This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.
Choose one cookie based and one IP based statistics program, as the numbers are a bit different depending on which one you use.
Look at a snapshot of your traffic using your statistics program weekly or monthly.
Before you do keyword research, make sure you’re using the right keywords.
Try asking your audience what they’d type into a search engine to find you.
Instead of pursuing just the competitive, short tail terms (short phrases like “internet marketing“), or only less competitive, long tail phrases (longer phrases such as “how do I get started in internet marketing?”), use some of the longer phrases to reach the shorter phrases – rank for both.
Choose one family of keywords and optimize for it. Unless you’re a seasoned expert, you’re not going to rank for dentist, dental practice, cosmetic dentistry, california dental work and los angeles crown settings. Pick an area, dominate it, then if you can, leverage your way into some of the other less competitive areas.
Getting good search rankings is mainly about the quest to present to the search engines a balance of content and links.
The harder, or more competitive, the keyword, the more complex it is to correctly balance the equation of content + links= a good ranking. The harder the keywords, the more multiple subtle factors come into play, but they are all related to these two items.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat (and I still want to know when and why, in history we inherited this expression. Why would I want to skin a cat?) Nearly every theory of search can be debunked or supported by theory. What you want to find is the method that got results for companies like yours.
Now that Google is trending towards personalization based on social circles, the quality of your social circle matters more than ever, as does the content you submit. Keep keywords and content in mind.
Pay more attention to Video. Film and television are the two mediums the masses are used to, and by far appear to be the most successful vehicles to promote your content. It’s far easier to rank with video than with text as many companies fail to realize how important video is.
Google is also placing more of an emphasis on localization in its shift to more personalized results. Be sure to log into the Google Local Business Center, as well as Yahoo’s, and get your local business office set up, whether or not you have a site.
Google Blog Search is increasing in prominence as Google continues to change the look of the results page. If you don’t have a blog, start one. If you do have one, make sure it’s positioned correctly in Google Blog Search, not just for a general search, but for the times you publish a new post.
Updates are another featured area of the upcoming new Google results page (you can already see this new Google look as the default on new computers, reportedly). To get in on this action, you want to make sure your tweets, and other real-time updates are on-message. That doesn’t mean talk about yourself all the time, it means, be consistent.
If you have things to sell, Google products is for you. It’s much easier to submit than it was back when it was Google Base.
Don’t forget about Yahoo, Bing, Ask, or the major directories, general or niche. Just because they aren’t Google doesn’t mean they aren’t important. Those of us who thought Yahoo was the only place that mattered were blindsided when Google came along, as were those who refused to add social media to their marketing mix, now that Facebook is driving as much traffic, or more than, Google. Today’s newbie could be tomorrow’s giant.
Pay attention to the major players, and niche rulers in search and directories, but be selective about anyone outside the top ten. The idea that submitting your site to 6000 directories will get you anything other than links at the 10% of them that count at all, is a myth. And you can get 600 equivalent links from article marketing, forum marketing, or buying them, so what’s the difference?
So yeah. I have 18 more Google Wave invites. I may seem less than enthused, but it’s not because I don’t think Google Wave is/will be useful – I’m sure it will when enough people are on it for me to actually collaborate with.
As we’ve discussed recently, there’s a lot of confusion around the issue of social media and getting a return on one’s time and social investment, to the point that some people think social media for business is ineffective.
If you’ve been thinking that lately, think about how happy you’d be if social media helped you get into your target market’s path through Google. According to a recent announcement by Google, social media may now be able to help you in ways you hadn’t ever dared to dream.
Everyone knows that social media can already help you with search in 3 ways, the first being the own 1, lease 9 method of making your mark on all of the top ten results, which I discussed in Traffic Reality about 4 years ago in great detail. The second, of course, is in getting links to your site from social media profiles or voting submissions, the third that popular submissions get rapid link boosts from multiple sources.
In Part One of Getting Into Google News, we talked about the traffic benefits of getting listed in Google News, and how to do so using a press release. Next, we’ll delve into how this can be achieved by having content in a publication that’s already in Google News, and what the advantages and pitfalls are.
Before we do that, let’s address a common concern many people have with focusing traffic efforts on Google properties that aren’t part of the web search.
You may be thinking that anything that doesn’t focus your efforts on getting into Google’s web search is a waste of time, or that diverting some of your limited time into pursuing Google News listings is just not worth it. After all, Google has come out with new services that generated a lot of buzz when they were coming out, then abandoned or failed to develop them.
We know that reading the news is one of the top four things people do online, and that if you want to be found online as well as off, you need to be a part of that activity stream.
It’s also faster to get into than Google’s web results. While it’s true that you can initiate content discovery by Google in seconds if you know what you’re doing, getting that content into the database still takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days. And to get ranked for the keyword you want? That could take months if it happens at all.
“Local search is an important priority for us, and we’re focused on helping businesses be discovered and helping consumers find the right local business,” a Google spokesperson told ITBusiness.ca in an e-mail interview. “One key component of that is the Local Business Center to allow business owners to have control over their listing.”
I build traffic systems to increase the profitibility of your website. You can implement them yourself with one of our how-to manuals, below, or you can email us at support@asktinu.com for a free consultation, to evaluate your site for a custom solution.
Morgan and Cindy Lighter
Cindy is our organizational whiz. Morgan is the author of our most popular column, Tool Time Fridays.
I’m going to keep this brief because of all the time I spent looking for the bumblebee, thinking of what a mascot for 
