So you’ve bought your Dreamweaver, an eternity later worked out how it works, started to build your site which is targeting your chosen niche or promoting your affiliate product and after what seems like forever you have added quality content. You’ve bust a gut to get this far, but this is where the real work begins. You need to get your site seen by as many people as possible. You need to drive as much traffic as you can whether it be through a pay-per-click campaign or via organic traffic.

Let’s say you decide to target organic traffic. You need to get a high ranking in the search engines. During your website construction you have already been using a keyword research tool and a SEO Tool and spending the midnight hours mulling over the chosen keyword phrases your research has indicated you should be targeting on your pages and using in your URL. Your whole site from headings to meta-tags, to meta-descriptions and anchor text are all optimized taking account of semantically related words, keyword density and the long tail.

Next you begin your back link campaign spending hours trying to get quality back links to your site. Social bookmarking takes over your life for days on end, you post on relevant blogs and all relevant forums, you set up your blog, submít articles to article directories and then submít your entire site to SEO friendly website directories.

Yet more analysis follows, as you now study your competitors’ websites. You investigate what keywords they are targeting and study the links that they have developed and you develop strategies to be better than they are. Slowly but surely your site climbs the rankings. You constantly update your site adding quality content and before you know it your site is fast approaching the first page. A steady trickle of traffic flows on a daily basis. At this rate you should soon be top of the rankings and then …. the sky’s the limit!

Unfortunately it doesn’t usually quite work like this. Yes it is true that if you have picked some long tail keywords to target you may be able to get somewhere near the top of the rankings or indeed even to the number one spot. In most instances however the traffic won’t be great and you would need to get each page of your website targeting a different long tail phrase and getting to the top of the rankings for that phrase each time for the total traffic to be lucrative. It’s certainly possible but does require a lot more graft.

For very popular keyword phrases it proves incredibly difficult to dislodge the top sites from their positions, even though in theory you may know that you have better back links and better content. Without the top positions the mass traffic won’t ever be yours. It is just so frustrating as you probably know. I certainly do. So you go away and you research again and you analyze again and you spend days poring over the detail and you work and you work and you know what, it makes not one jot of difference. You just cannot crack the top spots. Why not? How many times have I asked this of myself?

Now perhaps your tactics aren’t quite right. Perhaps the phrases you are targeting are the wrong ones or perhaps you’re back links are not quality back links. Do you have the quality of content on your site that you think you do? Yes, yes, yes, I hear you say. So what is going on? Well it could be something as simple as the age of your domain.

Google places a lot of trust in back links, especially quality back links to your site, but it also places significant trust in sites which have been around for a significant period of time. This is especially true if they are frequently updated. In many cases the top ranked sites are trusted sites as far as Google is concerned because they have an authority status due to their back links, but also due to the length of time they have been operating. If your site is an equal to a competitor’s site in terms of content and back links, but it is a far newer domain, there will be little chance of you dislodging your competitor from the top slot. The site that has been there for five years serving the web community carries a lot of trust with Google.

To dislodge these sites requires tremendous effort to create quality back links and sometimes you may not ever achieve it. It can be done however, you just need to be aware of what is going on and keep persevering. Some internet marketers have resorted to buying old domains in an attempt to overcome this challenge in building the website around the domain. I’m not entirely sure how Google reacts to this, especially if you are adding new content on a continual basis. Does the domain itself carry an inherent trust because of its age or is it the content that carried the trust from the old website?

Either way it’s worth exploring as one of the tactics along with keyword analysis and building back links that you could adopt in an attempt to get higher rankings and hence higher rates of traffic.

About The Author
Andy Lunt is an internet marketer who concentrates largely on organic traffic and the techniques needed to drive this traffic to various sites. If you want to learn how to find lucrative keywords that earn revenue then you need the best keyword tools possible. Take a look at the options at www.keyword-selectortool.com.

Demand Media has filed for an IPO. The company, known as a content farm to some, produces much of its content on sites like eHow and others in direct response to what it determines people are searching for on the web. Its filing shed new light on how much it depends on SEO and Google, in particular. That’s interesting, because I’ve never known a company — a publisher — so dependent on SEO (outside of actual SEO companies) to go public before. Below, highlights on these aspects.

The SEO and Google aspects really get going around page 14 of the filing:

Page 14: Google Funds Big Chunk Of Demand Media

We have an extensive relationship with Google and a significant portion of our revenue is derived from cost-per-click performance-based advertising provided by Google. For the year ended December 31, 2009 and the six months ended June 30, 2010, we derived approximately 18% and 26%, respectively, of our total revenue from our various advertising arrangements with Google.

Got that? Demand Media currently gets more than 1/4 of its income from Google ads, 26% for the current year through June 30, up from 18% in 2009. This section goes on to outline the risk that Google could terminate those agreements or not generate as much revenue as it current does for them. Sure, but unlikely, I’d say. Then again, changes like this did undermine Geosign. The Financial Post has a long story about this, which I can’t find on its site but which you can read archived here)

Page 18: The Importance (And Risk) Of SEO

Another method we employ to attract and acquire new, and retain existing, users and customers is commonly referred to as search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO involves developing websites to rank well in search engine results.

Our ability to successfully manage SEO efforts across our owned and operated websites and our customer websites is dependent on the timely modification of SEO efforts from time to time in response to periodic changes in search engine algorithms, search query trends and related efforts by providers of search services designed to ensure the display of unique offerings in search results.

Our failure to successfully manage our SEO strategy could result in a substantial decrease in traffic to our owned and operated websites and to our customer websites through which we distribute our content, which would result in substantial decreases in conversion rates and repeat business, as well as increased costs if we were to replace free traffic with paid traffic. Any or all of these results would adversely affect our business, revenue, financial condition and results of operations.

If you’re not familiar with SEO, our What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? page provides a short primer. As the filing describes, it’s the practice of generating traffic from search engines for free, akin to public relations (versus advertising).

As with public relations, good SEO can increase the odds of generating traffic, but that’s not guaranteed. This is a major risk factor, as the filing gets into more.

Page 18: Search Sends Nearly 40% Of Traffic; Google Alone, 26% Or More

We depend in part on various Internet search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines to direct a significant amount of traffic to our owned and operated websites. For the quarter ended June 30, 2010, approximately 40% of the page view traffic directed to our owned and operated websites came directly from these Internet search engines (and a majority of the traffic from search engines came from Google), according to our internal data.

So Demand Media gets about 40% of its traffic for free, most of which comes from Google. How much from Google? That’s not said.

Google’s generally estimated to have a 65% share of the search market in the US, which means using that figure, Demand Media gets about 26% of its traffic from Google. However, site operators routinely report that they receive 80% or more of their search-related traffic from Google. That would put Demand’s traffic from Google closer to the 32% mark.

Page 19: Traffic Is Vulnerable To Algorithm Changes

Our ability to maintain the number of visitors directed to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites through which we distribute our content by search engines is not entirely within our control. For example, search engines frequently revise their algorithms in an attempt to optimize their search result listings.

Changes in the methodologies used by search engines to display results could cause our owned and operated websites or our customer websites to receive less favorable placements, which could reduce the number of users who link to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites from these search engines.

Some of our owned and operated websites and our customers’ websites have experienced fluctuations in search result rankings and we anticipate similar fluctuations in the future. Internet search engines could decide that content on our owned and operated websites and on our customers’ websites, including content that is created by our freelance content creators, is unacceptable or violates their corporate policies.

Any reduction in the number of users directed to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites would negatively affect our ability to earn revenue. If traffic on our owned and operated websites and on our customers’ websites declines, we may need to resort to more costly sources to replace lost traffic, and such increased expense could adversely affect our business, revenue, financial condition and results of operations.

This is the key section to me, and I’m glad to see it’s included. As I said, we’ve never had a company that I’ve known of go public with a business model that’s so dependent on gaining traffic from search, in particular from Google.

To date, Google’s shown no heavy signs of putting a crackdown on “content farms.” However, there’s no lack of public attention about companies like Demand Media and ample criticisms that they seem to walk all over Google, ranking for whatever they want, with low quality content. The IPO even speaks to this on page 20:

Perception that the quality of our content may not be the same or better than that of other published Internet content, even though baseless, can damage our reputation. We are frequently the subject of unflattering reports in the media about our business and our model.

It’s not all baseless criticism, but neither is it all true. Plenty of content from Demand Media and its brethren is good and helpful. But plenty of it can also be substandard (just as there’s plenty of substandard content outside content farms).

As Google continues to come under pressure about these concerns (here’s just one of many examples), I think it’s likely we’ll see them institute an algorithm change to further weed-out low quality content. By algorithm change, I mean a change to Google’s computer “algorithm” recipe that’s used to sift through all the pages it has collected and decide which are the best to list.

That might have an impact on Demand, just as it might have an impact on publishers all over the web, large and small. But because Demand seems so much more dependent on Google than many other publishers, the risk is much higher.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, did address content farms tangentially when discussing Google’s “MayDay” algorithm change recently at our SMX Advanced search marketing conference. From his talk:

Mayday is about looking at the state of web content in 2010 and what signals do we use to differentiate between quality and, for example, content farms. He says people affected by this update should step back and look at how much content they’re generating and how close does it come to being spam.

Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithms, was also asked about content farms in a Financial Times article recently. But he didn’t specifically say they’d receive any special attention. From the article:

“If there is an information gap out there and someone fills that gap, it’s good for the world,” says Amit Singhal, the Google engineer responsible for its ranking algorithm

Bottom line? My gut says that when your business model is all about making money off Google for free, rather than making money by publishing content that taps into Google as a side benefit, you show up on the radar of Google’s search quality team as a potential threat requiring close attention. That doesn’t mean you get shot down, but one of the best ways to avoid trouble at all is to stay off the radar in the first place.

Page 21: Mining Search Data

We collect data regarding consumer search queries from a variety of sources. When a user accesses one of our owned and operated websites, we may have access to certain data associated with the source and specific nature of the visit to our website. We also license consumer search query data from third parties. Our Content & Media algorithms utilize this data to help us determine what content consumers are seeking, if that content is valuable to advertisers and whether we can cost-effectively produce this content. These third-party consumer search data agreements are generally for perpetual licenses of a discrete amount of data and generally do not provide for updates of the data licensed.

There are a number of keyword research tools, such as those from Google, that allow mining of what people are searching for. However, it is far more effective if you have access to an entire database of search activity, so that you can do direct research. Demand Media has access to some tools like these (places like Hitwise and comScore both provide such databases). I’m a little surprised the exact sources aren’t named, as that’s a potential risk factor — knowing the exact sources helps you judge the quality.

Read the rest of this post at SearchEngineLand…

About The Author - Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle, can be found on Facebook, Google Buzz and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.