Keywords Choice To Get Best Results

As a search engine optimization copywriter, I�ve seen my share of keywords. When working with me, clients choose their own keywords (or have someone else choose them) and then send me the list to include in their copy. I must admit, sometimes I am just amazed at the selections I receive.

It�s absolutely imperative that you make wise choices in the area of keywords. Many people simply look at statistics. Others go strictly on the most highly searched keywords from one particular search engine. Still others do no research at all and just guess. While the first two can work in combination with one another, they still don�t offer a complete solution.

From working with many search engine optimization expert, I have gathered a few tips on how to choose effective keywords that bring results. I�d like to share that information with you so you can improve both your copy and your search engine positioning.

Narrow Focus

Choose keywords that have a narrow focus. The most common mistake I live seen when selecting keywords is choosing those that are too broad. For example, one client sold cleaner for granite countertops. One keyphrase that was originally under consideration was granite countertops. However, as his SEO expert explained (and I agree), people could be hoping to find information on almost any aspect of granite countertops installation, price, service, dealers, etc. This keyphrase was too broad and eventually was discarded.

The same applies to geographic locations. A real estate agent wanted to use the keyphrase Richmond County. However, upon searching the Net for this phrase, his SEO expert discovered that there are at least three states that have a Richmond County. Instead, the SEO expert chose phrases such as Richmond County, Georgia real estate� to narrow the focus and ensure qualified traffic.



Applicable to the Page

Another common area where people wane is in being determined to use keyphrases that simply dont apply to the page. In one case I was asked by a client to use the keyphrase payment portal on a page that had nothing to do with that topic. At the time, that was an excellent phrase to target, but it would have been quite a stretch as it had little to do with what the site was about.

Just because a keyphrase gives you the opportunity to be highly ranked doesnt mean you should use it if it has nothing to do with your site.

More Traffic or Better Traffic?

I see the battle between lots of traffic vs. more targeted traffic just about every day. Clients are generally programmed by Web hype to believe you need as much traffic as you can get regardless of where it comes from.

Most SEO experts I am associated with (and this SEO copywriter) believe you need traffic that will actually stick around once they reach your site.

Why have tons of people coming to your site if they will just leave after three seconds because they didn't find what they were looking for? It�s better to have fewer people - more targeted prospects - who are more likely to buy.

By targeting your keyphrases so they are as accurate and focused as possible, you will gain the attention of customers who are specifically searching for what you have to offer. While your unique visitor or page view count may go down, your bank account balance will likely go up!

Web Traffic To a brand new Website

Every single day, more and more people upload brand new websites to the Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be hundreds of thousands of new pages being added daily (if not considerably more!). That thing make Difficult search engine optimizer work to optimize any site.

The one thing that all of these new websites need in order to make their existence worthwhile is traffic, which leads me to one of the most common questions I am asked and the subject of this newsletter:

'How can you generate traffic to a brand new website?'

Of course, there are a number of different answers to this question and what I would do myself is probably very different to what a completely new Internet entrepreneur would do. The reason I say this is that the first thing I do when launching a new site is make use of my existing website traffic by advertising the new site on my other established sites. In addition, I have the luxury of a large mailing list which I can use to drive traffic to the new site.

I appreciate that anyone starting out in online business won't have these options open to them (and in fairness, neither did I when I first started), so let's look at things from the beginning. Day one of your first website.....

It is a fact that the quickest and probably most effective way of bringing targeted traffic to your website is by paying for it. Now before you rush off and sink $50 into one of those '50,000 hits for $50' schemes, DON'T, this isn't what I mean. Those schemes are largely a complete waste of money. Even if you get the traffic that you are promised (as opposed to some software script visiting your site and pretending to be a visitor), it will not be targeted and therefore there is a very low chance that the traffic will generate sales. When I talk about buying traffic, I mean by using the pay- per-click services offered by most of the big search engines.

You probably already know the sort of thing I mean - for example, Google Adwords. Pretty much any search on Google will display a list of adverts down the right-hand side of the page and these are all paid adverts. Every time you click on one of them, the advertiser pays Google a fixed amount which could be anything from 5 cents upwards (depending upon how competitive the keyword is).

Pay-per-click allows you to be very selective about which keywords your advert is shown for and this allows you to target your advertising perfectly. Other big names in the pay-per-click market include Overture, Espotting and Findwhat.

Now, before you all start emailing me and saying that you already knew about PPC let me just say that I am well aware that people know about it. The problem (as I see it), is that people aren't using this type of service because of the fact that they don't want to spend any money on advertising. That's all well and good but the fact is that the Internet is getting more and more competitive each day and the chances of you building a successful website business from scratch without investing any money are tiny to say the least.

If you want to attract a decent level of traffic to a brand new website in a short period of time, it is almost a necessity that you use pay-per-click on one of the main search engines. If you don't, then the growth of your traffic levels will be painfully slow and inconsistent at best.

When I launched my very first websites I invested heavily in pay-per-click advertising. At one point, I was spending over $6000 a month on Google Adwords alone!!! Seriously I really was spending that much money. It was a constant battle to tweak the website sales copy and continue to test the advertisement text just to make sure that my sales were covering the advertising payments each month. At the time I was probably just about breaking even but buying traffic in this quantity meant that I was able to fine-tune my sales pages and start to build up a list of mailing list subscribers.

Once you have got to the stage where you know your sales pages are converting visitors into buyers, then you can start to gear up with other methods of getting traffic to your site - writing articles, linking strategies, viral methods (eBooks etc), using your eBay 'About Me' page, using your link as a signature when you post on forums etc. All of these methods will win you traffic (and in most cases it will be completely free) but it will take time for the traffic to build to a worthwhile level. If you rely solely on free traffic, you really will be building your business one hit at a time.

Of course, once the free methods of gaining traffic start to pay off, you can begin to wind down your paid methods, though you may not want to - after all, if you are earning more in sales than you are paying for your pay-per-click traffic, why stop it?

As your portfolio of websites grows, you will also be able to share the traffic around a bit by linking to your own sites and of course, if you are capturing your visitors email addresses, you will be building a mailing list of people interested in the products you are offering.

Like I say, I appreciate that the above may not be the ground-breaking secret that you were hoping for but as with so many things online, there really is no secret. Achieving success is simply about taking action and whilst you can succeed online by spending very little money, the chances are that you will succeed a lot quicker by making a bit of an investment. You don't have to be spending thousands of dollars a month as I was but any new business owner should be prepared to invest a few hundred dollars a month in order to get things off the ground....

A Guide to Quick Search Engine Optimisation

A number of factors need to be considered when optimising a web site for the organic results of the search engines. The cumulative effect of optimising all parts of a website is greater than the sum of its parts optimised individually.

Each factor overlaps with, or is related to, at least one other, and for maximum results the big picture needs to be captured by a search engine optimisation strategy.

This article outlines the elements an effective SEO strategy should cover.

Content:
Body content should be relevant and not copied from anywhere else. The density of keywords and phrases should be approximately 5%. Related keywords and phrases can be used to boost relevancy.

Search engines like to see that a web site is serving current and valuable information. Frequently changing content and the addition of new pages will keep both search engines and users interested and can improve rankings.

Titles tags:
Titles are the most important tag used by the search engines for determining the topic of a page. They should be relevant, concise, not use repetition and unique to every page. A call to action can encourage click through from the search engine results pages

Inbound links & PageRank:
Due to the democratic nature of the major search engines, a web sites reputation is based on the number of relevant and trusted incoming links. The better the reputation, the higher a web site will usually rank. Reciprocal links carry little weight these days. Editorial citations have the most value as these are nearly always human edited.

Indexation:
Generally speaking, the more pages a site has indexed, the better its chances are of ranking high. Certain infrastructure and content issues can hamper or even prevent the indexing of pages, and thus, have a negative impact on rankings.

HTML/XHTML & CSS:
Weight of keywords, relevancy of a page and a site as a whole and its 'crawler-bility' (the ease at which a search engine can read a sites content) can be maximised by effective use of CSS, HTML and XHTML.

Meta tags:
Whilst meta tags are no longer used by the major search engines for ranking, they must still be unique to every page and have certain limits placed on character length.

For the purpose of ranking, meta tags can actually be omitted altogether. However the description may be used as the snippet in the search engine results pages, so there is an opportunity to increase click through rate.

Keyword choices:
The choice of keywords is essential to determining the relevancy of a page. Targeted keywords should be placed in the title tags and sprinkled evenly throughout the body copy, without making the text contrived or the keyword density too high.

Internal link structure:
The internal linking structure is paramount to how a site is ranked. Search engines like to see a clear and logical hierarchical structure. This improves crawlability and can help maximise internal PageRank, which solidifies a web sites ranking position. Search engines also give more weight to links found within body content as these are usually human edited.

Spam:
Any activity that falls outside the search engine guidelines is considered spam. The potential penalties range from negative impact on rankings to permanent de-listing.