I'd add that SEO is not just a ranking exercise-- it's a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you <title> tag and the first ~150 of your meta-description are what drives people to click through to your site.
Also, all other things being equal, the first position on SERPs gets ~42% of clicks... So it's a winner take all game unless you are talking about a content business.
OH-- also do some keyword analysis. In Andrew's example-- how many people search for "fishing tips" versus "fishing advice" or "how to fish" or "intro to fishing"? Keyword analysis is about finding out what people are searching for and then digging in to see how competitive those keywords are. If you want to dethrone the #1 result for "fishing tips" you'll want to analyze their SEO. If they are a 10 year old page-rank-9 domain with 87,500 inbound links, you might consider gunning for a less sought-after search term.
Excellent point. I was in charge of much of the SEO of a large internet retailer and our organic traffic was stunning. Unfortunately no matter how hard I lobbied to start work on conversion, split testing etc, they insisted I do nothing but drive traffic to our poorly converting sites. When sales started flattening out despite the continuing month over month increase in organic traffic I was let go as a cost saving measure. And while still an Internet Retailer 500 company their position has slipped significantly down the ranks. At the time I left we had top ten positions for hundreds of our most important key words including #1 position for many of our first tier words. When doing SEO remember that traffic is only as good as it converts.
This all seems like good advice too. I think the top SERP gets more than 42% of clicks though... more like 70. SEO is in many ways a winner-take-all sport at this point, and it's gotten more so over the years. Google released some eye-tracking data and people just look at the top 1 and then top 3 results, then they re-search.
I'd add that SEO is not just a ranking exercise-- it's a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~60 characters of you <title> tag and the first ~150 of your meta-description are what drives people to click through to your site.
Also, all other things being equal, the first position on SERPs gets ~42% of clicks... So it's a winner take all game unless you are talking about a content business.
OH-- also do some keyword analysis. In Andrew's example-- how many people search for "fishing tips" versus "fishing advice" or "how to fish" or "intro to fishing"? Keyword analysis is about finding out what people are searching for and then digging in to see how competitive those keywords are. If you want to dethrone the #1 result for "fishing tips" you'll want to analyze their SEO. If they are a 10 year old page-rank-9 domain with 87,500 inbound links, you might consider gunning for a less sought-after search term.