Submitedge - Search Engine Optimization Blog

Using Keywords to Target Your Specific Audience

When you start to advertise your business online, you will probably be dealing with one of the major search engine companies. The most common form of advertising involves purchasing keywords that you wish your ad to appear in response to.

If you wish to market a particular product, like a line of clothing for pets, you will want include pet clothing in your list of keyword phrases, along with other more specific phrases such as cat clothing or dog clothing. Pet gifts would be another good choice. Once you start to receive response to your ads you can refine your keyword list to maximize your traffic.

Consider how consumers search when choosing your keywords. Ask yourself what you would type in if you were searching for a product like yours. Write down a list of all the different categories your product could fit into, and consider sales words, like best, favorite, cheap and affordable. Geo-targeting is also a good idea if you have a physical store location and want to advertise it as well. Simply add a keywords such as Chicago, Dallas or the Bay area to your list.

The most common way to pay for advertising is based on CPM, or ‘cost-per-thousand impressions’. M is the Roman numeral for a thousand, and an impression is simply an appearance of your ad in response to a search. A rate of $50 CPM would mean you are charged $50 for every thousand times your ad is shown. Getting the most sales out of your impressions is what keyword targeting is all about.  

Why Negative Keywords are Positive for Your Business 

Negative (or excluded) keywords were originally implemented as a way for website owners to prevent their site from showing up on keyword searches. That sounds odd until you remember that most websites pay for advertising based on how many times their ad appears in response to searches by consumers.

If you run a website that sells exclusively women’s hair products, you probably want your ad to pop up in responses to searches that include combinations of the keywords hair, products, women, female, and a multitude of variations.

But what if some-one runs a search for ‘men’s hair products’? If your ad pops every time hair products is input, this search will produce your ad as well. You will pay for these views, and have a slim to none chance of making a sale.

That is where the exclusion of certain keywords can help you narrow your audience to those who are interested in your product. By making men, men’s, male, masculine and other variations of the word non-applicable to you, the number of wasted views will be reduced considerably. Google uses the term ‘negative’ for these keywords; Yahoo refers to them as ‘excluded’.

Now you will still get views from consumers searching for hair products, female hair products or women’s hair products, but any search with the word men or a variation thereof will not show your ad. This should increase your view to sale ratio by a good percentage.

Some trial and error may be required to find the proper balance of keywords to include or exclude so you get the most out of your advertising dollar.

Learning to utilize links to bring traffic to your blog or website is an important part of optimization. Links do help improve your search engine ranking, but they are also a powerful traffic source in their own right.There are several types of links and they all serve slightly different purposes. All are ultimately designed to bring more page views back to your own website.

Inbound links are the best links to have. Other website owners who link to you represent that you are an authority in a particular field; it’s like a recommendation to check you out. The very first inbound links you can get are the ones you put in yourself, linking your website to your blog and vice versa.

External links can be valuable if you make them easy to find and use, and if they lead to a valuable site. Sometimes people will bookmark your site and return to it just to find your links! Hopefully they will link to your page, and encourage their friends to do the same.

Internal links go between different pages within your own website, or between different places on the same page. The longer you can keep people bouncing around within your site, the more page views you can rack up!

Reciprocal links are links to other websites that are relevant to your own, who in turn link back to you. You can find other websites to link to by checking directories for similarly themed pages and request a link exchange from them.

Once you have learned how to implement linking, you can start to get fancy. Drop an email to websites that link to you requesting a ‘deep link’ to an internal page in your website. Most visitors who enter websites by way of a deep link check out the home page before they leave, and they might just stay and surf your pages for a while.

Another fancy technique is to use ‘embedded links’. You can use these in your blog or as internal links in page text to prompt a click. Usually you can just make the specific text relating to the linked page be a different color, using code to enable a link directly from the middle of a sentence. These should be used judiciously, however, as too many of them can distract the reader from the flow of the article they are reading.

Another handy trick is the ‘back link’. This is useful if your websites lead readers through a series of pages, and you would like them to return to the starting point when they are through. If this starting point is not the home page (which usually has its own internal link up top) and if it is several pages back (making the browser’s back button less useful) a back link can be inserted and labeled ‘back to start’ or ‘return to **** page’.

Well utilized links can provide a steady stream of traffic over time, and should be looked on as one of the most readily accessible tools to the average website owner.

Watch for information on how to build links and when to use them in future posts!

Using Your Blog to Optimize Website Performance 

A blog is a wonderful way to increase online traffic to your main website. Many people will log onto an interesting looking blog, and this is the perfect way to lure them across to your home webpage. Sidebar links can lead readers to your business site, and articles aimed at drawing in a larger audience can do the same.

Engineering a new blog used to be delegated to HTML savvy tech-heads, but with the advent of such free blog creation tools like Blogspot (provided by Google to Gmail users) almost anyone can create a smart looking beginners blog in a matter of minutes. The mystery of setting up your own blog has been all but dispelled, thanks to this and other user friendly programs now freely available across the market.

You can use one of several provided templates to get started, and update or change them later as desired. Pics are easy to download, and a variety of fonts and text colors are readily available to make your blog interesting and fun.

If you update your blog on a daily basis it will attract more attention. Use hot keywords in your titles and tags to maximize traffic to your blog, and encourage visitors to post as well. You can easily moderate the comments and the more activity your blog sees, the better.

Consider a contest to get your blog noticed; this can be as simple as a guessing contest or a competition to choose the name for a new product. If you have an attractive logo you can promote your blog and your business by giving away free items such as caps or t-shirts to every the first twenty or fifty people to sign into or register on your website by linking from your blog.

Eventually, if you publicize the existence of your blog and make it a main hub for discussion in your particular field, search engines will start picking it up and you will have an additional link to your site. Once people start to visit your blog, they often return and link their friends as well.

You can use your blog to advertise your products, to post updates on what’s new or forthcoming, or simply as a place for FAQ or product comments from your consumers. Utilizing a blog lets your customers be an active part of something larger, and will foster the feeling that your product is user friendly as well.

Using keywords to tag all posts to your blog can optimize the chances of a search engine picking up a relevant post or article. You can administrate your blog on a daily or weekly basis to keep it up to date and productive. Find other blogs and websites in similar fields and request a link sharing partnership.

Many people don’t fully realize how a blog can help their online business, but the fact remains that blogs are a powerful tool if used to their full potential. A blog doesn’t have to be personal or flirtatious; a serious, informational blog can generate almost as much traffic as a standard website!

Google offers unique tools that allow webmasters to track the progress of their website called Google Webmaster Tools. Apart from allowing webmasters to track the progress of their websites, Google Webmaster Tools are also a great way to control the way Google indexes and caches pages. To better understand how Google Webmaster Tools can be used, lets take a look at the services offered:

Content Analysis

Every webmaster knows content is king, and Google’s webmaster tools allow webmasters to identify potential indexing and caching issues that might be occurring due to improper content. Popular content related problems include:
Title problems: Repetition of page titles and improper page titles can cause Google bots not to index or cache pages.
Meta description problems: Improper Meta tags, repeated Meta tags or meaningless Meta tags can result in non-indexing of content.

Non-indexable content:

Pages that contain Flash content or other non-indexable media extensions are not indexed by Google.
It is important to regularly check the Content Analysis section to look for pages that are not being indexed by Google. In a nutshell, webmasters can make sure their website content is being indexed by Google.

Web Crawl

The web crawl section allows a webmaster to keep close tabs on pages that are not being indexed by Google. Sometimes certain URLs report non-indexing and ‘page not found’ errors to Google bot. Regular monitoring of the Web Crawl section allows a webmaster to search for potential indexing and caching problems. It is always a good idea to upload a site map on Google Webmasters to allow Google bots to index and cache pages much faster.

The Links Section

Link building is still an important part of search engine optimization, and webmasters have to keep close tabs on which links are relevant as per Google. The Links section in Google Webmaster Tools allows a webmaster to know exactly how many incoming link his/her website is receiving. In addition, a webmaster can also carry out a close analysis of the internal linking of his/her website to get a better idea of how the PageRank of his website is being distributed.

Set Crawl Rate

The ‘Set Crawl Rate’ option is available under the Tools link and allows a webmaster to decide how frequently Google bots crawl and download web pages. Apart from offering a lucid graph that mentions the amount of data that is being downloaded from a website, the Set Crawl Rate option also allows a webmaster to decide how often Google bots crawl and download data. It is important to keep in mind that the ‘Faster’ option is only available to websites where Google has decided that a faster crawl rate will make a difference.

Remove URLs

Sometimes webmasters do not want Google to index and cache certain pages, and it is possible to remove a URL from Google’s site index using the Remove URL section in Google Webmasters (even after a page has been indexed by Google).

Rishi Modi is a certified SEO professional, and a leading search engine optimization expert. Rishi is also the CEO of www.submitedge.com.