Seo and Keywords
Keywords - Choosing Them - Using Them in Your Site - Linking With - Exact Match Domains - Saving Files
Seo has a lot to do with keywords. In fact, it is about the most important aspect of a good seo campaign. Without keywords done properly, your site is dead. It is actually pretty simple to do it correctly, but you can see on the net that lots of people are doing it wrong.
Idiotic Keywords - Don't Get Caught
Too Big
There are many people that aren't really into seo. They want to start a site and sometimes build something pretty cool and expensive. Then, when it comes to the site doing well in Google, it goes nowhere because they are trying for idiotic keywords. For example, suppose a little guy has 5k dollars to spend and wants to sell boats online. Usually the guy will decide to try and rank for the keyword boat. This is great and all, but that keyword is so difficult, that the guy will not have a chance against large competitors with 5k dollars and little knowledge. Similarly, you don't want to go for the keyword car unless you have some serious cash or are an awesome seo.
Not There
Now, some people realize that they can't rank for these kinds of keywords on their budget and skills so they choose something smaller. A guy might choose something like camouflage boats as their niche. This sounds like a great idea since a lot of hunters like to camouflage their boat. A person might think, "This will get me into the hunting boat niche." Do you see the problem yet? If you use a keyword tool, you will find that there are 0 searches for camouflage boat. So, you can build a great site about camouflage boats and probably have great rankings for the keyword. The only problem is nobody searches for that keyword and it's meaningless. In other words it's not there; not in the search engine. If you use a keyword tool, you will find the closest thing are camouflage bass boats and it gets four hits per day (3Google and 1Yahoo). Now four hits per day isn't really a business, especially when you won't get all four hits on your site. Keep reading and we'll share the keyword tools at the end of this article.
Too Small
We kind of touched on this already. You can't make a site on a tiny niche that gets like 4 people per day. On the net, if you do a good job, you'll get about 1% of your traffic to convert to sales. So, that means out of 100 visits, you will get one sale. Now, a niche of four people per day, means you might get two if you do a fantastic job and two people per day will take you 50 days to make a sale. If you can sell something super expensive, it might work, but as prices increase conversion rates go down; keep that in mind. Most people wouldn't make anything on a niche this small. What you need to do is assume a 1% conversion rate and figure out your profit margin. Then, see how many people it will take to make a sale. This 1% seems small, but it's targeted traffic and is actually quite good. You can purchase some bad traffic like pop-unders from a professional spammer like Zedo and your results will be much less. It's a process of trial and error and takes much thought.
Time on Keywords
Typically people spend a lot of time on design. I want it to look this way. The image is everything approach is the typical mindset. And, while this helps reduce bounce rate, there is much more to the story. Many of these people invest so much time into the design and product and actually only a few minutes on keywords. This is a huge mistake. You need to spend some serious time researching your keywords. You might spend a good 100 (or a lot more) or more researching keywords before you commit to go for them. Remember that if you can't do well with a keyword, your entire site is a waste. You need to make sure that the keyword is attainable and that it will be profitable once you reach the goal.
How to do Keyword Research
There are many ways to do keyword research. There are two main questions you are trying to answer: 1- How many type this particular keyword into the search engine? 2- Is the keyword attainable? Without experience, it is difficult to answer and that's where a good seo comes in. Here are a couple tips.
How Many People Type the Keyword In the Search Engine?
The first thing it to see how many people type the keyword in. A good free tool is from Aaron Wall and can be found here: tools.seobook.com. People also predominately use two other keyword tools. 1- Wordtracker found here: www.wordtracker.com and 2- Google Adwords found here: www.adwords.google.com. These are the best tools for keyword research. You can also find trends and things from Google insights or other tools, but these tools are all you really need. In fact, you can use just one of them and be fine.
Can I Attain the Ranking?
With Google it's a competition and often unfair one. Some firms are going to have many in-house seos and many offshore workers. Do you have the same level of commitment both financially and personally. If not, you can't compete and must go somewhere else. Don't get discouraged because you can still win. You just need to choose wisely. How do you do that?
The best way is to simply type the query into the search engine and see what comes up. Do the sites look professional? Can you provide something unique that isn't already there? Can you provide better content or more content? If so, how? These are the questions to ask yourself. The things you don't want to see are high pagerank, big brands, huge sites, and swarming (see other article on swarming). To check the pagerank of a site you can go here: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php Any site that has a pr five or above is going to be very difficult to beat. A site with a pr 4 is difficult to beat and a pr three or below is doable. Now, it's hard to say because it depends on so many factors, but pr is one of the things to look at. If you really feel you can provide a better site than what you see, than you have a pretty good chance. Google highly favors big brands, big sites, and people that swarm. So, you have to keep that in mind. If you are not into big brand or big site or able to swarm, than you need to go somewhere else unless you think you have something really great to offer that isn't there; and still, be careful.
Using Keywords in Your Site
While blackhat wins, stuffing keywords in your site is just plain dumb as Google will penalize you. It's way too obvious. It worked back in the early 90s, but not anymore. But, here are some things you need to do: 1- Use the keyword in the site title and 2- Use the keyword in the meta description and 3- Use the keyword in the page title and 4- Use the keyword in the page content. So, for each page of the site, you can tell Google four times you want to get that keyword. This may sound obvious, but many sites don't even put the keyword in these areas and they wonder why their site never ranks for that; hello, Google want to be relevant. If you tell them what you want to be relevant for, your chances go up substantially.
You don't need to worry about keyword density. If you write honest content, without manipulating it, that is the best route. Write some content that people want to read. Just make sure and use the titles and meta description properly. There is some debate about whether to use exact matches. For example, the site title could be boat, the page title could also be boat, and the meta description could be I love boats.
Keyword Sizes - Styling
The size of a keyword also matters. When people want to make emphasis on a word they will make it larger or bold it. So, when you build a site, keep the titles in bold and use bold when you want to emphasis a keyword. It all needs to look natural, but it's helpful because a lot of people have the title font the same size as the regular font and sometimes bold is not used. Larger size and bold is a way to also tell Google, "I love this keyword. Please give it to me." When you build your site, you'll notice you can use h1-h5 as headings (heading tags). H1 is the largest and h5 is the smallest. You should make your titles with these h1-h5 headings. You'll notice from web searches that a lot of sites use h1-h3 and very little of the smaller fonts. It makes sense because h1-h5 is primarily for headings (oh, the h stands for something). Nowadays, with css, you can pretty make the headings look any size you want and pass the h1-h5 ratings to Google as you wish. Still, in most cases it's not worth messing around with.
Anchor Text
Finally, make sure and use the keyword in the anchor text. The anchor text is the text you click on when you see a link. In your html code it will look like this <a href="http://www.iloveGoogle.com">Google Loves Me</a> The anchor text is Google Loves Me. So, make sure that this text is the keyword you want to rank for and link it back to the page or your site that says in the title, Google Loves Me. You can create a link like this when you get links to your site or for internal linking. Just so you are aware, internal linking also helps a lot in a search engine priority to a page. Google thinks that if you think that page is great, you will link to it internally and it's true. Many people have more internal links to the buy page and that will help you get more sales.
Themes
This is extremely important. Google loves a good theme. Does it make sense to sell kids toys and condoms on the same page? I didn't think so. It's inappropriate and it also doesn't make sense; Google will penalize you for both. So, when making your site, pick a good theme. You can see themes all over the internet. Your them could all be closely related to your niche. This helps the search engine a lot because their number one goals is relevancy. Who is more relevant, a site with one page on fishing boats and 100 pages on jogging or a site with 100 pages on fishing boats. Google looks for relevancy and that makes picking a theme important. Choose a good group of keywords that accentuate your theme.
How Many Keywords Should I Try to Rank For?
In most cases, you'll be lucky to rank for one or two decent keywords. With that in mind, build your site around one or two keywords that you know that you badly want and that you think are possible to attain. Still, you should be going for many more keywords. Most people suggest around 5, but there are lots of sites that rank for thousands or millions. So, it all depends. If you aren't too big, I would suggest five to start out with, but focus your site on one or two that are the frontrunners.
Exact Match Domain
It is much easier to rank for a keyword that matches the domain. For example, the domain www.car.com will have an easier time ranking for the keyword car than www.hairstylesthatlooklikecars.com. For one thing, people are more likely to click on car.com and more likely to just type in the domain without even searching for it. This has worked so well, that many black hat web spammers have spent millions in creating the perfect way to steal exact match domains and link them up to their sites in fake names and servers all over the world. If you can't get the exact match domain, don't give up because you can still rank for it. You're just starting at a small disadvantage. Still, it's always a good idea to have the keyword in the domain. If you can't get cars.com, maybe you can purchase something like redcars.com or something like that. If you have cash, you can always hire a domain broker to find you some hot domains; they will be expensive.
Google has discouraged half the web masters out there by reducing the relevancy of exact match domains. This was in part to push their brand focus. Most brands couldn't just buy all the exact match domains for millions of keywords and so Google threw this metric down in an effort to boost less relevant brands and line their greedy pockets. Still, no matter, it's still a good idea to have exact match domains.
Saving Files
Google also looks at the way you save your file. If you save your file name pantyhose, but your page title is rubbernecking it's not a good idea. The keyword you want to rank for should also be used in the way yous save your file names. More importantly, the url is determined by how you save your file in static sites. Dynamic database sites need the url rewritten.
The Url
The url is of the most utmost importance. The site should have the keyword in the url. For example, your site might be www.camouflaugeboating.com/kayak.html. This is a much better url than www.camouflageboating.com/?12343a;ske.php. The url tells Google what you want to rank for. If someone is building your site, tell them you want the good seo extensions on the url. The way to do this is to rewrite the .htaccess file for seo urls. Many content management systems like Wordpress already allow for this. Don't accept bad urls from any programmer as it will destroy your site.
If you have a static site, then it is much more simple. All you do is save the file with the keyword you want and that's what is used in the url. That makes it easy.
Are You Giving Up Yet?
Look, it may seem difficult, but ranking is still possible. The main thing is to look at the competition and do a better job. How can you do that? Well, if you're small you can move faster and be more innovative. These are the weaknesses of large rivals. They can't move quickly or turn around very well. They can however move forward in one straight direction quite well. Find a category that needs some innovation and then work really fast before they turn around to eat you for lunch.
Final Thought
Google won't be the master forever. They feel invincible. You can tell by the crazy things they do and the amount of people they get angry. It's just a matter of time before they either lose out completely or are taken down to number two or number three. If you have a good site built, you can sit and wait for opportunity. If Google doesn't like you, maybe someone else will.
| 
