Yes, you read the title right. My company recently performed extensive search engine optimization on a client website, and the results were staggering. Within a month, organic search traffic had dropped by over 60%. Inbound leads from organic search had dropped by over 50%. And the client was absolutely thrilled with the results.

So when is less organic search traffic better? And when are fewer leads from organic traffic better?

Less traffic from organic search traffic can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of traffic, and fewer leads can be better when the site attracts the wrong kind of leads.

To give you some background, this particular client offered a highly-specialized service to B2B companies. The reputation of the company and the quality of the service commanded a high dollar figure per engagement. They were THE major player in an industry that they had practically invented. However, their prior search engine optimization company did not factor in any of these very important considerations while optimizing the website.

The firm in question was clearly from the “traffic-at-any-cost” school of search engine optimization, and they didn’t ever engaged the client with the type of questions that you would expect from a real business partner, including the most basic questions, such as “Who is your target market?” They were not a marketing partner – they were a traffic delivery mechanism. They were not actively involved in the client’s success, because to them, increased organic search traffic was the sole measure of success.

They certainly were not lacking in technical skill – they were able to deliver quality rankings for competitive keyphrases. And the methodology was not suspect, as all techniques were well within the terms of service of all major search engines. So what exactly was the client justified in complaining about?

It turns out they had plenty of legitimate complaints. Although rankings and organic search traffic were up, sales were down. Additionally, web form leads were coming in and the phones were ringing, but nothing was closing. The sales staff was spending a lot of time following up on leads that were, quite frankly, junk. Outbound prospecting had come to a standstill because salespeople had marching orders to follow up on inbound leads, which were certainly abundant.

After a brief analysis, it quickly became clear what the root of the problem was. The prior search engine optimization company, with their “traffic trumps all” mentality, had turned the site into a magnet for do-it-yourselfers, small firms or individuals with very low budgets, and visitors looking for frée advice.

In their quest to obtain the most organic search traffic possible, the prior search engine optimization company had erred with the most fundamental building blocks of the campaign – keyphrase selection. Instead of carefully selecting keyphrases that were suitable to attract the high-end clientele that the client was accustomed to, they successfully (in the sense that they achieved high rankings) targeted keyphrases with modifiers such as “free,” “advice,” and “ideas.” All of these keyphrases were immensely popular, all of these keyphrases were difficult to achieve high rankings for, and all of these keyphrases should not have been utilized in the campaign in the first place.

When you optimize for low-quality phrases (“low-quality” obviously means different things, depending on a company’s goals) you receive low-quality organic search traffic in return. When low-quality traffic submits a form lead from a website, it stands to reason that the lead itself will also likely be low-quality. This was, of course, exactly what was happening to our client.

After our analysis, we broke the news to the client that the campaign had been fundamentally flawed. They were not happy to hear this news, but it did match up with their experience. We also told them quite frankly that moving forward, we would be emphasizing traffic quality over quantity, and by extension, lead quality over quantity. They were quickly convinced that organic search traffic was not the most important metric in a search engine optimization campaign, and were excited about a new, ROI-based approach.

Luckily, we did not have to throw out all of the work from the previous firm. They had laid a solid foundation in terms of tactics, which allowed us to recalibrate the keyphrases and realize results in a very short amount of time.

So, to revisit our accomplishments, organic search traffic decreased by 60%, leads were cut in half, and sales increased dramatically. The slowing pace of the incoming leads was more than offset by the quality of the leads – many leads derived from the Fortune 500 companies with whom this client was accustomed to working. Previously, visitors from these desired companies had been turned off by keyphrase modifiers such as “free” – they were serious people looking for a serious solution and they recognized that what they needed was not going to be free.

For too many people, including practitioners, search engine optimization has a very strict meaning – acquire rankings and traffic from related keyphrases. Until more companies realize that search engine optimization is a marketing tool to be judged and evaluated just like any other, there will be countless examples of campaigns deemed a huge success by those who worked on them, but as failures by those who have to deal with the aftermath.

About The Author
Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company, which was awarded a prestigious American Marketing Association award in both 2008 and 2010. Buresh has been featured in respected publications such as Entrepreneur, Success, Dírect Marketing News, Business to Business, Search Marketing Standard, Public Relations Tactics and the Atlanta Business Chronicle. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to How to Build Yóur Own Web Site with Little or No Money: The Complete Guide for Business and Personal Use (Brown, 2010), The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Atlantic, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google for Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and international clients.

When I teach my SEO classes, I begin by telling the students all the things that SEO isn’t. I’ve always felt that it was important because they’re often expecting to hear some secret formula for SEO success. And why wouldn’t they, with all the myths and outright wrong/bad information that constantly swirls through the SEOsphere? When I finish telling them that everything they thought was SEO really isn’t, they stare at me with their mouths hanging open. So I tell them what SEO actually is:

Making your website the best it can be for the search engines and your site visitors.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t do much to alter their blank stares. After all, it’s an incredibly open-ended definition of SEO. Still, it’s the only one that truly encompasses what good SEO is all about, as well as why you need to do it. While my method of SEO has always been based on that principle, more people are coming around to it in the wake of Google’s Panda Algorithm.

Pre-Panda, many people built thriving businesses using the following basic SEO process:

* Buy a keyword-rich domain name that encompasses the products you want to sell.
* Build a templated website around it.
* Link internally to the product pages with descriptive anchor text.
* Use those same keyword phrases in the Title and H tags.
* Submit the website URL to lots of directories.
* Drop links to the website in other people’s blogs and forums.

Voila! Instant Google Success!

They’d repeat the process hundreds of times with different types of products, and then run on autopilot. While it might not have worked on every site they created, the sheer volume of websites they ran would be enough to make them a decent living.

So maybe there was a secret formula after all?

Perhaps, but after Google’s Panda Algorithm was implemented, many (but not all) who followed and succeeded with that formula for years suddenly lost a good chunk of their revenue.

What Changed?

My own speculation, based on numerous websites that I’ve reviewed where this happened, is that Google finally decided that there needed to be more to a website than having “SEO in all the right places.” And it makes sense. Why should one site do better than another just because they read up on SEO and knew the best places to stick their keywords? It shouldn’t. And by allowing exactly that to happen, Google was enabling sites with old-fashioned, by-the-book SEO to beat out potentially higher quality websites.

The result was Google not always giving their own users (the searchers) the best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally blaming Google here. It has to be a daunting task for a machine to know the difference between an okay (but great with SEO) site and a great (but perhaps not so great with SEO) one. Especially when so much of how Google tried to determine relevancy and quality was based on links – and even more on anchor text. It simply became too easy to game that system.

Giving Google What They Wanted

I certainly understand and even empathize with those site owners who’ve lost a significant portion of their income. They were just giving Google what it wanted. And because it worked so well, they had no reason to go above and beyond their basic formula. Why build a brand for your company when a keyword-rich domain would provide a better return on investment? Why spend time becoming an expert in your industry and educating your target market on the intricacies of your products when you could hire someone to write low-quality “SEO articles” and submit them to article directory sites instead?

Interestingly enough, many of the business owners I’ve talked to who have been getting by with formula SEO all these years have told me that they have tons of happy customers. Yet there are no obvious signs of this online, such as glowing reviews on Google Places or other online review sites (there aren’t bad ones either). How are customers even supposed to remember the name of a company called something like WoodAndMetalDiningRoomChairs.com? (I just made that one up.)

Mainly, customers found these websites through Google, made their purchase and received their merchandise. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there was also no personal connection made. This is further illustrated by the fact that if you look at social media sites, you won’t see much chatter about these companies. In fact, many of them don’t even use social media, or simply have cursory accounts. Again, they didn’t need to.

No Marketing Budget

A marketing person, plan, or budget was never necessary nor even a consideration. Sadly, for those companies, they don’t have much choice anymore if they want to stay in business. But ironically, now that they really need a marketing budget, there’s no money in the till to go toward it.

If I’ve just described your business and websites – even if you haven’t lost a portion of your revenue (yet), you may have thought you could hire a new SEO company to mix in a little extra SEO mojo and fix up your Google problems. But while they might find some on-page or off-page things you could be doing better, I wouldn’t count on that to bring back your lost traffic and sales.

So What Should You Do?

You need to seriously rethink your online strategy. You need to stop saying, “Well, it always worked for me in the past.” You need to build a brand and you need to market the heck out of it. You may even need to consolidate all your related keyword-rich domain websites into one big brand website. (Don’t do that last one without consulting a professional.) You need to learn everything you can about social media marketing and start doing it. You need to get in contact with your happy customers and ask them to write reviews online as well as to evangelize about you to everyone they come in contact with. You need to also keep in contact with them in a variety of ways.

All of those things are going to make a much bigger difference over the long haul than rewriting your title tags or adjusting your keyword density. The big takeaway here is that while your website may already be the best it can be technically for search engines, it’s time to make it the best it can be for your users. Both parts of that equation are equally important. It’s not going to be quick or easy, but if you want to stay in business, it’s probably going to be necessary.

About The Author
Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, an SEO Consulting company in the Boston, MA area since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen. If you learned from this article, be sure to invite your colleagues to sign up for the High Rankings Advisor SEO Newsletter so they can receive similar articles in the future!

By now, most site owners realize the importance and value of SEO in the development and growth of their site. A properly optimized site is going to rank better in the search engines, see more targéted traffic being directed over, have a higher conversion rate and much more. However, SEO is incredibly long term and nothing can rush time. It takes time for a site to build a good trust factor with the search engines and until that happens, most of your off-site SEO efforts are going to produce minimal results.

If you recently launched your site and are already looking into SEO, here are 5 things you should focus your time and energy on.

Learn the Basics of SEO for Yourself

There is no shortage of blogs, whitepapers, articles, reports, e-books, webinars, videos and more that can teach you the basics of SEO. It is imperative that you as the site owner arm yourself with as much SEO knowledge as possible during the first year of your site’s life. The more you know about SEO, the less likely you are to be conned by a black hat SEO company and the less likely you are to make black hat SEO decisions by accident. A good place to start is with the Bing and Google Webmaster Guidelines. Consider those two sources as your SEO line in the sand; what they say goes. Look for other reputable blogs and sites that can help you learn more about SEO and how others in your industry are using it to their advantage.

By taking the time to teach yourself the basics of SEO (you could take an SEO course or spend time with a consultant as well), you’ll be better prepared to take your SEO to the next level after your site has aged a little and earned the trust of the search engines.

Start a Blog

Start blogging right away. Start with at least one blog post a week and see if you can work up to one a day within the first year of your blog’s life. That may seem like a huge ordeal now, but you’d be surprised at how easy it gets to write a 350-500 word blog post with practice. You’ll learn how to better formulate your thoughts, present a single idea and flush it out entirely with time. If you aren’t confident in your writing ability or are struggling to come up with topics, turn to your employees and co-workers for help. The worst thing you could do is launch a blog and then not routinely update it with fresh content.

It takes a long time to hone your writing skills, find and develop your niche, build your reputation and attract loyal readers to your blog, so don’t expect to see major results fast. However, just like your site, as your blog ages it earns more trust from the search engines. Individual blog posts can start to rank for targeted keywords, increasing your online brand presence.

Build Your Social Network

If you are just getting onboard the social media marketing train, you’re in for a surprise! Social media marketing takes a lot more time than most companies realize, and it needs a solid strategy to run on. Don’t walk into social media blind and hope you’ll figure it out before something goes wrong. Take the first year of your site’s life to really develop your social profiles and connect with your target audience. What kind of content are they looking for from you? When is the best time to engage them? Which sites do they spend most of their time on? If you want your social media marketing efforts to be effective, you need to understand the behavior of your target audience so you can better reach them.

Focus on On-Site Optimization

The first year of your site’s life should really be spent focusing on the site itself. Don’t worry too much about developing a full blown link building strategy just yet; it’s more important to make sure your site is in the best shape it can be! Work on creating great webpage content, developing an internal linking structure that helps keep your visitor engaged, tweaking your landing pages to improve their conversion rate and so forth. Your website is going to be the hub of the rest of your Internet marketing. It doesn’t matter how great everything is off-site if your website doesn’t measure up. At the end of the day, it is your website that is going to convince visitors to act. Does it matter how many show up or how they got there if you website fails to convert?

Develop an Editorial Calendar

Content pretty much fuels all of your SEO and social media marketing. Without great content, you don’t give your target audience a real reason to check out your site, profile or blog. In addition to all the content you have to create for your sites, you also need to start looking into 3rd party sites where you can publish guest content. Take the first year of your site’s life to build relationships with industry bloggers and other site owners that allow guest articles to be published on their site. Identify which popular industry blogs cater to your target audience and start laying the groundwork to get one of your articles published there. If you can create an editorial calendar for you to follow, you’ll be able to get a jumpstart on your content marketing.

About The Author
Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a Boston search engine marketing and SEO consulting firm. With over 12 years of industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal (or SEO Journal) and by publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com.

Anchor text is perhaps one of the most important aspects of Search Engine Optimization but it is also one of the least talked about.

This one element of SEO is important to understand because it can help your page get ranked for a target keyword and also help you evaluate your competition more precisely.

The latter is critical and, in fact, if you don’t take anchor text backlinks into proper consideration when looking at the competition for a keyword you could be missing out on some hidden gems that are easy to rank for.

What Is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the hyperlinked text you see on a webpage. It is the visible words that you can click to take you to another page. Anchor text html code looks like this:

On most websites, you typically see this as blue text that is underlined and when you click on it with your mouse, you are taken to the corresponding url.

How Bloggers Use Anchor Text

Bloggers and website owners use anchor text naturally to point to other pages on their website as well as pages on other sites that they find relevant to what they are blogging about. You’ve probably even done this yourself when writing a post where you referenced another post on your site, an affiliate product or even a post on another site.

Usually a blogger will use a phrase that indicates what the page is about in the anchor text, as opposed to a url, so that the sentence reads correctly.

The anchor text in these links helps both the visitor and the search engine spiders figure out what the ‘linked to’ page is about.

How Search Engines Use Anchor Text

Search engines use anchor text to help them figure out what the hyperlinked page is about. So, as you can see, getting anchor text backlinks with relevant phrases in the anchor text is pretty important if you want the search engines to rank you for a particular keyword phrase.

In fact, anchor text is such an important factor in ranking a page that pages can rank for a keyword phrase even when that phrase does not appear in the url on the page!

There are several cases where this has happened, but perhaps the most famous is where the Adobe Reader download page ranked number 1 for the search term ‘click here’ for many years even though those words were nowhere on the page. So many people had linked to that page using the anchor text ‘click here’ that it got to the number 1 spot without any on page SEO for the term.

Search engines place a large importance on external anchor text (links coming in from other sites) and some importance on internal anchor text (links from within your own site) when ranking a page so it stands to reason that you should make getting anchor text backlinks with your target keyword phrases a priority.

One important thing to note is that it is widely thought that if two links on the same page target the same url, that only the first link is counted by Google so you want to be sure that you use your desired anchor text in that first link.

How Anchor Text is Important When Judging Competition for a Keyword

If you think about how important anchor text is to the search engines when determining ranking for a keyword, then it’s easy to see why it is a critical component of analyzing the competition for a particular keyword phrase.

Google even provides you with a search operator to do this – the allinanchor operator. You can use it by typing the following into the Google search bar:

Allinanchor:”your keyword phrase”

This will return the pages which have anchor text pointing to it that contain the quoted keyword phrase.

I hope you can see how powerful this is – first of all, Google must think it is an important element of a page because it provides the allinanchor operator. Just the existence of the operator would seem to indicate that it uses the anchor text when deciding what a page is about and ranking it.

Secondly, using this operator will show you which pages are optimizing for your chosen keyword phrase!

It makes sense that only the pages that have anchor text backlinks with your phrase are the ones optimizing for it so you can forget about searching for your phrase in quotes or any of that nonsense.

Not only that but, you can take a look at the actual backlinks for each of your competitors and see how many of them have that anchor text and what the strength of those links are to make a more educated guess as to how difficult they will be to beat out for that top spot.

Anchor Text “Best Practices” For Your Website

Now that you know how important anchor text is to your rankings, I’m sure you will want to pay more attention to it in your SEO efforts but you don’t want to go hog wild and create tons of anchor text backlinks all with the same keyword phrase or you might find that your efforts don’t yield the results you want.

Here are some things to consider:

1. Vary Your Anchor Text - We all know that Google prefers it when people link to you naturally and when that is the case, they don’t all use the same anchor text. So, when you are linking to your site from your articles or web2.0 properties you want to make sure you don’t always use the same phrase as well. Using your target phrase in about 50% – 60% of the links is probably a good idea.

2. Links From Relevant Pages – For the best results, you want your anchor text backlinks to come from pages that are related to your topic. This is what would happen naturally if people were linking to you and it would most likely be from a blog post on the same topic.

3. First Link On Page – Don’t forget that Google only counts the anchor text from the first link that it sees so if you have more than one link to the same url on a page, act accordingly.

4.Plan For Natural Linking – There’s nothing better than having people just naturally link to one of your posts but, of course, you can’t control the anchor text they use when they do. Since most people will naturally use your headline as anchor text, you want to be sure to consider that when coming up with the title for your blog posts.

Anchor text is crucial to both your SEO efforts as well as when analyzing the competition for a keyword phrase. Taking the time to use it properly can be the difference between ranking in the top 3 and not ranking at all so it’s in your best interest to start putting better anchor text practices to use in your business today!

About The Author
Anchor text backlinks play a key role in SEO. Get a free copy of Lee’s “Website Promotion Blueprint Guide” to get more website traffic: http://hypertracker.com/go/leedobbins/PhantomWriters/.

You’ve worked so hard with your search engine optimisation strategy. All that blogging, article writing and, SEO copywriting and, rather expensive, SEO tweaks to your website structure have finally paid off.

Proudly, you show everyone your website on the front page of Google for your chosen keyword.

Fantastic, but before you head off to the pub to celebrate, there is a wee problem.

Yes, your website is ranking superbly, but your analytics (and inbox) are showing that you have no traffic.

Is that right? Can you really have a well ranking website, but not have any traffic?

What’s gone wrong?

Yes, it is possible for this to happen and it’s more than likely due to one of these reasons:
You’re not really ranking at all
Your keywords aren’t delivering (because you’re targeting the wrong ones)
You’re simply not attracting the all important click

Those lovely people at seomoz.org explain all in their post I’m ranking, so where’s my traffic.

First of all you need to discover your particular problem. It could be down to the rankings you are seeing being personalised or localised (this is why you may not really be ranking).

It could be that there is so much competition for your keyword that you’re site is actually appearing ‘below the fold’ and people just aren’t scrolling down that far.

Perhaps your keyword simply isn’t getting any traffic because the search volume for it is really low. Or it could be that the keyword you are targeting doesn’t match the audience you’re after.

Or it could be down to the way your listing looks. Perhaps your title tag is looking spammy or your META description is simply boring.

If you’re website isn’t performing as it should, take a few minutes out of your day and have a read of seomoz.org’s post.

It may be that a few tweaks is all it will take to turn things around.

Check out Briar Copywriting for more articles by Sally Ormond

About the Author:
Sally Ormond is a UK based freelance copywriter (and SEO Copywriting specialist) who works with businesses of all sizes and industries to create eye-catching, persuasive copy. But her writing doesn’t stop there – also a self-confessed Twitter addict (@sallyormond) and blogger, she offers a wide range of useful articles about copywriting, marketing and social media in business on her blog, Freelance Copywriter’s Blog.