There is a lot of money in selling software, which means there are a lot of ad dollars flowing into spreading the idea that you need some secret tool to compete in search.

As explained throughout this series, SEO has moved beyond being a mechanical process to being something that is far more social and subjective. While many SEO tools focus on misinforming the user into thinking that there is a secret keyword density ratio to target (or some other such bunk), the truth is you need to build organic links to help make your site compete. No amount of raw analysis and number crunching is going to make good links automatically appear.

Where SEO Tools Have Value

Tools do have some value, mainly in helping you save time while researching things like…

• how strong competing sites (and pages) are based on their link profile and site age
• how much search traffic each site gets (based on value and volume)
• where a page ranks in the search results
• what the on page optimization for a page looks like
• the relative values of different keywords

A recent SEO tool sales letters exclaimed “Long gone are the days of clunky, standalone, research tools.” And in writing that, they are correct. Rather than paying to download some clunky desktop software, we thought that you should be able to have access to some of the best SEO tools at your fingertips – free of charge.

The Best FREE SEO Tool Suite

With that goal in mind, we created the SEO Toolbar. A free Firefox extension that saves you time and money every day by giving you access to a dozen keyword research tools, and dozens of other useful features. You can download it, along with our rank checker here.

If you do not have any SEO tools yet, then you are best off downloading our SEO Toolbar – which has been described as the Swiss Army Knife of SEO. You can download our full SEO Toolbar free of charge. Simply go to the download page and install it in your Firefox browser. We promise you will love it – especially when you see how much time it saves you!

Download it at http://training.seobook.com/download-your-free-seo-tools/

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

One of the bigger problems with learning in the field of SEO is that there are a lot of people who have a nugget of information. And they spread it far and wide without the proper context needed to evaluate the potential risks and rewards of any given strategy. So new SEOs end up thinking topic x is the most important, then topic y, then topic z. And then someone debunks one of those. Many false facts are taken as truths when the people with a nugget of information (that they found from some source) spread it as fact.

Accurate Answers Need Context

As the structure of the web changes and search engine relevancy algorithms change then so must the field of SEO. This means that the right answer to questions can change frequently, and information from many years ago may not be correct. Does PageRank matter? When I first got in SEO it was crucially important, but over the years other pieces of the relevancy algorithms (like domain age, domain name, domain trust, domain extension, link anchor text, searcher location, search query chains, word relationships, search personalization, other user data, result re-ranking based on local inter-connectivity, input from 10,000+ remote quality raters, and even a wide array of penalties & filters) have been layered over the top of the core relevancy algorithm.

If that sounds like a lot, it is because it is!

Yes, PageRank is important to driving indexing, but for rankings it is nowhere near as important as it once was. SEO has become a much more refined art. In an October 2009 interview, Google’s Amit Singal stated:

No one should feel, if I dismantle the current search system, someone will get upset. That’s the wrong environment. When I came, I dismantled [Google cofounders] Larry and Sergey’s whole ranking system. That was the whole idea. I just said, That’s how I think it should be done, and Sergey said, Great!

Great SEO Service is Interactive

Search keeps innovating – as it must. Each layer of innovation creates new challenges and new opportunities.

Not only does SEO strategy change over time, but it also varies from site to site. A large corporate site has a different set of strengths and weaknesses than a small local business website. The best SEO advice must incorporate all of the following

• where you are
• where you want to be
• the resources you have to bridge the gap between the above 2 (domain names, brand, social relations, public relations, capital, etc.)
• what the competition is doing
• your strengths and weaknesses relative to your market

That is why having an interactive SEO Community is so important. It allows us to look for competitive strengths and weaknesses, and offer useful tips that fit your market, your website, and your business.

Even Search Engineers Don’t Know All the Search Algorithms

The algorithms are so complex that sometimes even leading search engineers working for Google are uncertain of what is going on. Search engineers can’t know every bit of code because Google has made over 450 algorithm changes in a single year.

When I first wrote about a new algorithmic anomaly that I (and others) saw, I got flamed with some pretty nasty words on public SEO sites…a few of which are highlighted below:

The above people were:

• confident
• rude
• wrong

And that is part of the reason I stopped sharing as much research publicly. Sharing publicly meant…

• spending long hours of research and writing (for free)
• creating more competition for myself (from the people who listen to my tips and advice)
• watching my brand get dragged through the mud by people who didn’t have the experience or capacity needed to understand and evaluate what I was writing about (but who had enough time to hang out in a free forum and blast me).

Whereas if we share that sort of information in our exclusive member forums we…

• help our customers
• get to share information and learn from each other’s experiences
• don’t get blasted by the trolls hanging out on the public forums

Google’s Matt Cutts Confirmed I Was Right

In early 2008 Google’s Matt Cutts (one of the top 4 search engineers working at Google) wrote about the above issue that he did not know existed (even AFTER he was alerted to it).

But take notice that Matt would not confirm the issue until he claimed it had been corrected. So if you wanted to research that issue to better learn the relevancy algorithms it was already gone.

SEO professionals either captured the opportunity early or missed it. And, if they waited for the official word from Google, they missed it.

Back to PageRank

So PageRank…is it important? Yes, primarily for

• determining the original source of content when duplicates of a page exist
• selecting the initial set of results (before re-ranking them based on other factors)
• establishing the crawl priority and crawl depth of a site

But when determining which site ranks better than the next, link diversity is typically far more important than raw PageRank. And even though PageRank is supposed to be query independent, Google warps their view of the web graph where necessary to improve relevancy, like when locaizing search results:

Q: Anything you’ve focused on more recently than freshness?

A: Localization. We were not local enough in multiple countries, especially in countries where there are multiple languages or in countries whose language is the same as the majority country.

So in Austria, where they speak German, they were getting many more German results because the German Web is bigger, the German linkage is bigger. Or in the U.K., they were getting American results, or in India or New Zealand. So we built a team around it and we have made great strides in localization. And we have had a lot of success internationally.

The above quote shows how they look at far more than PageRank and links when trying to determine relevancy.

3 Common SEO Approaches

There are 3 basic ways to approach search engine optimization

• a mechanical strategy, where you try to outsmart the search engines and stay ahead of their relevancy algorithms
• a marketing-based approach, where you try to meet ranking criteria by creating the types of content that other people value and making sure you push market it aggressively
• a hybrid approach, where you take the easy mechanical wins and study general algorithmic shifts…but are primarily driving your decisions based on fundamental marketing principals

Comparing the 3 Strategies

For most people the first approach is simply too complex, risky, and uncertain to be worth the effort. Not only do the sites get burned to the ground, but it happens over and over again, so it is quite hard to build momentum and a real business that keeps growing. In fact, most of the top “black hat” SEOs have “white hat” sites that help provide stable income in case anything happens to their riskier sites. Some people are great at coming up with clever hacks, but most people would be better off focusing on building their business using more traditional means.

If search engineers have access to the source code and still don’t know everything then how can people outside the company know everything? They can’t. Which is why we take a hybrid approach to SEO.

The approach we teach is the hybrid approach – a marketing-based strategy with some easy mechanical wins mixed in. Our customers take some of these easy wins to help differentiate their strategy from uninformed competitors, and then use marketing principals to build off of early success.

The Paradox of SEO

In using a marketing based approach you build up many signals of trust and many rankings as a side effect of doing traditional marketing. If people are talking about you and like your products then you are probably going to get some free high-quality links. And this leads us to the paradox of SEO: “the less reliant your site is on Google the more Google will want to rely on your site.”

If you want good information to find out what is working and what is not, you can use our site search to find answers to most common SEO questions, and know you are getting answers from a trust-worthy source. The information we give away is of higher value than what most people sell.

If you still have specific questions about your site, and would like our opinions we recommend joining our online training program – which will give you immediate access to bounce your questions off of hundreds of the top SEOs from around the world. Here is your link to fast-track ranking success: http://www.seobook.com/4973.html

Thanks for letting us help you out. We wish you luck and great success in the search results!

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

Prior to creating the SEO Book training program I conducted a survey of SEO Book members. One of the questions was, “What is the biggest thing stopping you from improving your website rankings and traffic?”

The most common answer to that question was “link building”. If links are so important how do you build them? Here are some great techniques for providing content that people will actually WANT to link to:

Quality Links You Can Build Today

One of the easiest was to start building links is to submit your site to leading general web directories and directories in your niche.

Don’t just think of directories as being places that accept websites. Some of the best directories represent business partnerships and exist on sites like manufacturers you sell for, local government sites, or your local chamber of commerce. For example, Google lists some of the most popular Google Checkout business partners
http://www.google.com/checkout/m.html

• Would some of your business partners be willing to link to your site?
• Are there any trade organizations or local business organizations you can join?
• If there are no relevant organizations, could/should you create one?

Web Directories

This video covers directory submission.

Here is a list of some of the most well trusted online web directories

• Business.com – $299 per year for commercial listings.
• Yahoo! Directory – $299 per year for commercial listings. Free for non-commercial listings.
• BOTW – one time $299 fee (SEO Book subscribers get a 35% discount coupon)
• JoeAnt – one time $40 fee
• DMOZ – also referred to as the Open Directory Project or ODP. Free submission, but it may take a long time to get listed as it is ran by volunteers.

Here is a link to a $50 off promotional code for Business.com

SEO Book subscribers also have access to a list of a dozen more top web directories.

How to Influence Link Anchor Text

Link quality is one important factor, but another important factor is link anchor text. In this interview Google’s Adam Lasnik highlighted the importance of using descriptive anchor text:

Useful descriptive Anchor text can be great, not only for the user who gets a better idea what he or she is going to be clicking through to, but helpful for Google to better understand what that page is likely about.

You can’t always control how other people will link at you, but you can guide them. Most people refer to things by their official name. If your domain name is ChicagoDentists.com, and you are aggressive at marketing your site, then many people who mention your site are going to link at your site with Chicago Dentists as the anchor text.

Beyond your domain name you can also guide anchor text with the names you give articles, tools, and other content published on your site. If you want people to reference something on your site using a specific set of words then make sure those words are in the page title, file name, and in the product name. Creating a product logo helps influence anchor text even more.

Tons of Link Building Ideas

Beyond directories, there are many blogs and other websites that discuss your topic. Are there ways you can appeal to their editorial interests?

We made a list of 101 different link building ideas. Rather than publish them again here, we figured it would be best to give you a link to the list. As you can see from the list, many of the ideas are creative, others are weird, and some are downright profitable!

Tomorrow, we discuss easy ways to create content that others will spontaneously link to — to save you from having to do loads of legwork requesting links from other websites.

Killer Link Building Tools

Hub Finder

One of the research papers we referenced yesterday (Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment [PDF]) discusses topical hubs and authorities. We created a premium SEO tool for subscribers named Hub Finder, which helps you locate sites that link at many top ranking competing websites. The theory behind this is that these pages are often industry resources, and if they link at many competing websites there is a good chance they will be willing to link to your site as well.

LocalRank Tool

One of the research papers we referenced yesterday was a patent from Google about re-ranking search results based on how they interlink (LocalRank: Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity). We created a premium SEO tool for subscribers named Local Rank, which helps you understand how the top ranked sites in Google cross link, in an attempt to help you estimate how competitive your target keywords are, and what sort of promotional strategies competitors are using.

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

Yesterday we covered on page optimization, and mentioned how some people are too aggressive with keyword density. Of course copy that is dense with keywords likely sounds dense, and will not convert site visitors into buyers. But some automated content generation programs create content that is better than some page copy that people write.

Some major corporations, like Thomson Financial, publicly admit that they generate news reports using robots to write the content.

Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data. Thomson management likes its reporter robots so much that it has decided to expand the fleet.

The cost of creating content for the sake of it has dropped to ~ $0. In a market dominated by outsourcing and automated content generation, a search engine has to look beyond what we say about ourselves if they want to stay relevant.

Links as Votes

Part of what allowed Google to grow so influential so fast is that they use elegant link analysis in their relevancy algorithms.

Not all votes are counted equally. The more quality websites that link at a given website, the more that website is trusted when it links out to other websites. Google’s PageRank algorithm is designed such that links from the homepage of a leading university are trusted more than a link from a low quality website that links to other low quality websites.

In the image to the right, you can see that the top page passes 50 units of link weight, whereas the bottom page only passes 3 units of link weight. Both links are still worth getting, but the top one counts much more.

Link Anchor Text as a Relevancy Aid

If another site links to you saying that your site is about Chicago dentists then that link is interpreted as a vote of trust for your site in general, and it counts much more for the words in the link anchor text. Such a link would help you rank better for Chicago dentists and closely related topics.

Search Engines Follow People

Search engines only trust us if others trust us too. Search engines follow people.

Tomorrow we will cover an easy way to get great links.

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

A Ranking Dropkick From Google … From #1 to #1,000

In November of 2003 Google did a major update to their search relevancy algorithms, which was known in the SEO community as the Florida update. That update marked the day that SEO became hard. Prior to that point in time, on page optimization tips from many SEOs would have sounded something like this “use your keywords heavily everywhere.” But that update changed how on-page-optimization works.

“Over Optimized” = Spammy

Keyword density is an ineffective measure of relevancy, so excessive repetition is not an effective SEO strategy. Many (formerly top ranked) pages and sites that use keywords too aggressively end up getting completely filtered out of the search results.

Google’s Matt Cutts described the type of pages that disappeared in this video

Mix Up Your Keyword Usage

Your on page SEO strategy should use semantically related phrases and mix up your keyword usage. If your page title is “Chicago Dentist & Dental Care : Business Name” then your on page heading tag should be something like “Your Friendly Dentists in Chicago”.

If you are already a subscriber, this spreadsheet in our member’s area offers examples of how you might want to mix up your keyword usage
http://training.seobook.com/site-architecture-internal-linking

4 Ways to Include Variation in Your On-Page SEO Strategy

• Singular vs plural forms of a keyword
• Use synonyms
• Add in relevant keyword modifiers
• Change word order

Visualizing a Keyword Map

A cool tool called Quintura helps you visualize related phrases.

Type in some of your keywords and find out what keywords and keyword modifiers they think are related.

Google also offers a similar word relationship tool, and Microsoft’s Bing shows common related keywords directly in the upper left of their search results. In addition, most search engines offer a search suggestion feature (on their homepage, on search results, on search toolbars, and in the browser search box) which recommends popular related keywords directly in the search box.

Tomorrow, we cover how search engines like Google decide which site to show in the Number One position

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

Here’s a simple tip that could easily save you 12 months of work:

Setting up an effective SEO campaign in a competitive market can be a long drawn out and expensive process. Worse yet, if you are focused on the wrong keywords, you might need to start over again after you find out that your site is not producing the results you want.

An easy way to avoid needing to start over is to test the value of keywords before you heavily commit to your SEO strategy. Buying pay-per-click ads (PPC) from search engines like Google (AdWords), Yahoo (Search Marketing), and Microsoft (adCenter) allow you to see what keywords have the ability to drive traffic to your site.

Learning The Hard Way

When I was new to the search game a client of mine told me that he wanted to rank for a list of fairly broad keywords. We were slowly moving up the search rankings, but he was not seeing much return. SEO is an investment game and it takes time and capital to build momentum. He had a rather low budget though, so it was taking months to see little response.

I could tell that things were not working out as well as either of us planned, and suggested we shift his budget over to AdWords to see what keywords are most valuable for his business. It turns out that the keywords he told me he wanted to rank for had very little value to his business. If I bid more than 15 cents a click for any of them we lost money. But there was a line of products he sold that had some related keywords which people converted on at a great rate. We could afford to pay $2 a click for some of these keywords and still make profit.

In late 2004 we adjusted his SEO strategy to match what worked well on the pay per click ads. When the economic downturn happened in 2008 and 2009 many competing businesses went out of business. Had we not used AdWords to test his keyword strategy his business would have likely went under as well. But he still ranks at the top of the search results because his SEO strategy was focused on what keywords worked well for his website.

Test a Variety of Keywords

Not every keyword you try will be profitable. But if you try a variety of keywords tightly related to your business you are far more likely to succeed than if you only bid on 1 keyword. Most businesses should test at least 5 to 10 different keywords, while retail oriented businesses should test a much larger set of keywords, driving traffic to the most relevant page whenever possible.

Some tools, like our keyword list generator, make it quite easy to quickly create a list of related keywords by entering locations in one box and core keywords in the next.

Track Conversions

All the major PPC ad networks have built in conversion tracking tools which show you what keywords and ad groups convert well. You can also pass the conversion value through to these tools to know exactly how much business came from each ad campaign and each keyword.

In the above groups I used obtuse campaign names to prevent you from knowing what site this data is associated with, but note that

• the highest volume keywords (listed as “core”) were associated with most of the transactions, but they also had relatively high conversion costs (since they were the most obvious keywords to target)
• the keywords that we bid much less on (listed as “cheap”) still were not very “cheap” once you factor in the cost per conversion (the traffic was available at a discount rate only because the keywords were worth less)
• the longtail keywords (listed as “individual”) did not create a ton of sales volume, but they were cheaper clicks and they tended to have a fairly high conversion rate when compared against the core industry keywords (using a keyword list generator like the above and mapping keywords out against URLs helps pick up a lot of this under-priced traffic)
• the ad group with ad copy catering toward big spenders (listed as “custom quote”) on the surface looks more expensive per conversion, but…
  • the average order size of these customers (not shown) was much larger than the average order size of other customers, yielding far greater profit per conversion
  • some additional orders were taken over the phone (so the cost is even less than what was shown)

If tracking conversions is hard, you can place a link to a coupon (or some other free offer) on your landing page and view a click on that coupon page as a proxy for conversion and user intent. Some more sophisticated strategies involve setting up different 1(800) phone numbers based on the marketing channel or keyword.

Where to Start Testing With Pay Per Click Ads

For most businesses the best way to start pay per click advertising is to test your ideas on Google AdWords and then carry the best results over to Yahoo! and Microsoft. You can find coupons for bonus credits on Yahoo! Search Marketing and sign up to create advertiser accounts on all 3 major search engines on this page.
http://tools.seobook.com/ppc-tools/

There are a lot of smaller ad networks that sell traffic as well, but most of them have low traffic quality, so they don’t help you save money and they do not offer representative market feedback. For most advertisers the smaller ad networks are a complete waste of time.

This training module is a free primer to help you get started with pay per click marketing effectively http://training.seobook.com/ppc-search-engine-marketing

Apply AdWords Data to Inform Your SEO Strategy

Find out which keywords have value for your business, and set up your site structure based on the top performing keywords. Our member’s area offers an example spreadsheet on how to structure a website
http://training.seobook.com/site-architecture-internal-linking

Tomorrow we discuss “on-page optimization” — how to use your keywords on your webpages.

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

Yesterday we discussed the precise targeting offered by keywords. But even if a keyword is valuable, it might not be valuable to your business. For example, if you are a dentist in Chicago, it is not worth the effort to try to rank for the word dentist. Why? 99% of the people searching for that phrase do not live near Chicago, and are irrelevant prospects. What you would want to rank for, if you were a Chicago dentist, would be things like

• Chicago dentist
• Chicago dentists
• dentist in Chicago

Understanding Searcher Intent

Even within a niche like dental work, there are more specific types of dentists people search for, like implant dentist and cosmetic dentist. If you offer these types of services you would want to rank for keywords like

• Chicago implant dentist
• cosmetic dentist in Chicago
• etc.

Free Keyword Tools

There is a wide array of free keyword tools on the market. My favorite keyword tool is the SEO Book keyword tool – it is fast and free, powered by Wordtracker, and allows you to quickly export your keyword data.

Every keyword tool has some data errors or anomalies. Don’t expect the tools to give you exact numbers, just rough ranges. If you are in doubt as to the accuracy of one keyword tool you can compare it against other keyword tools. And you can use an AdWords ad campaign to test keywords – a topic we will discuss tomorrow.

Here are some additional cool keyword tools

• Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool
• Google’s Traffic Estimator
• Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool
• Microsoft’s Ad Intelligence (which is a plug-in for Microsoft Excel)

If you have any questions about any of these keyword tools and are a subscriber please ask in our keyword tools forum.

Gather More Keyword Ideas

• Anything people would likely search for to want to buy your services is a potential keyword.
• You can look at emails from customers or customer questions as potential keywords.
• If you have been publishing a site for a while and have analytics data you can use the analytics data to find keywords.
• You can analyze competing sites looking for keywords.
• There are literally hundreds of ways to come up with keyword ideas.

Group Similar Keywords

After you get a list of keywords start grouping related keywords together…

• You should be able to target related phrases like ‘Chicago dentist’ and ‘dentist in Chicago’ using a single page.
• Chicago cosmetic dental work is a different concept than ‘Chicago dentist’ is, so you should create a separate page targeting that that term and why prospects would want to buy that service.
• You can use Microsoft Excel, Open Office, or Google Docs to start aligning keywords and related modifiers with your URLs. We have an example spreadsheet in our member’s area here
  http://training.seobook.com/site-architecture-internal-linking

Tomorrow, we cover how to use PPC ads (such as AdWords) to discover the value of keywords to your business.

Cheers,
Aaron Wall

P.S. If you are already a subscriber, this article offers more background advice on keyword research http://training.seobook.com/keyword-research-suggestion-tips

Have you ever wondered why Google is worth over a hundred billion Dollars? Or why a single click from Google can go for as high as $50? The reason is the precise targeting offered by search engine marketing.

How Most Advertising is Broken

Most ads try to club you over the head and beat you into submission. Search engine marketing is a completely different form of advertising because rather than trying to tell you what to do, the searcher requests to see the ads and views them as relevant to their wants, needs, and goals. Advertisers bid to show up where they are relevant – when they are irrelevant. If they bid for irrelevant keywords they lose money on every click.

2 Approaches to Marketing

Ads on websites with no targeting can have little to no value. Search traffic, which is laser targeted, is worth over 30x as much. [1]

For display advertising, Credit Suisse estimated that in 2009 the average CPM will be $2.39, down from $2.46 in 2008.
…
As for paid search, JPMorgan projected that for every 1,000 searches, $75.33 would be generated from ads in 2009.

Would you rather hunt for customers, or make yourself available to customers hunting for you? SEO allows you to tap the value of search, with your customers finding your business when they need your products & services!

Research the Market Value of Any Keyword

The cool thing about search engine marketing is not only is it so targeted, but it benefits search engines to share valuable keywords with prospective advertisers. This means you get to spy on the relative search volumes of different keywords, and how much your competitors are willing to pay for keywords.

Using the Google Traffic Estimator Sandbox you can view how much Google’s estimate the of keyword value at

For example, here is the estimated value for credit card and credit cards

Notice how there are 3 different listings for each keyword. They are based on Google’s AdWords ad match types, and can be used to help you know the relative search volumes between different types of searches.

1. Mystique theme by digitalnature | Powered by WordPress represents searchers who searched specifically for the keyword credit card with no other modifiers in it.
2. “credit card” represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for a keyword that contained credit card in it, including people who search for keywords like best credit card.
3. credit card represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for any keyword that contained the words credit and card somewhere in their search string, including people who search for obscure keywords like payment card without any credit.

Enter some of your keywords here and see what Google thinks they are worth. Please note these values are rough estimates, but they are a good starting point.
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

1. list down 5 important keywords to your business
2. enter in all 3 match types for your keyword
3. pick your language & markets
4. do not enter a bid price (this way Google assumes you are willing to pay the market rate)
5. hit enter & get your results

The above tool estimates the value of traffic to a single paid Google AdWords ad, but most searchers click on the free search results, so the keyword value to your business may even be higher than estimated by the above tool.

Tomorrow we cover other useful keyword tools as well as the keyword research and discovery process.

Cheers,

Aaron Wall

PS: This free article offers more background on why search is such a powerful marketing channel.

Without an understanding of these principles and a system to incorporate them into everything you do online, you will not get the success you are seeking.

On the other hand, learn how to effectively utilize them and you will start dominating niches all over the Internet driving thousands of visitors to your site on a daily basis.

So what are the principles that rule search engine rankings and how do I improve mine? Here they are:

1. Relevancy
2. Popularity
3. Originality

Relevancy

Relevancy is something defined as having relationship to. For example if your website was about golf, related content would include information about such things as golf clubs, golf courses and golf lessons.

Content about anything other than the topic of the website or related topics would not score for relevancy, thereby having no chance of ranking in the search engines. Search engines check your site for relevancy.

You need to be right on topic for whatever it is you are targeting with the content you create. A final word of caution about relevancy: Relevancy alone will not rank your site. You could have the most highly relevant, best original content ever written posted at your site, however if there are no sites pointing to it, it will never rank in the search engines. Relevancy does not work without the concepts of popularity and original content.

How To Increase Search Engine Rankings and Drive Website Traffic with Relevant Content

The first step is to choose the keyword or keyword phrase you want your content to target. Let’s say you’re trying to get a higher ranking for this keyword phrase, the topic I am currently writing about, “Improve Search Engine Ranking”. Firstly, you would want to find what people are searching for and specifically target that keyword if you want your content to rank for that phrase.

Make sure you include the keyword phrase in the title of the article, for example your title could be “Strategies To Improve Search Engine Ranking”. Always try to put the keyword or keyword phrase as the first few words of the article title. Always remember to use the keyword phrase, several times throughout the article. Finally make sure your content remains 100% relevant to the keyword phrase.

Popularity

Popularity works together with relevancy to improve search engine rankings. Popularity is based on two key measures:

1. How many sites link to your site

A site’s popularity is measured firstly by the number of sites that directly link to your site.

To demonstrate popularity let’s take a quick look at YouTube. YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, Why? All links and embed codes taken from YouTube and embedded on other sites, whether that be Facebook, Myspace, a blog, a sales page or a website, creates an automatic link back to YouTube where the video is hosted. Every time someone shares a YouTube video a link is created.

With the number of videos shared Youtube gets thousands of new incoming links daily. This is one of the reasons why YouTube videos rank very highly on the search engines. Their site is super popular.

2. The Popularity of The Sites Linking To You

The more popular the site linking to you is, the better the score given by the search engines.

How To Create Link Popularity To Improve Search Engine Ranking and Drive Website Traffic

The more incoming links to your site the more popular it is. It is therefore always important to syndicate the content of your site (with a direct link to the content on your site), to as many sites as possible. The Internet presents a host of sites where you can post your content for free to increase your search engine rankings, including popular high ranking sites like article directories, blogs, social bookmarking sites, video sites, press release and social network pages.

Originality

Originality basically refers to unique content. In simple terms the search engines ask the question, is this same piece of content all over the Internet? As an example if I took a highly relevant and popular article from my site and posted it to hundreds of sites it would not rank high in the search engines as it would no longer be deemed unique.

How To Maintain Unique Content And Share It To Improve Search Engine Rankings and Drive Website Traffic

There is no doubt that spreading your unique content across the Internet is important for driving traffic to your site. The secret is to make several unique versions of the same information all with a backlink to your original article posted on your site. Spinning is a popular term used to describe the process of changing the titles, key words and phrases throughout your article to make several unique versions. Placing these all over the Internet with a back link to your site will improve rankings.

Follow the steps above and I guarantee you will see an increase in the number of visitors to your site.

About the Author: Chris Hopkins – To learn more about how you can improve search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your site it is important to learn all you can to rank highly. Visit the following link to access my Free Marketing Training and start ranking today.