Whenever a new website is launched, one of the first things concentrated on during the process of adding content to your website is optimizing it for search engines. Whenever one optimizes content for search engines, they are essentially making it easy for search engines to understand and index. Keyword research is done to make sure that the genre of content is placed in a high traffic niche where it will be seen by many.

However, after creating your content and performing basic on-site SEO, you job is still not complete. You now need to drive traffic to your site by advertising and linking to it. This begins the process of off-site SEO. Again, you perform keyword research and link to your content using a variety of niche related keywords so as to place it in the path of keywords that have an appreciable amount of traffic. For example, if you have a website about how to sell ebooks online, after doing a little keyword research, you will find that the keyword “how to sell ebooks online” receives about 720 searches per month. Not very impressive. Now you discover that the keyword “how sell online” receives 49,500 searches per month, a major jump in potential traffic. Additionally, Google Keyword Selector Tool shows that it has much less competition. Let’s optimize for that instead! STOP RIGHT THERE!

There are sever glaring problems with this logic that will absolutely KILL your conversion rate should you decide to take this route. For starters, the Google Keyword Selector Tool is only good for one thing if you are a publisher and that is showing you how much traffic you can potentially receive for any particular keyword. It is important to not that the metric that this tool gives for “competition” IS NOT the metric that you use to gauge how much competition you have when attempting to rank high in the search results for certain keywords you are targeting. It is something completely different. For a quick and dirty way to see how much competition you really have for any particular keyword, simply open your browser, point it to Google and search for your keyword. Next, make a note of how many results are show just under the search field.

In the case I mentioned above, the keyword “how to sell ebooks online” we have 1,860,000 competing pages. Wow, that seems like a lot. But that is nothing compared to the 109,000,000 competing pages we have for the keyword “how sell online”. In this case the competition metric in the “Google Keyword Selector Tool” was obviously a metric for something other than competition between competing pages. So, just make note of that. If you want a simple way to calculate whether or not one keyword is better to pursue than another, one thing you can do is to open an Excel Spreadsheet and list each keyword in the first column, monthly searches in the second column, and total competing results in the third column. In the fourth column, place the following formula…”=(SQRT(SQRT(B2))/((C2^2)^2)*(1E+23)”. With this formula, keywords with extremely low search rates or extremely high levels of competing pages are penalized. Next go to DATA, SORT, COLUMN D, DESCENDING, and click “OK” and rank you keywords in order of decreasing effectiveness. If the keyword at the top of the list is relevant, then use it. If not, move down the list to the next one and so on. Again, this is a simple way to see if ranking for any particular keyword is even possible with a reasonable amount of effort.

Now, there is another, more important question that we must ask ourselves about our content and the keywords that we optimize for. The question is: “Does this keyword actually describe my content accurately?” This question is much more important than: “Does this keyword receive traffic?” Why? Simple. All of the traffic in the world is utterly and completely useless if it is not targeted. Let’s put it another way. If your traffic is not targeted, all of your efforts to drive traffic are completely wasted. This effect will be evident in your conversion rates. If your traffic is not targeted, meaning if people do not find what they thought was behind your text link that they clicked on, it will not convert…at all. Then, they will “bounce” like a ball, away from your site and NOT continue to navigate through it. Search engines, make heavy note of “bounce” rates. After all, why would they list your site for a keyword if visitors, via bounce rates, consistently tell them that it is not relevant by immediately leaving? In short, they wouldn’t.

Let’s think back to our keywords and our example landing page. If visitors click on a link with the text, “how sell online” which gets tons of searches every month, they may be expecting generalized information about how to sell any of a variety of products online. It could be hard goods, perishables, software, an old car, a service, old textbooks, anything. But if you go to this landing page and actually read it, you will quickly see that it is an instructional e-book on how to sell information products online, e-books specifically. If the visitor comes to the site expecting to find information on selling products other than e-books, then they will probably bounce. If they come to the site wanting to get information on how to sell e-books online, then odds are that they will hang around a bit longer and may even click on a link to learn more. The bounce rate, which is defined as the “Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits” then goes down, which is a good thing.

SEO is great if used correctly. To use it correctly, you have to use keywords that accurately describe what you visitors are going to find when they visit your site. If you try to use high traffic keywords that are not COMPLETELY relevant to your content, then your bounce rate will go up.

This is a trap that many newbie search engine optimizers fall into, myself included. It is a painful lesson in that SEO is a great deal of work which can easily be misdirected.

If you learn nothing else from this post, learn this: “Targeted traffic is more important than a high level of traffic.” You could have a million visitors a day to your site, but if they bounce and/or do not convert, you would have been better off if they had never visited. At least that way, you would not have had your hopes up for no reason. I would take a hundred targeted visitors that will not bounce and that may convert over a million non-targeted visitors any day.

In short, massive amounts of non-targeted traffic, much like “Page Rank”, is highly overrated. Highly targeted, relevant traffic is where it’s at. So remember, when performing SEO and keyword research, take a break every once in a while and re-read your content with a fresh set of eyes or get a friend to and make sure that the keywords you are targeting accurately describe your content. Lower that bounce rate and increase those conversions.