“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein

I am fortunate to be in a position to offer SEO advice to a number of people and in this capacity I have observed that many (if not most) of the problems that people face with search engine optimization (SEO) don’t stem from overly complex issues but from either a mis-understanding or mis-implementation of the SEO basics.

Funnily enough, it does remind me a little of a situation from my past. Years ago, when I was a young, ambitious geo-scientist I would occasionally find myself in need of advice from the Chief Geo-Physicist. In offering advice, he would always irritate me enormously by going back to first principles to resolve whatever problem I had. How could it be that the answers would be found there I kept thinking to myself? The situation was doubly vexing when more often than not…that was indeed where the solution was to be found. Eventually, I came to realize that I should not make assumptions and when in a need to troubleshoot, I would carefully make sure that the solutions weren’t a lot simpler than I thought if only I took care to make sure I hadn’t overlooked the fundamentals.

But what has all this to do with SEO you may ask?

The more I have found myself in a position to troubleshoot SEO issues the more important I have found it to have a clear process for reviewing the circumstances of the issues while at the same time ensuring that the fundamentals have been implemented properly. This post has been written to describe the process I use so that people might be able to troubleshoot for themselves without having to seek external advice for something that might be founded in the SEO basics.

Of course any analysis of the SEO characteristics of a page or website should initially start by determining whether Google and the other search engines have discovered and indexed the page/post or domain under question. If this has not happened, then other considerations apply (has the domain been banned for instance) which are beyond the scope of this post but may be the subject of a future posting.

The remainder of this post therefore discusses circumstances where there are no issues about whether a page/post or website has been found and indexed but where the ranking outcome (within the search engine results pages or SERPS) is inconsistent with what is expected. There is no difference whether the factors discussed below are addressed while the content is being considered and published or during a troubleshooting exercise after the fact. The fundamentals must be implemented to ensure the best SEO outcome. Throughout this post wherever I mention the word ‘keyword’ that refers to either a keyword or keyphrase.

Step 1 – Understanding the Keyword

Having established that the domain and/or page has been found by Google, the next step is to understand the keyword being targeted. Using Market Samurai, I establish the traffic potential and that the SEO competition is not so extreme that under normal circumstances it would be almost impossible to rank on page 1 of Google for that keyword. In addition, from the amount of (phrase match) competition an expectation of the time it might take to achieve a Google Page 1 ranking is suggested as is the volume of link building that will be necessary.

My general rule of thumb is that for keywords with less than 30,000 competing pages (phrase match) then the time to rank on Google page 1 may be 1 – 3 months. Were the competition to be up to 100,000 then it may take from 3 – 6  months and that greater than 100,000 then from 6 months to a year. These time frames are simply due to the time it would take to achieve the degree of off-page authority (external back links) that would be required to rank for keywords that have greater numbers of competing pages. Of course these numbers aren’t specific but are based on my experience over the last few years.

Secondarily, Market Samurai can also be used to assess the ‘quality’ of the competition currently ranking on page 1 of Google for the keyword being assessed. The purpose of this is two-fold: firstly to ensure that those sites that are ranking aren’t too competitive and secondarily to establish the level of authority that the ranking sites currently have so as to set an appropriate expectation for the amount of work that will be required to out-rank them.

It goes without saying that there is no point in targeting a keyword that has no commercial potential if the purpose of the page or website is to make money. It is recommended to ensure that evidence of commercial activity exists if that is the case although that subject won’t be discussed in detail in this post.

Step 2 – Assessing On-page SEO factors

Once the keyword meets the requirements of step 1, it is necessary to publish content that has been appropriately optimized for this keyword  in order to rank in the SERPS for that keyword. It is amazing the number of pages that fail to do this thereby seriously reducing their ranking potential in the SERPS.

In simple terms, if you want to rank in the search engines for a keyword then it is paramount that you have a page or post on your website that has been properly optimized for the keyword you are targeting. While on-page SEO factors may not ultimately be primarily responsible for the final ranking your content will achieve, it is imperative they are implemented properly as a sound foundation to maximise the value (from an SEO perspective) of the external links that will point to the page. Ultimately, it is the quality and quantity of your external links that determine your final ranking in the SERPS, but the value of the link network will be significantly reduced if the keyword optimization of the link network and the page they point to are not consistent and optimized for the keyword being targeted.

But not all on-page SEO factors are equal, so I have categorised them below as being either critical, recommended or optional:

Critical on-page SEO factors

• keyword or phrase is contained within the domain or URL
• keyword or phrase is contained within the title of the page or post

Recommended on-page SEO factors

• keyword or phrase is contained within the meta-description of the page or post
• keyword or phrase is contained within a header tag on the page or post
• keyword or phrase occurs in the tags of a post (especially pertaining to a blog)

Optional on-page SEO factors

• keyword or phrase occurs in the first paragraph of the main content of the page or post
• keyword or phrase is bolded and/or italacized and /or underlined
• keyword or phrase is used as the anchor text of a link within the page or post
• keyword or phrase is used as the alt text of a link within the page or post
• keyword or phrase is used as the title tag for an image contained within the page or post
• keyword or phrase is the name of the image file used within the page or post
• keyword or phrase is used 4 – 5 times at least within the whole page or post (1% keyword density)

I highly recommend that you ensure that at least the critical and recommended factors detailed above are implemented in your published content and as many of the optional factors as the circumstances allow. The goal is to ensure that when the search engines spider and index your page/post there is no uncertainty about what keyword the page/post is relevant for.

Step 3 – Assessing Off-page SEO factors

Assuming the keyword and on-page factors have been properly considered and implemented then a poor ranking outcome will almost certainly be due to a lack of authority in the eyes of the search engines (primarily Google). This lack of authority will almost certainly be due to either a link network (that points to the page or post) that is either too small, lacks links from other authoritative sites or is optimized (through the anchor text of the links) for the wrong keyword.

The first thing to do is assess the size of the link network (using the seo competition module of Market Samurai) that points to your page/post and compare with the link networks of the pages that are currently ranking on page 1 of Google for the targeted keyword. Pay particular attention to the number of links that have a Google pagerank greater than zero. While it is necessary to have a platform of PR 0 links, the reality is that your ranking will be influenced much more by the smaller number of high PR links you have than the higher volume of PR 0 links.

Ultimately, it is possible to rank high for any keyword if you have enough (quality) links but at the very least you need to have more links than your competition has.

Assuming you do have more links than your competitors but are still failing in the SERPS, then you will need to assess the anchor text of the links to ensure that the keyword or phrase that predominates amongst your links is again consistent with the keyword being targeted. I have had several cases where there were plenty of links to a page being assessed but where the anchor text was different than the keyword for which the page was expected to rank for.

In the end, let’s be very clear, if the on-page factors are properly implemented for a keyword being targeted then the ultimate ranking outcome is almost entirely dependent on the number and quality of the external links that point to the page. But the value of the link network is considerably enhanced when the on-page and off-page factors are both optimized for the same keyword.

In almost all cases (after having established that a page/post has been found by the search engine spiders) the process outlined above is the procedure I follow when troubleshooting an SEO problem. If the ranking outcome is not as expected then the problem usually tends to exist within one or several of the areas discussed above.

There is only one other factor that may need to be considered and that is the impact of time. It is clear to me that sometimes it takes time for the search engines to discover and give a page credit for certain on-page and off-page factors. This is especially true when something has changed on the page or when the link network is constantly changing due to additions or losses within the link network. On several occasions, I have witnessed that it has taken Google from 4 – 8 weeks or more to recognise a change or to give credit for ranking factors that should have positively influenced the ranking position of a page or post within the SERPS. So, if everything discussed above is in order, make sure that a sufficient period of time has elapsed before you come to the conclusion that a problem exists.

So there you have it. My motive for writing this post was to assist people who may need to troubleshoot a poor SEO ranking outcome and for whom a review of the SEO basics may reveal the problems that are the cause.

It is…as it is,

GuruBob

Technorati Tags: guru bob, GuruBob, gurubobco, keyword, keyword research, Market Samurai, offpage, offpage factors, offpage seo, offpage seo factors, onpage, onpage factors, onpage seo, onpage seo factors, phrase match, phrase match competition, ranking outcome, search engine optimization, search engine results page, SEO, seo basics, seo issues, seo ranking outcome

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.” – Marshall McLuhan

In that frustrating time between when the Apple iPad was announced and when I was finally able to get my hands on one (earlier than most thanks to Ed Dale) I thought very carefully on how I would use the device and how it would add value in my daily work practices.

Like many people who spend as much time online as I do, a considerable amount of my time is taken up with consuming content, be it email, PDF documents, audio and video podcasts, news feeds and general web surfing. What I hoped and what ultimately has transpired, is that I would be able to conduct those activities on the iPad thereby unchaining me from the desktop when I choose to do those things. Now, particularly given that I have mobile WiFi access (using the MyWi app on a jail broken 3G iPhone) I can productively consume content or manage email wherever I choose to be and whenever I choose to do so.

I am fortunate in that I was already a big user of Cloud services from document management (Google Docs) to email (Gmail) and there would be no transitional issues as those services would be accessible on the iPad right from the outset.

But there was a long standing issue, however, with my main email account which had been an irritation for me for a long period of time, it just took the iPad to cause me to do actually do something about it!

You see my email account was a POP email account through which, over a period of nearly 10 years, I had acquired an archive of nearly 2.5 Gigabytes of email stored on my main desktop computer. This email archive is important in my business because I’m expected to be able to search back through that archive when issues come up that may have occurred months or even years ago.

Even before the iPad was a reality, when I travelled away from the office for an extended period of time, I would copy that email archive from my desktop to my laptop so I could access and manage email while on the road and that copy it back to my desktop upon return. This was considerably annoying and ultimately unsustainable and for some time I knew I would have to solve this issue for good but I put it off on the assumption it would require a difficult and time consuming solution to be implemented.

As it turned out it wasn’t as bad as I thought (often the way) although the solution did require some effort to implement. I knew I had no alternative but to transfer my email archive into the cloud and use an online email service. My choices were many although in the end only 2 were really feasible for me. As an Apple .me member I could have used the email service provided by Apple but I was a little leery of doing that as Apple has had problems in the past and I wasn’t confident using that service.

The only other real choice was Gmail as I have been using that service for years without problems and the over 7Gb capacity of a Gmail account meant that I wouldn’t have a problem with importing my existing email archive. In addition, it is possible to setup a Gmail account to look like it is your existing POP account and Gmail will pull email in (via POP) from your existing mail server (often provided by your ISP) and when you send mail from Gmail it can be configured so the mail seems to be originating from your POP email address. All this was relatively easy to implement, but how to get my existing email archive into Gmail…that was the problem.

The solution again was easy but definitely time consuming. It turns out that I could setup my newly configured Gmail account as an IMAP account (see image at left) meaning that I could add it to my existing mail client (I use Mac Mail) and having done so, drag folders from the mail archive on my desktop machine to equivalent folders in the Gmail account. Having dragged the folder in Mac Mail to the Gmail account, the mail client handles the import of the individual emails up to your Gmail account through the magic of the IMAP mail system. All it took was time and patience.

Being a little pedantic about folder management in email, I had over 600 mail folders and when I dragged them into Gmail the folders (even the nested folders) were converted to labels. This was great as I didn’t need to manually re-create my folder structure, it was effectively done automatically.

Now I couldn’t just do the move in one global move, I had to move groups of folders bit by bit and it took me nearly 5 days of gradually moving folders across in Mac Mail and wait for all those emails to be uploaded (via IMAP) into the Gmail account. What I can say though is I got all 2.5 Gigabytes of email imported with only a few failures and even those completed successfully just by attempting the move a second time (just occasionally your connection to Gmail drops and times out which causes the failure).

Having done this, I can now manage all of my emails on the iPad (and as a benefit also on the iPhone or in a web browser) and can access my full email archive wherever I happen to be on multiple devices. There are other productivity gains as well because searching email in Gmail is very fast and efficient and the time it takes to process and archive email is faster once you get the hang of the Google label system.

The other principle benefit is the spectacularly good spam management system within Gmail, some of which I had to do manually before.

So there you have it…if you are like me and have a legacy email system that binds you to a single desktop, then a solution does exist if you are prepared to go through the pain of importing your mail archive into Gmail via IMAP.

It is as it is.

GuruBob

Technorati Tags: cloud services, email, gmail, guru bob, GuruBob, IMAP, ipad, iphone, mac mail, pop mail

“A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.” - Dorthea Brande

In a previous post “GuruBobsBlog.com has moved to GuruBo.co“, I mentioned that one of my main concerns I had in relocating GuruBob‘s Blog to a different domain was the steps required in the physical moving of a WordPress blog. I was aware that it would involve a transfer of the underlying SQL database but I didn’t actually know what to do. As it turned out, the reality was no where near as bad as the concern (isn’t that often the case) although there were some issues that arose which I thought might make an interesting post especially for those of you that may need or want to move a WordPress blog.

Having spent a cursory 10 minutes or so searching in Google for instructions on moving a WordPress blog it was clear that there were a few key steps that need to be done. I am using Cpanel based hosting (http://www.hostgator.com/) and the instructions reproduced below are for that platform:

1. Backup the WordPress database on the old domain using PHPMyAdmin or plugin.
2. Export the WordPress database on the old domain using PHPMyAdmin
3. Transfer all the files from the old domain to the new domain using your preferred FTP client
4. Import the database previously exported on the new domain using PHPMyAdmin
5. Change the wp-config.php file on the new domain to reflect the new database settings

The most critical aspect is to make sure you have a full backup of your existing blog which you can either achieve by using the backup function in (PHPMyAdmin) or by installing a WordPress backup plugin of which there are many available. Thereafter, the exporting of the SQL database which WordPress uses to store all of it’s data is a fairly straight forward process using PHPMyAdmin and you end up with a .sql file on your computer.

Having transferred all of the files from the hosting area of the old domain (this can take some time for a large blog with many posts) to that of the new domain, the process of re-importing the SQL database file (.sql) was also fairly straight forward using the import facility in PHPMyAdmin.

Having completed the steps above, I was reasonably confident that my blog would be faithfully replicated on the new domain and navigated to the home page only to find that while the blog was there in all it’s glory, all of the URL’s pointed back to the old domain including the WP-Admin panel.  Suffice to say this was a problem.

After a few minutes of consideration and after careful review of the instructions I had followed it dawned on me that the instructions expected that the user was moving a blog from one host to another…but that the domain name was staying the same. This would indeed be the case for most people who had either changed host (to take advantage of better or more extensive facilities) or had bought or sold the blog from or to a third party.

This was not the case for me, however, I was staying on the same host but the domain name was changing, in fact both domains were hosted in the same Hostgator re-seller account.

What to do, what to do….

To find the answer I sought the assistance of friend and uber tech geek Eugene Ware of Noble Samurai. He pointed out to me that the database export file (.sql) that was exported in Step 2 above, was in fact a text file and that all references to the old domain name in that file would need to be replaced with the new domain name. It turns out, for my blog which had only 8 posts at the time of transfer, there were over 800 references to the domain name in the .sql file!

Like all optimistic geeks, Eugene and I did a bulk find and replace and re-imported the .sql database using PHPMyAdmin. Once again we checked the blog with anticipation of success only to find that while most things were fixed, there will still some errors.

We were left with the only option but to look at the file manually and check all references to the domain name and figure out why the bulk find and replace didn’t work.  It turned out that the solution was again fairly simple but only if you knew beforehand. You see the database not only references links to the full domain name (http://www.domainname.com/ etc) but also to the folder within the hosting area where all the files in relation to the blog are stored. Were the folder address the same on both domains, then there wouldn’t have been a problem but it turned out that the home folder on gurubobsblog.com was /home/gurubob while on gurubob.co was /home/guruco. From here the solution as to replace all references of /home/gurubob with /home/guruco and all was fine.

A final re-import using PHPMyAdmin and lo and behold the blog had been properly replicated on both domains.

At this stage I could have just mothballed the blog on the old domain and just start using the copied blog on gurubob.co. I did not want to lose the search engine rankings I had acquired for gurubobsblog.com, however, at least until gurubob.co had acquired enough authority to rank in its own right in the Search Engines for the keywords I was ranking for.  To achieve, this I once again turned to Eugene’s expertise and we decided that the best thing to do was to 301 redirect all the pages on the old domain to the duplicated page on the new domain. To achieve this, just a few lines of code are needed in the .htaccess file in the root folder of the old domain and they are reproduced below:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomainname\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomainname.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomainname\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomainname.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Now if you find any reference to the old blog in the SERP’s and click on that link you will automatically be redirected to the same page on the new domain.  You can also advise Google that blog has been moved in your Google Webmasters account.

So there you have it. I hope by documenting the process I followed that it may somehow help any of the readers of the blog achieve the same result. As it turns out, moving a WordPress blog is no where near as bad as it seems especially when you know exactly what to do.

It is…as it is.

GuruBob

PS After having completed the domain name changes manually in the .sql database file, it turns out there is a WordPress plugin that makes this process just that little bit simpler. It is the Update URL’s WordPress plugin. This plugin does make some things simpler but may not fix the references to the home folder so factor that in if you still have problems after using the plugin.

Other useful posts on Moving a WordPress Blog

• How to Move WordPress Blog to New Domain or Location « My Digital Life – For blogger who self-hosts the WordPress blog publishing system on a web hosting server with own registered domain name, sometimes, you may decide to reorganize the blog link URL to make it tidier or to reflect new focus or theme of the …
• Move WordPress blog to inner page- This ‘N That – OK, so i’ve already showed you how to put a static page on your wordpress home page. But what if you want a blog, but you want it showing on an inner page? Here’s the solution: Make a copy of your index.php file. …
• Create a static homepage for WordPress- This ‘N That – I’ve been asked about this a few times lately, I know there’s a plugin that does this, but this is the most simple way, by far. Duplicate the page.php file of your theme and name it home.php; Right before the line that …
• HowTo Safely Move your WordPress Blog from One Host to Another – This tutorial will help you in moving your WordPress blog from your old server to a new server pretty safely. Make sure you keep backups.

Technorati Tags: blog, database, guru bob, GuruBob, gurubob.co, gurubobsblog.com, how to move a wordpress blog, moving a wordpress blog, phpmyadmin, robert somerville, sql, wordpress

“When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.” – Japanese Proverb

It has been a while since I last posted and there has been quite a lot of water under the bridge since then.  The 2nd Coming Home seminar has come and gone as well as an internal 30DC workshop where we discussed and planned for the 2010 30DC.  All of these events were distractions but never the less I had hoped to find the time to continue posting before now.

All of a sudden an interesting opportunity arose as Ed Dale and myself were approached by the domain registry (cointernet.co) for the soon to be released .co domain to participate in their co-founder opportunity. What this meant is that we were given early access to a .co domain as co-founders and to that end Ed has relocated his blog onto eddale.co and I decided to move gurubobsblog.com onto gurubob.co.

What is the .co domain you might ask and where has it come from.

Well, for some time now, the Colombian domain suffix has been .com.co and has been the preserve of mostly Colombian companies.  Given the attractiveness of the .co suffix and it’s connotations for companies and communities and the like, a decision was made to change the Colombian domain suffix to a second level type and so the .co domain is being released to the world.  At present, an application is being made for the .co domain to be treated as a global domain (rather like the .tv domain) by Google which would mean that it could be geotargetted to any region at the initiative of the domain owner.

So why would I want to move my blog on gurubob.co?

The main reason is keyword specificity. In a perfect world, I would have been able to acquire gurubob.com but that has been unavailable for many years so it seemed a great opportunity to get gurubob.co. Secondly, not having to add an extra word to the domain means that the relative keyword density in the domain is higher and the overall domain name has fewer characters thereby being easier to remember and quicker to type. I do think that when the .co domains go on general availability on the 20th of July 2010 that many people will consider a .co domain for these reasons.

The only hesitation I had was in relation to moving the existing WordPress blog onto a new domain and while it did offer some challenges it wasn’t too bad. Some of the things I learnt about moving the blog were interesting including an easy to apply site-wide re-direction of the old site to the new site and I’ll write about them in my next post.

At this time, only co-founders have access to a .co domain but over the next few weeks trademark holders will be able to apply to reserve domains that relate to their trademark. There will be an opportunity to go into an auction for popular domain names from mid-june to early July with general availability starting on the 20th July.  It is possible to pre-register for a .co domain at Go Daddy.

That’s it for now. I’m interested to see how Google will treat the blog now it has been moved to GuruBob.co and will report on that in future posts but I do think the .co domain may offer a tremendous opportunity in the near future for people to acquire highly keyword specific domains that will hopefully be treated as global domains that in time will be able to compete on equal terms with .com domains.

It is as it is.

GuruBob

ps if you would like to find out more about the Co-Founders program in relation to the .co domain then click here to visit the cointernet.co web site.

Technorati Tags: .co, colombian domain suffix, domain, domains, go daddy, guru bob, GuruBob, gurubobsblogcom has moved to gurubobco, keyword specific domains, registration

In a previous blog post titled ‘The Key Is The Keywords‘ I discussed why keywords and key phrases are so important on the Internet and even more important where Search Engines (like Google and Yahoo) are concerned. It is critical to realise that if you want to receive traffic from the search engines for a specific keyword or key phrase then you must publish relevant, unique and optimised content on your site or blog that is targetted to that keyword. Additionally, if you want to give yourself a realistic chance to rank high in the search engines for a given keyword, you must filter your candidate keywords (that you could optimize for) based on the amount of SEO competition (phrase match competition or SEOC) that exists for those words.

I am going to make the assumption in this post that you haven’t choosen your main target keyword yet and are still trying to make head or tail or which keyword to optimise your website for relative to the market/niche/microniche you wish to enter. In the context of this post, I refer to SEO competition (SEOC) as the number of competing pages on the internet that contain the specific key phrase you are analyzing. SEO competition can also be thought of in terms of the quality and authority of a website that contains a specific keyword but I want to discuss that aspect of SEO competition in another post.

At the beginning of the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC) we teach the importance of choosing a keyword or key phrase that is being searched for at least 80 to 100 times a day and where Google is aware of less than 30,000 pages on the Internet that contain the specific phrase. You can find the specific phrase match competition easily in Google by entering the phrase in quotes. In the example search (click on the image to the left) I have searched for “Robert Somerville” and Google was aware of 67,800 pages on the Internet that contained the specific phrase at the time I did this search and captured the image shown. Competition changes daily (sometimes hourly) so don’t be surprised if the number varies when you search.

Now why was it that I choose 30,000 as the cutoff competition variable for phrase match competition and why don’t I use intitle (number of times the keyword is found in the title of a webpage) or inurl (number of times the keyword is found within a URL) or whether the keyword is contained within at least 1 link pointing back to the site? Those are the questions I mainly want to address in this post.

When I began preparing the basic research that lead to the development of the SEO strategy that was taught in the 2007 30DC, I was mainly interested in determining simple filter variables that, when applied, significanly increased the probability that the keywords that remained after the application of the filter, would have a sufficient traffic reward and were not too competitve that it wouldn’t be posible to rank on page one of Google for that keyword or key phrase within 2 – 4 weeks.

I realised after many tests, that the more competing pages that exist for a given keyword or key phrase, the greater probability that there would be too many authoratative web pages (that contained the specific phrase already) meaning I would have trouble out ranking them to get onto page one in Google. The fewer the number of competing pages the less chance that there would be too many authoritative sites that happen to contain or were specifically optimised for the keyword or keyphrase I was interested in.

Remember, at the stage that you are applying the traffic and competition filter you are trying to filter out a mass of keywords that are semantically related to your initial area of enquiry to identify a much smaller subset of keywords that meet the criteria. We are trying to drill down from a Market level of enquiry (where keywords have 100′s of thousands or millions of web pages that contain those words) to a micro-niche level of enquiry. And we want to do this to give us a reasonable chance to rank for keywords with a given level of competition so we can test the commercial value of the traffic associated with those keywords before we jump in a develop an extensive website and incur a large time and/or monetary cost.

I’m often heard to say that it takes as much time and money to develop a website for a keyword that has no value at all (no traffic, too much compeition or no interest within the traffic to buy or take advantage of a commercial offering) than it does to target a commercially valuable keyword or set of keywords. This being the case, surely it is in your interest to reduce the probability of failure and that is what the traffic and competition filters are designed to achieve when you commence an initial level of enquiry.

One often mis-understood aspect of the strategy we teach in the 30DC, is that we assess the traffic based on broad match searches (meaning we assess the maximum traffic reward possible for a keyword/key phrase) but we assess the competition based on phrase match. Many people question this approach and I will provide an answer to this seeming paradox based on my practical understanding of how Google works.

If a web page contains the words of your target key phrase but not the phrase itself, then the web page only has a weak probability of ranking for the specific key phrase in the Google search engine results pages (SERPS). Additonally, Google realises that when people search on a key phrase (more than one word) they are really interested to find pages that contain the key phrase not just pages that contain the words in the phrase but not the phrase itself. Fortunately, when a web page has a high ranking for a specific keyphrase when searched for in quotes (phrase match search) Google preferentially ranks that webpage in the SERP’s for the broad match search as well (key phrase without quotes) because most people don’t realise they will get more relevant returns if they conduct phrase match searches. In effect, most people aren’t using Google in the most effective way to get the most relevant results.  Google knows this and tries to compensate to giver .

So by filtering and optimizing based on the phrase match competition, the resulting keyword optimized content should receive preferential ranking for the broad match search (for that keyword or key phrase), but this only occurs when your web page has sufficient authority and relevance (mainly created by your keyword optimized off and on-page link network) to rank high in Google for the phrase match search.

If we are going to get preferential broad match ranking at a certain point (when we gain sufficient authority) then it is in our best interest to establish the traffic reward that comes from having a good broad match ranking which is why we initially assess traffic based on broad match rather than phrase match. Even though the broad match traffic is less relevant to our phrase match focus, it is still more relevant than completely generic traffic and we would want to expose our website to the maximum amount of traffic over time.

To round out this post, I want to point out another key factor that I established from my initial testing and research that also prompted me to land on the number of 30,000 for the SEOC competition variable. As I was creating websites and targetting keywords I began to realise that some of my websites were being sandboxed by Google (they were indexed but weren’t appearing in the SERP’s for the keywords I was targetting) and some weren’t. It turned out after a number of tests for keywords with a range of phrase match competition that Google was less likely to sandbox my site when the keyword it was relevant for had lower phrase match competition. This is very important early on when you are trying to acquire sufficient authority in the eyes of Google (mostly link building) and that sometimes Google observes the link building as too aggressive and sandboxes the site until everything settles down and the relative authority can be established. But when the phrase match competition is low, Google is very reluctant to sandbox a site becuase it reduces the overall relevance of it’s index for that keyword. When there is a large number of equally relevant pages, however, then Google doesn’t mind sandboxing a site for a while (days to months) because there are many equally relevant pages that can appear in the SERP’s so the quality of the index is maintained.  It turned out, back when I was doing this testing, that around 30,000 phrase match competition for a keyword or key phrase that Google rearely sandboxed a site if it was highly relevant for that keyword or key phrase even if my link building activites were a little too aggressive.

I also believe that Google is morely likely to index and rank a new site or web page and place it into the SERP’s for a keyword if the keyword has very low phrase match competition although I have less actual evidence to back this up. But it makes sense really, if we produce content for a keyword where there is a low number of competing pages then it makes sense that Google would want to rank that new content efficiently and high in the SERP’s particularly if the on and off-page factors are well optimized for that particular keyword. We are in essence giving Google exactly what it wants and increasing the quality of the Google index for that particular keyword or key phrase.

So there you have it, these are some of the reasonings that sit behind the SEOC variable of 30,000. Let me remind you that the application of this variable (and the traffic filter) is merely to quickly filter a list of keywords within a particular subject area so you can quickly establish whether there is a sufficient traffic reward and competition profile for those keywords.  You still need to review the quality of the websites that are currently ranking for your target keyword/s and preferably seek confirmation that there is a commercial focus for those keywords online before you decide to go on a create a website to test those keyword/s. I see investigating the Inurl and Intitle variables for a keyword as part of the quality analysis for a keyword which I only do after a keyword or keywords meet the traffic and competition criteria. More of that in a future post.

The more we can do to reduce the probability of failure, it stands to reason we are increasing the probability of success for those keywords that pass our filtering criteria. But at a certain point analysis can lead to paralysis of action which we must constantly guard against. The 30DC strategy can be implemented quickly when you have reached a stage 4 level of competence. So if your analysis leaves you in doubt but you can see a reason to go forward (based on traffic, volume of competition, quality of compeition and evidence of commerciality) then it may be easier to throw up a quick blog and actual test the keyword for real. As long as you take heed of the early results and not let the test drag on too long if it turns out to be a failure, then you should be OK.

This subject can be challenging and can be difficult to comprehend when you are beginning to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Feel free to ask any questions in the comments or send me an email to emailgurubob@gmail.com and I’ll do my best to respond as soon as I can.

It is…as it is.

GuruBob

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“Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” - Wayne Dyer

In an earlier post on the Four Stages of Competence, I mentioned that a key driver for you to move from one stage of competence to the next is your motivation. I want to explore the definition of motivation at length in this post and discuss it’s importance in relation to setting goals and the need for rewards/penalties.

Looked at logically, it seems easy. Let us say that you had a desire to succeed with Internet Marketing, you would set appropriate goals and assuming that the reward that you would achieve when you reach your goals is desirable enough, then you would be easily motivated to do the work to learn and implement them.

But I’m sure like me you have set out to do this in the past and failed…perhaps many times.

Why does this happen?

Part of the reason might be a lack of understanding of your principle motivation system and what you personally need to achieve goals.

As it turns out, there are two main types of motivation; one is ‘towards’ something you want (your goals for instance) and the other is ‘away from’ something you don’t want (fear of failure or loss or ridicule). We all have elements of both types of motivation within us but if you are predominatly driven by an ‘away from’ motivation, then the lure of a desirable goal may not be enough to get you to take action and implement in the face of experiencing something you don’t want. Fear of failure, loss of certainty and potential for ridicule or embarrasment are powerful drivers and they make it easy for somebody to give up on a goal half way through or prevent them from getting started in the first place.

This is the classical carrot and stick scenario.  What makes the donkey move, the desire to get the carrot or to avoid the stick.

So what can you do?

Well if you happen to be predominantly towards motivated (as most entrepreneurs are) the possibility of NOT achieving the goal is a sufficent penalty to keep that person on track. They are driven by the need to achieve because failing is not an option and they crave the reward that comes with success.

For an away from motivated person, however, the penalty needs to change from being goal focussed to a self imposed penalty (real not imagined) that you will impose on yourself if you don’t stick to the plan and keep working towards the goal. The away from motivated person needs to feel that the penalty of not working towards the goal is worse than giving up.

This can be hard to do, it requires real discipline, so you may need to garner the involvement of your partner or significant other to hold you to your self imposed penalty.  And make it real, make sure the penalty is tangible and significant, something that you would hate to lose if you decide to give up or not follow through.

The main thing here is to be absolutely honest with yourself. It is very easy to say that we are towards motivated but the reality is that most people are not, they are mainly away from motivated expecially in something as important as Internet Marketing where success is measured against your current income earning capacity. It is very easy when faced with inevitable set backs to fall back on what you already have, however much you think you would prefer something different.

The other aspect of being away from motivated is that it provides very little energy or direction to push you forward. Often, no matter how hard you try to avoid the things you don’t want, you seem to contine to attract these things. Listen to your ‘internal dialogue’…are you mainly focussed on what you don’t want or or fearful of what might happen if you fail? Then you might be away from motivated and it is critical you take this into consideration when preparing to start a new endeavour.

But don’t worry, you CAN change. Recognise your motivation system for what it is and put measures in place to increase the probability that you will set clear goals and that you will take positive action towards those goals.

It is…as it is.

GuruBob

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