Why Strict Keyword Densities Are No Longer Necessary
To truly understand how SEO works today you need to have an understanding of the history of SEO as a marketing strategy. Search engine optimization did not develop in a vacuum and it won’t evolve into what it will be tomorrow without the developments that are occurring today. There is a continuum and it can be traced.
To begin with, SEO did not really get its name until after Google came on the scene. Before Google, Internet marketers were optimizing their websites but they didn’t really call it that. However, that “optimization” was very primitive compared to how it’s done today.
Meta Tags, Backlinks And The Rise Of Google
At one time, pre-Google, all you had to do was add a bunch of keywords to your meta tag list and you’d rank well for those keywords. It didn’t even matter if those keywords appeared in your page content or not. You’d still rank. Hardly seems fair, does it? That’s why Google rose to such prominence as quickly as it did. The company introduced a whole new paradigm.
When Google came along, no one was interested in analyzing back links. Today, that seems intuitive, but at one time no thought it was important except for two guys with the software to make it happen.
Those two guys started Google, whose search ranking algorithm was based largely on the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page. Soon, Internet marketers started dropping their meta tag strategy in lieu of a backlink strategy. Back links became the new currency.
From Backlinks To Semantic Natural Language
Over the years, Google has tweaked its ranking factors to include more than just an analysis of the number of inbound links to your site’s pages. Quality of links, relevancy of links and link diversity are important too. And there are more than 100 other factors Google considers as well. And then there are Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and many other search engines. Each one has their own ranking criteria.
One consideration that the major search engines look for today is natural language, or semantic language, syntax. While keywords are still important, successful web page do not need X number of one keyword phrase per Y number of words on the page, what marketers call “keyword density”. Instead, it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the right places on your page and in proximity to other important elements on the page. And to write naturally for your site visitors just as you would if keywords were not important.
In essence, the search engines are looking for the best content for every keyword phrase they rank pages for. If you stuff your pages with keywords just for a ranking then you are doing yourself and your site visitors a disservice. It’s basically shooting yourself in the foot. Trust me, that hurts.
On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
How Google Understands Your Search Queries
Search engine optimization is the process of writing content and designing web pages so that they have an improved chance at ranking for search queries when a person starts to look for something at a search engine. Google has become the search engine of choice for a lot of people, primarily because it has lead the way in the science of search. Its algorithm is the key to how Google understands search queries.
To truly understand how to SEO a web page, you have to have some clear idea of how a search engine ranks them and that means understanding how Google attempts to understand search queries and the intent of searchers. A Wired magazine article delves into that issue and goes into considerable detail about the history of Google’s algorithm.
Search engine optimization is not a shot in the dark. While there are no tried-and-true methods that work in all cases, if you want your web pages to rank better for the search terms you are targeting, you should at least learn how search engines work, especially Google.
Is SEO Getting Harder?
Search engine optimization seems to be getting harder and harder. Is it, or is it just my imagination?
In the early days of the Web, all you really had to do to rank a website is choose a good domain name and add the right keywords to your meta tags. You could have hundreds of keywords in your list of meta tags, even some that weren’t on your web page, and you’d rank for the key terms you wanted to rank for. Not today.
The search engines have become so much more sophisticated. And so have search engine optimizers. And there is more competition going after every keyword. It’s not easier. It’s harder.
So how can a new webmaster seeking to get his website recognized earn the rank that he desires? The first thing to do is to study a little bit about SEO. Learn what you can. If you have a business to run then you likely won’t learn everything, but you can learn enough to be able to discuss valid tactics with a real professional. Learn enough that you won’t be taken advantage of. The life of your website depends on it.
Should You SEO Your Site For Facebook?
According to WebProNews, Facebook and Microsoft are extending their relationship, which will be a big boost to Bing’s search share. Or Facebook’s search share. However you want to slice it.
This is obviously good news for Bing since Facebook is one of the Web’s most trafficked websites – more so even than Bing itself. To get the exclusive on the search feature of Facebook should do wonders for the search engine’s search share. But what will it do for website owners?
I think it could mean that search engine optimization for Bing will become even more important. It’s already important though not quite as important as SEO for Google. But I can see that this relationship with Facebook could make it just as important to optimize for Bing as for Google. That is especially true if Facebook manages to overtake Google as the No. 1 most trafficked website online.
But here’s the catch: Optimizing your web pages for Bing won’t be any different than optimizing them for Bing right now. It will just be more important.
How Phrase-Based Indexing Influences SEO
If you’ve never heard the term “phrase-based indexing” then let me give you a quick primer. The concept is based on clustering. Google’s search bot will go out and analyze pages that use certain phrases together. For instance, “baseball” and “home run”. Add to that the key phrases “base hit” and “strike out” and you’ll start to get a picture.
If a large percentage of pages on the Web that discuss baseball also use the other key phrases in the cluster then you have a high value set of phrases. Google can use this information for several purposes.
One purpose is to identify phrases that are popular among spammers. If the search engine can identify those then the spam can be filtered from the search results. But another purpose is to use the phrase clusters themselves for ranking purposes. A web page that successfully incorporates the cluster of phrases into its content could rank higher for the initial key phrase – “baseball” for instance – than a web page that simply re-uses the initial key phrases over and over again attempting to achieve the right density.
This is particularly telling because what it is really saying is that natural language writing is preferable to stilted keyword-based writing. The search engines have been treating content this way for several years. Understanding this will improve your SEO.
Do Article Spinners Work?
There is a new practice in article marketing using SEO tactics on the cheap. It’s called article spinning. The practice is simply taking an old article and putting it through a computer software program that mixes it up and changes the sentences around so search engines don’t recognize it as duplicate content. The problem is, it is duplicate content and usually the articles don’t make a whole lot of sense.
For instance, the article spinner will take a sentence from the third paragraph and make it the opening paragraph. It might even exchange a keyword for another pre-selected keyword. Then it will take a sentence from the bottom of the article and make it the second sentence while moving the first sentence of the original article to the third sentence spot and thus forming a new paragraph.
The article spinner rearranges the entire article this way. And marketers actually use them.
I’m not going to say that the articles are poorly SEOd. By bot standards, the SEO isn’t bad. But the writing is usually horrendous. I don’t know how people make money with these articles, but some do.
It’s almost always better to use original articles. Original content in any format is always best. The search engine optimization will almost always be better, but the writing, which is always for humans any way, will nearly always be a big step up. And your reputation will go along with it.
Will SEO Ever Die?
Veteran folk rocker Neil Young sang a popular song in the 1970s and 1980s that went something like this:
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll will never die
Later, King Missile made a hit with a song titled “Rock and Roll Will Never Die.” The message has become a clarion call for rock musicians who want the romantic dream to live forever.
SEO is no romantic dream (and some would argue neither is rock and roll), but you could apply this message to it just as well. SEO is a marketing tactic for online businesses that involves writing your web content in such a way that search engines rank that content against other web pages for specific keywords. If you do it well then you rank high. Bottom line.
The reason SEO will live forever is because search engines rely on content. Searchers thrive on it. Robots feed on it. Webmasters provide it. If you provide what human searchers need and what search engine robots feed on then you’ll always be in business. SEO is a necessary tool for doing business online.
2010 Search Engine Optimization Goals
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. Have you established any search engine optimization goals for this year?
It might seem like an academic exercise to establish goals for SEO, but it’s really not. If you want your search engine optimization efforts to be successful then you’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to work your plan. That requires setting some goals.
The first step to successful goal setting is to analyze where you are now. What got you here? Have you been tracking your progress?
Some of the important SEO metrics to keep an eye on include:
- Search engine saturation
- Number of inbound links
- Keyword rankings
- Page rankings per keyword
- PageRank
- Traffic count (visitors, unique visitors, etc.)
- Bounce rate
These are not the only metrics that are important, of course, but it’s a good start. Figure out where you stand right now then chart a course for where you want to be by year’s end. Goalsetting is not a difficult task, but it is an essential one – even for search engine optimization.
Why SEO Is Still Important
You might think, with all the talk of social media, real-time, and video/viral marketing, that SEO is not as important as it used to be. Don’t be fooled. It’s still as important as ever and, if anything, is more important than it ever was.
There are two things more than anything else that influence the importance of SEO – increased competition and search engine policies.
Regarding competition, there’s not a lot you can do other than try to out-optimize your competition. That requires some competitive intelligence, but it also requires some aggressive search engine marketing and keyword research. You need to know what people are searching for and how you can meet the demand for information better than the other guys. That’s a bit of a no-brainer.
The tough one is search engine policies. They change, and they can change drastically. Sometimes without much notice. But they rarely change in ways that are unforeseen and illogical.
For instance, in the past couple of years we’ve seen the search engines go from offering 10 blue links of organic results to offering a handful of organic links along with images, video results, and listings from other verticals. Savvy web marketers should have seen that coming. The rise of the verticals almost ensured that would happen. And people demanding better search results all around was a huge factor as well. Plus, it just makes sense. People searching for information on a given topic may not necessarily be looking for a website – they could be looking for a video or an image.
So, search engines change. And that means SEO can sometimes change. But, again, it rarely changes in ways that can’t be unforeseen or that are totally illogical. Just because your friends are going social doesn’t mean that SEO isn’t still necessary. It is – now more than ever.
Why Internal Links Are Important Too
Test question: Which links are more important (multiple choice):
- a. Outbound links?
- b. Inbound links?
- c. Internal links?
No, it’s not a trick question. The answer is, All of the above. Sorry, that wasn’t an option. You pass by default.
All links serve a purpose. It isn’t merely navigational. Outbound links can send traffic to other websites and cause the people you want to buy your widgets to leave in mass droves. But that’s not what you want, is it? Still, carefully placed outbound links can serve a useful SEO purpose.
Inbound links, too, can benefit you in your search engine optimization goals. As well, internal links can be SEO gold.
In fact, internal links are just as important as inbound links for SEO purposes. Both are better than outbound even though outbound links can be good for SEO. Internal links with the proper anchor text can pass just as much SEO link building juice and inbound links and are easier to get. That’s why an internal navigation structure for your website is the No. 1 link building method for most SEOs. It should be for you too.
Local Search Zeitgeist
Do you know what people in your city are searching for? Are they searching for the local sports team or hero? Or for the local elementary school?
Interestingly, in many of the largest urban centers in the nation, local searchers are searching for schools. Big surprise there, right? I mean, people do place a high level of importance on their children’s education.
Google publishes its Zeitgeist report every year around this time and this year they’ve got the most popular local searches for some specific cities. And you’d like to know the methodology behind it all, well …
To compile these local lists, we found the most popular searches for each selected city and then ranked them based on how unique they were to that city. A query is “unique” if it is disproportionately popular in a particular city compared to the rest of the country. This method explains why popular local searches (for example, for a specific movie theatre) may appear higher than a term for which people across the country are searching (for example, for a regional sports team).
The one theme that I do find recurring in most of the cities on the list is that people are searching for local high school and elementary schools and colleges. Beyond that, the searches are truly local.
Video SEO: Did It Just Get Better?
Bing has announced a more enhanced video search platform and from what I can tell, it’s not bad.
While I don’t think this is a sweeping innovation by any stretch, I do give Bing kudos for making some changes this year that makes it more competitive – even if slightly – in the search market. While I don’t expect Bing Video Search to come anywhere near YouTube, Hulu, or Facebook in terms of volume of videos watched, I do see that Bing Video could capture some of the video search market from Google and Yahoo!
But not much.
The one advantage that Bing Video offers is organization. But the real question will be in SEO. Will Bing offer any SEO advantage to webmasters who use video? If so then you can expect Bing Video to be a major player in the SEO game. That’s possible, but is it likely? Only time will tell. I’m rooting for Bing on this one. We could use more video optimization opportunities.
Stop The SEO Myths, Do What Makes Sense
Sometimes the SEO world folds in upon itself and starts doing weird stuff. Such a thing happened just recently when Matt Cutts made an offhand remark about Archive.org. Michael Martinez sums it up pretty well.
If you read his blog post and come to the conclusion that you should NOT block Archive.org because you don’t want to be accused of being a spammer then let’s go back to school. Matt Cutts wasn’t sending a signal that anyone who blocks Archive.org is a spammer. On the other hand, simply blocking Archive.org isn’t going to solve all your problems either.
Clearly, whether you block Archive.org or not is a decision you have to make for yourself. There are legitimate reasons for doing so. Spammers – some spammers – do it, but they do it for a different reason.
When it comes to SEO, don’t follow the crowd. Don’t listen to the myths and turn them into religion. Just do what makes sense.
If You Can’t Outrank – Try To Outsell
Search engine optimization is a tough game and sometimes you reach a point where your competitors have to0 many guns in their arsenal for you to outrank. If you can get to position two or three in search results, perhaps you can outsell them instead.
Meta tags are pretty much redundant when it comes to on-page SEO. The smart move now is to use those meta tags to outsell your competitors and the perfect place to start is in the description tag. This provides the snippet that searchers see in organic search results.
Rather than optimizing for keywords, try optimizing for clicks. This means using that tag to sell and like all sales pitches you need a call to action. Rewrite your meta description so that it gives the searcher a reason to click through – then invite them.
If you can get to the front page of the serps, particularly the results above the fold then start to concentrate on ways of winning those clicks. If you can out sell your competitors you should see a significant share of the traffic coming your way.
Content, Links, Meta Tags – Which SEO Factor Is Most Important?
Content, links, meta tags, keywords … it’s all a sea of confusion, right? Which SEO factor is most important?
Links are important. They build link popularity. Relevance, page authority, anchor text, link age, they’re all important, right? Yes, they are all important. But links are the not the most important thing for SEO. Without at least one inbound link to your website, it won’t get crawled and the search engines won’t index it. But for search engine ranking purposes, links are not the most important SEO factor.
How about meta tags? No. In fact, Google doesn’t even consider meta tags for ranking purposes. Yahoo! and Bing still consider meta tags, but they aren’t the most important ranking criteria.
Is it keyword density? SEOs still talk about keyword density. In fact, keywords get a lot of airplay all around. Keywords in title tags, keywords in alt tags, keywords in anchor text. Yes, they’re all important. Even keyword density, to some degree, is important. But not the most important thing.
Content.
Quality, original content is the most important SEO factor online. There’s a reason “content is king” is the Internet’s chant. It’s not a campaign slogan. It’s reality. Content is the most important SEO factor. Over links. Above keyword density. And higher than meta tags.
Make your content shine and dress it up with great links, meta tags, and keyword considerations. But make your content the king.
Two Branches Of SEO
There are two branches of SEO that every website owner should be familiar with. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Your on-page SEO consists of keyword management, meta tags, alt tags, navigation, and other elements that exist on your page to help you produce effective SEO for your website. Off-page SEO consists of anything you do off of your website, such as building links, that produces SEO benefits.
One of the best things you can do off page is to list your website in directories. Many webmasters don’t know it, but you can submit your internal web pages to deep link directories and build links to those internal pages.
Neither on-page SEO or off-page SEO is more important. On-page SEO, of course, must come first. And it should really be your focus in the early days of website development. But after your website is built you’ll need to focus on link building and off-page SEO.
Do Low Quality Back Links Affect SEO?
One of the most common worries among new webmasters is whether or not low quality back links will adversely affect their SEO or web rankings. Generally, no. But you have to take each case on its own merits.
Webmasters, most of the time, cannot control who links to them or why. That’s not your problem as webmaster. But if you are concerned about a particular back link or group of back links you can write to the website owner and request that your link be removed. Most webmasters will oblige, but if you run into a situation where you are refused then you might have other options. The search engines, however, will not help you in that situation.
Back links are generally good for webmasters, but they are only one factor that affect rankings. There are plenty more. Still, some links won’t benefit you at all. If a website has a reputation as being spammy, chances are links from that site won’t go to benefit you. But they won’t hurt you either. And that’s the beauty of low quality back links. It’s best not to worry about them.
Are Backlinks As Important As On-Page SEO?
The argument continues – are backlinks more important or is on-page SEO more important? There is a growing number of SEO professionals who believe that backlinks are the holy grail of SEO. But most of us still chant that content is king. Which is it?
Personally, I think backlinks aren’t important at all until you have some on-page SEO working in your favor. What’s the point to building links to a page with no content? Even if you succeed in boosting that page’s rankings, visitors to the page will be disappointed to find nothing there. But a well optimized web page that answers a question for a lot of people within a particular niche is a gem, with or without backlinks.
Don’t get me wrong. You’d be a fool to build a web page today with no link building plan. But I’m simply illustrating the importance of quality on-page SEO. That’s the starting point. Everything else, from there, is upward mobility.
Optimizing PDF Files
Search engine optimization is always changing, always improving, and that’s a good thing. One of the latest developments in SEO is that webmasters now have the ability to optimize PDF files. But how?
First, you have to ensure that your PDF files are not in a secure folder. Locked by security walls will cause search engines to be denied access and if search engines can’t crawl them they can’t be indexed. But other than that, there aren’t too many restrictions.
PDF files are optimized a lot like HTML pages. You can place your keywords in the headline of the document as well as in subheadings and throughout the document. You can also link out from PDF files to other pages on your website and use important anchor text for those pages. But more importantly, you can link inbound to PDF pages using appropriate and relevant anchor text to help improve their crawlability and ranking quotient.
PDF files also have author, tittle and description information that you can fill out when you create them. Use that information as the search engines may be able to use it for indexing.
Ensure that you when you create your PDF file that you do so using a text editor or word processing program like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, or CoffeeCup. Don’t create it as a .jpg or it won’t be crawlable.
Optimizing your PDF documents is not hard and can be done just as you would do for an HTML page.
Use Page Anchors To Better Your SERP Listings
Google has announced that page anchors can now appear in the SERPs for specific pages, however, Google decides which pages based on its algorithm functions. This is a great opportunity or SEOs.
First, let me say that page anchors have always been useful from a user experience point of view. Got a page with multiple sections in it? Add a table of contents at the top and link to each section with an anchor. A user looking for specific information can find it just by scanning the table of contents and going right to where they need to go on the page. Now, however, you can do it for SEO reasons.
Of course, it will be a few weeks for SEOs to start blogging about what they did to manipulate the rankings using page anchors, but it’s coming. You should plan on using keywords in your anchors, however. Is that a given?
Are SEO And Reputation Management The Same?
There can often be a confusion of terms in search engine marketing. Many people seem to think reputation management and SEO are one in the same. They’re really not. While reputation management does often involve search engine optimization, SEO is not necessarily reputation management.
Here’s what I mean:
Your online reputation is an aggregation of all the things that you and other people say about your online. Good and bad. Many times, comments made by and about you are search engine optimized and rise in the rankings. When they do more people will see them. But someone can say something about you – again, good or bad – and not use SEO techniques, which will likely just land those comments in a vacuum.
By the same token, just because you’ve SEOd your website and caused it to rise to the most prominent positions in the search results doesn’t mean that you’ve done an adequate reputation management job. If you target the keyword “blue widget”, for example, because that’s what you sell, then you are not necessarily affecting your reputation by ranking well for that key term. Someone searching for “blue widget” will find your website if you rank high enough, but they may not know you from Adam. On the other hand, if they search for you by name they may not find your “blue widget” page.
So you can see, SEO and reputation management are not the same. They are both necessary, but the approach for tackling each is different. Treat them that way.
Is Duplicate Content An SEO Or Web Design Issue?
Duplicate content is again hitting the headlines around the net, this time for all the right reasons. In the past many believed that search engines such as Google penalized sites that had duplicate content issues – this is not true. That doesn’t mean that duplicate content is harmless, it can create a lot of problems for your pages.
Is duplicate content then an SEO issue or a web design issue. Like many things related to search engine rankings, it is both. Or rather, it is one that leads to another. If your web design, more importantly, your site architecture includes dynamic parameters then the chances are you will have duplicate content issues.
If you can see URLs that include question marks, strange characters, or have terms such as ?sid=12395923 added to the end – you have dynamic URLs. Yahoo! and Google allow webmasters to control what parameters in URLs they want ignored.
In Yahoo!, the option is available through Site Explorer. In Google, Webmaster Tools has the option under Site Configuration > Settings. It is important to control which versions of a page are indexed.
If more than one URL points to a page then you could be leaking link juice. The more link juice you leak, the lower your page will rank in search results. Control which pages are indexed and you will gain a little control over the flow of link juice – an essential component of SEO. You work hard for links – why waste them.
What Makes Good Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is a process that seems to be getting more and more sophisticated as time goes on. Used to be, a webmaster could toss in a few keywords on the web page, add some meta tags, and all was well. Today, there are more than a couple of hundred ranking factors to consider. And what gets one website high rankings may be completely different for another website. Generally speaking, it’s better to focus on principles than specific techniques.
However, there are some best practices that are, across the board, very effective. Savvy search engine optimizers know that putting your keyword in your title is very effective. They also know that inbound links can make a mediocre site a great one. And your URL is important in many ways as well.
But there are certain factors that today may not be important while being extremely important next year or five years from now. A good search engine optimization specialist should be able to look down the road and predict, with some fair amount of accuracy, where search is headed – and begin to optimize web pages for the future of search as well as for today. You don’t need a crystal ball, just a good handle on the playing field. Can your SEO boast of that?
Is On-Page SEO More Important Than Link Building?
I was discussing link building today with a friend and we both agreed that link building is important. But neither one of us were willing to say it was the most important thing. You can build all the links you want to a poorly optimized website and you likely won’t get too far. But we’ve all seen the results of the Google Bomb, right? The problem is, one algorithm change and those bombs blow.
But on-page optimization is fairly constant. If you stick the basics – good content, clean code, fast load times, light on the images, proper keyword management, internal navigation – then your website should do well. Inbound links can never serve as a substitute for poor on-page optimization.
However, if you have a well optimized website with all the right design and content elements then a good link building campaign can enhance it tremendously. Link building should be seen as a supporting activity for good on-page SEO. It shouldn’t be a primary optimization tactic.
Is It Time To Target Your Search Engine Optimization
For many years the name of the search engine optimization game has been to target Google. The more articles you read the more often you will come across references to Google, Matt Cutts or Webmaster Tools. Every now and then, Yahoo! or Bing creeps into the conversation.
The theory has been that Google gets the majority of traffic so that is the place to rank. It has been a reasonable theory too and most sites find that if they get it right for Google, they are close to getting it right for the others.
Yahoo! recently announced a new search design and at the same time made a little noise about targeting people search. A search for a person will produce results which include profiles Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed. Their aim, to be number one for people search.
It was not so long ago that reports indicated that Bing was doing well in the travel, retail and finance sectors when it came to searches.
If the search engines are going to target certain niches, perhaps the time has come to reassess our search engine optimization strategies. If your site is based on travel, retail or finance, it may be time to focus your search engine optimization strategies on areas that will help you rank well on Bing.
Many will argue that you can optimize for all three search engines, and you can. However, we still bring the focus back to Google – perhaps it is time to change that.
Search Engine Optimization Is On The Brink Of A Major Change
Search engine optimization is about to change. Forever.
Google has recently announced a preview of its upcoming change in search algorithm. This is supposed to be one of the biggest and most radical changes ever. They’re calling it Google Caffeine.
Everyone from Aaron Wall to BusinessWeek have taken it for a test drive and written about it. Some of the things that people are saying about Google Caffeine are:
- Lightening Fast (Mashable)
- Newsier by a nose (CNET)
- No real difference (BusinessWeek)
- Too much emphasis on real-time results (Marketing Pilgrim)
- Increased weighting on domain authority (SEOBook)
- Indexing more of the web (Vizion Interactive)
- Smarter at finding fake websites (ComputerWorld)
There are a ton of people talking bout the new Google Caffeine. In fact, search for “Google Caffeine” without the quotes and you’ll find over 5.37 million results at Google and 10.8 million at Bing.
It’s interesting to read what some of the most prominent people in search engine optimization are saying about it, but mostly what I’ve found are a list of disagreements. About the only thing everyone agrees on is that Google Caffeine is faster than the current Google and includes more results in search queries. But I do believe that search engine optimization is on the brink of a major change. Don’t you?
The Most Overlooked SEO Secret Known To Man
Many times, clients ask us if they have to pay for ranking for keywords that they weren’t targeting. The answer is no.
Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.
Every website will inevitably rank for certain keywords and phrases that weren’t being targeted. It’s a part of the natural order of the Web. Some of those keywords will actually prove to be beneficial for you.
It’s nearly impossible to predict what people will search for. Google has said that a 20%-25% of its search queries are brand new searches that have never been seen before. That effectively means that you’ll see a certain number of queries in your server log delivering traffic to your site in unexpected ways. That’s the power of the long tail.
If you can target long tail searches over a long course then you can penny and nickel your way into top search rankings one long tail search at a time. Eventually, if you win enough of the long tail phrases, you’ll start to rank for the general search phrases in your niche as well. And you’ll see loads of traffic coming to your site just because you were persistent enough to pursue the long-tail strategy.
The Principles Of Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is the one thing that every person doing business online needs to know how to do, or hire someone who knows how, but few businesses take seriously enough to make the investment. Everyone seems to be excited about prospects in social media – and we agree, there are some exciting opportunities to be found in social media marketing – but when it comes to optimizing their websites for search engine traffic, so many small business owners are lost.
They don’t have to be.
SEO really isn’t hard. There are some basic principles to optimizing web pages, but simply knowing the principles isn’t enough. There are some ins and outs that an experienced guide can help you with.
One of the most important principles, for instance, in optimizing websites is link relevance. Most people focus on link quantity. But link quality is even more important than quantity and involves building links back to your website focused on the right keywords for your site. It’s just one part of SEO, but it’s an important part.
If you really want to learn how to win in the search engine game, it helps to learn the most important principles of the game, or hire someone who studies those principles every day.
Search Engine Optomization Does Not Always Produce The Required Results
Search engine optimization is more than just finding keywords and ranking in the search results for them. In fact, that is probably the downfall of many a web site owners.
Sure, they receive swags of traffic from the search engines, however, their conversion rates are often extremely low. The end result is that a web site owner walks away from any type of search engine optimization program. Their pages then drop out of the search results further exascerbating the web site owners views on SEO in general.
Having failed to achieve any results with organic search, they then turn to paid search. Using common keywords can be an expensive way to gain traffic on any pay-per-click platform, search or otherwise. Common keywords are highly competitive – this drives up the price per click.
Let me let you in on a little secret – high priced pay-per-click keywords generally have a low conversion ratio. In fact, you can often get a far higher conversion ratio using keywords that are a fraction of the cost of the more common keywords.
They weren’t wrong to target the search engines for either organic or paid traffic. Their mistake was to target the wrong set of keywords. We are now living in a world where the internet is playing a role in the lives of almost everyone. Not only that, users are becoming more savvy when it comes to searches. The biggest rise in searches has been in the long tail search involving four or more words.
Finding the right keywords is the hardest part of any search engine optimization program. You want keywords that used by searchers because they want to act. Keywords that target casual surfers should be low priority. If you’re in business, you want action and that generally means sales.
One of the easiest and most cost effective ways of developing both an organic and paid search engine campaign is to hire a professional to work with you. Notice I said with you and not for you. That is an important part of the relationship.
A professional internet marketing firm has the experience, and the access to tools, that can help find the most appropriate keywords for your business. As a professional yourself you should be familiar with terms such as ROI. Internet marketing is about getting the best flow of converting traffic at the lowest possible cost per conversion possible – in other words, maximizing your ROI.
Look towards a professional internet marketing firm like Reciprocal Consulting. They can maximise your online presence and help you gain sustainable traffic that converts with the highest possible ROI. That equates to the highest possible profits – after all, isn’t that why your in business.