Tag Archives: SEO
SEO Keyword Selection Strategies
Posted on 03. Mar, 2010 by admin.
SEO is a vehicle that drives potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination, which is your website, you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your website. You do this by creating implement specific seo keyword selection strategies.
Think of the right keywords as the “Open Sesame!” of the internet. Find the right words or phrases and presto, massive traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your seo keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors making it all the way to your site, or seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive, decreases dramatically.
Your seo keyword selections serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So, your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and key phrases.
You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words to use for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It is hard to be objective when you are in the center of your business network, which is why you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directlly to the source.
Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search phrases yourself, ask for words from a as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.
The customer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.
Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword selections to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.
The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just surf around your website and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, keep in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.
Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your seo keyword selection is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will bring up your URL.
You can purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and key phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software; such as, Google Keyword Tool or WordTracker, will even suggest variations of your keywords and key phrases. The higher the number the software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your website. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the customer will probably never scroll down to find you.
Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater likelihood that the customer, who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword, “automobile companies.” However, your company specializes in bodywork only . The keyword, “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would, nevertheless, serve you better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing your oil filters, you will get only those individuals with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. I other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.
The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the consumer rather than the seller. You want to determine what motivates a person looking for a service or product, to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example; such as, a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between a “Seattle Job Listings” and “Seattle IT Recruiters”, which do you think will benefit the consumer more? It you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you select? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school, who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until you find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to your site.
Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends do change. you cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.
Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of our keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.
This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site, who will actually purchase your product, fill out your forms, or download you product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficiency of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.
Learn To Conquer The Internet Using SEO
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Learning To Master SEO Fundamentals
Posted on 05. Jan, 2010 by admin.
To feature your website on top of every important search engine, it is vital that you learn the various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tricks that can ensure that your website or blog beats the hundreds of thousands of other websites posted on the internet. Here are some valuable tips and strategies on learning how to SEO.
The first tip is to understand the manner in which search engines work. They do not understand graphics. They depend on matching the words in the search criteria with the keywords that might be present in your website. Therefore, it will be necessary that you include many keywords and key phrases as you can into your website. Imagine the different key phrases that your viewers might type into the search text box and try to incorporate them into your site. Even if you included photos in your site, make it a point to attach text tags to those photos so that the search engines can understand them.
Your key phrases should also be mentioned in the url and other related file names. This is what the search engines are looking for. The title tag, which is located at the top of your website should contain relevant key phrases as should the meta description tags. The description tags will not be seen in your website, but will be featured in text form when the search engine displays your results. Therefore, it is important to include phrases that entice the readers towards your website in your description tags. Although it is important to remember not to just dump the same keywords and phrases in your URL, title and description tags and your file names since most search engines will interpret that as spamming and just reject your site. Instead, try to incorporate various related keywords and key phrases that are similar to your keywords.
It is also a good idea to check your standing after conducting some dummy searches through various search engines. This will give you a chance to fine-tune your keywords and key phrases. During this search, try to find out what the standing is of your competitors and try to analyze the reason for their success in case they are placed above you. You should also ensure that your site’s internal links are crossed-linked perfectly since search engines will find it easy to latch on to the right page. Another important tip is to continually add fresh content to your website since this will please both search engines and even your visitors. The chances of your website getting bookmarked will also increase if you keep on providing fresh information.
Once you have made the necessary changes to your website, patience is key. It will still take some time for search engines to recognize that fact and push you up the search engine ladder.
Make sure that you body copy is curtailed to around 300 words and that your keywords and key phrases are injected at regular intervals instead of bunching them at the top or bottom.
If you remember these tips and after making all the necessary changes to your website, you wait patiently, you will be pleasantly surprised to watch the search engines lock to your site during any related search. Try out various new methods to ensure that your site remains on top since your competitors too will be doing the best to jump over you.
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Keyword Research…On Page SEO
Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by admin.
This is where SEO starts, plain and simple; if your site is not optimized for the keywords you are targeting, you’ve lost the battle before you’ve even started.
In this chapter I will be pointing out the key features your site needs so that your site looks professionally optimized to the search engines! On page factors are just as important as building links and other aspects involved getting your site to the TOP!
Title & META Tags
Your Title and META tags are the first thing the search engine spiders see when visiting your site! Be sure that your home page TITLE tag is related to the keywords you identified!
Using the “forex” example from the keyword research chapter this is how it would be done!
As you can see added are the TOP 3 keywords to the title and the 5 keywords to the META keyword area. There are some other SEO META tags that are included so that your sites get indexed faster!
Here is the META tag sequence used on all sites that are top ranked! Feel free to use as a template!
Important Pages to Include
Here is a list of pages that you must include on your website. The spiders (search engine bots) will go to crawl your site and will be looking for these pages, you can simply put them in the footer or wherever you like.
- Contact page – It’s crucial that your prospects/visitors have a way of contacting you.
- Disclaimer – If your sell products or information in particular on your site, it is a good idea to use a disclaimer to keep your visitors, in the “know”.
- Privacy Policy – Spam used to be a big issue and mostly everyone hates it! Let your visitors know that you will keep the information you gather from them safe, i.e. their email address.
- Sitemap – This makes it easy for the spiders to scan your site, making each page on your site available for anyone to see. It gives your webpage more structure. I will go over how to create a sitemap further in the ebook.
- Five pages of Content – Google and other search engines look at how much quality content you have on your website that is relevant to the keywords you are targeting. Be sure to have at least 5 articles/web pages with quality content on them.
Creating a Sitemap
These days creating a sitemap is very easy; there are FREE automated tools that will do this for you. You want to have a sitemap on your site because it will make scanning your site a lot faster, thus indexing you’re all your webpage’s a lot of faster.
The spiders will visit your sitemap and see all the pages that your website includes, instead looking at the one by one.
So here’s how to create the file…you would simply go to:
You would simply enter your website URL and it will return an XML file that you would upload to your server to appear on your site! This is too easy NOT to do it!
Robots.txt File
I don’t want to go all nerdy on you and throw a whole bunch of techie stuff your way but it is important to know what your site needs. As more and more people catch on to the power of marketing on the internet, the more valuable this information becomes!
So what is a robots.txt file? It’s basically a text file that’s created with notepad or any compatible text editor. You can add certain web pages on your site that you DO NOT want the search engines to crawl.
The reason for this could be to keep your download page for your customers from showing up in the SERPS or showing duplicate content on your site. This way it won’t seem like your spamming the search engines with non-sense.
Even if you don’t have any web pages that DO NOT want to show up in the SERPS it is a good idea to have one uploaded and on your site so the search engines know that you’re playing by the rules!
So here’s how you create a “Robots.txt” file, these are very simply to make despite the name. J
Like I stated before you would simply open notepad or your favorite text editor. This lines you will enter in this text file are as follows:
User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or file name]
It’s pretty much self explanatory; you tell which spider, i.e. Google, MSN or Yahoo not to crawl the “Disallow” listed sites. That’s all to it, too easy right?
Let me give you a few examples so you know exactly how this should look when you create your robots.txt file.
Let’s say you DO NOT want the Google bots (spiders) from crawling a particular page on your site. This is how it would look:
If you want to allow the spiders to index everything on your site and just want to have the robots.txt file on your site for good measures. This is how it would look. Feel free to copy/paste for your own use!
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Search Engines Explained…What Are Algorithms & Pageranks?
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by admin.
What are Algorithms?
Now that we know how your web page shows up in the search engines it’s important to understand what an algorithm is. Well Wikipedia says…
An algorithm is a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, often used for calculation and data processing. It is formally a type of effective method in which a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task…
So basically what this is saying is, is that the search engines critique your sites based on certain criteria to see where it will rank in their results. Some of these criteria’s include:
1. Location & Frequency of keywords on your web page
2. Amount of links pointing to your site
3. How your website is structure
4. How relevant & unique your content is
What is Pagerank?
I felt it necessary to include this inside this ebook because it plays an important role when you begin building links. I think Wikipedia is much better at explaining things, so here is the definition from Wikipedia:
Pagerank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.
A website can have a pagerank of 1 – 9, obviously the higher the pagerank the better! When your finding site to link to yours if is important to find those links that have high pagerank (PR).
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Search Engines Explained
Posted on 29. Nov, 2009 by admin.
I am going to present a training on SEO and the reason is I have spent the past months researching and studying this topic. I am fascinated with this subject, but then again, I am a Sr. Software Engineer with over twenty years working with computers. Thus, due to my interests and past experiences, SEO and other topics the surround computer usage does interest me.
This is not to say that those who have little to no experience with computers cannot learn SEO. Quite the contrary. Many individuals with little to no experiences have been successful at applying SEO principles. It just takes a willingness to study the subject, apply what you have learned, and patience in going through the learning curve. One must stick with it because once this skill is learned, you can apply it to your online marketing and achieve success using it.
I understand that many of you are coming from different levels of knowledge, some of you know little to nothing about ranking in the SERPS, some of you have a little knowledge but not enough to DOMINATE and the rest of you probably know enough about SEO to rank high for certain keywords.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically performing small tasks on and to your website so that the search engine spiders can crawl (look over) your site so they can include it in their directory, this is also known as getting indexed.
A spider is a robot that the search engines use to scour the web and check millions of millions of websites at super speeds. Since there are millions of sites being built each day, there is no way you or any company can keep up with a task such as that. These spiders index and sort web pages by relevance, so your web page shows up in the search engines when it is appropriate for the keyword you are targeting.
All activity on the web starts with a keyword! People get on the internet to search for something and they generally go the search engines to find this information. When a topic is searched in the search engines the most relevant sites will show up first! These sites have optimized their web pages to show up first in the SERPS. Web pages with the TOP rankings get all the traffic for absolutely NO cost!
Most prospects/searchers only look at the TOP 3 results of any search engine listing! So you can’t be dangling at the bottom of the results page expecting to get traffic!
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To SEO or To PPC?
Posted on 16. Nov, 2009 by admin.
The online community is definitely a large market place that you cannot ignore, especially if you have an internet business. There are thousands if not millions of consumers that you can tap in the internet.
At the same time, the internet also poses a quite different challenge. The easy access that internet provides also gives you as much competition as you can imagine. It is too crowded and congested.
Having a website is not enough to make your business running and able to compete. You must take other alternatives to give way for the online community to access your website at any rate or chance possible.
You have to expose your website. Make it known. It has to be visible. It has to be frequently targeted by consumers and surfers.
Invest in marketing your internet site. There are basically two options available to you, the SEO and PPC. These two are probably the most desirable alternatives you can get for your internet business as strategy for search engine marketing.
1. SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Some researches indicate that 60% – 70% of internet surfers and users actually resort to using the Google search engine to find and locate web sites and pages, for any topic they desire. SEO is the process taken to make sure that the internet uses will find your website when ranked among the top results of a search. This way you can make sure that you will be visible and can clearly stand out from the rest.
To get a search engine optimization, you will have to build on your own internet site frequently hit internet links to web site pages. The process will involve IBLN or Independent Back-Linking Network, wherein hundreds or even thousands of pages will be utilized to promote a particular website of a client.
In SEO, there is no need for you to pay for the clicks although it will require you to spend time doing research to get a favorable combination of ads and target audience. The SEO process is a long term one. It requires months, 6 months at the least, before the proper outcome is fully achieved, but once the goal is accomplished, you will definitely get a steady source of profit.
2. PPC
PPC means Pay Per Click. It gives way advertising on a search engine. These are sponsored listings that you see whenever you make a search. There will be a charge whenever a visitor or web surfer clicks on any of your ads. There will first be a bidding process. The highest bidder for the price per click will definitely get the chance to be first listed in the search engine.
With this kind of advertising, you can still basically control your campaign as you get to create your own ad. You will also manage the target audience and still stay within the bounds of your budget. Most of the providers of PPC advertising will allow you to specify the target market, either by topic, industry or geographical location. You can also very well check if your ad gets to be shown at all and if it is competitive with the rest.
There are some guaranteed benefits when you get to maximize the PPC strategy.
- PPC lets you advertise to the whole of the online community. It is also relatively easy to set up.
- At first glance, PPC advertising may seem very expensive. Could it possibly happen that someone out there will go on clicking on your ad? This will definitely give you a large bill without the expected profit on your part. If this provides a lot of worries, be rest assured that there is a protection for you. Networks are able to recognize fraudulent clicks.
- You can also set a budget for a certain period. The moment your budget has been used up by the target number of clicks, your ads will no longer be displayed until the next period you want it again displayed.
- You will also be able to adjust well to changes in market demands and trends.
In deciding which of the two strategies will work right for you, think of your goals and of your resources. They definitely offer benefits and advantages that will work for your good. The better way to approach this two is to evaluate according to your short term and long term plans. Take the PPC course for your short term goals and choose SEO if you have long term ones.
There world is out there for you now. Just make sure you do what will work best for your entrepreneurial endeavors and visions. The secret to success lies in your hands. Just study your options well and you’ll get exactly what you want.
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Top Search Engine Optimization Marketing Secrets
Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by admin.
Search Engine optimization is all about making modifications to websites, which can help attract more visitors, ultimately converting into sales. When you design the website, you ought to make sure that you use seo marketing secrets that will bring in the requisite traffic. However, sometimes in spite of spending a substantial amount of money, you may not get the expected results. Though you have taken the effort for SEO there may be some mistakes that led to losses. You should be aware of some typical mistakes often made and ensure that you avoid them.
- Bad selection of keywords: When you select keywords, make sure that you do not select highly unique or highly popular keywords. If you use unique keywords, though you would list at the top of the search engine rankings, you may not find yourself any relevant customers. Similarly, if you use some very popular keywords, you will face stiff competition from those already at the top.
- Ignoring title tags: Many times people ignore the title tags that can greatly improve search engine optimization marketing secrets. Using keywords in the title tag helps, as the search engine can find relevant keywords in the very beginning, which can make it easier and faster.
- Not providing HTML version: If you have designed a website only in Flash, then it becomes difficult for the viewers with slower connection to download it. Similarly, it becomes even more difficult for the search engine spiders to crawl. Rather, search engines ignore such sites. In such cases, it is necessary that you provide a HTML version also for your website, which is useful for your search engines to find you.
- Failing to provide sitemap: Often when you make JavaScript menus and do not provide sitemaps your site fails to make better impact on the search engines. What it means is that search engines cannot read JavaScript menus. With sitemaps, you can enable indexing and crawling by search engines, failing which you would not get higher rankings.
- Focusing too much on Meta Tags: Many experts feel Meta Tags are fast becoming obsolete, so avoid focusing too much on them.
- Using too many images for menus and heading: Though images make your page look good, using text for menus and headings helps search engines to find what they are looking for easily. The search engines cannot read images, which means a zero effect on your attempts to improve rankings.
- Resorting to backlilnk spamming: Avoid getting backlinks using link farms, hidden links etc. You will benefit by creating back links from relevant and authentic sites like article directories. Similarly, using too much interlinking is also considered a backlink spamming.
- There are other small things like using fancy fonts, too many tiny fonts. Similarly, using FrontPage is not advisable. There is a possibility that the output may be poorly crafted and may not even be compatible with all browsers. Though a small spelling mistake can be of help to get visitors, it is not advisable as they do not speak to well of the quality of a website. Your links should never have any spelling or grammatical mistakes.
Remember, that you should regularly update and keep your website fresh. Ensure that you do not make these search engine optimization marketing mistakes or all other efforts will be in vain.
