Take a look at your site’s image ALT tags and answer this question honestly: How closely do they resemble their respective page’s title? The answer most webmasters would give this question is what inspired this post.
I noticed that some webmasters use the exact same text for their ALT tags as they have in their title. These people are targeting a single, highly specific keyword that they want to rank highly for. What’s the problem here? It’s not so much that this keyword stuffing can have negative effects on their sites – the real issue is that these authors are going into the SEO world with the wrong mindset.
Why focus on one single keyword? Why is it so important to snag that #1 spot in the search engines for that specific keyword? Does it matter at all? Of course not! What matters at the end of the day is your site’s traffic and how well that traffic converts to your goals, whether it’s a simple form submission, a purchase, or simply an affiliate click.
People are willing to spend so much time and money to optimize their pages to rank high for one keyword that they miss out other opportunities. Let’s revisit the example of the image and the ALT text: what would happen if instead of pushing that one keyword, you actually explained what the image shows? Wouldn’t that open doors to ranking for other keywords?
I looked into the traffic statistics here at w3techie and I found an interesting correlation that I hadn’t ever seen before. I plugged in the number of visits from organic search with the number of keywords sending traffic for seven days last week (when I experienced a traffic spike on Christmas). The results blew my mind.
Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient was over 0.99. That means that there’s an almost ideal correlation between the number of visits the site got from organic search and the keywords that drove traffic to the site that day.
I thought that this must be wrong. Excel must have made a mistake. I checked the results on my calculator but got the exact same value. What does this mean? It’s time to expand the data points.
Below you’ll see the same graph, which includes all search traffic and keyword data from December 1st to December 25th.
Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient is still above 0.98! How can this be? Let’s try taking that outlier out.
There we go! Without the traffic spike outlier, it looks like Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient is 0.9, which is more reasonable. However, this is still extremely high. This tells us that there’s a very significant correlation between how many visits our site got and how many keywords drove visits to the site on a certain day.
We have to keep in mind that w3techie was re-branded at the beginning of December and the site experienced a huge drop in traffic, which is visible here. This may mean that the data is not representative of sites that have been online for a longer time on a single domain. We also have to keep in mind that this is a small sample, and it would be interesting to look at the correlation with all visitor data for 2011, but I haven’t found a way to easily export that data into Excel.
What does all of this mean? It means that when traffic from the search engines increases, it’s usually not a sudden jump in rankings for a particular keyword – it’s most frequently an increase in the number of keywords your site ranks for. Ranking for more keywords = more visits from the search engines.
So what can you do?
Just write naturally! Don’t force yourself to use specific phrases in your articles and don’t worry about your rankings for one specific keyword. You have a statistically strong correlation showing you how legitimate, organic traffic is increasing as a site naturally ranks for more and more keywords. Don’t trust the results? Try this with your own data and see what you get!
You can maximize your SEO opportunities by extending your keyword targeting to rank for many keywords, not just one. It looks like time and money spend on improving the overall quality of your site can bring you much more traffic than spending resources on improving the ranking of just one keyword.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
So true. Earlier i was targetting on only few words, but nowdays i do not promote any words exactly, and while doing so long tail in search engines keywords in reff clicks has expodentially increased.
While your analysis is very interesting and appears to be valid, you’re making a couple of assumptions that don’t hold true.
The first is that SEOs are optimizing a site with the same profile as your sample. Personally, I have several sites that are very thin – a single page, targeting a single keyword phrase. To take your approach on a think site like this would be wholly ineffective. If you are building an authority site, then your approach makes more sense; in fact, this is the approach that I take. When writing an article for an authority site, I completely discard SEO and write for my readers. Afterwards, I run titles and image captions through keyword analysis and look for low competition first and foremost. That’s it – the traffic I get from unanticipated long-tail searches is consistently more than from a single keyword if I attempt to target it that way.
The second is that all traffic is created equal. If I’m selling car insurance, traffic from the KWP “car insurance quotes” is going to convert at a much higher rate than traffic from the KWP “car insurance horror stories”. I may only need 10 visits from the first term to make a referral, but I might need 1,000 visits from the second before I get paid.
Great analysis, though. It confirms my own feeling on the matter, which I haven’t to this point rigidly tested.
I agree and disagree with this post.
I agree because targeting different keywords can be a very great choice for bringing in different traffic. I actually target 2 of them myself. With 1 website you can get so many ranks for a lot of different keywords but that only works with sites that are well rounded, which brings me to this. My website can only target about 3 keywords due to the niche. If I target anymore it will be useless traffic to me. That is why it is so important to me to be #1 but for others is not so much because they’re sites have more to offer and the different type of traffic they bring can all be the type they want or need.