In August of 2006 AOL leaked millions of search records. Some SEOs scoured through this data to look at click data by ranking. A comment on Jim Boykin’s blog reveals the percent of clicks for each position for 9,038,794 searches and 4,926,623 clicks. Donna Fontenot shared the relative click volume of lower ranked results relative to the top ranked site.

1. 42.13%, 2,075,765 clicks
2. 11.90%, 586,100 clicks
3. 8.50%, 418,643 clicks
4. 6.06%, 298,532 clicks
5. 4.92%, 242,169 clicks
6. 4.05%, 199,541 clicks
7. 3.41%, 168,080 clicks
8. 3.01%, 148,489 clicks
9. 2.85%, 140,356 clicks
10. 2.99%, 147,551 clicks

An eye tracking study in 2004 by Cornell University revealed similar results:

Now based on this knowledge, we only need one more input to determine traffic when we get a position anywhere from 1 to 10 in the SERPs, that is the Average Daily Impressions. We can get an estimate of this from Adwords Tools, but if you want to get more accurate numbers, you have to spend a little research money and buy PPC ads. This will give us a more accurate number of daily impressions.

Here’s a summary of the keywords from Brian

inurl:forgotten_password.php “We will send the address of a unique verification page to you via email click”

Elgg

“Powered by Elgg”

Drupal Searches

“Allowed HTML tags: <a>”

Laconica – microblogging

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=inurl%3Aregister+URL+of+your+homepage%2C+blog%2C+or+profile+on+another+site&btnG=Search

b2evolution

“Your URL will be displayed” “Line breaks become <br />”

JobberBase

“powered by jobberBase”

“powered by Mephisto” comment
“powered by subtext”
“Powered by s9y” comment

Find most used CMS and Least used CMS from CMSMatrix.org and find dofollows!

Strings

“leave a comment”

Submit A Link

• keyword + “your link here” -reciprocal (example)
• keyword + “post your link” -reciprocal (example)
• keyword + “post a link” -reciprocal (example)
• keyword + “post your link” -reciprocal (example)
• keyword + “list your site” – reciprocal (example)

Commenthunt.com

Azure Profiles – http://freelanceswitch.com/designer/17-websites-to-boost-your-designer-profile/

Link Buying Queries

• • “become an advertiser”
  • “advertising options”
  • “advertise with us”
  • “become a sponsor”
  • “sponsor our site’
  • “sponsor site”
  • “sponsor us”

Link Data

Yahoo Site Explorer

Alexa – http://www.alexa.com/data/ds/linksin/seomoz.org
Exalead – http://www.exalead.com/search/results?q=+link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fseomoz.org&x=0&y=0

1. Ezinearticles PR: 6 / Alexa: 255
2. Buzzle PR: 6 / Alexa: 2,599
3. GoArticles PR: 6 / Alexa: 22,529
4. ArticleBase PR: 5 / Alexa: 1,826
5. ArticleDashboard PR: 5 / Alexa: 29,138
6. ArticleClick PR: 5 / Alexa: 32,451
7. Web-Source PR: 5 / Alexa: 36,492
8. Isnare PR: 5 / Alexa: 39,948
9. Site-Reference PR: 5 / Alexa: 81,497
10. SearchWarp PR: 4 / Alexa: 8,148
11. Amazines PR: 4 / Alexa: 35,964
12. ArticlesFactory PR: 4 / Alexa: 39,955
13. ArticlesFactory PR: 4 / Alexa: 43,735
14. ArticlePool PR: 4 / Alexa: 60,289
15. Article-Buzz PR: 3 / Alexa: 40,193

Article sites that don’t need sign-up

http://www.webpronews.com/, Page Rank: 7, Alexa Rank: 14,536
http://www.qarchive.org/, Page Rank: 6, Alexa Rank: 1,786
http://www.articlecity.com/, Page Rank: 5, Alexa Rank: 41,377
http://www.articlebiz.com/, Page Rank: 3, Alexa Rank: 92,151
http://www.selfseo.com/, Page Rank: 3, Alexa Rank: 49,086

Register and submit article sites

http://www.ezinearticles.com/, Page Rank: 6, Alexa Rank: 333
http://www.articledashboard.com/, Page Rank: 6, Alexa Rank: 42,902
http://www.articleclick.com/, Page Rank: 4, Alexa Rank: 42,147
http://www.articlemarketer.com/, Page Rank: 4, Alexa Rank: 41,411
http://www.goarticles.com/, Page Rank: 3, Alexa Rank: 18,786

If you know of other high PR article submission websites that are not listed here, let us know!

http://www.zimbio.com

Off Page SEO can be broken down into parts.

Metrics That Matter

1. Indexed Pages.
2. Google PageRank.
3. Links to URL.
4. Links to domain.
5. Domain age, address and info.
6. Last crawl date.
7. Alexa Traffic Rank.

Reports and Goals

1. Record your site’s current position and set goals.
2. Keep reports of all your activities so you’ll know which ones are effective and which are not worth the effort.

Link Building

1. Search Engines. Submit your URL and xml sitemap to Google, Yahoo! Search, Bing, Ask.com.
2. Web Directories. Submit your URL to top tier web directories such as Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, Librarian’s Internet Index, IllumiRate, MavicaNET, Jayde. Also submit your URL to second tier SEO friendly directories.
3. Write Articles. Submit your well written articles to High PR Article Websites.
4. Reciprocal Links. Add sites similar to yours and let them know that you linked to them. Ask nicely but don’t force them to link back.
5. Link Baiting. Employ link baiting techniques.
6. Link Trojans. Make use of link trojans. Examples of link trojans are free giveaway wordpress, joomla or other css themes, plugins, forum icons and avatars.
7. Social Media. Submit your site to social media sites (Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn). Always remember to present VALUE so people will have a motivation to link back.

Indirect Link Building

1. Commenting. Comment on on-topic blog posts and forums and let them know about your articles. This technique should go together with well written articles.
2. Answer questions on Yahoo! Answers.

Server and File Settings

1. Make sure that there is only one version of your site – 301 redirect all non www. URLs to the www. ones or vice versa.
2. Serve up easy to read and understand canonical URLs.
3. Name your files such that they are easy to read. “moonwalk-photo.jpg” as opposed to “moon734.jpg”.
4. Make an XML sitemap and upload it to the search engines.
5. Make effective use of robots.txt. Do not allow search result-like pages and a large number of auto-generated pages with the same or only slightly
   different content to be crawled.

HTML Title and Head

1. Use targeted keyword in the <title> but keep in mind what visitors would see. Your page title should be less than 68 characters long to be fully visible in the SERPs.
2. Limit meta-description to 150 characters.
3. Interior pages should have distinct meta data.

Your Content

1. Use only one <h1> tag per page.
2. Use alt tags in images, links, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words, but search engines cannot understand pictures; so they will refer to alt tags to understand what you are trying to say.
3. Use alt and longdesc in <img>.
4. Make sure that your code is valid, in some instances bad code can lead to search engines not being able to properly read a page. Use the W3C validator to check your markup.
5. Follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2 (WCAG 2.0) (Note: this is a very looong read). Highlights can be read at a WCAG discussion at WebmasterWorld and a similar onpage seo checklist here. Google has also published their SEO Starter Guide (pdf).
6. Provide a useful 404 File Not Found page.

Linking

1. Implement “rel=nofollow” links to unimportant pages within your site. Focus your link juice on the most important pages, don’t splatter it all over your site.
2. More importantly, use “rel=nofollow” links to bad links or bad neighborhoods. Otherwise, you may get penalized for linking to them.
3. Make sure there are no orphaned pages. Everybody wants to be loved, including web pages.
4. Use absolute URLs. Read why…
5. Make good use of anchor text in linking to your pages. Avoid writing generic anchor text like “page”, “article”, or “click here”.
6. Use breadcrumbs.
7. Provide an HTML sitemap for the site.

Google Adwords Traffic Estimator

Semrush

Website Grader

SEOmoz Linkscape

SEOmoz Trifecta

SEOmoz Term Target

Multi-Rank Checker – Google PageRank and Alexa Ranking checker

Keyword Density Analyzer

A comprehensive list of 136 SEO tools that you can get lost in.

Matt Cutts summarizes some of the most important points in SEO in one short interview.

Google Trends

Microsoft Adlab

Spyfu

SEO Digger

Keyword Discovery

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Any internet marketing professional will tell you, just as we will, that an effective Search Engine Optimization campaign can generate more traffic than an expensive banner-ad program, or costly and time-consuming pay-per-click methods. Some of the best methods of optimizing a website are ensuring that a page is not overly heavy in file size, maintaining a good content to code ratio, using lots of relevant content, and filling the page with as much text and links as you can without “spamming” the search engine spiders.

We’re not going to cover all of the basics of XHTML and CSS. We assume that you have a basic, working knowledge of the two languages and have some experience in utilizing them. We suggest reading ALA’s CSS articles, and Zeldman’s Better Living through XHTML if you need more on the basics or more reasons to switch over.

We’re going to be focusing entirely on the benefits of using XHTML and CSS to show you how to improve the readability of your code for search engine spiders, maintain a good content-to-code ratio without going beyond file-size and word-count limits, and how to use CSS to mimic common image effects.

There will be – in no way, shape or form – any unethical methods of SEO covered here. If you’re reading this article in the hopes of learning how to get an adult site listed in the “school supplies” category on Google, we kindly suggest you fall off the face of the earth. Any hate mail regarding this can be directed to sally@morekinky.net. It’s due time to pay her back for all those “petting zoo pictures” that manage to bypass my spam filtering system.

File size and content ratios

The best way to begin an optimization project is to make sure that all your code is readable. Search engine spiders work much the same way that the human eye does, and if there’s too much “junk text” in your HTML, it’s going to be hard for spiders to know what is what and to be able to decide that a page is relevant to a particular category. Improving your structural organization will not only make it easier to read for you, but ensure that search engine spiders know what you’re trying to show them.

Visually, a human reader sees the green Arial text set at 24px and bold green at the top of the page as the main title for your website. However, if you don’t have your markup implemented well enough, a search engine spider will not. Instead of using this to declare your title:

<strong><font color="#00FF00" size="24px">Main
Title of My Very First Website </font></strong>

Put this in your XHTML:

<h1>Main Title of My Very First Website</h1>

…And this in your CSS:

H1 {font-family: Arial; size: 24px;
color: #00FF00; font-weight: bold;}

Using XHTML to declare your main heading as H1 will ensure that a search engine spider knows that the contained text is the title of the page, while styling it with CSS yields the desired design effect. Using H1 through H6 accordingly, you can use this methodology to style the sub-headings on your website and let the search engine spiders know they are of importance. But don’t forget to use one or two of your keywords in the title—otherwise it won’t make a difference either way.

Using Images Wisely

An H1 tag placed directly after the <body> tag will be weighted heavily by many search engines, especially if it contains one or two of your keywords. But sometimes, putting a nice big heading tag after your body tag can detrimentally affect your masthead image placement. Using CSS, we can work around this little hang-up in some instances by placing our masthead logo as a background. To do so, the following code would be added to your BODY declaration in your CSS file:

background-image: url(../images/logo.png);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-position: top left;

Embedding a logo as a background instead of dropping it straight in to the HTML will make that piece of the puzzle fit together nicely. (Unless, of course, you don’t need the image to be presented before your H1 element.)

Pesky Javascript Rollovers

Everyone loves rollover effects. Even my completely dimwitted grandmother likes it when an e-mail link rotates every time she hovers over it. Using CSS allows you to emulate rollover effects with grace and lower file size, but one of the greatest benefits is providing more textual content for spiders to “read.” Using CSS to dictate rollover effects instead of separate images will give you a marginal, yet effective advantage in the fight for search engine positioning, especially if the textual link is one of your keywords.

Tim Murtaugh’s Mo’ Betta Rollovers is a great guide on how to use HOVER states to emulate common image rollovers.

Wrapping it all up

There are many ways to increase a website’s search engine positioning. Some of them are extremely effective while others are offensively unethical. Using standards compliant methods to create highly readable, content rich code with optimized content can aid in your campaign to dominate the search engine category. Every website has a place on the net, just make sure you know where your place is.