Choose your battles
The key to good search engine optimisation (SEO) is choosing winnable battles. At Webreality we guarantee that all our client’s site content will be indexed, we guarantee that we’ll help them develop a link strategy, and we’ll work with them to drive more traffic to their sites. We won’t however guarantee where they’ll list in the engine. SEO consultants that promise you no.1 positions are selling Snake Oil and shouldn’t be trusted.
After creating a site full of rich and relevant content. You check your site validates at the W3c validator. You submit your site to Google, and you sit back and wait (this can take as long as 3 months, but is usually quicker).
Now you should work out which keywords you want to win. Let’s imagine you run a small video production company, and you decide you’ll win lots of business if you are no.1 on Google for ‘bbc’.
There are 121,000,000 entries for bbc, and the first five entries are from the BBC itself. Followed by Wikipedia and YouTube. The BBC site has ‘bbc’ in its url, has massive traffic, and 286,000 inbound hyperlinks. Let’s face it your video production site is never going to be as relevant to the World as the BBC site is. So you should aim at keyword inventory that isn’t being competed for, and is very relevant to your target audience.
Visit the keyword selector at Overture, it’s a good place to start to find targeted phrases, like for example ‘video production Jersey’. A quick scan through the results shows that all the listings are for New Jersey, and no site contains the exact phrase ‘video production Jersey’. Placing this phrase in your page title, will almost certainly give you a top ten listing, and exact placement will then be determined by the relative traffic volumes and link popularity of your neighbours.
I explained all this to my friend Onno who runs the beautiful Les Etagnes in Nendaz. Over a beer recently, we made a few tweaks to his site, and got him from zero visibility to page one for ‘nendaz hotel’. Definitely worth a beer.
Eye tracking
Thanks to George from P&O for drawing my attention to this study:
http://www.checkit.nl/pdf/eyetracking_research.pdf
Study supports concept that the browser glances over the sponsored links as part of the track across search results. Good adword design should give good information - thus mimicking the organic listings, and typically generating a higher CTR (click-through rate).