Most of the SEO gurus and guides out there tell you to focus on getting your site to the top spot in Google for your keywords. It’s an admirable goal and it’s certainly something to strive for but being on top of the SERPs isn’t everything. There’s more to getting clicks to your site than just being ranked highly in Google. Take a look at this chart I swiped from one my sites using Google Webmaster Tools:

I cut out the search terms on left but this is for a varied bunch of terms that all rank number one in Google. You’ll notice that despite all the terms being ranked first, the click through ratio varies greatly from 100% down to 33%. That is because of other factors in the SERPs beyond just being the first result.

Some of these things you can change. Your onsite SEO is very important, like the meta info and page titles that appear in the results (if you’re using WordPress there are good plugins like All in One SEO that will do this for you automatically). Your site name is a factor- site names relevant to the keywords will be more likely to get clicks. The number and type of ads appearing above the results is a HUGE factor that unfortunately you can’t control without buying ads yourself. Relevancy of the other results is also a big factor; if your site looks like it matches what the searcher is looking for better than the rest of the results on the page (or with a more intriguing page title), you’re going to get the click whether you’re number one or number nine.

Here’s another chart I pulled sorted by clickthrough percentage; I chose a middle of the road percentile for demonstration purposes: continue reading…

I’ve noticed an interesting change in the way that Google gives results when searching with quotes. In the past it was not necessary to close your quotes to get an exact match search. You could use an opening quote only and then type in your search query and the SERP page would appear exactly the same as if you had used both opening and ending quotes like the search pictured above. But now, an open quoted search looks like this:

It’s gone from 1 match to 400,000 matches. While the exact match for this particular search still ranks at the top of the SERPs, note that Google lists many other results as if the query was entered without quotes at all. What’s interesting is that on a particular search I just did (not pictured), the exact match DID NOT appear first in the SERPs.

What does this mean? Well I’m not sure how many people use the no ending quotes shortcut to search in Google (or if there’s even a way to find out) but it’s no longer a viable way to research anything. Any users who do search in that way, will no longer be getting the exact match results they are expecting. I don’t think it’s worthwhile to pursue any strategies to take advantage of it in any way other than to increase your rankings in general (since I’m assuming the percentage of users who are affected is small) but it’s something you should definitely be aware of for your own research if you had been using this shortcut.

Finally some seo development. Big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Live) will soon be using rel=”canonical” tags in order to manage duplicate content on your domain name. The tag will be used in the header of your page next to meta tags. For example <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.exposedseo.com/wahtever.php”> will tell search engines that the page is a copy of http://www.exposedseo.com/wahtever.php. Fore more uses and information have a look at the original SEOmoz article. I don’t know when but I’m sure there will be a way to exploit this little tag soon.

It has recently been proven that duplicate content penalty only exists when the content is being duplicated on the same domain. Could this be an attempt to help webmasters sort this out? rel=”canonical” tag is said to replace 301 redirects which will make things much easier. Not only that, rel=”canonical” is only there for the spiders which means that the duplicate page will still be there for your visitors and won’t redirect to the original. Meanwhile, we just have to wait and see.

A few years ago I used to run two popular 3gp video blogs. These two blogs used to have around the same number of backlinks in various search engines. It was me in charge of seo so I just did pretty much the same thing for both. What really surprised me a few months later is that one of

the blogs started to receive traffic from Google images. Over 30,000 monthly unique visitors to be precise. Why? Because that particular blog had a different format. I have tested the same layout a number of times and it always worked a treat. Shall i give it a try here on my blog? (My keyword will be seo) First of all I need an image called seo.jpg. I then upload it to any folder I want. I then stick this images in my blog post so that it is nicely surrounded by text with a decent keyword density and change the alt tag to seo. That’s it! I should be ranking quite well within a month or two.

Other tricks that can help:

1) Linking back to your image with appropriate anchor. For example seo (Not really needed)
2) Opt-in for enhanced Google image search.

When you start receiving traffic from Google images you might want to redirect it to your landing page. You can use something like this in your htaccess:


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://images\.google\.com/imgres
RewriteRule ^Folder/upload/[^.]+\.jpg$ http://yoursite.com/Folder/page.cgi [R=301,L]