A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO KEYWORD RESEARCH

Keyword Research is numero uno in the process of optimizing your web site and pay-per-click campaign. This step involves choosing the most apt keywords your target group requires to improve its ranking in search engines.

In a layman’s parlance, keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.

Step 1: Keyword Identification

The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: "cat food" and "dog food".

Step 2: Locate Your Keywords

The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularities, you can make use of the Aleksika keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.

Step 3: Choose Keywords

The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.

Instead of making your search more vague and inaccurate, (which generally happens when you try to choose one-word keywords), it is suggested that you focus your concentration on only those keywords that can be easily managed. And that would typically mean phrasal keywords.

AVOID UNETHICAL PRACTICES IN SEO

Let’s be objective. Why have you spent your precious time and money putting up a website? Obviously so as to benefit from the sort of publicity the net has potential to provide you with. The main reason you have a website is so that others can see it and know about you or your business. If you aren’t being seen then the primary point of putting up a website is lost completely.

Being advertised on a search engine is one of the most basic ways of inviting visitors into your site. But advertising yourself is not enough you also have to ensure that you have the right amount of visibility which will get you noticed; a high ranking therefore is an absolute must. Search engine optimization is that missing link between a good and a great business, it earns you customers, keeps your website well visited and makes your investment on the site a success.

While nobody dare deny the kind of benefits you are likely to reap from being ranked high on a search engine, a certain amount of decorum needs to be maintained even here. A number of unethical practices have recently become prevalent amongst those desperate to boost their rankings. While on first glance these might seem completely harmless to you it is important that you recognize them for what they really are. The first step towards doing that is spotting what YOU might be doing wrong. Following is a list to help you through your discovery:

Inappropriate use of keywords

Sooner or later you are bound to find out that between you and the search engine, you are the one with the brain cells. But don’t go overboard with your discovery. Yes, you can fool the search engine with long strings of text into which you discreetly bury a gallon of keywords which have no relevance whatsoever with your site, but in the end you won’t be fooling the customers who will be finally using the links. Let’s face it, if the user is searching for “fish” or “fishing” he/she is most likely to not click on a site with a text like “boating fishing exotic animals site seeing great locations cruising Kuala Lumpur”. The irony is that if someone is really searching for a subject related to your site’s material even then he/she is probably going to skip clicking on your link because the description betrays no clue as to what really the site is about.

Inappropriate use of Meta tags

First things first, if you are wondering what META tags are then they are the html code that your website designer has used to create your webpage. They are also used to inform search engines as to what the keywords on the site are. So as is obvious by now certain ways of tampering with your META tags, certain ‘tricks’, let’s call them, might help you fool the search engine in ways very similar to that described above. However, your brainwave won’t get you too far unfortunately because stupid though it is, even a search engine knows not to go by appearance alone when it comes to websites, so instead of depending on the META tags alone it usually also checks up the content!

False content

As a user you have probably come across a dozen sites which seem to have long strings of text which have nothing to do with the site as a whole and probably make no sense individually either. These are what are called ‘False content’; they are put up on a site only to use a few keywords which might get detected by a search engine. Needless to say such content is a complete obstacle in a good read and even if the overall look and feel of your site is A1 every visitor will get put off by these.

While no one is taking away the fact that a good ranking is important it is probably also of some importance to gain it the right way. And tricking the visitor or disrupting their read is certainly not the way I would call right. Stick to making your website useful and make sure it has the right kind of ‘real’ content, once that is done no one will be able to stop you from getting a high ranking with the search engines.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT SEO COMPANY

Deciding on the ablest search engine optimization company can become a Herculean task, if you are not very sure of what you are looking for. But, following some key thumb rules will make you take an informed and educated decision.

Firstly, you should know, more than anyone else, what you are looking for. You ought to know what exactly you want the SEO company to do for you. Once you know your requirements, you will be in a position to decide whether the company is doing what you want them to do.

Often, misleading company ads claim to add your website into hundreds of search engines and assure good rankings too. No company can assure that and this does not work for two reasons. One, they will probably place your ad or website link in many websites, that too for free. Secondly, these sites that they submit your website to (or search engines as they call them) usually do not generate enough traffic to effect your website. This brings us to the most pertinent question. Which search engine do you generally use when you are looking for something? In more cases than none, it's Google or Yahoo. Will this company submit your website to them? Sounds doubtful.

Steer clear of companies who claim to give top rankings to your website immediately after submission to search engines. Nothing can be closer to falsehood than that. Also, stay away from firms that are more interested to make money than provide rules that can improve the ranking of your website. The company should strictly abide by the SEO code of ethics and not make false promises to its clients.

So, how do you choose a reliable SEO company? Above all, build trust in organizations that are very clear about their dealings with clients and those who do not make tall claims about improving or retaining search engine rankings of websites within an absurd amount of time.

Study their websites and decide if they sound sensible and reasonable to you. Do they emphasize on the importance of relevant keywords that, among other factors, will enhance the website rankings? Work with companies that have earned good recommendations in the industry. In other words, you can trust companies that have done a good job with people you know and can rely on.

COMMON SENSE SEO STRATEGIES

Want to see your website dancing at the top of the Google rankings for your keyword phrases or your niche? Yes, it is possible. Simply read on to find out...

Google, MSN, and Yahoo all use their own methodologies and/or algorithms to calculate the relevance of your pages, but here are a few common factors that are accepted by most to guarantee good rankings in renowned search engines.

Analyze your pages, and start the process today; remember to resubmit your changes when you are done, and the traffic will start to flow.

1) Keyword Density

Try to achieve a 3.5% to 7% keyword density for each of your pages. This means, your keywords should get repeated 3 to 7 times per 100 words written. However, do NOT overuse your keywords on the same page. Related keywords may help further.

There was a time when random usage of keywords was accepted by major search engines. This led to utter chaos and visitors hardly got to read what they were looking for. This was brought to the notice of search engine webmasters and it changed the rules overnight. Today, it is considered spam and the offender is punishable by law.

2) Keyword Phrase Choices

It is next to impossible to get a high rank for a single keyword, so make sure you aim for some lower-demand phrases too. The keyword ‘coffee’ has been listed in Overture as getting searched 370830 times a month. ‘Coffee’ as a keyword has an immense competition. However, a key phrase like ‘coffee club’ shows just 1813 searches. Getting a number one rank for coffee would of course be wonderful, but having a moderately good rank for several lower-demand keywords must be an essential part of your search engine optimization strategies.

3) Original Content

Google can penalize websites that offer exactly the same content, and this can result in lower ranking for all sites. In extreme situations, the website may be written off from the search engine forever. How many times have you seen multiple sites meant to promote the same old resale rights product? All of them display the same old sales page. The cleverest thing for you to do would be to simply rewrite the sales letter and submit that page to the search engines. This is vitally important SEO tip. Make sure you put in connected words and phrases; not simply the targeted keywords. Originality always sells. And it sells more than any other strategy ever used.



4) Linking Right

Make sure all your links use proper text. How many times have you seen "click here to visit" on a website? Simply changing the link text will cause your page to rank higher in all the search engines. You may also select connected phrases as link text. An interesting text link raises the visitor’s curiosity and increases the value expectation of the product.

5) Repetition of Key words and Phrases

Do ensure that the key phrases and keywords that you select appear multiple times in every one of your paragraphs and the entire content as a whole. Remember to put in connected phrases and keywords to help give a boost to your SEO. Do not let yourself get attracted to keyword stuffing which is the other name for indiscriminate repetition of the same keywords again and again.

5) Update yourself by visiting SEO news sites to stay in tune with the latest trends. The engines keep on shuffling their formulae and strategies so you can do good to get yourself updated on the latest news.

6) Alt Tags

When adding a picture or an image to your webpages you must add connected key phrases and words to the alt tags. Taking this simple step helps in boosting your PR.

Reviewing your site from time to time, implementing the necessary changes, and keeping abreast of the newest trends in Search Engine Optimization will definitely ensure your site achieves a top ranking for your chosen keywords and key phrases.

DOING YOUR SEO THE SIMPLE WAY

Let’s talk business from the very beginning. How well do you know the SEO business? No matter how much you read on SEO, there are tactics and methods that will always baffle you. What every expert thinks is important, may become the least significant the very next day. Close study of websites and features of those ranked highest in search engines may open your eyes to strategies that have crossed no mind so far. If you have already built a website there are two things you need to do.

Concentrate on the ON page and OFF page optimizing. On page deals with getting your description tags and meta tags similar to your webpages. One key fact not to forget is to use tags with the keywords in the content.

Off Page optimizing is probably the most important. Without this, you cannot even expect getting visitors on your site. This is nothing but an exercise to get other sites to point to your site, sites that have similar subjects.

Over the period of time, the topic of link exchange has also undergone a number of irreversible changes. Today, people are asking for money to exchange links to get higher PR sites. What can you do now? Well, you could buy maybe a couple of links at the most, if it is absolutely necessary. Apart than that, find out forums where you can post or discuss about your website. How? By simply Googling it. After that, when you get your membership, you can put your website URL within the signature box. Another way of off-page optimization is to submit articles to article directories. Articles also help to make your website popular.

But you have to write excellent CONTENT for your specific site. This is called a one way link, meaning there will be no reciprocal links. Work this out and submit your articles to around fifty free article directories or websites; this should lead to a good PR in say a couple of months. Articles work big time and in ways that are always not apparent immediately.

DON’T LET THE SEARCH ENGINES DROP YOUR WEBSITE

For websites, their ranking on the major search engines is one of the most vitally important factors. Why this is so important is because when websites rank high on the search engines, there is a flood of targeted web traffic from visitors, absolutely free, who are looking for information or products. So, it goes without saying that all those kinds of activity should be avoided at all costs that might hurt a website’s chance of achieving a premium listing. Here are some issues that websites should avoid, at any cost, if they are eager to optimize their rankings with the major search engines.

Tip #1 Don't Spam

No major search engine indexes websites for too long, if they are found to engage in spamming. What’s more, from time to time, search engines revise the way they define "search engine spam", so it would be worthwhile, both as a visitor and a website owner, to educate yourself and stay updated with the definition of spamming by the major search engines. Search engines often blacklist websites that practice spamming, which means you don’t get off by simply not getting indexed but you might also get your website blacklisted for life.

Tip #2 Don't Use Frames

Search engine spiders crawling the web do not respond well to websites using frames and frequently miss many of the pages that are listed within the website.

Tip #3 Don't Have Pages Under Construction

Make sure when you submit your URL to the search engines to get indexed, that you do not have pages still under construction. Search engines as a rule don't like to list pages that are yet under construction. So, always complete them before you submit your websites for indexing. Also, never use the phrase "Under Construction" on your pages that are unfinished! It does not create a good impression.

Tip #4 Never use Sneaky Tricks like Invisible Text

Do not use invisible text stuffed with keywords to try and boost your SE rankings. It may not be apparent to your viewers that you are using invisible text, but the search engine spiders will detect it and may even blacklist your website. Play fair and safe and always go by the rules.

These are just a few of the most oft-used suggestions to keep your web pages indexed by the search engines. However, these rules are not exhaustive. There are others that also matter a lot. The idea is to be informed and educated. And it is always a good idea to believe and accept that the search engines are, and will always be, smarter than you.

GETTING LISTED ON GOOGLE

Everybody, simply everybody with a website wants to be listed on Google. And why not, it is after all the most popular search engine used by millions of people all over the world, the doorway between you and thousands and thousands of visitors who will flock to your website once they spot you, and isn’t the main purpose of putting up a website just that ? Although getting listed isn’t the only thing required for you to get visitors, you also want a good rating, a high ranking which will put you in the spotlight and will give you the opportunity to be noticed. But perhaps your site is new on the block, maybe you think it’s too small a fry to be picked up by Google. Relax that isn’t even an issue, just sit back and look at all the options you have.

First of all, let us clear out a fundamental point. There are, as you probably know, two ways of doing things, namely the right way and the wrong way. Now, although the wrong way is clearly wrong it is of some importance that we know it thoroughly so as to avoid it completely.

Following are, to put it politely, the avoidable ways of getting listed on Google.

Google provides it’s users with a way to put their URL’s in queue for crawling at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Now the utter failure of this method probably has a little to do with the mechanics of the process. You see, once you have typed your website’s address into the space available here it is put in a queue (behind oodles and oodles of other pages) for the GoogleBot to, well, crawl. Anything can happen after this. For one, your site might not get crawled, or suppose it dos get crawled (which in itself is about a million in one possibility) it might not be indexed by Google (!) So ultimately there’s no telling where that URL of yours will end up going. But I am guessing wherever it goes it won’t go anywhere near the first few pages of search results. So in other words this way is a complete waste of time. No one has really benefited from it, and if you ask me no one ever will.

And now the more likely way to be listed by Google.

If you want to notch up to that coveted spot on Google then simply crawl another site. You know what they say about girls, go gaga over them and they don’t cut you an inch of slack, but ignore them and go to someone else and they’ll be eating right out of your hands, well believe it or not that principle works here too, only in a less jealous fashion that is. Once you put up your URL on some other site it might chance to be spotted by GoogleBot and followed upon. That chance following up will be your golden ticket to Google.

So, here’s what you can do, you can either put up your URL in like a million different sites or you can use a little sense and put it up on a few popular sites which will fetch you the sort of traffic even a couple of dozen others won’t. Pick a few sites like Amazon.com to plant your flag into, and soon you’ll sink your teeth right in to Google itself.

I know what you are thinking; you are probably wondering just how you will manage to get these larger sites to put you up and in the course grudging me for putting you on the same chase yet again. But don’t worry I promise it’s not as hard as it sounds. Just get yourself into a few discussion sites and forums and get involved in discussions about related topics; only put your hyperlink along with your signature.

Statutory Warning: don’t try and get prompt results by pulling smart alec’ish tricks like typing in your hyperlink and adding a jerky GO HERE! caption. That won’t help you earn anything besides a good whack from the moderator’s of the site. Invest some time into this and really participate in the discussions, once you do that you will earn the liberty of sharing your URL with others.

If you have a certain amount of flair for writing and are proficient with words then you have an advantage over others like you. Believe it or not you can put this talent in line to work on your behalf.

Write a few well researched well planned out articles about topics which might appeal to your targeted market. As in the previous method there are no shortcuts here and nothing, absolutely nothing, besides quality content will do you any good. Try and act smart, copy paste from elsewhere or simply try to get away with a badly done job and you will be at the receiving end of a royal brush-off from readers and editors.

Writing an article is really not as hard as it sounds. Since it’s about your specific line a little research wouldn’t really cost you much time or labor. Record your results, go ahead experiment with a few situations, come up with hypothetical situations to explain particular problems and provide your analysis or solution for them. Once you have done a good job (and believe me when I say you will know when you have done a good job) proudly provide your own name and hyperlink of your site at the end of the article.

If out of the two procedures we have discussed today you choose to use the second one, that is to write articles, then here are a few additional tips. A common phenomenon seen amongst most first time writers is their propensity to quit after writing the very first article, which usually convinces them of how completely incapable they are of the task. Do not get bogged down by similar thoughts. Keep writing even if you think your efforts are not as good as you would like them to be. The more you write the finer your skills will get, the easier it will be for you to express yourself and in no time your articles will be scooped up by editors for their own sites. The more number of such sites you are included into the greater number of means of letting your link be known to people. As your popularity increases so will your chances of being put up by Google. Good Luck.

HOW TO DEVELOP LINK EXCHANGE STRATEGIES

Link exchange is one vital aspect of growth for any website. And so, developing good link exchange strategies is one of the finest steps that any website owner can take up. But you may wonder how that would help you or your website in getting ahead of others. Reasons are many, but fact remains that having some great link exchange strategies is always a wise approach towards the growth and promotion of your site.

Among all reasons behind good link exchange strategies, the best would be that it helps get a good lot of internet traffic to your website. You just need to find out other websites similar to yours and in direct competition with you for exchanging links. That way you will be able to get just the kind of targeted viewers you want to come to your site.

Integral to great link exchange strategies is the hunt of fine and apt websites. This can even furnish your website with some quality content. And, as is popularly known by all webmasters, well-written content in the site is the key approach to creating a solid web presence and the best way to get spotted by search engines. Finding out a huge list of sites to exchange links with can be the first step to your strategies, but it cannot stop at that. If you really want to get benefited, you must make sure about the quality of the sites too. Whenever you trade links, do it with sites that have quality content and an established web presence.

Another great and extremely helpful link exchange strategy is to exchange links with informative websites, those having good information on topics related to your site. This not only keeps your site updated, but also attracts visitors and potential targeted traffic to your pages in search for more. It would be even wiser if you can write a few lines on your site about why you advocate visiting those links on your page. It would be as authentic as useful to your visitors.

Looking out for websites having keywords related to your site can again be one fine idea for structuring your link exchange strategies. The easiest way to go about this is to type your keywords in a search engine and analyze the list of websites shown in the search results. From these, you can then pick websites that you think would be worthy of a link exchange. However, try limiting your choice to the first and second result pages because websites in these first two pages draw the maximum traffic and would therefore be able to benefit you in a link exchange.

To check the performance of your link exchange strategies, you can simply enter the URL of your site in the search box of a search engine and get an entire list of websites whom you exchanged links with and who still have your link on their pages. That way you can judge your strategies better.

There are even more strategies for a beneficial link exchange than these. But these are some of the best and most popular of them. With more study and research, it would not be hard to find out more on link exchange strategies. The web is a vast store of information and with sincere research and efforts it is quite easy to achieve the much coveted success for your website.

KEYWORD DEMAND: ISN’T IT ENOUGH?

You could get half of the global web traffic for the keyword "dirtbagging," but that means only about 10 visitors per month. Without a presentable keyword demand don’t ever expect to get enough traffic. However, the total demand is simply a single factor to consider. Read on to know about a few others.

1. Supply/demand ratio. Last month, there were 290,000 searches for the keyword "fishing", but could you compete against the 35,000,000 results on a Google search? "Bass fishing tips," with 3,700 searches and 31,000 results is a more likely winner.

2. Total supply. For "dirtbagging," Google shows 240 results, and well, there might be twenty searches a month for the keyword. It would be real easy to make it to the first page. On the other hand, a keyword that has a demand to the likes of a million, and gives up search results numbering a million has a better ratio, certainly, but you cannot really get into the first few results pages. No matter what the ratio, you must be able to hold your own in the competition against the supply. If your website is there on the number 10 results page, it is as good as not being on the list.

3. Type of keyword. Achieving good search engine ranking is important, but the kind of visitor you are attracting to your website is also equally important. Who would you say is likelier to click on your affiliate links or to buy something from you - a visitor searching for "fishing poles” or "fishing stories”? If it was fishing gear that I sold, I sure would be glad to have half the traffic for the latter term as the former.

4. "Uncommon" keywords. Look for uncommon search phrases, however in your search for odd keywords, be careful while you optimize for bad-grammar keywords and misspellings. At least don’t do it at the cost of the reputation of your site.

Lastly, when you do your keyword research, you should seriously consider if you have genuine interest in the subject that the keyword represents. If needed, can you write a page on the subject, and do you feel you can deliver the kind of information a person searching for that term might be looking for?

LONG-TERM SEO: DOING IT THE ORGANIC WAY

You might be wondering when long term SEO would start showing ranking results, right? Well, to be honest, search engine optimization does take time to divert substantial amount of the targeted visitors to your website. Just as it takes time for your site to appear in the result pages of search engines, organic search engine optimization takes time to be fully effective.

It is quite a regular client query as to how soon or how late can they expect the SEO projects to be in effect, or in other words, when can they get a good search engine listing. To this, the only answer is — patience! Any long term marketing effort, with SEO as its base, invariably takes time. You just need to be patient to realize the rewards.

Optimization Timeframe

The time span required for the SEO effort depends on some factors. One such is the keyword-accuracy factor — whether the choice of keywords/key phrases is right, whether it matches with what a potential visitor would type to find your website. So, evidently, if your keyword selection is accurate and if it is in keeping with the needs of your targeted viewers, you can be well assured of maximum success. Next, consider if you have used a Paid Inclusion and/or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) service. The recipe to successful optimization is the sum total of efficient SEO, Paid Inclusion and PPC services. Organic SEO alone takes longer to show results than when combined with the other two.

Paid Results

Services like Paid Inclusion or PPC bidding yield results much faster than the conventional search engine optimization. In Paid Inclusion submissions, you are given a time-frame for which your website remains indexed in search engines after you sign up for it. And in PPC bidding, you start having results just as soon as people begin clicking on the PPC ads you posted. Well, search engine marketing of this kind includes a yearly budget for payments and renewals — Paid Inclusion submissions need to be renewed and PPC click-through costs demand a monthly payment. However, organic SEO coupled with PPC usually help in keeping the cost down for the paid service, and is particularly helpful if you are paying too much for the PPC campaign. At such a high price, you are well assured of extra targeted traffic to your site; so you can lower the bidding prices in your PPC service or even do away with some keyword bidding.

The time-frame allotted for your paid submissions implies that the search engines are making money in the meanwhile through the process. One good thing about ‘paying to get SEO results’ is that you can be sure of your site’s rank-stability in the search engine database. Chances of a position-change in the listings are much lower.

Organic SEO

Now the organic route to search engine optimization is a little different. The finest reason to take recourse to organic SEO is to foster your web-presence at a minimum cost. But if you are only banking on organic optimization, you may have to wait up to three to six months to get complete results of your optimization efforts. But once you are done with optimizing your site, the bulk of the job is done. This is one great advantage to organic SEO. Although you may have to fine-tune your site with keywords and texts from time to time, but until and unless you thoroughly redesign your website, you are all set to get loads of targeted viewers. Just keep a tab on the status of your listing and read your log statistics often, especially to keep abreast of the new keywords people are typing in search engines to find your website.

Patience Pays Off

The simplest and slowest of optimization efforts, organic SEO is web-promotion through common sense. It does not include lofty ideas and fancy promotion tools, and is, hence, time-consuming. The success is slow but stable. Organic SEO believes that good site-navigation, good amount of keyword-rich content and a good lot of inbound links from relevant websites lead to long-term success.

Patience is what you need to flaunt if you’re going about the organic route to search engine optimization. It is true that organic SEO takes time to show results, but rest assured, the output you get will be worth your wait.

META TAGS ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR WEB PAGE

Meta tags are something that you can never afford to overlook from the perspective of search engine optimization. You can avoid many mistakes by including these. Using meta tags is one of the surest methods to avoid 'spamming' the search. Following are the three most common and the most important meta tags that are used in SEO.

Meta Page Title Tag

The title tag is supported by all search engines and should be considered as the most important element in your optimization process. Why? The page title is the first thing visible to search engine spiders as well as your human visitors. They can see your title at the top of the page in the browser and it is the title that becomes the all-important clickable link in the listings on the major search engine pages. These should as a result be accurate and concise, and should also include your important keywords. The title tag is usually an interesting, eye-catching headline with all important keywords used once.

Meta Description Tag

Most of the search engines support the meta description tag. Though it is somewhat less important than the Title Tag since the human visitor will not be able to see it, the description is often included in the search listings beneath the title tag and hence should be a correct and keyword-rich description of everything the page stands for. Google normally uses a gist of the webpage content; it will only use the meta description tag when it is not able to find sufficient page content to create a page description.

Meta Keywords Tag

This tag is very rarely useful mainly because it has been abused to the maximum. However, one cannot do without this tag either. It should be used very carefully and with a lot of judgment. Include your main keywords here. Repeating them and/or using related keywords 4 or 5 times is ideal. It is far better to include your keywords in the page content; that will be far more important in attracting the attention of the search engines.