our new line of hockey pucks come in new colors such as blue, yellow and green.”

A good rule of thumb is if you have included the phrases, and you enjoy reading the piece, it flows nicely, then you have probably done a pretty good job. On the other hand, if you are repeating your key phrase four times in three sentences, you have probably gone over the edge into spamdom.

Until next time, keep it natural!

I’ve been following traffic to TKG.com during the domain change and the new domain has experienced fluctuating traffic trends; however, the increase in the total number of unique visitors to the site is a positive trend that I’m happy to report on! Not surprisingly, our Search Engine referral traffic has wavered over the last few months, but we still have a SE presence and the SE’s continue to drive traffic, so I can’t really complain.

An interesting stat to point out is the declining trend in MSN referrals which is the opposite of what I expected given that TKG.com’s rankings in MSN have been somewhat steady during our domain change.

*I’ll discuss this drop in traffic at another time…promise!

During this whole domain change process (since April 30th), we have experienced some trying times with Google…First we found out that TKG.com was blacklisted and then our Google rankings disappeared and we had to deal with Google taking over a month to index just 25% of the pages on TKG.com - Nevertheless, Google has continually supplied the majority of Search Engine traffic to TKG.com every month this year!