MickMel SEO

The hot thing for the last year or so is to proclaim “PageRank is useless!  Ignore it!“.  Some of the dumbest things I hear are statements like “A PR2 site can outrank a PR7 site, therefore PageRank is meaningless.“  Duh!  If a higher PR site always ranked better, then Google.com (PR10) would rank first for every query.  There are certainly other factors in play, and PageRank is just a piece of it.

I’ll certainly admit that PageRank isn’t as valuable as it once was.  However, it is still presumed to be a small piece of the Google algorithm (along with 100+ other factors), making it not completely worthless.  It might not help much, but if it helps at all then it can’t be considered “worthless”.

More importantly, it’s crucial to understand what PageRank represents.  It’s the little things that contribute to your PageRank that are worthwhile, and the green bar is a representation of that.

Let’s use a football analogy.  Suppose your team is 10-0, and you’re about to play the team that’s 0-10.  Chances are good that you’ll win.  However, you aren’t going to win based on the fact that you’re 10-0.  In fact, your previous record is of no value in this game.  What is of value are the things that contributed to that 10-0 record.  For example, your team would likely have:

• a big offensive line
• a smart quarterback
• a talented defense
• a clutch kicker

The green PageRank bar is like your 10-0 record.  It won’t help much on it’s own, but it represents other things about your site.  If a site has a PR7 and is ranking well, it’s not ranking there because of the PageRank itself, but because of what that PageRank represents — lots of inbound links, many coming from other quality sites.

This site is a great example of that.  I’ve watched traffic slowly grow since I started writing, and our PageRank has gone up as well.  The PageRank is an indication of the growing number of inbound links that we’ve earned, and those links are helping us rank better, thus increasing our traffic.

Is this a fair assessment of the current state of PageRank?  Do you think it still means more?  Or do you maybe think it’s been pulled from the algorithm and is indeed worthless?

Yesterday we discussed how the long tail can be one of your best allies.  Coincidentally, Jim Karter wrote a post yesterday with a great suggestion on how to discover more great long tail keywords to blog about.

His suggestion is very simple – keep track of what people are searching for on your site, then blog about the items that haven’t been discussed yet.  He is using the “Fluid Dynamics Search Engine” script, but there are other options as well.  If you use WordPress, there is a great little plug-in called Search Meter that will record all of the searches performed on your site.  In addition, I highly recommend that you use the service provided by HitTail.  They track your incoming visits and suggest new keywords based on the previous visitors.  Between Search Meter and HitTail, you’ll quickly have a long list of new topics to blog about!

If you’re more aggressive, you can even write your own script to track searches.  On our church site, I’ve done just that.  I built a custom search engine using MySQL’s fulltext search, and I record each query in our database (along with date, time and number of results found).  I breeze through it from time to time to see what I’m missing.

Some of the things I’ve discovered in the past year or so:

• People wanted information about having weddings at the church, so I built a page for that.
• People can’t spell our staff member’s names correctly, so I added a bunch of misspelled keywords to each staff member’s page.  For example, you can find me if you search for “Mickey” or “Micky” or “Micki”.
• People searched for “www.google.com” quite a bit.  That’s odd to me, but I built a proper landing page to help them out.

The list could go on and on.  By tracking the searches, I can not only improve the quality of the search engine, but I can build the content that people are already looking for.

The longer you can stretch out your tail, the better!

About 3-1/2 years ago, Chris Anderson of Wired coined the phrase “the long tail“. If you’re not familiar with it, the term is a way of expressing the advantage of going after thousands of unique search queries (or products) rather than focusing on just a few big ones.

Product-wise, Amazon is the king of this. They sell many copies of popular books, but they’re also able to sell millions of copies of obscure books simply because they’re not constrained by the square footage of a single store. Those individual sales of lesser-known books generate a massive number of sales each year.

The same idea works with search engines. While it’s great to rank well for some power terms, the real magic (and money) is when you rank well for thousands of less-popular searches. According to Google, 20-25% of the searches they see each day are queries that have never been searched before. That’s a staggering number! Millions of searches today will be brand new to Google. The wider you can rank in your niche, the more of those visitors you might pick up.

Here is an example using the website from our church. In the past month, we’ve had 7,084 visits from search engine visitors, and they’ve used a total of 1,958 different queries. It’s not a huge number of visitors, but it’s pretty good for a church site.  Let’s dig into a few of those searches to see what they’re so helpful to us.

Here are a few of the queries that landed on us. I’m glad we rank well for these, but they’re not especially beneficial:

• mt bethel umc — 542 visits — Of course, this is our most popular. I’m glad we rank well for it, but those are people that are already looking for us.
• must ministry — 16 visits — It’s great that people found us when searching for this ministry, but they could be anywhere in the country and it probably wasn’t of much value for them to find us.
• churches — 3 visits — Of little value, since they’re probably not from the area.

How about the long tail? These are searches that occur far less often, but are very valuable:

• easter egg hunts in marietta ga — 3 visits — People looking for an egg hunt in our area and found our site. There is a decent chance that they decided to visit as a result of this search.
• methodist church marietta — 2 visits — Using Google Analytics, I can see that the two visitors looked at 14 pages on our site. At least one of them probably came to visit.
• adult softball leagues in cobb county georgia — 1 visit — We have exactly what this person was looking for.
• cobb county georgia church youth groups — 1 visit — This one visitor viewed 13 pages on our site. They were looking for a youth group in our area, found one, and wanted to learn more.
• daycare centers in east cobb county — 1 visit — They viewed 16 pages on the site. Again, we had exactly what they were looking for, and they’ve probably paid us a visit as a result.

The list goes on and on. In the past year we’ve had over 9,000 different queries that attracted two or fewer visits. These are big, long, ugly queries like the ones shown above — but they’re the ones that work.  If someone enters a long, precise search query and your site is near the top, you have a good chance of getting the sale/lead/visit/whatever.
So how do you build long-tail traffic? It’s pretty easy. Just follow basic SEO principles to help Google really understand your content. Things like:

• Text-based navigation (not images).
• Text rendered as text, not buried in images or flash.
• Frequent internal links in the text of your site.
• Proper title and H1 tags.
• Well-formed URLs.

Build lots of quality content, then make sure Google can fully understand what your content is all about.  Do that, and over time you’ll find yourself loving the long tail.

I’ve recently been accepted into the SearchMe beta and thought I’d share some of my thoughts.  For those that haven’t seen it yet, SearchMe is a visual search engine — the results are shown as screenshots of each site, built in an iTunes coverflow sort of way (see the photos at the bottom).

In terms of performance, I was pretty impressed.  It’s all done via flash, so there aren’t any special plug-ins required.  The results loaded rather quickly, and I was able to scroll forever.

The results themselves were pretty shaky.  SearchMe makes it clear that they’re in beta and still working on the results, so we’ll have to give them that. I’ll send them my feedback on some of that, and hopefully they’ll get things firmed up.  I kind of wonder why they didn’t partner with Google to drive the queries, then let their technology add the flash.  Seems like it might have worked a little better.

I probably won’t ever use this as my primary search engine, but I could see it being quite useful for certain kinds of queries, such as trying to find the “best looking sites” in a particular genre.

Here are a few screens to give you flavor for it.  Sign-up for the beta and give it a shot when they let you in.

I’ve seen a few posts (Dave Naylor, Joost de Valk) discussing this over the last few days and thought I’d share my view of it.

Both posts bring up the same analogy, attributed to Matt Cutts:

Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it’s a 2nd order effect.

My analogy is: suppose you’ve got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.

Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.

While I agree in theory, I think that’s a bit oversimplified.  What if you could re-allocate your $100 more effectively in just a few minutes, then go try to raise it to $300?

Sculpting PageRank is one of those things that can earn a nice benefit in a short period of time, but you can keep tweaking forever for progressively lesser and lesser gains.  See the chart on the left.

For example, you probably have links on your site for “log-in”, “privacy policy” and other such pages.  Go in and nofollow those.  How long did that take?  Two minutes?  That alone probably brought as much benefit as it will to go through every page and carefully sculpt things out.

Knock out a few of those links, then spend your time trying to work on getting $300.