Yes, You're Number One on Google, Who Cares?

Ok, lots of people care...if you are ranking number one for the right phrases. Unfortunately, as Lisa points out, some people still think in terms of number one rankings and lots of traffic without considering the need to focus on the right rankings or the right traffic. While that may be nice in terms of bragging rights, it doesn't pay the bills.

There's sometimes a belief in the search engine optimization community that he who gets the most visitors to his site wins. These people are retarded. Optimization isn't about duping people into visiting your site; it's about increasing visibility, qualified traffic, and conversions. It's not about seeing how many oddball terms you can rank for.

This is yet another "back to basics" point, but it's once that continues to pop up and thus, requires continued discussion.

So I'll back up Lisa here and point out that if you are new to the world of search engine optimization, one of the most valuable lessons you can learn is the different between traffic and targeted traffic. You can drive so much traffic to your site that your server will crash and never make a sale. You can also drive large numbers of sales with small amounts of traffic.

Take the time to research not only what phrases catch people's eyes, but what phrases convert.

You can do this by analyzing your server logs to find out what types of phrases lead to purchases or actions, but that only works for the phrases you rank well for.

An even better option is to run short term paid search campaigns that target the phrases you are considering optimizing your site for and to analyze how the traffic interacts with your site. While it's true that paid search traffic often reacts differently than organic search traffic for the same term, you'll still get enough of an idea about how people interact with your site to make wise choices about the phrases you need to target.