As people continue to do more business and research over the Internet, search engine optimization (SEO) firms are scratching their heads wondering how to achieve great rankings for their Web clients.
And business owners are getting more desperate because they want a piece of the $143 billion online sales that took place in the United States during 2005. Thats a 22% jump from 2004 with no slow down in sight.
One method of supposedly generating great rankings is called linking. This technique has gained in popularity with SEO firms, but produces questionable results. Terms like, mutual linking, one-way linking, reciprocal linking, cross linking, and partner linking have worked their way into SEO strategy plans of Web masters around the world. The justification for linking is more links means more importance which equals more traffic.
Beware of this method. To presume that Google will assign or rank your site higher based on a large number of links is simply not true.
Linking Does Not Equal Ranking
If youve followed the linking method and have linked or traded links with 100,000 other Web sites, congratulations on the hard work. You have asked the Googlebot 100,000 times to index your Web site, assuming that the sites you have linked to are indexed by Google.
The Googlebot, one of many search bots or spiders that Google uses to crawl the Internet, will see your Web site link listing in the Web sites or directories where you have linked. But this will not increase your ranking. You have simply asked the Googlebot to return to your Web site multiple times and cache your Web sites information or content.
Three Primary Factors Determine Rankings
Content
Three primary factors determine your Web sites ranking or position in Google or other major search engines for a particular term or search phrase. The first and most important factor is content.
Content is king. If you have a Web site that sells left-handed products, then add talking points about any and everything left-handed. Talk about the history of left-handed beliefs, list famous left-handed people, and write about left-handed beliefs in other cultures and countries. Make your Web site the go-to source for everything left-handed.
Many people and businesses do not have time to actually write their own Web copy. A professional copywriter can furnish you with keyword-rich, highly original Web content to enhance and improve the quality of your Web site with the aim of transforming more of your visitors into customers. If this is a budget buster, consider publishing E-Zines or using article Web sites, which allow you to republish articles related to your Web site or business. However, original content is best.
Relevancy
The second factor that determines your Web sites ranking or position in Google for a particular term or search phrase is relevancy.
Beware, relevancy is in the mind of the beholder. Make sure you are interpreting yourself through the publics eye. What is relevant to you is not necessarily relevant to a new visitor to your Web site or the search engines. If you are a wedding planner, your Web site may contain information, links and articles about wedding-related subjects such as, bakeries, florists and bridal wear. Should you include jewelry or marriage advice Thats up to you. Remember to ask yourself, Is this relevant to my visitors
Visitors
Search engines are machines. They compile information about the Web site content it indexes and records. Therefore, if a poorly ranked Web site receives an astronomical amount of UNIQUE visits, the Web site position and ranking in most major search engines will improve exponentially. This might happen if a little known Web site was mentioned in the main stream news media.
If you, like many other Web site owners, are not that fortunate, you will have to rely on email campaigns, newsletters and networking to get the word out.
Visitor traffic is not the be-all, end-all to ranking strategy, but it certainly helps Google determine where to rank your Web site in the search engine universe.
In a nutshell, there is no magic bullet to great search engine results. But using Content that is Relevant to your Visitors will take you a long way. Build your Web site for visitors and search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Tehoma, AlltheWeb, Excite, and Lycos, will follow.
About the Author
Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a . They provide services to national companies as well as small to medium businesses throughout the United States. Rick can be reached at (757) 619-6456 or .
In this article, we will briefly touch on one method of finding the best keywords to position your web-site at the top of as many searches as possible.
The Master Keyword Chart that we will create will, however, fulfill many other functions that will make a definite impact on the effectiveness of our web-sites.
Now we all know that attempts to fool the search engines are doomed to failure 99% of the time. The alogorithms have already been set to scupper your efforts, or if they havent, they soon will be.
Nonetheless, there are many legitamate, effective ways of optomizing your site such as;
a.. creating well researched meta-tags;
b.. the trading of relevant, quality links;
c.. posting of articles, network posts & advertisements for inward links;
d.. referencing other websites for outbound links;and, most importantly;
a.. filling your pages with compelling, informative content.
The one thing that ties together all these methods, and many more, is KEYWORDS.Everything a spiderbot (a search engines little hunter) does is guided by their search for the best keywords that match a search-term that a user enters everytime they perform a search.
With so many web pages (over 1 billion) competing for those prized No.1 spots, however, it pays us to spend some considerable time researching which keywords are worth trying tooptomize.
By using a very simple, free tool called the Keyword Selector Tool from Overture, http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ , the grand-daddy of the search engines, along with the search engine that we want to be placed highly on, we can find which specific keyword terms will bring us the highest number of visitors, whilst offering the least amount of competition.The result will be a Master Keyword Chart.
1. Creating a Master Keyword Chart.
This can be done in your choice of a database, spreadsheet or text file. I prefer a spreadsheet, but this is a matter of personal preference. I dont recommend using a basic text editor (such as Notepad or Wordpad) as this will limit the functionality available and calculating the formulas that will be covered later, will be very time consuming. If however, you feel more comfortable using this, you can still produce just as good a chart.(You can download an excellent free, open-source office suite at OpenOffice.org which comes with both a database and a spreadsheet program).
Using the spreadsheet example, you first need to create 4 columns as illustrated below:-
KEYWORD TERM SUPPLY DEMAND USE-ABILITY
article keyword 511 25 20marketing
keyword article 55,000 35 1571
In this example I have used the search phrase or keyword term of keyword article and I created it by;i) Opening the free Overture Keyword Selector Tool and in the box provided, entered my keyword term.After a few seconds, depending on your connection, a list of all related keyword terms that have been searched for in the course of a month (normally 2 months ago) will be shown. The numbers to the left are the amount of times these terms were searched.
I recommend that you start with a keyword term that is relatively generic as it is often surprising to find what people search for. You may miss a well suited phrase if you are too specific to begin with.
ii) I have then copied each term and entered it into my chart as shown. I have then entered the number of times each was searched into the Demand column.(In this example, the top searched term was - article flighti*******al****keyword search****test . Now this search term was either the result of a bot or someone purposely searching for the term in order to move their own site up the listings. One of the alogorithms the search engines use is that of how many times a term is searched. Many times, when using the Overture Tool used here, you will return results such as these. As in everything else, common sense plays an important part. Do not just blindly follow the formula or entirely hand over your own judgement to statistics.
This search term only returned 4 phrases, which is very low, but fortunately, useful for use in this article.Most searches will return a much larger number. As you go down the list, only copy those terms that you feel would have a place in your web-page content. If for instance, you are writing about Birmingham UK, keyword terms that contain Birmingham, Alabama, would have no relevance. Ignore these.
iv) We now have our list of terms and the demand for their searches. Next, we need to know how much competition exists for each term. open your favorite search engine and enter each search term.
N.B. When you enter the terms, be sure to enclose them in . If you just enter the words as on their own, you will be given ALL the sites containing the words, anywhere, and in any order.to illustrate - keyword article above, entered without quotation marks, returned - 30,600,000 compared to 55,000 when using the quotations. you can be pretty sure that all of the 55,000 were relatively well placed in the 30,600,000 since they had the actual phrase as entered. We are targeting for the top spot, so are only interested ion those other sites that also have the exact phrase.
v) At the top of the search engines window, you will see something like Results 1 - 10 of about 55,000. It is the 55,000 that we now want to enter into the Supply column alongside each keyword term.
vi) Now, before we apply the simple formula, we need to give our common-sense some more exercise.You may have some terms that are showing hundreds of thousands, or even millions, that are optomized for that term. These would be unrealistic for many of us to try and position highly against, so can be deleted straight away. Conversely, there may be some terms that whilst are in very low demand - under 50, for instance. However, these are at times the most profitable. Let me explain with a different example;-
Entering tableware into the Keyword Selector Tool, I find that country moose tableware had 44 people search for it. Now I have no idea what country moose tableware is, but let us go with it. On a search in Google, I find that there are only 13 sites returned for this term, and they are all suppliers. If I can then find an affiliate and/or dropship deal with one or two of them and I write some good copy on country moose tableware, what are the chances of my site getting into the top 3 of the page. now only 44 people have searched, but with such a specific term, the chances of these people looking to buy are very high, resulting in excellent conversion, which, in the end, is what we are all looking for.
Anyhow, back on with our chart. We are almost done.
vii) Now we have eliminated all terms that have just too much competition, made a seperate note of any especially specific terms, and have a list of all others. We can now, simply divide the supply figures by the demand figures, entering the results in the use-ability column. We then sort the results in ascending order. (This is where a spreadsheet is particularly useful).
The keyword terms with the lowest use-ability figures are the ones we are most interested in. These are the ones with the least competition, whilst being searched the most often. In the keyword article example above, this was self-evident. with only 511 sites coming up for keyword article marketing and 25 people searching for it.It is going to be much easier to achieve a good position with these keywords, and click-thrus, than trying to compete with 55,000 others for keyword article for the sake of only 10 more searchers.However, for most other keyword terms, your number of results, and the figures called up, will be much more variable and complex, so it is always worth applying the formula. Now I know which keyword phrases I want to optomize my pages for to bring me the best possible position in those searches that will bring me the highest return.
I have a completely FREE course on how to gain top-placement for any web-site available, simply find my email address on my website and make contact.
This 250+ page course also gives access to SEARCH IT! - containing the Overture Keyword Selector Tool, andmany more analysis tools to help your site optomization.
2006. Andrew E. Barnes. You are welcome to reproduce & reprint this article provided that the content & links remains unchanged and this resource box is included intact.