Vertical Thinking - Content and Long Tails
IMAGE CREDIT: LAEVEN
I love thinking vertically, a lot.
And, this little post made me thing vertically on the topic of long-tails and the relation it had with fresh content on a page.
Now, lets do some introspection.
How does a user land up into your page for a long tail?
Is it because of the title, meta or in-bound links?
I don’t think so! Its all about what’s on the page.
Assume that your getting 1500 visitors to a page from 750 different long-tails, its not because your “trying” to rank for all 750 of these keywords i.e your not optimizing your titles, or building in-bound links with anchors of these 750 keywords to get ranked for them.
It would also not be technically feasible, to do so - you can’t effectively “optimize” for long tails in the conventional way - you need to work around it and think.
I ran a small research, with long tails and how pages were ACTUALLY ranking for them, and here’s something interesting that I found.
I ran a Google search for the keyphrase “cadillac escalade wheels rim red and white”.
And, here’s what I found.
Now, if you look at result #2 and analyze it, you will figure these thing out:
I - Result #2 does not have all the long-tail keywords in the title.
II - Result #2 does not have any in-bound links pointing to the URL with the anchor “cadillac escalade wheels rim red and white”.
So, what’s making it rank there?
Pure Content! Look at the page in question and you will see that its a keyword rich content mine.
So, for actually ranking for these long tail keywords, all that you need is relevant and keyword rich content.
So, there are the analogies broken and here’s what no guru will tell you about ranking for long-tails.
#1 - Build Keyword Rich Content.
#2 - Build even more keyword rich content.
#3 - Create specifics about whatever your selling in a page ( tables maybe? )
#4 - Get the page indexed and get it a few generic links.
Breadcrumb Navigation For SEO
Many of us have probably seen the breadcrumb navigation in action in a couple of sites, without understanding fully what it was for.
This is what a breadcrumb navigation looks like:
The breadcrumb navigation initially evolved as a usability and user experience strategy.
The whole idea was that a user could “retrace” his steps with respect to his navigation from the homepage which would enable him to get back to where he was previously by just utilizing the breadcrumb navigation bar.
Ever heard of the Hansel and Gretel story where breadcrumbs where used as markers?
The breadcrumb navigation got its basic framework from this exact same idea.
Now, getting back to the topic of the Breadcrumb Navigation for Search Engine Optimization, its a big plus to your website because of the following points:
- It helps your pages get more internal juice to each other, because they are being effectively interlinked thanks to the breadcrumb navigation bar.
- It enables users to get more incentive to go back and forth, thus generating more page views per user.
- It allows Google to properly index and cache pages according to the relevant structure.
- Its an amazing way to cluster based on different keywords and groups for the search engines.
Heck! Even the Beginners Guide to SEO published by Google advocates the usage of the breadcrumb navigation.
Your just missing out on something neat if you don’t have the breadcrumb navigation installed on your site.
SEO An Art or Science?
This is probably the gazillionth time someone has been talking about whether SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) is an art or a science.
There’s this set of people who claim to specialize in the “art of SEO” and others who claimed to have mastered the “science of SEO”.
But, what the hell is SEO?
Is it an art or a science?
I just thought it would be fun to do a little bit of an investigation.
Here’s what dictionary.com defines an art to be:
” the craft or trade using these principles or methods.”
So, the definition typically means that an art is something where we apply acquired knowledge to create something.
In the case of Search Engine Optimization, we apply the acquired knowledge of the way google behaves, the way it ranks sites or the way search engines work in order to generate results i.e search engine rankings and traffic.
So, that seems okay doesn’t it?
I was pretty confused myself, so I decided to go and pick up the definition of “science” from Wikipedia, and this is what it said:
” systematized knowledge in general.”
“a particular branch of knowledge.”
These are two different definitions of Science, and I thought both made sense with respect to SEO.
With SEO, its definitely a systematic process and definitely a branch of knowledge.
We use acquired knowledge systematically to optimize sites.
So, how do we actually categorize SEO? As an art or a science.
This brought me to a single idea.
In common usage, we don’t actually represent anything too “systematic” as an art.
Art is more of a creative idea than a systematic and singular process.
Even thought we all like to claim that SEO isn’t a systemized process, it is one to a large extent.
There is a lot of creativity involved in Search Engine Optimization, but it is at the end of the day still a singular system of process which are used to procure results.
SEO as a science makes more “sense” - since its more of application of acquired knowledge and systemized processes.