Is the long tail approach good or not? Yes or No please?

Great post. I am a little late on this one, but better late than never. I love the long tail, but now it's time to get to those 1% keywords with the real conversion. I liked the breakout.

Ironically, (according to hittail) our site gets 92% of it's traffic from the long tail of search. But finally, as a result of the links aging and the internal / external link factor having a high allinanchor concentration (across multiple core terms) as a result of some diverse IP link building over the last year, our site is devouring extremely competitive terms and making leaps and bound for competitive keywords.

Dream terms like "SEO" in Google went from the hundreds into the top 70, SEO company from 180 into the 20's, etc. Now I can't wait to go back and fine tune the site's internal links, theme is a bit and lose about 75% of the off-topic anchor text on poorly linked pages, seal down the obsolete content with "no follows" and see what happens. I foresee a top 10 for the keyword SEO and multiple variations in our near future.

Brilliant answer, made me rethink my whole philosophy on how to link plus draw in extra custom. Before your advice I was struggling to think up articles. After reading your post I read through my sales page with a pen and paper in hand and looked for anything I could expand upon. Ideas just flew off the page. I guess this is one of those times when if you don’t know what to look for then you'll never find it. And yet it was a simple idea that probably never would have occurred to me.

One thing I was wondering is how you structure your articles and ensure you get all your key words in.

While I'm in a writing mood I'm going to let my brain loose and start tapping away at my keyboard. Then once a few articles are done and dusted I was going to trawl through some key words and then try and work out how to introduce them into my articles and this is where I think I might get stuck. So I was wondering how you approach this and ensure you get all your key words in your articles?

If its possible would you list a page you have optimized and inform me of the key words used in that page. I think this would kick my brain into gear.

I'm a bit of a newbie at this and I guess I feel like some of my friends when they see a stripped motor sitting on a bench in my garage. They wouldn't have a clue what bit does what or when or where it goes or even where to start.

I'm eagerly awaiting your next book.

Can a site map get ranked? Forgive me if I'm asking some dumb questions its just that I have little idea how things work in the SE world of indexing and ranking. Is seems to me that a sitemap is likely of having a high percentage of key words. Do search engines know that these are sitemaps and therefore index them. If not what is to stop anyone from writing pages that are key word heavy like a sitemaps?

Thanks

Richard

For landing pages, it's can be difficult to visualize the transformation to a "landing zone," so let me kind of map out one approach.

Start with the home page, a sales letter for (whatever). You probably have a list of bullets that represent benefits, or at least you have a list of benefits. Maybe you have a list of problems and a statement of your solution.

Now, each of those feature/benefit or problem/solution statements is a potential page of content, even a potential landing page. The easiest way to write these is to close with a call to action and/or a link back to the main sales page.

Now, how you link to these extra pages from your home page is up to you. I like to use "named anchors" in the HTML code, so that if I have a statement on the home page, I can link to a secondary page with greater detail, and then link back to that named anchor, so the reader is returned to the same place in the sales letter.

So they read, read, read, see an interesting benefit that's especially important to them, maybe the product "Cures Acne." "Cures Acne" links to a page that explains in more detail what a wonderful cure it is (almost a mini sales letter), closing with a link back to the main sales letter right at the point where the "Cures Acne" link appeared.

They click the link, they read that page and are further persuaded, then they either click back to the home page (at the anchor point) or they click an order button.

How you link to together depends on how you want to sell. I've used a benefit list down the left side as navigation, with every page closing with a call to action and order button. I've also used footer links to tie together groups of "squeeze" pages when other types of linking don't make sense.

It usually takes a few days after you make your changes to see real effects in the quality scoring. The best thing to watch for is changes in the minimum bid, since some keywords will never show a "Great" quality score.

In terms of keyword strategy, it helps to use related terms if you are using broad matching and phrase matching, because you have to be relevant for every search query that those might trigger. Less important with exact matches.

There is another book coming. We are still working on the final couple rounds of editing for "Pay Per Click Fast Start," but I do expect we'll have it out within the next few weeks.

Sorry to monopolise your comments section with my questions but my thinking caps on this morning plus I cant think who else or where else to ask.

Do I need to be as thorough with my key words research when writing content for my adword ppc campaign based website or can I just use the terms already in my campaign?

My thought are it’s a combination of both, but I was curious to know if I need to go to the same depth as you suggest in SEOFS2007 or what extent I need to research?

I'm really looking to save time as writing content takes time and I want to do as well as I can out of the content I've written without overdoing it. Not looking for short cuts just don't want to waste my time.

How long after I submit my updated site will google look at it and adjust my campaign. And what would be the next step after they do?

Do you plan to write some info or a book on this subject as I'm sure this info isn't just gold dust to me.

Thanks again

Richard

Thanks for the quick response. I'm in the uk and wrote my message just before midnight. I was pleasantly shocked to see a response waiting for me when I woke up. Excellent and very appreciated.

One thing I wanted to do was write my main sales page (homepage) and just have one link to my other pages at the base of my homepage. In your book you advised against this and instead using link text in the main text body. I don’t really want my customers wandering off my homepage. Would you have any ideas on how to link effectively without driving my customers off my main sales page?

Thanks again.

Richard

Richard, at this point I'd recommend at least 10 pages of content linked from your landing pages to help with Google's quality scoring situation.

Unless you limit the keywords you target very narrowly (not always a bad idea, BTW) you may find it difficult to convert every visitor with your home page.

If I have a page that's converting well for a keyword, I'll do whatever it takes to make that page work in Adwords.

I do run across people who are trying to push Adwords traffic to a "squeeze page" or a single page sales letter, and it's rough going. On the other hand, if you have 15 different squeeze pages and link them together, you can boost that quality score substantially.

Doing basic on-page SEO is one part of creating a "relevant" landing page. Keyword strategy isn't really much different between PPC and SEO, at the top level anyway.

I'd be more worried about Adwords "slapping" a keyword stuffed page, than SEO implications. I wouldn't expect a page like that to get ranked, but that's hardly a penalty.

I appreciate the free information and enjoyed reading your book. I don’t have the time to read every seo strategy on the net and most of them contradict each other which totally baffles someone like me who only presently uses adword to promote their business. This is why I find your site so refreshing, its as if the mist has finally cleared.

I do have a question and that is to do with adword ppc advertising. I am only using a one page site at the moment and read before that I should have at least 15 pages of content to prevent being penalized by google which is presently happening. Is this correct?

I have read before that I should have my ppc adverts go to the most relevant page. Is this true? I would prefer to have all my ppc go straight to my home page which is the main selling page of my website. If I have related content on second tier pages will this be good enough for google to view my home page as relevant?

I have read SEOFS2007 and wondered if the info is relevant when all I'm after is an adword friendly page.( I am not interested in building the natural search results with this site. I'm working on another site for that.) If you have the time I would greatly appreciate your insight.

One last question; If I write a page just for the search engines full of key words can there be an issue with key word stuffing and will search engines penalize me? (wont ever do this but just curious as all I want to do is build an adword page)

Thank you for all the help.

Richard

I think that when you add LSI to the mix, it becomes even more confusing.

Thanks. Franck.