The answer is keyword choice.
Keywords (also referred to as keyword phrases and keyphrases) are the short, descriptive phrases that you want to be found with on the search engines.
The authors of Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day provide excellent strategies for choosing the right keywords.
Here are some of their tips…
Use these triggers and questions to create your list:
- What is your business or organization’s name?
- Imagine you are a member of your target audience, what do you type in the search box?
- What are your products or services? What information do you offer?
- What need do you fill for your target audience?
- Think seasonal. Does your product or service vary from season to season? Do you offer special services for special events?
- Are there common misspellings, alternate spellings and regional variations on your keywords?
- Where is your business located? What variations could you include (for example, include OH and Ohio)?
Expand the list by checking…
…with your coworkers who can provide new perspectives and ideas
…your website for terms you are currently using
…industry media for terminology and hot phrases
…website statistics for terms people are already using to find your site
…with your customers. Salespeople are great resources and can tell you what terms customers use to describe your services.
…with friends and neighbors. Businesses are often blinded by insider terminology they use to describe themselves.
…competitors websites
This list will help you to begin creating your list. The next step is to assess the search popularity, relevance and competition level to develop a manageable list of 10 target keywords.
I’ll provide you with some tips to do that in coming weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, pick up the book. You won’t regret it, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Cou7zin.
Enjoy brainstorming!
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]]>Well, after attending a panel discussion of local bloggers in Richmond, I’m not absolutely sure.
John and Sherry Tetersik from ThisYoungHouse.com, Arnold Kim from MacRumors.com and Jeff Kelley from Tobacco Avenue made quite a few points that resonated with me.
All bloggers stated that they didn’t practice any formal SEO strategies with their blogs…and all 3 had great traffic that is continuing to grow. As a matter of fact, ThisYoungHouse.com has jumped from 800 visits per month to over 360,000 per month…in a year! No SEO folks.
Just pure, compelling, unique content that is updated 2-3 times per day. This couple actually takes photos of projects from their home, not from magazines or other sites (well, on occasion they do). They have a growing community of readers who come back again and again and post comments!
When asked how they got readers, all of the bloggers agreed…“Good, regular content”
John and Sherry added that being a good consumer of other industry-related blogs has been key for them. This means…
- Reading and commenting on other blogs
- Linking to other blogs in posts
- Adding other blogs to your blogroll
Bloggers are known for their regular give and take…link love is often reciprocated.
One more point that is pretty key, in my humble opinion, is that they all agreed that a tightly focused subject in which a large group of people are interested contributes to their success.
I did look at the number of backlinks using Yahoo! and the numbers are quite impressive:
- ThisYoungHouse = 12,619 (Blog Age – 1 year, 5 months)
- MacRumors = 1,012,788 (Blog Age – about 9 years)
- Tobacco Avenue = 9,650 (Blog Age – 1 year, 3 months)
What’s important to note about these backlinks is that many of them come from pages on their blogs…another beautiful thing about the blogging platform. Think about it if you write 3 posts a day for 1 year, you will have 1,095 backlinks. In addition, with WordPress, each category generates its own page and each tag generates a page. You’ll probably have at least an “About” page and if you build your entire site in WordPress, you will most likely have more than a few pages.
ThisYoungHouse has actually become quite popular, has been mentioned in mainstream press and has a regular column in a national magazine, so I’m sure that many of their links are from other industry-related sites who genuinely think their content is great and link-worthy. I’d have to confirm, but I’m pretty sure (based on the number of hours they spend running the site) that they are not building many of these backlinks manually. This is what happens when you have a blog that generates a great following.
So, what’s the takeaway…there are several…
- Build a great website about a topic in which you know people are interested
- Nurture your website by updating content regularly (this is a lot easier if you have a blog, so the next one is…)
- Start a blog
- Give love to other blogs
- Don’t stress out about not ranking on the first page of Google for your keyword or phrase
- Focus on doing great work and building a community of readers
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]]>From Alvit.de…
Google PageRank (one word) is Google’s measure of the relative importance of a Web page on the Internet. The numbers rank from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the stronger the PageRank.
From Google…
PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
From GoogleGuide.com…
In other words, Google conducts “elections” in which each web page casts votes for web pages with hyperlinks to those pages. But unlike a democracy a page can have more than one vote and links from pages with high PageRank are given more weight (according to their ranking) and thus help to improve the targets’ PageRank.
From SelfSEO.com…
The facts that we do know about page rank are;
1. One-way inbound links from websites with topics that are related to your website’s topic will help you gain a higher page rank.
2. Other one-way inbound links from pages with high page rank but unrelated topics do help a little, but not nearly as much.
3. The number of links outbound from the website that links to you also determines the value of the link. A related website with 10 outbound links that links to you is much better than a related website with 100 outbound links that link to you.
Also important to keep in mind that search engines crawl and index webpages not websites, that is why your page rank may vary from page to page within your website.
Good internal linking and navigation can help distribute page rank well throughout your website. Your index page is the most important page Google indexes and your other pages will inherit some page rank from your index page because it is linked from there.
I have one website that is a PR4 on the main page but contains several PR5 and PR6 webpages in the interior of the website proving that Google ranks webpages individually.
When you are doing your link building campaign, do it for more than just the index page. Put links out there for your interior pages as well.
Webmasters and individuals will link to quality content and quality content is the single best way to higher page rank and search engine listings. Content is still king. Links are not king.
People link to articles and content that is original and well-written and that contain quality information not found elsewhere. Google also ranks webpages higher in listings that have quality content. That’s why it is still the best SEO method there is.
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]]>Everyone wants to increase traffic to their website.
One of the methods that has been successful is viral marketing. Viral marketing happens when someone shares something on the internet that they think is informative, entertaining or amazing.
I’m sure you’ve gotten your share of links to YouTube videos over the past few years.
The great think about viral marketing is that it usually has a low cost. The only thing you have to add is lots of creativity.
One tool that makes viral marketing possible on your website is to use a “share” or “tell a friend” link.
ShareThis is one of these tools:
This is a simple snippet of code that you add to your website to make sharing easy for people who visit your website.
Because the information that is shared is sent from someone they know, the recipient is less likely to view the email as spam.
This tool also makes it unlikely that the email will be blocked. As a result, the information can be spread very easily.
All it takes is for the initial recipient to forward the email and for the cycle to continue.
Information that is most likely to be forwarded and linked to by bloggers and other website owners has been coined by some as “link bait.”
Here are 3 resources that can help you wrap your mind around link bait and hopefully get your creative juices flowing to come up with your own idea for link bait on your website:
- www.jimwestergren.com/link-bait/
- www.marcandangel.com/2006/10/24/link-bait-proof-of-concept-and-how-to/
- tropicalseo.com/2007/andy-hagans-ultimate-guide-to-link-baiting-and-social-media-marketing/
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]]>Here’s a summary of the tips, but you must read the entire article for the meat and great examples:
10 SEO tips that I know can have a profound impact on your search traffic:
- Adopt the proper mindset
- Prepare the targeted keywords in advance
- Target 3 and 4 word phrases
- Know where to find the right key phrases
- Choose the right 3 and 4 word phrases to target
- Optimize page titles and permalinks
- Optimize the internal links within your site
- Add No Index meta tags
- Remove unnecessary links
- Building up a ridiculously sized tag cloud can be a good thing
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]]>Here’s how Google describes its service:
Search term suggestions on Google.com are powered by the Google Suggest service. Google Suggest communicates with Google while you type in order to offer suggestions to you. All the information you send to Google — such as searches you type or ones you select in Google Suggest — is protected by Google’s privacy policy. When providing suggestions, Google Suggest doesn’t refer to anyone’s personal searches; it uses information about the relative popularity of common searches to rank its suggestions.
In the example below, there are a lot of people searching for keyword elite software. However, for this post, I am writing about keyword research tools. You can see that “keyword research tool” was not as popular as the phrase “keyword tool,” so I chose to use “keyword tool” for the title instead of “keyword research tool,” but included “keyword research tool” in the body of the post.
Again, there are many more sophisticated keyword research tools on the market, both free and paid, but Google Suggest is a quick way to make decisions on the fly without risking being sucked in by analysis paralysis.
Tell me about your experience using this tool or other keyword research tools.
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]]>Let me know what you think in the comments.
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What is SlideShare? With over one million registered users, SlideShare is “the best way to share your presentations with the world!”
View These Tips
- Explain a complex business process that could use a few visual aids
- Create “how to” tutorials
- Give a sales presentation
- Breathe some life to case studies
- Bring existing presentations to the web
- Repurpose old articles by turning the main points into a presentation
Check Out These Resources
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The State of Washington has filed suit against a Redmond-based search engine optimization and Web services outfit that has done business under the names Visible.net, Captures.com and WebMarketingSource.com. In essence, the state attorney general contends that these entities have ripped off their mostly mom-and-pop clientele through a pattern of unfulfilled performance promises and financial shenanigans. While the clients may be on the smaller end of the spectrum, they have been forking over real money, with initial startup charges ranging from $3,750 to $9,750, plus a monthly fee of $40 to $100. Read the entire article.
A blogger with SEO experience responded by providing excellent tips about what you should look for when hiring an SEO company and what to avoid. Take head and don’t get taken by one of these companies.
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