SEO can seem like a long hard slog with little or no reward at times. Your mind often racing, constantly thinking about keyword phrases, H1 tags and links, as you lay trying to catch a few winks. Six months down the line your SEO efforts are nowhere to be seen, not even a trace, except in the redness of what used to be the whites of your eyes. But what if, it didnt have to be this way. What if, there was a method of seeing results sooner rather than later.
I still remember when I first set out on my path of SEO enlightenment, vividly. If I knew some of things I know now, it would have been a completely different journey and a much shorter one to arrive at the place Im at now (slightly further up a never ending path). The sleepless nights as my brain churned through the new chunks of information learnt that day. The eureka moments when you learn the most simplistic of things like anchor text and emphasising keywords with bold tags. Learning how to perform keyword research was one of the most enjoyable and undervalued aspects of SEO. And did I mention the sleepless nights.
Anyway enough reminiscing and back to topic of this article. The SEO snowball effect is a simple an analogy. Remember those cartoons where a character would role down a snow covered hill, gathering more snow and increasing in size until they crashed into something like a tree. Well that is the SEO snowball effect, minus the crash at the end (hopefully).
You see, if you drew a chart that measured the effort put into SEO and the traffic it produces, you get something very much similar to that snowball. At first the effort you put in yields very little traffic if any at all. But putting the same amount of effort in again results in slightly more traffic, until further along the chart, the same amount of effort yields a much greater output of traffic.
The problem with this, is the time it can take to see the first initial traffic from your efforts. Many webmasters will give up because of this, while others carry on but only see little reward in the first year or so. However, there is a way of optimising the initial stages of this snowball and it all comes down to keyword selection.
In brief, many webmasters focus on keywords they believe are worth the effort in terms of traffic and rightly so. After all, whats the point of chasing keywords that no one uses or only have a very small number of impressions So we go after the big boys, the keywords with lots and lots of traffic. But this contributes to the snowball effect because the effort required to obtain a top hundred ranking can be a lot on keywords with higher traffic levels. While the traffic gained from being listed in position 67 will be insignificant. So maybe there is a reason to gun for those keywords with fewer impressions
If you conduct you keyword research intelligently you should be able to find quite a few keyword phrases with small amounts of traffic but more importantly, phrases that contain your main keywords. By optimising these phrases you are contributing to the SEO of your main keywords, simply because the main keyword is part of phrase. These lesser phrases in terms of traffic are much easier to reach traffic generating results and therefore can be done much quicker. Once youre happy with the rankings of that phrase, simply move onto the next until all small traffic phrases are optimised. In a lot of cases the combined traffic from sub-primary keyword phrases can be more than the primary keyword it self, not to mention more targeted.
When all sub-primary phrases are optimised, the chances are your site will rank well for the primary keyword with little or work left at all to get the top spot. The best thing is you have targeted the best keywords but received highly targeted traffic earlier in the campaign. Turning the snowball effect from an annoying symptom into a competitive advantage.
James Anderson is an SEO Consultant at Podium Solutions, a based Manchester, UK.
2005 James Anderson. Author bio box, links and copyright notice must be included in all reproductions of this article.
As you well know, getting a good listing on the search engines can really help get some good, quality traffic to your site.
But how do you get a good listing Thats the million dollar question.
Rather than explain how search engines select the top sites or how to trick them into listing your site in the top 10, lets learn some of the facts about search engines.
Now in case youre wondering why I dont just give you the magic formula or algorithm for getting a good search engine placement Ill give you:
Fact Number 1: Search engines change their formula frequently in an attempt to keep quality sites at the top of the listing. They do this because of all the attempts to trick or fool them and, to stay popular with their users, they need to list the most relevant sites first.
Fact Number 2: Every search engine has its own formula for determining the sites and the ordering of the sites it will list. And even though they all use many of the same factors in their formulas, there is no 1 formula that will work for all of them.
As for giving you some of the tricks that others have tried to use to get good search engine placement, Ill just say that the tricks that have worked in the past like using misleading meta tag keywords and embedding hidden keywords dont work today and the new tricks like creating lots of spam sites using automatic search engine page creators wont be working much longer.
Fact Number 3: Search engine owners know the tricks being used and develop ways to filter them out.
Now that you know that there is no 1 magic formula and using a trick wont work for long, you should also know:
Fact Number 4: Search engines do black list sites they consider spam and block them from being listed.
Because of all the articles and products about Google, you may think that Google has become the search engine of choice. And while Google is gaining in popularity,
Fact Number 5: Google still hasnt captured Yahoos number 1 position.
Even though Google isnt number 1,
Fact Number 6: Using good advice on how to improve your Google position will also help you with your placement on Yahoo and many other search engines.
Some of good advice for getting a good position is to have a site with good content and to use your keywords within your content. But the web has become so big that there are now thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of pages competing for the same keywords.
Because of this explosion in the number of pages available for generic keyword searches,
Fact Number 7: Search engine users are now adding more descriptive terms in their searches.
Another fact that most people dont realize about search engines is that:
Fact Number 8: Search engines dont rank or list web sites, they rank and list web pages. That means every page of your site has the potential to be listed if you set it up properly.
Since were getting into the realm of less known search engine facts, lets talk about how
Fact Number 9: Search engines use their own traffic tracking information to
help determine which sites to list. If they see that they have a top site that continually gets visited for a brief amount of time and the searchers usually come back and continue looking, the search engine may determine the site is of little value and either move it down on the list or remove it.
The last fact isnt really about search engines but has been included to help you measure your progress as you work to improve your search engine positions.
A couple of terms youve probably seen many times are Google Page Rank (PR) and Alexa Traffic Ranking. While both measure different things,
Fact Number 10: Google PR and Alexa Traffic Ranking are 2 of the best indicators on how well your search engine optimization work is going. Improving your Google PR and your Alexa Traffic Ranking can help you get a better search engine position.
Susan Carroll owner of has formed a global community of online business people through her weekly newsletter.
Susan recently finished a free report about adding automatic content to your website that search engines can see. Its available at:
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