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His typical Adwords seminar is two days.  The first morning is about keywords and ads.  Everybody is watchin', sippin' coffee and smilin'.

Then the math starts after lunch.  I sit in the front and turn around..... quite a few of the people behind me are using their phones or are watching the screen with a "10,000 mile stare".

The second day... quite a few people are not there.... by the afternoon the math nerds are the only people left along with a few people with the 10,000 mile stare.

Now, I am not saying that he is a bad teacher.  He is fantastic. Fantastic.  He says there during every break, during lunch, back early after lunch, stays late to answer EVERY question.  The problem is everybody thinks that makin' money from Adwords is easy, you just write an ad and pay 5 cents a click.  Then they realize that they are up against genius people who have rock bottom costs who are really hungry.

I just searched for the first paragraph on their homepage and it returns 16,000 hits in google, The second returns 9600 and the third 1,400. Searching for the first paragraph of their 'about us' page gives me 13,000 results!!

I think you are correct.   This is deadly stuff.

This happens all of the time.  Lots of people come in here to Q&A and say..... :"Wahhhh! My traffic dropped" and we say..  "You got dupe content".. and they argue with us.

If you have a site that is getting lots of traffic there is going to be lots of copies of your content out there.

I was selling backpacks and over 1000 Chinese sites republished my descriptions (they were made in China) and my rankings tanked. Tanked.

I had a great article of interest in the commodity investing niche and the weasels in that space grabbed it and republished it on xx,xxx domains.  Not kidding. That many.  Too many to fight with DMCA filings.  My article, which IMO was best-on-the-web tanked.  All of this with me publishing first, using author and Google+.

A few years ago a well-known news site started grabbing my feed and republishing.  My rankings dropped like a rock.  But they were good guys and quit doing it when I asked and my rankings came back.

This stuff happens all of the time. Scrapers and human weasels are grabbing your content while you are sleeping.  I am surprised if any reasonably popular site does not have tons of grabbed and republished content on the web and Google does a really bad job of attributing - even if you use the tools that they tell you to use.

If you have not done so, consider reading. Advanced Google Adwords by Brad Geddes.   I have read it twice, and reread some parts of it many times.  Best book anywhere for adwords.

If you are spending major money on PPC then you must attend Brad's Adwords Seminars.  This is  two days of intense training for Adwords.  This is not a fluffy seminar.  The first morning covers the basics and then you get deep into spreadsheet math.

Adwords is not a word game, it is a math game.   This is not a seminar where you will sit, sip coffee, fart and go home an expert.  You are going to do lots of math that will require you to think VERY HARD.  But if you can learn what is being taught you will definitely make a lot more money and your competitors will be making a lot less.

Making money with Adwords is very difficult for me.  More difficult than SEO.  Why?  You are competing against the entire resources of your competitor.  They might have lower cost inventory, cheaper shipping, cheaper labor.   If they get 60% off MSRP and you get 40% off MSRP then they can spend that 20% on Adwords and still make the same profit that you do.  But if you bid enough to compete with them then you lost 20% off the top, then pay credit card fees, shipping from manufacturer to you, labor, shipping supplies.  You just made zero profit.

My suppliers are often the ones who bid against me on adwords.  Really really hard to beat them when they have huge cost and expense advantages.

Like I say, Adwords is a game for the people are really good at math, have highly skilled people making a website that converts customers like greased pigs, and are cut-throat competitors on costs and expenses.

You better know your numbers or you will lose your shirt.

We have a rule at our office......  "Do not assume that your competitor knows what he is doing."

Why?   Bet on yourself.  Bet on yourself.

Your competitor probably doesn't know what he is doing... and you probably can't figure out what he is trying to do.

Map your own course.  Make your own decisions.  Don't let competitors who are probably noobs jerk your plan around.

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Does anyone think that using the logo as a H1 would have any negative effect from a search engine perspective?

I think that it is a waste.  If you are not ranking for your own brand you have big problems.  Use the H1 for what you are attacking.

I helped a guy with an auto glass website in a city not far from Scranton.

Almost immediately after the site went up they were getting most of their business from the website.  The SEO was easy because the competitors were few and naive.

I think that your first few paragraphs were a good response.  You identified this as a "local attack" and have a reasonable idea of how to do it.

We would need to talk about this.....

We either need to teach him how to do his own local SEO or find some super good cheap outsourcing. There's plenty of tutorials on the subject but he will need coaching if he's going to do it properly himself

As a company we might not want to send clients to cheap outsourcing or tutorials.  We might want to do that work properly ourselves rather than take the chance of the client or the outsource screwing up the job.

In the second half, you mentioned twitter and facebook.  I get a little uncomfortable there for two reasons... 1) will client be able to do this / does he want to do this / will he do it right; and more importantly, 2) is this something that will drive enough business to produce ROI or will it be a fire drill for the client and a place for people to complain rather than just call the office to seek resolution.

But, that is just me personally.  I don't find much value in social but maybe I don't know how to use it.

Two things that I would respect in a job applicant is a little caution about.... 1) is client able to do this well enough for us to put our name on his work... and 2) is this part of the job going to produce ROI.   I would want to look at some auto glass companies who are doing FB and twitter and see if we think it is worth the time.  If we find someone who is doing it well then we have something to learn.

...quite a few of such talents will be extremely control freaks... just what I have dealt with, they are more like lone wolves than team players...

Just jumping in here because this statement resonated with me.

I have tried to get good work done with top-rated people and have found that they have a mind of their own.   Really frustrating.  It is my website vs their values.

A trusted advisor told me ... "You are spending so much time and energy fighting this....   Just make your design very simple and something that you can do for yourself.  That will be so much easier than pulling teeth."

So, since I don't have clients with expectations.  I set my own and am back to whistling while I work.  My site looks like a newspaper and for my niche that is perfect.

At my office employees know that they are paid by the hour and that I am paid on the overall performance of the business.  So they willingly accept my decisions (even though they might say "you try that and decide if my way was right" -- and I want to hear that from them.  Sometimes they ARE right.).

When I have tried to work with designers I can't get them into the mindset that I am the one with all of the skin in the game.  So if they disagree with me they should do it my way and see me enjoy or suffer on my decision.   If my decision is bad then they can gloat when I return to pay them to redo it their way.

It sounds like the Moz elearning site. 

Maybe Rand can get Moz.edu?

If I was hiring someone... I would be asking...

"Let's say a client comes in who owns an auto glass business in Peoria, Illinois.   He has a four page website that consists of "homepage"... "location"... "about us"...  "services provided".  Tell me exactly what you are going to do to bring him customers from the web."

I am going to sit there and keep my mouth shut until you either tell me exactly how you are going to make it rain for this guy or until I decide that the interview is over.

(If you were going to be working in my office I might be willing to hire a person who needs a little coaching.  But since you are going to be working out there where teaching you stuff and watching what you are doing is more time consuming and difficult, you need to be a complete package before I hire you.....  I would also want you working a schedule that I determine.  You need to be ready and available at our convenience - that means you are at the computer at 6:00 AM because we are in the eastern timezone and start at 8:00.

Consider offering it on a random day as a surprise for your visitors.  Then see if the size of the shopping cart increases and the conversion rate increases.

This allows you to do it without long-term commitment and test how it hits your visitors mentally.  This offers it to everyone equally and might avoid your best customer writing to you asking... WHY DIDN"T I GET FREE SHIPPING?!

I wrote this Moz post a long time ago but the details (and member comments) are still relevant.

http://moz.com/blog/ten-tips-for-buying-a-website

The only thing that I would add is....  If you are buying a domain today it would be a good idea to do a Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Links risk assessment.

Good luck.

If I have a link from a page on my site to a page on your site and you kill the redirect then my visitor will hit a 404 on your page.  That is how site-to-site traffic is handled.

Now, search engines could remember that a page is redirected - but I would not bet any money on that.  So, I leave my redirects up forever.

I have a site that produces a lot of temporary content.  We redirect thousands of URLs each year.  To make that easy to manage we use subfolders such as mysite.com/sports/2012/egol-hits-grand-slam/.  When we are ready to abandon the content for /2012/  we will find some that is pulling traffic, redirect it to related page, then all files that have no links or no traffic can be redirected to a single location.  The order of commands in .htaccess allow that to be done easily.

Thanks, Rand.

Good to know that you have these tests built-in.

Since about noon yesterday and into this morning, when I clicked the blue refresh buttons for a keyword, that keyword jumped to the top of the list, spun for a bit and did not return a ranking.   I just tried a few and am getting better results.

Google has turned into a black box.

Thank you Lesley and Jonathan.

The ranking monitors that I use are not working.  Also, today most of the searches being done through google are not showing keywords in analytics programs.  My [keyword not provided] counts are up between 25% and 35% on all of my sites.   I figured that while Google was at it they would cut off our rank checking abilities.

I might be responding too soon on this... but has anyone been able to use the Moz rank tracker or any other web-based rank-tracking tool that uses the Google API since about noon today (NYC TIME)??

If you use your website content on ebay verbatim.  Then you might have a duplicate content problem that could result in your site being filtered from Google's search results.

If you author content on ebay for the same topic that appears on your website be prepared to see ebay.com above you in the search results.  It is very hard to beat ebay, it is awfully hard to beat them.  Did I say that ebay is hard to beat?

Linking from your ebay pages to other domains is against ebay rules in most situations.  If you are trying to refer buyers to your website ebay will take action against you. When I sold on ebay, links from their auction and store pages were not allowed unless that link was to a reference only page that did not attempt to refer the visitor to another page.  The rule is probably the same now but you should read their rules to be sure.

You are allowed to link to a website in a few situations.  One is from your "about us" pages.  Links out of ebay are OK there.

Depends what you can do with it..

If you have an ecommerce site selling high value items with a great conversion rate and very high customer lifetime value that link will be worth 4x as much to you as the guy with 1/2 your conversion rate and 1/2 your profit margin.

The link might be worth even less to someone running an adsense site on a noncommercial topic.

Also, it depends upon the maturity of your website.  If you have a new site with very few links then a new link can be kickass.  However, if your site is established with thousands of links then one more will not have a dramatic effect - unless it is a valuable link that hits a relatively new content page.

Oh!  Don't do it.

Your ebay store will then compete with you.

Also, do not link to your items on ebay from your website.   Huge mistake.  I did that with one of my sites and my site got beaten in the SERPs by multiple pages from ebay.  I took the links down and ebay pages beat us for MONTHS!   We lost lots of money. 

(If you don't care that ebay beats you in the SERPs then you might link to them... but ebay seems to get a huge huge boost for just a couple of links.)

You can link to your site from your "about us" page.  That is OK, in my opinion.

Scrapers and feedgrabbers.

It is easy for us to understand that getting into the top three positions for a 45% keyword is going to be more difficult than getting there for a 28% keyword.  So, at first glance this is really easy to comprehend.

That is the basic value in the keyword difficulty tool.

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To understand this tool fully, you need to build a few websites that each have some content out on the web.  Then you will see a piece of your content ranking for a keyword and know what it took to produce that.  Now you have "experience" that you can use as a gauge.   Now you have a number and it will be like holding a rock in your hand, hefting it a bit and having some idea of APPROXIMATELY what it weighs.

However, keep in mind that this scale is from 1% to 100% and it is probably not linear.   A rock that gets a keyword difficulty of 58% probably weighs about ten times as much as one with a 48%.

The scale is logarithmic (or something close to that - but definitely not linear).

Now.. you asked about easy vs hard and how long it takes to rank.   That depends upon the amount of resources that you have to put into the battle.   If I have a powerful site, I can toss up a page and it might immediately be competitive and on the first page of the SERPs for a 45% keyword.  EASY.

But you put the same content on your site, which is new and has not developed a strong track record, and it might not be visible in the first five pages of the SERPs.   HARD.

The difference is that I have the resource of a strong website behind me and that makes the KW easy for me.  You don't have the luxury so the same KW is hard for you.

Other differences in resources can be budget for site promotion, relationships with other webmasters, and an enthusiastic tribe of website visitors who will tweet... "Chapman nails it again!  Woohoo!"  That can be like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Another difference is the quality of the content.  My strong site might get that first page of the SERPs for a 45% keyword with junk content.   But you write something really impressive that attracts links, likes, tweets, and attention.  Although you rank initially on page five of the SERPs.  People who see your content share and link to it at a much faster rate than the junk article on my site... so over time your rankings will climb.  My page will eventually be defeated as superior content is published on other sites.

The bottom line...  SEO is a "battle of resources".   Knowledge, talent, wit, verve and dedication to quality are amazing resources in the long term.   But the resources of a powerful site, a huge budget, established relationships and an enthusiastic tribe give Goliath a huge and immediate advantage - even if undeserved.

So, easy vs hard is relative... but the number scale ranks keywords in their approximate order of "resources required" - which we could substitute for the word "difficulty".

This really isn't a direct answer, but it is how I approach the problem.

The difficulty with long-tail keywords is that there are SO MANY OF THEM.   It is impossible to target all of them.

Building specific landing pages for each of them would be really time consuming if done properly with content and would make a very spammy site if done quickly.

So, what I do is draw upon my knowledge of the products or topics that I am targeting and write the following types of content.

1. The questions that people most frequently ask.

2. The things that they don't ask but need to know to be succesful

3. The things that would surprise them - like misconceptions, extremes  and WTFs.

If you have a lot of #1 content on your site it will pull in a lot of these long tail keywords.  These pages should be substantive in length and detailed in information.  That will put a lot of diverse words on the page that will match many long tail queries.  These will pull in traffic.

Content in the #2 and #3 category, if written with substantive length and detail, will also pull in a lot of long tail... but in addition, these are the types of pages that people will link to, share and recommend.  They are the astonishment topics that people enjoy and share.  In general, these are some of the most successful pages on my websites.  My site is mostly factual and serious topics... but I get tons of traffic on these types of topics through links on reddit, stumbleupon, cracked, FB, etc.

If these files have links, do they count as inbound followed links?

Yes, absolutely.

You can find links from .ppt   .pdf   .xls    .doc   and many other types of document files in your Google Webmaster tools account.

In addition, those documents accumulate PageRank and pass it.   I have some PR6 .pdf documents.   You can also optimize their document properties so that they will compete in the SERPs with a title tag of your choice.

If you publish these types of files, always put an attribution link to your website and don't hesitate to link to content on your website where it would be useful to readers.

If you are clever you can even place "Add to Cart" buttons in these documents. 

I got into a Panda problem because I had a lot of duplicate content in .pdf documents - to control the scale and appearance of printed graphics.  I was able to use .htaccess to apply rel=canonical to the .pdf documents and attribute them to specific html pages.

These documents can do just about anything that a webpage can do if you are clever.

barbequed ribs

OMG!   Oh, I am laughing so hard I will have to wash my glasses.

We prefer to make our client's competitors do their own work and break a sweat.

I fill that tag with BS.  That'll fix those lazy weasels.

No, honestly... I still use meta keywords.

When I write an article I write the title tag first....  "Begin with the end in mind."    Then I write the meta keywords.  Makes me think about where I am going.

Anybody who is lazy enough to harvest that info is lazier than smart.  Not a threat.   And, I believe in the theory that imitators come in second.

.....  and....   I bet Google is using meta keywords and counting those nofollow links  it's their "reverse psychology" algo to screw SEOs.  (Of course they are not counting blog and forum spam and sitewides... but nofollow links that appear to be editorially given - such as wikipedia citations - are counted at 5x the normal rate)

"How much content should i write then?"

Tell them that their post should be one of the best on the web for the topic that they are writing about.

Should i shoot for 300 words per post, higher.

This is really really really short in my opinion.  Most of the product descriptions on my ecommerce site are a lot longer than this.  Blog posts and articles are usually way over 1000 words to be competitive with other content on same subject on the web.  If you are not writing that type of content then in my opinion why are you writing?

Look at the Moz.com blog and you will see that what people are writing there is kickass stuff of way over 1000 words and usually lots of images.

Also don't let them get away with writing posts with no images.  Tell them to take photos or hire someone to take them.  A blog post without a photo is really boring.

added...  hey Schwaab.. I saw that "no" reply this morning.       It got lots of thumbs up before that page went down.   I am enjoying your posts.  Keep up the great work!

I watch analytics on a website (for a friend's business) that is reasonably stagnant, which just experienced a massive spike in search traffic for no explainable reason.

Try digging a little deeper into the analytics.

If you are looking at his analytics you should be able to see where those visitors were coming from on that day... also pages that they entered and lots more.   The answers are just a few clicks away.

Lots of my writing is done from a NordicTrack elliptical.  I put a shelf in front of it, added a computer, two monitors... then put a keyboard on top of the display.  Any post to Moz that I make between 7pm and midnight is from that elliptical.

**you speak further on this? **

It's a personal opinion .  I believe that when I have these on a page I get more long-tail traffic.

Add them to your pages and then you can have an opinion too.

Let's say you have a travel site.  Information only.  You have dozens of articles about New Zealand destinations and you get your best images, shrink them down to common size thumbnail, place a few words beneath each.  I bet that page will have a kickass CTR.

Maybe you have a site about Czech glass, with articles about the many different types.  A huge page of images with a few words beneath each would be kickass for generating pageviews.

People really like images and if you have superior images I think that this will generate a lot of action on your site.

Doing this in a small way (but scaling across the entire web) are the content advertising from Taboola and Outbrain.... (also the merchandising activities for goofy products uses the outlandish image to generate clicks)

salivating

I don't know the answer to your question but if you made a page like that and called it "window shopping" it might be kickass for generating sales.

3 to 5 tips on how to use graphical layout (font, images, graphics, organization, menu, etc) to make content irresistable.

My first reaction to this is...  Don't expect to put lipstick on a pig and have people line up to kiss him.   If you don't have great content to begin with the graphical layout will probably not make much difference.

**Font... **  Use lots of subheadings.  These break up the reading and allow marginally interested people an opportunity to scan your article for topics that are personally interesting

Organization...   I use a two-column layout.  Left column is text and the right column is photography, graphs, data tables, references, videos, related content menus.    Sometimes I have way more right column stuff than text so I mix the images, data, etc in with the text column.

Images... I make it a point to have one really nice image at the top of each article.  I really like spanning the page with a wide image but if I can't find a good one I find or create a kickass image for the top of the right column.

I often spend good money on images.  A staff member here takes great photos and makes great line graphics.   I often license photos or pay a graphic artist to make illustrations.  We often spend a lot of money purchasing props for photos.

I have lots of articles that are accompanied by hundreds of dollars worth of photos, images, data, videos.  A few that have over a thousand dollars worth of this media.   I can also have a week or two spent on research and writing.  Good content can cost a lot of money.  Collecting the data needed to make one graph can require days of labor.

You need to be really careful because....    It is easy to lose money on this type of content.    It is easy to lose money on this type of content.    I said that twice for emphasis.  I have spent a lot of money on content that has bombed.

If you are producing expensive content for low volume or low value audiences then you will probably lose money.

Photos, video, data, graphs, and art will not be successful if you don't present it well.  They are not magic bullets.   So before you spend a lot of money on lipstick be sure you have a princess instead of a pig.

**Menu... **  If you go to wikipedia you will see that most article of substantive length have multiple subheadings and near the top of the article there is a small box listing those subheadings as on-page anchor text links.   Those on-page anchor text links, in my opinion, have on-page optimization value that is exceeded only by the title tag.. and that is the most important tip of this post - in my opinion.

Place these pages on a permanent URL.  Then update the content of that page as needed.

If you change the URL then all of the people who linked to your event page will then see their links hit old information or hit an error page if you delete the page.  And, you don't want to do a new redirect every year.

We link to some academic sites that change their URLs frequently.  We are always cussing about them.

You can place a general description at the top of the page under a large detail photo.  Then down below - beside each color photo example you can talk about the pretty turquoise blue color of this item and how it is great paired with tan slacks (don't give a specific item there because it be discontinued, but you can link to search results or a color category page).

Thank you, Everett.   Interesting ideas.

When I have a product that is available in several colors of styles I include all of them on one page but have separate, descriptions, product photos and buy buttons.  I am doing this with the hope that it will make it easy for customers to see all options at once but also to make a much richer-appearing page for Google.

The price increase had very little impact upon sales or conversion rate.  I did not see a change in bounce rate.

Yes, actually we increased prices significantly and saw a decline in rankings.  I can't say that was was the cause - it could have been coincidence.

If I search for "hiking boots" and scan down the SERPs I see the following...

1. Google reports "483 items" for the Zappos.com page.

2. Google reports "Results 1 - 36 of 85" for the Shoebuy.com page (and that does not appear in their code).

So, Google is obviously paying attention to the depth of your information or the number of items that you are showing.   If they think that is important enough to count and report in the SERPs, might they also be using that information as a ranking factor??

PRACTICAL APPLICATION FOR SEO:  If google is using this information, perhaps people should list all of their color, size, etc variants on a single page.  For example if you sell widgets in five colors, instead of making one page for each color, list all five on the same page.

Yes, they do change on some sites.  But I bet that most sites put up a price and don't change it very often.

I can't point to examples because they involve private information.  And, I have not done general research.   Sorry.

Thank you, William.  I agree.  And ebay would be problematic because the prices there are bids at auction.

Thanks AWC,  I have wondered about stock status too.  I suspect that pages with an out-of-stock item decline in rankings  - but again I am not sure.

I have not done any detailed studies on this but it seems that Google might be using low retail prices for specific items as a ranking factor in their organic SERPs.

Does anyone else suspect this?

Just askin' to hear your thoughts.

Thanks!

You are being beaten because your competitor is garrett

Find out if the content manager knows about keyword research.

I do content management and have a graph on my wall that has two axes...

The horizontal axis is "Profitable"

The vertical axis is "Linkable"

Content ideas are written on post-it notes and placed at an appropriate location on that chart.  The goal is to work on those in the upper right quadrant first... then generate more ideas for that same quadrant.

After all upper right quadrant content is produced then pick the most fun jobs from the upper left and lower right quadrant.

Generate more ideas for all quadrants but lower left.

I do the same as Christopher, but without FB and Twitter.   My visitors do that for me.

In my opinion a lot of people who try this method and do not succeed have content that is less than inspiring.  For this method to work well you have to compare your content to the top ranking sites for your keywords and have clearly better, more substantive and superior photos.

I launch new content and only promote it on my own site and to the people who subscribe to my feed.  It might rank deep in the SERPs at first... when I check on it a year later it is usually on the first page of Google.  So I am not paying a lot of attention to rankings or to links.  And, because the content is generous in length it pulls in lots of longtail queries.

**However, that approach can get daunting if you have say 25 keywords that a small business wants to target. **

uhh... This sounds like a small project.  

**What if the client wants all of the keywords and has the budget?  Do you just ramp your RCS content creation efforts? **

Some people have been writing RCS every day for the past several years.  They are usually the ones who are doing well in the SERPs.

It seems that you can do overkill and quickly run out of RCS content to produce.

If you really know your RCS... the sky can be the limit in most niches. What appears to be overkill and depletion to an SEO might be just the tip of a large iceberg for the content area expert.

In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.

This sounds like a site that has been hit by a panda problem.   One of my sites had a lot of content republished from .gov and .edu domains -- mostly done at their request.  This was duplicate content and the rankings of this site dropped across the domain on a panda date.  We did noindex/follow on those pages and deleted some.  Rankings came back within a few weeks.

For the past two weeks are improving the content of a website that we usually do not work on.  It is ranking below its potential so we are writing detailed product descriptions for lots of pages that were not much better than cookie cutter pages.  This work will take a few months.

So, although I don't know if what Bruce Clay is saying is correct....  that is where I am betting my money.

Over the past year lots of sites are being hit by Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Link Penalties.   There are also many other reasons that traffic can tank.

Moz member MarieHaynes has a website that summarizes these common traffic loss problems and a quiz that can help you diagnose.

http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/

Thanks.

I guess all of my pages are cornerstones.   Don't know why I would build anything else.  

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I do have some groups of pages like you describe.   They consist of..... One page that is narrowly optimized for a very difficult short-tail keyword (widgets) and that page links to supplemental pages on many related keywords (brass widgets, wooden widgets, plastic widgets, etc).

My page for the root keyword links to all of the supplemental pages, and all of the supplemental pages link back to the root keyword page.  There links appear two places.  1) in the bread crumbs; and 2) in the paragraph text of the page.

I have had great results with these pages.  My root page will have paragraphs and photos for every supplemental page topic... then the supplemental pages have extended content on that topic and lots more images.

Comment...  I stopped thinking about linkjuice a long time ago.  I don't regret it.