Search Engine Optimization News, Website Promotion Tips

Posted By jucick on June 29, 2009

Internet marketers and webmasters have always had a love/ hate relationship with Google. Whatever you think of them they do provide website owners with some great market research tools.

No matter what market you are in or plan to be in, you will find these free tools provided by Google very useful when researching your market. You should be researching your market constantly, NOT just when setting up your site. The internet is ever changing and, if you’re not keeping up with those changes, you will be left behind.

Market Research Tool 1 – Related Searches And Wonder Wheel

When you start typing in the main Google search box you should see a drop down box appear giving you some alternative search terms related to the word you typed. Note these phrases down in a notepad file or write them on a piece of paper. They will be useful as part of your keyword list used in the next tool. You will also see more related search phrases after you click search. Scroll to the bottom of the results page and you will see “searches related to:” Note down any new phrases shown there.

Recently Google has released Wonder Wheel which is also a related keywords tool but is shown in a mind map format. You can also click on the related phrases to find more useful search terms. To access wonder wheel: enter your keyword in the standard search screen, then at the top of the results on the left you should see a show options link. Select that and it will reveal a menu. Near the bottom of the menu you should see wonder wheel.

Market Research Tool 2 – Adwords Keyword Tool

We all know how important keywords and search phrases are. Let’s face it, it’s what drives the internet. Google has provided us with a tool that tells you what keywords and phrases people are using to find what they are looking for. You are able to search an individual country, more than one if you hold down the ctrl key on your keyboard as you select, or all countries.

The adwords tool is now more valuable due to the fact it shows actual search numbers. Previously you only had a green bar to indicate how much traffic the search term received. You can also see how competitive each keyword is amongst adword advertisers, showing us which keywords are commercially viable.

Market Research Tool 3 – Google Trends

Now that you have an idea what keywords your market is using you can use the trends tool to check the history of that keyword / phrase. Google Trends supplies data for the last 5 years, giving you an idea if the search term is consistent. You can also see if the search term is popular at certain times of the year, also known as a seasonal keywords.

Another important function of Trends is the section that tells you the popularity of a keyword by country, city and language – very useful if you are targeting particular countries or even cities.

Market Research Tool 4 – Google Alerts

Alerts is underused by webmasters. If you want to stay in touch with what’s hot in your market, you can by using Google Alerts. All you have to do is enter the most popular phrases in your market. Google will then send you links via email depending on what type you select.

The types are news, web, blogs, video and groups. If you would like a mix of all, you can select comprehensive. You can decide how often you want to be updated by selecting either: as it happens, once a day or once a week. I hope you can see how powerful this is if you want to be seen as an authority in your market.

Market Research Tool 5 – Google Web Search

Finally, we have Google’s standard web search which is not standard in my eyes. It provides a lot of information if you know what to look for. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of running a website. By performing a search of your market keywords, Google will tell you what type of content it sees as important.

If you see videos, blogs or images this gives you another way to reach the top 10 of Google. If you see Web 2.0 style sites such as Digg, that could be another avenue. If there are adword ads on the right side of the screen, that tells you the market is commercially viable and more importantly that the keyword you entered is good enough to pay for, especially if there are 10 ads or more.

As you can see, even if you don’t have money to buy the latest tools, I have shown you there is a way to get some very important information using free tools from Google. Are you starting to love them now?

Source: SiteProNews

Category: SEO News, SEO Tips | Comments Off
Tags: ANALYSIS, GOOGLE, KEYWORDS, SEM, TOOLS

Posted By jucick on June 12, 2009

Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination—your website—you need to provide them with effective signs that direct them right to your site by creating carefully chosen keywords.

Think of the right keywords as the “Open Sesame!” of the Internet. Find the exactly right words, and presto! Hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or overused, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site—or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive—decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase.

Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties.

You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to your site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work—and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

Source: SiteProNews

Category: Search Engines, SEO Tips | Comments Off
Tags: GOOGLE, KEYWORDS, RANKINGS, SEO, SERPs, TIPS, TRAFFIC

Posted By jucick on June 12, 2009

We made a video at SMX Advanced with Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in terms of the no-follow attribute.  These no-follow changes have some pretty significant implications for lots of things, first and foremost though it seems these changes are specifically geared to mitigate, to some degree, the effectiveness of PR sculpting.

Now, PR sculpting is a fairly advanced concept a lot of folks may not fully understand.  So, I figured I would try to provide some explanation of at least the general ideas involved.  That seems like the best way to go about explaining why Google is looking to make some sort of change in their treatment of no-follow.  If you understand PageRank sculpting, on other words, you will get why Google might not like it so much.

I expect I will have at least 5 people ‘way smarter than me’ hop in the comments or rip me in Twitter for leaving out ‘this’ or ‘that’ in terms of the subtle nuances of PR sculpting. My response to this would be; for the purposes of this article, the subtleties are immaterial.  So simmer down.  I would be remiss however if I didn’t add a little warning in here for people to thoroughly read up and make sure you understand PR sculpting before you start slapping no-follows all over your site.  You really can screw your site up if you do it wrong.

So what the heck is it anyway? I’m so glad you asked. We’ll start with the concept of your Page Rank ‘power’ or ‘authority’.  This is the overall ‘value’ of a given page in terms of how much ‘authority’ that page has to pass along via it’s outbound links.  You have no doubt heard people talk about ‘link juice’, that’s what link juice is.  The more important (in Google’s eyes) a page is, the more link juice it possesses.

Now think of your website as a bucket (or maybe an elegant punchbowl or some kind of fine china bowl if a bucket is too base of a mental image for you). Your bucket contains all of your link juice.  Now think of your outbound links as tiny holes in your bucket.  Your link juice flows through the holes and passes on your page’s authority.

Now, the PR sculpting theory holds that the more holes you have in your bucket, the more your link juice is spread around or diluted.  This is at least in part supported by the search engine accepted and approved concept of Crawl Efficiency (see the Vanessa Fox video or article for more on that).  Search engines aren’t going to spend forever crawling and indexing every link on every page, so the concept of crawl efficiency basically means you prioritize the important stuff for them.

How do you do this?  Well you stick no-follow attributes on non-important links.  PR sculpting theory takes this one step further and says that ALL outbound links count as a hole in your bucket, so you would then want to make more liberal use of no-follow to help direct the flow of the link juice.  For example; if you had navigation links at the top of your page, in the side bar and again in your footer, PR sculpting would say you add no-follow attributes to all but one set of them.  Less holes = more juice flowing through the holes that are left.  Get the idea?  Good.

Now, the hullaballoo at SMX Advanced had to do with some rumors or suggestions that Google may be going to change how they look at no-follow in relation to how the link juice is passed along.  So if you had, for example, 10 outbound links on a page and no-followed all but 2 of them, effective PR sculpting would funnel all of your juice through those 2 and not dilute it over all 10.  Google, being… well, Google, doesn’t like to have situations where people can ‘control’ the value of links – especially for the purposes of ranking better in Google.

Does Google need to make changes to manage the effectiveness of PR Sculpting?  What do you think?

So much buzzing and grumbling ensued when it was suggested that Google might not look at no-follow in quite the same way moving forward.  If you have 10 links and no-follow 8 of them in other words, they were still going to count you as having 10 holes in your bucket instead of sending more love to the 2 regular links you didn’t add no-follow to.

By the end of the show, there still hadn’t been much at all in the way of an official word from Google on the subject.  However, I very strongly suspect we will have one soon.  The implications for counting no-follow links ‘against’ you in terms of authority passing ability raises all sorts of difficulties.

For one, let’s say you have a popular article that gets 500 comments.  Most everybody that leaves a comment also leaves a link.  Generally these links are no-followed.  If more links = some sort of diminished or diluted authority of a page, that would seem to suggest your fantastic article that got 500 comments was maybe not as good as an article that only got maybe 5 comments.

Second, the whole no-follow thing was Google’s idea to begin with.  It’s very existence is arguably not much more than a Google helper to assist them in managing the whole link economy they created out of their heavy reliance on links as a ranking factor.

Google hates paid links because paid links have the potential to impact search results and if you can buy links you can essentially raise your result in Google.  The problem is, paid links have been around longer than Google….  we used to just call them ads.  So, Google decided if you slap a no-follow attribute on a link, it meant you were not trying to pass your page authority on to that link and therefore weren’t being paid to elevate said link in their index.

Now, it seems like Google is starting to see people using no-follow to emphasize links via the PR sculpting thing and they want to do something about it.  A cynical person might say they sound like they are trying to have their cake and eat it too…  but a Google person would just say they are just trying to protect the integrity of their index.  Personally, I’m all for Google protecting the integrity of their index…  but I think it gets to a point when maybe they need to do something about their index’s over-reliance on inbound links as a ranking factor. Maybe then they wouldn’t have to sweat this sort of thing quite so much and/or dump the burden of link formatting and management off on the webmasters and the SEOs of the world.  Those guys have enough on their plate as it is.

Source: WebProNews

Category: Search Engines, SEO News | Comments Off
Tags: GOOGLE, no-follow, PageRank