Real Web Marketing Blog

Statistics for Measuring Link Building and SEO

by John Eberhard

When one is engaged on a campaign to do search engine optimization and build up links to a web site, how do you tell if you’re doing a good job?

The purpose of SEO and a link building campaign, first of all, is to create thousands of links to a web site from other web sites, so that the ranking of that site will improve on Google and other search engines. Google has stated that its main criteria for deciding how high to rank your site is the number of links to your site from other sites.

And we want the rankings to improve ultimately in order to increase the amount of traffic to a web site coming from search engines. So unfortunately it’s a little indirect. We build links, so we can improve search engine rankings, so we can get more traffic. And we of course want more traffic so we can get more leads or sales from the web site.

So the first thing we use to measure whether we are doing a good job is the number of links to your web site. With my major link building clients I measure this monthly. The way to do this is to go to Google and enter a string like this:

“realwebmarketing.net” -site:realwebmarketing.net

That’s your web address, in quotes, a space, a dash, a colon, and the web address again, not in quotes. Every time I talk about how to do this I get complaints that it doesn’t work. But if you do it exactly the way I explain above it will work. Make sure the dash doesn’t get turned into an em dash.

I frequently get asked “How many links do I need?” That depends on what industry you are in and how many links your competitors have. In some industries you might do really well to have 3,000 links, while in others you might need 20,000 or 30,000 or more to compete effectively.

Google makes constant changes in how they count links, so it is not unusual for the number of links to drop off dramatically occasionally. The correct action is to continue the link building campaign and the number of links will shortly come back up to where it was and continue higher.

The next step in determining the success of a link building campaign is to take your list of keywords that you are targeting, i.e. that you want to be ranking well for, and checking how well you rank for them on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I run a report on this monthly for clients, usually checking 100 or more keywords.
And no, I don’t sit there checking each keyword manually. I use software called Market Samurai for this. The final report looks like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google Mar 11	Yahoo Mar  11	Bing Mar  11
Keyword 1	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 2	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 3	5	7	62
Keyword 4	1	1	1
Keyword 5	1	1	1
Keyword 6	6	23	24
Keyword 7	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 8	16	50	50
Keyword 9	1	8	8

Then I count up the total number of #1 positions, top 10 positions, top 20, top 100 and top 500 positions. I track these month to month. Some people wonder why I bother to check the top 100 and top 500 positions, as anything lower than say position 20 is not going to result in additional traffic. That’s true, but by tracking it this way I can see the results of the campaign, and if the number in each category is improving each month I know the campaign is going well. If you only tracked the top 20, there would be all this improvement occurring that you’d never see until those keywords arrived in the top 20 down the line.

Finally, we make sure when we start with a client that he has Google Analytics on his site and we then track the number of visitors and page views on his site month to month. And we want to see that traffic steadily increasing over time.

That’s what we look for to tell us how well the SEO and link building is working.

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Google Maps

by John Eberhard

Google is definitely the place to be found online, with 72.11% of all Internet searches, compared to 14.57% for second place Yahoo. And page one is also the place to be, since 83% of all search engine searchers do not go past page one.

But getting onto page one for Google for your top keywords isn’t always easy. Getting onto page one for the regular or organic listings, via search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, can take 6 months or more. And for a really competitive keyword, you may not get onto page one at all.

You can get onto page one via paid ads with Google AdWords, which is great. But it’s also a continuing expense.

Google Maps is a feature of Google whereby when Google perceives through the nature of your search that you are searching for something local, it will bring up a map on page one. The map will have balloons on it showing the location of different vendors, and there will be listings shown to the right of the map.

So the Google Maps feature is a great way to get your business listing onto the elusive page one of Google. And with the graphic, it pulls your attention right to the map, which is partway down the page.

This new feature is great for local businesses like restaurants, home improvement companies, health care practices, dance studios, attorneys, private schools, or any business that services a local area. When you consider that 66% of Americans use the Internet to find local businesses, and 73% of all Internet activity is related to local content, if you have a local business, you need to get onto Google Maps.

The tendency is to think that if your business is listed somewhere in Google, that you will automatically be put onto Google Maps. Not so. You have to go through a whole process to get your listing up there, and the link will click through to sort of a mini web page for your business on Google, with your contact info, a map, description, pictures, and customer reviews.

Part of the process of getting your business on Google Maps involves “claiming” your listing, then putting up all the information, and uploading photos. It also helps your placement of your listing (how close it is to the top) if you also have listings on Yahoo and MSN, and on other sites such as Yelp and Hotfrog.

Once a searcher clicks on “more info” on the map, they will be taken to your Google Maps page, which includes, as mentioned before, customer reviews. As I covered in an article a few weeks ago, with customer reviews, as Don Henley says “This could be heaven or this could be hell,” depending on what kind of reviews you get. A couple bad reviews can have a way of killing online business, and somehow they have a way of going to the top of the review listings and staying there a long time.

My recommendation for local businesses is:

1. Get your company listed on Google Maps. We can do this for you if desired.
2. Put up an autoresponder email system like I described in my article a few weeks ago, whereby you enter the email addresses of happy customers into it, and then the system sends them several emails over the course of a week or two asking them to write an online review for you. The emails also include links to several places where they can write reviews. This allows you to be proactive in getting good reviews that will soon outnumber any bad ones.

Using this system you will get onto page one of Google and hopefully will get you good online reviews that will outnumber the bad ones. I am relatively new on this whole line so I don’t know what the numbers are like, but getting onto page one of Google is always a good thing.

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Checking Your Website’s Ranking on Search Engines

by John Eberhard

How well your website ranks on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) determines to a large extent how much traffic your website will get. There are other sources of traffic (blogs, social media, sending email) but search engine traffic is one of the biggest ones.

First I should explain that a website does not just rank well or poorly on a search engine. It ranks well or poorly for a given keyword. The sequence of actions to getting good keyword rankings on the major search engines is:

1. Do keyword research to find the gold nuggets, the keywords that have good traffic but not tons of sites competing for them.
2. Do SEO (search engine optimization) on the site to put those keywords onto the site in all appropriate places.
3. Do a link building campaign to build up the number of links to your site coming from other sites. See my last article for specifics on what to do here.

So once you do all that, what now? How do you check whether your campaign is working? It’s all intangible, existing in invisible computer bits and bytes somewhere. How can you see whether you are making progress?

Something I started doing a few years ago for our link building clients, is a monthly report that includes a search engine ranking grid. It looks like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google June 2010	Yahoo June 2010	MSN June 2010
Keyword #1	15	Not top 500	109
Keyword #2	66	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword #3	63	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword #4	123	25	Not top 500
Keyword #5	20	Not top 500	78
Keyword #6	10	485	115
Keyword #7	261	54	Not top 500
Keyword #8	5	7	2

(Actual keywords have been changed to protect the innocent.)

The point of this is that we can see month to month, how well we are doing in terms of the website’s ranking for the various keywords that we are targeting for the client. Then I do a tally on how many #1 keywords, top ten, etc., we have each month.

I get this information using software called Market Samurai. I don’t enter each keyword by hand and scroll through hundreds of listings.

Keyword Rankings Summary	Mar 2010	Apr 2010	May 2010	June 2010
Keywords with #1 position	4	4	5	8
Top ten keywords including #1s	20	19	19	23
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	30	26	34	32
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens	66	62	78	81
Top 500 keywords including #1s, top 10s, top 100s	101	100	115	125

With this information, I can now see how we are doing month to month. If your link building program is working, you should see the number of keywords in each category going up. There will be some fluctuation, but over time they should be going up.

You may wonder why I even care about whether our site is ranking for a keyword at the #485 position. That’s not going to get you any traffic, right? That’s right, it won’t. No one is going to scroll through 48 pages of Google results to get to your listing. In fact, until your site breaks the top 20 in terms of ranking for a keyword, you’re not going to see much traffic from it.

The point is that our SEO and link building actions will start working by getting the site to rank for that keyword, and when it first starts ranking for that keyword it will be in the very deep numbers. Then as you continue working, the rankings will get higher and higher, as that ranking number gets lower and lower and you get closer to the top.

If you only checked whether or not your site was ranking for a keyword down to the #20 position, you could be making progress but you’d never know it.

Does SEO and link building take a while? Sure. Getting great search engine rankings and resulting traffic is not for the impatient or the faint of heart. It’s a 6-12 month or longer program. But by using this system, you can see that progress is being made.

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SEO and Link Building

by John Eberhard

I recently was communicating to a client and realized he had a confusion between the terms "SEO" (search engine optimization) and "Link Building."

This prompted me to write an article recently with various definitions related to Internet marketing, which I thought was going to be dry and boring but I got several positive comments on the article.

I've decided there is a bit more to say about the relationship between these two internet marketing actions. Here are the definitions again:

SEO: Stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of selecting the best keywords, according to high traffic and low competition, and then placing these keywords in the appropriate places on the website. SEO is a one-time action, not something one tinkers with month by month. It should be redone every 2-3 years, as keyword traffic and competition can change significantly.

LinkBuilding: I have observed some people have glommed this activity into SEO and use the term SEO to refer to both SEO and link building. For the purposes of clarity I think it is best to keep them as separate terms. Link building is the action of creating links on other websites linking back to yours. Google states that the number of links to your site from other sites is its primary criteria for deciding the ranking of a site. So link building is a vital activity if you want your site to rank well on search engines and thus get increased traffic.

Some people get the idea that SEO is like some magic wand and all they have to do is get SEO done to their site and watch the traffic flood in. This is not correct. SEO is an action one does to a website that basically makes it possible for the site to rank well for the keywords that you select during the keyword research process.

But in order for the site to really rank well, you have to then do a program of link building. The ideal program is to do SEO, which is a one-time process, then do link building for at least 6-12 months. The best actions I have found for building links are:

1. Article Marketing: You write a 400-500 word article, then submit it to article directories. You include a "bio box" at the end of the article that includes brief info on you, your company and your website address. Each directory then counts as a link back to your site. Great for building quantity of links. Using this method I can build up links to thousands in just a few months.
2. Optimized Press Releases: Write press releases that contain some of your target keywords, and then submit them to online PR sites. Great for building quality links.
3. Blogs: Take both your articles and press releases and put them up on a blog, and take the keywords in the articles and releases and make them into a link pointing back to appropriate pages on your site.

Just as it is not as effective to just do SEO without doing link building, it is not as effective to do just link building without SEO. Why? Because one of the steps of SEO is to do research on keywords and select the best ones. Then you take those selected keywords and utilize them in your articles and press releases.

When doing a full program of SEO and link building, then each month I check the ranking of the website for all of the keywords I’m targeting. I use software called Market Samurai to do this, as it would take forever manually. Then I count up how many #1 keywords I have, how many in the top 10, top 20, top 100, and top 500. As you continue the link building program, you will see the number of your keywords in each of these categories go up month to month.

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Website Marketing Made Easy, Part 1

by John Eberhard

Most people who have a website for marketing their business have one of three problems with it.

1. The website is producing no leads or sales and they have no idea what to do, or whether anyone is even coming to the site

1. The website is producing a few leads or sales, but the owner doesn’t know how to increase it

1. The website is producing a decent flow of leads or sales, and the website owner wants to increase that, but doesn’t know how

Made Easy

The basic concept of website marketing is that you want to drive as many people as possible to your site and then you want to make sure the site is set up to actually convert those visitors to leads or sales.

There are essentially four methods of driving people to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising (PPC)
2. Non-paid, or “organic” traffic from search engines
3. Driving traffic to a blog, then referring visitors over to the main website
4. Social media marketing

One vital thing to do to help you measure your progress is to ensure your site has a good web statistics program installed. Most free ones you get with your hosting plan are garbage. If you don’t have a good one, I recommend installing Google Analytics, which is free. It shows how many people are coming, what pages they are visiting, where they are coming from, and for search engines, what keyword they entered to find you.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click advertising through Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center is still the fastest way to drive traffic to a site. You can put up a few campaigns and start increasing traffic to your site dramatically inside of a week. And it is extremely effective. I always start a client with a campaign on Google.

Basically your text ads appear on Google, as one of the first three ads on the top, or in the narrow right-hand column, and when people click on those text ads, your account gets charged.

If you sell a low ticket item, however (let’s say under $100), pay per click is not usually the best way to go, because your Google charges for the people coming to your site will often be more than your profit margin for the item you’re selling.

But for high ticket items, pay per click advertising is ideal. And it has the added benefit that you can exactly target where your ads will appear in terms of geography, which makes it ideal for local businesses such as home improvement.

Organic Traffic from Search Engines

Organic traffic is defined as traffic that comes from the regular, non-paid listings on one of the search engines.

Google, Yahoo and MSN can bring a great amount of traffic, but only if your site is ranking well for keywords related to your topic that have some decent traffic (a lot of people searching for those keywords every day).

So how do you know if your site is ranking well for your keywords? And what do you do if it isn’t?

You can go to Google and enter a few keywords and search through the pages to see if your site comes up. I use software called Market Samurai for this because I deal with a lot of keywords.

If your site isn’t ranking in the top 50 results for your keywords on one of the major search engines, you’re not going to be seeing much traffic from that. If that is the case, the first thing to do is have some keyword research done, because you specifically want keywords that have traffic but do not have a ton of competition. And I find invariably that if people aren’t trained in how to do this, they will select single word keywords or other keywords that have a million-plus sites competing for them. And you’re just not going to be able to rank for keywords like that. So you need to select keywords with good traffic but low competition.

Once you select a good list of keywords, then you need to make sure those keywords are well represented on your site, including in some invisible areas of the code. This is called search engine optimization.

Next you have to engage in a program of link building, which means to get other sites to include a link to your site. Google says the number of links coming to your site from other sites is the most important criteria in their determining how high your site will rank for any given keyword. Most sites, if the owners haven’t done any link building, will have a few hundred links or less. You need thousands.

As you build up links, and if you have selected your keywords well, you will see your search engine rankings moving up for those keywords. This is a 6-12 month process.

Next week I’ll cover driving traffic with a blog and with social media.

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What So Important About Keywords?

by John Eberhard

Keywords are an important subject when doing just about any marketing on the Internet. These are words or phrases that people are going to be typing into the various search engines.

You have to know what the best keywords are to use, when you are doing search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, blogging, article marketing, or sending out optimized press releases. Each of these activities is more effective when you have the properly targeted keyword phrases to use.

So it’s important not only to know what keywords to use, but you also have to be aware that the kinds of keywords you need to use will be different for different purposes.

The Big Picture

The first thing to know about keywords is that you have to select keywords or keyword phrases that have a lot of people searching for them. This may seem obvious but I have talked to people who had selected keywords and thought those were the keywords to use but no idea what the traffic was for them. There are several good tools to find out keyword traffic, including online services Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, and software such as Market Samurai.

The next thing to know is that at the beginning of the search cycle, people type in more general keywords, either single words or phrases that describe the whole category of thing hey are searching for, such as “MP3 player.” Then after they have done some initial searches and learned a bit about the category, they will then enter more specific phrases, such as “ipod mp3 player.” Then as they are getting ready to buy, they will enter even more specific phrases describing the specific product they want to buy, such as “ipod nano 4GB.” Note that this final, third phase is the time when the person is most likely to BUY. At that point he is usually looking for places where he can buy the product and comparing prices.

Keywords that are from this third phase of the searching cycle, are most descriptive and which tend to be 2-4 words or more are called “long tail” keywords. These keywords are not only usually easier to have your site rank for them, they tend to be the phrases the person types in when he is closest to being ready to buy.

Most people who I talk to who are not trained in these facts tend to think that they want to target keywords that describe the overall category, usually single word keywords, like “golf,” “consulting,” “dentist,” “chiropractor,” “marketing,” “computers,” etc. Although these single word keywords tend to have lots of searches, people typing them in are not usually at the buying point in the whole search cycle, and because of another factor which I’ll describe next, you won’t usually ever be able to rank well for them.

Competition

One of the facts of life is that there are usually fewer resources than there are people that want those resources. So it is with keywords. There are lots of companies trying to sell products on the Internet.

For the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO) and link building, you want keywords that don’t have too many sites that are competing for them. If the keyword phrase has too many sites competing for it, you just won’t be able to ever rank well on search engines for that keyword. Most single word keywords have tens of thousands or millions of sites competing for them.

The goal, when looking for keywords for SEO or link building, is to find keywords that have decent numbers of people typing them in, but low competition. I use Market Samurai software to find this information, and I look for keyword phrases that have less than 50,000 competing sites for them, and the lower the better.

Different Uses for Keywords

There are essentially two major uses for keywords, one is SEO and link building on one side, and pay per click advertising on the other.

With SEO and link building, you want to find keywords that have as high traffic as possible, and as low competition as possible. Then with SEO you want to put those keywords into the appropriate places on your website, and with link building, you want to use those keywords in your blog posts, press releases and articles. All of these actions are geared towards getting your site to rank well for those keywords and raise them up onto the first page of search results for those keywords. That gets you traffic from search engines.

For pay per click advertising (PPC), you want to select keywords with high traffic. But here you are not really concerned with how much competition there is for a keyword. And with PPC you want to choose both long tail keywords and more general keywords. PPC is a different animal and if you only choose long tail keywords you will probably not get enough traffic to make it worth your while. There is a lot to know about PPC and I’ve covered that in other articles and will continue to write more in the future.

Good luck with your keyword finding efforts.

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He Said “I Can Guarantee the #1 Position on Google…”

by John Eberhard

Someone called me up recently saying that someone had walked into their office and said he could guarantee them the #1 position on Google for two specific keywords related to his business. My contact wanted to know what I thought of this?

There are a bunch of people out there making this kind of offer to businesses, and I happen to think that most of them are being totally dishonest and preying on the lack of knowledge of most business owners in how this website marketing stuff all works. I have run into quite a few of these guys, who have sold their offer to someone who later became my client. Let’s take a look at some facts regarding all this:

1. First of all, there are two sets of search results on a Google page; the organic results, and the paid or sponsored results. The organic results are the regular results for that search on Google, appearing in the left-hand wide column. The paid results are achieved through setting up a pay per click advertising account on Google AdWords, and these appear in the right-hand narrow column, and usually at the very top, the 1-3 results on the left, highlighted in yellow. Many of these people who make such promises will just put you up with an ad on Google AdWords, bidding high enough to achieve the #1 slot for the keywords they have promised you. There is no trick to this.

1.  Promising someone the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords, even if they achieve this through Google AdWords or other means, doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It all depends on how many people are searching for that keyword. Do you think it would mean anything to have the #1 spot on Google for “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” if only one person per month searched for that keyword? I’m using a ridiculous example but the concept applies to any business. Owning a keyword that no one searches for is meaningless, and any money you pay to achieve that is pretty much wasted. I remember one home improvement client who had been sold a certain number of keywords at X amount per keyword, with all of them having various city names included in the keyword. Most of those keywords had zero traffic and he was being charged monthly for each one, paying around $2500 per month.

1. Even if this guy who promised you the #1 spot for the keyword “blue and purple striped pipe cleaners” went out and got you that spot using Google AdWords, you probably wouldn’t get any traffic from it. One of the things to consider when setting up a Google AdWords account is getting keywords that have lots of traffic. And the final product of a Google AdWords campaign is supposed to be conversions, i.e. a person who responds to you and becomes either a lead or a sale. The product is NOT having the #1 position on Google. That may sound great and may be a means to an end but it is not the product itself.

1. There is no way that someone can guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for a high traffic keyword in the organic listings. Maybe they can guarantee it for some lousy keyword for which no one is searching, but this is pointless as I said above. The key with search engine optimization is to first do some keyword research and find keywords that a) have decent numbers of people searching them monthly, and b) don’t have a ton of sites competing for those keywords. These are the gold nuggets. Once you find them you embark on a link building campaign to move yourself up in the rankings for those keywords, and this is a several month process.

In summary, I think these guys who guarantee you the #1 spot on Google for specific keywords are, for the most part, being dishonest and ripping people off.

The real way to do this, is:

1. Start a Google AdWords account and select high traffic keywords, set your geography so the ads appear in the geographical locations you want, and put your ads up. Then bid high enough so your ads appear somewhere in the top 5, and set it up correctly so that you start driving traffic to your site. Remember that conversions are the key. Using AdWords you can achieve high rankings quickly, while you are working on the next part.

1. Do keyword research, select keywords that have decent traffic but low number of competing sites. Then optimize your site and put these keywords up on the site. Then start a link building campaign using these selected keywords and stick with it for at least 6-12 months.

If you do “b” above and stick with it and don’t bail too early, you will achieve a good number of keywords in the top 20, top 10 and some #1 positions. And they will be keywords that will be worth something.

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What Types of Keywords Do You Need, and What Do You Do With Them?

By John Eberhard

Some of my past articles have dealt with how to find the right keywords for a web site. This article will cover what types of keywords you need for different uses and what to do with them.

Pay Per Click Keywords

The types of keywords that one needs tend to be different for pay per click advertising (PPC) or for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

With pay per click, one usually wants to use the most general keywords he can find that are applicable and relevant to what he is advertising. For example, if you are advertising a physical therapy practice in Glendale, CA, you would use keywords like “physical therapy,” “physical therapist,” or “physical therapy practice.”

With pay per click, you would not need to use keywords, for instance, that included the name of the town, i.e. “physical therapist Glendale,” and similar variations.

I recently reviewed a pay per click account that had been set up by someone else and it was set up with all these types of keywords that included the name of the city they were in, but didn’t even include the more general versions of those keywords. I’ve even seen other companies similar to mine offering to set up PPC accounts with all these keywords using the names of the city and surrounding cities, and charging you X amount for each keyword, as if that’s some kind of great thing. It’s not.

Here’s why. Keywords that include more words, such as “physical therapist Glendale” or any other similar keyword, tend to have lower numbers of impressions, meaning that fewer people are typing them in. This type of keyword is often referred to as a “long tail keyword,” and is desirable for SEO uses, as I’ll explain in a minute.

But to set up a pay per click account using ONLY long tail keywords (especially keywords using the names of cities or other geographical areas) is a mistake. Because Google AdWords (as well as most other pay per click systems) allows you to select the geographical location of where your ads will appear. So if you’re doing business in Glendale, CA, you can set up your campaign so it only appears to people in Glendale.

So if your physical therapist in Glendale sets up his account only using keywords with the word “Glendale” in them, he will be missing the much larger group of people who will just type in “physical therapist.” So he’ll be missing out on those potential visitors. In the example of this account that I reviewed, he wasn’t even getting enough impressions to use up his relatively small budget.

That’s not to say that you can’t use keywords with the name of the city in pay per click, but you don’t need to. Using what Google calls “broad match,” you’ll get those people anyway just using the phrase “physical therapist” because it will include every search that includes those words, which would include “physical therapist Glendale.”

Keywords in SEO

The type of keywords you use in SEO, however, is totally different. Here, you want to use more long tail keywords. The reason is that short, general keywords such as “physical therapist” or “golf” or “software” are extremely competitive, because when it comes to ranking well on search engines for a given keyword, it is not limited to just your local area. It is international. So every company in the world that sells those products or services is competing for those keywords. And some have been working at ranking for those keywords for a number of years. So your likelihood of being able to rank well for one of those general keywords is close to non-existent.

So the trick with SEO is to find keywords that are longer tail, have more words in them, and which have some decent amount of traffic but not as much competition.

So in our previous example, for SEO purposes the physical therapist would want to use keyword phrases such as “physical therapist Glendale,” because he is much more likely to be able to rank well for that keyword. You don’t have to use all keywords that list names of cities in them, but in general the long tail keyword is best. You want decent number of searches per day, but not tons of competition.

Summary

It’s important to understand the processes for pay per click and search engine optimization, and understand which types of keywords work best for each.

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The Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

by John Eberhard

The subject of search engine optimization (SEO) is an important one, because if done correctly, it allows you to take advantage of search engines and get traffic directed to your web site from them.

The first thing to understand about SEO is that everything with search engines is based around keywords. Your site doesn’t just rank well or poorly on a search engine, it ranks well or poorly for particular keywords. And by keywords, we mean any word or phrase that people type in at a search engine looking for something. When looking for keywords, phrases of 2, 3, or 4 words actually work better than single words.

So the trick in SEO is to come up with a list of possible keywords, then find out how many people are searching for those keywords monthly, and how many competing web sites they are who are trying to target those keywords.

In SEO it is vital to pick the right keywords. If you pick keywords that have too much competition, you can do all the SEO (and later, link building) that you want but you will not be able to rank for those keywords. It will all be wasted effort. So the trick is to find keywords that have decent traffic, but as little competition as possible.

There are two web sites that offer keyword research services, Keyword Discovery, and Wordtracker. A lot of people swear by Wordtracker but I find its interface to be a bit retarded. My tool of choice is Keyword Discovery, which is easy to use and fast. They have a free tool that just shows search counts and a paid service that also shows the competing site information.  

Once you have a list of keywords selected, the next step is to start putting those keywords onto your web site pages as much as possible, without putting them into the pages too much, which is called “spamming.” It’s not the same as sending unsolicited email of course, but nowadays, just about anything done on the Internet that is considered too much is called “spamming.” It’s the generic term meaning “You’re doing it too much.”

Here’s where you need to put your keywords.

1. Meta Title: This is part of the hidden part of your web page called “meta tags” which give information to search engines but are not seen by visitors. The meta title is what appears in bold blue and underlined on a search engine when your listing comes up in response to a search. You should select 1-3 of your top keywords for your meta title, and these are more important than and should come before your company name. And you should have a unique meta title for each page of your site, each with keywords appropriate to that page.

2. Meta Description: The meta description is what appears on a search engine listing underneath the meta title, that describes your page. This is where you write copy that is appealing and compelling and gets your potential visitor to click on the listing and thus arrive at your site. I sometimes see sites with no meta description and then Google or other search engines will take random text from somewhere on your page and stick it in there. Oftentimes text from your navigation bar will end up there. Not very professional and not very compelling to get people to visit your site. Insert 2-3 of your top keywords into the meta description, and make this description different for each page of your site.

3. Meta Keywords: There is a keyword tag in the meta tags, and this is where you can put every keyword that will be relevant to that page, with each phrase separated by commas. There is some controversy as to whether to include a meta keyword block, as Google and some other search engines ignore it. Only Yahoo gives it much attention. But hey, it is another valid place to put your keywords onto that page, and it’s not “spamming” (I hate that word).

4. Alt Tags: Alt tags are text tags that are attached to graphic files on a web page, that can be seen when you mouse over a graphics file. Using Dreamweaver or some other web authoring program, you can enter your alt tags for all of your graphics files. Use your alt tags not so much for descriptions of the graphics, but as another completely valid place to put your top keywords.

5. Headlines: You can design a web page using “h1” and “h2” tags, for headlines and sub-headlines, which then defines the font and size and colors for the headlines. Any keywords included in these headline tags are given more weight, so if you can include them there do so.

6. Body Copy: Finally you have to use the keywords in your body copy (text) for that page. Use your top keywords for that page as much as possible without being unnatural. Each page should emphasize 2-3 keywords.

Search engine optimization should be done for a site at least every 2-3 years, and then sets up your site to be able to rank well for the keywords you are targeting. Once done, then don’t forget that you have to do link building after that, which is equally if not more important.

The New Recipe for Search Engine Ranking

By John Eberhard

One of the characteristics of the web is that it is constantly changing. What may have worked great two years ago may be a dismal failure today.

After doing some extensive research I have come up with what I think is the best recipe for search engine success today. This is after reading these sources, among others:

The Unfair Advantage Book on Winning the Search Engine Wars
By Planet Ocean Communications
http://www.planetocean.com/

The New Rules of Marketing & PR
By David Meerman Scott
http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/

Tiffany Dow’s Blog
http://www.tiffanydow.com/blog/

Videos and eBooks by Stompernet
http://www.Stompernet.com

Following the experiences of my client Stan Dubin
http://www.marriagesuccess.com

So here goes on the new recipe:

Keyword Selection and SEO

For gaining good organic (not paid through Google AdWords) position on the search engines, it is vital to find keywords with decent traffic, but without high competition. This is a process of mining not for the obvious choices, but for undiscovered gold.

Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly Overture, used to have a free search term suggestion tool that was the best tool on the web. Unfortunately, they took the tool down recently, or sometimes it works but it has old data. My tool of choice that has replaced this is the free search term tool from Trellian:

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html?query=

It has a limit to how many searches you can do per day.

Another valuable tool is Wordtracker. This is an online paid service ($60 per month). I’m not crazy about this tool but it does give you an invaluable insight into the value of a keyword, which it calls the KEI, or Keyword Efficiency Index. This is a score (the higher the better) that is based on a high number of monthly searches, and a low number of web sites competing for that keyword. This is how you can find gold.

SEO

Once you know what the best keywords are for you to work on, which is based on their having some decent traffic but low competing sites, then it’s time for search engine optimization. This involves:

1. Putting the keywords appropriate to your pages into the meta-tag keyword block
2. Putting the keywords into the headlines
3. Putting the keywords into the page title and the “meta title,” which is what shows up as the title for your page, underlined in blue, when the page comes up on the search engines
4. Putting the keywords into the text on the page
5. Putting the keywords into alt tags, which are text tags attached to graphic images on the page. These show up when you mouse over the graphic and leave the mouse there.

Anchor Text

In earlier articles I have covered the fact that even more important than anything you do on your site, it is vital for you to have links to your site coming from other sites. Google considers this the most important criteria in ranking your site.

According to the Planet Ocean book, THE most valuable thing that you can have in terms of raising your rankings in search engines is called “Anchor Text.” This means a keyword, let’s say “affordable SEO,” that appears on another web site, and where that text is underlined in blue and linked to your site. If the service that you delivered was affordable SEO, and a number of other sites had the words “Affordable SEO” and that text was linked back to your site, that would be the most valuable thing that you could have in terms of raising your ranking in the search engines for the keyword “affordable SEO.”

So the trick is building up links to your site, not just with your web site address, but with anchor text that includes one of the keywords you are working to get rankings for.

In the past, most search engine marketing experts did what was called reciprocal link building, where you link to another web site and they link to you, usually on a “links” page. And most search engine marketing experts today still recommend this as their core method of building links with anchor text. This method has slowly been dying out for a year or two, and even those experts who recommend it will qualify and say it should not be more than a certain percentage of your link building actions. Then in May 2008 Google changed its algorithm again and the word on the street now is that the new algorithm gives much less credit to links that are reciprocal.

So how does one get anchor text links built up to his web site, without using reciprocal link building?

Content Hubs with Anchor Text

We have been submitting articles to content hubs, also called article directories, for over two years. We have built thousands upon thousands of links to client web sites through this technique. The problem was that you could just get your web site URL into the articles, you couldn’t put in anchor text. So it built up links, but not the most valuable kind of links.

Until now.

We have done research and have listed out a fair selection of high Page Rank content hubs that allow anchor text links into the articles. It’s a new ballgame with content hubs.

Blogs

I’m a relative latecomer in the blogosphere, and was finally convinced of the necessity of blogging by my client Stan Dubin, whose blog www.marriagesuccess.com has gained excellent ranking on some long tail keywords by putting the keywords prominently into his blog posts, often in the title.

I have since started two blogs myself and am now working closely with clients on their blog activities.

One of the benefits of blogs is that you can put in, wouldn’t you know it, anchor text. You can use keywords in your posts and then link those keywords back to appropriate pages on your web site. My thought on this is that this works best if your blog URL is a different one from your main site.

Another advantage of blogs is that there is a group of search engines specifically geared to blogs and if you notify them (called “pinging”) after you make a post, the new post gets into the blog search engines and then into the regular search engines.

And when you set up your blog, put up links on it, to your other web sites and blogs, using – guess what - anchor text.

Optimized News Releases

In his ground-breaking book “The New Rules of Marketing & PR,” David Meerman Scott talks about the new rules of PR, including the swelling popularity of news releases on the web and how these can be used to talk directly to customers and potential customers, not just be directed at media people.

The key is to write a press release that is keyword rich, put it up on your site, or on a blog (my thinking is putting them on a separate blog just for your releases is better – that’s what I am doing now), and also post it on several online PR sites. These PR sites will then get it into big news sites like Google News.

And of course, when you post the release on your blog, don’t forget to add – you got it – anchor text. And some of the PR sites will allow you to add anchor text as well, usually for a fee.

My thinking on the releases is the best frequency is to do them once a week. David Meerman Scott says to find ways to write and send out releases all the time.

HubPages.com

Stompernet.com and Tiffany Dow’s blog recommend setting up pages on HubPages.com. Each page should be on one specific topic, and can feature one article or multiple articles on that topic, videos, and links to your sites and other site of interest. Link to each of your sites that are on-topic to the page, to all your blogs, and to other pages that you set up which I’ll describe next. And would you be surprised to know that your links can be in the form of anchor text?

Anyway, every time you write a new article you should put it up as a HubPages page.

Facebook Page

I’ve become quite a fan of Facebook, and have now gotten into creating “Pages” on Facebook. These are pages that are devoted to promoting a business, and can have descriptive text, contact info, links to your sites and blogs, links to your other pages of interest such as your HubPages.com pages, videos, and photos. You can ask all your friends on Facebook to join as a fan, and once they do that you can send out information to them on a regular basis, such as sending out new articles, posting new videos, pictures relating to your business, and so on.

Squiddoo

Squiddoo is another site similar to HubPages where you put up what are called “lenses.” Treat the same as HubPages.com. Rinse and repeat.

Social Bookmarking

Now that you’ve created articles on your site, posts on your blog, news releases either on your site or on your blog, pages on Facebook, pages on HubPages.com, and lenses on Squiddoo, all with anchor text and all linking around to one another, the next step is to join Digg and Del.icio.us and start bookmarking each page and each new post or article. This adds another link to each of these pages and allows people to find your articles or sites or posts through searching on these sites.

Summary

So that’s the new best recipe as far as I can see today. By doing all these things, you can be proactive. You don’t have to take the idiotic approach that Google recommends and write good content and then wait for people to find it and link to it. You’re in control. You create the content. You put it up all over the place. You create the anchor text. You create the rankings. Let’s get to work!