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Posts Tagged ‘keywords’
Friday, September 16th, 2011
A very prominent SEO and veteran Internet marketer recently said that keywords are no longer necessary. Just write content, he says. The search engines will rank you.
Is there wisdom in that or is it a bit misguided?
I certainly believe that social media has changed the stakes of the game. You can feasibly build a business model completely around social media marketing, in which case keywords are not necessary. You could promote your content through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Klout, Foursquare, YouTube, and every other social media giant out there and do just fine. No keywords necessary.
But I subscribe to a holistic view of Internet marketing. What I mean by that is, you want to give yourself every bit of an edge that you possibly can – in social media and in the search engines. To succeed at building yourself an edge, keywords are certainly helpful.
Many SEOs proclaim that keywords in titles are helpful to your on-page SEO. I’ll have to agree. That’s been my experience.
The prominent SEO mentioned above says keywords in titles aren’t necessary because it is your inbound links that are pushing you up in the rankings. But I’ve seen pages rank prominently without the links. So, no, I’ll have to say that’s bad advice.
I’m not saying links aren’t necessary. I’m not saying they aren’t helpful. I’m saying links alone are not going to give you the edge. Nor will on-page keyword stuffing. You have to focus on the big picture and that means honing your on-page content with SEO in mind.
Tags: keywords, links, SEO, Social Media
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 6 Comments »
Friday, May 13th, 2011
When you consider that roughly 90% of searchers click on results on the first page, and that more than 80% click on results in the top three positions on the first page, it makes sense to try and improve your rankings for important keywords. Moving a keyword ranking from the bottom of the first page to one of the first three positions can boost your website’s traffic by thousands – of course, the hard numbers depend on your niche and the number of people searching for information on a particular keyword phrase.
Considering these facts, it makes sense to boost those rankings. So how do you do it? Here are the steps to boost your keyword rankings for any keyword you want to improve upon:
- Check your organic search traffic under Traffic Sources in Google Analytics
- Export the data in CSV
- Using a website ranking tool, check the rankings for each keyword on your list
- Find the keywords that are sending you traffic despite their lower rankings (you’ll get better results if you focus on those keywords where your rankings are at the bottom of the first page or on the second or third page; these are easier to push up to higher visible rankings quickly.)
- Once you’ve got your list, start a link building campaign for those keywords (write articles, guest blog posts, and use social media to promote them)
Your link building campaign should focus on achieving high value anchor text links for the specific keywords that you are targeting. If you do this right, you’ll push your rankings up a few notches within a month or two. That will increase your traffic, and if your web pages are converting that traffic, then you’ll see an increase in ROI.
Tags: keywords, link building, search engine rankings, website traffic
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 5 Comments »
Friday, April 22nd, 2011
If you add a blog to your company website, there are 3 very distinct SEO benefits that you gain from doing this. Of course, you only get these benefits if your blog and if you blog in the right manner.
Here are those 3 benefits:
- Fresh Content – Every time you write a blog post, you add fresh content to your website. This invites the search engine spiders back to your site to crawl it. Each time your website is crawled is another chance to rise in the rankings for your keywords.
- Increased Search Engine Rankings – Not only do you have more opportunities to rank with each blog post, but each blog post can rank according to its own merits. Every blog post is considered a separate web page by the search engines. As such, each blog post can rank for a separate keyword phrase.
- Linkbuilding – Because you can link to your website pages from your blog, you can drive up those pages in search engine rankings using powerful link anchor text.
There are other benefits to blogging, but these are three of the biggest SEO benefits. Needless to say, the more often you blog, the more likely you are to realize these benefits. And if you create blog posts around your important keywords, you’re also more likely to realize these benefits.
Do you have a company blog? If not, why not?
Tags: blogging, keywords, linkbuilding, search engine rankings, SEO
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 11th, 2011
Confused about SEO? Did you just buy a nifty SEO book, or download one for free, that promises to tell you everything there is to know about SEO? Be careful. Some of those books are optimizing like it’s 1999.
Here are 10 outdated SEO tactics, and some of them are suspect that they ever worked at all:
- Meta Keywords – For awhile, Ask.com looked at these, but then they got out of the search game. Even then, they only had about 1-point-something percent of the search market share. Adding meta keywords is a waste of time.
- Search Engine Submissions – Submit to all the search engines you want. It won’t help you. The best search engines will crawl your site if it’s crawlable. You don’t need to submit to search engines.
- Header Tags (H1 and H2) – These are nice. They look good. You have nice headlines. But that’s all. Put keywords in them. That’s cool. Your visitors will know what the site is about, but the search engines don’t care about these tags.
- Keyword-stuffed Content - This has never been a good practice. Today, it’s even worse. Focus on great content that helps your visitor.
- Using The Same Title Or Keyword On Every Page – Seriously, did you think the search engines wouldn’t notice?
- A Different Page For Every Similar Product You Have – OK, so you have a catalog of 1,000 products. Red widgets, yellow widgets, pink widgets with blue polka dots, etc. Having a separate page for each widget is not going to help you rank for widgets.
- Linking To Popular Websites – Even if those sites are in your niche. Outbound links have no value. It’s the inbound links that count.
- Publishing Only Other People’s Stuff – I see blogs with auto-generated content and think, “Do you really think that’s going to work?” It doesn’t.
- PageRank Sculpting – A few SEOs taught a couple of years ago that you could increase your link popularity to your best pages by adding a nofollow attribute to links pointing to your terms of service and privacy policy pages. Don’t count on it, especially if your website has only 10 pages.
- Minor Changes To Your Pages – Do you think tweaking that 1,250-word page to have two more uses of your keyword is going to help you rank better? It won’t. You’re wasting your time.
If your SEO guru or free e-book download is telling you to do these 10 things, fire him or throw the book away. These SEO tactics are useless and a waste of your precious time.
Tags: keywords, SEO
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 2 Comments »
Monday, March 14th, 2011
Do you have a healthy website? Does it do what it was meant to do?
Every small business website has a function. The job is to sell your services and attract new business. Of course, there are different methods and strategies for accomplishing this goal. But the bottom line is, your website must perform, and if it is a healthy website, then it will perform its necessary functions in a healthy manner.
Small Business Mavericks offers a website check up as a part of our regular service. During our check up, we look for specific things that tell us whether or not your website is healthy. These include:
- Does your website target the right keywords?
- Are you attracting good links or bad links?
- Are you beating your competition?
- Are you maximizing all of your traffic sources?
- Is your SEO localized enough?
- Is your website getting crawled often enough?
- Is your website attractive or is it turning customers away?
This is just a smattering of the things we look at when we conduct a small business website check up. We perform a full top-to-bottom check up to see if there are missed opportunities in your marketing and, if so, we’ll tell you what they are and how to fix it.
There’s no reason you can’t have a healthy small business website. How about a check up today?
Tags: inbound links, keywords, small business, traffic, website
Posted in website development | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
Effective search engine marketing is dependent upon the rules of supply and demand. The supply side consists of the websites containing information that people are searching for. The demand side of the equation is made up of the information that people are seeking. In other words, what keywords are people typing into the search engines right now in order to find what they are looking for?
It’s important to note that these keywords could change over time. For instance, five years ago, if the majority of searchers looking for information on small business marketing were to Google “small business marketing”, then that would have been an important keyword then to target if you wanted to drive search traffic to your website. As consumers become more educated in search, they change their search habits. So, using the example again, suppose that today the majority of searchers looking for small business marketing information used the key phrase “SBM marketing online.” If there is a direct correlation in the decline of the previous keyword phrase to the increase in searches using the other, then online marketers should update their keyword list to include the current demand.
This really isn’t hard. You should conduct new keyword research at least once a year, but I would say about every six months. If you notice that searchers are using different keywords today than they were six months ago to find information about your niche, then start using those newer keywords in your content.
By updating your keyword list on a regular basis, you can keep your content current while stretching for sticky content that will always be available due to long-term algorithmic considerations.
Tags: keywords, search engine marketing
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 11th, 2010
I seriously haven’t given the keywords meta tag a whole lot of thought lately. But Michael Martine brings up an interesting point.
While his glee seems a little bit over the top, I can actually see him jumping in the air and clicking his heels together, I do see the point. The keywords meta tag is officially dead.
True search marketers have known for several years now that Google stopped relying on the keywords meta tag a long time ago. Bing, too, stopped using it. And that really left Yahoo! and Ask.com. However, Yahoo! bowed out of search and turned its search features over to Bing’s algorithm. There went one half of the reason to still be using the keywords meta tag. Then, Ask.com announced that it was leaving search behind. There went the other half of the reason.
When I wrote my post yesterday about Ask.com getting out of search I hadn’t thought about the keywords meta tag. But thanks to Michael Martine, none of us ever have to think about it again – until some college kid gets the bright idea to start another search engine based on it (hey, it could happen).
So now you have my permission to officially stop using the keywords meta tag on your web pages. You can do it if you want to, but it likely won’t help you anywhere.
Tags: keywords, search engines
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
In a HubSpot webinar today I learned something rather interesting. If you want your Facebook status updates to be shared and spread as wide as possible there are certain words you can use in your updates to make that more likely to happen. I’ve never thought of this before, but the list is interesting. From best to least best (all of these are good):
- Facebook
- Why
- Most
- World
- How
- Health
- Bill
- Big
- Says
- Best
- Video
- You
- Apple
- Media
- Top
- First
- Obama
By contrast, the worst words to use in your Facebook status updates are anything related to Twitter, iPhone or geek and tech-related words. In essence, Facebook has more of a mainstream audience whereas Twitter has more of a tech- and geek-oriented audience.
Here’s my takeaway: It is no longer a question of either/or with Twitter and Facebook. If you have a geek or tech oriented audience or sub-audience within your niche then there is a place for you on Twitter. But you have a completely different and viable audience on Facebook.
I also learned that if you use the word video in your update then your status update is more likely to be shared. Do the same on Twitter and it likely will not be shared. Now what can you do with that information?
Tags: facebook, keywords
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Google has two keyword research tools (actually three, but I won’t count the Google AdWords internal toolbar) and you should be aware of how to use them.
The first tool is the Google AdWords External Toolbar. This is essentially the Google AdWords internal toolbar except that you don’t have to be logged into your Google AdWords account to use it. It’s a great tool if you are just doing cursory research that you don’t think you are going to use right away or you don’t have a Google AdWords account and want to do some keyword research.
You can generate ideas in one of two ways – using descriptive words and phrases or by associating them with a website. If you are generating a keyword list for a specific website that have already built then be sure to check the box for Website content.
Next, enter some keywords in the box and check “Use synonyms”. You can also filter your keywords to exclude unwanted words that you don’t want to target. For instance, if you are searching for keywords related to “widgets” but don’t want anything related to “red widgets” then you can exclude the keyword “red” or the phrase “red widgets”.
After clicking the box to generate keywords, you’ll see your keyword list pop up with the following columns:
- Advertiser Competition
- Local Search Volume (month specific)
- Global Monthly Search Volume
The match type will also be set to broad. You can change it to exact, phrase, or negative. I recommend starting with broad and you can narrow it down as you do more research. You can also expand the columns that are displayed, but if you aren’t planning to do any PPC advertising then the other columns won’t help you much.
You can use this list to see which of your keywords are the most popular from month to month and to judge what your competition for those keywords is. It’s a good tool to use.
Google’s Search-based keyword tool is slightly different. With this tool you can actually get more specific in your research initiatives. Since the data is based on actual searches rather than broad research data it should be more accurate, but that doesn’t mean it will benefit everyone. This tool is a great tool if you already have a website built and you want to expand your list of keywords for specific pages on your site.
The search-based keyword tool allows you to compare keywords generated for a specific web page on your site and the keywords in your Google AdWords account. If you are currently running a PPC campaign then you can find new keywords to target. It is a great tool for showing where you might be missing opportunities.
I challenge you to learn more about these to keyword research tools. Use them when the time is right.
Tags: google, google adwords, keyword research, keyword tool, keywords
Posted in search engines | 4 Comments »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Do you know what the most important SEO factor is today? Even after ten years of search engine optimization best practices, there is still one SEO factor that outshines them all: Quality, Original Content.
That’s not to say that other factors aren’t important. Number of inbound links, link relevance, keyword density, keywords in URLs, keywords in title tags, meta tags, alt tags, authority of pages linking in, link age, and hundreds of other factors that influence SEO are still important. Some are more important than others. And most of these factors, when coupled with other factors, still are more powerful.
But overall, nothing compares to unique, original, quality content. All other factors being equal, quality original content still outshines all others as the most important SEO factor. Keep your content golden and your SEO will be golden.
Tags: content, keywords, links, SEO, SEO factors
Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »
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