Some roads can lead to confusion
Have you heard that you need to know your AdWords Quality Score?
Welcome to the world of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, for short.
Beware! Before you go any farther down this road, I need to offer a few words of advice. SEO can be highly addicting and that addiction can be very costly, in money and in time. But, fear not! I promise that I will not lead you down any dark alleys. You are free to exit at any time.
Google defines its Quality Score as: "A measurement of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad. Higher Quality Scores can lead to lower prices and better ad positions."
OK. So, what?
Well, if your business depends on search engine hits to generate prospects, you may be spending a great deal of time trying to optimize your search results, and that means you worry about how effective your keywords are.
OK, now. What are keywords?
Keywords may be single words or phrases. They are used by search engines to match what a user is looking for to the ads or pages that are labeled with them. The more unique the word or phrase, the greater the chance the search engine will rank the page high on the list of matches. That's what is meant by a Quality Score.
Oops! Did I go too far?
Let's back up a bit and look at an example. If we type a very unique phrase into the search field for Google.com, the results will list exact matches first. In other words, those pages that have keyword matches will rank highest among all pages.
Try it by searching on your name, or your street address.
Now try a very unique name, like "Algernon Emory Smith." You will discover that he was killed in the Battle of Little Big Horn.
Photo source - www.CusterLives.com
Now, even though Algernon is not a very common name, if that was what you typed in the browser field, our Calvary Officer wouldn't show up on the first page of the results. So, uniqueness matters.
But if your keyword is too unique, only a few people might ever try to search on it. How many people are looking for information on officers killed with General Custer?
It sounds so simple, doesn't it?
Therein lies the problem. It is.
At first, you don't even realize you are getting hooked. You write a blog post, add a few labels, identify them as keywords, and sit back and wait for the traffic to roll in from the Internet highway.
But that isn't what happens.
People are not reading your blog? Why not?
Maybe you need to let them know you have a blog.
But isn't that what the keywords are supposed to do?
Yes, and no. It is still a hit and miss game, not exactly like the lottery, but just as addicting. It takes constant involvement on your part, or on the part of someone you hire, to link in your social network sites, send out Tweets and emails to get friends and family to get their friends and family to appreciate (Like?) your hard work.
Oh, don't get me wrong. It is possible to drive business to your site by devoting all this time and money, but that only gets you to the next step, conversion.
We'll tackle that in the next installment. In the mean time, you might want to discover what Algernon did at Little Big Horn.