Being visible in the search engines is not just about being on top when someone is searching for a cheap coffee machine or a last minute holiday to Mallorcathat part of the discipline can be secondary if you don’t recognize, respect and deal with the part of reality called: You are what Google makes you.
I am sure you recognize this from yourself. If you are going to buy a new camera, you would probably search Google for make and model in order to see if there are any good offers, tests or anything else that could be of interest. If you don’t, maybe you should think about doing it. A lot of people could save both money and frustrations if they Googled potential providers and purchases before buying anything. Learn all about the way to protect your business with the new e.book and online video course SEO-LEX. Get a free version here.
You can either choose to fireproofor put out fires
Try to imagine what it will cost a kitchen provider if 5 potential customers every month decide against it due to a “hate site” online. This is why it is a good idea for all companies who have a brand and/or names of prominent people to protect to do preventive work. It is always easier to prevent bad publicity from becoming visible in the search engines then dealing with it afterwards. Once you have trimmed your website after wearing out this book, when you have built a reputation on blogs, on Facebook and other social media and probably your own blog as well, then it will be significantly more difficult for your detractors to get ahead of you in the search engines.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the most price effective way to advance a World Wide Web site online. Full Stop. SEO is half scientific discipline, half experience and gut sensing, so if you are strategic about SEO, engage an SEO company to do the work.
There are at the least 4 stairs involved in Search Engine Optimization:
The basic step is the technological proof of your website; Is the coding right? Can the search engines follow links? Etc.
The 2nd step is substance and setting. You will need proper search optimized copy writing, image optimization, video optimization, search term analysis, competitor analysis, marketplace research, etc.
The 3rd stage is growing incoming connections. Links matter as votes, the more ties you get, the stronger, and the improved the link referrer is, the greater the link. You can receive links by submitting your web site to directories, article publishers, placing blog comments, meeting place participation, invitee posting,
The fourth step is tracking and analytic thinking. Trailing and analyzing what is passing, on your site, is fundamental for advanced maturation and reinforced SEO endeavors.
Every now and again, you must start over with stage one and continue to better your websites profile performance and thus the climb in visitors in your online store
In a wider sentience, SEO is part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which takes on SEO, Pay per Click (PPC) and other cases of online marketing and promoting. SEO is frequently mentioned as organic optimization and relates to the results on the left side of the search engine results page (SERP) as contradicted to the paid Adwords results.
You can do yourself a great favour by start studying the basic principles of SEO. This will help you discover a good and outstanding SEO bureau and the kinetics in idea exchange with the office is very priceless. You will get a greater functioning by your office and the SEO company has an interesting and participating client, that’s what we name a win-win position. If you don’t have the money for an SEO bureau, there are lot’s of content on the cyberspace to assist you to do it yourself SEO, just do a search on Google for “self service SEO” and you’ll discover lot’s of serious places to help you grow into an SEO Samurai.
A quiet revolution has taken place on the Internet. Over the past few years a growing number of Internet marketers known as SEO specialists or SEO technicians (”SEO” is the acronym for search engine optimization) have been rejecting the “get links at all costs” philosophy that has made pariahs of the SEO community. Search engine optimization blogs often tell their readers that the secret to SEO success is to obtain as many links from as many sites as possible. This attitude has alienated many Webmasters from the SEO community.
The endless quest for links has driven many people to post empty, worthless comments on millions of blogs; to list sites with cheap, scammy Web directories, and to resort to many cheap tricks in order to deceive search engines. And what is ironic about the situation is that was for the most part completely unnecessary. So says one SEO blog, SEO Theory. Since late 2006 SEO Theory has been teaching those in the SEO community who will listen a better way, a less conspiratorial approach to managing search results.
And by many accounts the SEO theory philosophy is working. People now take the SEO theory blog very seriously, so seriously that many people are now trying to rank Web sites for the keyword “seo theory” — some even through very clever means. Dozens of articles on the SEO Theory blog attest to the fact that the SEO community pursues inefficient, poor-performing tactics for building better search rankings. Now other people question the value of many of those same tactics.
SEO theory is not a simple “art”. It’s a science. There is method to the madness and that method has to follow sound scientific principles in order to ring true. There can be no doubt that some very popular writers in the field of search marketing have recognized the value of SEO Theory without trying to compete with it. The innovative techniques and tactics that SEO Theory has introduced to the search optimization community have helped restrain the barbarians from charging into every Web site they see.
Sometimes, a good Web site should be left alone and not used as merely a base for providing links to another Web site. Links bring the Web together, but the overwhelming demand for links from the SEO community has become abusive, invasive, and harassing to many people. It’s fortunate that there are a growing number of voices showing us there is more to SEO than just links.
Having search engine optimisation Melbourne as a tool for advertising is a powerful weapon within the cyber world. Want to know what SEO means and how it works to help you boost your advertising and marketing capabilities? Here’s how. Let’s say you have all the things needed, great content, striking website, and good choice of keywords. Now, all you need to find are good links to other sites that are relevant to your website. As you would soon find out, the more links from your site or from the article or content you have written, the higher you go up on the search results of the search engine you chose. Picking the right the content and having non-mediocre website is a must if you want to win the war within the cyber world. Having an SEO or Search Engine Optimisation expert by your side, ready to teach you with everything you need to know, and you, as a content writer per se, work hand in hand with each other and the results will be terrific. I can assure you that. So, why wait, grab an expert search engine optimiser now and see your site gather visitors by the minute and soon, you’ll realize that it was all worth it.
If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Getting a company’s name and products, or services, onto the first page of a genuine Google search isn’t a trivial piece of work. In fact, there are four distinct skills that a search engine optimiser needs to possess. Most people possess one or maybe two of these skills, very rarely do people posses all four. In truth, to get to all four, people who are good at two of these need to actively develop the other skills. Now, if you are running your own business, do you really have the time to do this? Is this the best use of your time?
Specifically the four skills needed for SEO work are:
- Web Design - producing a visually attractive page
- HTML coding - developing Google friendly coding that sits behind the web
- Copy writing - producing the actual readable text on the page
- Marketing - what are the actual searches that are being used, what key words actually get more business for your company?
Many website designers produce more and more eye-catching designs with animations and clever rollover buttons hoping to entice the people onto their sites. This is the first big mistake; using designs like these will actually decrease your chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that’s right; all that money you have paid for the website design could be wasted because no-one will ever find your site.
The reason for this is that before you get people to your site you need to get the spiderbots to like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software used by the search engine companies to trawl the Internet looking at all the websites, and then having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms to rank the sites. Some of the complex techniques used by web designers cannot be trawled by spiderbots. They come to your site, look at the HTML code and exit stage right, without even bothering to rank your site. So, you will not be found on any meaningful search.
I am amazed how many times I look at websites and I immediately know they are a waste of money. The trouble is that both the web designers and the company that paid the money really do not want to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!); I now work round the problem. So, optimising a website to be Google friendly is often a compromise between a visually attractive site and an easy to find site.
The second skill is that of optimising the actual HTML code to be spiderbot friendly. I put this as different to the web design because you really do need to be “down and dirty” in the code rather than using an editor like Frontpage, which is OK for website design. This skill takes lots of time and experience to develop, and just when you think you have cracked it, the search engine companies change the algorithms used to calculate how high your site will appear in the search results.
This is no place for even the most enthusiastic amateur.
Results need to be constantly monitored, pieces of code added or removed, and a check kept on what the competition are doing. Many people who design their own website feel they will get searched because it looks good, and totally miss out this step. Without a strong technical understanding of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle to get your company on the first results page in Google.
Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill in its own right. This is the writing of the actual text that people coming to your site will read. The Googlebot and other spiderbots like Inktomi, love text - but only when written well in proper English. Some people try to stuff their site with keywords, while others put white writing on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans cannot).
Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only will not fall for these tricks, they may actively penalise your site - in Google terms, this is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and “naughty” sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months, you can still be found but not until results page 14 - really useful! As well as good English, the spiderbots are also reading the HTML code, so the copy writer also needs an appreciation of the interplay between the two. My recommendation for anyone copy writing their own site is to write normal, well-constructed English sentences that can be read by machine and human alike.
The final skill is marketing, after all this is what we are doing - marketing you site and hence company and products/services on the Web. The key here is to set the site up to be accessible to the searches that will provide most business to you. I have seen many sites that can be found as you key in the company name. Others that can be found by keying in “Accountant Manchester North-West England”, which is great, except no-one ever actually does that search. So the marketing skill requires knowledge of a company’s business, what they are really trying to sell and an understanding of what actual searches may provide dividends.
I hope you will see that professional Search Engine Optimisation companies need more than a bit of web design to improve your business. Make sure anyone you choose for SEO work can cover all the bases.
John Fowler trained as a Mathematican and has worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, much of the time in sales related functions. He now spends his time between being a partner in SEO Gurus and as a sales and management trainer for ICT companies. John can be contacted via SEO Gurus
So you’ve built your website, you know what keywords you want to target (i.e. what words your customers are searching for), and you’re ready to write your copy. You’ve been told that you should use your keywords frequently so that you appear in search results for those words. But what does “frequently” mean?
How many times should you use your primary keyword? This case study helps answer that question.
Some background on “Keyword Density”
In order to understand optimum keyword usage, we first need to have some way of measuring keyword frequency. In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, frequency is actually referred to as density. Keyword density is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount of that page. For example, if your page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase appears 5 times, its density is 5%. So when you hear someone say “keyword density”, that’s normally what they’re talking about. (TIP: You can automatically check the keyword density of your page at LiveKeywordAnalysis.com.)
However, there is another, more complex measure of keyword density which takes into account the text components in the HTML of the page (i.e. the meta tags: Title, Keywords, Alt Text, Description, and Comments). When using this measure, you don’t just count the words your visitor sees; you also count the words in your meta tags. For example, if you have 100 words on your home page, 10 words in your Title tag, 20 words in your Description tag, 70 words in your Alt tags, and 10 words in your Comments tag, your total wordcount for the page is 100 + 10 + 20 + 70 + 10 = 210. Similarly, when counting keywords, you don’t just add up the number of times a visitor will see your keyword, you also count the number of times that keyword appears in your meta tags. For example, if your keyword appears 5 times in the home page copy, 3 times in the Title tag, 5 times in the Description tag, 30 times in your Alt tags, and twice in your Comments tag, your total keyword count is 5 + 3 + 5 + 30 + 2 = 45. So with a total wordcount of 210 and a keyword count of 45, your keyword density is 45/210 x 100 = 21%. It is argued that this measure of keyword density is more relevant as the search engines measure density in this fashion. (TIP: You can automatically check the keyword density of your page using this more complex measure at GoRank.com.)
As you can see, you need to be very aware of which measure you’re talking about when you’re talking “keyword density”. But let me reiterate; mostly when people talk about keyword density, they’re talking the simple measure.
What is the optimum keyword density
And now down to business… What keyword density (of either kind) should you be targeting on your website?
There’s a lot of debate surrounding this issue because the search engine companies don’t disclose the details of their algorithms (as that would allow people to abuse the system). Instead, people working in the SEO world are left to figure it out based on their experience.
A recent article by respected SEO and Blog expert, Wayne Hurlbert, (see Keyword Density: SEO Considerations) suggests that Google sees pages with a keyword density of greater than 2% as spam. It was this article which prompted me to analyze the keyword density of my copywriting website.
CASE STUDY
The Website: This case study analyzes the website for my advertising copywriting and SEO copywriting business, Divine Write - http://www.divinewrite.com. For my primary keyword, my site is now on page 1 of Google.com (out of approximately 900,000 search results).
Number of pages on site: At the time of writing, my website contained a total of 53 pages.
Primary keyword phrase: “copywriter”
Average keyword density: Using the simple measure of keyword density discussed above, the average keyword density of my copywriting website is 1.9%. Using the complex measure it’s 4.9%.
Keyword density range: Using the simple measure, my density ranged from 0.4% to 7.6%. Using the complex measure it ranged from 1.6% to 17.5%
Some comments on the figures
• The figures and corresponding ranking detailed in this case study may not be directly relevant to every site. There’s a lot I don’t know about the algorithms and there are bound to be other factors at play which I don’t know about.
• With regard to Wayne Hurlbert’s article, it would seem that he is referring to keyword density as calculated using the simple method discussed above.
• The range figures are noteworthy because they suggest that you don’t need to be paranoid about having some pages with a very high density and some with a very low density.
Conclusion
A simple keyword density of 1.9% can be enough for a first page ranking in Google.com (assuming you have enough quality backlinks - see http://www.divinewrite.com/SEOCEO.htm and http://www.divinewrite.com/seoarticles.htm for more information).
Happy SEO writing!
* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.DivineWrite.com or www.ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.
