Comments on: Pulling Rank

By: The Agra Indian

The Agra Indian — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:48:07 +0000

I am with you Diane, PR is not the only parameter to measure the success of a SEO campaign. But people are so much optimistic about PR that they even don’t want to see a web page with low page rank. I can justify it by an example, if you send 100 request of link exchange for you PR 0 page you will hardly get a reply from other web masters, here I am talking about web masters who know every thing. People actually don’t want to deal with low PR.

This is the reason why people are running behind the PR.

By: Purple Widget

Purple Widget — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:07:12 +0000

I love you point about ranking for something nobody is searching for – it’s often a first understanding we must provide our clients. For years I used the example that I could rank them #1 for Purple Widget but because nobody searched for Purple Widget it would do no good. Kind of like being Bob’s Bicycles and ranking number #1 that term – just guessing the traffic there will be rather minimal. I started by Purple Widget blog dedicated to this point. And, as expected I rank #1 for Purple Widget and did so very quickly. But big deal, nobody visits because nobody is searching for Purple Widget on Google.

By: Slimline Warehouse

Slimline Warehouse — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:42:17 +0000

@Derek – Shouldn’t the site layout really be the task of web designers, rather than SEOs. I know that they often do a poor job of it, but unless you are a web designer and are implementing SEO at the design stage, it can be an almighty job to re-jig an entire website. More collaboration, I suppose, may be the answer.
I measure success by how the cash register rings!

By: Traffic Geyser

Traffic Geyser — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:13:34 +0000

Hi Dianne..

It was a coincidence that I stumbled upon your entry again on different website, I also noticed a lot of clients aiming and insisting that they really need higher PR not realizing the fact that they really need to work a lot about their website content to drive traffic into sales or leads, its all about marketing tactics and not the ranking itself that takes us all through success.. this was just my two cents..

By: philip

philip — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:35:44 +0000

I will still work for a pagerank for my site even though it is just a by product or reward for our hard work. I believe it is still relevant as an indication of the value of the content of the site. I am more concern about the outdated information displayed on the front page of search engine. Search engine should display latest information on the front page instead of a two or three years old articles.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:03:10 +0000

One of the main reasons why there has been so much focus on rankings is that firstly they are easy to report on and secondly alot of the focus often comes from the brief from the client. eg. I want to be number one for this term.

Real business success is measured by happy clients and money in the bank. Traffic+Conversion=Money in the Bank

By: Diane Aull

Diane Aull — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:41:20 +0000

@ Jeet – good point on the geo-targeting. You’re absolutely right; it doesn’t do a local business much good to rank well in the search engines for locations where they don’t do business.

By: Jeet

Jeet — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:36:06 +0000

@Diane: Great article !! You didn’t mention location based ranking. A site can rank #1 in US and not rank at all in UK. For small business geo-targeting is very important. I have seen discussions on forums where an SEO got the client’s site to rank on first page in US but it was a local Denmark business site and didn’t benefit from US traffic.

Conversion is the key. Fully agreed, I would give example of stumbleupon, it can send a LOT of traffic your way. But these guys are just bored guys asking SU to show them some random site they might find interesting.

According to me, SEOs can do a good keyword research and ensure they are generating better traffic than before. It should be website owner’s responsibility to have good sales copy and products to be able to make a sale.

By: Diane

Diane — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:48:05 +0000

Thanks to both of you for taking the time to comment! It’s great to be here.

@Derek, I agree totally. The layout, site architecture and content of a site has an enormous impact on whether a site is successful. Optimization for rankings without optimization for conversions is all too often a waste of effort.

@Tom, What personalization means for SEO? As I alluded to above, I think SEOs who today focus only on rankings are going to have to expand their horizons to also optimize sites for better conversions. There are already a lot of forward-thinking SEOs who do this today, and I think the trend in that direction is going to continue.

Especially with the economy the way it is, businesses need to see positive ROI from their SEO campaign, not just vanity rankings.

By: Tom Bradshaw

Tom Bradshaw — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:34:24 +0000

Great first article Diane!

I measure the success of my website optimisation by whether I have happy clients or not. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on Google’s growing personalisation of search results and what this means for the future in terms of SEO?