How to get more clicks/traffic out of your top search engine rankings?

If you already have top 10 rankings for your most important keywords this article will teach you how to get more clicks (better CTR) out of your organic rankings. If you have run AdWords or other PPC campaigns you have probably noticed how very small changes in the ad text can lead to massive changes in the ad's CTR (click-through rate).

Naturally, it stands to reason that changes in organic search engine results' descriptions can lead to different CTRs. When search engines list results, they show keyword rich text snippets taken from the page text, meta description tags or DMOZ/Yahoo directory listings. These keyword rich snippets are shown together with the titles of your pages.

Search for your keywords on Google and notice what text descriptions does Google show for your top ranked pages. Think about it - can you improve the link description so that more surfers click on your link? Most often, you can.

There are two issues here - which description will lead to the highest CTR and how to make Google show exactly this optimal text snippet. Let's tackle these two problems one by one.

How to write a link description that improves the CTR?
First rule here is that the description must contain your keywords. This is important because surfers like to see the keywords in the description and if the description lacks the keywords, Google may not show it at all (remember, Google chooses to show link descriptions that have the keywords it them).

The link description will have more clicks when it offers benefits and when there is a call to action (example: download something free). The best way to test it is to run an AdWords campaign. I use text that has proven to offer the highest CTR on my AdWords campaigns.
You can also use common sense. Write down a couple of text descriptions and try them for a period of time (either on AdWords or on your pages). I prefer AdWords because I can test different texts simultaneously.

How to make Google show your preferred link description?
Write the keyword rich link description in your meta description tag. Most often when Google finds the keywords in the meta description tag, it shows the text in the tag as a link description. That works on the premise that the meta description tag will provide a better human edited description than text snippets taken out from the page text (often text snippets lead to low CTR descriptions).

Your meta description tag must use a short well written keyword rich description that targets the most important/competitive/highest conversion keywords.
If the page targets many keywords then you will use the meta description tag for the most important keywords and edit the page text for your less important keywords until it produces a better description. In this case, you will need to edit the text around the targeted keywords.

Testing the idea
On one of my top ranked pages, I plugged a meta description from my AdWords campaign and I immediately saw better CTR (19% higher than before). On another page I got a 50% boost because the link description shown previously by Google was screaming "buy this stuff" and now the description looks like an interesting article title (actually it is a sales letter disguised as an article). Surely numbers will vary from page to page and from one link description to another.
All in all I think it is in many cases easier to increase your organic listings' CTR than to move up in the rankings for competitive keywords.
One last tip for your page titles - use a title of the type "list of your keywords - yoursite.com", not "yoursite.com - list of your keywords". The first title type has a higher CTR.

Articles From seoguide.org

How to get more clicks/traffic out of your top search engine rankings?

If you already have top 10 rankings for your most important keywords this article will teach you how to get more clicks (better CTR) out of your organic rankings. If you have run AdWords or other PPC campaigns you have probably noticed how very small changes in the ad text can lead to massive changes in the ad's CTR (click-through rate).

Naturally, it stands to reason that changes in organic search engine results' descriptions can lead to different CTRs. When search engines list results, they show keyword rich text snippets taken from the page text, meta description tags or DMOZ/Yahoo directory listings. These keyword rich snippets are shown together with the titles of your pages.

Search for your keywords on Google and notice what text descriptions does Google show for your top ranked pages. Think about it - can you improve the link description so that more surfers click on your link? Most often, you can.

There are two issues here - which description will lead to the highest CTR and how to make Google show exactly this optimal text snippet. Let's tackle these two problems one by one.

How to write a link description that improves the CTR?
First rule here is that the description must contain your keywords. This is important because surfers like to see the keywords in the description and if the description lacks the keywords, Google may not show it at all (remember, Google chooses to show link descriptions that have the keywords it them).

The link description will have more clicks when it offers benefits and when there is a call to action (example: download something free). The best way to test it is to run an AdWords campaign. I use text that has proven to offer the highest CTR on my AdWords campaigns.
You can also use common sense. Write down a couple of text descriptions and try them for a period of time (either on AdWords or on your pages). I prefer AdWords because I can test different texts simultaneously.

How to make Google show your preferred link description?
Write the keyword rich link description in your meta description tag. Most often when Google finds the keywords in the meta description tag, it shows the text in the tag as a link description. That works on the premise that the meta description tag will provide a better human edited description than text snippets taken out from the page text (often text snippets lead to low CTR descriptions).

Your meta description tag must use a short well written keyword rich description that targets the most important/competitive/highest conversion keywords.
If the page targets many keywords then you will use the meta description tag for the most important keywords and edit the page text for your less important keywords until it produces a better description. In this case, you will need to edit the text around the targeted keywords.

Testing the idea
On one of my top ranked pages, I plugged a meta description from my AdWords campaign and I immediately saw better CTR (19% higher than before). On another page I got a 50% boost because the link description shown previously by Google was screaming "buy this stuff" and now the description looks like an interesting article title (actually it is a sales letter disguised as an article). Surely numbers will vary from page to page and from one link description to another.
All in all I think it is in many cases easier to increase your organic listings' CTR than to move up in the rankings for competitive keywords.
One last tip for your page titles - use a title of the type "list of your keywords - yoursite.com", not "yoursite.com - list of your keywords". The first title type has a higher CTR.

Web Directories and Specialized Search Engines

SEO experts spend most of their time optimizing for Google and occasionally one or two other search engines. There is nothing wrong in it and it is most logical, having in mind that topping Google is the lion's share in Web popularity but very often, no matter what you do, topping Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not literally but in terms of effort and time) to top Google and keep there is too high. Maybe we should mention here the ultimate SEO nightmare – being banned from Google, when you simply can't use Google (or not at least until you are readmitted to the club) and no matter if you like it or not, you need to have a look about possible alternatives.
What are Google Alternatives
The first alternative to Google is obvious – optimize for the other major search engines, if you have not done it already. Yahoo! and MSN (to a lesser degree) can bring you enough visitors, though sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their algorithms. You could also optimize your site for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but having in mind that they altogether hardly have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, do not expect much.
Another alternative is to submit to search directories (also known as Web directories) and specialized search engines. Search directories might sound so pre-Google but submitting to the right directories might prove better than optimizing for MSN, for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you as many visitors, as if you were topping Google but the quality of these visitors is extremely high.
Naming all Google alternatives would be a long list and it is outside the scope of this article but just to be a little more precise about what alternatives exist, we cannot skip SEO instruments like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.
Web Directories
What is a Web Directory?
Web directories (or as they are better known – search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are directories where different resources are gathered. Similarly to desktop directories, where you gather files in a directory based on some criterion, Web directories are just enormous collections of links to sites, arranged in different categories. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (most often alphabetic but it is not necessarily so) and users browse through them.
Although many Web directories offer a search functionality of some kind (otherwise it will be impossible to browse thousands of pages for let's say Computers), search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways – most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by site owners. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how clever spiders become, when there is a human to view and check the pages, there is a lesser chance that pages will be classified in the wrong categories. The disadvantages of the first difference are that the lists in web directories are sometimes outdated, if no human was available to do the editing and checking for some time (but this is not that bad because search engines also deliver pages that do not exist anymore) and that sometimes you might have to wait half an year before being included in a search directory.
The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad.
Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.
Examples of Web Directories
There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites. Other popular general-purpose search directories are Google Directory and Yahoo! Directory. The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites.
Besides general-purpose Web directories, there are incredibly many topical ones. For instance, the The Environment Directory lists links to environmental sites only, while The Radio Directory lists thousands of radio stations worldwide, arranged by country, format, etc. There are also many local and national Web directories, which accept links to sites about a particular region or country only and which can be great if your site is targeted at local and national audience only. You see, it is not possible to mention even the topics of specialized search directories only because the list will get incredibly long. Using Google and specialized search resources like The Search Engines Directory, you can find on your own many directories that are related to your area of interest.
Specialized Search Engines
What is a Specialized Search Engine?
Specialized search engines are one more tool to include in your SEO arsenal. Unlike general-purpose search engines, specialized search engines index pages for particular topics only and very often there are many pages that cannot be found in general-purpose search engines but only in specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for every imaginable topic and it is always wise to be aware of the specialized search engines for your niche. The examples in the next section are by no means a full list of specialized search engines but are aimed to give you the idea of what is available. If you search harder on the Web, you will find many more resources.
Examples of Specialized Search Engines
Probably specialized search engines are not that numeric as Web directories but still certainly there is no shortage of them either, especially if one counts password-protected sites with database accessible only from within the site as a specialized search engine. As with Web directories, if there were a list of specialized search engines it would be really, really long (and constantly changing), so instead, here are some links to lists of search engines: Pandia Powersearch, Webquest, Virtual Search Engines, the already mentioned The Search Engines Directory, etc. What is common for these lists is that they offer a selection of specialized search engines, arranged by topic, so it is a good starting point for the hunt of specialized search engines

Importance of Sitemaps

There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.
One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.
Why Use a Sitemap
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.
Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).
If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.
Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.
Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.
Generating and Submitting the Sitemap
The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.
Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.
The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.
After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.
Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.

How to Build Backlinks

It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.

Getting Backlinks the Natural Way
The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.

Ways to Build Backlinks
Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking from one site to another site, which is owned by the same owner or exists mainly for the purpose to be a link farm), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, purchasing links in bulk, linking to link farms, etc.
The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks. A valuable assistant in this process is the Backlink Builder tool. When you enter the keywords of your choice, the Backlink Builder tool gives you a list of sites where you can post an article, message, posting, or simply a backlink to your site. After you have the list of potential backlink partners, it is up to you to visit each of the sites and post your content with the backlink to your site in it.
You might wonder why sites as those, listed by the Backlink Builder tool provide such a precious asset as backlinks for free. The answer is simple – they need content for their site. When you post an article, or submit a link to your site, you do not get paid for this. You provide them for free with something they need – content – and in return they also provide you for free with something you need – quality backlinks. It is a free trade, as long as the sites you post your content or links are respected and you don't post fake links or content.

Getting Listed in Directories
If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories
Generally search engines index forums so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks there is pointless.
While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

Content Exchange and Affiliate Programs
Content exchange and affiliate programs are similar to the previous method of getting quality backlinks. For instance, you can offer to interested sites RSS feeds for free. When the other site publishes your RSS feed, you will get a backlink to your site and potentially a lot of visitors, who will come to your site for more details about the headline and the abstract they read on the other site.
Affiliate programs are also good for getting more visitors (and buyers) and for building quality backlinks but they tend to be an expensive way because generally the affiliate commission is in the range of 10 to 30 %. But if you have an affiliate program anyway, why not use it to get some more quality backlinks?

News Announcements and Press Releases
Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

Backlink Building Practices to Avoid
One of the practices that is to be avoided is link exchange. There are many programs, which offer to barter links. The principle is simple – you put a link to a site, they put a backlink to your site. There are a couple of important things to consider with link exchange programs. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.
Linking to suspicious places is something else that you must avoid. While it is true that search engines do not punish you if you have backlinks from such places because it is supposed that you have no control over what bad guys link to, if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. For more details about bad neighbors, check the Bad Neighborhood article. Also, beware of getting tons of links in a short period of time because this still looks artificial and suspicious.