Colorado Cobras Reach Milestone on Father’s Day

As a Father of two, I got asked a couple times what I was doing for Father’s Day and replied ‘Baseball’.    But, baseball gave me an unexpected Father’s Day gift today as I was able to witness a very gritty performance by my 10 year old Son and his baseball team.

Just the day before, my Son asked me “What’s a Milestone?” and I explained that a milestone is a significant event in someone’s career, or a defining moment that is a turning point.

He looked at me and repeated, “Dad’s What’s a Milestone?”.

I did my best to explain, but it was much easier today as he experienced several milestones of which I am proud and will remember for some time:

• His baseball team reached its’ first championship game after winning 4 straight baseball games this weekend. While they didn’t win the championship game, they qualified for a spot in the USSA World Series.
• In the semi-finals, he pitched a complete game (6 innings) which I haven’t seen done by a 10 year old. His pitch count for 6 innings was around 75 pitches and he was exhausted when he took the mound in the last inning, but he wanted to secure the win for his team.

Of course the entire team was devasted to lose (rather convincingly) in the championship, and he was upset on the way home. As we started to talk about team and individual milestones that were reached, he started to feel a little bit better.  By the time we got home, he was feeling a lot better about the weekend and how much he and his team had accomplished and I feel like I got to experience a life changing event in my Son’s early life…which is a great Father’s Day Gift.  Thanks Son!

Keyword Rankings - Google Top 10 or Bust!

In our SEO business, we use a combination of metrics to measure the success of a particular SEO campaign and one of those metrics is the actual ranking for a group of targeted keywords. Our thought process is to create a list of targeted keywords focus on a combination of variables such as search volume, competitiveness, intent of the search, and conversions.

Once this is created, we use tracking software to monitor these keywords on a weekly basis while providing a report to our clients. Invariably, this creates a lot of conversation around normal fluctuations of rankings and the relationship of keywords to traffic.

One of our strategies for clients is to identify keywords that rank between 6 - 12 for quick movement up to top position(s) which we consider to be #1 - #3. Once we have a keyword rotating through the first 3 positions, we can often work on external link building and on-site link architecture to lock in a top position.

When only viewing a keyword ranking report, these small movements don’t seem very important. For example, a move from 27 to 8 looks a lot more impressive via our ranking reports as this keyword is soaring up the charts. While this is a nice move and may result in a little bit of traffic, a move from #6 to #2 is much more impressive and will lead to more traffic or conversions. Of course, the movement from #2 to #1 is the last step and most important step, all of these are just points of illustration.

To make it a little more scientific, I like to reference this study done by SEOResearcer.com. They produced this as a quick overview of how click distribution on the average Google results page is recorded visually by the user.

A #1 ranking, for example, results directly in almost 56% of all clicks possible on the page. In comparison, the #7 ranking through #10 ranking on the page only generates 1-2% total click traffic rates. This chart provides evidence that jumping from #10 to #3 is great—but jumping from #3 to #1 is huge in relation to total increased traffic referrals.

We tend to spend a lot of time doing keyword research at the beginning of every client project, so we have to assume our target keywords will deliver quality traffic to our clients.

One last note, Google owns approximately 80% of the search market compared to Yahoo! at 10% and MSN at 5% (I know these aren’t exact numbers, but I want to make a general point). When looking at rankings and ranking click percentages, this means that a #1 ranking on MSN is worth a combined factor of .0028 (56% for a #1 Ranking with 5% market share) which is comparable to a #10 ranking on Google with a combines ranking of .0204 (2.55% for a #10 Ranking with 80% market share).

I’d be more happy with a #10 ranking on Google than a #1 ranking on MSN since Google traffic tends to be higher quality and we know can work on moving the keyword even higher once it is on the first page of Google.

FLASH SEO - Deep Links & Page Titles With SWF Address

SWF Address is a code library that provides deep linking in FLASH and AJAX allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a particular website section or application state.

Here are some examples from the showcase on the product website:

This is good for deep linking and mistakenly thought to be good for SEO.  However, Google (and other search engine robots) won’t spider this content as it views the # reference as indicating an anchor tag.  This means that it references considers the previous two Nike Skateboarding Pages to be the same page.

However, there is a work-around using Mod-Rewrite (or similar redirection strategy) and here is an example:

Basically, Google is indexing http://www.gensler.com/projects and non-flash reading browsers (turn off javascript to simulate) and spiders will get the actual content on http://www.gensler.com/projects while FLASH readers will get http://www.gensler.com/#projects

What Your Website Says About You

I stumbled into a website at Wordle.net that creates word clouds based on a block of text or all blocks of text on your website.  Just for fun, I tried out this blog and found that it was pretty accurate as I tend to talk alot about SEO, Google and the Black Hat vs White Hat SEO issue.

Out of curiousity, I decided to run a couple more to see what I would get. Here are a few of the the results:

The Seeking Alpha Internet Sector appears to be focused on platforms & applications:

Google Adwords Blog - They must like to drink at Google:

New’s Year was huge at MTV, but I missed it. I was busy watching VH1’s 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs with my wife as we rolled into the New Year.

From the ESPN NFL Nation Blog, it looks like the Cardinals & the Ravens in the Super Bowl:

If anyone wants to take the St. Louis,I mean Arizona Cardinals and give me the points, email me here!