Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

People are turning to the internet more and more often for quick easy information on every topic you can imagine.

If you can anticipate some of the questions that might be asked in your own field, you can snag some traffic right off the top with a well worded title and some truly helpful content.

The main words for a real ‘question query’ are ‘how’, ‘how do’, ‘how can’, ‘how to’, etc. ‘Where’ is also popular for product search, as in ‘Where can (do) I find (name of product here)?’ For that matter, ‘find’ alone is a good keyword.

‘Affordable’ is better than ‘free’, unless you can actually offer a freebie product to hook people in and then try for the sale. ‘Buy’ is good, and so are ‘sale’ and ‘discount’.

For info on actually doing stuff, ‘instructions’, ‘directions’, ‘guide’ and ‘tutorial’ should all be frequent flyers. ‘Steps’, ‘keys’ and ‘ways’ rank up there too. Try ‘fun’, ‘creative’ and ‘fast’ too.

Once you have figured out what kind of article you intend to write, you can mix and match for maximum effect. Ten Best Ways or Affordable Family Fun other like titles can be combine with geographically specific areas if that will assist you - Tampa, SF, Chicago, Manhattan, etc.

Top Ten Ways to Prepare Venison would be a good title, as would Discount Taxidermy Services - Trading Meat for Stuffing. (What?? It’s almost hunting season!!)

Don’t be afraid to write several different articles on similar subjects - as long as the content is significantly different between articles, you can try out the different types of titles and see what generates the most traffic, you will have extra content for submission to directories, and you won’t have duplicate content issues.

It’s important to have a friendly, engaging style to your articles. If they aren’t interesting, people won’t read them, but if you have a solid hook at the beginning and a smooth flowing article that leaves them happy at the end than you will have come a long way towards fulfilling the need for information.

The trick is to put your material in an easy to follow format for the thousands of people who want information fast, now and without a lot of fuss.

If you don’t use keywords that people are likely to type into search engines, you aren’t going to rank. It’s as simple as that. By optimizing your articles starting at the title and keeping a steady light influx through out the entire piece, you can ensure that your information will be seen.

After that hurdle is past, hopefully your article will be linked to and eventually climb up toward the number one spot on Google. Your articles can drive traffic to your site, and in turn your sales will increase.

Try it out. If you don’t have the talent for writing, hire out a set of specific articles aimed at increasing attention and see how big of a difference it makes. Then you can tackle your keyword optimization in earnest.

All of us know the importance of choosing the right keywords while optimizing our websites. The problem however is in actually selecting the keywords and not in just knowing the importance of selecting the right keywords. How do we go about this? Some of the keywords are highly competitive and we may not be able to see fast results when we try to optimize our websites for those very highly competitive keywords.

Whether you are optimizing your own websites or your clients’ websites, make sure that you know everything possible about the business or the product which is being promoted by the website that you are optimizing. Only when you know the business inside out you will be able to know the keywords that people will be using to search for that product or service otherwise you will only have a limited collection of keywords. Amateur SEO professionals will often make the mistake of optimizing the websites for highly competitive keywords spending more and more time, energy and money in their effort to be successful. There are lots of keywords who potential often go untapped for the sheer lack of knowledge about the particular business or product. Keywords that people use vary from individual to individual so it should prompt us to think creatively for different choice of keywords for which certain websites are normally optimized.

Secondly, try to avoid single words unless the niche market for which you are optimizing the website really an uncommon niche and does not have competition. Moreover single keyword will bring lot of unfocussed traffic to your website though there is no specific harm in this you should be aware of the nature of the visitors that are drawn to understand the conversion graph properly only then you can devise a business strategy to improve your business. If you are going to get lot of general visitor traffic that is not really interested in your service, then obviously the conversion rates are going to be lesser and when you interpret your data without proper understanding of your website traffic then you are prone to make mistakes in your business strategy too. Everything is linked either directly or indirectly. Moreover, even people who search for a product or service use keyword strings with multiple keywords. If you are capable of think like the Internet users in those lines then you can certainly come up with winning keyword combinations.

Thirdly, when you are selecting your keywords you must think like your websites users and by optimizing your website for some fancy name that you have given your service or product you will not get any traffic even though you may be ranking high for that keyword because people may be using those keywords to search for your product or service. So the idea of optimization is to get traffic and not just good ranking for some strange keywords.

Make sure that you do a thorough research before you finalize your keywords and optimize your website for better visitor traffic.

Keywords are your special words in the internet world. The can unlock doors to places you never thought you’d get to, and lead the world to your door. If they are so valuable, why do some webmasters miss out on the opportunity to use them as often as possible?

I’m not talking about stuffing your content. That’s abusing your words and won’t help you at all. No, what we are after here is other ways and places to utilize your keywords for maximum productivity. After all, the more you use your words, the more powerful they can become.

** Use your keywords in your content of course, but do it with an eye to user friendliness and basic optimization - don’t go overboard!!

** Use your keywords when linking - your anchor text should target the specific keyword phrase you are trying to rank for on the page you are linking to.

** Use your keywords in your tags - your meta tags, title tags, social book-marking and anywhere else you can. As with linking, you can target specific pages on your site for this type of attention.

** Use your keywords to surround your graphics with pertinent information. Google may be crawling flash, but they still need signposts so they know where they are. This is the perfect opportunity to plug your phrases.

** Use your keywords in blog and forum posts, for extra kick. This is a good place to try out combinations of long tail keywords to see if you can pull a hit or two off of a lucky search.

** Use your top keyword phrase in your signature, if possible, and include it in your online correspondence as well. This will keep the focus of your site firmly visible.

** Use your keywords in your advertising. You want to offer the consumers what they want, so you need to appear relevant. What could be more relevant than the keywords they just searched for staring out at them from your ad?

** Make sure the snippets Google is using to describe you in the SERPs contain your keywords and are easily understandable. Don’t forget that when people read these, they are looking for relevance to their search or question.

** Use your keywords anywhere and everywhere you can when you are asked to guest blog, write an article or post a reply on an open forum.

Once you have gotten in the habit of optimizing your keywords automatically, your job will become easier as each new thing you do will provide maximum results and benefit to your site. Just remember to use your words, and great things can happen!

Yesterday we looked at how to find little monetized keywords we could use to our advantage. Often these phrases are clumsy enough not many webmasters will bother trying to optimize for them, but ignoring a phrase with over 4,000 searches per month and virtually no search results is a mistake!

‘Clothing pets’ is not getting any attention from advertisers as seen by the minimal cost of advertising - and there are no direct matches on the SERPs for that keyword phrase. This is where I could make my move. If I could corner the market on 4,000 searches per month, I can make a killing in conversions!

My goal now is to prepare pages with optimized content to be indexed by the search engines. ‘Clothing pets’ is a little awkward to work into a sentence, but there are a few tricks I can try.

Google used to ignore words like a, an, the, and, it, but, and many others. With recent tweaks to their algorithm, many rumors have been flying that ‘stop words’ such as these are no longer to be disregarded, although others say that in actuality Google has gotten smart enough to know the difference between insignificant words and ones that have import.

I’ll hedge my bets just to be safe - try to get my main keyword phrase in intact, or only using punctuation to make it grammatically correct, and use variations including stop words as my secondary keyword phrases.

Here goes, a lovely landing page:

“Introducing PetsStyles’ Fall Line of Clothing Pets Will Love!! As the days shorten and the temperature drops, you probably feel the need for warmer clothing. Pets do too! Fortunately, we have all the most stylish outfits for your pet’s winter wardrobe, including dog coats and puppy hoodies. We carry only the finest clothing for pets, made in the USA from American products and backed with a 100% guarantee. Check out our new fall selection, and receive a 10% discount today only on all clothing, pets’ accessories and homemade treats for dogs and cats.”

Get the idea? Once this page is indexed, I’ll have a terrific chance of it getting ranked well on the results pages, especially if I can manage to get some decent links to it. That page could actually be easily tweaked into a press release, and submitted for publication as well.

I might even consider throwing some AdWords money at it - the cost is minimal as I have seen, and I might be able to rank some nice clicks. I’ll run a short one month campaign to see how it plays out.

This is only one example of how you too can start ranking for undervalued keyword phrases. They don’t have to be misspellings, just an awkward combination that seems clumsy to optimize for, and has been overlooked when it comes to search volume and potential conversions.

Once you have found a phrase to optimize for, do it whole heartedly for a month, and you will see if it is worth the extra effort. These tactics won’t work every time, but you might just find a huge traffic driver that can boost your sales through the roof!!

Optimizing your website for highly competitive keywords can pose a great challenge and the results may not be that pleasing because often we may have to fight with internet giants who have some 20,000 back links or more. We will be only be whiling away our time trying to optimize the site for such highly competitive keywords; if we have to get ourselves ranked in the top 10 or 20 positions then we must match our competitors in all aspects but we may not have enough resources, time and money for a new business owner to put up such a tough fight and more over it will rather be highly time consuming.

This does not mean that we may not be able to get organic traffic to our website through search engines. There is more than one way to win; as a new business owner your immediate goal should be to attract natural traffic to your website. How do we do that but? The answer lies in the individuality of people; not every one uses exactly the same keywords and key phrases to while they look for a service. Each one will have a different approach and we need to tap into this to attract traffic to our websites. Instead of going for single keywords try and optimize your website for longer key phrases so that you can increase the chances of getting listed at least for those longer strings while you continue to strengthen your optimization for single and double keywords.

Moreover, you can localize your optimization along with the secondary keywords and this has worked wonders for me often and you will certainly be happy with the results. It is not just attracting any kind of traffic; the game is about attracting targeted traffic. Not SEO professionals have this insight; you will be able to get more targeted traffic when you use longer key phrases in your optimization. Let us just take a closer look at this, if you are going to search using a single keyword such as “web design” it can be used by people looking for various things and not necessarily a web design company; they may even be looking for information on web design and where to learn web designing and what is the use of getting such traffic to a website that sells web design services. Here even if you have appeared on top the traffic you get is not that focused or targeted. Where as if someone uses a long key phrase such as “quality web design services Alexandria” then the user is very clear in what he or she is looking for and the traffic you get for such a keyword phrase will be a sure hit. As you can see the ratio of targeted traffic you get to your website is for longer keyword phrases.

If you want to attract traffic to your website for highly competitive services you can still do it but you should be prepared to change your strategy to get the desired results.

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