D&D is a favourite among young, mostly male, geeky types, such as myself. It is a game of imagination where the players take the role of characters in a magical fantasy world. Battling dragons and other fantastical creaturesand gaining treasure and power as rewards. Once the domain only of the nerdiest of high school kids, over the last 30 years the game has grown to be a household name.

My interest in tackling this keyword is the promotion of my range of RPG miniatures that can be used with the game. These 28mm metal figures are designed for D&D (though they are just a s suitable for other role playing games). Using figures such as these really enhances the game, especially when they are painted. The act of painting miniatures is an hobby all to itself and thousand of miniatures get painted by hobbiest who will never use them in an actual game.

I’m also expanding into D&D adventures. In the game of Dungeons & Dragons, a Games Master (GM) controls the game and decides the plot of the adventure. Preparing for this can be a time consuming business as maps have to be drawn, monsters need to be created and battles planned. This has given rise to a market for adventures. Prepared scenarios that anyone can pick-up and play with minimal preparation. Whereas the 28mm miniature figures are a physical product, adventures can be reduced to PDFs making them ideal for an online sales.

To generate those sales our D&D site needs a lot of traffic. The sad truth of any online business is that the ratio between visitor numbers to
sales is very low. A 1000:1 ratio is exceptionally high for most general stores though in highly specialised niche markets it could be much lower. Most web sites probably operate on a 2000 – 5000:1 ratio. If this sound low, think how often you discover a new web site and then buy something from it. Most of us do it very rarely so getting a large and steady stream of traffic is vital. For 6d6 Fireball, that means keywords linked to Dungeons and Dragons such as adventures and miniatures.

In order to maximise the site’s chance of cracking the D&D top 10, the site has gone under a radical redesign. Instead of a very general blog style homepage, it is now a lot more static and heavily focused on the relevant keywords. Without this, incoming links would help me in the search engine but only in unpredictable ways. The redesign also allows better placement of adverts showing off our range of RPG miniatures and adventures. This increases the likelihood of a visitor spending money on the site and unless you convert visitors into sales, SEO is pointless.

The redesign was finished a couple of days ago and already is having an effect. Last week when I checked, 6d6 Fireball was way down in the 500 hundreds for D&D and that was for a specific article about Dungeons and Dragons, not the home page. Yesterday, the home page was around the 300 mark and today it is about 130 in the listings. For the other keywords, I’m already doing well but I forget to check my positions before I did the redesign. As of today, I’m 15th on the RPG miniatures keyword and 4th & 6th on D&D adventures. Importantly both listings feature the right landing page and not either the home page or a random article.

This is a good start for the Dungeons & Dragons SEO adventure. I will report progress soon.

The role-playing games site is on the surface a blog about role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. A lot of the work on this has gone into building a good relationship with other bloggers through comments and communal activity. This has been successful and generated us a page rank of 3 and a steady supply of traffic from search engines and links. However the real focus of the site is Fantasy Miniatures.

One side of playing tabletop RPGs is the use of pewter miniatures to mark out movement and combat. Collecting and painting these miniatures is a hobby all by itself and there is a large overlap between the world of wargaming miniatures and fantasy miniatures. Targeting miniature related keywords has been harder. There are a large number of suppliers on the web and many have been activate for several years. This has given them a solid base of links and PR that will be hard to shift.

As an SEO side project I have been helping a friend launch his own RPG site. This is not a blog but a site for software that helps players run their game. The first tool is a free monster generator for D&D. This has been a lot simpler SEO project as though there have been lots of generators and tools in the past, none have ever developed a strong position in the search engines. In just a couple of weeks of launch, the site was number one in Google for our primary, each-to-reach target but had also scrapped into the top ten of the our long-term target keywords.

This just shows that SEO is an unpredictable business and rapid gains can be made with planning, a lot work and a bit of luck.

My site about Tintin has done very well in attracting visitors. I was quick off the mark in creating the site after the film was announced, allowing me to grab a good Tintin Movie related domain. (Just a side note, if you are going to create a site about a film, then always include the word ‘movie’ in your domain name rather than the world ‘film’ as it is substantially more often used in searches). I’ve been number one on my initial keywords practically since the site was created and I’m now the authoritative site on the subject.

As well as a steady flow of traffic from the search engines, I have seen large spikes in traffic whenever there is an announcement. When it was revealed that Jamie Bell would be playing Tintin I saw a quadrupling of my traffic for the next couple of days. This gives a taste of what will happen when the film opens.

Real wealth comes from a firmly established domain built on quality content. Using this trick will get you the occasional click of an advert but it won’t get you links, it won’t get you a readership and it won’t get you a good reputation. This is a technique anyone interested in SEO should know about and choose not to use.

Blogstorm: How I use URL Search to get thousands of visitors

1.4. Width of the fixed layout?

As we have observed a strong trend toward fixed, pixel-based design layouts, we have decided to take a closer look at these layout and try to detect common attributes of such layouts. In particular, we have considered the width of the fixed layout which usually corresponds to the width of #container or #wrapper. Apparently,

• 9% used ≤ 800px
  (PostSecret, Seth Godin, Google Blog, BeppeGrillo.it),
• 15% used 801 – 900px
  (Neatorama, Kottke, DailyKos, Perezhilton, TUAW, Yanko Design, Scobleizer),
• 20% used 901 – 950px
  (Huffington Post, BoingBoing, TreeHugger, Dooce, Blogoscoped, SearchEngineLand),
• 56% used 951 – 1000px
  (ars technica, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, ProBlogger, A List Apart, TMZ, Wired, GigaOM, Joystiq, Zenhabis, Copyblogger, Consumerist, Slashfilm).

Conclusion: one can identify a clear trend toward wide fixed layouts of the width 951 – 1000px.

A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs

On the SEOmoz blog, they have a good article on how good graphical and usability design is as vital for success as designing for SEO:

There are a limited number of variables that search engines can take into account directly, including keyword placement, links and site structure. However, through linking patterns, the engines make a considerable number of assumptions about a given site. Usability and user experience are “second order” influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect, but measurable benefit to a site’s external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality. This is also called the “no one likes to link to a crummy site” phenomenon.

From: Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide Part VI: How Usability, User Experience and Content Affect Search Engine Rankings

Let Google Analytics run for two weeks before doing any SEO – This allows analytics to collect data and provides you with a baseline. I recommend you screen capture the relevant pages so you can show your client how your work has positively affected their site.

Evaluate the visual design of your client’s site – If the site drives people away, no amount of SEO efforts will help. If the site looks terrible, find well designed sites in your client’s niche.

Check compatibility between browsers – Visit your clients site using Mozilla Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Safari 3.x. Remember to do this on both a Mac and a PC. You want to make sure your client’s website renders correctly and won’t drive away users.

Source: The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO

“What is Google’s strategy? To provide their users with the best, most relevant results to their queries.If your business doesn’t align with Google’s strategy, then Google doesn’t want to help you.”

From: essons from the Domain Roundtable.

The message is clear. If you want to optimize your web site, learn to create quality content.

The bottom line is that you or your company need to become an expert on the topic of your site, and you need to put it out there in some unique fashion that has not been done before (or at least not many times before). There are many schemes used by people who try to avoid this burden.

For example, the term linkbait arose from the notion of developing content for the sole purpose of getting links. My discomfort with the term arises because it was interpreted by many to mean that the content’s relationship to the topic matter of the site did not really matter that much. Note: I am NOT saying that everyone means the term that way! But, for example, you could develop an article solely for the purpose of promoting it on Digg, even though you would never otherwise put it on your site.

This may be a viable strategy in the short term, but it will not stand the test of time.

From: Content is King, Baby!

SEO is seen by many as a black art, expensive, difficult and only usable by large corporations or evil spammers trying to trick Google. Nothing is further from the truth. SEO is easy to do, it costs nothing (though investing a little in your web site can help) and it benefits anyone with a web site. Its not even about making money. If you have a blog, a fan site or an online support group, you want people to find you. People who are interested in your subject. This is what SEO is all about. Making sure that those people who are searching find what they are looking for.

This is why I created Friendly Affordable SEO. I wanted to create a web site that was free, friendly and gave good advice on SEO so that the hundreds of thousands of people with blogs and web sites can get the visitors they deserve. It is also a big Thank You gift to the internet. In learning SEO I have read hundreds of articles and quizzed experts on forums and not once did I pay anything for that help. I cannot say thank you to the countless people who have help me but I can in turn help others.

So please come in. This blog covers news of SEO and general updates about the site. The nitty, gritty, how-to-do-it advice can be found in this selection of free SEO articles.

My Mother told me that the best way to learn something new was to watch people who were already very good at it. So when I needed to learn how to get my website ranked in the top ten results on Google I decided to study the most optimized websites I could find. So I analyzed the top 100 websites on three major keywords: “Britney Spears”, “Sex” and “SEO”.

What Have Britney, Sex and SEO have in Common?

Why these three? With “Britney Spears” and “Sex” it simply down to traffic. “Sex” gets 350,000 (1) searches a day whilst “Britney Spears” gets 55,000 a day. Any website that can capture that sort of traffic can’t help but make money so they represent a highly competitive arena for search engine optimization techniques. Any site that can get to the top of those keywords is worth looking at. “SEO” on the other hand only gets 600 searches per day but it stands for Search Engine Optimization (a term that gets 14,000 searches a day). If you are a firm selling services to help people get higher in Google, where you rank in the results for “SEO” is a pretty good indication of your ability. So despite its low traffic levels it is the target of the best and brightest in the SEO field.

SEO Techniques on Trial

Google says very little about how their engine work but so lots of other people have written about how worm your way to the top of Google’s results Most of it is probably rubbish but several factors are persistently cited as being critical.

• Page Rank – A reflection of the quality of incoming links to the page
• Keywords in URL – Does the keyword (search term) appear in the page’s URL? E.g.  www.BritneySpears.com,  www.MySite.com/Sex, or www.MySite.com/Whatever/SEO.html
• Keywords in <Title> – Using keywords in the <Title> tag.
• Keywords in Description – Using your keywords in the <Meta> description tag
• Keywords in Keyword Tag – Using your keywords in the <Meta> keyword tag
• Keyword Density – How often does the keyword appear in the page?

To test these I knocked together a PHP script that scraped the first 100 search results for each of the keywords. Then it analyzed  each page listed by Google for various factors. The results where exported to Excel where the final processing took place.

For comparison to the prime keywords  “Britney Spears”, “Sex” and “SEO” keywords, I targeted nineteen sub-prime Britney related keywords (2). These additional keywords are to allow comparison between the results of the big hitting keywords and more typical keywords. In total 2195 website were analyzed based on the results of 22 Google searches.

The Results

Page Rank Does Not Matter (too much)

This graph shows the average position in the results for a Page Rank (PR). There is a bias towards better results if your PR is high but for the  twelve PR 7 sites included in the results,  the average position was  41.5. Clearly a high PR does not guarantee any sort of success.

The average Page Rank across all pages surveyed was 2.09.  For the sub-prime keywords there was an average PR of 1.75 but for just the three prime keywords it was 4.24. If just the Top Ten results are used, the average PR for sub-prime is 2.21 and 4.83 for the prime.

Over 900 sites in the survey had Page Rank of 1 or 0 of which 132 were in the Top Twenty and 73 were in the Top Ten. Of sites listed for the prime keywords, 23 were PR 1 or 0 but only one site of PR 1 or 0 was in the Top Ten.

The advise to web masters from this is that a low Page Rank is not a killer problem. Two or three Top Ten results of each sub-prime search were PR 0 or 1.

Keywords-In

The four Keywords-In factors (Keyword in URL, Keywords in <Title>, Keywords in Description and Keywords in Keyword Tag) represent disputed territory for search engine optimizers. Many say that Keyword in URL (also known as having a “Keyword rich domain / path”) helps where as some say it only works for uncompetitive / sub-prime keywords. Some claim that you can be punished for over-optimization by using keywords in the URL.

The general advice for the Meta tags (Description and Keywords) is they are ignored by all the major search engines though some claim they have a minimal effect and are worth keeping. Only the Keywords in <Title> approach has any consistent support among search engine optimization websites. As long as the keyword in the title tag is consistent with the actual page content, then it is seen as a benefit.

That’s the talk but what about walking the walk?

Almost 80% of sites targeting prime keywords use the keyword in the page’s <Title> tag. Over half use the three other Keyword-In techniques. So whatever the SEO consultants say in public, they are certainly using these techniques at least half the time. Does it make any difference? Here is the same data but only for sites appearing in the top ten (first page) of Google results.

The differences between the two data sets show that sites using Keyword-In techniques are more likely to be in the top ten than sites not using them.  Keyword in Title and Keyword in Description both show a drop in usage for top ten prime sites but a notable increase for the sub-prime sites. This might indicate that in highly competitive keywords, they make very marginal differences. Not enough to compensate for higher page ranks and more links but for sub-prime keywords, where there is a sea of PR 0 or PR 1 pages, it can enough.

Combinations of Techniques

How many sites use two or more the Keyword-In techniques?

Just over 24% of the top ten sites on prime keywords use all four techniques where as the bottom six combinations are not used at all in top ten prime sites. Though 3.5% of prime top ten sites, along with 77% of sub-prime top ten sites, use none of these techniques and 11% of site only use one.

A Brief Note About Cause and Effect

With all the factors examined and particularly the four ‘Keywords-In’ criteria, the process of cause and effect has not been established. Any boost in result rankings they give may be illusionary. It could be that these techniques used to be important and older sites used them to achieve their position but now remain at the top because of the PR gained over several years. Or it may be that sites using these techniques are also employing other techniques that are the real driving force behind their position in Google.

However, the fact that they are prevalent in the keyword “SEO” is good evidence that professional search engine optimizers believe them to be important.

Keyword Density

Like pretty much everything in the search engine optimization world, the importance of keyword density is disputed. Depending on who you ask it either doesn’t matter at all, should never go above 5% or it can be anywhere between 1% and 20%. The numbers suggest a different story.

Prime sites are heavily focused around the 4% mark but most notable is the massive difference between prime and sub-prime sites.  This is a pretty clear signal that keyword density matters though other factors will trump it.

Other Factors

Its clear that many different factors can impact or your position in Google’s results. A few of the lesser factors (or at least issues that SEO experts talk about less) are the length of the article, the use of headers ( the <H1> to <H6> HTML tags, referred to as the <Hx> tags ) and the number of outbound links from the page.

From these results it looks like Google favors pages with a higher word count but prefers the main body of the text, i.e. the text in the paragraph and header tags, to be around 750 word long. The remainer of the word count is from navigation menus, adverts and the normal detritus found on web pages.  Of the 750 words in the main text, forty to fifty should be in headers in which the keywords should be lightly sprinkled.

The number of outbound links doesn’t seem to have any impact but this analysis did not differentiate between the outbound to the same domain and outbound to different domains.

Conclusions

In the world of high-traffic keywords, a high Page Rank and large numbers of inbound Links will beat all the on-page optimization techniques hands down. However for sites with similar page ranks and links, the ‘Keyword-In’ techniques can make a difference. A large percentage of top ten web sites employ them so the worst case senario is that they have no impact.

The picture is a lot clearer for anyone happy with picking up thousands of visitors a day rather then tens or hundreds of thousands. Most pages returned for sub-prime searches are not optimized. In fact, most of them can be described as incidental results. They are pages that mention the keyword but are not optimized for it and most have a low Page Rank. A page using one or more the Keyword-In techniques, a length of around 1000 words and with a keyword density of 4% has a good chance of making into the top ten even with a PR of zero.

1 All traffic estimates are based on data from the great folks at WordTracker

2 They were “Britney Spears Bikini” (4482 searches per day), “Britney Spears Exposed” (4788), “Britney Spears Tattoo” (2829), “
“Britney Spears Sister”  (2783), “britney spears piece of me” (2783), “britney spears sex tape” (2400), “britney spears naked”, (2348), “britney spears gimme more” (2146), “britney spears photos” (1462), “britney spears sex” (1339), “Britney Spears in the Shower” (1279), “Britney Spears Fakes” (1188), “britney spears mp3” (1170), “britney spears peace of me”  (829), “Britney Spears Dress up Games” (702), “Britney Spears Nudity” (664), “How Much Does Britney Spears Weigh” (496), “britney spears toxic” (394) and “britney spears no underwear” (199).