4 - Optimizing Your Site with Tags

Optimizing Your Site with Tags

Title Tag

The title tag is possibly your most important consideration when you try to raise your search-engine rankings for a particular keyword or phrase. Search engines use the text contained within the title tag as a primary factor to determine what the content of a certain web page is about. The text that makes up your title tag is also the clickable link that typically appears on the search-engine result pages when your site appears in the rankings. The title tag text also appears at the top of a web browser when someone is visiting a particular page on your web site.

Limit your title tags to 65 characters or less because most search engines do not display any more than that. Your title tag should be a concise statement summarizing the main point of your content, and should be compelling enough to encourage search-engine users to click the link and visit your site.

To increase relevancy for the keywords or phrases that you have included in your title tags, consider naming your files based on those keyword terms. See the example below (top portion of the WordPress Post Editing box)… do you see where it says “Permalink: http://webseoblogtips.com/keyword-density/”?

The web page file name is the words “keyword-density”, which is also my main keyword phrase for this article. (The below example image that shows the words “Keyword Density – Blog Tips for SEO Page Rank!“, is not to be mistaken for the title tag. This would be the description of your page, by WordPress default, wrapped in the “h1″ header tag, which you will learn about below!)


When you link from one page to another on your web site, your link text should be closely related to the title tag of the page linked to. Your title tag must also be unique for each and every page of your web site and should include one or two of your keywords that you want the page to rank for. Due to the ranking influence that the title tag possesses, a search-engine penalty is likely to result if the same title tag is repeated across all pages.

If you are creating your own Static HTML website through software similar to Dreamweaver, then you most likely know how to add this information. Considering that these lessons are based on the WordPress-based site, the story is a little different.

Some WordPress themes have an area for adding a custom title, but not all. If your theme does not have this option, then by default WordPress creates the title tag from the Heading Title of your article. If the title to your article happens to be longer than 65 characters like a few of mine, then your title will be cut off in the search results. The solution to your WordPress Theme based site is further down this lesson, so keep reading.

I have written an article about Title Tags, in which I will also leave the link at the end of this lesson for you to read… this article goes into much greater depth.

Optimize Your Meta Description Tag

You should optimize each and every meta description tag on your web site, because meta description tags are part of the display information that visitors see when your site is listed in the search engines.

The meta description tag contains a brief description of what your web page is about, and although not as influential as it once was in the search-engine ranking process. The meta description tag is important because you can use it as a method to deliver your marketing message and entice search-engine visitors to click on your listing versus clicking on your competition’s listing.

Create a few compelling sentences describing your product, services, or web site content, and place them in your meta description tag, not to exceed 160 characters (most search-engines use the maximum of 160 characters in their search results pages). The description should interest the potential visitor and tempt that person to click your search-engine results link.
You may be tempted to replicate the same tag throughout your entire web site, but this practice is likely to hurt your rankings; the major search engines could determine that all your pages are duplicates.

Not all search engines use the meta description tag in the results pages. Google, for example, generates its own description based on the content contained within the particular web page. Whether Google uses meta description tags in its ranking algorithms is not known. Still, you should take advantage of the search-engine spiders that do use the meta description tag in their ranking algorithms. Less-popular but still-significant search engines such as Ask.com, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb still do use the meta description tag in their results.

Optimize Your Meta Keywords Tag

Perhaps the least important factor in optimizing a web site for search-engine rankings is the use of the meta keyword tag. Similar to the meta description tag, the meta keyword tag contains a list of keywords or phrases, separated by commas, that describe the subject matter of a particular web page.

Today, the search engines give little consideration to meta keyword tags. Still, you should not skip implementing this tag on all your web pages. What sort of significance the search engines may place on this tag in the future is impossible to know, and although you are not likely to see an increase in your rankings with today’s ranking algorithms, anything is possible down the road.

In the mid-1990’s, back when search engines were much less sophisticated, the meta keyword tag was used by the search engines to determine what keywords and phrases a web page should rank for. As you can imagine, it did not take long before the meta keyword tag was exploited to obtain search-engine rankings for keywords or phrases that had nothing to do with the actual content of certain pages.

For each page on your web site, generate a short list of no more than ten keywords or phrases and include them in the meta keyword tag. Do not repeat keywords or phrases, and be sure that each web page on your site has a unique meta keyword tag. Again, although you may be tempted to duplicate this tag throughout your site, your rankings could decrease as a result due to duplicate content.

SEOCentro.com offers an invaluable tool to help analyze your meta tags of any of the completed articles on your site.

This tool analyzes every meta tag of a web page and offers suggestions to improve those tags. It will analyze the length and relevancy of your title, description, and keywords meta tags; it also verifies that all the tags are formatted correctly. Incorrectly formatted tags can render your HTML unreadable by the search engines, causing a ranking penalty, and they could prevent a web browser from loading your page correctly, thus rendering it unreadable to human visitors as well.

Try to make sure your meta tags follow the guidelines and suggestions mentioned by the tool. Keep your title, description, and keywords meta tags within the length requirements. This tool can also be used to analyze your competitors’ meta tags if you are curious to see what they have done differently.

This tool also analyzes the size and load time of the page. Pages that are too large or take too long to load can aggravate your visitor and push them out the door.

Your Title, Description and Keywords Tags Solution for WordPress

There is a solution to all your WordPress worries for the Title tag, Description tag, and the Keywords tag… the All in One SEO Pack plug-in. There are other plug-ins available, but this is the one that I use for my blog, and that I would recommend. This plug-in allows you to create your own title tag text and counts the characters as you type showing you if you need to shorten your title tag. It will do the same for your description tag.

Once you have installed the All in One SEO Pack in to your WordPress-based site, and enabled the plug-in, you will have a section to add this information at the bottom of your ‘Edit Post’ page as shown below.

SEO Effects of the Anchor Tag

Choosing appropriate anchor text for both your incoming and outgoing links can play a large role in increasing your search-engine rankings for the terms and keywords your site is targeting. Anchor text is the clickable text attached to a hyperlink. An effective use of anchor text is to describe the content of the page being linked to directly in the anchor text. In order to create anchor text in your WordPress-based site’s content, follow the instructions below.

For the Visual tab in your WordPress Edit Box, highlight the wording that you would like to use for the link, click on the link icon (looks like the ‘infinity’ sign or a flattened number 8 turned on its side), when the ‘insert/edit link’ box opens, paste your hyperlink in to the ‘Link URL’ box, click the ‘Target’ drop-down menu, choose to open link in a new window, or open link in same window, type in a title of the link if you’d like to, then click insert.


For the HTML tab in your WordPress Edit Post box, you will need to highlight the wording that you would like to use for your link, then click on the word “link”, a box will open, then you paste the hyperlink that you want the text to go to in the box, click OK.

 

Below is an example of what the anchor text will look like in the HTML tab of your WordPress Edit Box.

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Example Anchor Text</a>

When building links to your web page, you should always attempt to acquire links with highly descriptive anchor text. Search engines use anchor text to determine the theme of the page being linked to, and anchor text is an important factor in search engine’s ranking algorithms.
Do not overuse one specific variation of anchor text. The search engines will rank you higher if you include some variety with your terms when using your anchor text selection. If you recall, we discussed keyword variety in the LSI Keyword Research lesson… for a refresher, visit 

 2 – Keywords & Your Web Site! – LSI Keyword Research.

Add Emphasis with Header Tags

You can use HTML header tags to apply significance to keywords or phrases within a web page. Placing a selection of text within a header tag tells the search-engine spiders that the text is of a certain level of importance. Search-engine ranking algorithms place emphasis on text enclosed within header tags when determining where pages should be ranked for these terms. Much like the other tasks of this chapter, the use of header tags is standard practice and should be viewed as a best-practices starting point.

Header tags are arranged in preset levels of importance ranging from <h1>, the most important, to <h6>, the least important. Unless it is modified through other means, text enclosed within an <h1> tag appears larger than its neighboring text on the web page, and text enclosed within an <h6> tag appears smaller.

Header tags can be used anywhere within the <Body> tag of an HTML document, and the appearance of the resulting formatting can be altered with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is beyond the scope of this training. Their syntax would look similar to this in your Edit Post box, for the HTML tab:

<h1>Text enclosed within a Header 1 Tag</h1>
<h2>Text enclosed within a Header 2 Tag</h2>

Beyond using header tags to highlight text on your pages, you can use them to logically format your content into hierarchal topics and subtopics as shown below.

Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?

Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake

Too Firm?

Too Soft?

Choosing the Right Mattress

—————————————————————————-
The heading hierarchy reads like this:
h1 tag: (Page Topic) Losing Sleep Over Poor Sleep Habits?
h2 tag: (Main Topic) Your Mattress Could Keep You Awake
h3 tag: (Sub Topic) Too Firm?
h3 tag: (Sub Topic) Too Soft?
h2 tag: (Main Topic) Choosing the Right Mattress
Beyond using header tags to highlight text on your pages, you can use them to logically format your content into hierarchal topics and subtopics. For example, if you are writing an information page about PPC management, place that key phrase in a header tag like <h1>PPC Management</h1>. If within the same topic there is the subtopic “PPC Management Services”, place that key phrase in a sub-header like <h2>PPC Management Services</h2>.
To choose a header tag in your Edit Post box (Visual tab), you will see the drop-down menu in the upper left corner, marked ‘Format’. All you need to do is similar to creating anchor text… highlight the word that you want to add the tag for, click on the drop-down box and choose which heading format, it’s that easy (to add the header tag in the HTML tab, you would need to do it manually as shown above). See image below!

Do not expect drastic increases in rankings for keywords and phrases highlighted by header tags, but always try to use them wherever appropriate in your web page creation. You are providing a service to both the search engines and your visitors by visually emphasizing the important topics.

Text Modifiers

You can modify text on a web page to emphasize important keywords and phrases to help search engines and human visitors identify the main topic of that page; this can lead to higher rankings for those terms. Besides header tags, you can use other text-modifying tags to place emphasis on certain keywords, phrases, or blocks of text.
These tags included with WordPress are as follows: <B> which will give you the <strong> tag if you look in the HTML version of your Edit box, <I> which will show as the <em> tag in the HTML version, and the <U> that will show as <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Underlined Word</span>.
Each tag will also have the closing tag directly after the emphasized word as shown in the examples below. These examples are what the finished word(s) will look like in the HTML Edit Post box:

• <strong>Bold</strong>
• <em>Italicized</em>
• <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Underlined</span>

Although it is unlikely that the use of these tags is going to provide any serious boost to your rankings, it is important to understand that search-engine optimization is a cumulative effort, and the use of these practices together is what provides results.

Optimizing the Alt Image Tags

Because search engines cannot accurately read images, you will need to explicitly tell the search engines what your images are about. Although images are not necessarily search-engine friendly, they are a vital part of visitor-friendly design. A vibrant, colorful, image-based web site compels its visitors to stay longer and browse more pages.
As a general rule you should limit the use of images on your web page; if you can say what you want to with text, you should. However, if you use images, you should also use Alt Image Tags.
The Alt image tag is a textual replacement for an image. If for any reason an image cannot be displayed, the Alt image text appears in its place. Rather than just fill your Alt image tags with lists of keywords or phrases, take the time to write a unique relevant, if possible keyword-based, description of the image being described.
Abuse of these tags can lead to a rankings penalty, so be careful when writing your descriptions. Do not repeat the same words over and over again, and never repeat the same Alt image tag more than once unless the image itself is repeated. The search engines read Alt image tags and take that text into consideration when ranking pages, but Alt image text is not an equal substitute for actual text included within the body of the page.

5 - will be covering every aspect of structuring your content properly for people and search engines alike; the lesson will include proper keyword density and the proper writing length for article submission.

– You will be shown the importance of writing compelling headlines to writing in an original voice; a complete keyword-enriched web site makeover if you choose, plus the necessity of pinging your blog for updated content.

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

The Title Tag article mentioned from above: http://seoblogoptimizer.com/title-tags-seo-tips/
SEOCentro.com Meta Analyzer Tool http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
Here’s the link for the WordPress All in One SEO Pack plug-in http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

3 - The Roles of Links and Linking

How Links Affect SE Optimization

If the word keyword is the word that you hear most often in SEO, then links or linking would be the word that you will hear second-most often. Links have as much, if not more weight with search engine crawlers than keywords do.

A web site without links is like an uncharted island to quote one of my articles. 

This island could be sitting right there in the middle of the ocean, littered with diamonds or plants that grow that can heal disease. It doesn’t matter what this island contains if no one knows it exists. 

Do you see where I am going with this? The same is true of your web site… it doesn’t matter how great the site looks, the information that you provide, or the products or services that you are offering if people can’t find you. This site is as good as the undiscovered island.

Your first purpose of links or linking will be to connect your site with others that are relevant to the information that your site provides. 

Links will provide the method to which traffic to your site is increased… isn’t this the reason that you are playing the SEO game? 

Your desire is to increase the traffic to your site, which in turn increases the number of products that you sell, the number of leads you collect, etc. In short, links lead to increased profit and growth. Of course you’d want to use them on your site.

Snagging Inbound Links

Most of your web sites in cyberspace have links that lead to other web sites.

The links that leave your web site are important, but they are not nearly as important as the links that lead to your site. Links that lead to your site, called inbound links or backlinks, are viewed by search engines as votes for the value of your web site. 

The more inbound links that lead to your site, the more weight the search engine crawlers will give to your site, which in turn equates to better search engine ranking. Anytime that your site is being voted for, you will want to have as many of these votes as possible.

Inbound links are such an important part of a linking strategy that some organization find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. It is a good thing to know where your links are coming from, and one of the places you can gather this information is from a web analytics application.

My suggestion would be to get Google Analytics at the following link

http://www.google.com/analytics/

One of the most effective ways to find potential quality linking partners is to mimic the efforts of your most successful competition. What works for your high ranking competition, can also work for you, and any web page that links to one of your competitors is a prime candidate of yours for linking to your site as well.

Because the number of QUALITY inbound links play such a large role in the Google organic ranking algorithm, you should put together a list of web sites that link to your top performing competitors, focusing on the pages that target the same audience that you intent to target. 

Once you find out where all the links are coming from, you can attempt to acquire links from those sites to yours.

One of the oldest methods for gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved are. 

Then you contact each one of the sites that you discover and ask them to link to your site. Of course giving them a good reason that benefits them is always a plus. So you are not discouraged, you may put in a large amount of time into requesting links, for a relatively small return on your efforts.

Another great method is to offer articles to companies to freely use as long as they include information at the bottom that credits you and provides a link back to your site.

There are always web sites that are looking for good content to include in their pages.

I will be covering the additional methods to gain those inbound links in your final lesson, 
7 – Getting Unlimited Traffic to Your Site. For now, you need to know how to locate these sites that you can gain links from.The easiest FREE tools available to find your competitions backlinks are the search engines themselves. 

Google and Yahoo provide you with a way to find all the links that are pointing to a particular web page. You can use Google’s link query and Yahoo’s linkdomain query tools to allow you to find the sites that link to any other site.

For the Google link tool, go the 

http://www.google.com/, 

 type “link:yourdomainname.com” in the search box replacing “yourdomainname.com” with the one that you want results for. 

This will return the search results for all the web sites that Google considers relevant links to your web site… see below!


For the Yahoo linkdomain query, go to http://www.yahoo.com/, then in the search box type linkdomain - followed by the web site in which you want results for.

Evaluate Potential Linking Partners

One of the most important factors to consider is the age of the link domain you are trying to acquire a link from. 

Google tends to treat older domains that have been around for several years with more respect than domains registered recently. If you can acquire a link to your page from a domain that was registered in 1995, it is likely to have a greater effect on our organic rankings than a link from a domain that was registered last month.

To find the age of a domain, navigate to      www.domaintools.com, 

enter a domain name in the Whois look up search box, then click search. 

Once your results appear, scroll down the page to see the age of the domain from the Created date.

You should also try to acquire as many links as possible from domains with .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. The search engines know that these educational and governmental establishments are much less likely to link to low-quality pages than a typical .com or .net domain. If you cannot find any.edu or .gov links to directly link to you, try to find pages that do have a large number of .edu or .gov links and prospect those site owners for a link.

You may want to consider examining other factors when analyzing potential linking partners. Make sure that sites you are trying to acquire links from have incoming links that are relevant to their own content. If so, that site is likely an authoritative and trusted resource for that subject matter.

Also you should acquire links from high traffic pages.

Visit www.alexa.com, click on the link at the top, Site Info. 

Enter the domain name of the potential linking partner into the search box, click on the Search button; then click on the Get Details button when the page appears. The more traffic the site receives, the lower the Alexa number is. Aim for sites with Alexa rankings of less than 100,000.

Creating Outbound Links

The subject of outbound links has often been debated. There are some who worry about leaking PageRank – what (supposedly) happens when you link out to others. No one knows for sure exactly what mix of elements is considered when your page is ranked by a search engine. However, it’s safe to say that if you have only inbound links and no out-bound links, it can’t look good for your site.

The best plan of action is to have a balanced mix of inbound and outbound links. 

Your site visitors will expect to see some links leading to other sites on the web, whether those links are simple resources to help them find what they need, or something else.

You should also have some favorites out there that you find helpful and that you think others will find helpful, called your Blogroll on your blogs sidebar. When you’re creating your outbound links, keep the following guidelines in mind to appease search engine crawlers, because even though the main target for your links should be your site visitors, search engines will pay attention to your links, and your search ranking could be affected by them.

• Keep your links relevant – That doesn’t mean that you can link only to pages that are in the same industry as your own; but if you do link outside your industry, make sure there is some logical reason for sending your visitors in that direction. Search engine crawlers examine the content of links closely, both in the links that are created within text and in the actual URL of a link, as much as in the content of pages that are linked together.
• Be careful who you link to – Don’t link to low quality sites, because some search engines will penalize you for that. If, however you link to high-ranking sites, you’ll gain even more traction with search engines… the outbound links on your sites are under your control, so choose wisely.
• Don’t create pages that contain only links – When search engines see pages that contain nothing but links they read them as spam pages. If you must use a resource page, be sure to include descriptions of each link that you include on the page. Better yet, avoid this practice altogether if there’s any way you can.
• Monitor links and update broken ones – A broken link is worse than not having a link at all. When you link to a page and don’t check back on the links periodically, things could change… companies go out of business, web sites can change or disappear altogether. When the search engine crawler follows the links on your page and finds a broken link, this reflects badly on your site. If the broken link is there for a long time, the search engine could reduce your ranking because it appears that you’re not maintaining your site properly.

Use outbound links where they are relevant and useful to your site visitors and not one time more. When you do use them, take the time to ensure that your links are accurate and connect to the correct page.

A Linking Strategy to Stay Away from… Link Farms

If you’ve ever landed on a page with links ordered neatly around the page, and with little or no text explaining all of the various links, then you’ve landed on a link farm. These sites are collections of links that lead to other web sites, or sometimes to other link farms.
Link farms are not good strategy for improving your search engine rankings. Search engines don’t like link farms because they offer no information that’s of any value to the people who perform searches. For that reason, link farms are usually delisted as soon as they’re discovered.

Using Internal Links

Internal links are those that lead people from one page to another within your web site. This is different from the navigational structure. Internal links are more natural links that occur in the text on your web pages.
Without a good internal linking strategy, you run the risk of not having your site properly crawled by the search engine spiders. You should have links that lead from part of your content to another important element on your site (such as an archived article or news clipping), so site visitors find that moving through the information they’re examining on your site is a natural process that takes place without too much difficulty or thought.

The most effective methods of internal linking are as follows:

• Inline Keyword Text links – These are links that you can use anchor tags and keywords to link to other pages on your site (anchor tags will be discussed in the next lesson, Lesson # 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags!). Use keywords for your text links as often as possible: (Text is displayed as a link instead of the URL for the link being displayed.) Using the phrase Click Here won’t gain you any leverage with a search engine crawler. Using a link that reads Rhino Bicycles, when that phrase is one of your key phrases will help improve your search engine ranking as long as the link leads to a page that truly is about Rhino bicycles.
• Links within the footers of your pages – Footer links are a common linking strategy that usually takes visitors to some element of the site’s administrative functions. See below!

Whatever you do with the navigational structure of your web site, always avoid using back and forward buttons. Not only are these buttons frustrating for users who want more options than just forward and back, they’re also a red flag for search crawlers that your site may not be user-friendly. Take the time to build a navigational structure that gives your visitors the options they want for moving around your page and finding the information they need.

Remember the Basics When Link Building

It is important to remember that quantity is not nearly as important as quality while you build your link structure. Your linking strategy will be far more successful if you create links (both inbound and outbound) that are of high quality. When you link to other sites from yours, make sure that their site is more popular than your own. The same goes for inbound links… try to make sure that the links pointing to your site from another’s site is more popular than your own. Link building will be an ongoing process that you’ll work at for the lifetime of your web site.

Next lesson: Lesson # 4 – Optimizing Your Site with Tags!

– Lesson # 4 Will be Covering the Title tag, Description tag, Keywords tag, Anchor tag, Header tags (h1, h2, h3), Text Modifiers, and the Image Alt tag… Don’t Miss It!

Below are the links from this lesson in order of appearance (each link will open a new window or tab to allow you to easily return to this page for more link navigation.)

Google analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google & Yahoo Link Queries (find the sites that are linking to yours or any other site.)

Go to http://www.google.com/, then in the search box type “link:” followed by the web site in which you want results for.
Go to http://www.yahoo.com/, then in the search box type “linkdomain:” followed by the web site in which you want results for.
To find the age of a domain, navigate to http://www.domaintools.com/

Alexa for Traffic Rankings

Visit www.alexa.com, click the link “Site Info” at the top of the page, enter the domain name of the potential linking partner into the search box, click the Search button, then the Details button on the next page.

UA-37443639-1

2 - Keywords and Your Web Site

Keyword… that is the term you hear associated with search engine optimization all the time. In fact, it’s very rare that you hear anything about SEO in which keywords aren’t involved in some way.

There was a time when the keywords that were used to rank a page were one of the most important factors in obtaining a high-quality score.

Keywords are still vitally important in web page ranking. However, they’re just one of dozens of elements that are taken into consideration.

What are Keywords

Keywords are the words or phrases that potential visitors enter into a search engine's Search box to find a web site that is related to a particular subject. Simply put, keywords are the words that are used to catalog, index and find your web site.

Before you take the plunge directly into the keyword search tools, spend some time analyzing your target market… you will need to learn as much as you can about your potential customers and your competition, so you can choose the proper keywords for your site.

Additionally, for each page on your site, you will create a list of keywords or keyword phrases that you will write into your site's content... these keywords or phrases will also be placed into your keywords tag (tags will be covered in  4 - Optimizing Your Site with Tags. The keywords or keyword phrases that you implement into your content will be unique to each page of your site that you produce.

Placing Right Keywords for Your Site

Your chosen keywords and phrases will play a large role in determining where you will land in the search rankings. Placing these keywords in the content you write will make the difference between your page being found in cyberspace or not.

Selecting the proper keywords for your site may mean the difference between not being found anywhere on the web, or being the first site that users click on when performing a search. Let’s start by looking at the two types of keywords… brand keywords and generic keywords.

Brand Keywords are keywords associated with your brand. If you don’t use the keywords contained in your business name, business description, and specific category of business, you’re missing out.

Generic Keywords are all the other keywords that are not directly associated with your company brand. Example, if your web site, TeenFashions.com sells teen clothing, then keywords such as clothing, tank tops, cargo pants, and bathing suits might be generic keywords that you could use on your site.

You should also know that there are two categories of keywords… keywords or phrases that you pay a fee to use (called pay-per-click), and naturally occurring keywords that work for you without the need to pay someone to ensure they appear in search results (called organic keywords).

Broad Keywords & Phrases, Compared to Specific Keyword Phrases

As you begin considering the keywords that you’ll use on your site, the best place to start brainstorming is with keywords that apply to your business. Every industry has its own set of buzzwords that people think of when they think about the products or services related to their business.

Start your brainstorming session with words and phrases that are broad in scope, even if they may not bring great search results. Then narrow your selections to more specific words and phrases, which will bring highly targeted traffic to your site. 

Below is an example

Broad Keywords and Phrases

• Knives
• Indian Knives
• Damascus Knives

Specific Keyword Phrases

• Hunting Knives
• American Indian Knives
• Vintage Damascus Knives

Now that you have the idea about broad compared to specific keyword phrases, let’s move on.

Below is my favorite keyword research tool

 The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool,  

at   -   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type the keyword or keyword phrases in the box, click search and watch the results. As mentioned above, you will want to choose the most specific keyword phrases and their synonyms that you will be writing in your content or article.

Another tool for you to check out is Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool

at   -  http://www.wordtracker.com

Wordtracker offers a useful keyword suggestion tool that comes in free or subscription-fee versions. Wordtracker provides you with a list of related keywords and the estimated search volume for each keyword. Wordtracker collects search volume data from two search engines, dogpile.com and metacrawler.com.

Given the large size of the Wordtracker database, search volume estimates have proven to be fairly reliable and should provide you with a good idea of the kind of volume a given keyword generates across various search engines. Wordtracker breaks search volume estimates down into daily figures, as opposed to monthly numbers the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool provides.

Stemming Keywords

Keyword stemming is the growth of one related word from another, using suffixes and prefixes. 

It can also include the addition of words on either side to extend the keywords scope. A major factor in search engine optimization is the hunt for relevant keywords that are under optimized by competitors, yet frequently used by searchers.

For example, if you’ve chosen “book flight” for your travel web site, then the stemmed keywords for that phrase might be as follows:

• Booking flights
• Book flights
• Pre-book flights
• Re-book flights
• Re-booking flights
• Pre-booking flights
• Re-booked flights

There has been some discussion about the effectiveness of keyword stemming in your web site content. The consensus states that stemming is a good method to boost the number of times that you can use a keyword or keyword phrase on any given page.

Remember that rankings are achieved through a complex combination of factors from the algorithms that crawl your site. It goes back to what I said before… create pages for the user, not search engines. These are guidelines, but they will help you create a standard for how you use your keywords.

Using Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keyword Research

Semantic Indexing allows the search engines to determine a page’s relevance based upon its subject matter, rather than keyword density.

You can construct your sentences and paragraphs using semantically linked words to help make your pages extremely relevant to your particular search terms; covering as many thematically linked terms as possible helps establish high relevancy and a natural tone within your content.

In the world of organic search, latent semantic content refers to words that are connected thematically to a specific search query. For example: Computer, QuickTime, Mac, iPod, Macintosh, iPad, Mac Computer are all related terms synonymous for Apple Inc.

 There are Google tools available to assist you in finding terms related to your search.

There are Google tools available to assist you in finding terms related to your search.

If you go to        http://www.google.com/

type in the search bar “~apple” (don’t forget the “~” you’ll find next to the keyboard key # 1), even if you are using the new Google instant search, be sure to click the Search button to see the results in BOLD lettering.

 
Let’s take it one step further… with your search word “~apple” still in the search box, click on the link to your left “More search tools”, when the drop-down menu opens, scroll down and click on the “Related searches” link to come up with possible additional words at the top of the page.

For the word Apple, I did not see many additional synonyms that could be used, but when I typed in the words “~301 redirect”, I received many more usable phrases after I clicked on the Related Searches link, but not before. I guess it can vary with each word or phrase.

Another great source for semantic keyword research can be found at  -

www.Quintura.com/ 

Navigate to quintura.com, type in the word “Apple” and on the search results page. Position your mouse over the word iPod in the keyword cloud. Notice the terms that appear such as nano and itunes? These terms are related to the term iPod.

 Domain Name Tips

These are tips for the person thinking of re-naming their site, or just starting out. The question of what to name a web site is always a big one. When selecting a name, most people think in terms of their business name, or a word or phrase that has meaning for them. What they don’t consider is how that name will work for the site’s SEO. 

Does the name have anything at all to do with the site, or is it completely unrelated?

Have you ever wondered why a company might be willing to pay millions of dollars for a domain name? The domain name business.com was purchased for $7.5 million in 1999 and was recently thought to be valued at more than $300 million today. Casino.com went for $5.5 million and worldwideweb.com sold for $3.5 million.

Where SEO is concerned, the name of your web site is as important as many of the other SEO elements that you need to consider. 

Using a domain name containing a keyword from your content usually improves your site ranking.

A few things to keep in mind when you’re determining your domain name.
 




          1 - Keep the name as short as possible. Too many characters in a name mean increased potential for misspellings. It also means that your site address will be much harder for users to remember unless it’s something really startling.

          2 - Avoid dashes, underscores, and other meaningless characters. If the domain name that you want is taken, don’t just add a random number or piece of punctuation to the name in order to “get close”. Close doesn’t count here. Instead, try to find another word that’s relevant and possibly included in the list of keywords you’ll be using.

           3 - Opt for .com name whenever possible. There are a lot of domain extensions to  choose from, such as info, biz, us, tv, etc., but if the .com version of your chosen domain name is available, that’s always the best choice. Users tend to think in terms of .com and any other extension will be harder for them to remember. .Com names also tend to receive higher rankings in search engines than web sites using other extensions.


My favorite web site to search for available domain names is GoDaddy.com at the following address   

http://www.godaddy.com/.

If you find that the domain name is taken, you can click on the “Smart Search” link that is located directly below the search box with the words “Search for another domain” (scroll down just a little bit on the GoDaddy.com page to see the box).

If you found that the perfect domain name that you want is unavailable, Wordoid.com is another great web site to help you figure out some additional domain names from the one you like so much… 

you can check it out at       http://wordoid.com/

Again, it’s important to realize that domain naming is only one facet of SEO strategy. 

It won’t make or break your SEO, but it can have some impact. 

Therefore, take the time to think about the name you plan to register for your site and then how you plan to structure your URL’s as your web site grows.

Keyword Research Tools

The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, found at

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool located at

http://www.wordtracker.com/

A great source for latent semantic keyword research can be found at 

http://www.quintura.com/

Domain Name Tips

 GoDaddy for domain name search  

http://www.godaddy.com/

Wordoid for additional ideas for domain names  

http://wordoid.com/

 

1 - Understanding SEO

Internet  Beginning

 

The Internet was actually a collection of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites that users could access to download (or upload) files. The first search tool used on the Internet is Archie in 1990 by Alan Emtage. Archie wasn’t exactly a search engine which we use today as Google.

A program that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet. is known as Gopher which is created by  Mark McCahill, at the University of Minnesota in 1991.

Both of these programs worked in essentially the same way, enabling users to search the indexed information by keyword.

Wandex was the first program to both index and search the index of pages on the Web which is developed by Mathew Gray. This program was the first program to crawl the Web, and later became the basis for all search crawlers. After that, search engines took on a life of their own. From 1993 to 1998, the major search engines that you’re probably familiar with today were created.

A Search Engine

Type a word or phrase into a search box and click a button. Wait a few seconds, and references to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of pages will appear. 

So…what exactly is a search engine? 

On the back end, a search engine is a piece of software that uses algorithms (algorithms are computer programs used for calculation and data processing; it has a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task) to find and collect information about web pages.The information collected is usually keywords or phrases that are possible indicators of what is contained on the web page as a whole, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator – which is the web address that appears in your address bar of your browser) of the page, the code that makes up the page, and links into and out of the page. That information is then indexed and stored in a database.

On the front end, the software has a user interface, a word or a phrase, in an attempt to find specific information. When the user clicks a Search button, the algorithm then examines the information stored in the back-end database, and retrieves links to web pages that appear to match the search term the user entered. 

A Search Engine Results Page (SERPs)

A search engine that’s visible to users, are the search engine results pages, known as (SERPs). This is the collection of pages that are returned with search results after a user enters a search term or phrase and clicks the Search button.

The SERP is where you ultimately want to end up; and the higher you are in the search results, the more traffic you can expect to generate from a search. Your goal will want you landing on the first page of the SERP, specifically, in the top 10 or 20 results that are returned for a given search term or phrase.

Most people begin reading the titles and description of the top results.

A Crawlers, Spiders, and Robots

 

The query interface and search results pages truly are the only parts of a search engine that the user ever sees. Every other part of the search engine is behind the scenes, out of view of the people who use it every day. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, however. In fact, what’s in the back end is the most important part of the search engine, and it’s what determines how you show up in the front end.

This, crucial to your success, back end process that takes place is the collecting of information about web pages by an agent called a crawler, spider or robot. The crawler literally looks at every URL on the Web that’s not blocked from it; using an algorithm, it collects keywords and phrases on each page, which are then included in the database that powers a search engine. In the most basic sense, all three programs, crawlers, spiders, and robots, are essentially the same. They all collect information about each and every web URL.

This information is then cataloged according to the URL at which they’re located and are stored in a database. Then, when a person uses a search engine to locate something on the Web, the references in the database are searched and the search results are returned.

A Databases

Every search engine contains or is connected to a system of databases where data about each URL on the Web (collected by crawlers, spiders or robots) is stored. These databases are massive storage areas that contain multiple data points about each URL.

The data might be arranged in any number of different ways and is ranked according to a method of ranking and retrieval that is usually proprietary to the company that owns the search engine.

A Quality Considerations

The method of ranking called PageRank (for Google) or even the more generic termquality scoring. This ranking or scoring determination is one of the most complex and secretive parts of SEO.

When you are considering the importance of databases, and by definition, page quality measurements in the mix of SEO, it might be helpful to compare it to something more familiar… customer service.

What compromises good customer service is not any one thing. It’s a conglomeration of different factors… greeting the customer, attitude, helpfulness, and knowledge, just to name a few. These are a combined effort that come together to create a pleasant experience. A web page quality score is essentially the same.

Some of the elements that are known to be weighted to develop a quality score are as follows:

• Domain names and URLs
• Page content
• Link structure
• Usability and accessibility
• Meta tags
• Page Structure

 It’s a combination of these and other factors that are used to create the quality score. 

The better the quality score your site generates, the better the search engine results will be, which means the more traffic you will have coming from search engines.

Putting Search Engines to Work for You

Search engine optimization is essentially the science of designing your web site to maximize your search engine rankings. This means that all of the elements of your web site are created with the goal of obtaining high search engine rankings.

Those elements include the following:

• Entry and exit pages
• Page titles
• Site content
• Web site structure

In addition to these elements, you also have to consider things such as keywords, links, and meta-tagging. All of this means that the concept of search engine optimization is not based on any single element. Instead, search engine optimization is based on a vast number of elements and strategies. It’s also an ongoing process that doesn’t end once your web site is live.

A Manipulating Search Engines

SEO is about manipulating search engines!

You Can:

• Create a web site that contains meta tags, content, graphics and keywords that help improve your site ranking.
• Use keywords liberally on your site, so long as they are used in the correct context of your site topic and content.
• Encourage web site traffic through many venues, including article directory submissions, social media, forum and blog participation, just to name a few.
• Submit your web site to search engines and directories manually, rather than wait for them to pick up your site in the natural course of cataloging web sites.

These are just a few basic rules for putting search engines to work for you.

Page Rank

The Google’s PageRank actually started as part of a research project that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on at Stanford University.

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the Web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at more than that sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.””

In other words, it’s a mystery. A page that has more links (with equal votes) might rank lower than a page that has a single link that leads to a “more important” page. The lesson? Create pages for visitors, not for search engines.

A Tip to High Page Rank

There are many ways to help you receive higher Google PageRank, but one of the most important factors to be discovered by the Google Algorithm would be for it to notice backlinks from relevant, high authority sites. The more relevant an inbound link from another site pointing to your site is, the higher PageRank you can potentially receive. If you are not already doing it, you need to put an SEO plan in motion that targets relevant content websites.

One more thing to keep in mind… if you have a large amount of inbound links pointing to your site, that aren’t related to your site’s content, it can be detrimental for a higher Google PageRank.

Google Algorithm

The Google Algorithm is the heart and soul of the ever so popular Google search engine. One element of online marketing that has people scratching their head in confusion is the algorithm that actually determines what the Google PageRank should be.

Search engines as a whole are very complicated programs, even to the most brilliant mathematical minds. 

The algorithm that the Google search engine uses, establishes the baseline to which the web pages are compared for their database. For the Google algorithm, there are more than 200 factors that are used to establish this baseline. Google makes about half-a-dozen changes to that algorithm each week to reflect changes in the way people actually perform searches.

This mysterious baseline that we are talking about varies from search engine to search engine. Some search engines look more closely at links than others do, some look at keyword and context, some look at meta data, but most combine more than one of those elements in some unknown ratio that is completely proprietary.