Ah the Trials and Tribulations of Google Bounce Back

Posted on March 31, 2007
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It is my intent to teach how I do SEO while we run this no holds barred, public view of our SEO efforts.  So my topic today is all about Google bounce back – one  of the more trying but common occurance of any SEO effort.

So when I last discussed our progress a week ago, the site was at #63 for the term ’softball gloves’ and had other positions between 80 and 150 for the other three terms.  Great progess was made and by Thursday of this past week, we were at #36 for softball gloves.  I was excited but guardedly so.  You see I was anticipating a frequently occurring phenonemon that I refer to as Google bounce back.  And it hit Friday and today (Saturday).  So we bounced back from #36 to #50 for ’softball gloves’.

Dang!

But not surprising.  For newbies to the game a big advance produces a very giddy experience.  A rush that may only be compared to a boy asking the girl of his dreams for that first date and getting a ‘yes’.  You want to run out and shout to the world:  “Google loves me – I’m so smart – I’m nearly at my goal”.  But then comes the bounce back.  You suddenly give up maybe half the gain (sometimes not so much – sometimes more) and it’s crushing and you are despondent.

For those of us a bit more experienced in the game of SEO, we know bounce back is sure to be lurking.  So we temper the enthusiasm until the position holds a good 3 days – all the while our bodies and mind tensed for the disturbing bounceback move.

But we also know that we’ve established a new plateau on which we can move forward.  So from #63 to #50 is still a page and a half forward movement.  Something to be admired and respected, not snubbed.  I knew it was coming and now am planning for the next forward movement.  Maybe we’ll only get to #33 next time but our bounceback will be less.  We may end up in the low forties by next week.  It is this very anticipation that gets my blood flowing and makes me love SEO.

OK next steps.  Made a very minor change to the title tag and changed a few on page words to now be anchor text links to interior pages.

And of course we’ll continue with our linking strategy focused on deep links.

Stay tuned for more….

Nancy

Dreaming of Apple Pie

Posted on March 30, 2007
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I’ll warn you all this post may seem a bit off topic at first but bear with me.

Last weekend I was at Yanik Silver’s Underground III seminar. Yanik had asked me to make a presentation on how I take on the big boys (large companies) in the world of SEO. A great deal for me because aside from having great fun delivering my presentation, I had the unique opportunity to watch, listen and absorb ideas from other successful folks. The presenters were great and I walked away with several good ideas.

So here is the point. You’d have to be in a coma or staying at a remote monastary to not hear all the buzz about The Secret A.K.A success focused/abundance thinking. You envision huge success and it comes. So easy — right?

The way I see it, that’s step 1. I mean if all you think about is the small stuff you may miss the big stuff. I could be walking in a treed field and all I see is dirt and grass. Or maybe I’m thinking about apple pie and suddenly realize that I’m actually walking right by an old apple tree that is still producing some red, lucious fruits. My goodness, all I had to do was think about it and the tree seemed to magically appear.

So envisioning gets me in the right frame of mind to be ready to see the opportunity lurking right in front of me. But just spying the apples high up in the tree doesn’t get me apple pie.

No, that takes muscle. A little effort. I gotta climb the tree and get the apples and then I have to take them home, clean them up, dice them, make a crust, add a little sugar and cinnamon and bake the thing. Then I have my apple pie.

So going to a great seminar like Yanik’s gets me fabulous ideas. But now I have to put them in play.

It’s a lot like getting your site successfully found on the internet. Having the idea to rank may put you in the mind to learn information needed to get your site found on the Internet. But without the muscle, you’ve got nothing but some great ideas.

So anyone can rank their site with the right information and the muscle to get the job done. No matter how new you are, think of success, follow a knowledgeable path and put some muscle to it and you’ll win.

Tomorrow I’ll update you all on the softball/baseball site. I’ll give you a preview – we’ve made some good progress so you’ll see that but I’ll also give you all some insight as to why we are pulling ahead. That’s the knowledge path.

But for now I’m off to get a piece of pie. Apple pie – now doesn’t that sound tasty?

Nancy

Beating the Google Sandbox

Posted on March 23, 2007
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“And now for something completely different…”

I strive to bring you all information that the gurus don’t seem to be sharing out there. I’ve been pretty clear lately regarding my distain for long tail keyword research. In my opinion it’s just not needed. And worse yet, can waste your time

But the hoopla in long tail keyword research is created because of the presumed block Google will place on new sites (and maybe even established sites trying to rank for a new, competitive phrase) called the Google Sandbox. Whether you are new or old hat to search enging optimization (SEO) you have probably heard the term.

And the claim that you cannot rank on a competitive phrase in less than a year in most cases. Well I think that’s bunk. And I’m willing to prove it.

I don’t coach much but once in awhile a very persistent person can wear me down. This happened in December of 2006 when someone found me and dogged me until I agreed to help him. Well the first thing we needed to do was scrap the worthless site some web designer with no obvious ecommerce experience had put up. We scrapped the overly hyphenated name that this person had been instructed to get (you know those goofy looking URLs that are loaded with keywords and hyphens) and used a URL that was his store name (this person has already established a successful bricks and mortar store ) and in Mid January of this year with the basics of his site complete, we launched our SEO program.

The site, PrimeTimeSportingGoods.com is going after softball and baseball phrases. The big obvious ones like:

Now the timid, unknowing and weak would not dream of trying to nail those phrases in less than a year. But we are going after them. And after just three weeks we saw the first flickerings on Google. Yes, way out there but measurable.

In my SEO book anything measurable is moveable.

So we are taking steps, slowly and cautiously and after a few more weeks, we see good movement. Now we are in the low hundreds on some of our phrases and so we continue with our plan.

Today we are at #63 for ’softball gloves’ – in just 7 weeks of SEO effort. Below is a chart of our progress:

softball gloves

Interesting huh?

Wonder where we’ll be next week? Well tune in weekly as we update our progress on all the major terms. Get techniques and tips you can implement right away to start seeing improvement in your SEO campaigns – gain a real unfair advantage over your competition.

And see how you’ll get long tail traffic without even trying.

Is this something you could use? Is this anything you’ve ever seen done before?

Real time, real success – that’s what GiantSlayer.net is all about.

See you next week!

Nancy Andrews

Why all the buzz about long tail keyword research?

Posted on March 19, 2007
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I am terribly opinionated about the waste of time I find ‘long tail’ keyword research to be.  That’s because I look at search with a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) view not a PPC (Pay Per Click) view.  Totally different things, these two.

Pay Per Click is to Shotguns as SEO is to _____________________

What do you think the answer is?

Before you volunteer, let’s talk about pay per click and why I see it relating to shotguns.  In PPC, you pay for every visitor to your site.  Now even if you are Amazon and convert at a whopping 7%, you are still not selling 93 out of every 100 visitors.  So paying for 93 misses hurts. And if you are converting at less than 1% like most websites do, you are missing 99 out of 100 folks.  So the idea is to shoot shot at a big group of folks (a long keyword list with many different keyword phrases to target each of the individuals) and see where your shot is effective.  Then you reload as quickly as you can, perhaps modestly change your direction, and shoot again.  Conceptually as you go along, your shot becomes more effective at producing sales.  Make sense?

The biggest difference between PPC and SEO is time and specific feedback.  With PPC set up is fast (you can be live with a PPC campaign in a few minutes once you’ve done your keyword research) and you know immediately if you are hitting the target or not assuming you log into your account once a day or more.  Better yet you know which of your ’shot’ (keywords) hit the target.  So it makes sense to shoot as much shot as you can (lots of folks with different terms – not a lot of folks with one term), watch the results and then regroup and reshoot incorporating the feedback information.  Now loads of folks lose money on PPC even with all this feedback which is mostly a matter of the money loser either not accepting the feedback or ignoring the cost/profit relationship of their product market.

In SEO there is a bunch of work that starts after you complete your keyword research and then you wait and then you see if you moved forward or back and then you work again.  The time lag can be days or even weeks depending on how often a page is crawled by search engine spiders.  And if you change mulitple items at once, you have to then analyze what was the likely factor the moved you forward or backward.  Those who would recommend that anyone focus on long tail keywords for SEO is probably making the assumption that the work involved in ranking for a phrase that may get 1,000 visitors a day versus one that may get only 10 visitors a day is proportional.  Thus, they reason you should work on 100 pages for those 10 visitors each rather than work on one page for 1000.  That way if only half of them get to a top position, you are still likely to make money than to work endlessly on a competitive phrase that, they will tell you, you may not win.

The work involved with SEO ranking is not proportional.  That’s the fallacy underlying the SEO long tail theory.  Ranking for a 10 visitor a day search term is not 1% the effort that ranking for a 1000 visitor a day search term.  It’s not as much effort and it’s not as much time but it’s a lot more than 1% of the effort.

Now layer in the error rate in long tail.  What is forecasted for long tail terms can be notoriously off and you never know which terms are close to the prediction and which ones are way off.  A recent example I just learned was on a baseball site owned by a coaching client of mine.  Without any intent, we ended up ranking for ‘cheap softball gloves’, ‘cheap baseball gloves’, cheap softball bats’, and cheap baseball bats’.  These terms were pulling in a few visitors every day.  Well then I wondered how the ‘cheap’ phrases would stack up against the same phrases using the modifier ‘discount’.  I went out and checked two different keyword tools.  Here just one example:

Cheap Softball Bats                       Discount Softball Bats
Wordtracker                      22                                                 95
Trellian                            1,295                                             1085

Now just look at these numbers from a relative view because you can’t compare the gross numbers between the tools.  WordTracker says that discount softball bats is likely to be almost 5x more traffic than cheap softball bats.  Trellian says that the modifier ‘cheap’ is actually a bit more popular than ‘discount’.  So the first issue we have is who is more likely to be right on this particular query.  I highlighted that last part because I think that the one most likely to be right will change from query to query and I’ll never know which one is more accurate unless I actually successfully rank on any terms I’m comparing and check.  My guess was that Wordtracker was more accurate here.  Not sure why I thought that now.

Cheap Softball Bats                     Discount Softball Bats
Google Position                        7                                          8
MSN Position                           4                                           n/m
Yahoo Position                        n/m                                        n/m

n/m = not meaningful (any long tail position that is not on page one of a search engine is really not a meaningful position – it won’t bring any traffic)

Now here are the actual traffic results over the last 4 days:

    Cheap Softball Bats                    Discount Softball Bats
Google Traffic                        9                                                   2
MSN Traffic                           4                                                   0
Yahoo Traffic                         0                                                   0

Isn’t that interesting?  ‘Cheap’ way outperforms ‘discount’ even when we just focus on Google traffic where the positions are nearly identical.  And I didn’t put a lick of effort into getting the ‘cheap’ phrases they just came to us.  I did put work into trying to rank on ‘discount’.  I wasted my time.

Now there is one more dimension you really need to know about how SEO really works and then you’ll understand why I only spend real time on big phrases.  When a search engine finds you highly relevant on a big traffic, shorter term you will naturally get ranked on all sorts of variants were a second or third word is tacked on if all you do is place these words in your Meta tags, once or twice on your visible text and a sprinkling of times in links.  That’s really all you need to do.  Here’s an example of that.  Type in ‘golf gift’ and TGC is #1  type in ‘golf gift ideas’ and depending on the search engine, we are #1 – #3.  Now we make it really long tail and type in ‘golf gift ideas for tournaments’ and we are still between #1 and #3.  Am I trying to get ‘golf gift ideas for tournaments’?  No.  Do we have it anyway?  Yes.  That’s why long tail ranking is NOT proportional effort.  SEO doesn’t work that way.

You are better off aiming a big gun at a big target with SEO.

Pay Per Click is to Shotgun as SEO is to Cannon.

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