Comments on: SEO and reality: ranking first for ’subaqueous auto racing’ is only impressive if people actually search on that phrase

By: Heidi Cool

Heidi Cool — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:10:44 +0000

Kyle, Indeed, it's not rocket science, it just requires logic and thought. It requires enough knowledge to justify paying people like me to build sites with semantic mark-up and other SEO and social media friendly features, and to work with folks like you at Hubspot on inbound marketing strategies. But it's not so complex that people should be hesitant to jump in.

By: Kyle James

Kyle James — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:57:35 +0000

@Heidi - I complete agree. You are preaching to the choir as we would say in the South. Now if we could only convince everyone else that this stuff isn't rocket science and to quit being afraid of it...

By: Heidi Cool

Heidi Cool — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:13:37 +0000

Kyle,
great point about blog posts and RSS. I always tell people that having a blog on one's site is good for SEO - and can serve as the backbone of a social media plan. Although I hadn't set out to do it, this post really illustrates that point. When searching "subaqueous auto racing" (with the quotes to get the exact phrase match) Google now shows 52 results, while there were zero before I started. If this article had been added to a static page it would not have been indexed as quickly. Nor would so many have seen it to link to it from their blogs, reTweet it, etc. Yet this happened in less than 24 hours.

It also proves that it is easy to rank for obscure terms. Unscrupulous SEO practitioners can create examples like this to prove that they can get a #1 ranking. But marketers shouldn't be impressed by that. No one can guarantee a #1 rank on a truly relevant phrase.

Instead they should ask if a site saw improved traffic (over time), and if that traffic led to conversions—or whatever goals the site involved may have had. In this case I know I'm not getting traffic from the subaqueous phrase, but instead from bloghighed.org, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and my subscribers. In the long run, I may also get traffic on phrases relating to SEO and wordchoice but in the short term the traffic is coming from social media.

Dave,
Yes, that is rather handy. Instead of comparing Technorati and Google Blog search I can see all the links/copies in the phrase search. T'is very informative.

Mark
Thanks! You are absolutely right about tracking results. Writing the copy and implementing SEO is just the first step, measuring results and adjusting strategies is an ongoing process.

By: Mark Keating

Mark Keating — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:59:24 +0000

Heidi: Let me just highlight the last two lines: "... if the phrase doesn't bring visitors it isn't helping. "When editing copy for SEO it's easy to get wound up worrying about what phrases you should rank for, but if you write for your readers and apply common sense, you'll start to see meaningful results." And of course, you'll want to track those results, and see how many of those visitors convert into customers. Excellent post! Mark

By: dave

dave — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:29:12 +0000

At least it will be easy to see who is scraping your content.

By: Kyle James

Kyle James — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:10:48 +0000

It's not what you call it it's what people look for. Write that way and write for people and you win. Remember that Google is your dumbest, blindest visitor. Solid take-aways and yes you do rank #1 for "subaqueous auto racing"... I actually ran a search on it... Which I guess that is another takeaway... if you make it simple for visitors to figure out what you want them to do they will do it... like me go search for that term... @David - the reason that you can rank so fast w/ blog posts is because many services pull the RSS feed and KNOW that new content is there... Google is no different and I've seen many posts get indexed 10 minutes after they get posted simply because of the RSS effect.

By: Heidi Cool

Heidi Cool — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:00:53 +0000

David, Google is amazing. I think they are factoring in the links from Twitter even if they don't use them for pagerank. It seems to speed up the indexing. Part of it might be my SEO, but ranking high on a term no one uses is pretty easy. That said, having it rank in mere hours is totally a testament to their spiders. They are obviously gathering data quite quickly.

By: David

David — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:21:42 +0000

I think it's amazing that Google returns your site for 'subaqueous auto racing' so quickly. Their clever little algorithms must be working overtime, separating out all the phrases that can be extracted from any number of word combinations that people use on the net. Of course, it is testament to your SEO, but still - pretty impressive of Google.

By: schools4me (schools4me)

schools4me (schools4me) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:16:53 +0000

Twitter Comment... Heidi Adams Cool - SEO and reality: ranking first for ?subaqueous auto racing? is only impressive if people actually s... [link to post] - Posted using Chat Catcher ...