Another Baseball Update..

Posted on June 14, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment

OK I must admit that I’m guilty of starting too many projects (at least lately) and have been a bit remiss about posting our progress. The good news is that the progress has occurred, I just haven’t been discussing it. On our first key term (softball gloves) we are in the low 20’s on Google and #5 on Yahoo. MSN, because we are not too specifically focused on tight link text is following Google is at 25. A bit more work and I expect the site to be on page 2 of Google in the next week.

Of course we are targeting more than one term. So for phrase #2 (softball bats) we are at 31 on Google, #34 on Yahoo and high 40’s on MSN.

The site retains it’s rankings in the top 5 of Google for 2nd tier terms like cheap softball gloves, cheap softball bats, cheap baseball bats, discount softball gloves and more.

So the results beyond search engine rankings? The site is now getting over 300 unique visitors per day from search engine natural listings. The number is so high because the ‘long tail’ phrases just pop up without effort and that plus the prime listings on the 2nd tier phrases sends good traffic. And sales? Now on June 13th the site has surpassed May’s total month sales. And May sales surpassed April’s which surpassed March’s … You get the idea.

I’ll keep you posted. Really! :)

Nancy

Making Trade-offs - Update on Baseball site

Posted on April 22, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment

After making good progress on the term ’softball gloves’ I realized my client and I were faced with an interesting question. To proceed with our quest for this one phrase or to expand our efforts to move on other, potentially more lucrative, phrases. We chose the latter.

But before we get into that too deeply, I promised to reveal what is working as well as what doesn’t. When I last posted we had fallen back into #50 for our term softball bats (see my post: The Trials and Tribulations of Google Bounceback). I was expecting to make up ground lost when we had fallen to that position after getting as low as #36. Well to try to spark additional advancements, I went ahead and changed the title tag and placed two text links on the home page to interior pages. And then we fell to #80.

Whoops!

Not sure if it was a larger component of the Google bounceback in positions that we had already seen, I sat for a week. During that period, we slowly climbed back to about #74. Not too impressive. This was clearly a message from Google to me that we had now moved to an over optimized state on our homepage. So I went and removed the text links that I had placed and made a small revision to the title tag and we immediately moved back up to #59. Today we are at #47. I made another small change to the title tag last night and am waiting to see what impact that will make on our progress.

The key here is to keep a low profile on the key phrases you want to rank on. Try too hard, and you are sure to trip a filter with Google and see a set back.

Now back to the initial subject stay the course to rank better on ’softball gloves’ or go after an even bigger money term, ‘baseball bats’. When I had last posted about our #50 position on ’softball gloves’ we were at #118 for the term ‘baseball bats’. A great position for a new site with only 3 months of SEO activity but not close enough to ‘go for it’. Well the site naturally drifted to about #91 and I figured it may be time to give it some attention. Now by so doing, we’d have to sacrafice some forward movement on the ’softball gloves’ term but given a signficiant traffic volume difference, we decided to go for it.

Today we are at #66 on Google for ‘baseball bats’ Not too bad I think. Of course the glory and the monies hit when we get to page one. Which brings me to another point. How does a site make money if it’s out of reach for traffic on any major search term? I mean I’m pretty vocal about how I think doing analysis on long tail keywords is a waste of time so does this site make money?

In a word - yes. Here’s what’s happening. First, we get a fair amount of long tail without trying. As I’ve alway maintained, there is nothing wrong with long tail traffic, just don’t spend time trying to chase it. You will be surprised at what pages will just rank naturally and will find that many long tail phrases that real people visit your site on don’t exist in the databases of any of the keyword tools out there.

Secondly we have already nailed (page one of Google) a number of 2nd tier phrases. By that I mean we rank on page one of Google for the following terms:

And there is just as long a list of Google page 2 positions on 2nd tier phrases like Glovesmith Gloves, Discount Baseball Bats, Discount Baseball Gloves and many more.

But here is the important point, these 2nd tier phrases end up being only about 10% of the total traffic. The other 90% is coming in from naturally dervived long tail phrases, the ones we didn’t work for. Pretty cool huh?

Well that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more progress as we move this new site even further!

Mike’s Question about Google

Posted on April 13, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 10 Comments

Hi all,

Got this great question from Mike over on the “Ask me a question” section and I thought I’d make my answer a bit more prominent:

Nancy,
There is one thing I constantly wonder about with Google. For a lot of my keywords, the top spots seem to be taken by listings from shopzilla, bizrate, amazon, nextag, pricegrabber, etc.

Why is it that preferential treatment is given to these discount listings rather than the legitimate sites that optimize for those keywords?

Take a look at the keywords “latex pillow” or “floor pillow”, 2 keywords that I try and optimize for and look at the listings on the first page of Google if you want to see what I mean.

I don’t notice this as much in Yahoo! or MSN…

Thanks,

Mike

Here’s what you need to consider. Google has as it’s top priority to bring forth the best web pages for any given keyword or phrase. While we can always argue that they got it wrong, it’s understanding their mindset that’s important. Google, unlike the other two search engines, has this concept of an authority site. So if a site is considered an authority site it’s more likely to have pages rank than would a site that is not considered an authority site.

So when you raised your question and indicated that an unusal number of sites of the Bizrate, Shopzilla, MSN Shopping and the like were getting prominent placement, that made me wonder why. And before I even checked I assumed that the answer was that there really was not much competition on that phrase - particularly from authority sites - so Google would give top placements to interior pages of shopping sites.

Then I took a look and here is what I saw:

Competition and Traffic on selected search terms

So my hunch was correct, there really isn’t much real competition on those terms if you filter on sites that use the term in both their title tag and in anchor text in incoming links. This actually should be good news - right? However, I took a peek at your site’s standings and saw that your Google rankings were not in the top 50. UGH! OK why is your site getting no love from Google?

In a nutshell, you are not doing enough of what Google wants you to do and you are doing too much of what Google doesn’t want you to do.  I’ll be happy to take this offline with you to get a bit more specific but my initial look at your site was that while you had a fair amount of backlinks, looked like most of them were obtained via reciprocal link trades which work just fine with MSN and Yahoo but not too well anymore with Google.  Also your backlinks and title tag are too heavily laced with the word ‘pillows’ and/or ‘pillow’.

Finally I didn’t see where your site was targeting ‘decorative pillows’ but that phrase would be one I’d definately go after.  Much more traffic than some of the other terms.

 

Ah the Trials and Tribulations of Google Bounce Back

Posted on March 31, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments

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
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments

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
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment

 

“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
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment

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.

Long and Short of Long Tail Research

Posted on February 9, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment

With Yahoo publically announcing that it won’t support it’s Overture Keyword Inventory tool I’ve been mucking about with other tools to replace it. I like the Wordtracker keyword tool maybe just because I tend to trust Wordtracker more than some other sources. They’ve been around for quite some time and my real world experience chasing keyword is that they are as close as anyone in extrapolating likely search volumes for different keyword phrases.

BUT, I tend to trust keyword prediction tools more on the larger phrases than I do on the lower queried phrases. That’s just due to the likelihood that the smaller the forecasted traffic, the greater the degree of distortion when small samples are extrapolated over the universe of huge traffic. If that didn’t make sense to you think about the millions of search phrases typed in over many search engines. If the keyword tool is getting its sample from one or two sources and that sample is relatively small compared to the total actual search volume across all search engines, then the chance of under or over estimating search queries goes up dramatically the fewer times a keyword phrase is included in the sample used for projection.

If you get what I just said and agree with it, then does the current focus on long tail keyword research have any merit?

Maybe.

Well, maybe that’s better put as…

Sometimes.

Here’s the thing. I see a lot of folks getting all excited about long tail keyword search because with the current environment with Google, it’s getting darn hard to get rankings on higher volume keyword phrases. So touting the importance of long tail keyword search gives the SEO and SEM GURUS something to talk about. Something doable that should bring results to all of us slugging it out in the real world. And they’ll tell you that not only is it important, those long tail keywords will convert better than the high volume ones.

Here’s where my real world experience says ‘Just wait a minute, buster!’

Let’s say we are committed to making our fortunes with long tail phrases. Which ones do we pursue? If there is a huge margin of query error associated with these, then spending too much time on any one phrase means we may make a mistake. Worse yet, we don’t know how hard any of these phrases are to rank on.

Case in point…

I set up a page on my website to go after the phrase ‘chocolate golf balls’. Turns out even though the Wordtracker tool currently projects only about 15 queries a day, a lot of folks out there sell chocolate and have chocolate golf balls for sale. So my page only ranks well on MSN and not so hot on Google and Yahoo.

If I had spent significant time on it, maybe I’d do better but how much time do you spend on a term that at best gets you 15 folks a day? For me, not much.

On the other hand, your site will just get rankings on phrases you never thought of. For me, the term ‘golf and chocolate’ wasn’t something I thought about. Doesn’t even show up in the Wordtracker tool but I have top listing in Google and MSN (only #10 on Yahoo) but got some real traffic from it.

So use a good tool like Wordtracker but don’t spend too much time on any small traffic phrase. Save your energies to go after the bigger phrases.
Would you have expected any different advice from the gal who likes to slay giants?

Google Page Rank and Backlink Updates - Should We Care?

Posted on February 4, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment

Over the course of the period that seemed to stretch from Mid to Late January, Google performed a tool bar page rank update and backlinks update. This update actually showed a lot of sites losing backlinks and page rank. To my surprise, and actually relief, there hasn’t been a lot of public hysteria over this event.

Maybe because it’s a non event.

After all, anyone who has been in this game for any length of time knows that page rank just isn’t as important as it used to be. Sure, more is better but more doesn’t guarantee you a position ‘above the fold’ (a position visible without scrolling down - typically the top four or five positions).

And this is a good thing.

A good thing because it means that maybe, just maybe we all have a chance against Amazon and other giants like PriceGrabber, eBay, Shopzilla and more who have tons of PR and used to be able to just add a page and with a decent title tag would get a top 10 position on a keyword the rest of us were beating our brains out over. Don’t get me wrong, I still see these companies dominating the SERPs but a little less than I used to.

Imagine a world where we didn’t obsess over how much green our page rank tool bar showed each day. Well we might just be motivated to make sound business decisions regarding whether we exchange links with another site (like only exchanging links with relevant, compliemary sites). We may save countless hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars that we may otherwise have spent getting a coveted home page link from a PR 8 site. We would have time to focus on other things.

We might just focus instead on building sites with content - whether that is in the form of articles of interest for our customers or more products for sale, our visitor wins. We may implement more conversion testing so we can convert more of the good folks who visit us. Heck, we may take the time to implement a CRM system so we can stay in touch with our existing customers.

Building a business versus building PR? What a concept!

What does it take to rank on Google?

Posted on January 2, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment

If ever there was a question that the multitudes in quest for Internet success want answered, this must be it. But we all know that even if we could crack the Google algorithm the answer would vary for every search term and in some cases what is required is, well, really not very much at all.

I’m known to lurk on a number of forums and one of the things that makes my eyes roll back in my head is to read about ‘miraculous’ near overnight Google ranking success stories. You’ve probably seen them too. The tend to read like this:

“Wowee! My new site ranks on page one of Google for my main search term after only 1 week.”

With a little effort you can easily determine that the phrases are pretty darn easy material. Usually a four or five word phrase that VERY few folks would ever type in. Somthing like:

unique valentine’s day gift for grandson

Now that shouldn’t be too hard, in fact maybe, just maybe, someone could rank for a phrase like that just by using it on a page. Anyone want to take bets?

*************************************************************

I apologize for not updating this sooner - I forgot about the silly SEO experiment.  Anyway we not only got to page one of Google, we are page one of Google:

Valentines Day Gift for Grandson

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