If you are only focusing all your resources on popular search terms you are losing money… lots of it.  The conventional wisdom for developing a keyword campaign is to focus on the words that are most intuitively associated with the product or service being sold.  Then content, links, and HTML tags and other methods are employed, narrowly focused to most forcefully attack the organic ranking for those particular phrases.  Results are measured in the rankings achieved from this campaign and success or failure noted by an appearance in the top five, or first page of search results.

Huge money and time can be spent on this idea that top rankings for your business’s most popular keywords are the most effective way to have a direct and positive effect on organic traffic.  This is not entirely true, and according to new research while the top rankings on your most popular keywords would be a great traffic generator, the bulk of the traffic may lay in the long tail traffic.

For growing websites, opportunity may come from not simply working to promote the pages that you are trying to rank gain rankings for but by aiming at the long tail through focusing on increased publishing in your area. Build a list of topics that consumers in your space will be interested in, making sure to include even peripheral subjects.  If you have the information that consumers are looking for, you can de-emphasize the necessity of ranking for your primary keywords and rest in the long tail traffic that comes through publishing a larger quantity of great content.  This doesn’t mean that you should ignore the top keyword terms or that you should cease planning for your keyword success.  It does, however, means that its not enough to just focus on a rigid keyword list.  Capturing traffic from the so-called ‘long tail’ phrases by building content on a wide range of topics is a great way to reach your traffic goals.

Articles and blog posts are some of the best ways to build this type of diversification.  By putting quality, authoritative and and unique content on your website, and by keeping it updated regularly you will be in the best possible position to capture the consumers searching for your product.  The more content, the wider and stronger your net will be, next, all you’ll need to do is make sure you know how to process all that fish.

Having content that is not unique published on your site, whether you know it or not, can have a seriously negative effect on your business.  Duplicate content is one of the most difficult things that search engines have to deal with. The storyline goes something like this: Bots run around the internet. They look at content, index it so that consumers can find it when they need to. But what happens when the bot finds the exact same content in multiple places? Occasionally, the search engine won’t know which article is the original. It doesn’t want to index the same content twice, since displaying multiple rankings in the search results is counter productive for search engine users, and therefore, bad for the search engine. Thus search engines end up effectively penalizing by simply not including people who use duplicate content in the search results.

The effect of duplicate content, is best looked at ‘before and after’ any penalties or reduction on content value are assessed. Case studies have reported drops in traffic up to 80% for affected sites. While adding content from free sites, or other content publishers, can seem at first to bolster the overall quality of your site, it may be secretly hurting and preventing you from reaching your full ranking potential.

Penalties can Include:

- Site delisting (Very unlikely without other more serious transgression)
- Unindexing offending pages
- Less Indexing of your site in general
- Reduces value of your links
- DMCA regulation suit filing (which can cost time and money)

Constant-Content spends a lot of money and time ensuring that our content is unique and unpublished. We do this so you don’t have to wonder if the content you buy from us is duplicate. In fact, when you purchase an article for full rights or unique rights, we guarantee that it is unique.

One Page, One Keyword Idea

Though perhaps a little basic, try this: Decide that your goal for each page is to gain a ranking for one keyword idea, which boils down to 2 or 3 tightly focused keyword phrases. When you are building links to a page, both internal and external links,  and know exactly which phrases you’re targeting for the page, the result is an clear vision that makes it easier to complete the necessary work. This focus makes creating a bookmark for the page in Delicious, or fashioning a tweet to get the news about your new page into the Internet’s collective consciousness, intuitive. By no means is this a call to stuff repeated keywords into each page, but having the target keyword phrase (or phrases) in mind can help keep the desired outcome of the page more clearly defined – and search engines appreciate clarity.

Some people argue that one keyword phrase is a good place to start. Others argue that restricting yourself to a single keyword phrase will lead to unnatural writing (see the comments at the other end of this link), and because that writing isn’t enjoyable to read, it will cause prospective customers to bounce from the site. As is often the case, the best policy is to find a compromise between the two ideas. Keep each page tightly focused around one particular keyword idea while you maintain a natural and easily readable content-writing style.

 

Tight Focus Simplifies Promoting and Optimizing Content

When your pages are tightly focused in their goals, the actions required to promote and optimize the page become less daunting.  If you can create a site map that outlines every page that your site has (or you plan to add) and list the keyword idea for that page and the 2-3 keyword phrases that you’re targeting, you’ve created a firm understanding of what the goals are for each page.  While the search engines may send your visitors from any number of keyword phrases, having a solidified plan for what you’re aiming to rank for is putting the foundation in place to build your organic search marketing upon.

Looking at this from another angle: If you know what keyword phrases you hope to rank for, lining up the writing projects becomes easier. Have you been trying to rank for too many keywords on the same page? We can help with that. Log in, submit a request for custom content and purchase articles you need to start ranking for some of your keywords ideas.

Testing for Conversions

The second standout presentation from IMC Vancouver was given by Jared Waxman from Intuit who related some of the company’s experiences with testing. Intuit has built a testing framework that enables them to accomplish one day testing for new ideas. Quick testing means that they are able to try plenty of ideas and quickly reject bad ones.

Ten Pieces of Rapid Testing Puzzle

Loosely paraphrased the ten steps for quick testing are:

1. Create a testing strike force that has complete access to the site and the ability to make changes where they are needed.
2. Appoint one “approver” for what goes up. Have a single person approve the tests to expedite the decision making process.
3. Create one straightforward criteria to measure test success.
4. Report at the “go live” point of the test and then again when the results of the test are in. Between these two points, let the test run unhindered.
5. Develop ideas fully before implementing tests. While the testing team can tighten ideas, these ideas should be developed to their fullest potential before reaching the testing team.
6. Base test ideas on a reasonable theory and customer data.
7. Manage deadlines with quality and reduce scope as necessary to facilitate running tests and getting results in one day.
8. Take ideas from anywhere and everywhere, but allow the test team to maintain control of those ideas.
9. Maintain a flexible testing calendar. When one line of testing proves unfruitful, an open testing calendar will allow you to change your strategy and implement a new line of testing.
10. Practice one day test sprints. One day test sprints allow for the testing of many ideas and make testing a part of regular business rather than something only done once in a while.

Faith-Based Business?

Both Jared and Avinash emphasized that much of the work that we do on websites is unnecessarily faith-based. There’s no need for this approach. Available tools (like Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, which are both free) tell us what actions site users are taking and provide information to help us hypothesize what changes we can make to improve the function of the site. All that’s left for us to do is to create the tests to ensure changes are positive ones and use the results of those tests effectively and to our advantage.

Don’t Suck

The IMC Conference really brought in some great speakers this year. A couple of the talks today were really spot on. The first presentation was by Avinash Kaushik, who spoke about the topic of analytics and understanding your users. His Number 1 Rule? “Don’t Suck.” Such relevant and a happily irreverant advice set the tone for what was to follow. He exhibited pages related to High Speed Internet PPC Campaigns, which highlighted how many local high speed providers are shooting themselves in the foot by not helping people find what they need.

Hurray for Data

People who market online have a great advantage over offline marketers, who must use expensive means to gather data. Online marketers are just swimming in low-cost data. Anyone who wants to can add analytics tracking to their site and, in no time, have a wealth of data at their disposal. Unfortunately, using the data effectively is still pretty tricky.

Segmentation: Making Sense of Mountains of Data

Segmentation is the act of breaking your analytics down into groups that you can better understand. One of the segments that Avinash discussed were the loyalists (people who visit more than 3 of your pages, i.e., they are really exploring your site). Limiting your analytics results to only this group helps you to see where the interested people are going within your site. In addition to using segmentation, you can examine the top ten pages that are visited on your site and calculate at the bounce rates for those pages. The pages with the highest bounce rates are prime candidates for redesign. People are bouncing for a reason. Maybe that reason is fixable!

You’re Probably Wrong

One of the great benefits of working in the online world is the ability to find out quickly when you are wrong. Knowing where you can make improvements is great – it lets you hypothesize what problems those people who come to your site are encountering and how you might be able to fix those problems. Avinash has a great example in point five (cinco) of this behemoth blog post of just how inportant the testing part of this process is. Getting inside the human mind is no easy feat and, try though we might, our plans to divine what kind of page and content will help sites make sales seem almost sure to fail. Testing is the only way to be sure our hypotheses are correct!

The Internet Marketing Conference is setting up shop in Vancouver for September 16-18 and we’re going to be heading to Vancouver along with the folks from RevenueWire to take in the conference. I’m particularly hoping to connect with Gillian Muessig from SEOMoz and a number of publishers who might be in the market for the written word. The keynote addresses look great, presentations from Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, should really help focus our ideas on where we need to move next to keep the site growing and moving forward.

If you’re coming to the conference and are interested to meet up, let me know!

Constant-Content is heading out to New York this week to participate in Affiliate Summit East!  We’ll be there through the whole event from August 9-12.

Were going to be exhibiting at the Affiliate Summit Meet Market, so if you’re an affiliate in the market for content to build out your websites, swing by our table (#73) and strike up a conversation. We’re friendly! We’re going to be kicking off a promotion at Affiliate Summit for new customers so if you’re there come on by and pick up one of our promo cards for 25% off the first article that you purchase. (Note to Writers: Don’t worry we’re taking this portion out of the CC cut, it will have no impact on the amount that writers earn for each sale).

If you’re heading out to Affiliate Summit in New York leave a comment and let us know. I’d love to meet up and discuss any content project that you might have on the go.

Keyword Research

Keyword Research is a difficult task. Anyone who has tried to drive eyeballs to their website can vouch for this fact. It’s also well known that increasing traffic is not necessarily going to benefit your site, but increasing well-targeted traffic – people who are qualified to be interested in your product or service – will almost certainly benefit the bottom line. With this in mind there is little point in adding content to a site without making sure that you have defined your keywords clearly and are working to include them in your content, internal and external linking, and PPC campaigns. To fail to do this would simply dilute the effectiveness of this type of business development.

 

Local Words – Fresh Traffic

One of the essential components to good keyword development is knowing the local parlance and phrasing that surrounds your topic. For those immersed in their subject matter, it can be difficult to see their subject from different angles, but to develop a great keyword campaign, tapping into markets other than the market that you’re familiar with can be a big help. People in different countries use different word patterning and their languages exhibit specific linguistic nuances. This can present an opportunity to unlock traffic from new parts of the world as your keyword understanding expands. In the same way that much of the fun of traveling can center around experiencing cultural differences, engaging a multi-cultural business model will inevitably illuminate differences. One favorite example of local languages conveying the same meaning with different words include the greeting equivalents, “How you going?” for Australians and, “How you doing?” for Canadians and Americans. Another example can be seen in the the grand ‘biscuits‘ vs ‘cookies‘ confusion. This suggests that to pick one or the other is to err; incorporating multiple voices into your keyword strategy will allow your campaign to include potential clients from other locations.

Online marketers know that this difference in language can mean the difference between catching the eye of your target market and missing it. People often search the internet using spoken English, so understanding the way that a product is spoken about across a broad spectrum will allow for a larger and still well-targeted sales campaign. Finding how keywords are used in common vernacular in other regions or languages is difficult, but it is possible to get help.

 

Listening for Keywords

To help us develop more sophisticated methods for creating keyword lists, Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI Services, spoke to the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle about embracing some new techniques. One main thrust of his presentation was the idea that listening can be used as a form of keyword discovery. Rather than simply letting Google/Wordtracker/Fill-in-your-keyword-discovery-tool-here recommend keywords based on your understanding of a topic, he recommended visiting places that people gather to talk about your subject – forums, blogs and Twitter – to “put an ear to the ground” and learn the language of people in your subject. Sifting through these conversations, you can learn the words people are using to describe the products and services that you provide from their own mouths and start to build keyword phrases that highlight the local vernacular of people already active in the subject area. This technique expands beyond just gaining a better understanding for the search terms in a field that you’re not familiar with. A great first step to building a keyword list to focus on in a new niche is to find out what the experts and influencers are calling your products and services. Find the experts and influential publishers in your niche and consider their publications as fertile ground for finding relevant keywords for topics in your niche. This will give you access to a nicely refined set of keyword phrases to focus on. As Gab made clear, with highly targeted keyword phrases, the competition decreases, and whether you’re doing PPC or organic search marketing, less competition is good.

With over a billion people on the Internet there’s a whole lot of searching going on. Sometimes it’s easy to think that we’re all searching for the same things using the same words. We’re not. We’ve all got our own brands of English and our own ways of describing things that might be unique to us, our town, our country, our group of friends. It’s both mind boggling and exciting.

So what are the takeaways for webmasters, after listening to Matt Cutts‘ talk? One message that came through pretty clearly: after you’ve got the basics of good site concept and its architecture down, having some really fantastic content, videos or tools on your site should be the next focus. While there are still some search engine ranking gains to be had by applying yourself to the technical side of the optimizing your site, the message indicates that every webmaster needs to start looking long and hard at creating fantastic stuff for their site that users will find valuable and interesting.

To recap: having the technical side of things in order is certainly important, but if you want to realize high search engine rankings, it is essential to spend the time, effort and money to publish information on your site that is timely and helpful for the user.

Another take-away for the day came out of the Search Ranking Factors for 2009 talk, during which Rand Fishkin spent time unpacking the idea that search engines like to include freshly published content in their search engine rankings. Lots of times people are searching for news about a particular subject, and consequently the search engines will rank newly published information highly in order to satisfy the searchers’ (possible) need for recently published articles. This brings home the fact that there is a need to keep adding content to your site, and it shows that opportunities are available for sites that are regularly adding new content.

Lot’s of other great info is coming that I’m looking forward to sharing!

If you’re interested in following the events in Seattle, check out the #smx tag on twitter!

If you’re coming to SMX Advanced and are interested in getting together to talk about content, organizing content projects or anything else for that matter, you can get in touch via http://twitter.com/constantcontent or through the support@constant-content.com email address and we can arrange a time to get together! I would love to meet as many people who use the site as possible and get feedback about your experiences with purchasing content through us.