If I were to ask you the question “What drives SEO success”, not specific to any client, and I was a CEO, how would you answer me?

Here’s my response:

If you steal it, at least give me some credit

SEO success is driven by several factors that evolve over time, most of which are well guarded secrets by the search engines.  Through years of experience, testing and research search marketers have identified key areas that lead to improved organic search engine visibility.  It’s nearly impossible to simplify a very complex puzzle but the corner pieces to the pentagon shaped puzzle are quality keyword research; optimized page titles, meta data, and site navigation; fully optimized images, videos and social media strategies; a well built (search friendly) site with high quality, focused, fresh content – all helping to attract inbound links to a variety of pages throughout the site.

I haven’t updated this site in over 4 months, and before that there was a rather long content drought as well.  Yet, as of today this site remains in the #1 and #2 spots on Google for the targeted term of “purple widget”!

I think all of this simply goes back to my original point in creating this site, at least one of my points.  The term “purple widget” has low competition and very little search volume so a site dedicated so extensively to ranking for that term can continue to do so, even without daily, weekly or even monthly new content.  It was relatively easy (please note – I am a professional, do not try this at home) to get ranked to begin with and is relatively easy to stay ranked – for this insignificant term.

But if your site is competing for a term with any competition and that has any potential value to your business or traffic then to answer the question of this post – yes fresh content matters.  Don’t go 4 months between posts.

There is a lot of talk about links (aka “inbound links”) and link building in the world of search marketing and when talking SEO.  I’ll skip the commentary and common reasons/need for inbound links to your website and just leave it at – you need them.

But not all links are created equal.  And if you can remember back to high school – neither are prom dates.

So let’s take a quick look at some common types of links.

Bad directory links – There are a lot of lousy directories out – A LOT!  Google knows it and you should know it.  This is the girl that doesn’t really want to go to prom but her Mom is making here and since your Mom is making you go this is who you go with.

Good directory links – Okay, so you have to go to prom. This is the slightly cuter girl who doesn’t really want to go but knows she may regret it someday if she doesn’t so like you, she has to go.

Paid Links – Do I really need to explain what paying for a date means?  Hey, prostitution is a huge industry in the world and although many wish it would go away – it’s not.  Why?  Where there is demand there is supply.  And if nobody gets caught and nobody gets hurt – where’s the harm?

Reciprocal link exchanges – This one might be the worst of them all. This is taking your sister to the prom.  Okay – maybe some are like taking your cousin at least and a few get upgraded to your hot cousin from out of town and if you’re really lucky nobody knows and nobody ever finds out you brought a relative to prom.  But still – you’ll always know.

One-way links with just your URL – Beggars can’t be choosers.  This is your kind of cute friend.  If you take her you’ll probably have a good time but you know there’s no love connection – she’s your friend and that’s all – in the back of your mind you think you could have done better.

One-way links with good anchor text – Your really cute friend that you’d like to more than friends with – does she feel the same way?

Home page links – She’s hot, she actually said yes and seems to be having fun!  This comparison alone (like many others) could have several variations based on the content of the page, the popularity of the page and the type of link but this isn’t a white paper, it’s a silly blog post about chicks and SEO.

Home page link on CNN – Head cheerleader, and you’re losing your virginity after the party!

There are of course many other types of inbound links but the attempt at humor with the analogy to a prom date only goes so far.

I’ve excluded some real bottom of the barrel type of links (auto generated link spam, link farms, etc…) because nobody wants the image of those girls.  We know who they were (or are) and they might be fine for a quick bit of joy but afterwards you feel dirty and don’t ever want to go there again.

So today I take a quick detour.  There is a 1983 movie, Malice, that has a great – although lengthy – quote in it that I’ve liked.  Here is my SEO version of that quote:

“I am a Google expert, I am Yahoo certified in pay-per-click and search marketing, I have been awarded citations from seven different search marketing organizations, and I am never, ever sick at sea. So I ask you; when someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their website will be ranked # 1 on Google or that their keywords are the best or that they maximize conversions with a high ROI, who do you think they’re praying to? Now, go ahead and read your SEO 101 books, client, and you go to your church, and, with any luck, you might win the annual raffle, but if you’re looking for God, he was doing keyword analysis at his desk on November 17, and he doesn’t like to be second guessed. You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.”

SEO is an ongoing process with several pieces coming together to work over time.  And it can certainly take time to really start working – but when it does you can see some very quick growth.  The  more exposure your site gets, the more new exposure your site will likely get.  So when SEO starts snowballing new traffic and new conversions to your site – are you ready?

Can your servers handle the traffic?  All that work can lose its value if your site performance goes down quickly or the site crashes.

Can you handle the orders? Can you fill the orders?  When orders start increasing – can you keep up?  Do you have the stock on hand or at least the ability to ramp up quickly?  Do you have a plan?

And can you do all this while maintaining the high quality service that is easier for a new business that is still small with more time to focus on individual clients.  This high level of service likely helped you grow – don’t lose it when you get big.

With SEO it takes a long time to go up in rankings…but you can go down much quicker!  
So have you answered the very simply question:  Are you ready for your SEO to work?

So just that quickly a page specifically designed to rank for a keyword – worked.  So another example that SEO does work.

Like is the point of this entire site, this particular example has little value as nobody is searching for Green Widget but the principals remain the same.  It just takes longer for highly competitive keywords.

In the next several weeks I’ll start working on some specific techniques to improve the ranking for Green Widget, as I did with Purple Widget when the main site first launch (still #1 on Google by the way).

As an SEO Specialist dealing with clients I have often heard “I need a magic bullet for SEO” and then I go on to explain that as many as……okay, you get the picture.
And it’s possible I was a bit overly literal with what clients say – they may never have used those exact words; it was for effect – cool wasn’t it!

What I hear most often after providing an excellent list of recommendations, best practices and SEO ideas is “great list….but….” and that’s usually followed by “what should we do first?” or “can you prioritize this list for us” which really means – we aren’t going to spend the time, money or resources to take your excellent professional advice to really help our website’s search engine visibility; instead we’re going to try one thing, not do it very well and then after giving it no time to work we’re going to blame you for failed SEO and tell everyone we know SEO doesn’t work.

Sound familiar? 

So what can we do?  Basically we talk until we’re blue in the face (does that actually happen – can you actually turn blue?) and hope they eventually “get it” and understand what SEO really is.  Hopefully we can also provide some case studies that show, when given the proper effort and attention over a sustained period of time – SEO absolutely works!

Lastly, if you can’t beat them – join them….here’s is the Purple Widget SEO Magic Bullet List!  Lists are linkbait – right?  More about linkbait another day and this post has way too many words to be a linkbait type list.  That and it’s really not a countdown type list – sorry to disappoint…..

Keyword Research
Keyword Research
Keyword Research
Yes, it’s there 3 times on purpose.  Why? Because it’s that important.  All the SEO in the universe really won’t help all that much if you aren’t focusing on the right keywords.  Afterall that’s kind of (or exactly) what this blog is about – at least how it started. 
None of the rest of what could be a magic bullet has little to no value without the proper keyword research to back it up.  And to prove the point that there is no magic SEO bullet since you can’t (or really, really, really shouldn’t) do any SEO without keyword research that’s 2 things – a second shooter if you will….

#2 Page Titles
I’m not sure I really want to number to these, but I did on this one.
Page titles are among the most important areas of real estate on your website.  Effective title creation is it’s own very long blog post but to sum it up:
This my Website is not a good page title.
Search Engine Optimization Blog | SEO advice, tips, techniques, tricks is a good page title. 
Also – make sure EVERY page on your website has its own unique, keyword rich, effective, focused title.

Great Content
See, told you I wasn’t numbering these.
Create great content.  Have stuff that people want to link to – not because you paid them, or traded with them, or begged them, or sold your sole to the devil to get.  Having great content (and ‘content’ can mean many things of course) will go a long way to taking care of many things that drive SEO.

Inbound Links
Although it has changed SIGNIFICANTLY over the past several years, links to your website are still very important in obtaining high rankings.   Quality is more important than quantity but you still need quantity – they just need to be quality links.  Like I said above – creating great content will lead to a lot of natural links.  
What are good links, what are bad links, what are link exchanges, how do I get more links, do I have enough links?  Those are all great questions and each one a subject of a blog post of it’s own – if not a dedicated website for each one.  Except maybe the last one – do I have enough links – the answer is no.  Link building is a long, challenging process but when done well can pay off nicely – in time.

So again – THERE IS NO MAGIC BULLET FOR SEO!
But, if you can only do a few things for now these are some good places to start.

First, what happens at least a few days a week in front of where my office…it probably happens more but I see it a few times:
There’s a long stretch of a state highway that feeds into downtown from an area of town that has really grown the past several years so what was once kind of a nifty shortcut into downtown away from the Interstates is now a major artery into the city and traffic can back up quickly as it ends at a stop light at the edge of the city.
Since this road crosses the river there are little opportunities to get off and bail out when traffic gets particularly bad.  The only exception (2 actually) is access to a frontage road (access road, service road) that is a public road and allows you to zoom along side the highway for a few miles and then remerge into the same traffic.  So basically you can be a weasel and cut ahead of a mile or so of traffic.  I hate people like that.   So as I come from the opposite direction daily seeing this stream of weasels I think to myself – I hope there is in fact such a thing as Karma and I hope they get what they deserve someday – whatever that may be…

So how do I related this to SEO?  Those people are taking shortcuts.  Technically they aren’t doing anything illegal.  It’s a public road they are using, and they aren’t speeding (well, I’m sure some are but that goes to my point – taking chances), they aren’t driving over the median or jumping a curb, slamming into other cars to get back into the traffic, etc…
But they are certainly treading a fine line of moral behavior?  One could say (like me) that it’s a rude or cheezy thing to do.  Why are these people better than the rest of us?  Sit in traffic like the rest of us and we’ll all get there soon enough.  Instead they ‘cheat’ and move up in traffic – ironically causing the overall traffic to slow down since now there is a line of cars merging back into traffic.
So as your website sits and patiently waits for your hard work on fundamental, white hat SEO to pay off otherwise are taking shortcuts and then trying to get back in line with the rest of us.  They’re possibly taking chances but not technically breaking any rules.  So do you believe in Karma?  Do you believe that by playing by the rules and doing the right thing you’ll be rewarded in the long run and those taking shortcuts and tiptoeing a lot closer to the “line” perhaps crossing it now and then will eventually get caught and punished (Karma)?

You decide.

And just because I like saying it – PurpleWidget.com is still the # 1 result on Google for the search term “purple widget”

The site started from the ground up – new domain name and all in the fall of 2007.  It’s built on an e-comm software package that does an OK job of automating SEO but far from great and offers no manual editing of page titles, meta tags on product pages.  And changing landing pages takes some HTML coding knowledge and getting under the hood.  And since the owner of the site – a one man show – has no ability to do this himself my ability to do a lot of this coding helped out.  But still, I was facing (and still face) some challenges from the software.  But we shall overcome. 

He had no real SEO on the site for the first several months and was literally selling nothing.  Tens of thousand of dollars to get the site designed and set up – no sales.  Nowhere to go but up.  And, by the way he had no budget for SEO.  About 4 hours a month for several months (and that including doing a lot of the work with some coding rather than just data entry for key areas of the site) – then even less.  That’s part of the reason that this process may seem slow – it was far from an all out full-time effort but it was certainly better than nothing.

I won’t go into extensive details about every step that was done but it started with keyword research of course so the best phrases were being targeted.  The next focus was on creating some landing pages and adding some text to the dynamic category pages of an e-comm site.  Some improved internal linking with good anchor text put in where appropriate.  Next some attention was paid to how product names were entered and how category names were sculpted – with the limitations of the e-comm software these naming conventions were important (this is pretty standard with e-comm sites).  We then worked to improve the product descriptions of individual product pages – the site can still do a much better job of this but one area of weakness for many e-comm sites is lack of content on product pages so this is a chance to set this site apart from the competition.  Link building has been a part of the process as well as I’ve found industry specific blogs and attempted to at least exchange links (oh no – not link exchanges…..I know, I know but they still have some value if done well and done in moderation) if not get one way links.  I submitted to several decent directories early in the process – not sure I’d focus as much on this now but remember this site did not exist less than 2 years ago – directories provide one-way links.

So what has all this led to?  Slowly but surely traffic has increased, links have increased (more exposure brings more exposure!), and most importantly conversions have increased quite a bit!

I’ll start with the most important analytics – sales!  Remember, 6 months $0 sales when the site launched.  In the last 6 weeks (as of this posting of course) the site has generated over $5k in sales – and the owner notes that HALF of his sales start on the website and end with a phone call that analytics doesn’t capture.  My advice of the big phone number on every page of the site certainly makes sense now!  I’ve talked to him about capturing those sales in analytics but for a variety of reasons, he’s not interested.  But just know that the dollar values I discuss here are only about 50% of his sales right now!

So again, from no sales the first 6 months of existence the last 6 months (which of course includes x-mas sales) website analytics saw nearly $14k in sales!  So that $5k the last 6 weeks actually is more impressive now!  So sales are finally going well!

Now for the more SEO analytics type stats that us SEO Marketing geeks like:

First I’ll compare Jan 1 – Feb 15 ‘09 to July 1 – Aug 15 ‘08
(6 week periods that don’t include X-Mas)
And all stats are of coures non-paid keywords:

Conversions +26%
Total Transactions +125%
Total Products Sold +196%
So not only are we seeing more traffic, we’re seeing better traffic!

Same periods compared – sales that started with a Google search UP 213% in terms of revenue and up 87% with Yahoo! traffic.

Search engine traffic is up 17% – perhaps the least impressive number but let’s look at another number now.

Compare the first 6 weeks of 2009 to the first 6 weeks of 2008.  Year to date comparissions:

Visits up 83% Overall
Search engine traffic up 31% 
Google Traffic up 292%
Yahoo Traffic up 108%

So – as is often a question on Purple Widget – what’s my point?

Simple: SEO Works
It may work slowly when the budget is limited, and your website software is far from ideal but it does work.  Have patience and keep working on it – SEO does work!

Recently, and perhaps with more to come in the future in the face of global economic concerns I’ve gotten (or seen) e-mails from companies promoting themselves as competitors have failed or changed services.

These marketing efforts have dual impact.  One, they provide news to customers – maybe you didn’t know company X no longer did Y.  And they offer a solution.  Since X no longer can do Y for you, let us do it!  Taking it even another step a coupon or discount of somekind goes even further…try us and save 15% for example.

The two that come to mind from my recent inbox are Staples and FedEx.

It seems, and I did not know this until I got this e-mail, Office Depot is closing 112 stores – the e-mail had the story in it!  Staples is making me aware of this and reminding me I can always count on Staples.  No specifc offer but very clear links to find a store and about their benefits of free delivery and their rewards program among others.  

I have also gotten several e-mails from FedEx reminding and informing me of changes at DHL. 
The first e-mail I got started with:

It’s official: DHL is discontinuing its U.S. domestic-only air and ground services. If you’ve been shipping with DHL, chooseFedEx to make the transition as smooth as possible for you, your suppliers and your customers.

DHL has cancelled its money-back guarantee for international shipments to the U.S.

But FedEx Express still offers a money-back guarantee on international shipments if we miss our published (or quoted, as in the case of FedEx® International Next Flight) delivery time by even 60 seconds*.

  I received two other e-mails after this that reminded me and offered links to FedEx.com to promote what they can offer me.  I never got any such e-mail from UPS.  Did FedEx do any PPC for searches around DHL job cuts or DHL stopping service, etc…?  I don’t know the answer but I bet it wouldn’t have been very expensive to do so.

How does this tie back to SEO?  Well, I’m talking about on the web and I’ve linked to these companies.  Many other likely are as well.

Opportunities are everywhere – don’t miss them.