More General Keywords

The quality of links one employs in a search engine optimization plan will play a huge role in the effectiveness of the eventual placement of the website in the major search engines. Then again, it also does not hurt to see the rankings boosted in the smaller search engines as well! In all seriousness, you will want to see the website placed high in the rankings. Quality links will place a role in this.

By quality links, it is meant that you need to place links on relevant websites that have decent page ranking. Such links provide the much needed “juice” that will boost the presence of the site in the rankings. When you are placing procuring quality links, you will get quality results.

Does this mean that lower quality links will have no value? It would really not be correct to state that a link placed on a site or blog ranked with 0 PR will have 0 value. It will just have very little value and you will need to add TONS of low rated resources to get anything out of it. You could always add such links. In fact, you are advised to add such links. But, you cannot build a complete search engine optimization plan around such weak links. You need a few quality ones as well.

Actually, you will need more than just a few quality links. You will need to amass a decent amount of them to experience decent results in the rankings. Acquiring such links should not prove all that complicated if you know where to go. Many will opt to purchase such links or work with a professional placement service. This will aid in cutting down on the time required to find and place links on the net.

It does not hurt to add a few “errant” links on the internet here and there via comments and signatures. Hat is, you could add links within any blog comments you leave or within the signature of any message board posts you make. This would all have the rather positive impact of adding a few extra “mini votes” to your search engine ranking. Certainly, that will not hurt at all.

Just be sure to look out for website directories that have a decent page rank and submit your links to them. While it may not be easy to find a website directory that delivers a PR5 ranking, you can find a decent amount of PR2 or PR3 ones. These would certainly prove to be helpful directories as far as gaining search engine juice.

Once again, the proper mix of low PR and high PR placement will eventually deliver the results you seek. The key here is to have balance so that the search engines will take notice of your links and tally their value. Keep in mind that it will take time for the search engine robots to index the links. There are no immediate results. This will be true regardless of the value of the links.

Again, a comprehensive link building strategy is what you will want to attain success. There really is no way around this fact of SEO life!

While researching keywords for your website, you will come to know that there are a number of keywords that can be targeted. Most of these keywords will be longer than 2-3 word key phrases. Optimizing a website for one or two word keyword is very difficult but if you target a long term, it will be a relatively easy job.

The keywords that are more descriptive, usually have a low search volume but high conversion ratio. If you combine all your ‘long tail keywords’, they will show a reasonable search volume to target and such key phrases are searched by mostly a prospect buyer of your services.
In the figure above, we are targeting the keyword ’shoes’. This keyword has a very high search volume and because of that a very tough competition. You might get noticed for this keyword through an advertising campaign but your website and products listed over it must be very interesting to get user attention.

The second keyword is ‘mens shoes’. In this keyword, we have specified a category ‘men’ so we’ll only get users who are searching for mens shoes. A low cost and relatively low risk keyword but conversions for this keyword word still remain a question with respect to the website and products listed over it.

Now we move to the very specific users of search engines who are willing to buy and are looking for ‘red Nike mens running shoes’. It is a long keyword but very specific. Competition will be very low or there might be no competition at all for this keyword. Conversion ratio will be high and it will be very easy to optimize a website for this keyword.
Bottom-line; Research keywords properly and never ignore those keywords which have low search volume as they might be the best ones to target and get high conversions.

In order to get the absolute maximum potential out of your articles, they must not only be appealing to potential readers, they must be appealing to search engines as well. This means sprinkling searchable keywords throughout your articles (including your title) that attract search engine spiders. This will give your articles keyword balance.

By the way, when interspersing keywords throughout your articles, be careful not to repeat them so often they looked forced. Overdoing it with keywords (known as keyword stuffing)will make your articles read unnaturally, and will lead to an unpleasant reading experience for your readers.

In addition, if search engine spiders discover too many of the same keywords in your articles they will penalize your articles for spamming. This will adversely affect the search engine ranking of your articles. It might even get your site blacklisted if the spiders detect a pattern of keyword stuffing on your site.

So, what is the correct density of keywords for an article? Personally, I don’t think keyword density even exists as a calcuable numeric constant. In other words, don’t worry about the correct keyword density. And don’t worry about counting keywords. Just write.

Speaking of writing, I need to clarify what I meant at the beginning of this article when I said:

“In order to get the absolute maximum potential out of your articles, your articles must not only be appealing to potential readers, they must be appealing to search engines as well.”

I feel it’s important to explain what I meant by that statement, because it could easily be misconstrued. When I said your articles must be appealing to search engines, I wasn’t implying you should write for the search engines. That’s the last thing you ever want to do. You should always write with the reader in mind…ALWAYS.

That being said, if you want your pages to rank high in the search engines, you have to give the spiders something to latch on to. You have to give them relevancy. The keywords you use must be as relevant as possible to the page they’re on.

And the best way to do that is to establish keyword relevancy right out of the gate with your article title. Whenever possible, you should use your primary keywords in your title. No, not for the benefit of the spiders, but for the benefit of readers. You see, if you write articles focused on attracting a specific audience, you will automatically attract the search engines. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Establishing keyword relevance right from the start also means using your primary keywords in the first paragraph of your article. And then, throughout the rest of your article, including the closing paragraph.

Again, don’t force anything. Never place a keyword somewhere it doesn’t belong – where it doesn’t fit. Just write naturally, so that your article has a nice flow. After you complete your article, in addition to reading it yourself, let a couple of people you trust look it over to make sure it reads naturally. If it does, congratulations!

You’ve achieved your goal of writing a keyword balanced article.

SEO success depends largely on choosing the right keywords to start off with. Here we’ll discuss how to find and shortlist the best keywords for your website.

So let’s look at the first step of SEO: Keyword Analysis. Not the most appealing topic, but an absolutely critical foundation nonetheless. Keyword analysis is all about finding out which keywords people are searching for.

Essentially we’re measuring the demand for any given keyword. How we find this informational gold bar is by using Google’s free Keyword tool.

Using the Google Keyword tool, type in a broad term that would describe what your website offers. As an example, I’ll use an accounting firm, who provides various accounting services. For this, we will utilize a broad term, such as “accountant”.

The keyword tool will then show you the result, usually with 50 results per page. The next step is to sort this information by “Local Monthly Searches”, high to low.

From this list, we choose 10 – 20 keywords which best describe the actual website which is being optimized and write them down (or export them to Excel). There next step is to analyze the competition for your chosen keyword(s).

Using the list we have created, we need to visit Google.com and start assessing the competition for these keywords. Obviously, the lower the competition, the easier it will be to optimize for, so the ultimate goal in keyword research is to find high search volume keywords with low competition.

How we assess the competition is by typing each keyword into Google, one at a time, with inverted commas on either side. For example to assess the competition for the keyword, accountant, we would type “accountant” into Google and set it to South African results (or whichever country you are in). From this, we would see that the keyword “accountant” has 208,000 results – that’s way too much competition for any sane person. So we look for another keyword, say “accounting services” – this shows us only 24,000 results – getting better.

And so the process is continued until we find the best keywords with good search volumes and low competition.

I always try to target keywords which have less than 10,000 results locally, but this is not always possible. If the website is that of a local business, then its always a good idea to try using the keyword, along with the city name. e.g. “accountant Johannesburg” – which, as it turns out, only has 2,500 results… Now we’re talking….

And that sums up the first step in basic SEO – keyword research. Try to narrow down 3-5 keywords for your website to start with.

As with business, finding your niche is of paramount importance – the more targeted your keywords are, the easier it is to rank in and dominate the search engines. In my next column, I’ll show you how to implement these keywords into your website and get the ball rolling.

Google introduced another algorithm update in May 2010 and many webmasters have seen a huge drop in traffic from Google for keyword phrases that are three or more keywords long, known as long tail keywords.

Google is now able to index longer keyword phrases more accurately. It seems that Google guessed the best pages for long keyword phrases until recently based on other signals and keywords on the indexed pages. The new Google patent indicates that Google now has the computing power to index longer keyword phrases on web pages instead of guessing them.

What does this mean to business owners, webmasters and SEO companies? It means that those who have taken the time to anticipate the need of their customers and Google’s customers will be rewarded.

Whether in SEO terms or in pay per click advertising terms, long tail keywords are highly valuable. Think about what your search process is yourself and you will more than likely realize this.

The average person searching at the research phase will use a competitive generic keyword such as “party dress”. Not long after searching and seeing some high prices they will modify their search to something like “cheap party dress.” Now we are already into long tail keyword territory but it can go further. As the search deepens the searcher realizes that pink is the trendy color at the moment, or pink is what she fancies wearing on her next night out, so then she is using the long tail keyword “cheap pink party dress.”

The more experienced the searcher the more likely she will start off with this right at the beginning so as not to waste any time. And in general people are becoming far better at searching as the search engines continue to improve the results they show to us.

A long tail keyword means one of two things; either the person is close to making a buying decision or is an experienced searcher. Now with the Google algorithm update of May, combined with the buying profile of a long tail keyword searcher being stronger, and add in here the fact that a well optimized page for a long tail keyword has a far higher chance of getting to the first page of the SERPs then it is what they call a no brainer.

Think about it logically, when you want to find information online on products, services or for research reasons, you want to find it quickly, you want it to be as precise as possible and give you something extra that other information has not up until that moment.

Long tail keywords can be optimized in this way. The trick here is getting into the mindset of your customer and preempting all the possible things they would like to know about whatever the subject of the long tail keyword is and then going at least one step further. You will create a page which is resource, which means customers will like it and sites which see it as an authority may link to it.

On some of the search engine forums SEOs have stated that this algorithm which was named Mayday by some and Black Tuesday by others has had a disastrous effect on some well established sites which did not have enough content in deep pages.

Whether you are a small business owner, or a medium to large business owner, all the signs show that drilling down into your site with niche information across all aspects of your site based on long tail keywords is a good way to go. Long tail keywords are important both to your customers and the search engines; ignore them at your peril!

Long Tail Keywords for SEO There are many aspects of SEO that are important but even if you do every one of those things right, you may find that there is simply too much competition against others who have similar websites to your own. What are you to do in such a situation? One of the things you should focus on from the start is the use of long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are similar to any other type of keyword in that they are the words that a person is typing into a web search engine to look for your website or websites like your own. However, they are longer and more specific.

There are several key reasons why targeting these long tail keywords is important to building successful SEO. One of those reasons is the simple fact that your website will perform better in conversions when you use these words instead of the generic terms. For example, if you are trying to get your auto parts business online, building a website that targets words like auto parts is helpful, but it may be better to target actual locations. For example, you may want to choose keywords such as auto parts New York or auto parts Dallas. The difference here is that you are adding specification to the keywords which means that those in New York or Dallas who are looking for auto parts can find a local company to help them.

These types of keywords are long tail. They are made up of three or more words that relate to the keyword and provide the user with a more specialized search. Locations are not the only option for you to consider here. You may have a very specialized type of auto part that you sell. You may be building a website that discusses a specific type of vehicle.

Just like the research you do for traditional keywords, you also need to do the same type of research with long tail keywords. These keywords may not be used as much, but when you use them, you are likely to get a more specialized visitor to your website which may mean that you will turn a profit faster from that visitor than you would from a generic keyword. Long tail keywords should be included in your website to ensure that you are hitting your target market when it comes to visitors to your website.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don’t convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn’t going to help too terribly much so in my opinion – I’d put keyword research higher in importance. In fact, when I’m building affiliate sites my first step is to look up keywords and competition levels – then I look into products and websites and this method has worked very well indeed. It insures that I choose keywords that will both convert and that I can rank for in a period of  ime and with an effort level that matches the return.

So – if you’re doing keyword research, where should you begin? Unless you’re an affiliate marketer you already have a product and since you’re the target audience of this article – I’m going to assume that’s the case. For the purpose of this article I’m going to pick a hobby of mine and also an area where I don’t have a client and imagine I’m doing keyword research for the imaginary online downhill mountain biking store, DH Mountain Bikes.

So Where To Begin …

The first thing one needs to do is try to think up all the possible phrases that might apply. I call this my seed list… it’s the list of phrases that my research starts with and is generally based on brainstorming. In this case the list would be:

• downhill mountain bike
• dh mountain bike
• mountain bike

The keyword tool I generally use first is Google’s keyword suggestion tool. There are other great tools but I’ve found Google’s tool to be as accurate as any other, the price is definitely right (free), and they’re very good about providing the information required to know just how wrong the data is if you know where to look. So let’s do just that.

Before we begin you’ll need to head over to Google’s keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. In the top left (for now) you’ll see a link to a beta version of the tool. Click on the link and you’ll be at the new version of the tool which will provide you easy access to much more information – as long as you know what to look for. So let’s begin with our three seed phrases.

When you see the list you’ll first have to know what the numbers are. This tool is a tool designed for AdWords and the default number is the Broad match which means it includes every phrase with the term. For example, the term “mountain bike” has a broad match total of 2,740,000 which will include “downhill mountain bike”, “mountain bike parts”, “kona mountain bike”, etc. etc.

What we want to know is how many searches are for “mountain bike”. Down the left-hand side you’ll see a set of check boxes. Deselect “Broad” and select “Exact” and you’ll get the Exact match numbers – the number of searches for the exact phrase. You’ll quickly see that 2,740,000 drop to 450,000. This is how many people searched the GOOGLE SEARCH NETWORK for “mountain bike”. Why is this in caps – because it’s so commonly
misunderstood that I definitely want your attention brought to it. This isn’t the number of searches on Google.com – it’s the number of searches on all sites whose search is powered by Google. From YouTube to Beanstalk’s blog search – it’s all in there so the data starts to get skewed from the start. Then let’s add in all the automated queries from rank-checking tools and just manual searches from you and your competitors and the data gets further skewed. This skewing will exist in all data – the thing I like about using Google is that at least we know more about what’s adjusting the data.

OK – so from there we need to organize the data into a more useful set of information. To do this one needs to understand the columns of data. The first column is the keyword, the second you’ll see is a link to the term on Google Insights. We’ll get into this later. The next is Global Monthly Searches – this is the average number of searches/mo. worldwide. This can be helpful in some industries but in ours – I’m only concerned with the US market which is where my imaginary store ships to so I’m more interested in the next column Local Monthly Searches which is the number of searches in the US (or whatever region I’ve specified when entering my keyword phrases). This is the data I’m interested in. The last column is the search trend. This is extremely important but often overlooked. It is a column that wasn’t visible by default in the old/current version.

OK – let’s organize our data by search volume. Click on the “Local Monthly Searches” and you’ll see the keywords order by descending search volume. With this data in front of me I then typically look over to the Trend data to see what I can find there. In our case we’re going to see an increase in search volume in the spring and summer. This make sense of course. Think of your industry and see if the trends reflect what makes sense.

I’m also looking for anomalies. Often I’ll see phrases that jump for a single month. One has to know that unless there was a news story or other event that would spark interest in a single term or brand – a tool or some other such incident is likely falsifying the data. You need to look at these trends and see if they make sense. If not – you need to either test the phrases with PPC or just skip over them and select different phrases. There’s little worse as an SEO than focusing energies on a phrase only to find that the search volume is not what was expected based on the estimates delivered.

So now what?

So what do you do once you’ve filtered your data down to just what you’re interested in looking into competition levels on. Well – the first thing I do is to look to the trends to see if there are any phrases that obviously need to be filtered out. In this case there really aren’t any high in the search volume column. So the only thing left is to look at the competition levels to see what makes sense. For our purposes we’ll be dividing the list and research into two categories:

Major phrases – We need to decide what the long-term goals are going to be and the targets for the main pages. These will be the totally generic phrases such as “mountain bike” and “downhill mountain bike” as well as brand or type specific phrases such as “specialized mountain bike” and “full suspension mountain bike”.

Longtail phrases – We also need to look into the types of longtail phrases we’re going to want to target. In this case I know I’ll want to target specific parts which will require new research. I will spare you the details there, but I’ll end up with specific models of components such as “hayes mx2″. You don’t need to know what that is  - you need to know the makes and models in your industry (or other longatil opportunities such as “new york hotel with jacuzzi”, etc.)

I generally would gather together a list of 15 or 20 major phrases and 50 or 60 longtail phrases and would then head into the competition analysis to determine which phrases to move forward with.

And next week I’ll have that article for you…

Long tail marketing consists of niche marketing to a great many niches, selling small quantities of many products or services to each. Customers are targeted with “long tail keywords.” What does the term “long tail” refer to?

Chris Anderson popularized the “long tail” in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. Long tail keywords and niche marketing go together on the Internet. To see the long tail, get a spreadsheet of related keywords with their monthly searches, sort the keywords in decreasing order by searches and make a graph of the searches. You should find a very few keywords with many searches and a long tail of the distribution with few.

Most of us can successfully compete only for keywords in the tail of the distribution. The questions are: Which keywords in the tail? And compete how?

You can divide the keywords four search bands: the super, the high, the medium, and the low search keywords. The border between low and medium searches can be set to somewhere around 500 searches per month; between medium and high around 1000; and between high and super around 10,000.

You can divide the keywords into four competition bands as well: the super, the high, the middle, and the low competition keywords. The border between low and medium competing pages — pages containing the exact keyword phrase — can be set to somewhere around 10,000 searches per month; between medium and high around 20,000; and between high and super around 35,000.

To use a metaphor, the number of searches is the quality of the fruit — the higher the number of searches, the more ripe, plump, and tasty it is. The level of competition is where the fruit is on the tree. The super competitive keywords are on the tip top branches. The low competition keywords don’t even require you stretch. There are two not perfectly consistent principles for harvesting the fruit: (1) harvest the best fruit you can, and (2) pick the low-lying fruit first. Here are some suggestions on how to do that:

1) Remove the super high competition keywords from your list. You will not get that traffic.

2) Remove keywords with too high a level of competition for the number of searches. Why bother competing for them?

3) Do not target the high competition keywords first. Devote your time where it will do more immediate good.

4) Usually it is worth optimizing web pages by hand only for middle- or higher-band keywords. An exception might be for selling products with a high profit per sale — provided also the searcher is intending to buy.

5) You can devote web pages to low search and competition keywords if you generate the pages. That way, you only have to create the template once, but you get to reuse it for many keywords. It would not be worth your effort to write each one individually.

6) You can use the high end of the low band keywords in alternative titles of ezine articles. When you submit the articles through a submission service such as Submit Your Article or Unique Article Wizard, those services submit randomized variations of a your article to hundreds or thousands of article directories and blogs. They permit many alternate titles. You can have many articles spread around the web with titles including the low band keywords, all with less than twice the effort of submitting a single article. All these articles invite interested people to come to your web site. For the low competition keywords, appearance in a page title and page name (both of which you typically get in an article directory) may be enough to get the article listed on page one of the search results. Many page-one listings with few searches apiece is in the spirit of long-tail marketing.

7) There are a lot of searches for phrases the search engines have not seen before. You can devote a page as a destination for these very low frequency keywords. Create a page with a couple of thousand words of text filled with words and phrases related to your topic. When the search engine encounters some semantically-related but not yet indexed query, your page would be a good recommendation. You can also drop low-competition keywords into the text. They will bring a few searches themselves as well as contribute to the semantic classification of the page.

Divide your keywords by search frequency and by numbers of competing pages. It will help you plan your long-tail marketing.

Writing a keyword rich article title is beneficial to your article, but is it possible to balance SEO article writing with writing that also appeals to human readers?

Certainly!

If you follow the techniques and advice in this article, you will be creating titles that make sense, grab the reader’s attention, and accurately portray what your article is about.

Here’s where many people go wrong:

They write their article, then they say: “Now I need to figure out a way to get my keyword phrase into my title.”

Sometimes this afterthought approach works, but most of the time it doesn’t. When you create your article and title and then backtrack and try to get your keyword phrase in your headline, the result often looks unnatural and does not make sense.

Here’s the trick:

Do the opposite. Instead of finishing by trying to force your keywords into your already constructed article and title, use your keywords as a beginning point. Take your keyword phrase and brainstorm some natural sounding titles that incorporate that phrase. Then, write an article to satisfy the title.

Let’s look at some examples of keyword rich titles (listing the keyphrase first, then the titles):

• *Healthy Eating Habits*
• 10 Healthy Eating Habits That Will Help You Live Longer
• Healthy Eating Habits For Children
• *Short Track Speed Skating*
• The History of Short Track Speed Skating
• Short Track Speed Skating: A Beginner’s Guide

Each one of these titles makes sense, is comprehensible to a human reader, and is engaging enough to catch the attention of a reader interested in any of these topics. These titles are keyword rich, while still appealing to human readers. This is what you’re going for!

Notice that each of these phrases is a long tail keyword phrase (3-5 words long). When you are doing your keyword research you will come up with a list of long tail keyphrases and a list of 2 word keyword phrases. The long tail phrases are to be used in generating article titles and topics. The shorter main phrases are to be used in your resource boxes.

Does It Matter Where I Put My Keyphrase In My Title?

You may notice that some of the sample titles have the targeted phrase at the beginning of the title. If you can manage it in a natural sounding way, try to include the phrase at the beginning of the title. If not, don’t worry about it.

The point is not to use a strict title formula each time. Your goal is to generate quality titles that will attract readers, convey what the article is about, and also incorporate the keyphrase in a natural sounding way. If you come up with a great title that has the keyword phrase at the middle or the end of the title, then that’s fine. Focus on creating titles that are interesting and appealing to your target readers.

After you have gone through your list of long tail keywords and generated a few titles for each, then pick a title and write an article for it.

You see, this is the reverse of what many people do–take your key phrase, then brainstorm titles, then write an article that fulfills what the title promises. The result is a natural looking title and article. This is the type of article and title that readers, publishers, and search engines will love.

Keywords are phrases that people enter in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to find information, services, businesses or products. It’s how customers find us and buy. But, the Internet is a billion dollar industry and lots of businesses use various strategies to rank in the top 10 search results in these search engines. Statistics say that mostly people do not look beyond the first 20 search results. This data clearly shows how important it is to rank among the top 20 results or your business is not reaching your customers..

To find a pet shop in Los Angeles, we might type “pet shop in Los Angeles” in the search bar of a search engine. “Pet shop in Los Angeles” are keywords. The search engine will now crawl through millions of web sites and will bring up the most relevant results. The first 20 results are the ones to get the most business.

In order to get your web site ranked in the first 20 results, you need to perform a detailed keyword research. This research will help you find the most relevant keywords that people write to find the services you are providing. For example, if you own a “barber shop in San Jose, California,” just type the keywords in quotation marks and you will see the relevant results.

Now pull up a web site that ranks 1st and study it for the keywords. When you view the page source, you will see the different keywords. They are all highly relevant and that is what most people type to find a barber shop. After analyzing the various keywords on the page source, you should then read the text on home page and see as to how the keywords are being used in the text.

Keyword density is a very important aspect, as search engines mark high density keyword inclusion, in the text, as spam and those web sites are not included in the search results. When you are going through the text, you will find various keywords and how they are used. Now you can include them in your text as well as in the keyword meta tags that you saw by viewing page source.

Once you have added these specific keywords to your web site, it will take some time till the search engines crawls and registers them. After that, every time a person types, “Barber shop in San Jose, California,” your web site will be among the top results. The different keyword variations that can be used are “barbershop in San Jose,” “San Jose barbershop,” and other combinations.

Keyword research, analysis and inclusion in the web site is a professional’s job. This all comes under the bigger umbrella of search engine optimization. If you think you cannot give the time it needs, it is best that you consult a professional.