When I hear things in the SEO or internet marketing industry I always like to check them out for myself. I am a typical questioner, despite the authority of the source I have to go out there and trial it anyway, this is sometimes a good thing and a bad thing.

I have always been a stronger believer that the only links that can possibly send weight are those that are indexed. If Google doesn’t index a page surely it can’t possibly consider any of the links on it are valuable right? Well my opinion is, WRONG!
Links that Google finds but decides not to index definitely count, in fact I strongly believe you can rank a site based on these type of links.

Take a look at your webmaster tools, are all the links Google is finding indexed?

As you can see I have

Ok Ok, so what if webmaster tools are showing links that aren’t indexed? This proves nothing.

Time to take it to the next level then, I don’t like outing sites for using dodgy techniques, as long as the techniques aren’t outright spam I commend them.

Anyway, without giving the website away I’ll give you some basic info, I am sure if you do a little investigation you’ll find the site, anyway here we go.

On Google.com there is a site ranking on the first page for the keyword ‘lawyer’, the site isn’t much to look at but it wasn’t there 6 months ago and the link profile is limited to say the least.

Let’s take a look at the links doing a search on open site explorer;

Around 80% of the link profile is made of links just like this, profile links, bio links, signature links.

Don’t get me wrong links like this are no secret, I have built a number myself and ranked sites using them, however it makes a total mockery of the statement ‘Google doesn’t count none indexed links’.

Now I am not suggesting for a second that you should build a link profile based on un-indexed links, however if you need to build up anchor text then why not get them from wherever you can? If a webmaster can rank for the keyword ‘lawyer’ using these type of links you can literally use them to rank for anything.

I am going to discuss something that is usually seen as a big no no when it comes to SEO and have to point out at this point that what I discuss in this article is my own perspective and opinion, it is not the opinion of Branded3 or any of their associates.

Paid links is one of those really annoying subjects and my thoughts today are based on last week’s SEOmoz whiteboard Friday where Rand discusses how they purchased links, got higher rankings and then quickly took them down before Google came along and wiped them out!! Rand also reefer’s to another website that was band for buying a handful of links to rank better.

Now I hope by making this statement Google doesn’t come along and wipe my blog out but I think it’s important that people understand and know the truth;

Do High Ranking Websites Buy Links? Yes!

Do they only buy a couple to beef up their campaign? Depends…

Do paid links work? Yes!

Should I buy links? Depends….

Ok you’re no clearer than you were before right, let me have another go….

Over the last 6 years I have worked with all kinds of companies, brands and blogs all competing in different verticals, some massively competitive others not so.

Out of all those clients I have to say I have only ever come across a few that don’t actively engage in link buying, were not just talking about 1 or 2 links here were talking hundreds, if not thousands.

You get out your best link analysis tool and check out some of the link profiles of some of the biggest brands, see anything suspicious?? I am sure you will.

Ranking on top of Google is big business, people don’t want to take chances with their income therefore due to competition are forced into paying for links! It’s really that simple – competitive markets require companies to buy links to dominate and anyone that says anything else is plain lying.

Should I Buy Some Links

Well let’s start with the obvious questions ‘will I get banned by Google?’ and the truth is “I do not know”! The reason I don’t is because I have never seen a site get thrown out of the index for ‘buying’ links. I have seen sites penalised for spamming, linking to dodgy neighbourhoods, hiding content etc… But never seen anyone penalised for buying links.

I have seen websites that sell links suffer from a loss of PageRank (not lost rankings just the ability to pass PageRank) but have never seen a link buyer punished.

So the answer to will I get punished? Probably not, however, as always there are a few exceptions.

- If you go max out your text link ads account, you may raise question marks

- If you get some guy from digital point to buy you a thousand links for $50 this also might not be a good idea

- If you spam everyone in the UK with ‘I want to buy a link’ – not such a good idea

- If you buy thousands of links from irrelevant resources there is a good chance you’ll get slapped

- and if you hang around on digital point looking for sellers your putting your website at risk

All of the above are really stupid ways to go about link building/buying whatever….

How Do I Buy Links?

I am not going to go into specifics here as I don’t want to paint a target on my head. All I will say is if a link looks like it is bought then it will be penalised whether money passed hands or not, a natural looking link is never going to cause any issues.

The main issue with link buying comes with the acquisition technique, if your careless you may be punished.

I think Google generally deals with paid links by docking PR or preventing sites that sell links from passing as much.

Your competitors will be buying links and you’re not going to compete with them using viral content and article marketing, will they ever get found out? Who knows, but the truth is it doesn’t stop multi million pound organisations from doing it.

First of all apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of weeks, work has been busy and the World Cup has pretty much dominated my evenings

So now England have been dumped out shamefully I thought it might be a good idea to discuss something pretty positive that has happened to me over this World Cup period, I NOW RANK IN THE TOP 5 FOR ‘search engine optimisation’!!!

Now that I have gained a glory ranking I thought it might be a good idea to discuss how I got there. I work with clients daily that throw massive budgets at SEO and not surprisingly get results very quick, however my blog has had very little in terms of budget thrown at it and it goes to show you can make it to the top working cheap, the results will come a lot slower though.

Altogether it has taken me 18 months to position my website there; I did a lot of the work in the early stages and as my site has grown in trust the anchor text from article directories and blog carnivals have really started to count.

The truth is, in the last 3 months I have done very little link building with most of my links coming socially and none of them anchored with the target keyword (except maybe one site wide a fellow SEO kindly gave me).I genuinely believe working to a tight budget does not exclude you from achieving results as long as you’re consistent and gradually increase your investment.

Anyway enough bragging, what I want to do now is show you my exact approach to ranking SEO wizz where it currently is (4th ‘search engine optimisation’ 13th ‘seo’),

Quarter One

The first 3 months of any blog are painful, you spend 90% of your time writing and 10% reading, however there were a few fundamentals I wanted to achieve in the first Quarter, ones that I knew would see me well in the future;

- I wanted to create a hook, so I developed some tutorials, this would ensure a nice flow of natural links

- I wanted to have at least 20 posts optimised for long tail target keywords

- I made it a must to at least get one link back to each deep page/post

I knew things would be slow at first as I have created many affiliate blogs and they have all started the same way.

Quarter Two

My blog now had enough content and I could really let Google know it existed without risking the sandbox. The idea was to get as many links to the blog as possible with preferential anchor text.

- I decided to write 100 articles

- Submitted them through Article Marketer (Now content crooner)

- Mixed the anchor text between my main target keywords search engine optimisation, seo techniques, google seo, seo consultant, seo (All of which are now on the first page of Google bar ‘SEO’ however watch this space.)

This wasn’t about getting the blog to rank, it was more about building a bulk amount of links so that I could get new content indexed faster and give myself a little bit of an anchor text push.

Quarter Three

Traffic was now picking up; Google was beginning to give me a little authority so it was now time to turn up the heat. To do this I decided to write some posts that would ensure me a way of getting links in the long term, I am talking serious viral content.

There is an important definition to be made here, some people consider viral content as a way of driving masses of traffic, the problem is going viral on stumble (which I have done quite a few times) does not necessarily mean masses of links, in fact very often it doesn’t mean any. I wanted to create content that when people did find it they would link to it.

- I posted on Bing SEO vs Google and did a small case study (I rank no.1 for Bing SEO and gain new links every week with no effort)

- I posted about Link/Ranking correlation (Linked to by SEOmoz and has delivered 1000′s of visitors and recognition)

- I also completed a monster post on SEO content writing which ranks very highly and is still my third most visited page!!

This is the back bone of my website, the posts that give a return over the long period and not just an instant traffic boost. Every website should create this type of content/product/resource, something that is going to continually get new recognition.

Quarter Four

I was really beginning to rank well now but still needed more diverse links; I had some high quality links but needed a more diverse profile. To accomplish this I;

- Submitted to blog carnivals taking advantage of preferential anchor text

- Joined new forums adding my links in bio’s and signatures (not spamming, genuine forums)

- Attempted some cross linking with other bloggers (Didn’t particularly work)

The above gave me a better profile and pushed my PageRank to 4; however I was still sitting on the second page for some of my major terms.

Quarter Five

Now I had a diverse profile and some really good quality or high PageRank links, however it was time to bulk up the quantity, to do this I:

- Created some reciprocal link partners with good online buddies

- Commented on do follow blogs with ‘top commenter’ widgets (I stopped this as it didn’t really work)

The increase in the sheer quantity of links lifted me onto the first page of Google for a lot of terms; however I still needed to add something to the mix…

Quarter Six

I knew in order to reach the top five I need those ‘trusted’ links from websites long established on Google and the only way to do this was to grovel!

- I leveraged all my blogging connections and friends

- I offered links from my other sites in return for a link to SEO wizz

I only managed a few however these highly trusted links were very effective, pushing my website to the top of the tree!

You see??? No Magic, no ridiculous techniques just hard work and a smart well thought-out plan and anyone can do the same, given the right skills and commitment.

What’s my plan moving forward???

Well I can’t give everything away; however I will let you know when I’ve done it

Thanks to all who read, link to, promote and support SEO wizz, reaching the top wouldn’t have been possible without you guys.

Cheers

OK I know you will all have read about Google Caffeine going live and yes I realise this post is old news and I am never going to rank for the keyword, however even though I have read a lot about the new update there seems to be very little in terms of how it may affect our SEO efforts, so as well as talking about the update I also wanted to think about how this may affect rankings and general SEO efforts.

I think the best place to begin this is to summarise how Google was indexing pages and how caffeine improves on that process.

Google in the Past

When you search Google you are only seeing the indexed part of the web. Google’s index was made up of layers, obviously there are layers that were indexed quicker than others probably based on PageRank, however to update what we see when we perform a search, Google would have to perform an entire crawl of the web before it could update the results, this obviously caused delays, even up to 2 weeks according to Google’s official blog.

This lag in refreshing the SERPS meant fresh stories and information were being missed, hence Google’s emphasis on up to date information using tweets, Google news and blog results.

I won’t go into this anymore, you can read more about the technicalities on the official blog and a nice little video from Google spokesman Matt Cutts.

Caffeine has Landed!!!

Now that caffeine is in place it means our fresh new content is indexed as a continual process, Google doesn’t have to go out and index the entire web before updating your new blog post, instead it can fire it into the main index as it finds it. ‘Caffeine’ means more alert, switched on and ready to pump out the freshest content on the web.

The update has meant we have a 50% fresher index and means users will be able to better find the most update content for their particular search query.

So caffeine is great for users but what could it potentially mean for SEO’s and Internet Marketers that rely on Google traffic?

Some Thoughts Going Forward

Now, the official word is that Google Caffeine does not affect ranking factors however there are suggestions that the data collected through caffeine could be used to optimise the results even further.

Quicker Content = Quicker Traffic

Yes it’s that longtail thing again……

The fact is if you are writing a lot of fresh content and optimising it for easy win longtail traffic, that traffic should come through much quicker than before. Of course there are a few proviso’s on this, caffeine won’t be picking your new content up if your website lacks authority, so don’t neglect your link building as this will ultimately decide how efficiently your content is picked up by Google.

The best ways to get your content indexed faster is by either submitting to Google news and/or submitting new blog/news entries to a handful of bookmarking websites (which you should be doing anyway).

Are older pages going to suffer?

The truth on this is nobody really knows, if ranking factors haven’t changed this surely means the best optimised page regardless of ‘freshness’ will win. However, we have seen some interesting results across all our clients keywords with ‘fresh’ news stories making it into the top 5 on Google almost instantly with very little in terms of links, however these are really authoritative websites such as the Independent.

Does this mean we need to refresh and update old content? Not too sure yet but one thing to keep in mind is, if you hold keyword positions for terms that are written about in the media often, expect wild ranking fluctuations.

Quicker insights into your link growth

What we have to remember is that when Google crawls your page it also analyses who you link to and who links to you. This information could now be gathered and applied even quicker than before, therefore those 1000 new links you bought 10 minutes ago could potentially be discovered by Google almost instantly and signals acted upon within minutes.

This can also work in a positive way as Google will be able to apply fresh links from a viral campaign even quicker than before. When we launch viral content we usually see the effects in rankings land a week or 2 later, with caffeine this gap could be significantly decreased.

I am not going to lie, this is all speculation, either way I think caffeine is a positive step in the right direction and shouldn’t affect your ‘ethical’ SEO efforts other than maybe putting more emphasis on fresh content than before, if that’s possible .

Any further insights are more than welcome.

This post is aimed at those in the SEO/Online Marketing Industry, if you have no interest in the industry you might find this a little dull, if you do read on

I have numerous requests now asking for a post along the lines of “a day in the life of an SEO consultant” or “a day in an SEO Agency”, obviously there is an increasing amount of interest in the Search Marketing industry and people want to know more about how it works.

I guess the main issue with writing a post like this is that every agency, every consultant and every in house team will differ in their approach to SEO and Online Marketing in general. The type of clients you service has a massive impact on the techniques you use and the resources available. Some clients literally just want to see a report every month, other clients want to be actively involved in the processes, and neither is wrong, just different.

So in this post I want to give you an honest insight into the processes and departments at Branded3, of course some things I can’t disclose in the interest of the company but I will try and give you the best insight possible into roles, processes and responsibilities.

Link Building

I think the best place to start is link building, the link building team are the back bone of any good SEO outfit, and these aren’t just spammers who get links here, there and everywhere. Our link building team are looking for ‘quality’ links and we have weekly meetings discussing link strategy and creative new ways to get links, if we wanted to just spam everywhere we could outsource it for a few hundred dollars, that’s not our aim and if you’re a serious SEO outfit you need to start producing quality.

When brainstorming link building for a particular client we consider the following sort of questions:-

- What does our client have to attract links?

- Does anything need creating in order to attract links?

- What types of websites are relevant to our clients’ product?

- What other products are relevant to our clients?

- What leverage is needed to acquire the links?

- What is the competition doing?

We try and get the whole SEO department involved in this process in an attempt to be as creative as possible, we have a select time each week to discuss the link building requirements of every client we service and tend to stumble upon new ideas every week.

Just a quick note on leverage……

I know after reading the above points some of you are going to be asking “hmmm, leverage = Paid links???”………. I am not going to turn this into a paid links debate but I will say this, If a link looks like a paid link it is going to be devalued whether money passed hands or not. So if you have a blogroll link that you got from a good friend and they have 20 other blogging friends that pass good anchor text, the chances are these will be classed as paid even though you never spent a dime.

So, with regards to leverage and link acquisition in general, all I will say is ‘be smart’.

Typically our links builders will perform the following tasks;

• Competition Analysis
• Viral Marketing Brainstorming and Implementation
• Create and maintain online relationships
• Source relevant links agreed upon in client meetings
• Report to Head of Search on rankings, link acquisitions and quality details

We have a very strict quality process with regards to acquiring links taking into account:

- Pagerank

- Moz Metrics

- Inbound Links

- Outbound Links

- Indexation

- Trust

- Relevance

These are obviously very broad but it gives you a good idea of what we look for in a typical link.

We tend to avoid using our link building team for acquiring directory links, article links or press releases, not because these types of links are worthless but because we can outsource them relatively easy whilst still having a say over the quality. We differentiate between premium links and ‘content/user generated links’ they all have a place but we prefer to use our internal resources to develop quality link acquisitions.

On Page Optimisation, Keyword Research and Site Auditing

I and Patrick are both firm believers in on page optimisation and the effects it can have on the traffic of any website.

We have an ‘on page team’ who constantly work on enhancing the content and general optimisation of our clients. The tasks we complete are varied but the main aim is to better target page keywords and to fill in any gaps with lucrative terms, what Patrick refers to as ‘gap analysis’.

A typical site audit involves the following;

• Keyword Research
• Page optimisation – completed on every page of a website
• Site Architecture
• URL Structuring
• Internal Linking
• Content Brainstorming

Some of these practices merge and every client has different needs with regards to content and on page issues, however when a new client relationship begins we always start with an audit making sure everything is in place ready for the link building to begin.

Our content team work extremely close with the Pay Per Click side of Branded3 ensuring the keywords we are targeting are the most profitable and that traffic potential is as accurate as possible, often even if we don’t take care of the PPC for a particular client we ask for access to their Adwords campaign.

Pay Per Click

At Branded3 we class ourselves as ‘natural search’ experts, however we also get involved in the search marketing side of things, our intention was clear when we launched ppcagencies.org.

Our aim with Search Engine Marketing is probably the same as every other agency, we are constantly looking to reduce costs and increase conversions producing the best possible ROI. We see PPC as an ongoing management task, much like SEO, removing unprofitable keywords, increasing ad copy and landing page relevancy and ensuring our clients ads are seen at the most profitable times in the most profitable locations.

We report and discuss on PPC activities weekly so we can quickly get on top of any account issues.

Our main platform is obviously Google Adwords, however, we do use Facebook and MSN ads with limited effect if I am honest.

The Many Meetings

Yes here at Branded3 Search we are no different to any other agency and have a diary full of meetings including;

- Client Updates and Reports

- Traffic and Conversion Analysis

- New Business Meetings

- Brainstorming and Planning

- One to One Consultant Meetings

- Team Meetings and Feedback

- Training and HR

It can seem like a lot of time spent discussing instead of doing but if carried out efficiently meetings are essential to the success of the business. They help us prioritise, plan and implement, often you will find that someone has a great idea about how we can improve a particular campaign but unless they have a formal procedure in which to put forward their ideas they will never do it. These meetings allow us to stay on top of the major goals for each client and encourage creativity on all levels.

A Typical Day

A typical day for anyone in the online marketing industry will depend on their position, the clients they work with and the type of work they do (agency/in house/consultants). I head the search team at Branded3 Search and will give you a little insight into what a typical day for consists of;

8.15am – I try and hit the office at this time, however some of my colleagues may beg to differ . I spend the first hour of every morning going through my check list of urgent tasks and emails; this is an attempt to prioritise for the day and to ensure I complete what I’ve set out to do. Often they will be quick fixes such as emailing a client or answering a client query, however sometimes they can be large tasks such as hunting down an indexation issue or dealing with a severe rankings drop, these have to be scheduled in to be completed that day or week depending on urgency.

10.00am – We have a meeting with each member of the team to discuss the clients they are dealing with and how the campaign is doing in general (usually a weekly meeting). We discuss things such as;

• Links
• Traffic
• Viral campaigns
• Brainstorm new ideas
• Set action points for the month

We also discuss any potential issues or requests from the clients that are outside the norm….

12.00am – Lunch time!!!! This is usually spend at my desk with Fish and Chips Thursday being the highlight of the week!!

1.00pm – After lunch I like get my hands dirty with the link building, highlighting those clients that need an extra push that particular month and going out there and trying to create some fruitful relationships. I think it is important for any Head of Search/SEO Manager to get involved in the day to day search work. Not only does this keep them skilled in the practice but also allows them to better understand the issues consultants and analysts may be facing in their roles.

2.30pm – I will now look back to my task list and begin to work down them, the ones in the afternoon are the more time consuming issues and they can vary from sorting out bad press, problem solving on page issues, brainstorming viral ideas, advising on new page set up, diving into Google Analytics, communicating with PR companies and agreeing new terms with link partners. These are just a few of the many tasks I could deal with, I think that’s why I love the industry so much, it gives you the chance to work with a different problem every week, particularly within an agency environment.

4.30pm – I like to spend the last 30 mins to an hour checking in campaign process and seeing what links we have managed to acquire that particular day. We don’t have link targets as such; however what I will say is that I would prefer to see 2 Quality links at the end of any one day rather than 10 low quality links.

5.00-30pm – At the end of every day I spend time making sure I am ready for the following day with tasks clearly defined and important contacts recorded in the diary.

Of course there are a multitude of other things I do and times when office hours extend beyond the norm, however this should give anyone who is thinking about entering the industry a broad enough overview.

I realise not everyone that reads this SEO wizz is in the industry but hope this has been interesting to those that are.

If there are any posts anyone would like to see on here, just let me know, always happy to look at putting any sort of content together.

If you are serious about SEO and increasing search traffic then it is important to track it, not just by logging into your analytics everyday but by keeping in depth records of which keywords are driving traffic and any abnormal fluctuations.

Working in an SEO agency it is important to track this for clients, you may increase a clients traffic tenfold but how are you going to prove the increase was due to your efforts?

One of the best ways to keep track of search traffic is to break it down into longtail and broad terms. At a glance you can quickly see any increases or decreases in traffic; this will help you to quickly jump on any opportunities or issues.

Using Google Analytics

In my experience there is no better traffic analysis tool than Google Analytics. It gives you so many ways to break down traffic and spot changes that it is literally a no brainer.

Using Google Analytics to track longtail traffic is fairly straight forward; however let’s just define what we mean by longtail;

Many people consider longtail traffic to be 3 words or more, however I and most experienced SEO’s I know consider longtail traffic to be any keyword that drives small amounts of traffic but has no real competition.

On that note let’s go over to analytics and break this down a little, the first thing you need to do is pull up the keywords your website was found on in the last month, then use the advanced filter at the bottom of the keywords to highlight any keywords that sent less than 5 visits.

These will all be longtail keywords, however in order to get an idea of growth and how they’re performing you need to see data from previous months;

Analytics allows you to view a direct comparison to previous months and allows you to see how your traffic is growing, or not.

It will also allow you to quickly see which keywords underperformed compared to previous months;

http://www.seowizz.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/comparisonkeyword.png

Now because I am a little bit of a geek and an obsessive SEO I like to keep track of this on a month to month basis, this allows me to see how my site has performed over a longer period of time and I use excel to help me track monthly increases and decreases with regards to search traffic on all levels;

The graph works by calculating the increases and decreases in traffic based on the amount of searches a particular keyword receives on a month by month basis.

From the above graph (which is based on SEO wizz) we can see that traffic was down in December all round with every type of keyword taking a hit, we can also see an increase in traffic in March on the keywords driving 200 or more searches a month, this correlates well with my first page rankings for “SEO” and “Search engine optimisation”, I no longer rank first page for SEO but when I did it drove a lot of traffic.

More importantly and for no apparent reason I saw a massive drop off in longtail terms or terms bringing 10 or less visits per month, this is in line with the longtail drop off reported by SEOmoz a couple of weeks ago.

Breaking down your traffic month by month noticing differences in search traffic on all levels will help you understand what part of your SEO strategy is working and highlight algorithm changes, like the one reported by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget.

If you’re serious about SEO this is a must, how you monitor it is up to you but it is vital that you break down the different keyword levels.

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about sitewide links or links in footers. Many experienced SEO’s and internet marketers have openly slammed them as being spammy and carrying little in terms of link juice and authority; however the truth is they are very effective links in terms of both ranking and building up your overall website authority.

Now from what we can see at Branded3 Search there has definitely been an update in terms of sitewide link profiles with many major players losing rankings because of their “sitewide” heavy profile. You only have to look at the SERPS for ‘SEO’ and ‘search engine optimisation’, the top ten are 60% different from what they were 3 months ago, in the UK at least.

Despite what seems to be an obvious attack on sitewide links they still remain effective if used properly and in moderation. SEO wizz has around 600 domains linking in and I can honestly say only 5 or 6 are sitewide links, if I was advising a client I would never want more than 1 in 30 links being a sitewide, this is just my opinion, SEO has never been an exact science, all I would say is use sitewide links intelligently.

So now we have the introduction out of the way, what is the best way to use these types of links for maximum impact?

The Homepage

Your homepage is always going to be the strongest page of your website, however overloading it with sitewide links isn’t going to help your rankings or traffic in the long run. Everyone knows anchor text is key to high rankings but what they don’t realise is the rules that apply to anchor text don’t apply to link profiles.

For example….

Your link profile needs to be diverse with lots of unique domains pointing back to your pages.

Anchor text does not need to be diverse – If you had 400 links pointing to your homepage passing massive juice but with the anchor text as your domain name, the chances are you’re not going to rank, however throw a couple of anchor optimised sitewide links into the mix and you could well see yourself in the top 5.

I demonstrated this a month ago, I haven’t really targeted the keyword ‘SEO consultant’ in my anchor text, my site has good authority so I switched my title tag to include it, this got me to the second page with very little anchor text links, however when I placed just 1 sitewide link optimised for the keyword, this was enough to push me into the top 3.

So…. Concentrate on building a diverse link profile and use sitewide links smartly to boost your anchor text.

Deeper Pages

Many do not realise yet or understand the power of strong links to deep pages. Many of the posts we write or guides we put together are filled with longtail search queries, low hanging fruit that’s just waiting to be plucked.

I have blogged before on how to optimise our posts to target these but a healthy sitewide link can make all the difference.

Now these are very hard to achieve but let me explain a little, if you can get just 1 quality sitewide link to a deep page of your website you will rank in the top 5 for every longtail keyword on the page. I have been fortunate enough to work with clients who have huge amounts of traffic (6 million uniques a month) and something that is key to success is the sheer amount of external links they have pointing to the deep pages of their websites.

I had a client who built 2 sitewide links to all their ‘listing’ pages and in 1 year they were receiving 250,000 unique visitors from Google every month.

So if you can, go for it, hit those deep pages with a sitewide and your traffic will rocket on that particular post.

To round up then, sitewide links are not evil, they aren’t going to get you penalised, however if your link profile is made up of hundreds of them expect Google to devalue some. If you or your company are in the business of adding a footer link in your clients websites, optimised with the anchor text of your choice, expect that to stop working real soon, those days are over.

Yes the title sounds obvious right? Of course optimised content and traffic equate to more traffic duh! But where do analytics fit in?

Well I have banged on enough about long tail keywords on this blog but guess what? I am going to do it again as this is a really simple technique for increasing traffic almost immediately by doing a little research in your own analytics.

So enough talking head over to your Google analytics and get your last month’s worth of keyword data. This will show you all the results you were found on over the course of the month but we need to do something a little extra before we begin to dig a little deeper.

Scroll to the analytics filter below the keywords;

Select advanced filter and choose visits. What we want to do is check out visits that brought us 20 visits or less over the month. These will probably be very long tail keywords that we rank for and with a little bit of tweaking we can increase traffic on them.

Let me go through an example, I have filtered the results on SEO wizz and have come up with the following;

Like most people long tail keywords drive around 60% of my total search traffic, as I look down the list one immediately stands out;

A quick rank check on an incognito window shows I rank 4th for the term “writing seo content”, I am probably only receiving around 5% of the traffic on this keyword and with a little optimisation I can probably rank second or first, remember there is a huge difference between ranking first and anywhere below;

Information from SEOmoz’s recent post;

As you can see ranking second will double my traffic on this keyword and ranking first will increase it nearly 9 times!!! So I currently get 19 visits but can probably add 20 to that a month with 30 minutes worth of work. If I carry out this sort of optimisation on all long tail keywords I can probably increase traffic from 5749 to 40,000 a month.

Now don’t get me wrong this is very labour intensive but just imagine the benefit if you do a couple of hours per week? You could be increasing your traffic significantly every month. Next steps?

Find the keywords > Optimise the page > Fire a few internal links with anchor text > Fire a few external links with anchor text!!……. Easy

Just a quick note to everyone that has emailed me in the last few weeks, I have been run off my feet at branded3 hence the lack of responses; however I still love you and will reply asap.

I always worry about posting new found research as some clever dick always pops up to tell you they discovered it in 1999, however I have noticed something in the rankings recently that has made me re think Google rankings.

The Story

OK so I decided a couple of weeks ago to rank for “SEO consultant”, just something I fancied really, not the most competitive term.

Anyway….. I have obviously been keeping an eye on the rankings over the past few weeks on this particular keyword and a few more as well and there has been some pretty dramatic trends in the rankings.

One day I checked and I was 7th for “seo consultant” refreshed and I was 15th, refreshed again and I was 4th!!!

It’s not just that keyword either, I searched “search engine optimisation” I was 11th, refreshed and I was 26th and again and I was 7th.

Now rankings have always been up and down but this was a little crazier than usual.

Webmaster Tools Update

So…. Google announce the webmaster tools up date only a few days ago which explains that they are now tracking click through rates in the keyword sections of webmaster tools.

Now I don’t know how accurate these figures are and they seem to differ quite a bit to Google analytics, however the data it presents is interesting.

Just take a look at the below screen shot;

Now I am only using “bing SEO” as the example but the data establishes a few things across multiple keywords.

The first thing you notice is that out of 320 impressions I only ranked first 260 times (these impressions figures aren’t accurate as I usually receive around 600 visitors on this keyword a month), this means I don’t rank number one, I only rank there around 70% of the time.

The Old Theory

The old SEO theory determines your rank based on page optimisation and the number of links your page/domain has, the only thing affecting rankings would be competition in Google’s algorithm. I now think this is outdated and wrong, over the last 6 months I and other SEO’s have seen massive fluctuations in rankings suggesting a new way of ranking sites and determining traffic.

My Theory

Well, this is what I suspect, Google have confirmed nothing yet or any other SEO authority but the evidence I have seen strongly suggests rotational rankings.

Let me explain…. You do a search in Google on your main key term and you rank 4th, so you rank 4th??? Wrong you may rank 4th in that instance but you could complete the same search 10 seconds later and you rank 10th, a huge difference not only in ranking but the traffic too.

So… Google determines the rank of your site determined on page factors and links and then ranks you in a range of positions could be 5 – 10 or it could be position 2 to 4 pages back, depending on the person searching, there location, personalised search, time of day.

Ultimately how well optimised your site is determines how often you rank in a top position.

So your aim is not to rank in the top 5, which is now impossible, your aim should be to rank their most of the time.

What Does This Mean?

It means quite a lot.

1 – Determining traffic in a certain position is now impossible

2 – Your ranking position can change every second even if you’re searching on the same IP using an incognito window on chrome

3 – You can never say I rank number one, but only I rank number one most of the time

You see there are so many websites competing for the same space that Google has no choice but to use a rotational system like this and for all we know they may use the click through rate to decide whether your ranking gets better or worse, maybe.

I’d love to know everyone’s thoughts on this and if anyone has noticed these changes.

Testing keyword difficulty has never been a straight forward task, what do you test with? Links in? Links to domain? Search Volume? Awords Competition?

The truth is that all of them contribute toward the ‘keyword difficulty’ factor.

This is another post when I am going to sing the praises of the SEOmoz crewe, since they stopped delivering SEO services I have noticed a huge investment in their tools, mostly in making linkscape data more reliable but also tweaking the current tool box.

A tool that was announced this week was the new keyword difficulty tool, it breaks down all the metrics for you, so if your an SEO professional there is no better visualisation tool for client proposals, in my opinion.

Just check out some of the features:-

Adwords Data

Not only does the tool give you a difficulty factor in the form of a percentage (the higher it is the harder it is to rank) but it also gives you the relevant Adwords search including broad and exact match.

This is all the information you really need when trying to determine the potential of target keywords however, it doesn’t stop there.

Page / Domain Authority Metrics

The tool nicely shows the page and domain authority of the top ten sites, letting you see exactly what you’re up against.

Page authority is the SEO metric for the overall authority of any given page on the web based on link juice and authority, domain authority is based on the entire links to the domain as a whole.

Break Down Of Links

As we should know now, all links are not equal and we need to be aware of how many links our competition have, also how much authority those links are passing.

On top of that we now know that the amount of links to a domain is almost as strong a determining factor as the amount of links to a particular page.

As we can see the tool nicely breaks down the link data showing how many unique domains are linking to each of the top ten results.

Now if you’re not an SEO or internet marketer your probably not going to pay for the tool, however if you are an SEO professional, in my opinion the tools are the best on the market.

This particular tool can be used for more than just helping clients visualise their competition within their niche, it can also be used for mass research on the SERPS for multiple keywords.