One of the first bits of advice I give to those who are new to search engine optimization is to stop trying to rank for highly competitive phrases and to focus on the long tail of search. Hamlet Batista disagrees. In fact, he wrote a post yesterday explaining exactly why he feels the suggestion to aim for less competitive phrases is a bad one. I understand what he's trying to say, but he's missing the point.

Hamlet writes:

It usually took more than a year of link building effort to get to page one or two of the search results for the most competitive ones, but it was definitely a rewarding experience. I had decided to take the risk of working on several sites for so long because I was confident in my ability to reach my goals. The more successes you have under your belt, the more confident you get about your decision-making abilities and the better you are at judging risk.

If I had followed the experts' advice, I would probably still be a work-from-home affiliate, earning a good commission every month and switching links as merchants went out of business or as markets saturated. Fortunately, that was not how I envisioned my future.

But he over simplifies things and he misses the point.

Hamlet seems to think people like myself suggest starting "low" because we either don't believe someone can rank for a highly competitive phrase on their own or because we simply want to stifle the competition. While I'm sure it's possible some SEOs would feed bad information to readers because they don't want to compete again them, I'm fairly certain that's not the goal of most of the folks offering this advice.

I also don't think anyone would tell a site owner they should never go after competitive phrases, they simply suggest not STARTING with the goal of ranking for them. Obviously the idea is to start low and work your way up to aiming high. That's part of why people like myself encourage this progression of competitive targeting. With this in mind, I thought I'd toss out the top five reasons I believe site owners should start low when it comes to targeting keyword phrases.

1. You'll build rankings and traffic faster

There's no denying well trafficked phrases are hard to rank for. Obviously the more traffic a phrase produces, the more sites will want to target it. (Likely because the majority of site owners still think in terms of traffic rather than sales.) The most people there are trying to rank for a phrase, the more likely it is that at least some of them have a lot of search engine optimization experience under their belts. Thus, it can be next to impossible to crack the top ten when you're just learning about things like title tags and anchor text.

By targeting less competitive terms at the start of your campaign, you stand a better chance of ranking and driving traffic to your site quickly. While it's true these rankings will send less traffic than rankings for more competitive phrases would have, the reality is you probably wouldn't be ranking for those more competitive phrases yet anyway. Thus, a little bit of traffic is better than none.

2.) You take advantage of the Search Buying Cycle

I've written about the concept of the search buying cycle in past Search Engine Guide articles.

The basic idea is people tend to conduct multiple searches on a single concept before they make a purchase decision. In fact, studies have shown the average searcher tends to search up to a dozen times over the course of several weeks before they make a purchase (either online or offline.) It's important to understand we're not talking about people running the same search over and over again and then finally buying. We're talking about a user running multiple searches on the same topic before they make their purchase. This process of refining a search over time is what's known as the search buying cycle.

As a general rule, people begin their search in the "interest" phase by searching for fairly generic and general terms. As they begin to learn more about what they're looking for, they fine tune their searches to gather more information. This is what's known as the "research" phase. Finally, they complete the search buying cycle by conducting "purchase" searches that tend to be very specific.

A quick example of this progression might be:

Interest - "car insurance"
Research - "sports car insurance"
Research - "california car insurance"
Research - "best car insurance company"
Purchase - "car insurance instant online quote"

It's fairly easy to see that as people move through the search buying cycle, they often make use of phrases that fall into the keyword long tail. By leveraging these less competitive, but highly relevant phrases, you increase your chances at getting your site in front of them at one (or many) points of this cycle. Choose the right phrases and deliver a good experience, and it's likely the user will bookmark your site and return to it when they're ready to make a purchase decision.

3.) You'll increase conversions and sales faster

Building off the points I made about the keyword buying cycle in point number two, it seems family obvious you'll start to see your wallet fill up sooner if you target long tail phrases. In fact, one of the strongest selling points to targeting long tail keywords no matter what your experience level is that these phrases tend to convert better.

While a phrase like "auto insurance" may get three quarters of a million searches a month, searchers who type that phrase in are likely looking for information about car insurance. In other words, they're not very likely to convert to a buyer. On the other hand, the phrase "oregon car insurance quote" only gets a few hundred searches a month, but probably has a very strong conversion rate.

While there's no doubt high volume, low conversion phrases can ultimately earn you more money, there's also no doubt lower volume, high conversion phrases will help you see profits sooner. For a site just getting started, those quick rewards can mean the difference between feeding the coffers enough to keep going and crashing early on due to lack of sales.

4.) You gain experience

All skilled search engine optimization specialists learned by doing. Trial and error and continual testing is hands down the best way to learn enough to target those highly competitive phrases.

By starting off aiming at lower phrases, you will have the opportunity to do a little bit of tweaking on your site to find out what works and what doesn't work. Since phrases are less competitive, you'll probably also see ranking changes more quickly. This can give you the perfect playground for perfecting your skills and building up your search engine optimization knowledge.

You'll have the chance to see how title tag changes, link text and content structure can impact your rankings and you'll gain a "feel" for what works and what doesn't work. Over time, you'll learn more about what works and you'll be able to apply that knowledge toward more competitive phrases.

5.) Long tail phrases build the foundation for targeting highly competitive phrases

Perhaps the biggest advantage of targeting less competitive phrases is those phrases usually contain more competitive phrases.

Search engines don't view keyword phrases the same way humans do. In fact, they don't think in terms of keyword phrases at all. Google doesn't come visit your web site and count up the number of times you use "phrase x" on your site. Instead, they analyze patterns. Any text on your page could be considered a keyword phrase. (For all Google knows, the text "for all Google knows" is a keyword phrase.)

So, while you may be targeting "oregon car insurance quote," Google can also see the phrases "oregon car insurance," "car insurance quote," "car insurance," and "insurance quote." (Or any other combination of those words.) That means every time you optimize your site for "oregon car insurance quote" you're also actually optimizing it for those other phrases as well. Score a link from a great authority site using the text "oregon car insurance quote?" Guess what? You also just scored a link from a great authority site that uses the phrase "car insurance quote."

If you are building a solid site with good content that attracts quality links, you'll find it becomes easier over time to rank for more competitive phrases because you've actually been optimizing for them all along. Sure, you'll need to do some tweaking down the road to better optimize for those phrases, but the fact remains the work you do now can set the stage for a leap to even better rankings.

Starting Small is Smart

Aiming low may seem like a cop out to those who already have a strong SEO skill set, but for small businesses and site owners just learning the SEO ropes, it's smart. Dave Thomas didn't launch Wendy's by building restaurants in every city in every state and country in the world. He started with one lone store on Broad Street in Columbus, Ohio. As he perfected his skills and built up an audience, he gradually expanded with the goal of conquering bigger and bigger markets. It worked pretty well for him. Why shouldn't starting small and building up steam work for you as well?

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.

The team at Yahoo! announced yesterday that they've taken steps to make it even easier for small businesses to authenticate their site and setup full access with Yahoo!'s Site Explorer.

Yahoo! Small Business just made it easier for customers to submit and authenticate their sites to Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, all you have to do is make sure that 'sitemap.xml' is enabled and your site will be submitted to Yahoo! Site Explorer automatically.

With this feature, new stores as well as existing stores with 'sitemap.xml' enabled will have access to the toolkit inside Site Explorer. Within a few hours of enabling, you'll be able to locate your indexed pages and the links to your sites, as well as delete pages in the index or rewrite dynamic URLs. To double check if your site was auto-authenticated, take a look in the 'Source' column in the 'My Sites' page in Site Explorer.

Not familiar with Site Explorer or Site Maps? They're basically a set of simple tools Yahoo! has put together to help you gain more information about which pages of your site Yahoo! has indexed, which sites links to you and even which pages of your site are the most popular. If you aren't already using it, it's a great way to get solid information about your site.

Since Yahoo! has made it even easier to authenticate your site (which gives you access to more information), it's a good time to go check things out.

Yesterday, I wrote about my frustration with Google's crusade against paid links. While I pointed out some of the problems I see with Google's plans, I didn't go into near as much detail as I would have liked to. Thankfully, Dan Thies also put together an article on this topic yesterday and he does an excellent job of examining the FTC related issues at play in the paid link debate on his SEO Fast Start blog.

Dan breaks the issue down into several points:

From the FTC's perspective, defining a "paid link" isn't going to be as important as defining "advertising." When you look at it that way, all that really matters is that some financial consideration is given for the link.

He goes on to point out several examples of what is a paid link (Yahoo! directory listing) and what isn't a paid link (Chamber of Commerce membership) according to the FTC's perspective. While I see his point, I do disagree that the waters aren't quite as clear as he makes them out to be. I know I certainly wouldn't have a problem dropping paid text link ads on some of my sites and then "giving" those same ads away in exchange for products or services. (Anyone want to send me a new iPod Touch in exchange for a link?)

That said, even if you use a strict definition of paid links Google clearly contradicts themselves. After all, they don't seem to have a problem with the Yahoo! Directory, but they appear to be going after small paid review directories.

He also notes that while Google has referred to the FTC's requirement to disclose advertising on web sites, that may not really apply in these cases.

Dan says:

After all, the FTC isn't going to give a rat's tail about the effect of paid links on Google's organic results.

True...so true. Ultimately though, their reasoning doesn't matter. As long as people continue to search on Google and webmasters continue to be terrified of life without Google traffic, they'll be able to do pretty much whatever they want.

(Hat tip to Justilien.)

Not long ago my wife and I left the house for a nice dinner out. We are typically early eaters so we'll leave around 4:30 in order to avoid any the dinner rush and long waits to be seated. This time we didn't. As we pulled up to our (read: her) favorite restaurant she jumped out to find out how long of a wait there would be. She was told a good 45 minutes to an hour fifteen. About normal for this time of the evening, but she didn't want to wait it out so we left in search of another place to eat.

Yeah, you know where this is going. We ended up at another restaurant with another long wait. Again, not wanting to wait (her, not me, mind you) we ended up right back at the restaurant we started at. Funnily enough we ended up there roughly around the time we would have been seated has we stuck around. Go figure. Another dinner delayed.

Dinner delays are not that uncommon. Find a nice restaurant that is even mildly popular, get there during prime lunch or dinner hours and you can expect NOT to be seated immediately. We've come to expect that. But what about your favorite grocery store? Would you mind waiting 45 minutes to before you could start shopping? Would a 20 minute wait be acceptable at the mini-mart on the corner? Do you get upset (like me) having to wait seven minutes at the drive-thru at your local fast food joint? Undoubtedly, you also probably don't enjoy waiting an extra five seconds for a web page to load.

Hey, don't feel bad. You're not alone. Most people simple don't like having to wait (even a couple of extra seconds) for your website to load before they can start shopping. And they certainly don't like having to wait for each page as they navigate through your site.

While high-speed access is far more common today than it was just a couple of years ago, web technology has also gotten more advanced. With each new whistle and bell added to your website, with every new feature, wait time is added in your page downloads. So high-speed access or no, you still have to make sure you keep your download times in check and therefore reducing wait time for your site visitors.

A few quick tips to help you lose wait overnight:

Clean code
I'm often surprised by the nightmare code we often come across when working with new clients. Sometimes it's from poorly developed HTML or poorly constructed content management systems, or both. These sites might look pretty in the browser, but underneath the hood it's a mess. What these developers often don't realize that what's under the hood matters. Developing clean, minimalist code is a great way to reduce page file size and while creating less data that needs to be interpreted by the browser as your visitor loads the page.

Image optimization
I'm not referring to search engine optimization here, but graphic optimization. Most people (like me) are not experts in imagology (I just made that up) so whenever we create an image we don't think much about how to optimize it. But there is a lot you can do to an image to reduce the size of the image while maintaining every bit of its visual appearance, even enhancing it. This might not be an issue for sites with only a few images, but it's a must for sites that are very image heave, especially ecommerce sites that need to display row upon row of products to their shoppers.

CSS
There are a lot of advantages to designing sites using CSS. Just one of these is the fact that you can significantly reduce page file size (and therefore download times) by moving your font syles and page layout code off the page into an external CSS document. The best thing about using CSS is that once the browser pulls the file as it downloads the first page, the file is now cached and doesn't have to be downloaded each time the user moves from page to page. This leaves the only elements being downloaded as the user navigates the site is that which is unique to each page. This is a considerable time-saving tool.

External Javascripts
Like CSS, you can move your JavaScript code off the page and into an external file. Doing so gives you the same benefit of using an external CSS document; the JavaScript only has to be downloaded once as the visitor navigates through the site.

Increase bandwidth
Just like a city that builds new streets or widens roadways, sites that have increased in traffic may need to consider increasing their web hosting package to allow more bandwidth. The more traffic a site gets the more bandwidth is used as pages and images are downloaded more frequently. If you don't have enough allowable bandwidth your visitors may experience slowdowns, hangups or even just not being able to pull your pages up at all. Be sure your allowable bandwidth increases with your traffic rates, with enough room to allow for any sudden spikes that may occur.

Both CSS and include files can significantly help reduce wait times. On top of that, they also speed up the amount of time invested in making site edits. The time spent developing a CSS based website with include files alone is worth the time saved on the development end later on. Heck, losing wait isn't just about your visitors, it's about using your own time more productively.

But when it comes to meeting user expectations, you can't go wrong by speeding up your website. You can't impress your visitors with the quality of your information or products, if you're losing them due to slow download times. Help them out a bit, and help yourself out a lot by implementing a few wait loss measures on your website today.

Now's your chance. Google has announced plans to run search ads on Google Mobile Search pages. In fact, they also announced they'll be letting advertisers test drive the program for free over the next couple of months. Sounds like a good reason to get some solid analytics in place and take the new program for a test spin.

The email read, in part:

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com). We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

Each ad's eligibility will be determined by its landing page and only ads with landing pages that can be adapted for viewing on mobile browsers will be shown. You can monitor each ad's performance via a special performance tracking page within your account called "Performance Data: Search Ads on Google Mobile Search."

It's important to keep mobile searcher's intent in mind if you decide to spend time testing this feature. You're far more likely to see success with this program if you have a brick and mortar store that mobile users might be searching for, or if you offer up the type of content that people look for on the go. In other words, news sites, sports sites, weather sites and the like will probably fair better than fan fiction sites.