Posts Tagged ‘SEO tips’
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.
You probably know by now that Google values links from other sites in ranking your site. But, did you know that the way your own pages link together can have a big impact on how your pages, and therefor, your site ranks?
Maximizing Internal Links
Many Webmasters think that as long as users have a logical way to get through the site they have done their job. However, the search engines see things a little differently. Google and other search engines determine how important a page is by what other pages it is linked to. So, if the Google spiders need to go through a series of five links to get to a page they are not going to rank it as highly as one that was two pages from the main page. Ideally all of your pages should be no more than two links away from the home page or even linked directly on the home page.
Easy for Small Sites – Not so Much or Big Sites
If you only have ten or fifteen pages on the site then you can easily link all pages from the home page and link back from all the pages. If you can do that, they do it and you will maximize the value of all your pages. But what if you have a thousand pages or even more. Linking everything from the home page would be a disaster. What can you do?
Hubs of Content
If you organize your site into topics and create content hubs you can solve the big site linking problem. Create an index for each hub and link to all content on that topic from that index. Then link from those pages back to the hub and to the home page. Cross linking between content pages is also valuable where practical. When you do this with a large site be prepared for a lot of search engine spider traffic. The spiders live internal links and will bounce around for hours at a time indexing and ranking your pages.
Anchor Tags
Anchor tags are simple the text phrases you use in links. Just was with incoming links it is important to use the correct keyword phrases when you link to other pages on your site. If you are linking to chocolate cake recipes and you are targeting the phrase “chocolate cake recipes” on that page then use “chocolate cake recipes” as your link text. As with external links you will want to vary those links somewhat and target multiple keywords.
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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.
I can help you get search marketing results with my linking service, but for my work to be the most effective for you there needs to be a proper foundation of on-site optimization.
The good news is that on-site search optimization is much easier than most people think it is. You just need to take it one step at a time and make some small changes that can help you big time in getting good search marketing results. That is why I’m giving you bite sized tips that you can put into practice right away. Each tip is listed below with a brief description. Click on the title to get the full text of the tip. Please note that I’m still working on this site and all links may not yet be available but they will soon.
It all starts with choosing the right keyword phrases. You want to use keywords people search for, that are not supper competitive, and are relevant to the content of the page you are optimizing.
The title of every page on your site should be different and contain the main keyword(s) for that page. Lean how to use keyword rich titles to get better rankings.
Learn about the META description tag and why you should write accurate and enticing descriptions for every page.
You should always use carefully selected keywords for every page on your site. Find out the truth of how search engines use the META Keywords tag and how it can help or hurt your rankings.
Learn how many times you should mention a keyword you are targeting on your site’s pages.
What the Heck is LSI and Why Should you Care
LSI is short for latent semantic indexing. It sounds highly technical and difficult, but it’s not. Find out exactly what LSI is and how you use it to get better ranking for your site.
The way the pages on your own site link together can have a significant impact on yoru search engine rankings. Learn about using proper anchor tags and content hubs.
Why are incoming links the most important factor in your search marketing results? How can you get the right kind of incoming links from the right sites at the right pace to please Google and the other search engines?
If you are ready to maximize your search engine rankings you need to visit the main page of this site and let me help catepolt your site to the top of the search engines so you can see real search marketing results. If you are serious about increasing your profits and can make a small investment in your Web site fill out the form at the bottom of that page and I’ll let you know if I can help your site succeed.
