Writing SEO copy can be like negotiating a minefield. Get it right and your website will attract new customers via search engines and see improved sales. Get it wrong and new customers simply will not find your site. The good news is, there are some simple things you can do that will make all the difference.As far as the search engines are concerned, they want to find the most relevant content for each user’s search. They do this by looking at two things. The first is inbound links, which tell the search engines how important you are. The second is the content, which tells the search engines what you do and how relevant you are for each particular search.

Think Web Pages, not WebsitesGoogle looks at each of your web pages on its own merits, rather than looking at your site as a whole. So, when you are planning the structure of your website, you need to think about your key areas. Make sure that each area has its own page. That way, you can optimize each page for a particular product, offering or benefit.

For example, if your website sells electrical products, divide the site into separate pages for broad areas such as kitchen appliances, then create individual pages within these categories for products such as washing machines and irons.

Keyword Research

It is crucial that you get your keywords right, so rather than guessing, use keyword research. Single keywords tend to have more competition, making it difficult to get good organic search rankings for them, so it is far better to be more specific and choose keyword phrases. Continue Reading »
Writing Effective Search Engine Optimized Copy for the Web

SEO’s and Flash just can’t seem to get along. For years there has been the clash of the great looking site with all the cool stuff on it and that stodgy old search engine crawler that acts like it doesn’t exist. Designers and clients have had more than a few ‘conversations’ following the development of a site that looks great when you’re there but the only way to get there is through a link or a direct type in. The search engines have not been able to do anything with Flash in forever but there are active attempts from both sides of the fence to change this.

Adobe has rolled out their Search Engine Optimization Technology Center. The introduction to the site explains its purpose very well

Ensuring that search engines can crawl and index your rich Internet applications (RIAs)—so that your content can be found by others—is of critical importance to building and maintaining an online presence. While Adobe and the leading search engines are making significant strides in making SWF content more searchable, you can take additional steps now to improve your search ranking positions further.

The SEO Technology Center helps explain what the challenges are and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.

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Adobe Introduces Flash Info Site for SEO’s

Have you heard of the 80-20 rule? Well, an Italian economist called Pareto noticed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. His work was taken up by others until it entered mainstream thinking. You’ve probably heard variations of what’s now become known as the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto principle. They go like this: we spend 80% of our time with 20% of our friends, or we wear 20% of our favorite clothes 80% of the time.

More generally, of course, it is a common rule of thumb in business: e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” In business, for example, Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% percent of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.

So far, so good. But what if you found out that - where your website is concerned - the Pareto principle didn’t hold up so well? That 80% of your major keywords only account for 20% of your sales? In other words, by focusing on a handful of major keywords you may be missing out on the ‘real’ keywords that prospective customers are actually using to find your product or service.

Most webmasters apply the 80-20 rule: that the top keywords provide 80% of the business, but in practice, this has proved to be the opposite. In other words, the keywords that are most sought after are actually rarely those that provide the most business.

Let me put it another way: your website is far more likely to receive most of its search engine visitors through an assortment of low-volume search queries instead of a small group of keywords. And this means that by focusing on identifying the keywords which receive a lower volume of search queries you will see a jump in the overall amount of prospective customers from, say, Google, to your website.

What are these keywords? And how will they improve my visitor traffic?

Well, these keywords have become known as Long Tail Keywords. “Long Tail” because they are phrases that are usually made up of more than three words. For instance: “Paint” is not long tail, but “Outdoor paint for wooden shed” is long tail. Or, take “shoes”: “Adidas running shoes” is almost there. But “Adidas running shoes for women” is a long tail keyword.

Can you see the difference between “horse training” and “quarter horse training products”? Here is another example: ‘Credít Cards’ is the general keyword but effective long tail keywords within this niche could include: ‘good low cost credít cards for nurses’, ‘credít cards for people with bad credít’, ‘credít cards with low interest’, ‘benefits of corporate credít cards’, and so on.

The core ideas about long tail keywords is that there is less competition for them, so it’s easier to get good search engine rankings, and also the fact that people who search certain long tail keywords are much more likely to be potential purchasers. By optimizing your website and delivering content to match these search queries you will be attracting visitors who are searching for specific product information using these and other related search phrases.

And there’s no doubt that long tail keywords are highly effective at attracting traffic. What’s more important, there are thousands and thousands of long tail keywords which no one or very few people are pinpointing and so can easily be utilised.

So here are four key reasons why you should consider using long tail keywords to optimize your website for search engines:

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The Quick and Easy Way to Really Understand Long Tail Keywords

The underlying premise of SEO suggests that you understand the task at hand when it comes to outranking the other 999 entrants for any given keyword.

Google stops indexing a particular keyword after 1,000 results when assessing the aggregate relevance score to determine which results are spawned. By truly understanding this, you can discover a great deal from using a few basic Google search operators to determine what type of foothold a competitor has for a given keyword or niche.

Basic Competitive Analysis Metrics

1. Start with the keyword you are interested in researching. Place the keyword “in quotes” in a Google search box. Continue Reading »
Google Optimization Using Search Operators

Every other article on link building that we meet on the Internet tells us why links are important, teaches us how to obtain inbound links describing a variety of link building methods. I totally agree that we need links and I’m always open to any new legal link building tactics. But I believe that in the pursuit of more and more new links, we often forget about backlinks we’ve already got some time ago. Do they still exist? Do they lead to the correct page on our site? Do they have the right anchor text? These are the questions we should ask ourselves.

So, let’s start by examining a couple of simple but necessary tactics that can help you manage and optimize your existing links. Here they are: Continue Reading »
Easy Ways to Optimize Your Existing Links

In this economy, any marketing tool you can use to find new customers is worth considering. But perhaps the best marketing tool available to many small businesses is a yellow-pages-style web site. Such a site means prospective local customers looking for a business like yours know that you’re in business and ready for their patronage.

But a word or two of explanation… While the traffic statistics of the typical small business web site may not impress Google, eBay or Amazon.com, many small business web sites do generate significant numbers of prospects compared to the other marketing tools available. Commonly, for example, small business web sites can attract anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred new unique visitors on a daily basis. And that’s a lot!

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Internet Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

One Page, One Subject

Building a new website and looking for a good search engine results ranking is getting to be a major challenge now that most subjects you can possibly think of are covered by a variety of pages. All the major subjects such as travel, sport, news and sales are covered by millions of web pages. This means that getting top search ranking is really difficult to achieve, and hence the growth in SEO services as authors battle it out for top spot on those all important google results pages.

Even when your subject matter is a little off the beaten track, you’ve probably found you’re locked in a search results battle with all sorts of other sites and related topics. This is where the niche window starts to open, when you see other results coming up next to yours that are not offering quite the same service or information that you are. There’s really no need to be in competition with these sites.

 As the web develops and expands, the chances are steadily increasing that a user searching and finding a site will find one where the content is an exact match with their interest. For web authors this means one thing - it’s no longer sufficient to produce one page covering multiple topics - you need to split up your content.
Doing this is simple enough. Read through your content and split it up into the different topics or aspects that you cover. Now filter these sections of the information onto different pages, each keyworded to their own niche. Of course you should take care to have a home page that retains the address of your existing one, so that you don’t lose that hard won place in google’s index.

The Smaller the Niche, the Higher the Rank

Lets imagine you had a site about shopping bags. You could cover size, strength and design of bags on different pages. This way, someone searching for shopping bag strength can find a page right on topic, and google will rank it very highly for relevance. Continue Reading »
Search Engines and the Art of Niche Marketing