The most important thing you can do for your business and your website is develop relevantkeywords that are not too competitive yet generate targeted traffic to your website.
Its called keyword optimization. Why is it important
Because Keywords and keyword phrases do a coupleof things for you:
- With the right keywords, you will attract the viewers most interested in the items or services on your site.
- You will rank higher in the search engines for yourchosen keywords, saving you thousands of dollarsin advertising.
It all starts, however, with the best keywords that pertainto your product or services.
When selecting keywords you should select 1 perhaps2 of the most relevant keywords for each page of yoursite. I suggest using no more than two keywords per page, preferably one.
Why
Because search engines strive to deliver the most relevant pages for the search term entered. The more focused yourpage is for the search term, the more relevant the search engines will find your page. The more keywords you use,the less focused your page becomes.
How do you find keywords that your target audience will use
- Think like your readers. Take yourself outside your sitefor a minute and think about how you would find the products or services you are selling.
- Use Overtures Keyword Selector Toolhttp://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/Type in your most basic keyword and it will show you thevariations of the search term and also the count of how many times that term was entered in the search engine.
- Think of phrases as opposed to one single word. If yousell clay pots, think of keywords such as painted clay pots,or clay flower pots, large clay pots, buy clay pots. Use descriptive words when brainstorming phrases.
- Ask your relatives, kids and friends what they would type in to find your products. You would be amazed at the greatideas that can be generated. For example, I asked a teenager once what he would type in to find shoes online andhe said nice kicks. As of this writing, Overtures keyword selector tool showed a count of 12130. Hmmm, never would have thought of it on my own.
- Use a thesaurus or Websters dictionary to findsimilar words to your chosen keywords. Consider allforms of the word. For example, for the term supply thereis supply, supplies, supplier, supplying. Thinking of allforms of the word help a great deal in brainstorming keyword ideas.
- If you have a website already, place a search engine on your site. This would be a search engine that you put on your site that searches only your site such ashttp://www.freefind.com/. This will help you collect dataon what keywords users are using. Once youve collected a good list of search terms you can use this to help you determine the best keywords.
Along this same line, you can also use your website server logs to gather information on the keywords used to find yoursite.
Once youve made a list of the best keywords and keywordphrases, you will need to determine which ones are the best.
Your challenge is to find keywords that have a high usage countbut appear on the least amount of competing web pages.
Wordtracker.com is an excellent tool for helping you achieve this. Wordtrackers Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) will provide you with the number of times a keyword is used alongwith the number of competing web pages. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition. This means a better chance for you in getting to the top of the search engines.
Finding the best keywords and keyword phrases is an important part of your marketing mix. Find the correct keywords and buildyour content around them.
Elizabeth McGee strives to help webmasters and business ownersfind trusted marketing tools while also offering tips, stragegies and information for online marketing. Sign up for her FREE newsletter by visiting her site at:
To many websites, webmasters discover that major sources of website traffic come from search engines. Therefore, they are all keen on gaining top search engine placements through search engine optimization.
Based on our several years of SEO experience, we point out some common mistakes and shed some lights to correct it.
1. Cannot Get Indexed by Search Engines, Really
A came to me and asked a question: I have established a new website for 1 year, and found a SEO company to submit my website. However, my website can be found in search engines only when I type my domain name http://www.indigo8-solutions.com in search query box. The SEO company told me
my domain got banned. What can I do
Ah, I told them they have been fooled by that SEO company. If you type your domain name in search box and your website can be found, which means your website has not been banned. Interestingly, your SEO companys domain name is no longer found in Google. Their domain got banned only.
To help them find out their real problems, I found the following in search engines:
a. When typing their domain name in search query box, their site will be displayed in search result. Instead of displaying
Title Tag in the search result, search engine displays their domain name only.
b. Only 1 page is being indexed.
Whats the problem then
With a closer look to their coding, I found that at the top of their webpage, they heavily use Javascript to present theirheading, company name, visible content, and website menu. Actually, many search engines have difficulties in reading Javascript codes.
Solution
Put those Javascript in external js files and leave the webpages with plain HTML codes. Search engines usually have problems in crawling Javascript. Since their whole site navigation menu is written in Javascript, they should build a sitemap using plain HTML so that search engines can read all of their pages.
One more tips: When you cannot get indexed by search engines, do not blindly believe someone saying that your website get banned. You should firstly look at your website structure and see if your coding are clumsy and make search engines hard to read your website.
The problem created by Javascript is not uncommon nowadays. Even a very big also commits this error. They are now starting to rectify it.
2. Link Building
In many forums, some people are strongly opposed to link exchange and claim that it is a devil and it hurts your search engine ranking and even get you banned.
I personally do not agree. Evidence shows that many top sites are doing link exchange and getting top rankings across all major search engines. In addition, link exchange has been a long used way for traffic building by smaller websites. I do not see why search engines will block people to promote websites using this simple and long used method.
Indeed, link exchange becomes a problem only when you manipulate link text with a pure purpose of tricking search engines, exchange links with link farms, or buy hundreds of domain names and cross-link with your site.
A solution to avoid link exchange hurting you includes:
- Use a wide variety of link text
- Seek link exchange with sites of similar theme
- Emphasize on how many traffic you can get from your link partners instead of search engine ranking
Some webmasters know the importance of link exchange. However, they think that it consumes most of their time and finally give up doing it. A solution is that you can consider using Linkautomate.com to manage your links. This kind of software saves you time in link checking and link page update.
3. Use of Flash Intro
Web design companies try hard to persuade you to use a Flash introduction as your homepage. You think that Wow! The flash animation is very appealing and it makes your site looks more attractive. However, do you know that it can hurt your website in search engine ranking
Let me explain..
Search engines analyze website based on text. Flash, unluckily, is not text. According to How to Design Website Guideline of Siuchu Suga, search engines are not able to read content presented by Flash. They just treat Flash as an embedded object or graphics only. If you use a Flash Intro as your homepage, you will never get good rankings.
In addition, many Flash intro do not offer additional and meaningful content to visitors. Ask your visitors, how many of them are really interested in reading your Flash Intro before going straight to your website content
A solution to use Flash or not, please ask yourself whether the Flash intro is really useful and can offer additional information to your visitors Secondly, instead of a Flash homepage, you may consider making a Flash header together with content at your homepage.
4. Hidden Text and Meta Tags
Webmasters understand that keyword density is a way to improve search engine ranking, and some webmasters use a technique called keyword stuffing. They will stuff keywords into their webpages repeatedly, e.g. keyword 1, keyword 2, .... keyword 1, keyword 2.... Well, everyone knows it does not make sense to visitors. Therefore, those clever webmasters will make those text invisible. For example, make the text color identical to background color.
Unluckily, this trick no longer works. Search engines are able to detect it, and penalize websites using this nonsense technique. If you do not want your site being penalized, remove those text immediately in case you have adopted this method.
Okay, some webmasters only stuff keywords in Meta Keyword Tags, an area for putting keywords. I am sorry to say that stuffing keywords in Meta keyword tags is also no good. You can only repeat a keyword for 3 times at most. Nowadays, search engines place less emphasis or even no emphasis on Meta keyword tags. So, what is the point of risking yourself by stuffing keywords there
5. Use of Dynamic Pages
Many websites use content managment system (CMS) to generate their webpages. As generation of dynamic pages are easier for website development, CMS generally use dynamic pages. However, search engines have difficulties to spider and understand them.
To solve the problem, you can consider using Mod Rewrite in case you use Apache server or finding a CMS that can generate static HTML pages.
6. Be a Pagerank Monster
Many search engine marketers are too focused on their websites pagerank. Everyday, they are talking and checking pagerank.
They perform link building based on pagerank only. In fact, pagerank is only one factor for Google to determine search engine ranking. It also cannot affect your rankings in other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are too concerned about pagerank, you finally will ignore other important optimization criteria.
Therefore, you should repeatedly remind yourself that pagerank is only one of the many factors and you cannot only work on it.
7. Too Believe in Sandbox
Some webmasters propose that a new website will be put into sandbox by Google so that you cannot get any high rankings for highly competitive keywords. Even though their website cannot get any rankings after 1 year, they still believe that it is sandbox effect. Some even says Yahoo has Sandbox, MSN has Sandbox, etc...
From Googles patent information, there is no clue that such sandbox occurs. From my experience, if your site is new and cannot rank high in highly competitive keywords, it is solely because other websites are more established in search engine world. For example, they have more inbound links, more content, etc. Therefore, webmasters should not focus on finding how to get out from sandbox. Instead, you should put more effort in link building and content optimization. Eventually, you will see your websites rankings rise.
By Jimsun Lui, who is working in Search Engine Optimization division of Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Limited. The company assists clients in both Chinese and English search engine optimization