You have heard me talk about not diluting your keywords previously. The idea being that if you target too many keywords in a given page then you will dilute the strength of any one of those keywords. And the same thing goes with keywords in the title tag, you should only use two keywords and minimize the other characters. Just look at my homepage title tag:

<title>Organic SEO Consultant | Professional SEO Consultant</title>

As of today I am ranking #1 & 2 for Organic SEO Consultant and #1 for Professional SEO Consultant if that tells you anything!

Well the same holds true for your URLs, you should not have too many words in them. In fact Matt Cutts has noted that any more than 5 words in a URL starts to dilute the weight.

[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

So I would advise against using more than 3-5 words in your URLs. It all really boils down to not being greedy. If you try to keyword stuff Google will not like it and they have added measures over the years to combat keyword stuffing. And to boot, there has been recent study that shows short URLs get clicked on twice as much as long URLs! And there you have it, a double whammy, Google does not like long URLs and neither do users.

You bet your first place rankings they are! There are MANY people in the Internet marketing community that will tell you that paid links are dead and that it is merely a matter of time until all link buyers will get caught and penalized. Well I have news for you all, Google doesn’t and never will have the manpower necessary to stop paid links! And linking is such an integral part of their algorithm that they cannot change the importance of them. There I said it, and it feels goooooooooood.

If you look at the sites ranking for most competitive keywords and look into the backlink profiles using a tool like Yahoo! Siteexplorer you can easily see that they are most likely buying links. Whether it be a paid directory link from Yahoo! Directory or an internal page link on Forbes.com, they are buying links. I have seen the power of the paid link and I am a believer! Ahhh, that felt good too. I have seen paid links work really really well for people and I know their power. But you must do a good amount of research in order to determine what is a good paid link and what is not. I may reveal my honored and time tested paid link analysis techniques in a later post for you, so sign up for my RSS feed, or you might miss out on some really great advice!

Yes, there is! A 2006 study from Cornell University studaied the distribution of clicks on a SERP. How many more clicks does a #2 spot get over a #3 spot, etc.? They used eye-tracking to conduct the experiments, as well as a sample of undergraduate students performing 397 queries on various topics like music, movies, travel, local, politics, and trivia. Here are those results:

The results are staggering. But this organic SEO consultant already knew that the difference between #1 and #2 was gigagntic. I had a client that commanded the #1 spot for his main keyword for a very long time. Well he dropped to #2 and called me up freaking out, he said that he had lost about 40% of his business! Of course I got him back up there right away and he has been back at #1 since. I have many other stories from clients of just how much their business is affected. This study just solidifies, scientifically, what I have been preaching to clients all along. You can view the full story from SEO Researcher.

There are some valuable lessons to learn from this research and its results. When running an SEO campaign it is important to have focus. If the site you are working on has some existing rankings on pages1, 2, or even 3 and some of those terms carry some trafic with them then you need to work hard to get those terms to the top 3. Those terms are just on the cusp of seeing huge traffic gains. And it is much more reasonable to expect to move those terms to page 1 from 2 or 3 than it is to rank a term that the site is not even in the top 100 for. Focus on the terms that will bring good traffic that you can rank in the sortest amount of time. Then, once you have proven your self and provided the client with some gains and ROI, you can start to focus on the other terms.

I have been reading around the Web that there is a big to do about some statements that a Google employee has made regarding the fact that Google does not like long URLs. The conversation started over at Google Groups. The comments came from guy named JohnMu and specifically used this URL as an example:

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/small-kitchen-appliances-toaster-kettle-coffee-machine-blender-juicer-channel7-sunrise-australia-42.html

Now using descriptive URLs is typically a good thing, and I say typically because in this case it is overkill. And if the page that the URL goes to is not relevant to the URL then that is definitely not a good thing. The question that we all ask ourselves is will this trigger an algorithmic filter/flag, or will it simply be something that only a manual review would be able to notice?
photo credit: YoungBlog

He is sad because your URLs are too long.