How to Rank Better with Keywords

We’ve discussed this before, but of course I like to always go back and talk about subjects that were "hot" for our new readers.

Do you have a keyword strategy? If so, please weigh in and leave a comment. If not, check out some steps you may want to consider:

Quality Content
Your number one goal should always be to create quality content for your keywords. It will drive traffic to your site if it is useful and your visitors recommend your site to other visitors.

SEO
There is a lot of advice out on the web regarding SEO and many arguments about what does and does not work but one thing remains constant, if you take the time to optimize your pages for the search engines, you will receive better results than if you didn’t. One popular method is to have your keyword in the headline or H1 title of your page. Make sure the keyword is included in the first and last 25 words on the page. Pay attention to keyword density and don’t overstuff your pages with your keyword, it won’t work.

Blogging and Web 2.0
Your site should have a blog and an RSS feed attached so that you can use them to boost your keyword ranks. Make sure you tag your posts too, Blogger has a form where you can put your keywords (tags) for each blog post and WordPress uses categories that will automatically be seen as tags.

Article Marketing
If you want to be found using your keywords, try writing an article and placing it in a relevant section on your site. Once Google has indexed your site and has found your article (you can speed up the process by uploading a new sitemap and letting Google know about it), go out and syndicate that article by submitting it to other article sites.

Long Tails
You can work off of your master list and use related long tail keywords. Use one of the free keyword searches to find out what the daily searches are and go for the ones that aren’t in high competition if your site is relatively new. If you don't know what a long tail keyword is, please let me know and I'll do another post on that!

Domain names, URLs and Titles
If you haven’t purchased your domain name yet and you know that you are going to have a specific keyword that will relate to your site, buy a domain name with the keyword in it. Make sure that you have your keyword in your URLs to your pages and in your meta and title tags for the page.

Links
Use anchor text incorporating your keyword to link to your page. What that means is, instead of “click here” put the keyword so that it is the underlined linkable text. In addition, try to get quality one-way links from other websites that are related to yours. For instance if you sell baby clothes, try to get a website for moms to link to your site.

Useful Links for keywords:

Google Keyword Selector Tool is great, it can scan your site for existing keywords as well as give you suggestions for related keywords.

Want to see what people have been searching for in the past on Google? Try Google Suggest and start typing in your keyword.

Enter your site url and see what sitereportcard.com has to say about your optimization or keywords. It’s a fun and free tool for you to use.

There are many other tips for getting your keywords to work for you and I’d love to open up a discussion here so that we can help you grow your business. If you are one of my blog readers and you have some advice to share, please post a comment and give us your opinion.

Joanne

Search Engine Results Pages - Content is King!

I just finished going over our analytics and comparing the results with my SEO efforts for the month of December. The results are in…CONTENT is the number one driving factor to our website.

I know I’ve said that before, but I don’t know if I’ve really driven it home for our clients. There are so many “do’s” and “don’ts” in search engine optimization. All the information that I keep up with including newsletters, groups, articles, companies, books, etc.., all have their basic set of rules (formed a long time ago) and they change periodically when everyone starts to follow the new trends and the search engines change the algorithms, but the bottom line is – if you have good content and your site keeps evolving, traffic will come. Period.

Yes, there are tricks that dishonest companies use to try and get you where you want to be, but you end up being penalized for them. Rather than waste time and money on those efforts, why not just go for the honest way? Good old-fashioned work. We don't always follow the practices we should because of sheer lack of time. We're busy bees! But one thing is for sure, the things that we take the time to do - work.

Speaking of work, how about the people that work at deceiving you in your search in order to gain a buck? Grrrr. Nothing is more frustrating to me than when I do a search, a result comes up that is supposed to be relevant, I click on it and it’s just another damn directory site of another search using the keywords I just put in. It's like those little boxes within a box, O.K. the first time you experience it...but do you want to relive it every time? I don't.

I also get severely irked when I search for something and the results clicked on are just a page full of paid advertising. What's worse than that? When they have nothing to do with what I searched for at all. I read an article during the holidays (I’m sorry I don’t remember who wrote it and I didn’t save it) that kids were for sale at Target. Hello? Really? I just Googled “kid for sale”, here’s what I got:This is precisely why I hardly EVER click on the sponsored links. It’s most likely not what I wanted in the first place. The corporations who have an endless budget will have surely invested in SEO as well for the PPC ad. They end up wiping out the little guy by bidding top dollar for the PPC campaign. (Those of you who understand PPC may complain I'm leaving something out by not explaining the actual CTR, but that's not what this post is about.) Little companies just starting out try to jump in the big pool and they quickly drown.

My advice? Write some articles, start a blog and publish content that is relevant to whatever it is your selling. When we search for your product, we’ll be grateful to land on a website that is what we were looking for in the first place. Isn’t that what all of us want?

Joanne

The Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) Explained

Every year my family publishes a “Bad News Letter”. Ever experience the annoying high achieving family newsletter that comes in the mail from a distant relative? That’s not the case when it comes to my family. We love to highlight and laugh at the bad things that happened throughout the year. You won’t find any braggarts in that gem. I've been busy after work hours getting it together to pass out to relatives on Christmas Eve.

On to the subject…

Last week I was conversing with a client over the phone and she mentioned that she wanted her new website to be on the top of the SERP’s page. When I started to explain to her the logistics of being listed at the top for her search terms she was fascinated. She is a very intelligent woman with several websites already, and it got me to thinking that I should probably do a post for people who don’t quite understand it all.

So, with that in mind – let me just explain (gently) how it all works:

Whenever you go to a search engine such as Google and you type in a keyword or phrase (the words you are using to search for something), after you hit “Search”, the items that come up are broken down as follows:

Take a look at the image below with the results in red:

Those are the top paid results. To get in that position, you have to be engaged in a PPC (Pay Per Click) or (Adwords) campaign with Google and you have to be the top bidder for the keyword phrase that was searched on. In this case the phrase was “complete business cards”.

In the next image, look at the results in red:

These are also paid or “sponsored” results from a PPC campaign. The results on the side are not the top dollar advertising. Again, the person in charge of the campaign has a choice on what keywords to bid on, how much they want to spend per word or phrase and what position they want to be in.

In the next image, look at the results in red:

These are the natural search results. Meaning, the results that are showing up here are based on SEO (search engine optimization) and not a paid advertising campaign. This clearly demonstrates how important search engine optimization can be to your marketing budget.

I can get into more about PPC campaigns and how they work in another post. Next time we can have a look at Yahoo or MSN. I hope this was helpful to you.

Joanne