One of my favorite debates is whether or not the traffic you get from your search engine optimization efforts (SEO) really produce’s free traffic.

Sure, you can get streams of visitors from Google and the search engines without paying anything per click …

But what about all the things you must do to get your website listed in the top Search results?

I’ve posted this video that explains why this traffic isn’t always free …

Click here to watch the video

Watch the video and then leave us your comments or questions below.

Have a great weekend!

Chuck Anderson.

P. S. Join us on Wednesday, May 18 for our next 1 hour training webinar… click here for details.

Darren was extremely generous with sharing his insights on what to do if your website has suddenly disappeared from the results as well as what to do as best practices from this point forward.

He was also kind enough to share 4 additional training videos with our members that really explain Search Engine Optimization in depth, which is way more than I was expecting him to share with us.

I’ve placed links to the videos and serveral other resources mentioned during the webinar on the replay page.

Here is the entire webinar replay …

Click here to watch the video

Please watch the video replay of the webinar and then post your comments below to let us know how you were affected by the recent Google changes and any questions you may have about getting your site listed in the top search results.

Enjoy!

Chuck Anderson
Internet Marketing Center

SEOs and webmasters were eagerly anticipating, both in fear and excitement, the release of Google’s content farm algorithm. Google announced that these updates are being aimed at scraper sites, although many other innocent sites are being negatively affected in the process if they are not careful about their content quality.

On Wednesday, April 6th @ 11:00 am Pacific Daylight Time, I will be interviewing Darren Warmuth of UniqueArticleWizard.com for his insight on what the changes mean, as well as what you should be doing and not doing to get your website to move up the Google ranks and send you more traffic.

Register here for this one-time free webinar <– Click here

I look forward to speaking with you on Wednesday.

Chuck Anderson
Internet Marketing Center

P.S. Can’t make it?  Register now to be notified of the recorded replay.

This week’s conversation included a great conversation with Renard who was asking us when he should be thinking about putting affiliate offers up on his website and how to increase the number of visitors that he is getting.  Cijaye and I kind of went off on a rant which was likely more than he was asking for, but we just couldn’t help ourselves.

Anyways, it turned out to be a great clip so I thought I would share it with you …

Click here to gain access to this entire 72 minute coaching session …

On these weekly coaching sessions we offer expert advice for all skill levels and abilities.

Improving your website’s traffic, sales, and conversion rates – or getting a new Internet business off the ground – can be challenging when you’re working by yourself.

Without help or guidance, you can easily waste immeasurable time and money going in the wrong direction.

That’s why we developed the Internet Entrepreneur Club – to give you all of the support and advice you need to make more money with your website, providing you with a full range of expert training that includes:

• personal, one-on-one help with all of your biggest questions
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Click here to learn more about these exclusive Club benefits

Have a great weekend,

Chuck Anderson
Director of Marketing, IMC

With that being said…here we go!  I hope you find it helpful and interesting.

First, let’s have a look at Google’s new interface!

Now at first glance, I began thinking this interface is pretty cool, but annoying, but really neat, and annoying, but still cool, and really annoying.  You know what I mean.

It’s neat that it has suggestive searches.  It’s neat that it displays search and paid ad results in real time.  It’s very cool the technology and incredible processing horsepower this must take to be this quick.  However it is bit annoying in how it makes a lot of assumptions on our behalf.

So it’s all very intriguing, but the big thing I wanted to know was if this was a positive thing for internet marketers, or not.

First impression?  Yes AND No!  Yes, if you are good at SEO – No so good if you don’t take your SEO efforts seriously.

But before we get to that…

… did Google Instant come packaged with a new algorithm?

Google says not, yet over the past couple of days since its release, many of our sites have not only seen a large increase in traffic, but rankings for some very competitive keywords have shot up dramatically.  For example, the case of the short-tail keyword ‘stop smoking’ we rank for on one of our sites.  It has literally jumped a HUGE number of pages in Google to the #5 spot since the Instant release.  Good news to be sure.

As we heard back with the release of the caffeine algorithm, Google is going to be rewarding content driven sites more and more.  And this doesn’t just mean on-site content, but backlink driven content as well, such as backlinks embedded in article resource boxes.

Whaddya know….this article marketing stuff really works!

So, a new algorithm or just coincidence?  Who knows…simply stating an observation and including you in on my first random thought.  Regardless, the increased traffic is always welcome!

So what’s next?

Is there anything about Google Instant we need to be concerned about?

Well, yes…

The one obviously negative about Google Instant is that it definitely takes up some valuable real estate.  With the five ‘suggested’ keywords showing in the dropdown, it effectively removes one or two of the top organic search listings.

This means it is going to become even more important to be at the top of the search rankings.  Before, we used to shoot for ‘Top 5’ listings, but with the decreased screen space now available above the fold, it now looks more like ‘Top 3’ is going to be the new sweet spot – depending on how many ads are showing at the top of the search results.

Conspiracy theories abound, and we’ll probably never know if it was intentional, but there is certainly no doubt that the elimination of available space certainly makes the paid ads more prominent as they now take up a larger proportional percentage of the screen.

But how does this affect us as marketers – especially SEO dependent ones?

Let’s look at an example.

To do this, we’ll look at a stop smoking review site we use to track the benefits of article marketing.  First, a little explanation is in order.  Yes, this is a real affiliate site and is set up as a normal WordPress website.  The only reason we call it a ‘test site’ is that it is 100% promoted by article marketing.  There is no Pay-per-click.  No social media.  No other methods of SEO.  Purely 100% article marketing.  This allows us the ability to create valid testing without the results getting skewed.

Let’s use the new Instant interface to drive down a couple of levels and see what we can find.

As we’ve already seen, when the letters ‘stop sm_____’ are entered into the search box, we are prompted with the suggestion of ‘stop smoking’, which as we know ranks our site at #5’.

But what about the next suggested Google Instant listing of ‘stop smoking aids’?

If we select it directly, it gives us a hard search result just like the old interface would have.  Which I am happy to report, ranks our site at #1.

But if we don’t choose a suggestion and instead continue to type ‘stop smoking ai__’ here is what we get.

So the first question that comes to mind – is do we now target all these long-tail keyphrases shown in the Instant dropdown box?

As always, we have a definitive answer for you here – MAYBE!

As we can see by looking at the example, we get a dropdown of 4 suggestions, as the fifth is only a partial.  Now in this case, we know that we already rank #1 for the top two suggestions – ‘stop smoking aids’ and ‘stop smoking aids reviews’.  So the question is, should we be targeting the next two keywords on the list – ‘stop smoking aids free’ and ‘stop smoking aids coupons’?

Again, the answer is maybe.  SEO, done properly takes time, effort and money, so as savvy marketers, we need to decide whether to target these keywords based on research and NOT just because they show up in the suggested listings.

The first thing we want to consider is what is the commercial intent of the customers entering or choosing this keyword.  Commercial intent or OCI is data collected by Microsoft’s adCenter Labs and gives an indicator in decimal form whether or not the keyword is commercially viable.  Market Samurai also has this feature built in.

So we head over to the Microsoft labs and enter our keyphrase.  It comes back with a 0.92 probability of non-commercial intent, which is what we’d expect because the keyphrase has the word ‘free’ in it.  Not a great indicator of someone who is willing to spend money on your product.

Do we not bother with this keyphrase?  Again, MAYBE.  You knew that was coming didn’t you.

First let’s go looking for some more data.  We follow the search through and find that our site is on page two at spot #11 for the keyphrase anyway.  Pretty cool!

Just to digress a moment and make the point again about just how effective article marketing is, we do not specifically target ‘stop smoking’ or ‘stop smoking aids free’ yet we are ranking highly for them.  By targeting the long-tail keywords with high commercial intent, we also get search ranking for similar and complimentary keywords.

Anyway, back to the task at hand.  Do we target this keyword or not?  In this case because we are already so close to the first page, why not.  We’ll throw a few articles at it and get it ranked in the top three results.

But what if we weren’t on the second page?  What if we ranked on the 20^th page?  For that we would need to pull out every business person’s most effective tool – gut instinct.  The OCI data tells us that 92% of people searching for that keyphrase may not be willing to spend any money.  So let’s look at search volume with Google’s keyword tool to see what else we can find.  Market Samurai has this feature as well.

It shows that the monthly search volume for ‘stop smoking aids free’ is only 880.  So if 92% (810) of people are not willing to spend money and only 70 are, then perhaps this is not a good keyword to target.

BUT…if you know your conversion and profit per acquisition for your site – and you should – then you can make an informed decision about whether to target this keyword.  So assuming that 70 people per month could be buyers and we know our site converts at 3.94% (let’s call it 4% for easy math) and our profit per acquisition is around $50, then we can rightfully assume that we will sell 2.8 units per month for a total yearly profit of $1680 (2.8 units per month x 12 months x $50 PPA).  Not too bad.  Definitely worth it considering.

Now this is very top down thinking of course.  There are a number of other variables to take into account such as the fact that the #1 ranking will only get 40% of the clicks and so on and so forth (this may change dramatically and give much higher click through rates to the top listings with the decreased organic real estate).  But even at 40% CTR (click through rate), that still leaves nearly $700 a year profits less the cost of a handful of articles to get the site to rank #1 for this keyword.  Still not bad.

Still the question remains, do we spend the time, money and effort to push our site to #1 for this keyword?  In this particular case, because we can target more than one link in each article we send out, I would say yes.  Matter of fact, I believe we will be targeting these two links heavily for the moment – ‘stop smoking’ and ‘stop smoking aids free’ for as exciting as getting 40% of 880 monthly searches might be, hitting #1 and getting 40% of the 550,000 searches that ‘stop smoking’ receives, gets me all excited!

The BIG plus

So the main downside to the new interface is simply a smaller piece of real estate for organic listings.  Not a big deal, for as marketers interested in SEO, we are used to the competition.  However, there has to be a huge upside here for someone, right?

There sure is.  The people who own the top 3 listings should see a dramatic increase in traffic as it is only human nature for us to click on what we can see.  And if you can only see three to five listings now, the CTR of those sites will definitely rise.

So how do you get rankings like this for hundreds and thousands of keywords?

Simple.  We’ve been preaching it for years – CONSISTENCY and QUALITY!

Target a varying group of long-tail and short tail keywords for your niche.  Write or get well written articles done for you via a service like MyArticleExpress.  Keep sending out one or two articles per week for each of your sites.

Not trying to turn this into an advertisement for article marketing, but you can clearly see that this methodology is extremely effective to driving top search rankings.

And yes, you should be using video, podcasts and press releases as well as discussed in our free report on Organic Marketing That Sticks – Where to Start With Your SEO (PDF download).

So the magic formula once again is…

Target Long-Tail and Short-Tail Keywords – Write Quality Content – Submit Articles Weekly

And there you have it.

Thanks for sharing in these random thoughts with me.

Wishing you all the success in the world,

Noel Swanson

Google recently did an audit of  their own sites to see how well they were implementing proper SEO marketing practices, and discovered some dead-simple SEO basics they’d ignored. Check out the Google SEO tips video , where Matt Cutts presented their findings.

The experiment also resulted in a 49-page PDF of SEO tips full of quick fixes and how-tos so you can make your site a Google magnet.

No matter how great your product is, or how great your website looks, your online business will be left spinning its wheels unless the search engines know you exist… and your potential customers can find you in the search engines!

We wrote on Day One about giving your website a thorough tune-up, and on Day Two about providing great content on your website to keep your visitors and customers coming back again and again.

Now we’re going to give you some tips on snagging more search engine traffic in 2010.

Revisit your keyword research regularly: If it’s been a few months (or a few years!)  since you did keyword research on your market, you could be targeting keywords that no one is searching on anymore, and missing out on keywords that would bring great, highly targeted traffic to your website.   Things change pretty quickly in the search engines!

We’d suggest that you revisit your research quarterly to make sure that your content and your SEO strategies are taking direct aim at your market.

Don’t ignore the power of local search: Showing up at the top of the results for your local area in Google has never been more important, and Google is reaching out to businesses to make sure they take advantage of the opportunity. Google’s Local Business Center offers a robust set of tools to help you get your business listed and exposed to a local audience, and they’re even introducing flat-rate AdWords advertising for local businesses, rather than the traditional bid model.

Also, don’t forget to research location-based keywords when it comes to optimizing your website. The traffic they’ll deliver will be more targeted, since location-based searches tend to indicate a greater intention to purchase!

Extend your business presence socially: Increasing your social presence offers a ton of SEO benefits. First, you’ll show up in searches across social sites like Twitter and Facebook, where more and more people are going in search of information and products.  In fact, if you have video content, you’ll be interested to find out that YouTube is now the second-largest search engine on the Web!

Review sites like Yelp and Epinions are also directing targeted traffic to businesses that interact with customers (and potential customers) on their websites.  You can set up and monitor a business profile within your product or business category, and pepper your description and tags with relevant keywords to show up in searches in your local area — and nationally, too!

Getting more social also enables you to take advantage of Google’s new real time search focus — if people have been talking about you recently, you’ll show up in their “latest results.”

Keep your focus on the 80%: Yes, Bing is offering great results for some business owners, and worth SOME of your SEO effort to keep a solid ranking for your search terms — don’t ignore a new opportunity! But Google is still getting 80% of ALL the search traffic on the Web, so you can’t afford to scrap it altogether for the new kid on the block.

Remember, targeting relevant keywords will always be the key to making sure your traffic generation strategies lead to actual conversions. Too many online businesses focus on getting volume over gaining targeted visits — and end up with few conversions to show for it.

You can have millions of visitors headed to your site every day — but if they’re not looking for what you offer, those visitors simply won’t become buyers.  Focusing on relevant keywords is your best hope of standing out from the competition.

And speaking of traffic generation, we’re doing to dig into your PPC campaigns in the next of  our Your Online Business Tune-Up series!

Every now and the folks at Google put on their overalls and start messing around under the hood. They’ve been at it again recently, and sometime in the next couple of months we can expect the new, supercharged Google Caffeine.

These Google tweaks generally result in changes in search engine rankings. Sometimes significant changes! Will Google Caffeine change your search rankings? They’re giving you the chance to test it out.

You can test out the new Google Caffeine here. And if you’re impatient, you can see the results side by side with the with this Google Comparison Tool.

And here is a basic FAQ page.

Google is looking for feedback, so if you go to this invitation page you can tell them what you think and see what others are saying.

In typical Google fashion, they’re not revealing anything about what they’re actually changing. However here are some of the common observations we’ve gathered from various forums and blogs:

• Google Caffeine is crawling a lot more pages to get results — including pages that aren’t supposed to be crawled. So it’s returning far more results for each query.
• Google Caffeine favors fresh content. It seems to be refreshing its content much faster, so, for example, the results for breaking news stories are getting updated in real time. Updating your pages often is going to become a priority.
• Testers are saying the results are more relevant, with fewer spammy sites at the top.

Try it yourself and see if there’s any difference to your search results… then let us know by posting a comment.

When you’re readdressing your on-page SEO there are a few things you need to remember:

• The spiders determine what your site is about by looking for keywords in your text and in the HTML code behind your site.
• Your keywords need to relate to the content on the page.
• Spiders automatically follow links between pages, which is why it’s important to get links pointing to your website from other relevant sites. The links from page to page within your site can also help the spiders.
• Spiders are attracted by new content. Once your site has been indexed, they will return whenever you update or add something new.

To make it easy for you to quickly check your on-page SEO, here’s a handy list you can work through. Tick off what you’ve done and make a note of what needs to be addressed so you can start bringing those spiders back to feast on your content!

• My website is peppered with keywords and synonyms.
• My top-performing keywords are in key positions on my web pages, including all of the following:
  • My domain name
  • My title tag HTML code
  • My headlines and subheads, complete with proper <h> tags in their HTML code
  • My web page content — where they’re often bolded or italicized
  • The source code behind my images — both image tags and alt text
  • The anchor text on links to my other pages 
  • My description and keyword meta tags
• I have a well-organized XML sitemap (If you don’t know where to start to build an XML sitemap, try the free generator at: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com.)

Remember, the more traffic you get, the more sales you can make — so taking a little time to update your on-page SEO can mean more than just better search engine rankings

Since Microsoft released Bing in June, the new search engine has outperformed many people’s expectations. Unlike the ill-fated “Live,” Microsoft’s last attempt to introduce a search engine to go up against Google, Bing has been steadily gaining ground on its mammoth competitor.

In fact, comScore has reported that Bing captured 9.3% of the search market share in August, which is a 4.5% jump over its performance in July. And when Bing fully takes over for Yahoo search, that number is probably going to continue to climb.

But let’s not forget — Google still controls the lion’s share of the market, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon, especially with Google Wave waiting in the wings.

So what do you think? Does Bing present a real threat to Google’s monopoly on the search market? Or is it always going to be a mouse nibbling at the crumbs left behind by the elephant?

Talk among yourselves, folks… we’re interested to hear what you have to say.