Gideon: I notice that you’re on position one there. I’ve looked to the top right of the screen. It says you’re number one out of 39,400,000 results, so obviously you’ve done the inverted comma thing to do the search there, but still the number one position and most people will be typing in those keywords.

What’s the importance of coming up say number one compared to number two, three, four and the rest of the results on that page?

Dave: The lion’s share of the traffic goes to position number one. We actually recently did a short little video. I’ll try and think of the best way to find it over at my YouTube account.

Here in Melbourne I sent some of my team members into the city and they interviewed random people on the streets and we created a little video. It’s Google Versus Yellow Pages.

I wouldn’t call it a viral video, but it’s kind of like branded content. We interviewed random people and of all the people that we interviewed, they said they click on position number one or number two. They absolutely never go on to page number two. It’s always the one or two positions and they just trust that that is the right information.

If you were to compare position one to position three, I’ve heard numbers and they vary around, but it’s like 70% or thereabouts of the search traffic, 60 or 70% goes to this number one listing and then the rest is spread out beneath. The further you drop down the page, it drops off really quickly.

If we talk about right down at the bottom here – and there’s another one of my websites there going for the same keyword – further down here, these keywords down here aren’t going to be getting hardly any traffic relative to these.

That’s actually another little tip that I think a lot of SEOers miss out on. That’s the idea of making sure that you have a look where you’re already having easy wins.

You want to jump into your Google Analytics account and see where you’re already driving traffic from and what keywords you’re ranking for.

Visit those pages in the search engines, and then anywhere where you’re driving traffic from a particular keyword but you’re not in position number one, that is what I’d call the low hanging fruit and where you should target your link building efforts first.

If you’re already getting traffic on a keyword that’s in position number four or five, you send a few links to it, and Google already thinks it’s relevant because it’s on that first page. You can quickly pop it up to number one and take the lion’s share of that traffic.

Gideon: As you say, if you can get to the number one position, you can get like 60 to 70% of the traffic so it’s really worth it. I just want to make sure I understand what you said there and for our audience too.

If you already have an existing blog set up and you’re using Google Analytics, which is the program to track your statistics, look at the keywords that you’re already ranking for, the way the people are naturally finding your content on your blog already.

Then do the search in Google and find out where you’re ranking. If you’re not number one, do whatever you can to get your page to that number one position.

You mentioned getting links back to that page, for example, as a strategy to help you look more relevant to Google and to push it back up, right?

Dave: Spot on.

Gideon: I think we probably need to back track just a little bit. I think we’ll start with the foundational stuff and then we’ll blow that up a bit.

If I’m just getting started with this, maybe even if I already have a blog but I haven’t thought about SEO, what are the first few things that I need to do, the basic things that I need to do to help me set up for search engine optimization?

Dave: I think if you’ve got a blog, chances are you’ve probably gone for something like WordPress. WordPress is really good, and there are other ones like Movable Type and different things like that. I’d probably recommend WordPress just because it’s open source.

A lot of people are developing plugins and these plugins can give you a whole lot more flexibility and add additional functionality that you can’t get in just the plain install of WordPress.

I’d say go ahead and get WordPress. If you want to do it on the cheap, you can just use their standard default template and then go ahead and install some plugins.

Have a look at getting the All-in-One SEO plugin. If you just search All-in-One in the plugins area and you add that in, that will help you out as far as SEO because it gives you a little bit more control over making sure that you can edit your title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords. I can show you where those things fall on the page.

If you happen to spend a little bit of money, one particular theme that we’ve used which is the Thesis theme. Search WordPress for Thesis Theme and go there.

This is a theme that we’ve used and it’s done with two things in mind: usability, so the back end is really quite simple and there’s quite a lot of functionality, and they’re constantly updating it. There’s a good community there.

You know that that’s a template that’s evolving and you’ll get the upgrades, and in addition to that, it’s being built very much with SEO in mind, so the template itself is quite clean.

It uses a lot of CSS, which is cascading style sheets, which enables you to split out parts of the code into separate files so that when Google reads the page, analyzing what that page is about or what content is on the page, it’s as clean as possible.

That said though, you can just go for the plain WordPress install and you’re going to have just as much effect. This WordPress Thesis theme is just something we’ve used and it’s quite good.

You’ll see over here — I’m headed over to our Melbourne SEO Services website. This particular theme here is the Thesis theme. We use this on quite a few of our sites.

It doesn’t really feel like a blog, apart from we’re on the blog area here, but we’ve set each of these areas up here as pages, so depending on what you’re doing it for – I know we’re talking to a lot of bloggers, so you can set it up with a blog feel, but you can also take that and do just a normal business as well, or any product-based website. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that.

Gideon: When you say WordPress, I just want to clarify once again. It’s www.WordPress.org and get the software from there as opposed to www.WordPress.com. I just want to clarify.

Dave: If you just head over here and you can jump in there. It’s free to download. Just go ahead and download it and install it.

Gideon: I’m glad you’re showing that because I get a lot of people asking me, “Is it okay to install a www.WordPress.com blog?” I always kind of cringe because you don’t actually own it when you have a dot com WordPress blog. So definitely www.WordPress.org, that’s a really good tip.

Dave: There are some benefits for why you want to make sure that you register your own domain name as well from an SEO point of view.

Whenever we’re structuring out and planning out a new business that we’re about to move into, we pay really close attention to the keywords that we’re getting into our domain name because it does help. You’ll see it’s actually quite easy to rank for a particular keyword if that keyword is in the domain name.

There’s a whole variety of reasons why that could be something to do with the algorithms saying that, “Yes, this is important because it’s got the keyword in the domain name.” When I say the algorithm, I mean the Google algorithm.

It could also be that when you’re building links back to your website, obviously when you’re building links, a lot of people will link to you just with the URL of your site.

If you have the keywords in there, effectively that anchor text back to the website is going to be the URL. It’s like you’re building links back to your website with your keyword as the anchor text. That’s another reason it might work. I would definitely suggest people go ahead and register their own domain name.

When they do a little bit of keyword research, they’ll analyze what is the primary keyword phrase that they’d ideally like to rank for. This may vary, depending on whether or not you’re trying to build a brand or whether or not you’re trying to go after a particular keyword or something based around your niche.

Let’s talk about brand. If I go to www.DavidJenyns.com, obviously my brand is www.DavidJenyns.com. Therefore I wanted to have my name in there, but how many people are really searching in www.DavidJenyns.com? Not that many at the moment. I’m hoping that will build over time, but that’s the brand that I’m building.

When I compare that to something like the Melbourne SEO Services, we were very particular in registering our business name as Melbourne SEO Services, because that way, when I registered the domain name, it’s going to have the keyword in it.

I would like to rank for Melbourne SEO Services. That’s my initial longer tail phrase that I think I can pick up quite easily and then rank.

Then once I get that, I’ve also built in a more competitive phrase, www.SEOServices.com, which is something that once we’ve got Melbourne SEO Services, we can go after quite easily. All of that link building that we’ve been doing is going to have been building links with SEO services in there, so that’s going to ultimately help us rank.