Using Less Keywords for Greater SEO success

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords. It is said that you should analyze your keywords before you do any website optimization. I agree. Keyword analysis helps you see what people are typing into the search engines and you want them to find your site. What makes one tear out the remaining hair follicles is which variation of the word you should use.

“Do I put in ‘ac’ or ‘air conditioning’ or ‘a/c’? Do I optimize for all of them?”

The other question is concerning hyphens.

“Do I put ‘remote-control’, ‘richmond-va’? How many hyphens is allowable? Does the search engine distinguish words?”

These questions are valid because no one wants to miss an opportunity because someone typed in “flower” and you optimized for “flowers.”

Well, I have good news.

Google has been playing around with its algorithm and made it a tad self-aware … or at least aware of what you are trying to find. Certain words are becoming associated with other words to aid in bringing more relevant results to your browser.

Let’s look at our first example of “ac” versus “Air conditioning”

Interestingly enough, Google went ahead and substituted “ac” for “air conditioning.” If this is an upcoming trend, your keyword list can be reduced. If more abbreviations defer to the actual word, then the competition for those words will increase due to this substitution. There is no need to panic, this actually will help in the long run by eliminating keyword abuse.

For our second example, the hyphen has been a great tool for keywords, but having a url that looks like best-leather-shoe-springfield-ohio.html seems a bit overkill, if not spammy. Let’s see what Google has to say:

Google is able to split words and see individual words even inside a URL. The days of the hyphen seem to be numbered. If someone with the URL “lexingtonpubs.com” is wanting to optimize and is being told to change to “lexington-pubs.com,” their efforts will be in vain since Google sees t

he two words without the hyphen.

“But what

if the hypen is typed in anyway, as used in components?”

Let’s try something else then:

How about that? The hyphen was removed. So choosing to optimize between “rj12″ and “rj-12″ is no longer a choice you have to worry about. Maybe.

While Google has made some impressive tweaks to its algorithm, try the same search for ac repair in Yahoo or Live and see what you come up with. What do you do if they don’t follow Google?

1. Pay attention to market share (of which Google Dominates) and

2. Pay attention to your websites traffic and see what browsers most of your customers are using.

Remember, it’s always about the user surfing to your page. If most of your audience is using Yahoo to find you, don’t sweat it and expand your keyword list to include abbreviations. SEO is about finding out what people are looking for and we want you to be what they are looking for in the end.

The key to increase website traffic

Everyone wants to have a lot of traffic to their website. In order to get this traffic many people try to work on their Meta tags or even do tricks trying to get more visitors to their website. One of the simplest and most solid ways to increase the flow of traffic to your website is to offer more content. It has often been said that on the Internet, content is king. It is important to understand how more content can bring more visitors to your site and how to generate content that is related to your particular web site.

Why do you need more content?

Many websites are actually company brochures that have been adapted to the web. They merely describe a bit about the company or service and then add some contact information. Such websites usually have about 5-10 separate html files. If these pages have a good amount of text it is possible to optimize them for several keywords and web surfers may find the site.

However, if these sites are in highly competitive fields then it may be difficult to build a decent amount of traffic because search engines try to find the most important web sites that can answer a search query. Search engine robots look for keywords in the meta tags and in the text on the pages to determine what the site is all about. However the search engines also look at the links on the various pages. If your main page is about bicycles, for example, and you have links to other pages on your site relating to the same theme, perhaps, racing bicycles, mountain bicycles etc. then the search engine will conclude that the site is about bicycles, and if you have a lot of pages on this theme, your site should rank higher than someone with a company brochure site of a few pages.

In addition, as I have pointed out in a previous article each page, with its content on your particular theme, stands out alone as a mini website in itself and may come up in searches on the Internet. Thus people will often enter your site through the “side” or “back doors” and not the main page. The more pages you have the more chances of being found in searches, and the more different keywords you can optimize your site for.

So, by building a content rich site on a particular theme, you will boost the chances of your main page to come up in searches and you will increase the likelihood of overall traffic through your other pages coming up in good positions in Internet keyword searches. In addition to this, the more content you have the more respect your page gets from human-edited directories (such as dmoz -Open Directory Project), and other webmasters. If you have quality content then you swill gets more link requests, requests for permission to reprint your articles in ezines, more links to specific pages on your site. All of this will result in more traffic.

How to build more content?

Depending on the type of products or services you are offering, there are several ways to build quality content for your site. Here are a few examples

Product Reviews- If you are selling other peoples products, through an affiliate system, rather than just listing a link to the product, you can write a full review of the product, explaining how the product helped you and what are its strengths and weaknesses. This kind of content actually pre-sells the product, as well as being interesting reading in itself. If you have your own products you could give background information on it or get satisfied customers or users to write the reviews.

Background information- Every product or service exists in some kind of context. Suppose you have a hotel in a particular city. Instead of only listing information about your hotel, you could give some pages about the history of the city where the hotel is located or information about popular tourist attractions in that area. The possibilities are enormous.

Questions and Answers- Let your web visitors help you in the process of content creation. Start a questions and answers section on your website or in your electronic newsletter. Not only will you get insight into what your clientele is thinking, but by answering these questions you will generate useful content for your site and for your newsletters.

Bulletin Board Forums- Your web visitors can also directly write the content on your site through a bulletin board. Some bulletin boards are searchable by search engine robots, while others are not. If you have good content on the bulletin board you can also re-publish it on the main sections of your website to insure inclusion in the search engines.

Articles by others- There are no need to recreate the wheel or spend a lot of time writing, if that is not your cup of tea! You can also publish the articles of other people. There is a lot of quality content that is available free of charge. While you usually have to provide a link back to the author of the article, this is a small price to pay considering that some of these articles may pull in tons of traffic.

Top 5 Keyword Research Steps To Dominating Google

By following these top 5 keyword research steps you will be able to dominate your competition in any internet marketing campaign you launch. Keyword research is the foundation that your entire campaign should be designed around for. Below is a list of 5 simple to follow steps that if followed will lead to a solid foundation and a very powerful campaign.

1.) Google Suggest is a great free tool which you can find for free doing a Google search. You simply start typing in a keyword and it will automatically start suggesting some great key terms of your choice. This tool can help get your juices flowing and give you some great keyword phrase ideas.

2.) Use SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool which is a free tool you can find on Google. You type in your seed keyword and it will return the most popular searched keyword phrases back along with how many times it's being searched. You want to find a few keyword phrases that drive traffic using this tool. If the keyword phrase you want isn't producing any traffic then don't waste your time any further. Find some keyword phrases getting some great results, this is the key.

3.) Now that you have a few keyword phrases go to Google and type in the keyword phrase in the search bar. This will show you how many competing websites there are out there. Next put quotation marks around your keyword phrase like this “keyword phrase” and Google will return the number of optimized results, this is the real number we're looking for, record that number. Repeat this to all your keyword phrases and select the keyword phrase which has the least optimized competition on Google with the highest traffic and do the math. A formula for this is to take the optimized results and divide that by the number of searches. This will give you the R/S value, the lower the number the better the keyword phrase. Select the keyword phrase with the smallest number.

4.) Another great free tool you can find on Google is Google Adwords Keyword tool . You can type in your keyword phrase and it will return the advertiser competition along it's search volume. You can even see the estimated average cost per click competing advertisers are competing for. If you see advertisers paying big bucks for the cost per click that's a sign that there is money to be made with that keyword phrase. Use this tool wisely.

5.) Next go to Google and type in your selected keyword phrase and study all 10 of your competition on the front page. Start by looking at each websites PR(Google Page Rank). If your using internet explorer make sure you have Google's toolbar as on it they have a feature which shows you the Page Rank of any website. If you have competition with PR's of 7 or above I don't recommend competing for that keyword phrase as it will be very difficult to beat them for that spot. The lower the PR the better chance you have of taking their position.

Any good marketer can tell you that the most important part of any campaign is doing solid keyword research. Without it you won't have any results no matter how much time you put into your campaign. Using the simple 5 steps above will allow you to completely dominate your competition on Google and provide you with the foresight to see great success in your campaign by having a solid foundation built underneath you.

Eight Effective Keyword Research Strategies for Search Engine Marketing

Keyword research is the lifeblood of a search engine marketing campaign - either natural or paid search. If you don't promote your site with the right keywords, you will waste a lot of time and money for nothing. The obvious place to start your keyword research for a pay per click campaign is the search engine's own keyword tool. But you can go far beyond that to uncover keywords that are very effective for your business. Following are eight strategies for creating keyword lists.

1. Comb your web site for keywords. Every different way you have described your business on your site is a new keyword or set of keywords.

2. Think from your customer's perspective. Are the words you use to describe your business really the way other people would describe it? Ask around. Whatever words people are using to search for your kind of business are the words you need to target, regardless of what terms are used in your industry. Don't get so wrapped up in industry jargon that you end up paying for ineffective keywords.

3. Nichebot. We really like this web site. First sign up for an account. It's free to sign up. Then type a starting keyword related to your service or product in the text box at the top of the page and hit the Search button. You can change the middle dropdown list to “Overture” to get a better idea of the actual keywords people are using to search in Yahoo!. But don't overlook the “Word Tracker” option, which will generate a lot of keyword data.

The data will be returned with information such as the number of searches performed for each keyword, the amount of competition, and the KEI for each keyword (”KEI”, which stands for “Keyword Effectiveness Index”, is a value for the keyword based on a formula that considers the number of searches for the keyword relative to the number of directly competing web pages).

4. You can also look through your web logs for the search terms people have used on your web site or to find your web site. This is critical data that few businesses tap into. If people are already using particular keywords to find your site, then those keywords likely warrant extra promotion.

5. If you sell products, you can combine brands with attributes of the products (color, width, size, etc.) to create many specific, late buying cycle keywords. For instance, if someone is searching for “laptop computers” they are likely in an early stage of doing research in the process of purchasing a laptop computer. But if a person is searching or “HP Pavilion 15 inch laptop”, that indicates that he is further along in the buying process because he is researching a specific brand and screen size of laptop.

6. Competitors' brand names. Most search engines' official position on bidding on your competitors' trademarks is that you can only do it if you are the owner of the trademark, a reseller of the company's goods, or if you provide “substantive” information about the company. I suggest you bid on keywords that contain the brand, but don't use the brand name in your ads.

For instance, if you were marketing a line of tennis shoes, you might want to create one generic keyword group that contained brands names such as “Nike”, “Reebok” and “Adidas”, and then write an ad targeting purchasers of tennis shoes in a general way, without referencing any of the competition. Some of the brand name keywords may get declined, but probably not all of them.

7. Try to think of keywords that reflect different stages of the searcher's buying cycle. Early in the buying cycle, they will be looking for more general information about your type of service or products. Later in the buying cycle, when they are much closer to making a decision and doing business, they will use more specific keywords, which might include particular brands and models, or even locations to make a purchase. Try to use keywords that cover the entire buying cycle. It may be worth bidding higher for the more specific keywords because your conversion rate for those keywords should be higher.

8. Spy on your competitors. There are a couple of online services, such as SpyFu and KeywordSpy, that allow you to see what keywords your competitors are bidding on in their paid search campaigns. This information can be very useful. But don't just assume that your competitors are smarter than you are. You will still need to test to see which of their keywords are effective.

And remember that you are looking for groups of keywords. Unless your campaign is very small, it is unlikely you will want to run a 1:1 ratio of keywords to ads. It will be a very unruly number of ads to have to create and monitor. So you will be assigning ads to small groups of related keywords, and writing ad copy that applies to all of the keywords. So if you're going to run ads for “gardening”, you might as well run them for “flower gardening”, “spring garden”, and “planting”. The major search engines have some nice dynamic features that make it pretty easy to customize an ad for multiple keywords.

Using the above strategies, you should be able to greatly expand the number of keywords in your paid search campaigns, and generate many new keyword ideas for natural search. I recommend that you first use your paid search campaign to generate data related to your keywords, and then optimize your site for those keywords that convert at the highest rate, unless the keywords are too competitive to target with SEO.

Choosing best Keywords

Free Blog Traffic

Include keywords in your online profiles.

Whenever you create an online profile anywhere online - on your blogs, on a forum or on sites such as linked in - always use carefully chosen key phrases.

This increases the chance that people will find you, either via search engines or, for example at LinkedIn, via the site's search facility.

The other day a friend of mine, Phil Tanny, mentioned that he'd started a forum. To try to find it, I typed...

Phil Tanny forum...into Google. The No.1 search result surprised me. It was Phil's profile on our affiliate forum.

(The ranking may have changed by the time you read this.)

Profile links probably aren't very valuable in Google's eyes, but they're quick and easy to set up. Try it on our forum:

http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/discus/index.php

You can often find forums in your industry by going to Google and typing in...

keyword +forum

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