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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 10 – Evaluating and finding keywords

ashish — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:03:38 +0000

The previous post (Identify more Keywords) talked about how to identify the relevant keyword phrases for your site, including using some tools to identify alternate keywords.
This post will have more information on the topic of finding relevant keywords, and deciding the keywords to use. Consider the alternate keyword phrases to be synonyms, since it is true that not every user will use the same keyword while doing search, and it is very effective for your site if you are also able to rank high on synonyms. So, continuing with the camera example from earlier posts, you would like to have rankings for keywords such as ‘buy cameras’, ‘digital cameras’, but would you also consider some other keyword phrases such as ‘purchase camera’, ‘buy old camera’, ‘compact camera’, etc. These are all slightly different versions of the same keyword, and show up when you use tools to find alternate keywords.
In some cases, you should even consider using keywords that are a bit niche, in the sense that they are not searched for by a large number of users; the disadvantage is that a lesser number of people search for those, and the advantage is that your competitors will not be attacking those keywords with so much passion as they would be for ranking the more searched keywords. Having some keywords that are niche does not harm you in any way, since even with a lesser number of searchers, you can still get enough visitors to make it work your while. In fact, if a user searches for a specific keyword, it is more likely that he is actually interested and will click through to maybe even click on an ad or purchase something from your site.
What else helps you in determining which keywords to use ? Well, if you are running some sort of advertisements (such as Adsense by Google) on your page, then it is likely that you will be interested in knowing whether different keywords can result in different revenues for your ad clicks. And you should not be surprised by what your discover – different keyword do in fact have different rates assigned to them, and since you are in the business of making money, if by small changes in the keywords, you can earn substantially more money from your ad clicks, why not learn more about this ? If you use the Google Adwords tool (located at this link), you can enter your desired keywords, and then in the place where it says “Choose Columns to Display”, select ‘Estimated Average CPC’, and you will start to see which keywords are rated higher.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 9 – Tools for keywords

ashish — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:32:32 +0000

For the first time since I began this series about Search Engine Optimization, I started talking about keywords and their importance in the previous post (Keywords and SEO), with the post explaining what keywords and key phrases are, and what are some of the ways in which you should put yourself in your readers shoes to figure out keywords / key phrases to use.
In this post, I will get deeper into the use of keywords and key phrases, where all to use them, and how this impacts your Search Engine Ranking. There are multiple places you can put your keywords / key phrases, but putting them in your meta tags is not going to get your much benefit (by all means, put them, but make judicious use of them). More important is learning as to where all putting them can benefit you.
The most important of course (and as has mentioned previously) is to have a good keyword density in the content of your article. Going by the example of the camera in the previous post, let us consider the case where a person makes a website that tries to sell cameras and camera equipment (and this can be a challenging area since the number of sites selling the same stuff are pretty large). Ideal would be to high rankings for the keyword ‘camera’, but this is going to be very difficult since this is a very hotly contested keyword and the number of people trying to rank high (and making sustained efforts to achieve that) is pretty large. It is better to also look for multiple work keywords (or keyword phrases) that people would use to search for. So, you would want to select keyword phrases such as ‘Canon Camera’, ‘Sony Camera’, ‘Nikon Camera’, ‘Digital Camera’, ‘Cheap Camera’, and so on.
One way to identify more keywords that you can use, as well as identify the number of times those keywords are searched is through the use of tools. They also give you a reality check, since you may think that the keywords you are using and focusing on are the one that your potential readers will want to also search on, but it is best to verify this through some keyword suggestion tools. You can refer to your site, or just give a few keywords, and the 3 tools (and there are a large number of other tools available for the same) will identify the alternate keywords and the number of times those have been searched by (in one case, I was very surprised, since it seemed to me that I was writing about the wrong specialty, since most potential users were searching for a slightly different set of keywords). So, here goes:
2 tools by Google and 1 other tool:
Google Adwords Keyword tool (link)
Google Search-based keyword tool (link), allows you to refer to your site as well, and is based on actual Google search queries; very useful for those with an Adwords account, although useful to other people as well
FREE keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker (link)
Go ahead, give these tools a whirl, and you might find that some of the keywords that you thought are very relevant indeed are, while others are not so important.

Next post, we continue on the topic of keywords..

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 8

ashish — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:49:41 +0000

In the previous article (Optimizing images for SEO), I talked about how to ensure that you are getting the required boost from your images as part of Search Engine Optimization.
This post will start talking at a preliminary level, since we are going to start talking about an important part of the overall SEO gameplan; I will start explaining today about what keywords are, and how they are important for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization. Learning about keywords as a part of SEO is extremely important if you want to boost your blogs rankings in the top search engines, and you need the higher ranking to drive more traffic to your site, which in turn should generate more revenue to you. If you have done any kind of website optimization, talked to a SEO consultant, or read articles on this, all of them will jump out and shout ‘keyword’ to you.
So, what are keywords / key phrases ? Keywords or phrases are those single words or word phrases that are contained in your page, in the content, and that help in driving search engines to your site. They are supposed to represent what users typically search for, and if you are ranked highly by search engines for those tags, then there is a much better chance that when users search for those phrases, they will find your site. So, for example, if you have a site on selling cameras, then you would really want your site to be ranked high when users search for ‘digital camera’, ‘low priced camera’, ‘camera’, ‘SLR’, ‘Canon camera’ and so on. If you are ranked high, then more visitors, and hence more money.
Earlier, people would use a meta-tag (a tag in the header portion of the HTML page) to add such keywords, but because of people trying to exploit the system by adding irrelevant information in the meta-tags or by stuffing the meta-tags, it is believed that search engines have learned to ignore meta-tags (and in the worst case, penalize any site that tries such tactics); what they believe is that if such tags are included in the text of the contents of the page, then they are counted. So why do people not make pages entire in this format “canon digital camera low price SLR camera flash digital”, and so on. After all, this content adds a lot more keywords. Well, such a text would quickly turn off readers, and now search engines have got smarter, and they expect that such keywords will only form a small percentage of the overall text, else the text would not be proper content. Further, each search engine tends to have its own algorithm of what to use and what not to use.
As a starter (and future posts will provide more advanced technologies related to finding keywords which are of higher value, or used more), start to visualize as to which are the keywords that you would use were you searching like your customers, ask other people around you, look at forums, and then you will get an idea as to which are the keywords that you need in your content.
Next post looks at this topic in more detail ..

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 6

ashish — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:21:02 +0000

In the previous post (structure of a post for search engine optimization) I talked about how to structure a post in terms of title, H1, H3 tags, inserting keyword phrases, and so on without doing it in excess.
This post will talk about things such as defining permalinks (relevant for all blogs, although my experience is more with WordPress blogs), adding breadcrumbs, making your blogs faster, cleaning up the code).
- First of all, permalinks. Your WordPress default installation comes up with setting permalinks in the form of a parameter, and nothing descriptive. What you need to do is to go to your Settings inside the Admin -> Permalinks and change the settings from the default to something like ‘Month and Name’. Now, whenever you give a descriptive title to your post, that same will also be set for your post. So, for example, the URL for this post is something like ‘http://earn-cash-tips.com/2010/02/search-engine-optimization-tips-and-tricks-–-learn-how-to-increase-visibility-in-search-engines-–-part-6′. This descriptive URL makes the search engines pick up the URL and rank it higher.
- Make sure that you add Breadcrumbs to your site; what are Breadcrumbs ? These are the text near the top of a post that point out the path to the post. So, for example, for this post, the Breadcrumb would be in the nature of: Articles -> Optimization -> Search Engine Optimization. Breadcrumbs give your users an easy way to do site navigation, as well as also allow search engines to easily navigate your site easier. One way to do that is through a plugin such as the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin.
- Search engines read your site like a text browser, and cannot read your fancy JavaScript and CSS, so if you have built navigation systems based entirely on Javascript, then some search engines will have problems being able to read your site. You want search engines to be easily able to index your entire site, so make sure that the navigation to all your pages is easily available.
- In continuation of the above tip, make sure that you do not have too much of CSS and JavaScript code inside your site code, instead move it all to CSS files that are referenced properly from within your code. This provides a clean interface to search engines.
- Use Sitemaps. Sitemaps are easily available if you do a Google search, so make sure that you have setup a sitemap and submit to the different search engines (for example, for Google, submit sitemaps to the Google Webmasters site). Sitemaps allow search engines to get notified when you update your site, as well as provide them a way to get into all the pages of your site.
- Learn more about how to speed up your blog. Use database speeding up techniques to decrease the load required with database interactions, including reducing the number of database interactions. In addition, as the number of your viewers increase, start using plugins such as Wp-Cache and WP-Super-Cache to speed up your blog. Do other tips such as reducing the number of plugins you do not actually use, or which can be pretty heavy (such as the plugin that hunts for relevant posts – very useful, but can be heavy in terms of DB interactions)

As usual, you will read more in the next post in this series.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 5

ashish — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:26:52 +0000

The previous post in the series (Duplicate content and Search Engines) talked about duplicate content, how search engines ignored such content, and could potentially penalize you for the same.
This post talks more about how to structure your content for improving your rankings in Search Engines and involves the use of keywords in H1 and other headings. In a previous post, we talked about Keyword density should form around 4-6% of your post contents (not more, otherwise it will look like keyword stuffing). Identify key phrases that you want to emphasize in your post before making the post, and get a general idea of the location where you should use these keyword phrases. So, for example, if you consider this post, you should use the following keyword phrases ‘Search Engine Optimization’, ‘SEO’, ‘Content’, ‘Search Engine Ranking’, and similar such phrases.
- The title and H1 tags in your post should contain some of these phrases, but always keep in mind that the they should still be readable and be comprehensible to your readers. So, if you have a title such as ‘Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Ranking SEO’, it has a number of keywords, but does not form any sort of correct grammar (and keep in mind, that for titles and headings, you can use phrases instead of sentences), then it can look strange to readers. It is not very hard to have a correct combination of a keyword dense title that makes sense.
- With the above example, as you get down to the H2 and H3 tags, include the main sections of these keywords such as using ‘Search Engine’, or ‘Search Ranking’, so you are not stuffing your keyword phrases in all your headings, but are still using some of these keywords in a way that makes sense to your readers
- In the body of your message, use sections of your keyword phrases such as ‘Search Engine’, ‘Ranking’, etc, utilizing them in the body of the message, but keep in mind that your usage of the phrases should fit in with the body of the message and not break the flow of the post body.
- The way to start in this technique is to first write your post in your regular flow, and then optimize it for Search Engine Optimization. As a part of this, make sure that you use around 60 characters for the title of your post. Now, review your post and then consider breaking up the sections of the post using H2 tags; this helps to guide your readers through the post, and also provides relevant tags for the search engines.
- A typical WordPress installation has multiple links to the same content, and it makes sense to reduce some of the potential duplicate nature of these content that is visible to search engines when they spider your site. Using a plugin such as the All-In-One-SEO can set noindex for some of these locations, reducing the areas where this duplicate content is visible
[Consider this video about how to use the All-In-One-SEO-Pack (link)]

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