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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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Using Yahoo! YSlow to analyze web pages for performance (and more tips)

ashish — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:18:22 +0000

Improving the speed of your pages is normally pretty critical. If your pages are slow to load, then people quickly switch over, and even viewers who find the information on your pages useful tend to hesitate to come to your page more often; as for casual viewers, you can be pretty sure that they will switch fast if they find your page taking a lot of time to load.
You can take a number of steps to improve the performance of your page, but before that, you should be spending time to determine how the performance of your page actually is. You can get some idea just by loading your page and comparing the loading times of other pages, and there are a number of other tools that can help you determine the performance of your page. Many of these tools also help in giving you more details about which sections of your page cause overall bad performance.
One tool that can help you evaluate the performance of your sites is called Yahoo! YSlow (link to page):
Details about the tool are below.
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.
Details about performance optimization at Yahoo Developer Tools (link)

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.
Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.

The article above (link) contains a lot of details about how to increase performance, so make sure that you have read the page and evaluated which of these apply to you.

Learn about using Google Webmaster Tools from the official Youtube channel

ashish — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:12:06 +0000

The Google Webmasters is a great resource for learning more about how to optimize your site. Visit this site (link) to learn much more. The Webmasters Tools are an invaluable set of tools that will help you optimize your Google experience, which includes easier indexation of your page and its contents with Google Search. You will learn how to add your site to the list of tools, as well as how to add a sitemap such that Google will be easily able to learn about updates of your site.
If you want to learn more about how to use Google’s Webmaster Tools, then there is no better way than to learn from the Webmasters Youtube Channel, located at this location (link). Some of the more common queries are:

Should I expect increased traffic if I optimize my images?

Webmaster Central and Best Practices – Adam Lasnik – Google India SearchMasters ’09

And many more ..