Well now, it’s been quite some time since an article was posted on here so I feel like I owe everyone something really good.

It’s common in seo to make suggestions to potential clients to not go after that elusive one word phrase. But by doing so, and with seemingly all seo professionals on board, has it gotten easier to get ranked for one-word phrases?

I’ve personally have been able to get some top rankings for clients of mine within the past year – I’m not saying this to brag, but if everyone’s drinking that kool-aid, how will anyone know how hard it is to go after one word?

Now, there are those that will tell you that a one-word phrase doesn’t convert. In my experience, these phrase drive a ton of traffic to the site (as much as up to 10k unique visitors a day) – of course not all of them convert.

But about 20% do.

Yes, 20% of all people coming in on a one-word phrase converts at that rate for something on the site. Maybe not for the phrase that brought them in, but that person converts on something.

Now, using WebTrends or Google Analytics will tell you the phrase on which the person came in from, but to get the granular level detail, the only system I’ve been able to come up with and rely on is a site database capturing system. It’s been custom created, but it can track all the pages visited and will tell you that if someone originally came to the site for the term “KVM” but ended up buying USB Cables, that data is retained.

Now, all of a sudden, those one-word phrases are looking pretty good. And, with soo many seo’s purposely not going after them, I think it presents an opportunity to grab those top rankings for those magical traffic drivers.

So, go get those words!

-To your online success!

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Use language that sells

Use compelling language in the snippet where possible, by placing sales-orientated text near the first occurrence of the target phrase. For example, in the screenshot below (and overlooking any brand loyalty that people may have to Amazon or Game), the idea that a Wii Remote has free delivery is more compelling than knowing it can be used as a sword AND a paintbrush.

If you’ve got a strong brand, use it

Remember that sometimes there’s no competition for clicks when the user has their destination in mind before seeing the results. For instance, a user may know they want to go to Wikipedia when they search for “The Shirehorses” and head there despite it ranking at #3.

A very similar thing is likely to happen for product / shopping searches, where the searcher has brand loyalty to a particular retailer. I imagine that Amazon receives a similar amount of traffic (if not more) than Canon does for the search ‘canon 400d’ – this might still be a destinational search.

However, in this situation Canon could get the clicks from people who are researching the product as well as those about to buy if they manipulated their snippet to say something like, “See full details for the Canon EOS 400D, and buy it direct for the best online price.”

Prove that your site is going to be useful

Get listed in Google Local, and get a map and reviews next to your branded search results. OK: you’d hope not to ever lose clicks from your branded search, but a result like that below gives real trust to the visitor.

Cover all the bases for organic DKI

Fake your way into using dynamic keyword insertion for organic search. Although Google still prefers to use the meta description of a page as the snippet when possible, in a search of more than a couple of words, it often needs to pull a quote from the page in order to show text relevant to the search. By using the exact match of popular variants of your search terms (particularly ones with valuable searcher intent) within your text, you can have the search terms highlighted in your snippet in order to demonstrate high relevancy. (Of course, you should be doing this anyway if you want to target those particular terms.)

The example below shows three of the UK results for ‘choose an engagement ring‘. The user doesn’t want to know how to buy one, doesn’t want to know the etiquette, but wants help choosing one – the third link is likely to get the click.

Don’t give everything away too early

Let’s say a searcher needs to know the height of Mount Everest in inches, or can’t remember the order of parameters in PHP’s strrchr command. They might see the following results in Google:

There’s no need for them to click through to the results. Using a variation of the earlier advice, make sure the ‘answer’ on the page isn’t right next to the first mention of the search term if you want to get people to actually visit your page. These similar examples (‘height of mount everest in yards‘ and ‘str_replace‘) don’t spill the beans too early.

If you’ve being using similar techniques, or have seen sites that you think should be getting more clicks from their search results, please do share them in the comments.

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Rank High In Google in just 15 minutes.

1. Write complete unique article on required keyword for which u want to rank., with good keyword density in Microsoft word document.

2. Submit this article to Scribd.com, then add all required description, tags, and keywords etc to get good score.

3. After it is uploaded, share it and post the link to Digg and Reddit.com. Those are the only 2 I have used and using those two and a short 1 paragraph article got me ranked number 7 with over 2 mil. SERPS

4. Anyways this method is still in testing but I have consistently gotten ranked in the first and second page every time. Please tweak and make this method better and share your results because I have shared my findings with you.

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We’ve heard a lot of speculation lately about the future of rankings – the SERPs are clearly evolving, and what was once a simple list of 10 results has gradually become personalized, localized, and wikified. It begs the question: As the SERPs diversify, do rankings matter as much as they used to? Recently, I had an opportunity to collect some data on this question. Earlier this year, a client suffered a ranking drop for their primary keyword (likely connected to Google’s alleged brand-related changes), which has recently recovered. So, I decided to run some numbers to see how that ranking drop and subsequent recovery affected search traffic.

1. Direct Keyword Traffic

The graph on the left (I) shows the client’s rankings, observed weekly, for their primary keyword over a period of about 7 months. The right-hand graph (II) shows weekly search traffic for that same keyword:

A couple of notes: (1) this is a one-word keyword, (2) it’s relatively common/popular, and (3) rankings over the 7 months fluctuated from 1st to 5th (I’ve inverted the graph to show 1st at the top). I’m a big believer in eyeballing data first, and I think the graphs show some degree of connection between ranking and direct traffic. The visual is a bit more compelling than the correlation (r = -0.31), although there is some relationship. The negative correlation is expected and reflects the fact that a low ranking is better (1 > 5, value-wise).

2. Long-tail Organic Traffic

From a broader SEO standpoint, though, how did the ranking of the client’s most important keyword affect their overall search traffic? I’ve repeated the ranking graph (I) below, but added a graph (III) of weekly traffic from Google organic results over the 7 months:

Here, the relationship seems to fall apart (r = 0.21). Other than a late-summer dip, overall organic traffic from Google actually grew as their primary keyword rankings were falling.

What Does It All Mean?

So, do rankings matter or don’t they? Well, in terms of direct traffic for the specific keyword that suffered the ranking drop, there’s certainly some effect. Studies have shown pretty reliably that search visitors focus (and click) most on the Top 3 results, with #1 getting the lion’s share. Outside of the single-keyword view, though, the situation gets a lot more complex. While the client’s primary keyword is an obvious choice for their industry and is fairly competitive, the traffic for that keyword accounted for only 1.3% of their total organic traffic from Google over the 7 months. If we had chosen to take a very narrow view, and obsessed over their primary keyword, we would have neglected over 98% of their SEO results.

Of course, I’m not saying rankings are irrelevant, just that you need to take a broader view, including:

Tracking diverse, long-tail phrases
Tracking search phrases actually used by visitors (not what you think they use)
Measuring search analytics, such as total traffic from search
While the phrase “long tail” may feel like it’s been beaten to death, the impact of the long tail is becoming more relevant every day. Over the 7 months in this case study, Google visitors used over 250,000 unique phrases to reach the client’s site. Over 80% of those phrases didn’t contain any variation of the primary keyword at all. So, while rankings obviously still matter on a keyword-by-keyword basis, being #1 for your top keyword (or even your top few keywords) is no longer good enough – if that’s all you’re measuring, then you’re missing the big picture.

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