The search engine optimization approach Newfangled practices is more akin to farming than it is to hunting. Farming involves planting lots of seeds and then waiting patiently as each one contributes to a harvest. There is a place for SEO hunting, that aggressively goes after a few prize keywords. Direct sales of consumer products, for example, may require an SEO hunter. But in my opinion those goals fit an AdWord campaigns more than organic SEO. But hey, if you can get performance in organic search results for phrases like "ink jet cartridge refills" or "cheap airline tickets to Bermuda," more power to ya.
SEO farming on the other hand is about casting lots of compelling content onto your site. As we saw last month this approach is more in line with how search engines work, and it benefits from how searchers search. This month I'll use Google Analytics to demonstrate how you can reap an SEO harvest using a farmer's approach.
To embed this video on your site copy and paste this code:
Last month I had the opportunity to present the benefits of a content rich website to a group of advertising agency principals at the ReCourses annual New Business summit. As part of the presentation I printed out all the content of our website to demonstrate the impact of the long tail of search. While the top level of our website, the pages linked off our main navigation, consists of about twenty pages or so, the supporting content, our years of newsletters, blog posts and our book, add well over a thousand pages.
When you look at search engine results to see where search traffic goes, you'll notice that the majority of search hits are distributed across all these many pages, not just the home page. This list, printed from our Google Analytics reports, shows the exact search phrases where used to bring visitors to our site over a six month period. These are all the actual words typed into Google in which one of our pages showed up in the results and the searcher clicked to our site.
As you can see, this is a very long list. Very long.
Now as long as this list is, I only printed ten percent of it. The full list contains over 74,000 unique user sessions resulting from over 31,000 unique phrases. And if you examine the whole list you'd would see that the rarest phrases, those toward the end of the list that were used just once or twice, when added together, out contribute all the more popular search phrases at the top of the list. This is the power of search and the power of content.
Great newsletter, Eric. I think the videos are far more entertaining than just reading the text.
To springboard off the subject of SEO, A List Apart just published a great article on findability, which expands a little further on the issue of optimizing sites to help people find the content they're looking for.
Thanks for the video and SEO advice!
Nice video guys. In my opinion SEO means link building. I do not have any other views.
I am sorry. Please correct me if this is wrong. I am doing SEO for two years and this is only thing that I get in my head.
But user interactivity is quite different.