|
Introduction
This report will explore the current trends in Search Engine
Marketing and give practical ideas on how website owners can
better apply SEM to their own businesses.
Every website owner wishes to be great friends with the
major search engines. Developing a good relationship with
the search engines is a lot like developing a quality
friendship in real life with real people. If you are
genuine, interesting and reliable, you’ll make lifelong
friends. The same is true of search engines.
The interesting thing about search engines is that they can
help you make more and more friends every day – if you
manage your relationship with them carefully.
Search engines use automated scripts, better known as robots
or bots for short, that go out to find and index content on
the web. Because the bots detect new links and signal the
search engines that they’ve found something new to index,
the engine’s knowledge of the web grows out like a spider
web.
Because of this, the search engine bots are even called
spiders and the process of indexing new pages is then called
“spidering”.
The search engines, each with their own set of rules,
decides how to serve up the pages that they have indexed.
Initially these rules were quite simple, but that soon
changed.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You’ve probably heard the term SEO which is the abbreviation
of Search Engine Optimization.
Many years ago some smart marketers realized that you could
literally optimize your website pages by repeating keyword
search phrases over and over in the text and within the tags
of the page. (More on tags later.)
By repeating the word a lot, it tricked the search engine
spiders into thinking there was a lot of information to be
found about that phrase on that page (whether there was
indeed any at all). So the more you used the phrase, the
higher you could rise in the search engines for that phrase
– at least that was the theory.
This ultra simplistic manipulation tactic made the search
engines an easy target. Fortunately the search engine
engineers soon recognized this and changed their system so
that this keyword stuffing (is: search engine spamming)
wouldn’t be recognized as a way to improve a sites ranking.
From then on the search engine marketers and the search
engines have been engaged in a never ending battle. One side
learns how to optimize for the current search engine system
and the other ‘jabs and parries’ and puts a stop to it and
it starts again.
History of Search Engines
Alright, enough of the reader’s digest version of search
engine history. If you want to learn more about the
emergence of search engines as a major power on the web you
can find some good resources at:
• http://www.searchenginehistory.com/
• http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_history/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
• http://www.seoconsultants.com/search-engines/history/
Let’s move on to define some important terms and begin to
understand more about how it is possible to make friends
with the search engines.
What do we want from the search engines?
Organic Search Results
Primarily, we want ‘Organic Search Traffic’. This refers to
the natural visitor who comes to our website because they
searched for something and the search engine felt that our
website could deliver what they were searching for.
For example: If you search for “Affordable Web Design”, you
are presented with a page of mostly “organic” search
results. The “Pay per click” or Sponsored results may be
displayed at the very top of and/or to the right of the
organic search results.
The organic results websites are listed because those
website pages contain (among other things) occurrences of
the search phrase.
You get organic search traffic by providing content that
people are searching for. Where you turn up in search engine
results, now that is dependent upon a lot of other factors
that we’ll get into.
What else do we want from the search engines?
Pay Per Click Search Results
Perhaps we want ‘Pay Per Click Search Traffic’. This refers
to the visitors that we can receive by placing paid search
ads with a search engine.
Go to any of the big search engines and search for just
about anything and you’ll see ‘sponsored links’ either at
the top or at the side of your results. These are the paid
search ads.
With Paid Search Marketing you can buy a top ranking in the
search engines for any of the keyword phrases that you would
like to – if you are willing to outbid your competitors.
Some keywords and phrases become so highly competitive that
the cost per click can exceed $10.00.
What are Keywords and Keyword Phrases?
When you go to the search engine and you search for
something, that’s a keyword phrase. A single word is a
keyword, a phrase including that keyword is a keyword
phrase.
A single keyword example:
You are looking for information on e-commerce so you go to
your favorite search engine and type in ‘e-commerce.
E-commerce is your keyword.
Searching for a single word will bring you a pretty wide
variety of results. So you may opt to re-search with a more
specific keyword phrase, such as:
• E-commerce solution
• E-commerce application reviews
• E-commerce software installation
• E-commerce security
In some cases, to find the info you need you have to depart
from your original keyword completely.
For example:
Instead of e-commerce:
• Shopping cart solutions
• Online purchase applications
• Secure online transactions
Selecting the right Keyword Phrases – crucial to SEO
Since we know that searchers use a lot of different search
phrases, if we want to develop a website that attracts a lot
of that organic search traffic or carefully target searchers
with a paid search campaign, we need to know what search
phrases they’re using. And how do we do that?
Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research tools provide us with data about actual
search engine use.
One of the best known and longstanding keyword research
tools available is Wordtracker. (http://www.wordtracker.com/)
With Wordtracker you can brainstorm keywords in a variety of
ways and judge whether a particular phrase is worth
targeting.
Google provides a free tool that will even analyze your
website and give you keyword suggestions and indicate how
competitive the keyword phrases are. Find it at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
There are some higher end options for keyword research that
involves purchasing a membership or downloadable software.
• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ $49.95/month
• http://www.keywordsanalyzer.com
• http://www.keywordelite.com $176
Below are some other recommended Keyword tools:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.webconfs.com/website-keyword-suggestions.php
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
How do you do keyword research?
If you’re working on a brand new project and have no info to
start with, begin by making a list of what you think people
are searching for when they seek out what you’re going to
offer.
Take this list to the keyword tools and run them all through
to see what you can learn. You’ll find out that some of your
phrases are rarely searched for and others are searched for
a lot. You’ll also get suggestions for good related phrases.
If you have a current website, start by taking a look at
your web statistics to find out what phrases your visitors
are currently using to reach your website. (Hopefully you do
have statistics that provide this information.)
Take this list to the keyword tools and do the same as
above.
We could write an entire report all about keyword research
and developing a comprehensive list of great keyword phrases
but we don’t have time for that here. My best advice to you
is to develop as big of a list as possible, staying very
targeted to the purpose of your website and avoiding fluffy
phrases that won’t bring you the target visitors you are
looking for.
Keyword examples
If you want to sell someone email marketing, create a long
list of email marketing related phrases based on your
research but leave out things like ‘free setup’ because this
will bring you freebie seekers instead of shoppers. (Unless
you do offer a free setup.)
Avoid single and two word keyword phrases, as the
competition will be fierce. The more specific, the easier it
will be to rank for a very targeted audience.
Now, what to do with this huge list of keyword phrases?
Use them!
Now that we have a wonderful long list of often searched for
keyword phrases, we need to make certain that we incorporate
them into our website in a useful and natural way.
That means that we should be using them:
• in page titles
• in page headlines
• in our content
• in product descriptions
• in our sales copy
• to name page files
• to name graphics
What you do not want to do is to take one or two popular
phrases and use them over and over and over again. That’s
keyword stuffing that the search engines won’t like. You may
even be penalized in your search engine rankings for doing
this.
Instead, use one or two popular phrases a few (2 or 3) times
on a page in as natural a fashion as possible. And then also
incorporate a few of the other related phrases as well.
Where to use my keyword phrases
I sell Content Management software and web hosting and my
keyword research has provided me with a great long list.
These five phrases top the list:
• content management software
• CMS software
• secure web hosting
• content management publishing
• content management tool hosting
If I were foolish I would spam the search engines by placing
‘content management software’ in my content about ten times
then use the same term in the title, header, page title and
on the graphics too.
Not being foolish, instead, I use ‘content management
software’ a couple of times, then I also use ‘CMS software’
and ‘content management tool hosting’ as well.
Search engine strategy leaders teach us to create as many
pages as possible for your website in order to adequately
target all of your keyword phrases and to choose just one
keyword phrase to optimize for on each page – but that
doesn’t mean that you don’t use any other phrases at all.
Using your keywords in the content is simple, but how do you
incorporate them everywhere else? This brings us into the
code of our website.
If you’re building with html you’re going to do some simple
things. When you create new pages, name the pages using the
keyword phrase. (ie: wireless-keyboard-reviews.htm instead
of reviewarticle.htm or article34q123.htm, etc.)
If you use a blog or some other content management system
you’ll need to investigate what is necessary to make your
page files keyword rich. Every tool is a bit different and
most applications have some plugins or hacks that you can
use to incorporate your desired keyword phrases.
Then you will give the page a title, this is done with the
<title> tag up in the head of your document. You’ll enter
‘Content Management Software Reviews’ like this:
<title> Content Management Software Reviews</title>
Then to incorporate a phrase in our headline, we’ll insert a
headline font tag at the top of our page above our content
like this:
<h2> Content Management Software Reviews</h2>
Now take a look at any of the graphics you’re going to use
on the page. Name them using a keyword phrase. (ie:
content-management-software.jpg instead of CMSpicture.jpg)
Then you can also add a descriptive tag that will be read by
the search engines and appear when a user rolls their mouse
over the graphic. You might do something like this:
<img src=”/ content-management-software.jpg” alt=”Content
Management software discounts from Tammy’s Computer Store”>
Graphic tags are used for more than search engines, they’re
used to tell visually challenged users what is on a web
page. Software will actually read them the page, including
the graphic tags so it is important that the tags be
descriptive and useful, not just stuffed with boring
phrases.
Are other tags important?
There are at least two other tags that you’ll want to use in
your head area right after the title tag and these are the
keywords tag and the description tag. They look like this:
<meta name="Description" content="Content Management
Software Reviews and Product Sales.">
<meta name="keywords" content="content management software,
CMS software, content management publishing, content
management tools">
Up to know we’ve been talking about what you do on your
website to let search engines know what you are about. If
only that were all that mattered, our job would be easy. But
that is not where it ends. To make great friends with the
search engines, we have to venture outside of our own
website and optimize our website from the outside in.
The Importance of Inbound one-way Links
Definition: A one-way inbound link is a link from another
website to our own.
If what we have to say about our website were enough, we’d
all be so happy! But just like in real relationships, it’s
what others say about you that carries weight and this is
just as true with the web.
Search engines do index our website and they do take note of
all of the content and tags. The next step then is to take a
look at what other websites have to say about us. This is
done by taking a look at how other websites link to us.
Obviously, if nobody links to us, we’re chopped liver as far
as the engines are concerned.
The effect of inbound links
If lots of other websites link to us, we start to rise up in
the search engines estimation. But don’t get too excited
yet. There was a time when the sheer number of inbound links
mattered a great deal but that time is gone.
Link Quality
It’s not enough that we have a link. We have to have a link
from a quality, related website and its best if the link has
anchor text that confirms the content of the page it links
to. Anchor text refers to the words used within the link.
(They are the words people see on the web page that they
click on to follow the link.)
Because the total number of links can’t be used as a
valuable weight anymore (since that’s easy to manipulate
through simple determination and lots of worthless
directories) the engines have instead decided that each link
should be examined for its own intrinsic worth.
How is this done? Well, they consider its source.
If I have created a website to provide useful information
about natural health, and I have incorporated many well
researched natural health related keyword phrases into my
website as instructed in this report, I’ve done what I can
for myself. Now I have to go out there and find a few people
who will befriend me with a link from their website to my
website.
I could make twenty new friends in a month’s time and get
each of them to link to me from their existing website – and
all twenty links would not all be seen as the same as far as
the engines are concerned.
Ten of my friends may have websites that have very little to
do with natural health, but they like me so the link they
give me is nice, but not terribly useful for building up my
reputation as a natural health resource on the web. Still, a
link is a link and we don’t scoff at links. If we can at
least get them to use good keyword phrases in the anchor
text, we hope that will count for something.
Five of my friends do have sites in the natural health
business, so the link point to my natural health website is
coming from another existing natural health website. This is
good! The engines will give these links greater weight.
Four of my friends have natural health businesses that are
very closely related to my own. The content on their website
strongly compliments my own. The link from their site to my
site holds even greater weight with the search engines
because it stands to say that these websites wouldn’t link
to me if I weren’t useful in some way.
My last friend is a natural health guru. Her website is huge
and has been on the web for a long time. Not only is her
site great but she has hundreds if not thousands of other
websites that link to her, confirming to the engines that
she is indeed a recognized authority in the natural health
field. Her link to my site is given tremendous weight by the
search engines.
Making contact with complimentary website owners and
developing new links to your website is a huge part of your
overall strategy to make friends with the search engines. If
you don’t do this, you’ll never become best buds with any of
the big three (Google, MSN and Yahoo).
Developing in-bound Links
• Write and distribute articles
• Post on forums
• Comment on blogs
• Write the owner and ask for a link
As a rule, one way links are more attractive than swapped
links but again, we don’t scoff at the link exchange if it
is with a complimentary website. I would not waste any time
at all exchanging links with unrelated websites though.
Another way to develop links is to take advantage of social
bookmarking and networking sites. You’ll meet people, create
relationships and have many opportunities for posting a link
back to your site.
If you are able to do all of the above, and if you don’t
engage any of the questionable grey hat or black hat SEO
techniques, you’ll become and maintain a wonderful
friendship with the search engines.
WebGenesis is a
Sydney web design company. |
