It is an important question within the SEO world…”What is a #1 Google rank worth, compared to the #2 spot or #3 spot?”. The purpose of this question is to really understand what the business value is for a website that ranks at a certain point in the search engines.

It’s easily assumed that the higher someone ranks in the search engines, the better, but what are the specific statistics. Many folks utilizing search engine marketing, specifically SEO, for their businesses are looking to understand the value of moving up from spot #6 to spot #3. Here is a pie chart that describes the traffic distribution by Google ranking:

As you can see, here is the breakdown of traffic percentages by Google rank:

• Ranked #1 – 42%
• Ranked #2 – 12%
• Ranked #3 – 9%
• Ranked #4 – 6%
• Ranked #5 – 5%
• Ranked #6 – 4%
• Ranked #7 – 3%
• Ranked #8 – 3%
• Ranked #9 – 3%
• Ranked #10 – 3%
• Page 2 – 10% (average of 1% per listing on page 2)

So, what we see is that 90% of searches don’t navigate past Page 1! This is why the goal is always to reach Page 1 and climb it as much as possible. This, of course, depends on the competitive landscape (aka how many other websites are competing for ranking in the search engines) for the target keyword terms of a site. The ultimate goal is to use resources as efficiently as possible and target keywords that have the least amount of competition but that drive the most quality traffic.

Let’s give some numbers to this equation…if there are 10,000 people searching for a specific term, 4,200 of those searchers will click-through on the #1 listing…1,200 will click-through on the 2nd listing…900 on the 3rd and so forth. The difference between the 4th rank and the 1st is 3,600 visitors. That’s a big difference!

The Catch

Now, let’s keep in mind that these numbers are a bit imperfect considering the different ways users search. Each different way a person searches provides a different distribution of click-throughs on search results. There are 3 main types of internet search classifications:

• Navigational – wants to find a specific site (e.g. Spotify)
• Informational – looking for specific information (e.g. causes for the common cold)
• Transactional – wants to perform a web-mediated activity (e.g. “buy blue suede shoes online”)

Besides these different types of searches, the search engine results pages are also providing a multitude of different types of results, including videos, local maps, product search, etc., which can skew the results a bit. This just shows why it is a good idea to optimize for all the different channels (e.g. Google Places, Google Merchant Center, etc).

To learn more, check out this reference post by Aaron Wall at SEOBook – Google Keyword Click Data by Search Ranking Position

As any Internet search marketing professional is aware of, Google continues to make changes to their proprietary search results algorithm. This algorithm ultimately decides what results are presented when a user performs a specific search. The reason they continue to make updates to this algorithm is in an effort to provide the most relevant and high quality search results on the Internet.

The most recent update that Google made was the “Webspam Algorithm Update”. This new update was launched in an effort to reduce the amount of search results from people who “spam” webpages in order to try and deceivingly gain better rankings. The new update is going to target such “search spam” as:

• Keyword Stuffing  - Loading a page with target keywords in an attempt to manipulate rankings
• Link Schemes - Links trying to manipulate PageRank, links to web spammers, link exchanging, etc.
• Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects, “doorway” pages- Serving different content to the search engines than to users, hiding links in JavaScript, and poor-quality pages optimized for  a specific keyword or phrase
• Duplicate Content - pretty self explanatory here…duplicate content refers to content on a website that is used multiple times or taken from other websites

So, what does this mean for SEO companies like Adept and for every website on the Internet? It means that Google continues to encourage high-quality, “white hat SEO” tactics when optimizing websites because white hat tactics support SEO best practices. One of the many goals for Google is to reward websites that create a good user experience for searchers. Another goal is to encourage unique, fresh content on the Internet in order to provide a realistic ongoing perspective.

Here at Adept, we are acutely aware and in-tune with SEO best practices, as indicated by Google, as well as upholding the highest level of ethics. Our mission is to help clients optimize their websites to the fullest extent by following the SEO guidelines Google, and the other search engines, have put in place. This is how we operate and we take pride in that.

–
To read more about this topic, please refer to these credible sources – Search Engine Land, Official Google Search Blog

Today, let’s talk about SEO title tags. Many casual Internet users know what a website title tag is but for those who don’t, here is a quick 101 class.

Title Tags play a big role in on-site optimization because they are one of the first things that a search engine bot will inventory when crawling a webpage. This is because title tags are at the very top of a page and are used to summarize the content on that page (see the below image).

The main value of title tags is to use specific target keywords that describe what it is you do so that the search engines understand and rank your webpages appropriately. As an example, Adept Marketing targets keyword phrases for “internet marketing company”, “seo company”, “ppc company”, etc. These keyword phrases target what searchers online are looking for relating to our business.

The key is to target the most efficient keyword phrases for your business (i.e. the keyword phrases that drive the most quality traffic compared to the amount of competition for those keywords). To find out which keyword phrases are the most efficient for your business, it takes a bit of research using different analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google AdWords, Rank Tracker, BuzzStream, etc.

Once you determine the 10-15 most efficient and relevant terms for your website, utilize those in the title tags of your website pages. Keep in mind that the preferred length of title tags is under 60 characters. Make sure to place the most important keywords at the beginning of the title tag since the search engines put higher value on the first words then it diminishes from there.

Lastly, split up your keywords by using pipes (|) or dashes (-). The search engines don’t have a preference there so you can use whichever one you prefer.

This concludes your SEO Title Tags 101 class for today. Happy SEO’ing! Let us know if you need any help!

As discussed here before on the Adept blog, there are 2 main pieces of SEO – On-Site and Off-Site. On-Site SEO basically refers to all of the keyword targeting that happens within the content, title tags, meta descriptions, and internal linking structure of a website. Off-Site SEO, also known as Link Building, refers to the expanded SEO effort when exploring for quality “link-backs” from credible and relevant external websites. I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about the latter…Off-Site SEO (aka Link Building).

The underlying reason that search engines reward “link-backs” to websites is because it would be very difficult to determine which websites should rank higher than others if they have similar keyword targets and on-site SEO efforts. Google’s driving purpose as a search engine is to continually provide the most relevant, high-quality results for users when they perform keyword searches. Knowing this, Google had to look to other sources to help them qualify and rank websites…that’s where off-site SEO comes in.

Every time an external website provides a link-back to another website, Google views that as 1 vote of confidence. An analogy that I make is that Google views these links as recommendations and referrals…just like someone would have to provide for a job interview. The more credible the referral source (external website) is, the more weight that vote gets. This helps Google use popular consensus when deciding on who is the most relevant result for any specific search.

So, now that you have an idea as to what link building is and why it’s valuable…here is a quick view into how Adept Marketing does it for clients:

1. On-Site Link Building – As mentioned, this is something that happens on-site but can easily be qualified as link building. What needs to happen here is to build as many internal links as possible pointing from page to page in order to show the search engines which page targets which keywords. One tactic for this is to build out links in the footer of a site pointing to all the services/product pages by using the main target keyword phrase for each page (e.g. a link saying “SEO Columbus Ohio” should point to the page on the site relating to SEO services in Columbus, Ohio…like on the Adept site).
2. External Link Building – This strategy covers an exponential amount of tactics to go about obtaining high-quality, credible link-backs to a website. The key is to find the most popular and reputable referral sources. Here are a few favorites:
1. Social Media – It was recently reported that 7% of the Google search engine ranking algorithm is built on social media references. Valuablesocial media profiles to create and link-back to a site include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google Plus. Some others are Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, SlideShare, Wikipedia, MySpace, Meetup, hi5, etc. The traditional social media buttons to include on a website are Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These buttons encourage and make it easy for visitors to get and stay connected with you and your business through different channels.
2. Business Directories – There are plenty of local business directories to submit to including Google Places, Yelp, MapQuest, FourSquare, CitySearch, Yahoo Local, etc.
3. Web Directories – There are also plenty of these more general Internet directories, such as Dmoz.com, Jayde.com, Chiff.com, PearlTrees.com, Business.com/directory, GlobalSpec, SearchSight, JoAnt, and ExactSeek. It’s always a good idea to get a mix of paid and free directory submissions so that the search engines see a balanced level of effort. Obviously, the paid directories can be a bit more exclusive.
4. Blog Posts - Blogs are a fantastic way to create and share unique content online. Blogs that can be as strategic and targeted as you’d like to make them. There are a lot of bloggers that write about their own life experiences and are just looking for an outlet to express themselves, which is great. Writing for the purpose of SEO value is a bit different though because the goal is to create original, creative, and sharable content relating to a specific topic. This can prove to be very valuable because the search engines love to see fresh, new, sharable content online.
5. News-worthy Press Releases – Another tactic for creating SEO link-back value is by utilizing PR channels to promote press releases.

The list goes on-and-on for link building opportunities online. The key for building quality, relevant links to a website is to always keep in mind the philosophy of “give to receive”. If you can provide valuable, sharable content then you can obtain links from many sources easily.

Happy Link Building!!

In a recent SEO blog post, I referenced a few important SEO tasks to start with when optimizing a new website. One of those tasks is to upload an optimized robots.txt file to the root domain of the site. The below graphic explains that concept a bit more.

Another important concept in SEO is the site ranking formula created by Google, called the Google PageRank. Basically, what the PageRank indicates is the overall authority a website holds on the Internet.

As you can see from the graphic below, the majority of websites on the Internet rank from 1 to 5. PageRank of higher than 5 is very much above average and only the most influential and credible sites on the Internet, such as Ebay.com, ESPN.com, and the mighty Google.com, make it into the 7 to 10 ratings because it takes exponentially more time and effort to make it to that level.

PageRank is very important from an SEO perspective because it gives us all an indication as to how much equity a website has built up, based on domain age, high-quality inbound links, traffic volume and quality, etc. If you’d like to see how well your website is doing online, check out your Google PageRank (keep in mind that a rank of 3 to 5 is average…anything above that is very hard to achieve).

FUN FACT: PageRank wasn’t actually named for the obvious…that it is an indication of where a website/page ranks on a scale of 1 to 10. It was named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google, as mentioned in the infographic from another recent SEO blog post.

Lastly, but certainly not least, is a graphic that describes the SEO concept of “Long Tail Keywords”. Long tail SEO keywords are very valuable to a successful SEO campaign because they are the most efficient keywords to target.

As you can see from the graphic, competition and cost for keywords is highest when the keyword phrases are very short and broad (e.g. “shoes”). As you begin to target more descriptive keyword phrases (e.g. “red Nike mens running shoes”), you begin to achieve higher efficiency because of the low cost and competition while increasing the probability of conversion.

If an online user is searching for running shoes, they are more often than not going to refine their search by typing in more descriptive phrases until they find the results they want. Once the user finds the relevant results they want, they click on a listing and go to a website where they are more likely to convert because they are satisfied with the search results.

The difficulty is that there are many more long tail keywords to target which is why the initial keyword research is so important. Finding the most efficient long tail SEO keywords to target is an essential part of a successful long-term SEO campaign.