Posts Tagged ‘keywords’
The keywords you target can have a huge impact on the search rankings you obtain and the traffic you get. First and foremost your keywords need to relevant to the content of your pages. If you have a page about green widgets you don’t want to try to optimize that page for the term red widgets.
Popularity vs. Competition
There are really two parts to keyword research once you have in your mind the kind of keywords that are relevant to your page. You need to be concerned with how many people search for the keywords and how much competition there is for the keywords.
No Searches = No Traffic
It is useless to optimize for keywords that no one searches for. You need a way to get an idea of how many searches per month are done for your selected keyword phrase. Fortunately, there is a great free tool from Google AdWords that you can use. You can even enter the URL of the page you want to target and the tool will suggest keywords.
Competition
The other side of the keyword selection coin will determine how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keyword phrase. You need to see how many Web sites are competing for the same keywords. The easiest way to gauge competition is to do a search on Google for your phrase and place quotes around it to specify the exact phrase. If there are hundreds of thousands of pages found you may want to choose a less competitive keyword phrase.
Remember to read the rest of the SEO tips to get more ideas for optimizing your site.
Of all my search marketing tips this is the most critical and the hardest to implement. Google and the other search engines rank your pages primarily based on how many targeted links you have from other sites. Getting those links is hard and time consuming without a little help.
Targeted Links are Like Gold
You can have thousands of links to your site but if they do not use your keywords in the linking text and they require a link back they are not very effective in getting your pages ranked. However, if you get 100 one way links that use the proper keywords and they link to the proper pages on your site you can take over top positions in Google easily. The problem is that it is much easier to get 1000 untargeted two way links than to get those 1oo targeted one way links that Google loves.
The Hard Way
You can get those links yourself if you have a lot of time and persistence and know exactly what you are doing. You can create sites on free services and link back to your pages and you control the links. If you know where to get the links and have dozens of hours per week to work on it you can probably get your 100 targeted links in a year or so. There must be an easier more efficient way.
The Easy Way
As with everying in life, it doesn’t cost money it costs time. Perhaps you can do your own plumbing, but if your time is valuable you will probably hire a plumber. I offer a service that will get you 100 very targeted high quality links and will do it slowly and carefully just the way Google expects to see it happen. You can do it for free and spend your own time or you can pay to have the job done professionally. Please visit the main page of this site and learn more about the service I offer. If you are interested there is a form at the bottom of the page to register. I’ll take a look at your site and see if I can boost your search engine rankings with my service. Go here to get search marketing results.
LSI or latent semantic indexing is probably the most complicated aspect of search engine optimization, but when you know a little about LSI it’s not a difficult concept. When you think LSI, think context.
Words That go With Other Words
Latent semantic indexing is something Google is incorporating into its indexing algorithms to try to figure out exactly what a page is about. Here is an hypothetical case: Suppose Google finds a page with the main keyword phrase “mouse movements” and needs to match it to user searches. Is the page about moving a computer mouse or is it about the movements of a rodent? There will be clues in the text. If it is about a computer mouse there will be words like computer or mouse pad, or optical, or right click, etc. If it is about a rodent there may be words like cheese, trap, maze, droppings, etc.
How can you Use LSI?
Now that you know what it is, how can you use latent semantic indexing to help your Google rankings? The best thing you can do is to make sure your writing is unambiguous. Say you are targeting “blue widgets” and you want to make sure Google knows clearly what your page is about. Think about the context in which you are using the term and make sure the wording you use stays on topic.
You could also go to Google and search for Blue Widgets and read the pages that come up with the highest rankings and see what other words they are using. However, don’t spend a lot of time trying to second guess Google. Just keep LSI in mind while you are writing and it may help you focus on your targeted keywords and the naturally related words. Remember, LSI is all about the context of your words.
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Having an appropriate keyword density for the keywords you are targeting is probably the single most import factor in on-page search engine optimization. The way that google and other search engines determine what your page is about is largely by seeing what keyword phrases appear most often. That is a simplified view, but its still a useful way to look at it.
Don’t Overdo It
The only thing worse than having your keyword phrase not appear enough on your page is having it appear too many times. The search engines, especially Google, are wise to people writing pages for the search engines and not for people. If you stuff the page with keywords your rankings will be penalized. Google’s prominence in the search engine realm is due to providing a good user experience and they know how to weed out the junk.
Don’t Under do It
I have had clients ask me to look at page and tell them why they were not ranking in the search engines for a particular search phrase only to find the phrase was not on the page at all. You cannot expect the search engines to read your mind. If you don’t include the search term a few times you can’t expect to rank for it. The clients often tell me they put the phrase in the META keywords tag and don’t understand why that is not enough. As you will see in another tip, for the most part, the search engines ignore the META keyword tag, especially if it doesn’t match the text on the page.
What is a Good Keyword Density?
There are no absolute number I can give you because there are many factors that go into how pages are ranked. However, for Google, a good range to shoot for is 3 to 5 percent. I’ve seen pages way outside this range rank well, but it depends on so many factors that there is no surprise in that. The 3 to 5 percent range is a safe bet, but don’t be concerned if some pages are lower or higher. Yahoo and MSN tend to do better with higher keyword density, so it is always good to mix it up to diversify your traffic sources.
I hope this tip has given you a guideline and a starting place. Be sure to read the rest of my search optimization tips to gain more knowledge of how the search engines work.
The truth is, if you wanted to skimp somewhere and not include something on your pages this would be the element you leave out. However, I think there is still benfit to using the META keywords tag.
Times Change
At one time the search engines relied heavily on what you put in your META keywords tag. At that time the search engines did not have the sophistication they do now in parsing a page and determining for themselves what it is about. Many Webmasters abused the keywords tag and stuffed it with irrelevant keywords that they thought would get them traffic. As a result, they META keywords entries are mostly ignored by the search engines, especially Google.
I Use Them Anyway
I still like to use META keywords. There is some evidence that Yahoo does still pay attention to them and used properly they can’t hurt your rankings. You should be sure, however, to not keyword stuff your keywords tag. Don’t put words that are not actually on the page and don’t repeat keywords dozens of times. In fact, I almost never list a keyword more than once in the tag just to be safe.
It Helps you Focus
One reason I still use the META keywords tag is to make sure I’m focused on which keywords I’m targeting. It helps to be thinking about the exact keywords you want to be ranked for while you are writing the page. If you figure that out ahead of time and document the keywords in your META keywords tag you can be more organized and deliberate about your keyword targeting.
There are lots more search marketing tips for you to explore.
