Keyword Research

• Tier 1
• Tier 2
• Long Tail
• Stemming
• Plurals
• Derivatives
• Voodoo (LSI)

Onpage

• Title Tag
• Meta Tag
• Keyword Density
• Style Sheet Emphasis
• Link Text
• First Link Priority
• No Follow

Offpage

• Keyword Targeting
• Link Text
• Authority Linking
• Page Rank Sculpting

Link Building

• Social Sites
• Authority Sites
• Directories
• Press Releases
• Syndicated Content
• Article Distribution
• Multi-Media Distribution

Competitive Analysis

• Trends
• Spying
• Market Data

Site Structure

• No Follow
• Silos
• Theme Vectoring
• Interactivity

Content

• Uniqueness
• Informational
• Descriptions of Product
• Category Assignment
• Usability Balance

Source: MindMapOfUltimateWoe via Andy Jenkin’s Blog – Irreverence Rebellion and interweb marketing

The next time somebody says you just need a few keywords and incoming links think of this list and ask yourself if the person who Tweet’d “bold your keywords” really has a clue about SE algorithms and the many, many things that solidify top ranking.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

The Many Faces Of SEO

The searcher is a strange beast. You’d be very surprised by what search terms a person types in to the search engines. It’s usually not what your thinking when promoting your blue widget. More times than not you will find your market is using long tail phrases like “freaky custom blue widget” or “custom blue freaky widget” to find what they are looking for.

To help you understand why and, more importantly,  how to identify keywords your market is using to find businesses like yours here are a couple of great resources that give you  better understand of  how to zero in on what the customer is searching plus 7 research tips that can help you to be quickly found by your target market.

Keyword Research – Connecting With Your Target Audience

Keyword research is a vitally important part of your web site’s marketing, whether you are running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, optimizing your website, or launching an off-page SEO campaign In fact, proper keyword research should be the …

Keyword Research

It’s just I don’t know how to introduce something as incredibly dry and just as equally dull as keyword research. In fact you’re probably going to learn more interesting things by actually watching Anchorman. …

7 Secrets to Successful Keyword Research

The quickest way to gain that insight is by conducting research on possible keywords they use. However, so many of my clients conduct only very basic keyword research and miss many keywords because they don’t really delve into the …

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Keyword Research

Why just today I saw a tweet come across my deck gloating about keyword success for the broad keyword phrase online seo marketing and it only took them 2 months to get to the #9 position. 2 months! Btw- I couldn’t find this website in the first 5 pages.

Lets take a little closer look at some data for this search phrase.

Broad match:

Phrase match:

Key for screen shots:

SEOT – Estimated traffic if in the #1 spot
PBR – The percent of broad-match searches versus phrase match
SEOC – Search engine competition
SEOCT – All in title competition
OCI – Commercial intent

As you can see the search volume is very low for broad match at 118 total searches a day while phrase match is only 7 searches a day.

Looking at the PBR percentage only 6% of the words in the keyword phrase are used in this order. Just for reference I wouldn’t target any keyword phrase with less than 55% PBR.

The competition (SEOC) is over 2 million pages. A lot of noise there.

The SEOCT shows around 537,000 pages use the exact same phrase in  their title. This is actually a pretty high number which usually indicates you would have to do a lot of work to beat out 500,000 other pages using the same keyword phrase.

So at the end of 2 months the webmaster would enjoy a healthy 2 visits a day for the phrase match “online seo marketing”. Not much traffic for all that work they had to do to beat out 2 million competitors.

While it is true that you can hold the top position in search for unique keyword phrases, most of the time these phrases have a very low search volume. Although it is perfectly fine for a webmaster to celebrate keyword victories, from an international search stand point it’s hard to get excited about a keyword phrase that only brings a few visitors a day.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Useless Keywords

To see what I’m talking about go to Google and type in a competitive “core” keyword or phrase,  “mexican restaurant”,  into the search box and examine the results that were found. Chances are you will see local search results for your geographical area, in either the 1st position or around 4th position. These results are extracted from Google’s Local Business Center data which allows business owners to add their business to Local Search.

There is another way to get into the search results , not only in local search but organic search, and be identified as a local business. All you have to do to rank well in local search results is to have your city, state and zip code on every page on your site. Google’s spiders will find this and identify you as local business and drop you right into the search results.

The best place to do this would be in the footer of your site. If you use a content management system like the Wordpress platform I use here on this blog then changing every page is a piece of cake. Simply edit the footer.php file , add your local modifiers into the code and save the file. If you are not tech savvy and are using a web designner to manage your site for you, make sure he/she adds your local information to every page of your site.

See you on Google.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

How To: Ranking In Local Search

These tips should only be implemented after extensive keyword testing has been done. PPC  is the only way I have found to find the keywords that are worth optimizing for. Nothing is worse than SEO’ing for keywords that do not delivery the intended results. Until your keywords have been tested you don’t have anything concrete that proves whether a keyword will actually bring sales to your site. You don’t want just traffic, you want sales!

There are several advantage of SEO . The first thing to note is it’s free, unlike PPC where you have to pay every time someone visits your site. Being listed in the organic search results could also attract more visitors to your site than a  paid listings.  Believe it or not most people are not inclined to click on ads. They prefer to click on natural search results especially if the title of the link is written with the human, not the search engine, in mind.

There are downsides to SEO though. The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms which means you need to stay up-to-date on what changes are taking place with the search engines to stay competitive. But all is not lost. By following these basic tips below, you’ll stand a much better chance of being listed in the top 10 results for your keywords .

Title tag

The search engines place great emphasis on the <title> tag; it tells them what the web pages topic is about. Place your keywords at the start of the title tag for best results but remember; write the with the human in mind. Google will only read the first 60 characters of the title so don’t try to write a small paragraph here. This does more harm than good.

Meta Description

Over the past few years many people who give advice on SEO tell you that the meta description tag <meta name=“description”> is worthless. They are of the thinking that Google is just going to pull the description it wants from the page. Well, I’m here to tell you they are dead wrong. Sure, if you don’t have a description Google will pull something, but it’s usually not what you want. On several occasions I’ve seen Google mangle the description of a page by combing two different parts of a page into the description tag. Make sure your description contains your keywords, is unique;  keep it to 150 characters or less.

Meta Keyword

Google overlooks the meta keyword tag <meta name=“keywords”>, but Yahoo and MSN still read them. So spend a few minutes putting your keywords in keyword meta to add to your search engine authority. Don’t go crazy stuffing keywords here. Adding 3 or 4 main keywords is all you need. If your building landing pages for a ppc campaign the meta keyword can play an integral role in Google’s quality score for the ad.

( H1 tags, H2 tags)

The search engines place great emphasis on words between headings (<H1>, <H2>) so it would be a smart idea to have your keywords placed within them. Just make sure that the keywords are suitable to the content and you’re not stuffing them.

Page name

Having your keywords in your page name will help the search engines determine what the page is about. For example, if you page is about “nail polish colors,” your page name should look like this: http://yoursite.com/nail-polish-colors.htm.

Making sure your pages have all of these elements will increase your ability of getting listed on the first page ( top 10) of search results for your targeted keywords.

Best of luck to your SEO efforts!

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Search Engine Optimization:Tips For Domination