Archive for the ‘SEO 101’ Category

SEO Day 1: Keyword research

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 by Lorenz

Why are keywords important?

When someone does a search on Google for a product (e.g. mortgage), Google will look at its database and list all the sites they think are relevant to this search. There are about 140 different factors that influence how high Google will rank a site, the two most important ones are:

  1. if the keyword is actually present on the page (in other words, the pages they list must have the keyword “mortgage” in their content)
  2. and how many sites related to the keyword “mortgage” link to that page (preferably, the link to that page will have the word “mortgage” in it.

So if you are a smart business owner, you want your site to rank well in the search engines for a keyword relevant to your brand, product or service. This means that you will get targeted traffic: people who are actually looking for your product and will want to buy it.

But with millions of competitors trying to rank for this keyword, that is an almost impossible feat.

Start with the low hanging fruit

You don’t want to start with the most competitive keyword first. They way to rank for a difficult keyword is to first start ranking for an easy keyword.

This is where keyword hierarchy comes in.

Some easy keywords that people actually type into Google when they search for mortgages are:

  • best fixed rate mortgage (266 searches a day but only 20,000 competitors)
  • jumbo mortgage rate (325 searches a day but only 10,600 competitors)
  • fixed interest mortgage rate (398 searches a day but only 26,100 competitors)
  • fha mortgage rate (398 searches a day but only 11,400 competitors)
  • mortgage quote online (266 searches a day but only 11,000 competitors)

(You might wonder how we determined this. Keep reading, we’ll show you how you can find out how many competitors you have in the field, what people actually search for and how many searches there are on average a day).

26,000 competitors may sound like a lot, but trust me, if you follow our guideline, you’ll beat them all.

One you start ranking well for the keywords above, Google will conclude that your website must be relevant for the term “mortgage rate”, because you already rank well for the keyphrase “best fixed rate mortgage“, “jumbo mortgage rate“, fixed interest mortgage rate” and fha mortgage rate“.

As you can see, the term “mortgage rate” is present in each of these search phrases. Once you start ranking well for various shorter keyphrases with the word mortgage in them (e.g. “fixed mortgage“, “best mortgage“, “home mortgage”, “mortgage deals”, etc. your site will start to look very relevant for the keyword “mortgage”.

In other words, the trick isn’t to try to rank well for the most difficult keyword in your industry but to get in via the backdoor by trying to rank for easy (”long-tail”) keywords.

This is what the keyword hierarchy looks like for the term “mortgage”:

keyword-research-mortgage

Keyword research for the phrase mortgage

Keep in mind that this is a simplified list. At the bottom, you will need to rank for more than four “long-tail” keyphrases. In the middle you will need to rank for more than two keyphrases. At the top, you will eventually rank for the one word keyword, but by then you will already have millions of visitors.

The important thing to remember here is that for each of the bottom keywords you rank for already bring you visitors. The four bottom keywords in our example alone will expose your listing to 1387 views a day. Worst case scenario only 6% will click on your listing. That’s 83 clicks a day. Imagine only 2% actually decide to buy from you (onsite marketing can improve this ratio). That still culminates in almost 2 sales a day. With no effort on your part, and no other cost than your time or that of a SEO specialist). And once you rank well, chances are high that you remain ranking well for years. So there is no repeat cost.

That is why SEO is so powerful: it automatically generates sales for you while you sleep.

Establishing the keyword hierarchy for your site.

The model you will be using is the following:

Micro niche keyword research

Micro niche keyword research

You already know the Major Keyword you want to rank for. Now you need to find a number of niche keywords. Each one of these niche keywords has a micro niche that you can easily rank your site for.

But how do you establish these niches and micro niches? Two words:

Keyword research

The truth is, it’s easy. Google itself will tell you what people type into its search engine and how many searches there are on average a day for that keyword. Google also tells you how many competitors there are for that given keyphrase.

If you want to find what keywords people search for, and how many searches you can expect a day (on average), go use the Google Keyword tool.

Make a list of all searches you think people might type into Google’s search box and enter them into the the box.

keyword-research

Note that at this stage, you don’t have to have a clue what people are actually searching for. You just have to guess. Google will analyze the keywords you enter, and match them with actual search results!

Make a list of five keyphrases that you are interested in. Make sure they have a minimum of 80-100 searches a day. Research these keywords on Google.

Now do a search on Google for your keyword preceded by ” (e.g. “plumber Dallas). This will then list only the competitors who actually have the words plumber Dallas in their copy.

If we do this on Google, we find that 25,100 sites have this keyword in their text. This is a great indicator that these sites aren’t optimized for this keyword and that we can beat their listings with ease.

number-of-competitors

The rule of thumb is that if a keyword search returns less than 30,000 sites indexed by Google, we have stumbled upon a keyword that is non-competitive. Nobody is actually trying to rank number 1 for this keyword in an organized way.

So go ahead, and research your 5 chosen keywords in Google. If the search returns more than 30,000 pages in Google’s index, take it off the list. Find another keyword, until you have a list of 5 keywords that have more than 80 searches a day (the more the better of course) and have less than 30,000 pages indexed by Google.

Now you have a list of 5 non-competitive keywords we can start ranking your site for these keywords.

Market Samurai

If you have $149 to spare, then Market Samurai can make keyword research easier for you. It essentially will do the exact same task as what I’ve shown you so far, but it will speed up the process for you:

Over to you

If anything isn’t clear to you, or you want additional information or know of other great ways to research keywords, let us know by leaving a comment. We respond fairly quickly to all your questions and suggestions.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Generating traffic to your website, SEO 101 | 7 Comments »

To Wikipedia or not to Wikipedia?

Monday, March 29th, 2010 by Lorenz

We’ve had lots of questions from SME’s about listing their company on Wikipedia, most with the intention of ranking better in the search engines. This seems to be a popular concern, and we wanted to address all aspects of this issue in a comprehensive blog post.

Contrary to popular believe having a page on Wikipedia doesn’t help you much in terms of search engine ranking, although opinions are varied on this:

  • Wikipedia logoProponents say that the Bing and Google search engines do have algorithms give some ‘authority’ to sites that have a mention in Wikipedia. Since 2007 though, I have not seen any effect for Google listings, nor have I seen results for Bing.
  • Don’t make your own Wikipedia entry. That is against their rules. Others are free to do so. Letting others make the entry is just a better guarantee of getting (or remaining to be) listed.
  • Sometimes, Wikipedia entries rank better than your own. As a result, it might mean that you are competing for search engine listings with Wikipedia. If the article is short and fair and links to your website (in the source portion) it can generate traffic.
  • Keep in mind that anyone can change your Wikipedia entry and it gives you less control over your brand message. Personally I don’t consider this much of a risk, but theoretically it can land you in some brand controversy.

The bigger picture:

Considering the benefits and risks of a Wikipedia entry, I advise:

I don’t see too much benefit of creating a Wikipedia entry, apart from the perception that you have an ‘independent’ source mentioning your brand with the reservation that anyone can edit this mention of your brand, including competitors (which makes it one more brand mention that you need to monitor). My feeling is that you want to be listed in the search engines with as many entries that deliver your message, and a company website is the main vehicle for a controlled brand message. I am all for transparency and public debate about brands on review and encyclopedia sites, but I rather have this grow organically (by the people) then instigated by the brand themselves (which is an indicator only the brand cares about this mention. Worse, it might become a ‘turf’ war between competing brands with little public interest and as a result, little public input or awareness)…

(Better) alternatives improving brand visibility in Search engine rankings:

Having a YouTube video for chosen key phrases:

YouTubeYouTube videos create a larger listing in Google with a video thumbnail, thus attracting attention. As a result, I’d say that that is worth having in order to draw attention to your listing, and YouTube listings are predominantly shown below your brand website (if your website is optimized for this term). YouTube videos also integrate with Google Maps. Granted, anyone can comment on the video and the YouTube audience can be especially harsh. Again, I’ve never been overly concerned about public commenting, and keep in mind that you have the ability to respond or even retract a YouTube video if a competitor abuses the comments on YouTube. Wikipedia gives you little ability, and you need to contact editors instead if you want to set the record straight.

Over to you

Do you agree or disagree? Do you have a story to tell about how your brand fared on Wikipedia or YouTube? We’d love to hear from you:

Tags: ,
Posted in SEO 101 | 7 Comments »

Google employee discusses some effective link building techniques

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 by Lorenz
Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts

Building links to your website is one of the major strategies in getting your website to rank well in the search engines. Google and other search engines need to determine somehow what content is relevant to the user and what is not. In order to establish this relevancy, one thing they look at is the amount of links to your site.

Google assumes that every link is a vote for the value of that content. To determine why someone linked at you, the look at the topic of the webpage that links to your site and the topic discussed in your page that received the link. It then runs an elaborate computer program that determines why you got the link (for what topic material you received the vote) and matches that with the topic the searcher is trying to get information about (Google determines the topic by looking at the user’s search phrase.)

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, discusses some techniques to get links from others.

Below you’ll see his video, followed by a discussion and summary of his advice.

Build great content

Content that is valuable has a better chance of getting linked to. In other words, post something that people care about and adequately satisfies their thirst for information on the topic. If you effectively solve the problem or provide an education, your content will be seen as useful and ‘linkable’.

Types of content that gets linked to are:

Build a blog

Matt Cutts says there is no excuse for companies or even individuals not to have a blog. It is great way of having authorative discussions about a subject you know a lot about. Create tutorials that solve problems or educate.

Controversial posts

Matt Cutts isn’t to flattering about people who use controversy when writing their content. His main issue is that it is part of an anti-culture, where people define the world in a negative way, by emphasizing on what is bad and should be hated.

Saying that, if you truly believe something controversial and can back up your claim, it is worth sticking to your guns and try and convince your readers of your position. It might get you lots of posts linking to yours decrying what you wrote, but it is still a link.

But Matt Cutts is right in pointing out that there is a responsibility towards our culture as well. We don’t want to promote a culture that defines itself in the negative or creates controversy without basis, as a sort of knee jerk reaction against the prevailing attitude which one finds uncomfortable and attacks without proper examination or merit.

Humor

People love to laugh. Add some humor to your post and you can get lots of links.

Originality

Research and write about topics or issues related to a topic that nobody ever talked about. By doing that, your site will be the only site anyone could possible link to to further explore the topic.

Originality will truly help you if it is related to your overall search engine strategy (if you write a post that is far removed to the overall topic of your site, the links to that particular post will carry less weight in terms of helping you with your overall ranking in the search engines.

Building lists

“10 ways to do x” is a popular form of content writing on the web and are articles that get linked to often. It is part of our fast-food approach to knowledge.

Matt Cutts acknowledges the effectiveness of top 10 lists, but warns against a dumbing down of culture. Do create lists where appropriate, but make sure it isn’t all you do.

How to’s and tutorials

A great way to establish authority is by taking on an issue a lot of people struggle with and create a tutorial on how to solve it.

Have great site architecture

Matt Cutts is surprised at how many people ignore this. Make sure that your site is easy to link to: it must have linkable URL’s, your content should stay in one place (if you build content that moves around, it will be impossible for someone to link to that post) and have a site structure that makes sense both to humans and search engines.

Participate in communities

Join forums and leave comments on blogs that offer valuable insights. If you can help someone understand a topic better through your contribution, they will remember you, and might even be willing to link out to your site that discusses similar topic material.

It also spreads awareness: people who receive valuable feedback from you will start to regard you as an expert, and if they ever have a need for your services, they might just pick up the phone and call you for some business.

Social Media

Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook are all great tools to reach people where they hang out. Join discussions and groups and help them out in the same way you help out people on Forums. Again, this enables you to build authority. Once your authority on a subject is established you could be invited to conferences to speak on your chosen topic, and live bloggers could be linking out to your site – or people might simply remember you as an expert and give you a call to take on a project.

Newsletters

By allowing people to subscribe to your content, whether through RSS or email, or sign up for a newsletter enables you to deliver content more effectively. You don’t rely on the content consumer visiting your website, they can be notified of your content in their inbox. That heightens awareness of your content, and providing your content is of interest, might inspire someone to write a blog post about your discussion and link to your content.

Create tools and services

Create free tools that people can access to solve their problems, such as a knowledge database, plug-ins for Wordpress, clickable lists that solve problems in interactive ways, calculators (e.g. mortgage calculators), etc.

Create videos

Don’t just write, create videos as well (and provide transcripts). Video is a popular way to connect with a demographic that rather watches you talk than read your blog posts. It allows you to tap into a whole new demographic.

Conclusion

Matt Cutts adheres to the philosophy that content should be valuable, and that we have a responsibility to our culture not to clutter the web with spammy information or fast-food blog posts (such as mindless top 10 lists). He argues that backlinks are created by creating good content across platforms (e.g. blogs and video), networking and participating in the open source solutions.

There are many more link building strategies, and we will be discussing his suggestions and others in next months SEO tutorials.

2010 Predictions for Google and SEO

For a summary of Matt Cutts’ predictions and some extra’s, visit the related topic in our forum: search engine predictions for 2010.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in SEO 101 | 15 Comments »

SEO: The Basics of Ranking Well

Friday, March 5th, 2010 by Lorenz

We get a lot of questions on how you can rank well in the search engines. This is a vast topic matter that will be extensively discussed in our blog. For now, we just wanted to give our audience some quick pointers about the essential components of an SEO strategy. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask them in our SEO forum.

A brief overview

As with every specialized knowledge, we can draw broad strokes, while reminding the reader that the devil is in the detail.

Our SEO 101 Guide will open with describing the broad principles. They will give you an eagle eye overview of the framework in which we work coupled with a short overview of how these principles have developed historically in the search engine algorithms.

Raw PageRank (a.k.a. Link Juice)

PageRank by GoogleLet’s start with the smallest factor of interest.

PageRank used to be an important factor in SEO optimization for Google. Today, it is somewhat important, but it’s advocated effectiveness is more myth than reality.

PageRank was a simple algorithm that calculated the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. In other words, it wasn’t the amount of links that point to the page that were important (this is a frequent misconception) but rather the chances that somebody could stumble upon your page.

In the hay day of SEO, PageRank was extremely important. You could install the Google Toolbar, that gives you an indication of the PageRank of each page. The trick was then to get links from pages with high PageRank, as this would increase the probability of a surfer randomly clicking on links to arrive on your page. The algorithm would then list you higher in the search engines simply based on this algorithm.

Since the beginning of the Naughties search engines have gotten smarter, and PageRank has declined in overall importance, in many ways because it was such a random way of assessing the value of a page.

Key Words on the page

keywordsNext on the list is optimizing the keyword distribution on your page. Although the second least important factor, this can really give a boost to your site, and it is recommended that this is where you start your SEO efforts. We will be giving you an in-depth guide on On Page Keyword Optimization.

But for now, a quick overview:

It is important that keywords that are indicative to the search appear on the page. In other words, if a searcher looks for ‘electric kettles’ and your page is about ‘electric kettles’, those words better be on the page. Seems obvious, but quite often we don’t know what search phrases our audience would use. This would then require us to first find out what key phrases are the most popular when people look for our services. Once we know these key phrases, we should then include them on the page.

There is a whole ’science’ behind on-page optimization, and we will be addressing this in-depth. The science also extends to optimization for visitor to customer conversion, and this will be addressed in November’s tutorials.

Anchor text in Backlinks

Backlinks move your site to the center of the web

Backlinks move your site to the center of the web

More important than the keywords on the page is the words used in the link from an external page (on a different domain) than your page. If your page is about search engine optimization, and an external page links to you for the keywords search engine optimization. than that will count towards how relevant your page appears to be to the search engines, especially if the link comes from a page that is contextually relevant to your topic material.

The influence of anchor text in external links has been declining in the past, because this is yet another element that can be gamed by SEO’s. But if you have a lot of backlinks to your site, you will see a definite uplift in your position in the search engines!

Domain Trust / Authority

Way way back in the history of SEO, when the industry was still in its infancy, an astonishing 7 years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, Domain Trust didn’t really play a role that I knew off. Today, it is THE factor in SEO.

If Google decides that you are a trusted domain (like the BBC or Wikipedia) you will do well in the search engines for all key phrases that are relevant to topics you discuss. That is not to say that you can’t be beaten by pages that have lots of backlinks (see the previous page), but you will have to try a lot less to get far superior results. In fact, Google’s algorithm update this year (called Vince) has given even more weight to the fact whether Google trusts your brand or not.

So the task at hand is to write lots of quality content and become a trusted domain (this can take years) – or the second best thing: get lots of links from trusted domains (we’ll discuss this in future updates).

Conclusion

Although we will discuss some tricks other than the four main categories above, adhering to the above rules will take up most of our discussions and activities when optimizing your site for search engines. The recipe is simple: don’t worry too much about the myth of PageRank, focus on creating quality content with strategic placement of keywords, accrue backlinks across the web and fight hard to become a trusted site (the best way to avoid calamity with each new search engine algorithm update).

Over the next month, we will give you step by step instructions how to achieve success in each of these categories.

Over to you

Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think we left some essential information out? Or do you have questions that require clarification? Let us know, we love to hear from you.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in SEO 101 | 2 Comments »