This is a story about a poor guy with an inept domain that wanted to build a site geared for a very competitive keyword and his long, agonizing journey toward the true light of SEO wisdom.
Heres a little foundation for what Im about to cover here. A while back I bought a stupid domain name. It was one of those fairly useless domain names that might have been good for maybe selling cellphones or something. The thing is, though, Im a poor guy. I dont have time to taylor a site for cellphones with the pitiful amount of money I have. This was my thinking not long ago at least.
After sitting on this domain name forever I decided to put a site up there and give myself to the study of SEO or search engine optimization. It seemed like an interesting subject and I knew to those that managed to learn SEO, marketing, and some web design would fall infinite riches. It really sounded good to me.
So I went for the throat so to speak. More precisely I picked out some search terms that I will probably never be able to get traffic for in my lifetime. Smart I know. This had the grand side effect of having the site sandboxed by Yahoo and Google until pigs flew.
Recently they flew, however, and Ive come out of the sandbox altogether and hit face to face with a few SEO surprises. I did manage to get a tiny trickle of traffic but not from the terms I tried to get it from. After trying to optimize those pages for the key terms I received traffic from I got more traffic. This of course started me down a long road of speculation and hair pulling.
After many a night of such Ive come up with a few things that I believe will give anyone the power to eventually pull traffic off the net and covert it into a good decent living. Ill probably write an ebook and make millions one of these days.
Optimize by the page
Dont fall into the trap of focusing totally on building this far flung and far reaching site that will rule the world or make you millions instantly. Unless you have lots of money youre going to need to work for your traffic. Plan your site out carefully and make sure each page is a precision crafted piece of art.
I love serverside scripting and dynamic websites but Ive come to realize there is a danger that people will overuse these things. I know I have. If your site is dynamically generated, make sure every page isnt a total cookie cutter image of every other page. Its good to have the same navigation and same general layout but each page also needs to be special. Each page should have careful, proven SEO techniques applied to maybe a single key phrase.
Dont try to optimize one page for a handful of phrases. Just focus on one phrase. Do your keyword research and, whatever you do, dont haul off and pick a key phrase with 2 billion wealthy competitors in Google. Pick something that can be attained and can get you some traffic relatively fast. Select a phrase that is as specific as possible to your particlar niche and still gets a couple thousand or so searches per month from Yahoo.
Whatever you do, make sure that one web page has good, solid, desirable content that is keyword rich and one of a kind. This will help make it special. At the same time your content obviously needs to lead the customer toward your intented goal for monetizing your traffic.
Keep it simple
Ive found to my dismay that building a complex web site with all the content management stuff and all the database thrills isnt exactly what really gets the attention of search engines. Weirdly enough this can be true for internet surfers too. A nice, clean layout with very accessible content and intuitive navigation will be recognized by both search engines and surfers alike. If you can figure that part out youve just pinned down about 90% of SEO in my opinion.
Engineer your site for your traffic
When you start getting search engine traffic to your site take a very close look at what they are searching for. I assume you have some kind of statistics program and can mostly see what search terms people are using to get to your site. When someone comes in on a keyword or phrase you havent optimized for do a little research. Does the page they are coming to need touched up to include the search term or would this search term merit its own search engine optimized page to handle the traffic.
Conclusion
With every page you add you are gaining another potentially valuable piece of internet real estate. If youre doing your job right then eventaully each page should get its own traffic and you should begin to attain your goals. Patience and learning are the name of the SEO game.
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To maximise your website traffic through the search engines you need to focus on the Big3!
What/who are the Big3 They are Google. MSN and Yahoo search. This article will take you through these three search engines and what you can expect from them in terms of achieving results both in a short term, as well as a long term basis.
As a search engine, Google still continues to dominate, with Yahoo and MSN the next two choices for people utilising the search market. While in general Google is a clear leader as first preference for internet users when trying to find something of interest on the internet, this is not necessarily in all categories. In some categories you will find the website traffic coming from MSN and Yahoo search is considerably more than Google.
So it is important when optimising your website to target not just Google but all of the Big3 (Google, MSN, and Yahoo).
Some of our websites have achieved top 10 rankings and first place positions for main keywords in MSN whereas Google can take up to 3 times as long by comparison.
While the Googlebot will pick up a new website quickly, usually only a business name will achieve high ranking quickly, not your main keywords. Often new websites listed in Googles search results will not achieve high rankings for many months, and for very competitive key words six months plus. In saying that Google loves unique content; so for websites that are not in such a competitive market and providing something new and different, top 10 rankings can be achieved within a month or two.
Due to the amount of time it takes to achieve these ranking it is important that your website is always monitored and keywords are tracked on a regular basis to ensure you are keeping ahead of your competitors. Continual optimisation of your website may be necessary to ensure that not only do you achieve top rankings in the first place, but that you maintain them.
Note: Using a professional search engine marketing company like Quantum Web Solutions will benefit you considerably towards achieving these rankings. We also know various techniques that help drive traffic to your website much sooner.
The BIG3
Google Search: For those that monitor their website statistics (which is highly recommended if you want to ensure your website is doing well) you will notice that the Google spider can visit your website within as soon as a day of your website being launched for the first time. However, unless your website provides something new or unique, at this current time* it is highly unlikely you will achieve high rankings for anything other than your business name in a short period of time.
It is also possible there may be keywords that attain higher rankings, but if they are competitive keywords in a competitive market then this will be very unlikely. If you are offering a service or product that is new and/or unique, then you will certainly have more opportunity to achieve these high rankings as Google loves new content.
For very competitive markets you can look at up to six months plus to see your keywords bringing in the desired search engine traffic you are looking for. In these instances if you need to bring in traffic quickly, we suggest setting up a pay-per-click campaign. There are also other sources that can help bring in traffic to your site sooner than this, which we are able to provide as part of our services.
For new and/or unique website offerings, Google will give high rankings faster for a couple of reasons:
1. It is the opportunity to provide something new to the WWW.
2. There is less competition so there are not as many search results to compete against; therefore if your website is properly optimised achieving high rankings will be much easier and faster.
MSN Search: MSN is generally much faster in not only picking up a new website and listing it, but also if your website is properly optimised it is possible to achieve high rankings in the MSN search results in less than a month, even in markets that are relatively competitive. This is by no means guaranteed, but I have seen this happen on many occasions.So while generally MSN search will not always bring you the same volume of traffic that Google search will; it does have the advantage over Google that in the short term it will drive more visitors to your website.
Yahoo Search: While Yahoo Search can bring a steady flow of traffic into your website; the challenge lies in being listed in the first place with them. I have seen websites picked up by the yahoo spider and listed within a month, but these are rare occasions. Normally it can take at least three months if not more for Yahoo to visit your website in the first place, no matter what techniques are used. Once Yahoo search picks a website up however, it does not take very long for a website to achieve good rankings and to start driving traffic to a website.
There are many different search engines out there, but many of them feed their results directly from one of the Big3. By focusing most of your search engine marketing efforts around these three, you are highly likely to see website traffic coming in from other search engines.For anyone that is new to search engine marketing, the process of achieving high listings for your business may seem daunting. However with the right approach and focus it wont be long before you see string results coming not just from the Big3 search engines, but many other sources on the web.
* As the Search Engine market is constantly evolving, so too are the way search engines list websites in their results.
Andrew Seidel - .