Search Engine Keywords Selection

Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination – your website – you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site. You do this by creating carefully chosen keywords. Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically. Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases. You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source. Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different. The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business. Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation. The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation. Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL. You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you. Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you. Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face. The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site. Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase. Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers. This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

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Bad SEO Advice

I come across bad SEO advice all the time. Much of it may seem obvious to those of us who have been involved in search for any length of time, but for people who haven’t, it can be difficult to know what’s concrete advice, what’s speculation, and what’s just plain terrible. For that matter, it can be difficult for those outside of SEO to know what’s smart and what’s considered search engine manipulation.

I was in a meeting a few days ago and someone asked if it was true that for SEO purposes, a page should have as few outbound links as possible. I said outbound links were fine, great even! And then talked a bit about how it’s a bad idea to build pages for nuances in the search engine algorithms anyway, as hundreds of signals exist and they’re changing all the time. Oh, he said. We’ve been talking about implementing the canonical tag. We probably shouldn’t do that then. And I realized, how would a developer know that the canonical tag is awesome and the meta keywords tag isn’t? That you shouldn’t worry about keyword density but you should put important keywords in your title tag?

Recently, someone sent me an “SEO optimization report” for their site that came from automated software that guaranteed top ten rankings in 90 days. Some of the advice was good (use unique title tags), some was harmless (improve your Flesch readability ease score), and some was just crazy talk. Below is a bit of the crazy.

“You should increase your keyword density. You can do this by removing some text.”

This whole notion of keyword density has been around forever, but here’s what it really boils down to. How is your potential audience looking for this content? Put those words in your title tag, H1, and somewhere on the page. And use those words as anchor text in internal links to that page. If other sites link to the page using that anchor text, even better! It’s bad enough when people try to get the “right” keyword density by nonsensically repeating the same words over and over on a page, but removing other text? That’s just sad.

“Keywords in the HTML comment tags help a good ranking in Google.”

Um. Not really.

“Some search engines penalize sites if the terms from the meta keywords tag don’t appear in the body of the page.”

Well, first, search engines (in particular, Google) ignore the meta keywords tag. And also, this statement isn’t true.

“Your page includes the meta Google-Site-Verification tag twice. Search engines could regard it as a spamming  attempt and might decide not to index your web site.”

Wow. I assume this is simply a case of automation going awry and whoever wrote this software doesn’t actually think that having two verified Google Webmaster Tools accounts will cause Google to remove the site from the index. But even so, having duplicate meta tags of any kind doesn’t cause Google or Bing to flag the site for spam. I mentioned this was all about the crazy, right?

“Some search engines don’t accept submissions with capitalized letters in titles or meta tags.”

Maybe someone more familiar with old school directories can weigh in on where this comes from. But recommending that your title tags not contain capital letters? This may be automated software, but someone manually wrote that message.

“Some search engines rank sites lower that are hosted at free hosting providers.”

No.

PS – Creative use of bold won’t actually help. And question marks in URLs are just fine.

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SEO is Dead and/or Irrelevant With Google Instant?

According to Steve Rubel, Google Instant means the end of SEO. He writes that “Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work.”

Oh Steve. That’s not what makes search engine optimization work. That’s not what true search engine optimization is at all. Here’s what makes search engine optimization work and why Google Instant isn’t the death knell.

Everyone searches. Google said today that they get 1 billion searchers a week. People search a lot. So it’s important to be visible in search if you want to connect with your audience.A big part of SEO is ensuring that your technical site architecture can be crawled and indexed by search engines and the content can be extracted. If the infrastructure isn’t search-friendly, your pages may not be available in the index for searchers to find.Another big part of SEO is understanding the needs of your audience: what their problems are, what they are looking for, what tasks they are trying to accomplish, the language they use. Search data is awesome for finding these things out and better building products and content.

But the biggest misunderstanding of Rubel’s post is that SEO is about optimizing for a single query and that everyone saw the same results until now. In reality, searchers have been seeing different results for a really long time. Personalized search in particular has been increasing over time, causing everyone to see something different. And Google Suggest has also been around forever, so the idea of prompting refinements as the searcher types a query also isn’t new.

Sure, searchers may tweak their queries in real time, but they aren’t going to fundamentally change what they’re looking for. If I’m looking for a restaurant in Seattle, I’m not going to see results for “relaxing vacations in Mexico” and decide to go to Cabo instead of out to dinner.

I’ve always advised looking at audience needs and building a site that addresses them holistically rather than fixating on ranking for a single keyword phrase. And that strategy continues to be a sound one in light of Google Instant. Rubel says it will make “optimizing virtually impossible”. But the reality is that building valuable sites that meet searcher needs will only continue to grow in importance.

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Google’s Upcoming Algorithm Change: “Overly-Optimized Sites”

This past week at SXSW, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about an upcoming “over-optimization” algorithm launch aimed at those who abuse search engine optimization. Rob Snell transcribed the session, which included these comments from Matt (I’ve updated this article to include fuller comments from the transcript):

“The idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.

So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO—we handle that—and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whatever they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now…”

 [And later after talking about the positives of SEO] “Absolutely there are some people who take it too far. What we’re mindful of is when someone says, “We’re White Hat. We continue to do the right thing, and we see the Black Hats who are over optimizing or going too far, and they seem to be doing too well.” So we’ve been working on changes to try to make sure that if you are a White Hat or if you’ve been doing very little SEO that you are going to not be affected by this change. But if you’ve been going way far beyond the pale, then that’s the sort of thing where your site might not rank as highly as it did before.”

A lot of people have asked me what this means for those who include search engine optimization as part of their marketing mix. Some are worried that Google will begin to penalize sites that have implemented search engine optimization techniques. My thoughts? I think that some site owners should worry. But whether or not you should depends on what you mean by search engine optimization.

AS I’ve talked about and written about over and over (notably in my book and most recently in my article about Clay Johnson‘s talk about SEO killing America), SEO means lots of different things to lots of different people. When I talk and write about SEO and when we work with clients here at Nine By Blue, I mean:

Using search data to better understand your audience and solve their problems (by creating compelling, high-quality content about relevant topics to your business)Understanding how search engine crawl and index sites and ensuring that your site’s technical infrastructure can be comprehensively crawled and indexed

But the definition of SEO is a continuum. Some of it is clearly spam. But there’s a gray area of SEO that’s not exactly spam, but it’s really not those two bullets above either.

For instance, I’ll look at a page and see a bunch of keyword-rich links in the footer. “Does anyone click on those?” I might ask. “Nah, those are just there for search engines”. I go to conferences and hear people debating keyword density percentages, how many times a keyword should be repeated in a title tag, how to get links that “appear” natural. At some point, search engine optimization goes beyond making sure pages are as useful as possible for the target audience and that the site is crawlable and becomes a game of guess the algorithms.

Anyone who’s read or heard me before knows that I’m not an advocate for algorithm chasing. Historically, I’ve had this view because I don’t find it productive. Algorithms change hundreds of times a year. Signals differ for individual queries. The goal is always to extract all of the data on the web and show the very best page for searchers. So why not just invest time in making sure all of your content is extractable and are in fact the very best pages?

Now, there’s another reason to follow this strategy.

The type of algorithm changes Matt talked about in this SXSW session remind me a bit of how Google described the Panda algorithm. Panda wasn’t about spam. It was about separating high-quality, useful pages from pages that were just a collection of words about a particular topic. This seems similar, like yet another way of discerning that. At one point in the session, Matt said:

“We’re always trying to best approximate if a user lands on a page, are they going to be really, really happy instead of really, really annoyed? And if it’s the sort of thing where they land on a page and they are going to be annoyed, then that is the sort of thing that we’ll take action on.”

Matt talked about finding ways to surface smaller sites that may be poorly optimized, if, in fact, those sites have the very best content. This is not anything new from Google. They’ve always had a goal to rank the very best content, regardless of how well optimized or not it may be. And I think that’s the key. If a page is the very best result for a searcher, Google wants to rank it even if the site owner has never heard of title tags. And Google wants to rank it if the site owner has crafted the very best title tag possible. The importance there is that it’s the very best result.

Matt talked about this later:

“We tell people over and over again, “Make a compelling site. Make a site that’s useful. Make a site that’s interesting. Make a site that’s relevant to people’s interests… all of the changes we make, over 500 a year, are designed to try to approximate if a user lands on that page, just how happy are they going to be with what they get? So if you keep that in mind, then you should be in good shape no matter what.”

He also mentioned making Googlebot smarter, which is more an evolution of what they’ve been working on for years: being able to extract content from JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, images, forms… We’ve seen this in the last year with smarter handling of paginated content, for instance. (I wrote about the pagination tags Google supports here, but my post was based on a Google video and blog post where Maile Ohye mentions that if you don’t implement the tags, Google will use patterns from your site to try and create paginated clusters for you.)

Another thing to keep in mind about how Matt described this upcoming change is that he wasn’t speaking at a search conference. The audience was at least in part non-SEOs. He introduced himself as the person in charge of catching those who try to cheat Google. He was talking to people who (based especially on the question that triggered Matt’s  comments) were coming from the perspective of thinking of the type of SEO that’s really about reverse engineering algorithms.

Matt first talked about the benefits of SEO. He said to think of SEO like a coach who helps to present yourself better. He said that Google wants to level the playing field so that all content has a chance to compete equally. And when he talked about the kinds of techniques that this algorithm would look for he said they were looking for abuse: too many keywords, too many link exchanges. He contrasted what the algorithm was looking to flag to “great content”.

In particular, Matt said the following in support of SEO:

“The way that I often think about SEO is that it’s like a coach. It’s someone who helps you figure out how to present yourself better. In an ideal world, though, you wouldn’t have to think about presenting yourself and whether search engines can crawl your website. Because they’d just be so good that they can figure out how to call through the Flash, how to crawl through the forums, how to crawl through the JavaScript, how to crawl through whatever it is…

A lot of people seem to think that Google hates SEO. That’s definitely not the case…

 We even made a video about this. If you do a search for webmaster videos, we’ve made something like 400 videos. And we made one specifically to say Google does not hate SEO, because SEO can often be very helpful. It can make a site more crawlable. It can make a site more accessible. It can think about the words that users are going to type whenever they come to a search engine and make sure that those words are on the page, which just makes the site more user-friendly.

So the same sorts of things you do to optimize your return on investment and how well something spreads virally or socially is the exact same sort of stuff that often works well from a search engine perspective. So there is a ton of stuff that is fantastic to do as an SEO, it just makes your content more crawlable and more accessible.“

This isn’t the oft-heralded death of SEO. But it may be the first nail in the coffin of those who go beyond SEO and lose track of creating the best possible content for their audiences.

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A Successful Seo On The World Wide Web

When all is said and done, the only way that an Internet based business is going to thrive (even survive, in point of fact), is through ever increasing traffic to a particular Internet based venue. Traffic to a website is the key to the success of Internet business. One of the most effective methods of increasing traffic to a business website is through search engine optimization or SEO.

In this day and age, a great many people continue to find out information about businesses that are operating on the Internet and World Wide Web through search engine searches. Additionally, for the most part, people tend to visit only those websites that are generated after a search engine search that are listed towards the top of the search results. Therefore, if you want to have people visit your site after a search engine search, you will want to work to endeavor that your business website is ranked high on the search engine result listing.

Through search engine optimization, or SEO, an Internet based business can accomplish the goal of having a link to that business enterprise listed higher up on a search engine search result list.

In this day and age, there are professionals that specialize in SEO. As a result, if you are new to the Internet, if you are new to the world of Internet business, you will want to consider the hiring of a professional. While SEO truly is something that a business owner of operator can master in the long run, if you are new to the Net and really are intent on getting your business up and running, you will want to take the time to consider engaging the services of a SEO professionals. You can avoid the trials and travails of the learning curve — and get your Internet based business up and running (fast) in a shorter period of time by engaging the services of a qualified SEO professional.

In conclusion you also need to keep in mind that SEO optimization is only one of the Internet marketing tools that you should use to promote and expand your Net based business enterprise. SEO alone and without other marketing techniques will not be enough to ensure business vitality and success in the long run. The Internet is very competitive and you will want to include SEO optimization as one of the marketing tools that you rely upon to promote your business enterprise.

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