It appears that Google added a snazzy feature to see the CTRs of your top search queries in their Webmaster Tools. Here’s my website’s data for the above query:

So that’s a factor of 4-6 times better than the normal CTRs accepted as the standard in our industry.  How is that possible?  What’s attracting searchers to my search engine listing?  Let’s take a step into the mind of a searcher and examine their thought process.

So what’s working for our website?

• Title of the website matches their exact search query
• Url of the website matches their exact search query
• Description of the listing matches their search intent – They are probably looking for a list of controversial issues and possible further elaboration on these topics
• Url of the website is .org – Conveys a sense of authority and trust among many searchers especially on a query like this
• 1st result’s url is an ip address
• None of the other listings include all of the search keywords in their urls

What’s causing some organic traffic to click on our competitors?

• Sitelinks under the 1st and 2nd listing
• 1st and 3rd listings’ titles exactly match their search and the 2nd listing includes all of the search keywords

You’ve thinking “who cares that your website is a fluke and doesn’t follow the trend?”  Indeed this website is a bit of an oddity, but you should still care.  You now have the ability to see how modifying your title and meta description tag influence SERP click through rates on specific queries and pages.  Yeah, you could have estimated the changes these alterations would have had previously, but there’s a much larger margin of error because of the noise you have to deal with.  Isn’t it about time you reoptimized your page titles and descriptions to take full advantage of organic search rankings by boosting your CTRs well above the norm?

Writing for search engines is easy.  You take your knowledge about a topic and simply regurgitate it as text as quickly as possible while including those all important keywords.  If you are a bit lazier you might not even write original and just plain bad content, you’ll take an article already written on the issue and simply rewrite it, so that you trick search engines to think its unique content.  And if you are even lazier, you’ll just take that article, run it through a spinner, and repost it to save yourself valuable time.

The amazing thing is that you can get all of that poorly written, rewritten, or spun content to rank in the search engines.  You can get a handful to thousands or visitors a day (depending on which keywords you targeted and competition) to be directed to your site through search engines.  The fatal flaw with this system is that the end users you care about coming to your website are visitors and not search engines.

After those visitors read a few sentences of your content, they are going to be driven right back to the search engine results page away from your website.  Sure you might hook a few straggling visitors that don’t realize your content is crap, but the majority of these visitors will never return to your website again, and they most definitely will not convert to a conversion.

I guess you could harass your visitors with CPM and popup ads, but really the amount of money you’d make from that is insignificant to what you could generate if you wrote for people to begin with.  Plus in due time, Google is going to realize that you content is not worthy of visitors;  as search engines refine their algorithms, they are going to be able to identify useless content that currently ranks by examining everything from the actual text on page to how many users instantly return back to the serps.

Anyone can write for search engines, but writing for people is an art.  If you are writing for visitors, then you will recognize the challenges presented.  To create quality content you need to

• provide value
• give detailed examples
• say something new
• engage readers
• offer something unique

It is by no means easy to do this, and you still need to link, comment, and network to get your content recognized by others.  Writing for people takes talent, but by doing so you’ll see positive results.

Imagine yourself as a searcher looking for information about cutting the fat off of your web portfolio.  The author need to engage you as a reader which can be done using humor, posing a question, or even taking an unusual stance on an issue.  After this author has your interest, they need to inform you with details and examples about how to go about cleaning out the trash in your portfolio.  If the content fails to be different and say anything new, then you might turn elsewhere or just never be directed there in the first place.

If you provide knowledgeable and useful content for your readers, your chances of a conversion are greatly improved.  A conversion could be anything from getting first time visitors to return back to your website to having a user purchase a product you posted a review on.  The conversion is a multiphase process.  It starts off with getting visitors to a landing page and ends with your final goal, such as a sale or return visitor.  If you are writing for the search engines, then visitors are never going to make it past the first step.  The better content that you produce and push on user, the further you increase your chances of a conversion.

So take a look at the content you’ve been producing or have had produced for your sites.  What are visitors reactions to this content?  Are the majority of them bouncing away?  Maybe that’s not a bad thing.  If visitors are exiting your site after one page view, it could mean you addressed the question they wanted answered.  It could also mean that your product landing page needs work, thus they didn’t proceed further down the path that leads to a sale.  Look at visitor behavior, but look deeper than the basics – get into the mindset of your visitors and see your website as searchers do.  If you do that, then you’ll have an understanding of whether your site is satisfying the needs of your users, but more importantly you can see where change needs to be implemented, so that ultimately your websites serve people and not search engines.

You need to use photos properly to enhance your writing.  Excellent pictures will do the following things:

• grab a reader’s attention
• increase their interest
• further communicate your point

Photos need to be used in conjunction with quality writing in order to further captivate your audience.  Some writers are able to create superb content without any graphical aids, but I’m sure that if they included appropriate pictures within their writing, it would make it that much better.  Additionally, pictures opens up a whole new market – image search.  Take advantage of the opportunity to gather more traffic to your website.  You can’t sell yourself short in such a competitive time.

Which version of our website is more appealing?  Professional?  Involving?

It’s a pretty obvious decision that the version with pictures is a lot more lively, engaging, and interesting.

I used to include no photos whatsoever and the occasional graph when appropriate, such as when I showed how a Google penalty can affect your traffic.  I realized since then that images can greatly improve the message you are trying to get across.  The problems I struggled with when trying to incorporate photos were: where do I get these pictures from and what images should I use where?

Where do I get these pictures from?

• Websites: Flickr’s creative commons, stock.xchng, MorgueFile, EveryStockPhoto, iStockPhoto – You might have to pay for quality stock photos sometimes, but the price is well worth it.
• Take photos yourself if possible – Being able to tailor photos to your exact needs can have a significant difference in their effect, and it will save you the time of hunting for that perfect picture.

What images do I use where?

Stock photos should be used to enhance the point you are trying to get across.  Just because a picture looks fantastic, it does not mean it will work well with your content.  The counter-side to that is don’t use generic or overly used images; they look boring and add nothing.  The pictures you use should essentially flow with your content while adding a new depth at the same time.  There are plenty of other things you’ll need to avoid when you use stock photos, but that’s not what I’m trying to address right now.

There are 3 different types of images that you can include in your content: thumbnails, additive, and informational.  Thumbnails connect to your text but in a vague manner; there main purpose is to spark interest from your visitors.  Additive pictures are similar to thumbnails, yet they have a stronger link to your content and add another dimension.  For instance, if you are writing about chocolates, you might insert a tasteful photo of Godiva’s chocolates along side your text.  Informational images are essentially a graphical tools that helps develop your position.  You could include a graph instead of a table because it allows your readers to better visualize the data.  All convey a varying amount of information to your reader from “look at me” to here are the statistics behind my claim.

Pictures are an extremely powerful medium and if used properly they give your content an increased punch of delivery.   Utilize photos to their full potential, but remember to use them in moderation such that you don’t dilute their bonuses.

If you could hypothetically attain #1 ranking for each of those terms that distribution will now look something like this:

The increase in search engine visits is the key number that should catch your attention; it should hit you like a bus.  The benefit of improving keyword #1′s ranking far outweighs that of the other top keywords.

Perhaps you should reevaluate your search engine optimization and link building campaigns, and see where you can reap the most rewards.  Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, but understand the advantages of utilizing your resources to their maximum potential.

Write one or a couple (if you are felling particularly ambitious) answers including your link(s).  Copy and paste this answer to as many relevant questions as possible.  If you post this answer to unrelated topics, you will greatly increase you’ve chance of being suspended.  Try to achieve level 2 prior to getting suspended, so that the links you leave behind are clickable.  You can do this by voting for questions to gain points (prior to your massive spamming), posting questions on another account and choosing your own answer as the best answer, or by being more conservative regarding what questions you answer.  Have multiple accounts, so suspensions don’t halt you spamming.

Borderline Spammer:

The same concept as being a full out spammer, except you are much more selective with the questions that you pick to answer.  You only answer questions that your prewritten answers match quite well with.  The likelihood of getting banned is slim, but you might as well have multiple accounts just in case.

Genuine User:

You write a custom answer to each question and include your link when appropriate.  One might even include the links of other websites to give an answer more depth and validity is necessary.  The likelihood of getting banned is extremely slim, but it still does happen; luckily, you can appeal all suspensions.

Whichever method you choose to (ab)use, remember that you are creating and defining a reputation for the website that you link to.  I view Yahoo Answers mainly as a traffic promotion source rather than as a means of improving serps.  Granted the links are nofollow, they still provide some benefit when it comes to search engine optimization.

Above is a graph of what Yahoo Answers did for a website of mine; the posting method used would fit into the borderline spammer category.  I started to post ~250 answers over the period of 2 weeks starting on November 13th.  After posting was stopped on November 27th, traffic from Yahoo Answers asymptotes down to ~50 visitors per day.  As January continues though, you can see that traffic rebounds to ~150 visitors per day.  I am not quite sure what caused this slight rebound, but I believe that the questions started to rank for long tail search terms.

In terms of revenue generated regarding time spent, Yahoo Answers has done quite well so far.  The niche promoted earns $10 CPM, which means that approximately $150 was generated from Yahoo Answers traffic thus far.  Estimated time to post an answer is 1 minute, which means that this earned $36 / hour.  Not too shabby considering the fact that minimum wage is only $7.25 / hour.  This may just be mindless copying and pasting, but aren’t all minimum wage jobs exactly that?