Posted 5/2/08 - Kellex
Daily Blog Tips just ran an article detailing Google search results and where in the page your blog is showing up for your particular keywords. We all strive to be on page #1 for our specific keywords but according to this article and some research done by Cornell University, that may not be good enough.
In fact, if you are not in the first 1-3 words, you may not be getting enough looks, clicks or anything for that matter. Once you drop past the 3rd keyword, your chances of being visited drop dramatically. To tell you the truth, if you are not the #1 spot, this data shows you really have no shot in hell of being clicked but I just find that hard to believe.
Here some screenies for our NBA blog, Le Basketbawl for 3 different sets of keywords that we work on. (click on them for bigger versions)
Keyword: nba basketball blog (page 1, position 2)
Keyword: basketball blog (page 2, position 2)
Keyword: nba blog (page 2, position 3)
As you can see we fair pretty well especially for the keywords “nba basketball blog”. We are sitting just behind the #1 NBA blog on the planet, TrueHoop and we’re ok with that for now. Also you notice for our other targeted keywords we are on the second page, but we are also sitting in the top 2-3 positions which according to this data ranks better than being in the 8th spot on the first page.
Anyone else have any data on this? Or perhaps you have some results that show the difference between your spot at the bottom or top of a search page?
Daily Basketball is currently #3 on the front page of Google for "basketball blog." I'm also doing well for several other phrases.
To be honest, it doesn't bring as much traffic as you'd think, even in the #3 position. It's a decent amount of traffic, however, it's relatively meaningless (traffic-wise) compared to a link on TrueHoop or CelticsBlog...
However, if you had a dozen prominent keywords that you were in the top 3 of, it might be a considerable traffic source. It seems like a lot of those visitors are actually indexing spiders and robots, though.
Hopefully that was fairly clear. I definitely confused myself.
Heh, I know what you are saying. It really depends on the keyword that people are searching for.
My biggest traffic comes from keywords searches for "michael jordan quotes", "jashaun agosto", and others like that.
It really depends on what your readers want but the best thing you can do, is write any sort of post on a current hot topic and build keywords into it like crazy.
You'll like get hit on that for months to come.
I've heard the same thing on DP, but, as a logical web searcher, I know I always look at the descriptions of the top 5 or 10. Guess some people just click aimlessly.
You have it good for NBA basketball blog, though, because you actually have "basketball blog" highlighted, and you have 2 links for that word so it should get added attention.