Keyword Research Tips

If we are familiar of how search engines work and if we are aware of the customer behavior on the internet and if we are aware of the search terms being used by them to search for the products and services we deal in, your keyword research part for the SEO of your website becomes easy. Usually, this is not the case. The business owners perceive that inking the most common words related to our website design would do the SEO task well. That is not true. Before jotting down the keywords and the search terms we must keep in mind the following:

• Put yourself in the web visitor’s shoes and search for the products and services online to find the products and services you deal in. By using different variations of the search terms and by using the search terms that you have in your mind, will help you conclude what are the web surfers searching for and how they conduct their searches? You will also access your competition and hence form a SEO strategy.
• Our first aim should be to find the words, keywords that are most relevant to your business niche, phrases that are relevant and the long tail ends that can help in garnering more healthy results.
• Do not go after the keywords or phrases that show high traffic or high competition volume. If competition is high, remember, achieving good ranking would be rather impossible.
• Go after lesser competitive keywords and phrases. This will help you in getting to the top speedily. 
• Once you have achieved top ranking or prominent ranking for the lesser competitive keywords, getting to high ranking for highly competitive keywords would be rather easy.
• Make the choice for keyword, webpage by webpage.  By doing this, you will be able to select unique keywords for each pages, hence achieving ranking for each page of your website and getting more visibility on the search engines.

Understanding human behavior is an important element in the building your SEO strategy. Keywords have ruled the search engine marketing game and so has the user behavior. Keeping track will help in building a sustained search engine position.

SEO Best Practices for 2012

There was a time when SEO’s preached the best search engine optimization practices by focusing on the SEO web copy stuffed with or filled with keywords, phrases, their variations etc, most of the time making the content meaningless for the website visitors. There were keyword Meta tags and high density of keywords it the title and description tags. Since then, when the black hatters took the advantage and the Google search results gave meaningless web search results with fake or poor sites coming up on the search engines top ranking, the search engine looked to improve the standards of indexing and optimization.

The year 2012 has been eventful so far, the Penguin update daunted the efforts of the black hatters and gave them the signals that they will be for sure penalized by the Search Engine Leader by delisting of their sites.

We have since then come off age and became more realistic when we perform SEO. In this year, we need to:

Focus more on natural ways of building one way back links

Use keywords in lesser density, than we used to do previously (not 2 to 5% but the preferred keyword density ratio is 0.5% to 1%). This forces us to build website content that flows naturally and makes sense to the humans coming across our website content.

Focus on LSI - Latent Semantic Indexing is the call of the day. The artificially intelligent search engines can make out and sense the nature of the search, hence provide the best and meaningful results through semantic search results.

Our focus on Meta Tags - we need to change the habit of embedding the hardcore keyword in the Title tag. Instead aiming on the ability of search engines to index on LSI standards must be given weight. More effective Meta Title Tags and description tags can be developed and help the users find your website through LSI search results.

Before you get into the act of optimizing your website do study and learn through the guidelines provided by the search engines. Visit the SEO guidelines pages to get a complete handle on the SEO best practices for the year 2012.

3 Simple SEO Tips

Survival of the fittest, that true. Every coming day makes the competition on the internet fierce. More people come up with their websites and aim for high search engine ranking. While some succeed, others find themselves no where.  With many businessmen striving to find a prominent position on the search engines for similar keywords and phrases, it is not usually possible for everyone to find the top search engine result’s page spot.  It is but natural that only few survive the intense marketing game on the internet.

Visibility matters, even if it doesn’t come through top search engine ranking, your website visibility matters. 1st page ranking, within the first 10 spots, is good enough to a website. Alas, these positions do not guarantee business, but may be, a high click through rate is the reward for the visibility that you achieve.

To get more web visitors search engine optimization methods, especially, the off page gives a long lasting strong hold position to the web pages being optimized. The conditions remain to be the same. The On page and off page optimization must carry relevance to each other and must be inter related.

Let’s discuss 3 simple Off Page SEO steps that can help in strengthening the search engine position of your web pages:

Write, publish and distribute press releases – The news hungry nature of people helps us to leverage our search engine marketing. Our businesses have news to break to the people. Every business activity can be changed into a news worthy story and the same can be published and distributed through the press release distribution services online. If done well, the news might get picked up by the major media outlets and disseminated further. The benefit - more visibility, more readability by the target market and more one way back links

Blog – Blog – Blog – Create your marketing niche weblog. Communicate with the people about the products, services that you deal in. Tell them the good and the bad of your products and invite them to participate in every blog by leaving comments. Leave your web page link in every blog that you write.

Submit your website to niche web directories – This can your first step towards the off page SEO. Submit your web pages to the most popular online web directories and take the benefit of search engine spider’s crawling activity.

Getting ahead of the competition is the challenge that is faced by many online marketers today. We have to take our SEO steps soon before other fill the space.

Meta name=”news_keywords” content – SEO news

Google brings back the Meta keywords tag. Not really, it back for the news publishers only. The good old Meta Keyword Tag, which had been done away with, is refined and being re introduced for the Press Release writer and news publishers giving them more flexibility with words, also helping them to leverage their creativity. Building attractive news titles without having to bother about the keywords being must in the title and without having to focus on embedding more keywords and variation inside the news text. The Meta keyword tag will handle the job for you.

Wait, don’t rush, you need to understand the mechanics first. As Google announced this just a few days from now, we need to wait and see, try this out and understand the mechanics. Google has limited the length of Meta name=”news_Keywords” tag to 10 keywords. We don’t need to over step, no use.

We have been cautioned here by Google. They say using this tag isn’t your ticket for top search engine ranking; rather it is for identifying to the search engines and calling in the spiders for indexing, even if no keywords had been used in the title of the publication. Quality of the news release remains to be of essence.

Search Engine Land explains the mechanism by saying, “Google also warns that using the “news_keywords” meta tag isn’t a quick path to ranking better in Google News. It’s only one signal, and “high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.”

Rudi Galfi, the product manager at the Google News, explained the need of the “News_keywors” meta tag by saying, “Since the headline is a sequence of text that’s only readily understandable by a human, most machine algorithms would probably attach some sort of biological association to it. In turn, this would make it difficult for millions of curious users who are using Google.com or Google News to find the best article about the stock market crash they just heard about.

 The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.”

SEO, Using Press Releases

We have been reading many press releases with great interest. Mostly, the attractive title of the press releases makes us click and we read on. We are news hungry people. Every morning we try and gulp down news as it breaks on the BBC or CNN with our cup of coffee or while we are driving for work. Our passion for news gives the opportunity to businessmen to break their business news, stirring interest and thus we walk into their physical store or log on to their web store to find stuff.

On one hand, press releases have the power of bringing interested target marketing into the business net, on the other, more interestingly; it is the Off Page SEO tool which if built properly, with the relevant SEO elements can help in achieving multiple goals on the Off Page SEO.

Press Releases are:

1. Online marketing tools. The press releases, tells your business stories, gives the readers the insight about your business and leads many to your place of business. Some online marketers describe press releases as the best local marketing tool. 
2. Search Engine marketing angle must not be over looked here. Our purpose behind every online marketing and SEO strategy is to make our business and business activity searchable. Building in the search engine friendly features like using relevant keywords and phrases in our web conversations will help in triggering the search engine spiders and forcing them to visit and index the press release. 
3. The creative, original and purposeful press release get the attention of the other media outlet, gets pickup and gets more healthy back links for the website, thus strengthening the hold of the web pages on the search engines.

We need to write the press releases, get them published on the online press release journals and get them distributed through the press release distribution services to harness the fruits of the press release marketing activity.
Our hidden aim here is to get more one way back links and a higher page rank for our website. With prudent off page SEO steps we can ensure better off page SEO and better page rank for our web pages.

SEO, The new outlook

Many business people still are unsure as to how can SEO benefit them. They know about visibility as they are themselves the web users and use Google to search for information. They are familiar of what web user do online, how search is conducted and what needs to be done if you don’t find the exact information that you are searching for. Hence, not knowing what SEO can do for the business is ignorance. What is good for others is good for your business too. Hence, when put in easy terms, SEO bring visibility and free web traffic to your website, if your SEO elements are properly built in and your website off page optimization is done with good search engine marketing strategy.

On Page elements are technical, as these have to do with HTML codes like building Meta Title Tags, Description tags, image (ALT) tags etc. We have to be vigilant and learned enough so as to tweak out basic HTML elements of our web pages. Are you equipped to handle this? Mostly, entrepreneurs are not. They are not familiar with the HTML, so website designing is alien area to walk into. Here they need the help of the search engine optimizers and pay them so SEO fee to help them research their keywords and build the SEO tags and elements on the web pages.

Off Page Optimization – This can be a “do it your self project”. You need to know good English. Save your vocabulary, as you don’t have to show off. You need to keep your web content simple and understandable. You have to give some time to your off page SEO.

People on the web are looking for information and best source of information is the web content. We can helpfully look at:

a)      Submitting website to web directories

b)      Article writing and submission

c)       Blogging

d)      Press Releases

These are the best sources for spreading information. Leaving a link back to your web pages in these web conversations will help in bringing the interested web visitors to your website and would also generate healthy and relevant back links

For the entrepreneurs the more challenging task is to let the people know about the articles, blogs and the press releases, hence, thanks to the social marketing techniques, we can spread the word by leading the members of the social networks, your friends and peer by posting links on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn etc.

No so technical and not so difficult, “do it yourself SEO tasks” where you need intelligence and common sense, can be of great help your search engine optimization and help in getting your web pages more visibility on the search engines.

Semantic search

Wiki opens its discussion on Semantic search by saying, “Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable data space, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.”

Discussing the process of creating relevance during search, Wiki goes on the explain, “In order to understand what a user is searching for, word sense disambiguation must occur. When a term is ambiguous, meaning it can have several meanings (for example, if one considers the lemma "bark", which can be understood as "the sound of a dog," "the skin of a tree," or "a three-masted sailing ship"), the disambiguation process is started, thanks to which the most probable meaning is chosen from all those possible.

Such process make use of other information present in a semantic analysis system and takes into account the meanings of other words present in the sentence and in the rest of the text. The determination of every meaning, in substance, influences the disambiguation of the others, until a situation of maximum plausibility and coherence is reached for the sentence. All the fundamental information for the disambiguation process, that is, all the knowledge used by the system, is represented in the form of a semantic network, organized on a conceptual basis.”

We take our discussion further, but take into account more of the semantic search results process through the SEO Bridge. 

The optimizers and the website design builders need to take into account the relevance of the web pages to the web copy or shall we say website content. Even, when we talk about semantics we cannot over look the Facebook wall postings or the blogs or even form commenting cannot be over looked. Every thing is linked to the relevance of the subject, hence, filling the database and making it ready to produce the relevant search results when a query is generated by the web user.

Building content for the web, that has relevance to the subject, use of keywords, phrases and long tail ends with intent, not over using, over emphasizing or any way stuffing the search term, as the search engines are intelligent enough to analyze the intent of the content maker and the web surfer while processing search results. Let your content be naturally flowing, easy to be read and understood. 

Today’s SEO Tip

We read so much about search engine optimization that frequently we loose track that what has to be done today, to get more links. We are usually indulging in off page without a proper secure plan. With no plan of action, we remain beating about the bush really and getting no where as far as the building links is concerned.

The our link building activities where we prefer to leave the links of our web page we usually end up leaving the backlink to our home page. Well this is good, but enough to get the real juice out of the link building strategy.

There are other pages on your website that need attention too. May be the visitors are not interested in your home page but your products page might propel them to get in touch with you. The links back to your products page would give your website more links and better hold on the search engine positioning.

Think about it. What are other pages on your website that might be helpful if used in link building? There might be a few. The product page, the services pages, or better still, you can choose the three best pages you might think would be helpful in building links.

Ramapati Singhania shares my thought and says, “Take stock and choose any 3 of your "most important" pages today andset a plan to specifically work on increasing some natural link popularity, directly to those pages individually. Part of some people's trouble (when it comes to linking,) is that they become overwhelmed. The job seems too massive when really, it's not. Just a little plan and a little consistent effort even once a week, can carry you an ENOURMOUS distance! What's your plan? Start by choosing just 3 of your "most important" pages”.

SEO – Adding value to SEO services

SEO companies strive for business. Marketing SEO services had never been as difficult as it is these days. Out many reason for this saturation one of the main reasons for people walking away from the SEO companies is that, the companies failed to provide value added services. Why do we need highly optimized website? What is the purpose of getting high search engine ranking? We get visitors, more traffic, but our sales have not increased, our visitors are not converting into customers? We need to find answers.

The marketing edge that SEO companies used to sell their search engine optimization services was based on getting top search engine ranking for the selected keywords and keyword phrases. Many of the SEO companies succeeded in their work got the pat on the back and walked away with their booty for their job well done. They delivered what they promised.

The point everyone missed out was getting to the top does guarantee visibility. It can get your web traffic, more clicks, less unique visitors but it does not guarantee business, it does not guarantee conversions. The ROI of the business owner was hurt.

The tip of the day is – for the SEO companies – To make some efforts to deliver value for the money they charge. Getting to top might not be difficult, but getting the visitors to convert to customer’s is the task, if done well, will bring customers to your clients and hence give you an edge over other SEO companies.

My friend Ramapati Singhania shares my sentiments and says “Converting visitors to customers may not always be in the forefront of our minds as an SEO (we're always so busy thinking traffic), but once you start examining methods to convert your client's visitors to customers, you'll start to deliver additional value to your clients and you'll find a full consultancy approach does not go unrewarded.”

Link Building Methods

Link farms flourished before. People used to buy links, arrange reciprocal links and make efforts to strengthen the hold on the search engine ranking. This shows that link building has always been central to SEO strategies. But now the game has become more serious. Link farms are a big No No from Google’s point of view as links coming in from any site are not the links that matter any more. These have to come through the relevant and authority sites, with better page rank. Here quality of back links matter. The bad guys are in trouble.

Keywords focus must not be let loose as these are important and precious commodity. SEO web content development contains the set of and variations of targeted relevant keywords and phrases. Every web conversation that we get involved in if is with the relevant keywords, which must be prudently used, not stuffed or used meaninglessly, will help in SEO and link building.

Methods of link building

We are here to discuss various methods and must look at the easiest ones that can help you to garner more authoritative and relevant links.

Blogging – Web2.0 blog sites are the tools of general interest these days. Creating niche blogs and uploading your blog posts, and leaving the links in the signature sections help in generating back links. If the post is original, interesting and creative many other bloggers will like to link to your blog and many other might link to your website.

Forum Commenting – Forums are the best places on the internet where loads of conversations take place. The best forums are the ones that belong to your market niche. Participating in forums and leaving links of your website, will help. Two pronged benefits are visible here; (a) you get loads of web traffic to flow and (b) back links

Social media / Social Networks – Most of the web users are there to mingle, make friends and have fun but the serious side of social networks tells a different story. Creating interesting conversation and leaving links of your blogs, articles, and the social media updates etc, leads to the traffic flow to your sites but the juice that we get are the link, one way back links from these sites and other sites that link back to us.

Social Media for Building Trust

Trust opens more opportunities for business people. When we talk of trust, we are actually discussing the most precious commodity. Social media or social networking sites are the gateways that have opened our doors to our marketing and business prospects and hence, we can make our moves towards fostering and building relationships and trust among our target market. Social networks create engagement. By making the best use of this attribute we need to work towards building trust through our action and through the way we handle our online marketing game.

To build trust we need to:

Create conversation – I need to stress here is that we need to listen to our marketing prospects. Learn about their experiences of using our product or similar products available in the market. Reply to their queries and answer to the comments. The two way communication would mean that you are alive and that you are interested in solving people’s problems that have occurred after the use of the products. 

Replying to negative comments would bring you more into the game. Your reply will make them understand you, your business and your products as well as alert many other eager buyers who will respond with their comments and perception.

Consistency is the key. If you perform the disappearing act and be visible only occasionally, you marketing game will get a different perception. You will not be considered a matured marketer and hence building trust and as well as creating brand recognition will be difficult for your business.  

Share content – Keeping your friends, business page fans interested in your conversation needs you to share with them general things of interest. This means that sharing your marketing messages alone will not make your social marketing game thrive. You will have to attract their attention with jokes, stories, images etc and get them to comment on the content that you are sharing with them. Telling them that you are human like them and can get attracted with other interesting things available online too. 

Create a personality – You have to build or create personality. Do everything with vigor. The type settings, the images, the color that you choose in your conversation and graphics must be appealing and show off class. Do not force or hammer your marketing messages on them. Talk to them in the authoritative, humble tone.

Last but not the least, once people start trusting your words don’t disengage or do not change the color of your conversation. Keep going in the manner you have been striving for the past many days.  Social media is all about people and people interact when they trust others.

SEO Tip - SEO during Website Redesign

It seems that SEO and the website design or redesigns are two separate things. Yes, front fascia tells us that both are entirely different but in essence the professional will tell us that both must be worked on with in combination. Both the elements, that is, the website design and SEO have a perpetual unison and must be applied together when the website is being structured.

If you have taken up the task of redesigning your web pages, be sure that you don’t disturb the search engine ranking. Our purpose with the redesign is to make the website more professionally and make an effective presentation so that our website helps fulfill the visitor’s quest of searching online, but in this effort, I have seen many websites getting dented as far as the SEO elements are concerned. We must remember that it not the color, graphic, images and text alone that make things happen for your web presence online. Search engine optimization elements play a big game for you.

Ramapati Singhania, once again said today, “Are you thinking about a change in design? If you are considering a re-design of your Web site...Don't just think about the new colors and graphics and layout, but also be aware of how the new page structure will impact your search rankings, bookmarks, and inbound links. There are many ways to overcome problems, and the goal is to plan for any problems in advance.”

We have a lot to do. Before even opening up our browsers and web design tools, we must sit down to:

• Decide what is our purpose for redesigning our website
• Keep the visitors need first
• Your need to prove your effective presence, SEO elements tweaking is important
• Keyword research to embed more new keywords to expand our online presence
• Designing elements that need to be embedded with the SEO elements,
• Image optimization
• Internal linking must not be disturbed
• Improving up user navigation.
• Making search engine friendly URLs
• Take care of Meta Title Tags, Meta Description tag and, H1 tags
• Install Google Analytics
• Has the Website Sitemap been made

Keep you website simple when you start redesigning. We must remember that redesigning the website is our business need for (a) to satisfy the visitors need, (b) to satisfy our business promotion and marketing needs, (c) embedding SEO elements will make this happen on the search engines and will effect our web presence and web visibility.

Keyword Stuffing – The death trap for websites

We have come a long way since keyword stuffing become illegal. Yet, many optimizers are in the habit of pushing too hard to the top search engine ranking. The optimizers, the old school of through people, or those who have based their SEO strategies on black hat SEO practices don’t seem to come off, from their illicit practices of stuffing keywords in the web page content, Meta title and Meta description tags and so on. The effort of extracting juice through over optimization does not seem to be working anymore. Not with the Google for sure and also not with other search engines.

Webopedia defines keyword stuffing as, “A SEO technique used by Web designers to overload keywords onto a Web page so that search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search. Because search engines scan Web pages for the words that are entered into the search criteria by the user, the more times a keyword appears on the Web page the more relevancy the search engine will assign to the page in the search results (this is only one way that search engines determine relevancy, however.) Search engines often penalize a site if the engine discovers keyword stuffing, as this practice is considered poor netiquette, and some search engines will even ban the offending Web pages from their search results.”

About.com defines keyword stuffing as, “Keyword stuffing is a deceptive technique to try and elevate a website's search engine result ranking by including targeted keywords more often than they naturally would appear in a quality document. The intent is to make it so that it's it is unlikely to be seen by a visitor but will be visible to search engines.”

In every well defined line of keyword stuffing we can conclude that keyword stuffing can get your website dumped by the search engines and make you loose your authority on the web. The website or the web business suffers due to:

• The text become meaningless for the website visitors due to the over use or repeated use of the relevant keywords. As the text seems more robotic it chases the humans away and less conversions happen, in spite of the fact the site had attained top search engine ranking
• The Website gets penalized. It is delisted or banned from the search engine in due course of time; hence the short lived life brings no laurels to website owners.