The Truth About Competing Pages – SEO Gurus Are Liars

Posted in Keyword Research on Aug 19th, 2010 | 4 comments

You’ve seen it time and time again. Google SERPs screenshots with red handwritten font and hand drawn looking circles showing off the millions of competing pages a certain keyword has and the site the person was able to rank #1 in “just 28 days!” On the surface, it looks impressive. I mean, damn, 25 million results for that keyword? #1? That person must know their shit, right?

I’ve literally never seen a guru advertise a product with a screenshot like this that showed a legitimate, challenging ranking that they earned. Nearly every single time, the person is blowing smoke up your ass, for a variety of reasons that I’m going to try and explain here.

Let’s Get Started

Anyone who tells you that SEO is easy and fast and is trying to 1) get you to buy their software/ebook/service or 2) trying to get you to opt-in to their list and are hands down not telling you the truth and probably don’t know the first thing about SEO, link building, or anything else. They most likely grew up in Warrior Forum and have learned that it’s more important to launch a product than actually learn a single fucking thing about what they are actually trying to sell. It’s a self perpetuating mess that has left the SEO space full of shitty products, shitty guides, and shitty advice. (more…)

The Difference Between Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match Search Volume Data

Posted in Keyword Research on May 7th, 2010 | 2 comments

This will be a quick post, no real need to go into deep detail. This is something that’s important and a lot of people ask me about so I want to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of what’s going on.

Let’s start. There are 3 ways to check keyword search volume with Google: broad, phrase, and exact match. What the hell is the difference? And which one should you be checking search volume with?

Broad Match

Broad match is the default setting when using the Keyword Tool. What broad match means is that any time any part of the keyword shows up in a search phrase, that data gets added to the reported total searches per month. For instance, if the keyword is “sunflower seeds”, then any search with either “sunflower” or “seeds” or “sunflower seeds” in it will be added into the total volume. So the actual search terms “sunflower seeds” might only get 100 searches, while “seeds” gets 2000 searches and “fruit seeds” gets 600 searches.

So broad match search volume is an aggregate of all searches involving any combination of any of the keywords as well as other words you didn’t account for. It’s an inflated number when estimating search volume.

Phrase Match

Phrase match keyword search volume works like this: if you check phrase match search volume for “sunflower seeds” then the number returned will include all traffic for the main phrase as well as phrases like “huge sunflower seeds” and “sunflower guide for seeds”. The number returned is the aggregate of all search phrases that must include the entire set of main keywords, no matter if they are split up by other words or not. This number is definitely more accurate than broad match, but can still be slightly inflated.

Exact Match

Finally, there is exact match keyword data. The volume of searches returned when checking exact match keywords is simply for only that single keyphrase. So there are no aggregates involved, it’s only the total number of searches for just that exact phrase, typed exactly into Google, with no other words included. This is the most accurate number to reference when researching niches, as it doesn’t aggregate traffic you might not actually rank for and get. You should always check your search volumes with this setting on.

Finishing Up

The point of this post is that it is easy to be deceived by broad and phrase match data, so you should use exact match data when searching for niches. When trying to get ranked for certain keywords, you cannot guarantee that you will be able to rank for all variations and combinations of keywords, so the most realistic estimate of possible traffic is the exact match search volume data.

I’ll post more this weekend, I have some cool ideas in the works.

Til then,

D

Something Cool Will Be Released Tomorrow (maybe)

Posted in Development on May 3rd, 2010 | 4 comments

So I’m 75% done with a pretty cool little script that I want to give out here. It really is just something that will help increase your efficiency (hopefully), and is nothing more than a wrapper around some API functions. But it works well and as far as I know, doesn’t exist yet. Should hopefully you cut a few minutes of time out of your normal day.

The script is designed for anyone that has a lot of different SEO sites and is constantly checking their traffic. It is also built around Google Analytics so that is definitely a pre-requisite for use. I need to finish up a few functions and then style it up a bit to make it nice and clean, but as soon as that is done, I’ll post it up here along with some installation instructions (it’s basic, no worries).

Til then, peace,

D

Setting Up Ubuntu 10.04 For Local Web Development With LAMP, PHPMyAdmin, and Local Domains

Posted in Development on May 2nd, 2010 | 3 comments

So back on Friday, I opted to upgrade to the new 10.04 from 9.10 of Ubuntu. And of course, it froze midway through and I had to reinstall my OS. Thankfully I had a live cd laying around, because I popped that in and backed up my /home folder to an external drive I had. Then I proceeded to install 10.04 from scratch. Everything was good after that.

Of course, that means it nuked my Ruby install as well as my local dev environment. I really should have scripts written to automatically do all this crap when I need to, but since it’s only every few months, I don’t care that much. I also don’t care enough to remember all of these commands, so I just have a bookmarked list of guides that I follow when I need to.

So without further adieu, here’s what I just did to install a LAMP server, PHPMyAdmin, and configure local domains, to make local development easy as pie.

Installing LAMP

So Ubuntu makes this really fucking easy to do. All you need to do is open up a terminal and type the command:

and then select LAMP and follow the prompts. You can read a more through guide here (more…)

Traffic Stats From Month 1 of Layered Thoughts

Posted in Monthly Stats on May 1st, 2010 | 0 comments

Yeah, I know, I’ve been lagging pretty hard on posting here. Oh well. I’ve been in a less than good mood lately so wasn’t feeling it. But I’m going to try and post every other day in May, and I have a pretty solid list of topics I want to hit, so til then, chill out. I’m also going to write up at least 2 more posts in the niche product sites guide, hopefully more, so stay tuned for that too.

So around the end of March, I resurrected this old blog domain of mine and ripped out all of the old posts and decided to start fresh with a whole new set of topics and posts. Since then, things have gone pretty well. I got ridiculous traffic from that post I did on the simple Watir bot, which was sweet. I definitely need to man up and write up some more posts on that topic, people were obviously very interested in it. After that post, things settled down quite a bit, and I’m back to about 75-100 visitors a day pretty consistently. I’m really happy about that, blogging without readers is always difficult

So enough with the babbling, here are my analytics screenshots for the first month of Layered Thoughts:

Traffic Overview

As you can see in there, I got a little over 4000 visits, about 6500 page views, and an average time on site of a minute and a half. Not too bad. You can also see the traffic breakdown per page, as well as the splits amongst my referrers. Search traffic actually makes up a small portion of my traffic this month, all because of that post sending a huge amount of traffic through Hacker News, Wickedfire, and random other sites. I would imagine my search traffic will be a much larger percentage this month. (more…)