So why do so many people do this with their SEO?

It’s an all too common sight in the field of search engine optimisation to see websites, often promoted by SEO agencies, being optimised for the wrong keywords. Businesses can spend a lot of money, often thousands or tens of thousands of pounds, targeting keywords that are of no use to them in any capacity, or ones they have no hope of ever ranking for.

Let’s give you a for instance.

Say your business is in the divorce industry, and you’re a divorce solicitor offering quick online divorces. What words instantly come to mind when you think of divorce?

There’s the obvious, ‘divorce’, for example. But how competitive is that to rank for? You would need a sizable budget to be able to rank for such a generic keyword, or an already very established website, and how many people who were looking for your kind of service would simply use the word ‘divorce’ for their search?

No, that’s not the keyword you should be investing your time, effort and money into optimising for – although you will find that by optimising for the correct keywords, your rankings for ‘divorce’ would improve anyway.

How about other keywords such as ‘marriage breakdown’, ‘break-ups’, ‘split’ and ‘annulment’?

These keywords are all relevant to your business, and they’re the sort of words that should be appearing on your website, yes, but again they’re not the sort of keywords that you should be optimising for as such. Imagine that you’re looking for the services of a divorce solicitor, one that offers online divorce – what are the benefits of that service? What words would you use to find a service such as that?

More relevant keywords would be ‘divorce solicitors’, ‘online divorce’, ‘quickie divorce’, ‘cheap divorce’ and ‘divorce advice’.

Notice how they all contain the word ‘divorce’ anyway, so by optimising for keywords such as these you would be optimising for divorce as well?

Remember, when choosing keywords you need to ensure:

• Keywords are not too competitive
• Keywords are not too generic
• Keywords are relevant to your service
• Keywords will convert

What Analytics doesn’t give you however is a breakdown on the age-group of your website’s visitors, and their sex. For this sort of information you’d need your visitors to register on your website and enter their full details – which is rare, and unlikely.

With Facebook however, when you have a Facebook Fan Page you can get the full details of your page’s fans, the visitors to your page, and their sex and age. This allows you to determine exactly how to cater your offerings to your audience in order to maximise the effectiveness of your page’s content.

This snapshot for example shows that the male/female split of the audience for the Fan Page is almost 50/50, with 54% male and 46% female. Such a high level of female members of any page is rare. The details also tell us that the most common age of visitors to the page is between 35-44, followed by 25-34.

Imagine how much help a page like this would offer you and your Internet marketing efforts.

Unlike websites however, Facebook doesn’t offer a lot of reporting with these pages, save for the few scant details you get in the ‘insights’ section of each page, which tells you things like how much post interaction you’ve had in the last week.

This week however Facebook launched a new service where it emailed brief stats to page admins for their Facebook pages. The details came out in a single email, complete with stats for as many Facebook pages that you act as an admin for. The emails offer basic information such as the number of times your page has been viewed in the last week, and how many new fans you’ve acquired that week.

The details also compare the stats with the previous week, so you can see if you’re heading in the right direction. It’s no Google Analytics, but it’s useful to know at a glance how your Facebook page has been doing, and whether it needs an extra push.

The email stats look something like this:

+7 Fans this week (535 total Fans)
11 Wall posts, comments and likes this week (30 last week)
580 Visits to your Page this week (503 Visits last week)

Do you have a Facebook page?

Firstly, you need to be adding content to your website. This is a given. If you’re not adding regular content in the form of news, articles or blogs, begin now. You can’t expect to become the biggest and the best if you’re not putting the work in to your website.

Now that you are adding regular content, check your website’s statistics. Not your rankings, your statistics. This could be by using Google Analytics, AW Stats, or some other stats package. Have a look at your website’s current traffic and what keywords your visitors are searching for. You want to look for key phrases that are two or more words. This is called ‘longtail search’.

Now, this is the clever bit. Put those key phrases into Google to see where your website ranks for them. You’ll rank somewhere near the first page, or perhaps the second page, if you’re already getting a few visitors from them. If you find that you are on the first page of Google, near the bottom, or on the second page of Google for some of these phrases – and you know that your visitors are searching for these phrases, you can increase your traffic by using them.

Here’s what you do:

• Write a new blog post, article or news story on your website
• Use that exact search phrase in your post
• Ideally you should use it as the title of your post
• Link back to your original post or page than ranks for the phrase, using that exact search phrase as the anchor text

By following these steps you will increase your ranking for that phrase, and thus you will increase your traffic. Keep doing this each month with new phrases that appear in your statistics.

The more you write, the more your website will rank for, the more traffic you will receive.

If you said ‘to increase the ranking of your website in the search engines’ you’ve missed the point of search engine optimisation.

Now yes, SEO is about optimising websites so that they appear higher up the search engines. This is obvious. However, this doesn’t necessarily help your website to receive more traffic, or more sales. Your website ranking higher in the search engines is akin to your company increasing its advertising reach so that more magazines and newspapers carry your adverts; it doesn’t necessarily mean that more people will see them!

First of all, you need to get it right from the start and do your homework on your keywords so that you and your SEO company are optimising your website for keywords that people are actually searching for. Secondly, you need to make sure that the people searching for those keywords are doing so because they need your services. Thirdly, you need to make sure that your website is set up to capitalise on any traffic that it receives, so that you have a decent ROI (return on investment).

Your priorities should be, in this order:

1. Sales and Leads
2. Traffic
3. Search Engine Rankings

Your rankings are merely a means to and end, not an end in themselves. If you place all of your emphasis on attaining high rankings for the keywords that you have chosen, then what?

Never lose sight of what’s truly important, as a quality SEO company will include your website’s traffic statistics in your monthly reports, as well as your rankings, and will work with you to improve conversions on your website.

Yet, it’s not as easy as it first appears to gauge the success of a website.

Sure, you have the usual tells such as Google PageRank, domain age, number of backlinks indexed by Google and, if you want to waste five minutes, its Alexa ranking. But all of these could be deceiving.

For example, just because a website has a low Google PR, or even no PR at all, it doesn’t mean it’s not hugely successful. Google has been known to throw around PR penalties to website guilty of certain infractions on its rules, such as link selling. This means you could dismiss a website that has no PR, when it in fact is one of the most powerful websites out there.

Searching for backlinks in Google can be equally misleading as Google shows only a fraction of the links it really has indexed. Yahoo’s Site Explorer shows more, but that takes a while to update and often shows links that are no longer in existence.

So, short of actually viewing the Google Analytics for a website, how can you tell if it really is successful online and just playing possum with its PR?

Here are some tips you could try:

• Google the website name, with the TLD. This will show you websites that have mentioned it, and have most likely linked to it. Google may be coy with its backlinks, but it’s an open book with rankings.
• Google post titles used on the blog – if they show up on the first page of Google, the website is being indexed and ranked well.
• Google keywords that the website is optimising for – this will tell you how successful the website is for SEO, and is after all what backlinks are all about anyway – rankings.

The golden rule is that you shouldn’t assume that a website is low ranking with low traffic levels just because it appears to have no Google PR or backlinks.

Internet marketing is always one area that comes under scrutiny because you can clearly see how successful your PPC, SEO and email campaigns have been. You can track rises in rankings, traffic and conversions very easily using tools such as Google Analytics (or at least you should be), so the success, or comparative lack of success, of any Internet marketing campaign becomes apparent.

What some businesses will do however is to look at a lack of return on investment (ROI) and deem their Internet marketing a failure. They’ll see a lack of sales via their website, a lack of enquires, and believe that cutting costs is the way forward in the face of more profitable advertising methods.

If that is the case with your website, ask yourself why you have a low ROI.

Many people believe there is a direct correlation between the traffic your website receives and the money you can make from it. Unless your website earns money by page impressions, this is not the case. You need your website to convert, and high rankings for keywords and lots of Internet traffic from search engines is just the first part of the puzzle.

The main problem, more often than not, is that your website is unsuitable for the task at hand. Perhaps it has an amateurish design and doesn’t look trustworthy, perhaps it doesn’t display properly in all browsers, perhaps it’s difficult to navigate or maybe your products, or contact details, are hard to find.

You could even have basic scripting errors on your contact or purchase pages, and not even realise it.

If your website is ranking for keywords and is receiving traffic for those keywords, look at your analytics and see where those visitors are going and, more importantly, what pages they are exiting your website from.

You need to make it easy for users to convert on your website. The easier it is, the more conversions you will have.

However, the reporting interface for Google AdSense (the programme that allows webmasters to earn money from their websites) has barely changed for years. It’s become something of a comfy old blanket, with the only change of note in recent months being the switch to local currencies.

Google is about to change that as it has launched a new Beta test for its AdSense interface, inviting publishers to play around with their new features and offer feedback.

Google described its new interface as offering:

• Comprehensive performance reports: View your daily stats in graph format, and gain insight into new metrics such as the amount you’re earning from different ad types, targeting types and bid types.
• Quicker account maintenance: We’ve streamlined the process for a number of common tasks to help you get things done more quickly. Whether you’re trying to update your contact information or make a change to a number of ad units at the same time, you’ll find that these types of tasks require fewer clicks and less account navigation than before.
• Prominent help links: There’s now help content available on every page, so you’ll be able to find answers to your questions quickly while navigating through your account.
• Easier access to online resources: Visit the redesigned Resources page, where you can find the latest content from the Inside AdSense blog, our YouTube channel and our Twitter account, all within your own account.

The new interface is certainly much slicker than the old one, and has many similarities with the new Analytics interface. There is Ajax abound as you generate graphs and reports on the fly, and you can switch on different parameters, such as CTR and eCPM just by checking a box.

Google does warn that not all of the features in the Beta test will make it to the live release, so we won’t talk up any of the additions in case they’re abandoned by Google before the official launch date.

It’s good to know that Google hasn’t forgotten AdSense Publishers though.

New AdSense Layout

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AdSense Reports