Comments on: 3 Steps to Better SEO Performance

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:34:20 +0000

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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:29:46 +0000

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.

By: Robomaster

Robomaster — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:52:51 +0000

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?

By: Robomaster

Robomaster — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:48:25 +0000

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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:43:27 +0000

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.

By: Casey Brazeal (north and clark)

Casey Brazeal (north and clark) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:42:13 +0000

Any ideas about what keywords I should target, or how I can tell if my pages are indexed?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:54:58 +0000

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.

By: Casey Brazeal (north and clark)

Casey Brazeal (north and clark) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:11:41 +0000

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.

By: Jay Medina

Jay Medina — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:36:02 +0000

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

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:20:48 +0000

I find it amazing how many webmasters are out there that still donâ€™t get that content doesnâ€™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 donâ€™t make it obvious because Google can detect things like that.