Forum Moderators: open
I used overture and google adwords. Overture referrals were (a) low, (b) resulting in less business, and (c) seemed to go in suspicious waves of activity (as if someone was repeatedly clicking).
Thus i no longer use overture.
However their brand name thing was successful because of the money they threw at it and the alliances they made.
Is it just me, or are other webmasters seeing a negigible number of hits from overture.com?
I think that has to do with how competitive the phrase is and how competitively you bid. I was working for a hosting company a year ago and one of our big clients started paying $.30 / click for a highly competitive phrase. I wondered why are network traffic had gone up so much so fast ... this site was eating almost half the company's bandwidth!
My site is non-commercial, and because my main, all-important single keyword isn't something that any business wants to target, I come up #1 because nobody wants to pay for a sponsored listing with it. Note also with this huge disparity with Google hits, the #1 and #2 listings on that SERP happen to be from a large site which has relevant content to that search word. (The #3 listed site is a business where this 3 letter acronym is part of the company name, and obviously not relevant to the what people are searching for when they are searching for what the topic of my site is.) That I am getting 900 times as many hits from Google than Overture, and on a SERP where the #1 listed site on Google almost surely gets a large percentage of the clicks, is very notable. Only possible relevant other factor that I see is that the target audience of my site skews *heavily* to teenagers and young adults. Thus if for some reason Overture users tend to skew to older users (perhaps as a result of advertising to that market), then the people who use Overture would tend to be the sort that wouldn't look for my site.
In both cases were they linking to with the desired keywords in the anchor text before and after? Also, how competitive is the keyword phrase? If not very, the change in on page factors may have been enough to get #1. Also, one other point which is very important. Google does NOT parse words. If you were www.mainkeywordphrase.com, rather than www.main-keyword-phrase.com, this is NOT a case of keywords in domain name. Those hyphens make all the difference in the world. If you didn't use the hyphens, then mainkeywordphrase.com and companyname.com will be equal in how they do in Google for that keyword phrase.
DO: give the people what they want!
I never thought I'd see the day that such blasphemy would be posted here. And by a moderator no less. ;) To a degree PR is important. However, too many obsess just about PR.
DO break up your content pages when reasonable and logical and avoid 1 mega-page of content, but DON'T go nuts and give every sentance it's own page.
DON'T put a million useless links on every page in order to propogate your pagerank empire.
DO eat slowly and chew your food, you're not a googlebot.
DON'T tell your girlfriend she is now a PR2 and "this close" to getting PR ZERO. :)
Can someone point me to this 26 steps Brett thread?
DO read this:
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]
And while you're at it, DO read this:
12 Months with Google and Brett/How did you fair [webmasterworld.com]
DO: Forget about PR
I agree - the PR is important, but not that important one may get the impression by reading on WebmasterWorld ;-)
DO: have a lot good content
DO: at first think about the people, who will surf your site
DON'T: think only in SE related topics
DON'T: forget there is a live outside the internet
> Also, how competitive is the keyword phrase?
Not very, only about 70,000 sites listed.
I didn't hyphen the keywords, so I see what you mean; another lesson learned. I've been lucky so far that most people who link to my site are kind enough to use my keywords in the anchor text. Someone I link with recently suggested putting keywords in the Title attribute of the anchor tag to up our positions in Google, but discussions here in Webmasterworld (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/7827.htm) seemed inconclusive. Anyone have any experience with that?
DON'T: Just rely on PR
DO: Share your experience
DONT: Just lurk!
The rest of the suggestions are solid. If you follow Brett's suggestions [webmasterworld.com], and you get Chris_R's humor [webmasterworld.com], you will have more than enough info to develop a top 10 list.
