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I'd play with your ad copy - are you running multiple ad versions for this keyword? One of these ads may produce a higher CTR but also a higher bounce rate.
Generally I find my ppc bounces at a lower rate than my organic traffic, but as you illustrated here that's a generalization and must be looked at page by page.
Thanks,
Denver
I'd like to add a directory of websites to my ecommerce site. We operate within a nice niche both in terms of products and demographics. The directory would be specific to our verifical and market. My concern is how Google will see these external links.
A reciprocal link won't be required to be in our directory, but I suspect many sites would like back to us as we outreach to them with content ideas, their directory links, and as we share them with our social network on twitter and facebook.
The directory would be broken down into categories so each page may have 1-20 external links on it. Our architecture already incldes category links (all internal) so these would be in additional the links you would normally see on our site.
I'd also like to aggregate some content - again, mostly external links. Will Google have take poorly to that aggregation?
The focus on content creation is frustrating to me, too. If you are working for a large client or business with lots of time and money to develop unique content, than this model may be effective.
I'd really like to see an example of a small to medium sized business website (non-SEO related) that has naturally developed all the links it needs through link bait.
It's important to measure your bounce rate on your content, too. On my ecommerce site we add articles of interest to our market and these articles attract a lot of traffic. They also bounce at a very high level - so we attract the customer, they spend a good amount of time on the page, then bounce off. We've beefed up our on page promotion with coupons and in-content links to products to see if that helps.
Our most effective link building is all the standard stuff - relevant directories, product reviews (sites that have a reason to link to you - is this really "natural"), comment links and article postings.
Theoretically pure white contends that you build great content and folks suddenly start linking to you. In reality, we all work hard to find other sites that will benefit in some way by linking to our sites.
Of course, you can gain a lot of niche traffic by doing your research, making sure your on-page is solid and if your keyword phrase isn't terribly competitive you'll rise in the rankings and gain some traffic.
Is G+ coming up with business pages soon?
Thanks for the case study. I wonder how much of the impact was the fact that zillions of posts showed up in 3 days, probably with unnatural anchor text (the same, over and over). Would the impact be the same if one manually entered comments on various relevant sites with varied anchor text?
What are your recommendations for the best link building strategy for a B2C ecommerce site?
Does anyone use/recommend the use of anchor text links in blog comments (on sites relevant to your sites market)?
Thanks,
Mark
<title>SEOMoz Rand Fishkins Response | Footer Link Best Practices</title>
Ooops - did I over optimize this reply?
Hear us, Rand, hear us.
In my opinion online directories still have value and are one part of creating a link profile for your site. I would recommend you look closely at the inbound followed links of your key competitors who rank well. I almost always find online directories in the link profiles of my high ranking competitors.
Directories specfic to your topic or industry are more valuable, of course, as they also have the potential to drive traffic.
In theory linkbait is the optimial and most espoused method for gaining inbound links, but the effectiveness of this strategy varies depending on how interactive folks in your market tend to be. I doubt there is a more active community involved in creating linkable content than the SEO community.
Having said that, whether you are attracting links to your content or not, you should actively build high quality, well researched content. This will bring traffic and possibly links.
Hope this helps.
<title>SEOMoz Rand Fishkins Response | Footer Link Best Practices</title>
Ooops - did I over optimize this reply?
Hear us, Rand, hear us.
I'd use directory listing strategically - you don't want 500 listings showing up this week. If someone is delivering 500 links I would be concerned because it would certainly not have a natural appearance.
Directories are a part of an overall strategy and my approach, for what it's worth, is to add a directory listing slowly - perhaps one or two per week - and vary the anchor text and link to different pages of your site to vary things up.
I'd love to say that great content gets linked to and I'm willing to be converted, I just don't see it all that often in the real world.
Can someone point me to some small or medium sized business websites (non-SEO related) that have great inbound links generated almost entirely with content and linkbait? I'm continually open to learning.
Definitely have it go to your own site. Having spent 10 years in the newspaper industry (IT/Web) I'd be shocked if they know SEO.
I've got "Advanced Google Adwords" by Brad Geddes open on my desk right now. The best book I've found with extremely practical guidance.
Rob,
Thanks for all the information. I hadn't considered the hyphen issue.
I structured the title tags like this...
Is that the type of structure you recommend?
Thanks,
Mark
The focus on content creation is frustrating to me, too. If you are working for a large client or business with lots of time and money to develop unique content, than this model may be effective.
I'd really like to see an example of a small to medium sized business website (non-SEO related) that has naturally developed all the links it needs through link bait.
It's important to measure your bounce rate on your content, too. On my ecommerce site we add articles of interest to our market and these articles attract a lot of traffic. They also bounce at a very high level - so we attract the customer, they spend a good amount of time on the page, then bounce off. We've beefed up our on page promotion with coupons and in-content links to products to see if that helps.
Our most effective link building is all the standard stuff - relevant directories, product reviews (sites that have a reason to link to you - is this really "natural"), comment links and article postings.
Theoretically pure white contends that you build great content and folks suddenly start linking to you. In reality, we all work hard to find other sites that will benefit in some way by linking to our sites.
Of course, you can gain a lot of niche traffic by doing your research, making sure your on-page is solid and if your keyword phrase isn't terribly competitive you'll rise in the rankings and gain some traffic.
Nice Post, EGOL. You don't like Google with all the "improvements" - like to I rank 6th on page 1 or 17th, depending on what Google decides to display on the SERPS.
How about DuckDuckGo? They are pretty generic and without personalization.
I've read several times of this technique for determining if a particular keyword phrase is worth the effort of optimizing for in organic search.
In Adwords create an Ad Group with a single exact match keyword phrase and let it run in Adwords until you have enough clicks to measure valid results (I've often heard 200-300 clicks). If you are unable to convert the search term via paid search, the theory goes, it's probably not worth the effort to rank top 3 for that phrase and you should put your efforts elsewhere.
Do any of you use this strategy? If so, have you found the results to be pretty consistently accurate?
Thanks,
Mark
I would use the meta description tag synergistically with the intent of the page.
if the audience I was trying to reach was local the keyword phrase I'm optimizing for might be "Acupuncture for pregnancy in Chester" or if I wanted traffic from all over it might be "Benefits of Acupuncture during preganancy".
Let's assume local. In that case my title tag might be...
<title>Acupuncture for Pregnancy Chester | Company Name</title>
Of course, I'd include the relevant terms in my H1 tag, again in my content (bolded) with great, relevant copy.
(PS - I didn't count my characters for the title or meta description - remember to stay within the character limit recommendations)
Basically the content of the title tag, meta description, H1, bold and content should flow from your keyword research and intended audience.
That's my take on it,
Mark