Why you might be scratching your head at my analogy(and they are not always the best), there is quite a lot of validity in this statement considering that organic traffic increases can be much like that shiny car, pretty on the outside and hollow on the inside. For the most part, any SEO firm at some point can perform enough basic SEO and content creation to lift a site’s traffic simply because at some point you will drive so much long tail traffic that referrals will likely increase. What so often looks like a great report should have additional questions posed.

A review of your site analytics and these factors in mind can paint a better picture of whether your SEO program is targeted appropriately.

What site sections are driving traffic?

       -   Site sections such as a blog can drive a lot of traffic for a blog but often are virally motivated and this traffic can result in a 80+% bounce rate. Your traffic should be landing on your homepage or key pages that are a starting point for your conversion funnel or a page along this pathway.

How do organic visitors consume your content?

       -   Only in a perfect world does someone stumble upon your site and immediately become so enthralled that they instantly perform the intended action you are attempting. From an organic-wide view you need to ensure that page views, pages-per-visit and time on site are gradually increasing. This is also a way to show that site content has been developed for search engines but also for human visitors as content is compelling and there are links and calls to action to help propel visitors throughout the site.

Are organic referrals branded or non-branded?

       -   Every time you go all out on an offline effort or social promotion you are building your brand. And while not every offline viewer picks up a telephone and not every social user follows a link these web users search for company through a branded term. It is very important to parse your SEO reporting by branded and non-branded segments. Non-branded development should most often be your focus as a common SEO goal is to gain visibility across popular brand/service related terms.

How well does organic search referral s convert?

       -   Yes, I know, this is obvious. However, I am still surprised at how many people do not even think about this factor but more so with the climb in traffic. A thousand visits that do not convert at all are not as important as one visit that converts (brand identity freaks excluded). Analysis of these conversion metrics will allow you to figure out the most important goal of whether visitors are doing what you want them to.

Asking these questions of your SEO firm or analyzing these areas for yourself will help you to identify if your SEO campaign is successful or if the traffic numbers are misleading. Rankings are great but if they drove hollow traffic there is no importance for having a listing in that position and driving meaninglessness traffic. Who knows, if your site is a likely candidate for the conditions above, hopefully after a little work your traffic will drop next month…and your conversions will increase.

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I wanted to highlight a little problem that might see you being outranked for your own content. I am not talking about scrapers either, legitimate situations. You may ultimately be screwed for all your hard work developing quality content. Actually, the better you do your job, the more likely it is.

In the present world of SEO (and internet marketing in general) we all know that the ‘build it and they will come’ approach just ain’t going to cut it. One way to get the word out and even build some authority is the use of content syndication. This is generally in the form of RSS. And a LOT of us use this approach.

Did you know that this might just be a bad idea? Especially with a full feed?

Talking to Googlers

Some 18 months back the folks at WebProNews asked me if they could syndicate my content, verbatim, on their family of IM news sites. Right away one has to start worrying about this as they might just out-rank me for my own content, (given that they have greater authority). Thus I decided to talk to a Googler pal to see what the advised approach for this is.

At the time I was told that as long as the secondary source had a link back to the original, things should work out fine. And this did seem to be the case 80% of the time. Occasionally I’d get outranked (oddly Google was showing BOTH identical posts 1-2 in the SERP), but that was the exception, not the rule.

Fast forward, early 2010. I was working on a project in the finance world which was syndicating content out to a variety of locales including heavy weights such as ‘the Street‘. We noticed that, even with linkage to the original, we were getting spanked in the reg SERPs and Google News.

Back to Google we go.

This time I was told that we should look to throttle the RSS by delaying it some to ensure it was the first version picked up. Ok, great, so it seems that authority sites most certainly can still kick yer ass if you’re not careful.

The Case Study

I was chatting in the SEO Dojo chat room with my pal (and social media guru) Samir Balwani whom was having some issues with his blog and this very problem. As an example we can look at the post; 5 Things I Would Tell a Social Media Professor

If we look at a search for some leader text we see this – Or a Google search via post TITLE such as this here; “5 things I would tell a social media professor“.

You can see he is getting outranked by not only SMT but FaceBook as well (where he had a full feed). This, as you might imagine is not an ideal situation. Interestingly it should be noted that both of those entries actually link to the original via redirects. As we know there is some link love loss from that which means our 20% just got even worse.

Ultimately these domains had more authority and are effectively stealing his thunder AND rankings. Sure, we all want the authority building that can come from being in these publications, but at what cost? At very least we should be controlling which content gets syndicated and which doesn’t (I have a deal with WebProNews that they don’t touch any pillar content for example).

The Fix

And so what can we do to have the best of both world? To get the name out there without having and adverse affect on our SEO efforts? A few things come to mind and have been shown to work in these situations.

• Delay RSS – this was Google’s advice although I have not found an option for this in (their own) Feedburner system. This means you need to do it via the RSS programming on your site and then hook that up to the feedburner system.

• Only use partial feeds – this is certainly another option that will also help solve the problem, though in some cases they don’t allow that. For example SMT says, “ We do not use partial feeds or content summaries or posts without a photo or avatar. We are a community, not a link referral service.”

• Make sure article TITLE is linked up – while not huge, it can help to further strengthen the post itself for the core terms being targeted. Every little bit helps.

• Don’t let them link to RSS UTM – in the SMT instance, they linked back to the actual RSS feed link which get’s parsed as a 301 and certainly loses some juice to the original. Where possible, avoid this.

As you may have figured out along the trail, this is certainly something that we need to be aware of. In Samir’s case, he really wasn’t paying attention and this has been going on for quite some time. I can only imagine the traffic losses he’s suffered because of it. If you are syndicating your content via FULL FEED, you should be monitoring it to ensure that this isn’t happening to you.

And Google? Guys, if you’re aware of the problem in the search dept., why not give a head’s up to the folks at FeedBurner while we’re at it ( I tried to ) and get an option to be able to delay the feed, just for such situations. #justsayin’

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Keywords are words that people use to search for a site. For example: If you owned a site from which you sold pet care items and people typed in puppy food, you would want your site to come up. Now, some people might type in more descriptive phrases as well such as nutritious puppy food, or cheap puppy food. These are the types of keywords you would need to add to your sit e so your potential customers can find you.

The first step in optimizing your site keywords would be to find exactly what phrases and words people are using to find sites like yours. One way to do this is to do a search for a free keyword suggestion tool. Once you find one, just type in a one or two word phrase and this tool will tell you how many times your word has been searched for and give you other suggestions with their search numbers.

This can be a great way to find out which keywords are best to start using on your site. NOTE: This has to be done consistently. Don’t think that doing it once is all it takes. Keywords are constantly changing so to stay on top, you always need to know what people are searching for.

Now you need to make a list of specific targeted keywords (the more specific to your site, the better). I would start with a list of 10 – 20 keywords and/or phrases.

After you make up your list of highly competitive and specialized keywords it is time to start using them on your web pages. You need to take into consideration something called “keyword density”. This is the number of times you “plaster” your keywords onto your web pages. Too many times can do more harm than good. You would normally want your keyword density to be between 3% and 5%. That simply means that for every 100 words, your keyword appears 3 to 5 times. If you just paste the keywords a nywhere and everywhere your site will more than likely be rejected by the search engines.

It is also a good idea to headline your keywords in large, bold type at the top of your site.

For example:

Cheap Pet Care Items Including Nutritious Puppy Food

Another way of putting your keywords to good use is by using them as anchor text for your links. For example, instead of using a regular url or “click here for a link”, use keywords such as “pet food and toys” as the link.

You also want to make sure your web pages are titled with keywords, not just index or homepage or other generic titles.& nbsp; One example of a good title would be Pet Care, Vitamins, Nutritious Puppy Food, Cheap Prices, Toys

You want to use about 8-10 words in your title as only the first 70 characters will show in the actual title on your page.

Besides using the above methods, you want to sprinkle your keywords in relevant places throughout your webpage. Do not just paste them anywhere. Remember, quality, not just quantity will get you more results.

The best placement for your keywords is in the first 20 or so sentences. Then limit the use of the keywords throughout the rest of the text. You might also try summarizing all your pertinent keywords in your final paragraph to tie them all together.

NOTE: The spiders cannot read text on graphics unless you use the ALT tag. The ALT tag is inserted into the image code like this:

<A HREF=”http://www.mysitenamehere.com/”>

<IMG SRC=”mysitenamehere.com/125×125.gif” WIDTH=”125″ HEIGHT=”125″ BORDER=”0″ ALT=”Pet Care Food Vitamins Toys”></A>

Then, if for some reason the image does not show up your keywords “Pet Care Food Vitamins Toys” will.

If you consistently use the methods above, your site ranking should improve substantially. I know mine did once I used these techniques. But remember to research your keywords regularly and make any changes necessary.

He said, “I had this idea, see, where we would put all the keywords we wanted to use over and over again in white text on a white background. Then, the search engines would rank us near the top but it wouldn’t clutter up our page.”

I explained that this was a great idea, presuming he had a time machine and could return to early 1997-the last time this technique actually worked.

Search engines are getting smarter all the time. If you’re looking for a long-term success strategy that will allow you to concentrate on building your business rather than chasing the next search engine bait-and-switch, you need to know where to place your keywords for maximum results.

Before You Begin

Placing the wrong keywords in the right places won’t help your search engine visibility. Start with a keyword analysis to determine which keyword phrases will be most effective on your site.

Tools like Keyword Discovery and WordTracker will help you determine how much competition you have for specific keywords, and how often people are searching for phrases. It will also prepare alternatives and variations of your keywords so that you can cast a wider net. Once you have your list of effective keywords it’s time to put them in their place.

Titles

Titles are one of the few things search engine experts agree on. They’re probably the most important variable for search engine optimization (SEO). And yet, you may never have noticed them before.

That’s because titles appear not on the Web page itself, but rather in the aptly named title bar. If you’re on a Windows machine, this is where you see the minimize, maximize and close buttons. If you’re on a Mac, it’s where the red, yellow and green buttons reside.

You should front load your titles with your best keywords. In other words, “Recycled Paper Goods from XYZ Corp” beats “XYZ Corp: Recycled Paper Goods” for a search on “recycled paper goods,” all other things being equal.

Additionally, you should make sure that each page of your Web site has a unique title. Not only is a duplicate title a missed opportunity, it can be a red flag to the search engines that want to avoid indexing duplicate content.

Finally, make sure your titles read well. Titles appear as the big, blue link on most search engine results pages, and if they’re an unintelligible glom of keywords, people are less likely to click on them.

Headers

Headers and sub-headers are the “titles” that appear in the Web page. They are usually bigger and bolder than the rest of the text, and summarize the themes of the paragraphs that follow. Most experts agree that they carry more weight than the rest of the body copy.

Headers should reflect the title of the page, but shouldn’t be identical. This is because a variation of the title can help you cast a wider net, and also because duplication of title and header can appear “spammy” or “over-optimized” to the search engines.

Body Copy

Your page-specific, keyword-rich body copy is also important. You should be using your keyword-rich phrases and variations, too. Your copy also needs to read well. Bold and italics can help the reader scan the material for the most important ideas, and some experts believe this can also affect the search engine ranking of the page.

Intra-Site Links

Search engines give extra-weight to the words used in an intra-site link (from one page to another within your site) and–to a lesser degree–the words around the link. So, instead of “learn more” or “click here”, use keyword-rich links such as, “Southern Maine Landscaping,” or “Pesticide-Free Gardening.”

Meta-Descriptions

Meta-descriptions don’t appear on the page, but rather in the source code. The only time people will see them is on the search engine results page under the big, blue title tag link.

There’s some debate on whether meta-descriptions help with your rankings, (I think they have little to no value,) but a well-crafted meta-description on a search results page may get a person to click on your link rather than a competitor’s. Think of this as a short ad; what will compel a Google-user to click on your link?

Like title tags, meta-descriptions should be unique and reflect the content on the page.

Meta-Keywords

Got that time machine ready? Search engines give no weight to meta-keywords anymore. We generally recommend creating a list of keywords and using the same list throughout the site because they’re a giant waste of time!

In Conclusion

Of course, there’s a lot more nitty-gritty work that needs to be done in a competitive niche, but by placing your best keywords in the right places you can greatly increase your search engine visibility.

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