Home --> SEO Traffic --> 3 Steps to Better SEO Performance
3 Steps to Better SEO Performance
Why do almost all SEO methods work for some people and not others? It’s all in the details. There are 3 critical and often overlooked things that everyone needs to know about SEO that will ensure you get the best rankings possible, higher click through rates, and no penalties.
Search Engine Optimization is like an art form. Like all great arts, understanding what’s required to shine far above the crowd is by far the most important thing to learn. Many will attempt to make a career from their respective arts, but only a small few will ever have any real success.
The same can be said for SEO. The big difference though is that the SEO stage is much larger and can accommodate a much larger cast. Making it big in the art of SEO is far more achievable.
The one thing that remains the same for both is the reason why those few are so successful. The answer is actually much more simple than you’d expect.
It’s because in both cases, the artist understands why some things are more important than others. When it comes to SEO there are many myths about what is important and what isn’t. Working out the facts is often time consuming and tedious.
So I’ve gathered up all the best information and found the 3 things you should know about SEO to get the best rankings and traffic possible.
1. Competition is Good, Improves Profitability Outlook
You might be thinking I’m completely crazy but have absolutely no doubt that competition is not something to run away from. Ask yourself this: Would I rather be targeting keywords that have few searches, and fewer buyers? Or would I prefer to target phrases that have high traffic volumes with people who are already selling products and services?
If people are searching for it, then give them what they want. If a lot of people are trying to rank for it, GREAT! It means that it’s a profitable place. Where there is competition, there is cash.
You can try to be a trail blazer and go after all the hyper-extended long tail phrases to find that one gem that no one has found yet. Good luck with that. It makes far more sense to find what the people want, and give it to them.
Competition tells us one very clear message. That people want it, and others are having success providing it. No matter if your trying to sell a product, build a list, or simply drive traffic to a landing page or blog. High competition tells you what the people want and which phrases to go after.
2. Content Is No Longer King
If you didn’t think I was crazy before you will now. Content might be king for blogs, for building readership, and RSS subscribers but that’s where that magic stops. Your content will still need to be compelling and entertaining enough to engage and connect with your readers, but content is not what got them to visit. When it comes to SEO your content is no longer king.
Headlines That Attract Searchers, and Drive More Traffic!
Your headline is 100 times more important to SEO, and visits for that matter, than anything else. The only way to attract visitors is to have compelling and attention grabbing headlines. The page and blog title is your short form headline. Whereas your description is the long form, or extended version of your headline.
In both cases, it won’t matter if you get a first place ranking in the SERPs, if your headlines suck, you might as well be on page 100 because no one will be clicking through to your site.
So trying to pound more keywords or even trying to write titles for keywords rather than titles that attract people, is wasting a lot of time and effort. Try writing your headlines to grab attention and see if you can fit your keywords in so that it reads naturally without diluting the headline.
If you need help on writing great headlines that almost always work check out this series How to Write Magnetic Headlines on CopyBlogger. I know it’s a little older, but the information is as current today as when it was written.
3. Canonicalization Done Right Gets Site Out of Sin Bin.
Canonicalization, or having only one version of your site available to the spiders, has been talked about to no end. I won’t just rehash tired old information. If you need to learn about canonicalization you can read this article by Matt Cutts. But I still see people making one major mistake that effectively destroys all of their other efforts.
If you don’t get it right the search engines, particularly Google, will view your site as one big pot of duplicate content stew. The reason is because most CMS systems, webmasters, and blog platforms will at some point reference your default page, instead of your default site.
This means that your home page, the one that has all that link juice from those inbound domain links, has 2 URL’s indexed that point to the exact same page. Here’s an example:
Joe Blog is working to fix his canonicalization on his blog. He sets his Google Webmaster tools to prefer the www version of his site. For good measure he uses a .htaccess file to set a 301 redirect for any non www request to be forwarded to his www version of his site.
Joe Blog then decides to install a pluging that uses some PHP code to call the default page. Since the default page is index.php the URL generated is http://www.joeblogs.ext/index.php which is the same page as http://www.joeblogs.ext. This now leaves him with a duplicate content issue on the home page.
The simple solution is to add a 301 redirect and forward any requests for any part of the site calling index.php to redirect to the same location without the index.php in the url. Do you have a 301 on your default page?
This might seem a little ‘newbie’ but just checking around some sites I can see just how many people are making this horrible mistake. When you think about it, an entire site could be penalized simply by overlooking this important but subtle change. And it’s like…newbie…information.
Take some time and focus on some of the finer details on your site. SEO is a complex animal, and making these 3 simple changes to your blog might just be what you’ve been looking for.
Related Posts
12 Responses to “3 Steps to Better SEO Performance”
Leave a Reply
Start an Online Business FREE
- Win a Cash Prize - Logo Design Competition
- How To Install WordPress - The Right Way
-
7 Ways to Stay Focused and Achieve Powerful Results
-
Which Social Bookmarking Sites Bring the Most Traffic?
- Interview With International Blogging Prodigy - Yaro Starak
-
Eric B.: I used to use the Post Ideas plugin for WordPress....
-
Andrew: I ran the competition at DP but no one was able to...
-
Sunwukong: Did anyone win?...
-
Walter: For most of us it is easier to dream, we lose noth...
-
swasa
22. Oct, 2009
Wow ! very nice info to perform better.Thanks for sharing and providing.
InternetHow Blog
24. Oct, 2009
Number 2 is so true. You can write articles just for the search engines and don’t really give attention to its quality. However, if you make it obvious like overloading with keywords and etc, search engines like google can pick these up and ban your site. But, you don’t have tp produce great articles to get visitors from search engines.
Andrew
24. Oct, 2009
I find it amazing how many webmasters are out there that still don’t get that content doesn’t drive the traffic. When you look around you can see top ranking sites the have horrible layout and content, yet they get top placing plus high click through rates because they pay attention to what is in the title and description.
But I agree, you don’t make it obvious because Google can detect things like that.
Robomaster
29. Nov, 2009
I have to say I disagree to some degree. While optimizing your titles and webpage to by search engine optimized is important, if you don’t have good content, the traffic you get will go to waste. You have to have a proper balance of SEO and quality content to get the readers and keep them.
If you only work on SEO, you’ll be doing all the work yourself and you won’t last.
If you only work on quality content, nobody will ever read it and it’ll go to waste.
If you work on both, then your quality content will get read by the few visitors you got by your own SEO work, and eventually you will have enough readers that they’ll do the work for you by linking to your posts, digging and stumbling your content, and making you seem enough of a influence to get featured on sites like Lifehacker or Problogger.
Andrew
29. Nov, 2009
I’d say that we actually are in agreement. However I tend to separate the components. IMO getting rank is one part of SEO, getting clicks is another part of SEO. Keeping the visitors in my view is not an SEO technique. Keeping visitors on your site is more about marketing and your skills as a writer than it is about SEO. I think too often this line gets blurred and I believe that the two components should be viewed as separate components in an overall strategy.
But I do agree that in order for a site to be a success it needs a solid foundation in both SEO and great content.
Jay Medina
24. Oct, 2009
Very good article! As to what i had read from other article Branding has to play a big role your website. The better the brand name and the better the details and eye candy features sure do will have more clicks on your website.
My Latest Blog Post:
Why You Should Never Use Call Waiting
Casey Brazeal (north and clark)
30. Oct, 2009
Andrew, what would you say is a good percentage of total traffic to a blog coming from search? I find that mine bounces around like a pinball, and I am often surprised when it goes up or goes down. Currently I average about 15% I feel like stronger SEO could bring that number up. But, I would like to know what you think.
Andrew
30. Oct, 2009
Casey that’s a really good question but also a tough one. In my opinion it’s all relative. For instance, how many pages have been indexed, how well are you ranking for your target keywords on other metrics. I’ve read on some blogs that claim to have more than 80% of traffic from search and then others that are very popular that have less than 10% search traffic because of sheer volume of tweets, direct traffic and RSS feeds.
So having said all that I’d say if less than 50% of your traffic is from search then you could do some work to improve that. Also that because it’s relative that you could decide to set yourself some targets and work towards them.
The bottom line is that the more page you have indexed, and the more that rank in the top 10, the more traffic you’ll get.
Casey Brazeal (north and clark)
30. Oct, 2009
Any ideas about what keywords I should target, or how I can tell if my pages are indexed?
Andrew
30. Oct, 2009
Keywords are a matter of competitive and popularity research. You need to find out what people are searching for as well as which sites are ranking for those words/phrases and what you’ll need to do to beat them out. I’ll see what training materials I can find and send over to you.
To find out what’s been indexed use the site: operator in your search query. site:northandclark.net but also Google webmaster tools will tell you exactly how many pages are indexed based upon an XML sitemap.
Robomaster
29. Nov, 2009
How long should you expect to have to wait before getting any significant amount of search engine traffic? My blog is less than a week old, has gotten a rush of stumbleupon traffic (7000 uniques over the last two or three days), is being retweeted quite a bit (average of 10+ retweets), yet only has around 50+ incoming links.
How do I gain more? How I create content that gets linked to?
Andrew
29. Nov, 2009
It really depends on how well optimized your site is which determines where you land on the SERPs. But more than that is how compelling your headlines are. The better the title and description, the more likely it is you’ll get clicks. Believe it or not, it isn’t that hard to rank very high, even #1 position, but it’s a waste of your time if your headline and title is poorly written. You might get a #1 placing but you’ll get minimal CTR.