Keyword Research – part 1

SEO tips, marketing strategies No Responses »
Feb 092011

This is the first part in a series where I’m going to be exploring how to do Keyword Research and generate good leads – particularly for anyone with a new or planned website. It’s true that keyword phrases can make or break a business that relies to some extent on search engine leads.

Why Pay for a Research Tool?

Since I’ve been using Market Samurai tool for nearly a year now, I’ve realised the information that is missing from the free Google Keyword Tool (albeit Samurai still relies on this tool for some search data)… that is both handy and vital to have.

One is ‘OCI’ commerciality – this variable measures the likelihood that searchers could be buyers. (Don’t fret, we’ll cover this later). Two is the ability to see Competition levels, Trends, and Adwords prices all in one screen.

Learn How to Use Professional Keyword Research Tools

Click to see helpful videos about the 1st Golden Rule – How to Find Relevant Keywords with Market Samurai. It’s really good for beginners. I like how they compare it to panning for gold. So true!

After this, go straight onto: 2nd Golden Rule – How to Find High Traffic Keywords

You will then be able to distinguish what defines a high traffic keyword – so you can cherry pick the niche markets/words for you to work on. You won’t believe what you will find out about Google searches!

If you’re running an online business, you’ll need either the correct SEO copywriter or this Market Samurai tool to be in the top 2% of all websites.

Other Relevant Posts:

Building Links for Better SEO

Search Visibility 2: Building a Theme with Keywords

Posted by Jennifer at 1:02 pm Tagged with: , ,

Drilling Down on Your Online Competitors

SEO tips, Small Business Brisbane No Responses »
Jan 272011

We’re going to explore today how to drill down on your online SEO competition for local Brisbane businesses. Especially now that we’ve had a tough month with floods and the obvious economic effects even for those not directly affected.

If you want to investigate the undergarments of your online competition, look no further than Yahoo Site Explorer. This handy wee tool shows you incoming links (inlinks) of ANY website.

Success leaves clues. Also bad back-linking leaves clues, so don’t get too confused.

Some blog comments with your signature are propagated through a site, leading to 20 links which only really count for one vote. On forums like meetup.com, you’ll find a similar occurrence. So don’t get too excited by the final number… quality counts.

If you want to recreate someone else’s inlinks, first ensure they know what they are doing, and then ensure that your target keywords are exactly the same. Probably you will want to have your own strategy and use a professional – for about $40 per hour, it could be well worth it.

Next – Gather SEO Competition Data

Anyhow, the next step is to gather your SEO competition data on the top five websites for your niche keyword searches. E.G. For ‘copywriter Brisbane’ results are: heart harmony #1, snappysentences #2, power of words #3  etc… ‘Copywriting Brisbane’ brings up entirely different results.

If I wanted to be absolutely sure of my own placement, I would use Market Samurai and the SEO Competition module. This is because your own computer gets to know your ‘most clicked’ results, so could be showing your website higher than it is to others.

Check Yourself Out – in Google’s SERP

Check how your website looks with “Instant Preview” on the Search Engine Results Page – hit the magnifying glass near the title. Compare your preview to others around it. Compare your title and bolded keywords to others above it. Like when we look in the mirror, we want our listing to appear attractive in every way!

I presume that you already know your top five keyword phrases with the most traffic. No?  Then use Market Samurai or Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find them. (I can also help you with this service if you’re needing to rewrite your website copy anyway).

Please note my upcoming presentation at B2B Brisbane meetup on the topic: Writing Your Way to a Distinctive Online Presence. February 9, at 6:15 pm. If you miss out on the last spot, I may be doing this presentation again in Redcliffe in March or April.

Posted by Jennifer at 2:33 pm Tagged with: , ,

Optimising Website Links for SEO

SEO tips, Website Design No Responses »
Nov 082010

It’s true, there are many tricks to search engine optimisation and building links. Here are some of the main things that you can influence:

  • Use keyword rich ‘anchor text’ in both internal and external links (where you can).
  • Optimise your page titles metatag according to that page’s main content. E.g. Write ‘chocolate bars’ not ‘Cadburys’.
  • Write a great metatag description, especially for pages that may not have a lot of keyword content (when Google is more likely to use yours).
  • Comment on other relevant industry blogs, whereby they allow a link back to your website.

Anchor Text
You might be wondering what anchor text is. Here is a great article all about it: What is anchor text and why is it so darn important for SEO

Basically you should delete all the internal links on your website saying “click here” or “about us” and rename them with some keywords that could possibly be searched for. Your SEO-savvy copywriter should do this for you (say hello to Power of Words).

When commenting, don’t forget to use your main keywords, but still remember to add some value to the post’s topic.

Text Beats Graphics
If you just remember the phrase “text beats graphics”, it will remind you to not have a java language page, Shockwave Flash entry, or jpeg image as the main viewable graphic of your visitors. Hey, I love creativity. But when you have to sacrifice real interested visitors to be creative, that’s when any marketing objectives have gone bye-bye. (Image headers are OK and can always have a textual ‘alt tag’).

Robots like plain text and text-based links. So always have an alternative to your pull-down menus and your images, and use ‘alt’ image tags and keyword rich hyperlinks. It also helps us humans get quickly to where we want to go.

Last year I advised an accountant at Snelleman Tom that using Java meant that their website was impenetrable to searchers. I see they’ve made a new website with much better architecture and visibility. No need to thank me, that’s OK.

Posted by Jennifer at 12:34 pm Tagged with: , ,

Should You Really Customise and Write a Website Yourself?

SEO tips, Small Business Brisbane, Website Design 1 Response »
Aug 262010

Small business owners are a busy lot; today we consider… do you have time and skills to DIY your content and run a full CMS?

We wrote a little about this when we considered the question, DIY Template or Employ a Web Designer?

Recently I found another web company offering an ‘all-in-one’ solution – where business owners pick a template and do their own content and optimisation. This really assumes that business owners have an eye for design and colour, copywriting skills, and knowledge of keywords and where to put them.

That’s quite of a lot of assumptions. Most people who are very good at what they do, whether plumbing a roof or consulting to business, don’t have the time to research and get good at these varied skill sets. Hell, they don’t even have the time to consult with us on what they want in their website at times, much less always be doing it themselves.

Content Updates to Websites

In our new publication ‘Small Business Websites… Finally Explained’ we express the need for regular website updates if you want your website to be fresh and ranked well in Google. (And we practice what we preach).

If you or your partner can set aside 3 to 5 hours per month and you are a concise writer, please go ahead and pay for a full CMS (content management). If you’re normally in a car or up on a roof for work, then look into getting Hosting Maintenance included in a standard small business website. This means you can send in your website updates every couple of months at no extra cost.

Remember, you can optionally add a WordPress blog to a small business website and easily enough put in articles. Blog writing can be a simple affair and help your site be found for very specific subjects and locations. These can be articles which encourage the reader to purchase from you. When (notice I don’t say if) you realise that you can’t possibly keep up with writing these posts then I’d be happy to do it for you on a regular weekly basis, from $40 per post, or less for editing. Cheers.

Posted by Jennifer at 2:36 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Search Visibility Part 2: Building a Theme with Keywords

SEO tips, marketing strategies No Responses »
Jul 142010

Building a Theme with Niche Keywords

Many people have a simplistic view of keywords. Just putting two word phrases commonly searched for onto your website isn’t enough. You need to attract the right visitors from the right selection of keywords.  Search engines are actually quite clever at working out themes through indexing methods, saving you the job of over-thinking keywords.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing method that identifies patterns in the relationships between terms and concepts. Words used within the same context (i.e. ‘new computers’ and ‘MacBook Pro’) have a relationship. With this relationship in mind, you can organise a keyword list into themes of related keywords. It’s pretty much how our mind likes to work anyway.

From those themes, your site’s best structure and content will start to emerge.

Tools to Help You

If you don’t have the benefit of your own consumer research, there are tools to help derive keyword relationships, like Google’s Wonderwheel. Wonderwheel, listed on the left side of Google.com search results, shows related keyword phrases that can be used to build subpages within each of your categories. (Just click to show the wheel’s results).

Chris Anderson’s 2006 book ‘The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More’ explains the theory that its best to concentrate on the smaller, more focused end of the customer movements/sales chart (i.e. the long thin tail). Since this book come out, every Internet guru has been talking about how to apply this methodology to internet search (keyword research).

As you assign related keywords based on their relationships, it may be you end up with several long-tail keyword phrases. This is a good thing. Achieving rankings for one or two-word queries (e.g. ‘web design, ‘landscape gardeners’, ‘car sales’) are important, but most experienced marketers have found they  generate the MOST targeted clicks and BEST sales conversions from three- to five-word queries (web design Brisbane, landscape design Sydney).

What I do is use the Market Samurai tool to investigate more three-word or longer keyword phrases. If you’ve got money on the line, then I suggest spending some time to research current market trends and keyword searches… it’s better than fumbling in the Internet darkness.

Posted by Jennifer at 1:54 pm Tagged with: , ,

Site Structure and Search Visibility

SEO tips, marketing strategies No Responses »
Jul 142010

To understand why site structure – navigation and linking – is so important, first we must understand Page Rank. At Google, the algorithms measure the “authority” that a domain builds up over time, mainly through linking.

Link Building. If other sites link to a particular site, this is a prime indicator to the search engines of that site’s importance. It doesn’t matter whether this has been a natural occurrence or the web manager has helped it along a little with correct linking strategies. And if many sites in a particular niche hyperlink to the website (i.e. it’s not a paid ad), this tells the search engines that the site is important in that industry.

Getting relevant incoming links is important.

Page rank flows like a river. Any page with authority (good links, been around for a while) can also pass on authority, both to external sites and to other pages within the same website. Now imagine the best possible relevant pages which could recommend you… leaders in their/your field, bloggers, advertising giants, creative genie, etc.

This work will lead you to know where to go to get links back… links that improve both search traffic and page ranking. Their authority can boost your pages’ and domain’s authority.

See part 2 of this post in “Building Themes with Niche Keywords”.

Posted by Jennifer at 1:51 pm
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