SEO Tips & Techniques Lens

Keywords, Key Phrases, Search Terms, Search Queries, call them what you will, but they are absolutely vital when it comes to having a successful online presence. If you are not appearing at the top of the search engines for those keywords your qualified customers are typing in, you most likely won't make the sale!

A qualified customer, or lead, is someone who has typed in a keyword that is a 100% match to what service(s) or product(s) you are offering. When a qualified lead lands on your website the chances of making a sale are much, much higher. As an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Specialist since 2004, this is where many people and clients alike go wrong in their decision making.

Choosing the wrong keywords will leave you wondering why you aren't seeing the same number of sales that the keyword tool(s) lead you to believe there would be. There are varying reasons that will explain this, even when choosing the right keywords can't assure you there will be so many sales!

In the first instance, the data you get from any keyword tool, even Google's, is not 100% accurate. In the case of Google, they never publish anything that makes it easier for SEO Consultants to assist their clients in achieving better rankings, if they do, they won't show the whole picture so to speak.

As for other tools, their stats are based on databases that only represent a smaller percentage of online users. Bing and Yahoo! receive about 30% of search activity performed online while Google get around 65%, the other 5% approx, is all other search engines collectively like Alexa for example.

Secondly, a certain percentage of those numbers are made up of you, and your competitors checking their rankings on a frequent basis. So, with this in mind, I will give you some examples for a real estate who only services a certain area. The numbers used have come from Google's AdWords Keyword Tool .

Louise has been in business for just over a year and wants to attract more customers via her website. I have presented Louise a long list of keywords and immediately she gets really excited, she's amazed at the numbers for the search term 'Real Estate'.

Louise: "Wow, 2.7 million people a month search for 'Real Estate', I can't imagine that many people visiting my website."

SEO Consultant: "That is a lot Louise, but let me explain, that's every keyword combined that has the words real and estate in them. It's called a 'broad search term' and could be something like 'Real Estate Agents Sydney', you're in Melbourne. There are also exact search terms shown in this list and as you can see, over 200,000 people a month in Australia actually type 'Real Estate' alone, but even so, how many of them are actually within your service area or looking for something you don't offer?"

Louise: "Even so, I'd like to rank for that keyword and get as many as I can!"

SEO Consultant: "I can understand that, but if you target more specific search terms, you will most likely end up with more sales than chasing keywords with larger numbers. We can of course aim at those bigger terms, but the more competitive a search term is, the harder it is to obtain top rankings for various reasons."

"The more competitive it is, the more people there are trying to rank for that exact keyword making it much more likely the top 10 - 30 websites listed are using SEO to better their rankings. We can of course target these top keywords as part of long term goals but in the short term, the most effective way to achieve fast results is to target less searched keywords (long tail keywords). This will ensure your website is able to turn more visitors in to paying customers."

As an example, I worked for a company as their full time SEO Specialist, when I started they were getting around 9,000 visitors a month from approximately 1,500 keywords. After doing some SEO targeted at long tail keywords, they were getting more than 19,000 visitors a month from around 4,500 keywords.

Focusing on these long tail keywords meant two things;

1. Better rankings on many long tail keywords were achieved in a short time.
2. A dramatic increase in visitors was also achieved in a short amount of time.

As a result of this approach a dramatic increase in leads and sales was seen over the first 2 - 3 month period almost instantly turning a $20 million a year company in to a $40 million a year company.

Unfortunately a lot of people get bad information or don't understand everything that is involved in running a successful SEO Campaign. It's not just on and off page, its keyword selection, ensuring your website meets the needs of your potential customers and so on.

This is why I always recommend you at the very least get some reliable advice before you even purchase web hosting, a domain name or get your website developed. You can save a lot of money and lost sales buy getting it all done right well before your website is ready to go online!

As mentioned in the Link Building section, your site is going nowhere unless you get quality links to your site. At the same time, if your site is isn't optimized correctly, it'll be headed in the wrong direction. In this section we will go over all the things you can do to make your web site as search engine friendly as possible.

SITE & LINK STRUCTURE:
The structure of your site relates to the files and directories in your site, ideally you will have done this when building your site, if not it will be very beneficial if you implement the following style of structure for you site. I have named this section 'site and link structure' because they directly affect each other. The folders and filenames for your web pages make up the link structure of your site.

Let's say your site is about flowers again and your domain name is www.iloveflowers.com. The site is a general information site about the many types of flowers out there and we want seperate categories for each. In this case you would want a site and link structure similar to the following;

www.iloveflowers.com
www.iloveflowers.com/rose/roses.html
www.iloveflowers.com/daffodil/daffodils.html
www.iloveflowers.com/daisy/daisies.html
www.iloveflowers.com/violet/violets.html
www.iloveflowers.com/tulip/tulips.html

In this example we would have folders for each flower (rose, daffodil, daisy, violet and tulip). Then accordingly named web page files in each folder (roses, daffodils, daisies, violets and tulips). Setting up your site structure like this not only gives us the above example, it makes it natural for you to use your keywords in your site menu/navigation area. Other web configuration files like .css or javascript files can also be named using keywords.

Another important part of site structure is files that aren't web pages like images, documents, audio and video files etc. etc. You should also try and incorporate your keywords in them as they will also make up part of your link structure. Lets say we have a video about a rose show, it would be placed in the 'rose' folder with the name 'royal-roses-show-2009.mpg and it would give us the following URL;
www.iloveflowers.com/rose/royal-roses-show-2009.mpg

URL's play a very big role in how your site ranks within the search engines, especially within Bing/Yahoo!, so having your keywords present within them is a big advantage. Additionally, the search engines spiders that crawl your site basically do a better job if your link structure is organized and easy to follow.

The last thing I would include as part of your site structure is whether or not your site is standards compliant or W3C compliant. Having a site that is standards compliant means all its code uses valid structure, there are no broken links or missing files and so on. You can visit www.w3.org to learn more about web standards and run some tests on your site. Having a compliant site doesn't necessarily mean you will rank better, there are millions of sites ranking just fine that aren't valid. Still though, if you want a site that's error free, accessible and user friendly you should look in to it.

When you consider Google looking at such factors as bounce rate, time of site and other user metrics when ranking a site, it only makes sense to ensure you site isn't full of errors, dead pages, slow load times etc.

CONTENT:
The content within your site relates to the actual text that can be read on your site although any text that is, or is in an image can not be read by search engine spiders. Your keywords should be present within the content and you should optimize each page according to its keywords with the home page showcasing your main products or services, if applicable. Otherwise use your home page to aim up at your most searched product or service.

Each page within your site has the potential to gain rankings and that's why you should optimize them all according to their relevant keywords, just as important, you need to build links to all optimized pages in your site.

Placing your keywords in bold and tags places more importance on those words assisting the search engines rank your site accordingly. The same can be said for using keywords within the link text (anchor text) on your own pages and within your site's navigation menus.

PAGE TITLE:
Always ensure your page titles are written in a natural manner and don't use the same page title for every page in your site. Write unique page titles for each page that reflects the content or subject of that page. Considering the page title is a strong element search engines look at, you want to ensure your keywords are in them. Don't spam the page title out as search engines are smarter than that.

H1 - H7:
Page headings are another elements that carry a fair amount of weight and they should be used within your content and like any other element they should be used correctly. Each heading should be used to break up your content as you would use them in an article for example. Ideally your keywords will be placed in the headings.

INTERNAL LINKING:
In recent times the internal links within your site from one page to another are playing a bigger role in how Google determine which pages of your site will rank for certain keywords. If you haven't, I'd highly advise you go through your site and ensure the anchor text of your internal links is using descriptive text, ideally the relevant keywords you are targeting, not generic terms like 'learn more' or 'read more'.

More recently Google have also been using the internal anchor text of a site to create a dynamic title which is shown as the blue text in their search results. Considering Google have gone to the extent of using internal anchor text to create what they consider better titles to show in their listings, this one is a must do!

As mentioned just above, once you have done everything right the majority of your traffic will be coming from long tail keywords. If you haven't heard of a long tail search term before it's basically any search query a user types in to a search engine that has more than a couple of words, I'll give an example below;

Short Tail: Affordable Hosting.
Long Tail: Affordable Web Hosting Packages.

A short tail key phrase basically consists of one or two words and of course a long tail is anything longer than that. The reason the majority of your traffic will come from these is because long tail search terms are generally much easier to rank for as the vast majority of people are focused on the short tail.

Now this doesn't mean you should go and focus on the short tail, in actual fact I've never even bothered with them, but as I said if everything is done correctly, you will see a lot of traffic from these keywords. In fact, every site I've ever worked on has seen the vast majority of their traffic come from long tail keywords collectively!

Using the two search queries above as an example, the reason for this is if I have optimized my site really well for 'affordable hosting' and I offer hosting packages, chances are I'll rank well for 'affordable hosting packages' also. I'm not sure how I rank elsewhere but here in Australia I rank #2 for both those terms and I've never optimized or link built for the latter term.

So now you are familiar with long tails the most important fact to mention about them is that they generally have a much better conversion rate. Someone typing in more than a word or two is obviously very specific about what they are looking for so once they find it, they are more inclined to purchase. If I just type 'labels' and I'm actually looking to buy address labels online here in Melbourne, who knows what I'll find on the front page of Google. On the other hand if I've searched for 'address labels online melbourne' the result I get are going to be much more specific to what I'm looking for and as a result I'll most likely purchase from one of those companies.

To be honest I'd say the two easiest way to rank for long tails would be first taking a little extra time and thought during your keyword research, don't just stop once you have enough short term or heavily searched terms. Look through all the suggested keywords and see if there is anything common in those lesser searched terms, you'd be looking for words like 'buy', 'services', 'online' and similar, I'd also be looking at what cities or suburbs get a bit of search to.

Once you have done this you can then ensure those words appear in the right places or go one step further and create some landing pages around those long tail keywords. Either approach you take, giving some time and thought to the long tail will pay itself off many times over!

Getting backlinks to your site is vital to your success on the search engines. Naturally you need to have your research done, keywords selected, on-page correct so you rank for the right terms; But without backlinks you might be lucky and rank for a handful of keywords that generate a few visitors.

You also need to ensure your off-page work (obtaining backlinks) matches your on page work as I mentioned in my article about On Page SEO. You need to use a variation of your keywords in your backlinks. That's not all though, you need as many links as you can from relevant web sites or web pages.

You main objective when trying to obtain links actually comes from your on-page, creating quality content that people will link to. Other than that, you can also do the following to increase your backlinks. If you have a web site about flowers, then ideally you want links from other sites about flowers. You could then get links from florists and other sites about flowers such as forums, blogs and other online communities.

There are many sources of getting links out there but you need to be cautious in your efforts. Don't just take a link for the sake of a link, you want links from quality sites, larger sites with more authority are also better.

Below I will go through the different resources I have found very beneficial when building links for a site. Just remember though, when using forums, blogs and similar, participate and contribute rather than just chase links. Chances are it will get deleted as spam anyway, if it doesn't, it isn't the way to go about building brand awareness.

WEB DIRECTORIES & CLASSIFIEDS:
Directories & Classifieds can be very useful, especially those dedicated to a specific topic (vertical directories). Having said that they aren't considered a top grade link by Google, you want to use all the good ones then move on. When building links you need to mix up the resources your links come from.

BLOGS & FORUMS:
Blogs & Forums are a great way to get links. By participating you gain links back to your site while building good personal relations and brand awareness. You can also control the text in your backlinks via your signature.

NEWS SITES:
News Sites are another great resource for links while building personal relations and brand awareness. You won't always get a high PR link but you will build some brand awareness as these sites can get a lot of traffic.

SOCIAL MEDIA:
Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites are another great way to build some backlinks along with personal relations and brand awareness. Each of these sites can vary in their nature, again though, you need to make a genuine contribution to reap the rewards.

RSS FEEDS:
If your site is RSS enabled then submitting your feeds to submission services and RSS Sites is an excellent way to get your content out there and generate some links and brand awareness.

HIGH PR LINK ACQUISITION:
The previous methods mentioned are quite general and it isn't hard to find a good source or sources for this type of link building and while I've seen some really good results considering the quality of these links, if you want to take down the top rankings sites or even have a chance in a competitive industry, you need high quality, high PR links.

To an extent this is much easier said than done, you can use link mining and competitive analysis, link mining is time consuming but can be rewarding. The other option is to find someone who specializes in building these types of links, in a lot of cases these guys will own their own network of high PR sites that span various topics enabling you to acquire quality links with much more ease than scouring through pages of search results.

While I won't be giving you any shortcuts here, if you look around for long enough you will find them. The only issue you may face once you find these guys is the cost, some can be very, very expensive while others will enable you to purchase a PR5 or PR6 link for just $4 a link, yep, $4...

LINK MINING:
This is by far the best way to get valuable links. It's tedious but you pick up relevant links of high quality. You can mine links a few ways;

Software
This is a nice fast way to build a list based on keywords or your competitors.

Manually
Using Google you can type search queries like the following to source out great links, for example the following returns pages that have the word domain in the page title and guestbook in the url.

intitle:domains inurl:guestbook

You can also use search engines themselves to see how many links a site has and work off those lists.

You can try the following at Google to find competitors backlinks or your own;
link:http://www.yourdomain.com/

You can try the following at Yahoo to find competitors backlinks or your own;
linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com

Another great way to build helpful links is to simply type your keywords in to Google and find any top ranking sites you can get links from. These links will help your rankings as they come from established sites on your keywords. When building links to your site be sure to build them to other pages in your site, not just the home page.

We all know the story about the tortoise and the hare right? Well, when it comes to link building you can be either, the catch is once you have chosen you need to stick to it. If you go all out building 5,000 links a month then nothing for a few months, then another 5,000 then nothing for 6 months, it's going to look spammy to Google. If you are comfortable doing 280 links month in and month out, that would be a better approach.

If you are a consultant, or doing your own SEO, no doubt you have looked around and tried some of the software available out there and unless they offer a free trial, it's hard to know just what you're getting. Having specialised in SEO since 2004, I've tried more than my share of software and web based tools and as such, I thought I'd stick this post in here and maybe save you some time.

First I'll kick off with a list of web based tools out there that you will no doubt find quite useful;

WEB BASED SEO TOOLS:

Open Site Explorer - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org - Backlink Analysis.
Submit Shop - http://www.submitshop.net/ - Wide range of SEO tools.
Sitemap Generators - http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators - This is a good list.
Website Analyzer - http://www.check-domains.com/website-analysis/website-analyzer.php - This tool does a lot.
CEKPR: http://www.cekpr.com - Use this to validate the PR of a site when link building!

SOFTWARE BUILT TOOLS:

Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com - On and Off Page Analysis, Rankings, Sitemap Creation & More.
Cute Rank - http://www.cuterank.net - My pick by far for checking rankings.
SEO Spyglass - http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass - My pick for backlink analysis.
Woopra - http://www.woopra.com - Real time web analytics and one of my fave toys.

For quite a while now, in web years anyway, search engines have been including social feeds, blog posts and updates in their search results in an effort to keep up with the living and breathing web. In 2011 we saw some big changes in how search engines were interacting with social networks.

By far the biggest of 2011 was a deal struck between Bing and Facebook which gives Bing access to the social networks user data. Basically, if you are logged in to Bing via your Facebook account and search for something a friend, or friends, have liked, you will see this in your search results. This was a massive win for Bing in their efforts to chase down Google's market share, add to this Microsoft's purchase of Skype and it should go a long way to open up their advertising avenues and increase their search market share.

Surely the team at Google are seeing both these developments as missed opportunities, especially the sale of Skype which will of course become another advertising stream for Microsoft who also have MSN under their belt. After the Facebook deal and taking the Skype deal in to consideration, I went out on a limb and made a prediction here at the office; "Within the next 3 years Bing will be as big if not bigger than Google!". Yes it's a bold statement but should Bing keep landing significant blows like the Facebook and Skype deals, Google are in for a shaky ride this decade.

It makes one wonder how Google will return fire, at the moment they have a far superior search engine but should Bing put some serious effort in to bridging that gap how do Google stay on top. Sure they have YouTube but I don't think that will be enough if Bing keep making big time deals and purchases. What if Google got the bank roll out and purchased Twitter? Straight away they increase their advertising reach and have total control of the 2nd biggest social network online.

In February of 2011 there was some chatter going around that both Facebook and Google had been in low-level talks with Twitter. Quite simply, Google would be crazy not to purchase Twitter and the last thing they need is to see Facebook get hold of it as there's a good chance BIng would get some exclusive access to that data also, another nail in the coffin for Google.

If I was Google I'd buy Twitter regardless of its actual, or perceived, value because in all honesty it's here to stay and has plenty of potential. Done right, Twitter could quite easily go toe to toe with Facebook as far as popularity goes. The fact they are different in nature isn't a bad thing, quite a lot of people, and businesses, have both a Facebook and a Twitter account.

For now thought it would seem neither will get their hands on Twitter, by mid February 2011 Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo dismissed all the talk as nothing more than rumor. However, when pressed further about Facebook in particular, Dick wasn't so dismissive, regardless, every man or company has their price and should either one of these internet giants make a substantial enough offer you can bet your life the hammer will go down on the sale.

Why can't I find my site in Google?
Most websites find their way in to Google's index naturally, however, you should do the following to ensure indexing. Build links to your site so Google can find it when crawling the web, links are also critical to ranking well. The other is submit an XML sitemap via Webmaster Tools, this is the fastest approach as you're informing Google of your site exists.

What is a qualified visitor?
Qualified visitors are those looking for your products or services in particular. A basic example would be umbrellas, if you sell blue umbrellas you don't want 1,000 people a month coming to your site looking for a pink umbrella. Keyword research ensures that we deliver as many people as possible looking for the products and services you offer.

What does SEO Involve?
SEO can be split in to two parts, on and off page. On-page is the work done to your site making it more relevant to the search terms people use to find your products or services. Off-page involves building links to your site from other sites, Google place a lot of importance on inbound links so having many quality links to your site is critical to obtaining top rankings.

What is a keyword?
Keywords are search terms or phrases that people type in to Google to find products, services and information, doing keyword research will show you which keywords get used more often. Doing thorough keyword research will help ensure you get qualified visitors to your site, in turn this will increase your conversion rates.

What are white and black hat SEO?
White hat means playing by the rules which ensures your rankings will stay put once they have been achieved. Black hat involves techniques that Google do not approve of, when Google discover a site is using black hat it will be removed from their index indefinitely.

Should I bold or italicize keywords?
Using bold or italic on your keywords makes them more prominent and helps Google and other search engines distinguish what your website is about. While using bold or italic text is purely optional, it is recommended.

Why do many top sites have no content?
Many sites found atop the search engines are large corporate entities with very strong brand awareness. As such they naturally obtain a lot of inbound links which pushes them up the rankings without content present. Regardless of this, it is recommended to have at least a few hundred words on those page would like to rank well within the search engines.

Can URLs with query strings be indexed?
Yes they can, such URL's will not hurt your rankings and with the right on and off page SEO in place they will still rank fine although using search engine friendly URLs is always a better option. The reason for this is it makes life much easier for Google when trying to establish what a certain page is about. Another bonus is pages using a name such as seo-services.html form part of the URL which is another positive towards better rankings.

Can I change the font size of headings?
Yes you can, just be sure the font size isn't too small, this is known as tiny text and will cause your site to drop in the rankings or be removed from Google's index all together! Regardless, it would be well advised to ensure your headings are set out in the correct format.

I can't find my site! Is it banned?
Generally not, if you have followed Google's guidelines you have nothing to worry about, it is more likely your site isn't optimized correctly for your desired keywords. It's also possible Google just hasn't got around to your site yet. The easiest and most reliable way to get your site indexed with Google is to sign up with Webmaster Tools and submit an .xml sitemap, these are usually picked up by Google within 12 - 24 hours.

Can I automate Link Building?
In short you shouldn't! The main reason is you want to ensure the vast majority of your links are coming from sites of a relevant nature to your own as these will give your rankings a much bigger boost than a link from a totally unrelated site.

Should I buy keyword rich domains?
You can, if you plan to put a unique website on each, multiple sites with duplicate content are pointless and only the oldest site in Google's cache will rank. Keyword rich domains are easier to rank in general but having said that, any domain can be ranked for any keyword!

What to do about competitors who spam?
Nothing, you could report them but your time is better spent worrying about your own objectives. Google are far from stupid and sooner or later such competitors will pay the price.

Files buried deep in sub-direcotries?
Google prefer your files are easy to access and well organised, at the end of the day, the more user friendly your site is, the more likely it is you will rank well. If your content is well organised and your site is well structured, you don't need to worry about how many folders deep a page is, Google will find it.

Should I create a blog for my site?
This one is purely optional but statistics indicate a website with an active blog receives up to 7 times more traffic from search. The trick to using a blog successfully is ensuring you post unique and useful content on a regular basis.

SEO Companies & Search Engines?
Not at all and to be bluntly honest, anyone claiming to be affiliated with Google should be well avoided. The same could be said for those that guarantee you a #1 position, while achieveable over time, it should never be guaranteed!

How much traffic do my competitors get?
That data is only available to the user via their web hosting control panel or analytics programs such as that offered by Google. By comparing data on sites such as Alexa you can get a rough idea of how much traffic they are receiving but this information is quite vague at best.

Do I optimize for singular or plurals?
Both, Google still treat singular phrases and their plural versions differently, you can easily tell by entering some keywords in to Google. If you don't want to do this with the on page process it can easily be compensated for using the right anchor text in your back links.

Keeping rankings after moving hosts?
There is a theory that hosting in the country you're trying to rank will improve your rankings but there is no solid data to back that up. When switching hosts it's highly advised not to shut down your old hosting until your site can be found on the new hosting server after which point it should be smooth sailing.

Getting indexed after a re-design?
The best way to do this is again by submitting an .xml sitemap via webmaster tools. You should also use a 301 redirect from all old pages to the new pages so Google isn't finding dead pages within your site. It would also be a good idea to set up some 404 pages should someone find their way to an old page. Finally, any inbound links you may have to those pages should be adjusted to the new ones.