Q: Many people have their own definition of long tail keywords. Some people believe this to be really long search quarries such as, “San Diego luxury waterfront real estate” while others might base their definition off of estimated search volume and still others have completely different opinions. What would you consider to be long tail keywords?

A: I typically consider long tail keywords to be the ones that do not show up on the keyword tools, or those that only get a few searches a month. It is entirely dependant on category as well. In some celebrity categories some of the longtail keywords may still get hundreds of searches a month. For a niche local real estate site maybe a few searches a month is longtail.

Q: I’ve read somewhere a long while ago that before you came into the picture that the term, “SEO Book” wasn’t a keyword that was searched all that much. Would you have back then considered “SEO Book” to have been a long tail search term or how would you have classified it years ago? How do you classify the term today?

A: Since it had almost no search volume at all it could certainly be considered a longtail keyword at the time. After I branded it the term became a strong keyword with significant search volume. The growth of the industry while I was marketing my brand aggressively helped as well. Other industry keywords that were not even on the map, like SEO training, have appeared as powerful keywords as well.

I think part of doing well with search is identifying growing trends and getting in early such that you can ride out the growth. If you track the conversations closely and are actively involved in the community you get to see the trends before most competitors do. That is how I picked up blackhatseo.com and whitehatseo.com for $8 each. I am sorta wasting them, but if a good idea strikes I can use them more aggressively for marketing.

Q: A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to one of my clients who questioned the value of more specific search terms which are highly competitive and harder to rank well for. To be more specific the articular terms we chewed over were, “Austin real estate” and “Austin Realtor“.

We both readily agreed that Austin real estate is the most searched keyword but what we couldn’t decide on right away is which of the two would be a better keyword to rank for. Our argument is that if someone was searching for real estate that they may not be ready for a Realtor. However if they were searching for a Realtor then they may already have a property in mind and are ready to speak to a Realtor. So my question to you is which is better to have good rankings for; a highly searched broad keyword that is harder to rank for or several dozen or hundreds of long tail search terms that are easier to rank well for right away?

A: I think ranking for a wide array of low volume keywords is a lower risk strategy. But in the above example, as you noted, both terms are related to different points in the sales cycle. The later term (realtor) should convert better, but you want exposure for the early term as well, as many people likely end up trusting and sticking with whoever they found earlier in the sales cycle.

If you are trying to compare the relative volume and values of a wide array of keywords you can use a keyword tool and a keyword list generator to create a list of keywords and bid on them via PPC. Use analytics to track which ones work best for your business.

Q: Do you currently or have you spent a considerable amount of time reviewing analytics data to find keywords that you may not have thought of in the past in order to guide your decisions on what you end up writing your own blog posts? Would you consider the majority of those gathered terms long tail?

A: Yes. I find common keyword modifiers and keyword phrases in analytics data, and then use that data to refine my keyword strategy. Many of those keywords tend to be longtail keywords but sometimes there are high volume terms that you forget to target but accidentally rank for. If you rank well for something you did not intentionally target then you should be able to rank really well when you target it. And beyond creating new pages that target the keywords, sometimes I also sprinkle the keywords in throughout page copy of established pages. This strategy can really extend your traffic for high authority pages. My keyword tool has an FAQ section to offer usage tips AND to allow that page to rank for a much wider variety of keywords.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 9.8
• Overall Rating: 9.8
• Usefulness: 9.5

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Susan Moskwa informed us in the Q & A section of last weeks phone conference that even if a page is blocked by Robots.txt that it still can have PageRank passed to it from pages that are linking to it unless you use nofollow within the link.

Let’s say that you don’t care rather or not your Policy & Procedures page is indexed by Google or not so you decide to add the page to your Robots.txt file. This will effectively tell search engines that abide by the rules set fourth within Robots.txt to not index that particular page.

Let’s say that you have a footer link to your Policy & Procedures page as well as a link to this page immediately below your order form or other forms found through out your website. If these links are not property created with the nofollow tag then you are going to be passing PageRank to your Policy & Procedures page that doesn’t even have the privilege of being indexed by Google.

This goes to show us that taking the time to make sure something is done right is going to be far better then having to go back and fix things later. If your website is leaking PageRank then that can affect how well certain pages of your site performs within Google SERPs.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

I’ve had many clients ask about them and I’ve seen other Internet marketers ask about them on forums, webmaster related chat rooms, blogs and even the most recent Google phone conference last week (March 28th 2008).

What Are Sitelinks?

So what exactly are Sitelinks? Well first off they allow people who might be searching for your website to pick and choose which page of your site that they might be looking for. At this time Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed… if any.

This is one example of what Sitelinks look like when they show up for someone searching.

News, Games, People and places and so on in the above image are considered Sitelinks. At this time you can have a maximum of eight Sitelinks. Keep in mind though that if within your Webmaster Tools your site is only displaying three or fewer Sitelinks then Google will not show Sitelinks for your website.

Speaking of Google Webmaster Tools, you can find what pages Google has identified for Sitelinks by going to Links and then to Sitelinks.

If Google has declared any Sitelinks for your website then you’ll see something that looks like this inside Google Webmaster Tools.

How Do You Obtain Them?

I’ve already mentioned that Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed. However the decision isn’t entirely out of our hands. Like anything else with search engine optimization, there are things that can be done to help Google along.

For example, if you want your contact page to show up then make sure you have one or more of the following on site optimization techniques covered (preferably more than one).

1. Name the page according to what it is about. Creating ‘Contact-Us.html’ gives search engines and visitors a pretty clear idea of what the page is about.
2. Include the page within your Google Sitemap AND your on site Site Map if you have both of them; if you don’t then you should.
3. Within the content of the page use the words, ‘Contact Us’ and see about using H1, Bold and other formatting to help make it stand out.
4. Link to the page from other pages of your website using the anchor of ‘Contact Us’. Make sure this isn’t just done in your navigation though as search engines pick up constants on a website like navigations.
5. Link to the page from other pages of your website using images that have Alt Text of ‘Contact Us’; maybe even go as far to have the image named ‘Contact.jpg’ or something similar.
6. Off site linking to that page should also help as it gives an outside referral that search engines will hopefully detect.
7. If you are building your meta tags properly then you will naturally be mentioning ‘Contact Us’ somewhere in your title and description.

You’d obviously want to repeat the above steps for other pages that you want to stand out a little more than others do.

How Do You Find Them?

Google displays Sitelinks based on what the searcher has searched for. Google will return the most useful and relevant results. If Google thinks that some of your pages listed within Webmaster Tools are relevant then they will display.

Above I showed you an example of five Sitelinks that can possibly show up for my wife’s tutoring company in Southern California. However I have not yet conducted a search within Google that has caused the Sitelinks for that site to show up. Others on the other hand may have done so and seen completely different results than I have due to the types of searches i’ve performed and they have performed.

If you’d like to see a live version of Sitelinks simply search for MSN on Google and you’ll get some results.

Sitelinks Management

There are some pages within a website that just shouldn’t be displayed as a Sitelink yet alone indexed by a search engine. Removing a specific page from Googles index is a completely other post but you can choose to block a page from showing up in Sitelinks. Notice the third image above? Simply select Block next to the URL you don’t want displayed and Google will take it out for 90 days. Of course 90 days comes and goes pretty fast so you’ll want to make sure that you are purposefully MANAGING SITELINKS.

In Conclusion

Sitelinks have been around for some time now. They help increase your advertising space within Googles SERPs and help potential clients locate exactly which page of your website they are looking for if you take the time to help Google determine what should and shouldn’t be considered a Sitelink. You won’t always see them when conducting searches and just because Webmaster Tools shows that you have them doesn’t mean they will always display.

For more information on Sitelinks directly from the horses mouth, I’d consider this Google page titled, "How does Google compile the list of links shown below some search results?"

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 6.7
• Overall Rating: 8.0
• Usefulness: 9.3

1. They automatically alert search engines of new posts whereas a static website gets to simply wait to be crawled for the update to be picked up.
2. They are also crawled in the same way a static website is crawled in addition to advantage number 1.
3. They tend to rank far quicker for many different terms than static websites.
4. People can subscribe via RSS Feeds which also announces new additions by the Blogger.
5. There is a whole subset of search engines are available to blogs that aren’t as readily available to regular old static websites.

However while all that might be impressive and certainly many reasons why you should have a blog; it may not be worth all it is made out to be. Consider the following scenario:

You write a post targeted to reach a particular audience. Let’s say that post is all about foreclosures in your area. You then spend your time promoting that post through different social media sites, forums, maybe a press release and other types of marketing venues.

Sure you’ll get targeted traffic for this and you might even pick up a customer or two and a few really good rankings in Google in a matter of days. While this all sounds good here is what happens next in this scenario:

The housing market is no longer in trouble and our economy is stabilizing out. The banks and lending companies are just about back to normal with foreclosures in your area and new homes are priced so well that this is the latest buzz.

You write a post targeted to reach people interested in new homes and since foreclosures typically indicate a formally inhabited home, you decide to stay clear away from mentioning foreclosures except maybe in a brief passing. You then spend your time promoting like you did before.

Now you’ll get a whole new group of targeted traffic. However you are still getting traffic from your foreclosure post and that particular targeted audience is now seeing a post on new homes. This creates for a potential increase in bounce rate and lost business.

Not only does a Blogger have to find a creative balance when making sure not to alienate one target audience or another but they also have to worry about maintaining rankings for older posts as well.

Every time a Blogger posts a new post on a different topic, closely related or not, they are giving search engines the idea that their topic of interest has changes which then begins a slow and steady rank decline for past targeted keywords you’ve spent time and money targeting.

How about tried and true static websites? Do they have advantages? Absolutely and I have a few advantages to point out about them as well. They are:

1. They don’t typically change all that much and when they do it is partially due to syndicated content which isn’t always seen by search engines depending on how the website owner is choosing to display it.
2. Because they don’t change all that much their rankings tend to be long lasting even though it almost always takes some time to rank for targeted keyword terms.
3. Visitors come to recognize your site and learn how to navigate it. This would help increase your return visitor ratio.
4. The more times someone visits your site the more likely they are to do business with you because their return visit usually means they are keeping an eye on something you have.
5. With a little creativity you can syndicate pages of your website to other websites and even get to those special search engines like Technorati.

Clearly there are advantages and drawbacks to both methods. One shouldn’t replace the other though at this stage of the game.

Final Thought: While you are constantly posting new posts to your blog you should be spending equal amounts of time building onto your plain old static websites.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 10.0
• Overall Rating: 10.0
• Usefulness: 10.0

I started with my old account and decided that I’d keep that one as private for my personal and close friends. So that being said, I created a professional profile to separate my personal and professional life.

My Twitter account will act much like a feed reader in regards to my blog. When I write a post I’ll update my Twitter with the topic and a link to the blog.

When I find an interesting article or post on a forum I’ll twitter a link to that article or may even quote parts of it that interested me.

If I’m doing research on any given topic you might find that I’ll include a twitter regarding the topic I’m researching.

So why am I doing this? A recent survey conducted by Rand Fishkin and the SEOMoz crew indicated that over half of the 3,000 survey takers hardly ever read blogs. For those of you that do read my blog from time to time I thank you. For those of you that don’t, if you have Twitter I’d like to invite you to follow me.

I’m doing this for awareness and branding purposes. I’m promoting myself and my blog through yet another marketing wheel. If I have 10, 100 or a thousand people following me then I now have an opportunity to update them on my happenings and possibly motivate them in some way or another.

Twitter is a social network after all and the key to a social network is being social. That being said… are you being social? I am!

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

Good old Matt Cutts rocked our world on Thursday when we discovered one of his posts sitting at the top of our little competition. Our little side competition suddenly became much more interesting. Now instead of out performing one another we will have to set our scope on beating Matt Cutts in a game he robably doesn’t even know he has interrupted at the time of this posts writing.

I’ll be the first to admit that not all of our tactics to game one another have been all that kosher but at least in my case I figured it was a harmless term that very few people actually search for.

From blog category names to creative usage of titles and even creating the post with a keyword rich name and then renaming it so it wouldn’t be so obvious at first; we have pretty much done it all just to game one another.

All four of us involved in this little content writing competition have had our fair jokes about how Aaron Wall virtually made the term “SEO Book” popular. Before he came into the picture I think I read somewhere that it wasn’t a widely searched term. (If anyone reading this knows a link to an article that talks about that i’d appreciate you letting me know so I can reference it). Our little posse of small time bloggers figured that just maybe we’d make our term a big success like Aaron has. Well Matt; it looks like we now have a lot to work to do.

As far as I know only two of us have seen Matt show up at the top for our term so this post is somewhat of a head start for me but I think I will be giving the advice that we all should work not only towards out ranking one another but that each of us should work on pushing Matt down just for the added thrill… That is IF Matt allows us to have our fun without getting creative with his Super human Google Powers.

By now I’ve probably triggered a few Google Alerts. Somewhat purposeful and somewhat accidental I assure you. However it is what it is and I’m sure that Aaron Wall and Matt Cutts have probably browsed this post by now or at least have been informed that their names were brought up in one way or another.

Let me introduce the game players so that everyone knows who all might be involved in this little game of ours that has taken a serious interesting turn of events.

Zak Nicola - Zak happens to have some of the most interesting posts out of all of us simply because they aren’t all related to Internet Marketing or SEO related topics. He has a page or two on the ever so popular cat frenzy that seems to keep everyone occupied and let’s not forget Zak in drag! This very sexy picture of Zak Nicola got us laughing and smiling for a long time.

Jeremy Rivera - Jeremy is to blame for this competition. He is fairly new to Internet marketing in general and prior to that he was a Customer Support Supervisor. He got nosey and started asking questions one day and never stopped. It was a surprise to us all when the company we all work for decided that Jeremy deserved to be the Marketing Manager.

Jeremy originally ranked for this keyword term prior to his promotion. We all thought that it would be funny (and easy) to push his blog down on our targeted keyword so set out to write a lot of content (some useful, some not) around the topic. So the game began and has gone on for several months now.

Shirley Tipsy - Many people might recall Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006. There were two ladies who attended the conference that wore “Matt Cutts is a God” and “Matt Cutts Makes Me Google” T-shirts. Needless to say; to this day Shirley Tipsy still Googles over Matt Cutts. I was unfortunately not brave enough to wear any of those shirts during that trip so I didn’t go down as the guy wearing a “Matt Cutts Loves Me” T-shirt or whatever Shirley had planned for me.

Shirley Tipsy is also known as Audrey and she is our former Marketing Manager. She still works for the same company but now she is in charge of our company site and not our client sites. She has been involved in this game since the beginning but has been an even bigger game player in the SEO industry for many many years.

(Compliments of http://www.webuildpages.com/)

John Jones - That’s me! Jeremy first showed off his new blog to me via instant message at work one day. Later that evening at home he sent me another instant message letting me know that he was ranking for a keyword that looked rather impressive at first.

It is always easier to write about other people yet it is always easier to speak highly of oneself; why is that? I’m not exactly sure what to say except that I’ve been honored to work with the people I’ve worked with. I’m also very happy to have been contacted by people like Rand Fishkin and Rebecca Kelley for very small and non important issues all the way up to Barry Schwartz aka Rustybrick
over at Search Engine Round Table right around the time that Google launched their Adwords Print Campaign capability.

So now that I’ve introduced the players of this game I’ll tell you that the targeted keyword is “Content Writing Advice“. Many posts and many links have been purposefully established just to target and rank for this keyword term.

Zak probably has one of the best posts out of the four of us while my original post is probably the absolute worse out of the bunch. Now that Matt and others may be taking a small interest in this little game of ours though I hope that we will all be able to step it up a notch and show that we really truly deserve those top positions instead of Matt’s post on, “SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love“.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

Update 3/7/08 4:18am: For the record, Matt has always had a ranking
for this keyword term; he simply has never been number one for it. I should have
taken periodic screenshots and certainly a screenshot for last night. This morning
my obsessive compulsive self checked CWA (Content Writing Advice) and Matt is
no longer at the top again. Possible Google fluke last night or maybe this morning
but I still think this will be a fun addition to our competition to follow through
on.

• Uniqueness: 10.0
• Overall Rating: 10.0
• Usefulness: 10.0

I’ve written some pretty horrific blogs on here before even by my own standards. Some I’ve simply removed right away and others still exist though I won’t be pointing them out. Then again maybe a “Top 10 Worse Posts” section on my blog is a good idea…

I once gave a friend of mine some advice when he first launched his blog and he wrote a decent follow up blog titled, “Swallow Your Pride: How To Take Advantage of Constructive Criticism“.

So in the spirit of good humor and in hopes of everyone actually liking what I write on this blog I think for kicks I’ll find a way to set up a thumbs up / down system much like Rand Fishkin is doing over at SEOMoz with the blogs they post. Everyone could use a little constructive critism every now and then and even Rand would agree with that; right Rand?

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 10.0
• Overall Rating: 10.0
• Usefulness: 10.0

There are undoubtedly dozens if not a few hundred methods of obtaining links to your website or blog.

Last night I came across Stephen Dean’s Copywriting blog while doing a Google blog search for additional content writing advice that might help me with my own writing and to give additional advice from a sales pitch point of view.

I revisited his blog this morning and read another post that I skipped over last night. Stephen mentioned that some guy named James Brausch is offering a free copy of his newsletter to review.

I figure it couldn’t hurt since it was free so I hopped over to his website and the first thing that caught my eye was the criteria required to get the newsletter. This is part of what James wrote:

“1. Post your request on your blog with a link to this post on my blog. I’ll see the link or the trackback.”

James made that offer on February 29th and he has already had 10 trackbacks… 10 people linking to his blog and now 11.

James - please send me a copy to info@ this domain. Thank you sir!

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 9.0
• Overall Rating: 6.0
• Usefulness: 7.5

The conversation usually focus’s on what parts of content the website owner is using for linking purposes to internal or external pages. It is simple enough to say, “Click Here”, “Here”, “E-Mail Me” and so on.

When writing content it is a fairly decent idea to include the desired target keyword within your content. When that doesn”t seem possible with how you wrote it out then you should consider rewriting the content. If THAT doesn’t work for you then at least try to use parts of your keywords within the content.

What looks better from these two sentences?

• Click here for an example of keyword parts
• I’ve written a blog post on keyword parts if you are interested

From a visitor point of view, “Click Here” is a straight forward invitation to do something. From a search engine spider point of view you’ll get them to follow the link but when they record what the anchor text link was all they will see is, “Click Here”

From a visitor point of view, “Keyword Parts” explains what they are getting when they click on the link. Since most people surfing the web can identify a link and what you are supposed to do (Click It), you really don’t need to instruct them on what to do. From a search engine spider point of view you’ll get them to follow the link and they will record a potential keyword for the anchor text link.

Through this example I hope that my advice has given you some idea’s to look at when you are writing content. I also hope that you’ll pay attention to what you are using as the anchor text link.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

I have clients that rank well within the search engines for keywords they aren’t
even purposefully targeting. It just so happens that parts of the actual keyword
are found within the content of the page that they have written.

When giving this content writing advice to my Realtor clients I like to use
the following example:

“Tahoe Tyrol is nestled just South of Heavenly Ski Resort and many of
the luxury homes overlook the beautiful lake”….

Notice that within this sentence I my focus is on Tahoe Tyrol which is a fairly
pricy community in South Lake Tahoe California. By picking apart this sentence
I could potentially find myself ranking for the following keywords without actually
including them into the content.

1. Tahoe Tyrol luxury homes
2. Lake Tahoe luxury homes
3. Lake Tahoe homes
4. South Lake Tahoe luxury homes
5. South Lake Tahoe homes

The above terms are specific to my audience but there are a few keywords that
I might ‘accidentally’ end up ranking well for as well; they are:

1. Heavenly Ski Resort
2. Luxury lake homes
3. Luxury homes
4. Lake homes
5. Tahoe ski resort
6. Heavenly Tahoe

Some of these terms are actually found within the sentence like ‘Heavenly Ski
Resort’ and ‘luxury homes’. However they weren’t actually keywords I purposefully
wanted to target when writing the content.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 4.5
• Overall Rating: 4.0
• Usefulness: 3.0