Basically it enhances your long tail results. What I did was this. I opened up Urchin and adjusted the "dates" range to cover the last year. Then I opened up search terms. There are over a million in my data base. (of these 800,000 were for only one visitor each) The I filtered for my MAIN keywords one at a time. For example I could type in "Computer" to the filter and I would have a list of all the search terms that used "computer." I then snag the top 100 by exporting a spreadsheet and use it to create a new page called "computer index" This page is just a list of the top 100 long search terms and make each a text link to the web page on my site that I would like people to visit if they type in that search phrase. Why 100 terms? Because Google doesn't like to see more than 100 links on a page. I usually end up with 80 or so that remain when I am finished, because some of the top 100 are not relavent to my site, or contain phrases that will attract people that I don't want to attract. This does two things, first it tells Google that I have a page that matches the long key phrase because it is a text link to this page. Second, it gives me a landing page with tons of words that are related to my business, giving me great latent semantics.
Very interesting post. I have always checked my logs for keywords and tried to built some extral links with some of the information. I am not a big fan of landing (link) pages though.
Good tips, I never check (in fact, i don't know how to check) my logs .I will take your advice and check my logs right away
Neither am I a fan of landing pages. I hope that noone ever lands on those pages, though some do, I have to admit. Sometimes when I type into google the search phrase on my "index" it lists both the content page and the index page, but most of the time it is just the content page, or two of my content pages. And I still consider this white hat. After all, I am not trying to suck people into my site on false pretences. I don't use words that are not pertinent to my site. I am just trying to point out that I have exactly what they are looking for, whether free information or for-sale products. In fact, when I find a phrase on my list of 100 that isn't applicable to my site I deleted it, no matter how popular it is. Since these are mostly long-tail key phrases they are rarely used again by searchers. This is why I don't get many referrals to the index pages. But I am usually in the top 3 on google for these phrases (they are long tail after all). Again, the point is to point google toward the content pages, not to get people to come to the index pages. I don't use advertising on the index pages. Doing this with phrases that were actually used by people that found my pages intensifies my long-tail results. And it works best if you have log analysis software that will let you find and rank these search phrases easily. best regards wiz
Hi, I'm new to this and have a few questions: 1. Does Google make a note of the IP address of pages that link to a site? If I have many domains on one server and each of those domains links to another on the same server will Google know and ignore them? 2. You say there's a limit to the amount of links on a page - is there a limit to how long the links can be? (how many characters?) I've seen lots of SEO stuff that uses paragraph-long text links - what's the optimum limit? Cheers, pondlife.
1. Sure it does. You won't get as much credibility linking from the same server but that isn't what I am talking about. It doesn't matter that I am linking within my own URL, because I am not trying to raise my PR I am trying to let Google know that certain long tail key phrases pertain to these pages. So what do you mean by google ignoring them? If every one of those sites is referring back with the same key words it is a waste because google caught to what the page is about the first time. If you are trying to boost your PR, they probably caught onto that too. 2. Google's SEO advice page says (or used to say) to keep the links on one page below 100 or so. The length of a link isn't mentioned but I suspect that if the reason that your URL is long is because it is from a free web hosting service they will take that into account 3. Paragraph long URLs? I don't know the point to that.
Nice tip, never thought about taking all those long tail terms and linking them off to the appropriate pages like that.
About 15 months later I am updating my index pages and I thought I would go back to Urchin to see how I did. One 4 word key phrase got 2.3 times more hits this year than last year, increasing from 1741 to 4107 visitors. Another 3 word phrase went to 37 to 105 visitors. And longer tail phrases that contained this 3 word phrase went from 232 to 408 visitors. And the two-word phrase that this particular index page was targeted for went from 17000 to 25000, and increase of 47%. We get about $3 in sales per visitor on these targeted phrases so I figure this page made me at least an extra $24000 in sales this year. I was actually hoping for bigger results than these, but $24k is not bad for a Saturday's afternoon work. best regards wiz
I don't get it. I must be tired. Sorry. You have over a million search terms in your database? Why? Do you have tens of thousands of products you sell??? Why not optimize each page in your site for the most typed in keywords? Which are only a handful, anyway.
Because my customers don't do simple searches. They do complicated searches. I am optimised for what I think they should be looking for, but they don't often search on that. For example, I am not doing Las Vegas Vacations, but if I was my customers would be searching 8 day vegas stay pink bedspread 2nd-honeymoon kind of stuff. And only one person would do that, everyone else would come up with something equally hard to SEO. Maybe my business is unique, I sell to engineers, but I suspect that most customers are finding that if they just type in a simple keyword they find a million sites that they have to sort through to find what they want. They know that if they put in a few more key words they can maximize their search. SEO on simple keywords worked 10 years ago, but it doesn't work for me today. In the last week my most optimized key phrase got the most hits at 675. That page had 211 different key phrases, but the page itself had 14,000 visitors (evidently a lot of searches didn't even have one of the two words that I think are fundamental to the page). And my entire site had 170,000 page views. You can't optimize one page for 211 different key phrases, so how do you suggest I optimize my site? And why bother when only 137 of had 2 or more searches. It turns out that I am #1 in Google for a million different search terms. Unfortunately I only get 1 hit from each one of them, and I don't mean one hit per year
Thanks for the reply back. Yeah, with one million search terms, one would have to have one hell of a lot of items. Whew. If you get one hit from each of those terms, like you said, shouldn't you have had more than the 675 hits you got in the last week, and more than 170,000 page views so far? Just curious...how 'bout throwing up a hundred of the terms listed as #1?
We got 675 hits from our most popular keyword in the last 6 days, we had 32,000 keywords used during that 6 days. Since we are #1 in google, msn and yahoo on that keyword SEO won't help get more traffic from that one. best regards wiz
Nice post , I check on a regular basis and also use a script to add search terms to my keyword list. p.s. My Profile Picture is an invisible picture of a Jenifer Anniston nude