Web Analytics & Search: What’s Happening to My Traffic?

Massimo Paolini on June 8, 2010

You’ve spent $10,000 on your new web site design. 25 hours creating all the cool social media links for people to find you. Maybe you even bought 10,000 pay-per-clicks. But if you can’t figure out what’s happening to your traffic, all that earlier time and money is wasted. So what now?

First, it’s important to remember that the number that really matters is your bottom line. Then, turn to web analytics and look for the answers.
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Do I need SEO? –Greg W.

Massimo Paolini on August 27, 2009

I spend a lot of time around my seven-year-old, so I’m going to employ a little imagination for this answer. Try it with me:

Pretend you are Google–or any other search engine. Someone sits down at their computer, opens your search Captain Super Searchwindow, and types. You spring into action and get to work! Within a fraction of a second, you need to scan millions of websites to return the best results for this person. So, let me ask you, Captain Super Search: what are you looking for? In a millisecond, you went from 4 million pages to 100 and now you need to give your waiting person 15. What will make you pick those 15? Keywords that have been sitting still for the last four years? The title of the page?

The answer is simple: you will return the most recent and relevant sites in the database. While in the past this was performed by using things like keywords in title tags, meta tags, bold text, and other little tricks, today’s Captain Super Search is far too savvy for that and you will mostly ignore those.

My belief is that standard SEO techniques will give you only marginal advantage and bare nudges in search engine rankings. I will go as far as to say that Google will even skip the title tag and go straight to the content. If that passes muster, then it will check the site for valid links to other validated content. Only when that is completed will it grab the tag to add to the listing.

The bottom line is that you want to write sincere content that contains the proper information for your readers. Magically, your keywords will come to life in your text. If you are writing about cookware, you will “naturally” talk about the pots and pans (feel free to change the example) and thus take care of the keywords without having to worry about it.

So if you want to spend a lot of money on SEO techniques, call me and I will gladly apply those for you. Otherwise, just write sincere and on-target content, comment on other blogs about the same topics, create conversation on your blog, and your page ranking will take care of itself. And, Captain, that frees up your time to fight other content crimes!