Aaron Shear makes a compelling argument in a recent Search Engine Watch article. He explains that, when it comes to optimizing a webpage for the search engines, improper (or no) ‘targeting’ can severely detract from the ability of the page to rank highly for its chosen keywords.

Within the context of search engine optimization (SEO), ‘targeting’ means focusing the content of a given webpage on or around a particular keyword or keyphrase. The more targeted is your webpage, the more relevant your page will appear for the given keyword or keyphrase.

Higher relevance means a higher search engine ranking, which in turn means greater organic search engine traffic.

As Mr Shear states, the search engines evaluate webpages from the top left hand corner of the page to the bottom right hand corner of the page (including the page title tag). Further, search engines read the content from left to right, with the most important part being at the beginning of the text or tag.

Given this, the greater the quantity of information on a webpage, and, importantly, the more diverse that information is, the greater the dilution in terms of targeting. Which means, in turn, the lower the capacity of the page to rank highly for its chosen keyword(s).

The lesson? Focus your content as much as possible.

Try to avoid having one webpage about two or more different things. For instance, instead of having one page with “great deals on bicycles and tricycles,” aim to have one page on bicycles and another on tricycles.

And if you can be even more specific (depending on your keywords) even better.

I should also note that diluted or improper targeting also tends to cause a higher than desirable bounce rate - another factor taken into account by the search engines. A ‘bounce’ occurs when someone (or something) leaves a webpage the moment they arrive i.e. before the page loads. A high bounce rate indicates that most people find the content to be irrelevant… not good when the search engines place so much emphasis on RELEVANCE.

Source: Aaron Shear, “SEO Dreams are Made of This,” Search Engine Watch, November 18, 2008

So what exactly should you aim for when it comes to click-through rates (CTRs) for your pay-per-click ads, and conversion rates for the offers you make on your landing pages?

Well, it will vary according to how specific or general is your ad, and whether you have a ’soft’ or ‘hard’ offer. Assuming you structure and conduct your PPC campaign correctly, David Szetela provides the following guidelines…

According to David, CTRs will always be higher for in-demand products, services and needs, and lower for those that are relatively unknown or difficult to describe. For products, services or needs in high demand, you should aim for a 5 percent or higher (i.e. double-digit) CTR.

For low-demand products, services, etc it may not be realistic to expect anything beyond 3-4 percent. In either case, a CTR of 2 percent or lower is probably not good enough.

When it comes to conversion rates, a good conversion rate for a ‘hard offer’ i.e. an offer to buy something would be a minimum of 2 percent. David says that for business-to-consumer e-commerce sales, it’s realistic to aim for conversion rates of 5 percent or higher.

For ’softer’ offers, such as a free download (e.g. software, information, etc) a conversion rate of 10, 20 or even 30 percent is achievable.

Of course, as David points out, your conversion rate will depend to a large degree on your landing page and the degree to which you continuously test and improve it.

Meanwhile, you can still do a lot to optimize both CTRs and conversion rates by properly choosing, writing and structuring your keywords and pay-per-click ads. In this regard, be sure to check out David’s series on how to put together an optimal PPC campaign.

Source: David Szetela, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Click-Through and Conversion Rates”, Search Engine Watch, November 13, 2008

William Flaiz has written an interesting article in Search Engine Watch. He suggests that the days of compartmentalizing search engine optimization (SEO) are over and that a holistic approach is now what’s required to win in the new environment of “universal search”.

Argues Mr Flaiz:

“An integrated approach across multiple disciplines is the only way to address the diverse nuances of the new SERPs. We can tame universal search if we address it from all fronts: SEO, paid search, social media, Web development and user experience design.”

The article is aimed at SEO agencies but the principle remains the same for SEO departments or individual search engine optimizers. A holistic approach is required if we’re to achieve optimum results.

For instance, we’re currently working with a client to:

1. Optimize some new product pages;
2. Prepare press releases for those products; and
3. Write articles related to those products and website pages.

By understanding the underlying keyword strategy and taking an integrated approach we can ensure that each of these items work together to enhance our client’s search engine ranking for the terms it’s targeting. After all, although the methods are seemingly disparate, the objective is quite singular: a higher listing in the organic results.

And given the (growing) number of Internet “assets” - website, press releases, images, videos, pages on social media sites, and so on - the demand for a holistic approach is only likely to grow.

Bottom line: rather than approach any given SEO tactic in isolation, approach it as one component of an overall effort where your main aim is to optimize your presence on the search engines for the keywords that deliver you the maximum number of targeted, qualified prospects.

Source: William Flaiz, “Universal Search: The (War) Elephant in the Room”, Search Engine Watch, November 10, 2008

In keeping with the U.S. Presidential election theme, Search Engine Watch has provided a helpful list of tools from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL to help you choose who to vote for and where to vote.

Here are just a few of the interesting tools listed:

Google News - type a candidate’s name into Google News and if Google has indexed a quote by that person, you’ll see it at the top of the search results.

Google Mobile - type in your address and you’ll be directed to your local election precinct.

Yahoo Political Dashboard - a map of the latest poll results, which will hopefully be updated with real time results on election night.

MSN Election Live Q&A - ask and answer questions about the election in real time.

AOL Elections Toolbar - a toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox that will keep you up to date with election news.

Source: Search Engine Watch, “Election Tools from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL”, Search Engine Watch, October 31, 2008

In a recent Search Engine Watch article, David Szetela provides invaluable advice for organizing the keywords in your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

If you’re involved in PPC advertising, David’s articles (and all his articles) are a must-read. In summary, his three (3) tips are as follows:

1. If a keyword has received more than 500 impressions, but no clicks, pause or delete it. It is adversely affecting the relevant ad group’s quality score.
2. If a keyword has had 150-200 clicks but no conversions, pause or delete it. It’s not converting and is undermining your return on investment (ROI).
3. If a keyword gets just one conversion, keep it. If, after generating 30 or more conversions, the cost-per-conversion is still too high, lower the bid price. BUT if the cost per conversion is lower than your target, you might find that raising the bid price is worth it because you should see even more conversions.

Source: David Szetela, “Judging PPC Performance: Focus on Conversions, Part 2″, Search Engine Watch, October 6, 2008

Google recently added a tool to Webmaster Tools that shows links directed at 404 pages on your website.

Running the tool will generate a report that lists the links pointing to 404 pages. Useful, since (among other things) links to 404 pages don’t pass any ‘authority’ from a search engine optimization (SEO) point of view.

Armed with your report you will be able to contact the sites linking to those 404 pages and ask them to redirect or change those links. Alternatively, you can use 301 redirects to effectively pass the link authority over to one of the ‘real’ pages on your site.

Source: Frank Watson, “Google’s New Tools for Site Link Strengthening”, Search Engine Watch, Oct 17, 2008

Erik Qualman has written an interesting article in Search Engine Watch. He has compared the Internet activities of each of the United States’ presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, focusing on five key areas. He deems Obama as the overall online winner:

1. Website traffic (Obama is the winner): Obama’s site receives 5.5 million unique visitors, while John McCain’s site receives 3.1 million (based on Compete data).

2. Social media (Obama): Obama has over 2 million fans on Facebook, while McCain has just under 600,000.

3. Paid search (McCain): McCain has higher listings than Obama on key search terms.

4. Organic search (tie): while, for every one search for ‘McCain’ there are 2.2 searches for ‘Obama’… there are even more searches for ‘Palin’ (Republican vice-presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin) than Obama. In fact, there are more searches for McCain and Palin combined, compared with Obama and Biden (Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden) combined.

5. YouTube (Obama): Obama’s YouTube channel has 100,000 subscribers and his videos have been viewed 17.1 million times. John McCain’s YouTube channel has 24,000 subscribers and has been viewed just 11.1 million times.

How any of this translates into actual votes remains to be seen… but not too long to go now!

Source: Erik Qualman, “Obama is Winning the Internet War”, Search Engine Watch, October 16, 2008

Writing in Search Engine Watch Aaron Shear explains that Google has shifted - and will continue to shift - its search engine algorithm to be based more on user behavior and less on other factors.

In other words, Google is increasingly seeking to align its organic rankings with how search engine users interact with such websites, and less with the traditional factors of site structure, webpage optimization and even authoritative back-links.

As you can imagine, this has MAJOR implications for Internet marketers. In particular, according to Mr Shear, Google is focusing more and more on the following indicators of user behavior:

• Website performance - the degree to which it loads and functions correctly;
• Bounce rate - the percentage of web visitors who bounce back to the search results. If 80 percent or more of visitors return to Google after landing on your site, your site will probably be demoted or delisted. Having a bounce rate of 50 to 60 percent is apparently enough to keep your site ranked, but if you can get your bounce rate to below than 20 percent, your site will be performing in the top percentile and apt to rank well. It’s also arguable that, all else being equal, if you have a lower bounce rate than your competitors, your site will rank more highly.
• Links - authoritative back links are still of the utmost importance. It’s just that with the growing significance of user behavior, they’re no longer ‘all-important’. Aaron Shear says you should continue using blogs, social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, social chat engines, such as Twitter, and social networks, such as Facebook, for links.
• RSS - how many RSS feed subscribers you have. All else being equal, the more RSS feed subscribers you have, the higher you will rank. Mr Shear says that having at least 25 subscribers for an article (or page) is desirable, but if you can get 50 or more, it will be relatively easy to get highly competitive article themes highly ranked in the search engine rankings.
• Content - this is still highly important, but not enough. Aaron Shear says authoritative back-links trump great content and our experience bears this out too.

Okay, so what does all this mean for Internet marketers and what should you do? Well, the first thing to note is that junk sites (i.e. sites with worthless or redundant content) are less and less likely to rank well in Google. This is simply due to having high bounce rates and few authoritative back-links. Both of which derive from poor content.

On the other hand, having a perfectly functioning site with great content won’t be enough. You need to encourage people to sign up to your RSS feeds and/or actively attract back-links.

So, in a sense, nothing has changed. The formula for a high-ranking website is still great content and quality back-links. But what IS clearer than ever, is that Google is watching what PEOPLE are doing in relation to your site, and, as such, it will become less and less possible to use ‘black-hat’ and even ‘grey-hat’ technological tricks to fool Google into giving your site a high ranking. Of course, that’s not to say people won’t try…

Source: Aaron Shear, “Google’s Algorithm is Shifting”, Search Engine Watch, October 7, 2008

David Szetela, writing in Search Engine Watch, offers some excellent tips for interpreting pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign data.

He explains that the most crucial data points are the conversion rate and cost-per-conversion, and that if the underlying aim of the campaign is to generate profitable sales, then these are much more important than such metrics as the click-through rate (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC).

Yet, he makes a useful distinction. The CTR is still a useful indicator of how keywords and ads combine to generate a click, while the conversion rate measures how well keywords, ads, and the landing page combine to get a visitor to take the desired action (e.g. clicking on a link, opting in to a list, buying a product). The cost-per-conversion, meanwhile, measures the price paid to get someone to both click on the ad and take the desired action.

David explains that the results generated by a campaign can not only indicate the performance of the campaign, but can also highlight how well or poorly the campaign has been structured. For example, if the CTR and conversion rates vary widely within an ad group, the keywords in the ad group are not as related to one another, to the ad copy, or to the landing page (in the case of significant conversion rate variance), as is ideal. That indicates the keyword group should be split up into tighter groups.

Another tip is that when a particular keyword has a relatively high search volume and a lot of conversions at the right cost-per-conversion but a relatively low CTR… then it’s probably a good idea to carve off that keyword into a separate ad group - maybe even its own ad group - so that a more focused ad can be written.

On the other hand, if a keyword has a high CTR but low conversion rate, this may signify the need to better align the landing page with the PPC ad copy.

David Szetela makes an interesting point about keywords with low CTRs (e.g. less than 0.5%) and low (but not zero) conversion rates. While it may be tempting to scrap such keywords, he suggests that any keyword that produces a conversion is worth keeping. In this case it may be a matter of tweaking the ‘match’ settings and/or add some qualifiers to the keyword list (e.g. negative keywords) to improve its performance.

Check out the article for more tips for analyzing your PPC data.

Source: David Szetela, “Reading the Tea Leaves: Interpreting Keyword Reports”, Search Engine Watch, October 13, 2008

In a recent Search Engine Watch article, Erik Qualman makes some predications about how ecommerce and online advertising will fair during the current or impending (depending on where you live) economic recession.

Among other things, he predicts that online advertising may actually benefit as more companies shift their ad budgets online. But although online ad expenditure may increase as a share of total marketing budgets… the actual spend on Internet advertising may grow only marginally, plateau, or even decline somewhat.

Let’s face it. Many companies will simply have less money to spend, whether it’s on broadcast media or television.

Similarly, some online retailers may see more people shop on their websites. For retailers with ‘bricks-and-mortar’ stores, growth in online sales may not be enough to offset a decline in off-line sales. Pure-play ecommerce stores may, on the other hand, achieve a boost in sales.

Again, however, many consumers may just spend less. When it comes to buying ‘necessities’ they may well choose to shop online rather than offline.

But when it comes to ‘nice to haves’ they may simply cut or reduce their spending. Which means that online sellers of ‘nice to have’ products may also feel the pinch of the recession.

Regrettably, I don’t have any figures on how ‘how to’ information products tend to perform at times like this. Instinctively, I’d think that low-priced info. products aimed at helping people AVOID any of the pain associated with tough times are likely to do better, overall, than high-priced products aimed at helping people GAIN the pleasure associated with boom times.

That may mean we all start rethinking what we sell and/or how we sell it. For instance, we offer a course on how to build wealth and achieve financial security at http://www.investmentsuccessformula.com It might be wise for us to think about how to reposition that course so that the emphasis is on ensuring financial security now… Or it might be better if we shifted our attention to other products and services that are more naturally inclined to do well right now.

Or perhaps it’s a time when we – and YOU - simply focus on better serving our existing, valuable, loyal customers and subscribers. If the 80-20 rule holds true, about 20 percent of customers are responsible for 80 percent of sales. It may well be that, depending on what you sell, while you lose some of the 80 percent… your 20 percent will keep on buying… PROVIDED that you keep on delivering value.

While I don’t suggest any business owner let themselves become a ‘victim’ to the recession, I don’t think ignoring it is a wise move either. Depending on your business, it may be a time to rethink some of your strategies - either to avoid or to capitalize on current events.

Source: Erik Qualman, “Economic Depression 2.0″, October 2, 2008, Search Engine Watch