The Painful Truth About Getting Top Search Engine Ranking
“How do I get my website to come up on top of the search engines?” – That is one of the most frequently asked questions I get asked by clients.
The truth is, it’s not easy. With millions of websites on the internet right now and thousands being added each month, everybody is striving to do the same – to come up in the first spot (or on the first page).
In reality there are only 2 ways you can come up on top:
1. Set up a pay-per-click advertising campaign, such as Google Adwords.
2. Optimize your website for keywords (also known as Search Engine Optimization).
Keywords
Before you embark on either of these marketing methods, you need to understand about keywords.
Keywords or key phrases are the words that visitors type into a search engine to find a service or product. The best keywords are those that are commonly typed in by your potential customers, but which aren’t used much on your competitors’ websites. In other words, if you optimize your pages for keywords your potential customers use a lot, but your competitors haven’t thought of, you win. But here’s the catch…you won’t get to know which are the best keywords for your website simply by guessing.
There are many tools you can use to find what keywords people are using, including Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.
If you are serious about finding the perfect keywords, I would recommend using a tool called Wordtracker. Through a series of simple steps, Wordtracker identifies the best keywords to use on each page of your website. Wordtracker’s suggestions are based on over 300 million keywords and phrases that people have used over the previous 90 days. (In other words, there is no “guessing” when you use Wordtracker. Everything is based on the keywords millions of people have actually typed into search engines.)
Best of all, their competitive analysis tool enables you to find those “best keywords” – the ones your potential customers use, but which your competitors don’t know about.
Once you have identified the best keywords, you can either run a pay-per-click marketing campaign or optimize your website for search engines.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click advertising is when an advertiser (you) pays for each qualified click that sends a search engine user to your web page. PPC requires you to bid on keywords or phrases that relate to your business. The best known pay- per-click services are Google AdWords and Overture. Generally you can bid from as little as a few cents per visitor. However, the more you bid, the higher up in the search engine your advertisement will appear. Pay-per- click is a great way to deliver targeted and qualified visitors to your website at a very reasonable price.
It is a good idea to experiment with different PPC search engines to find the one that works best for you. In addition, you will need to spend time testing your keywords and ads.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines prefer to list sites that contain good content. In order to rank high you need to create a website that has maximum content and which uses lots of relevant keywords to your service and products.
Once you decide on the keywords, use them in
(a) Your website’s domain name
(b) The title of your page – This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window
(c) The heading of your home page
(d) The first paragraph of your home page
(e) Meta tags – Keywords, page title, description
(f) Titles of your graphics
(g) Alternative (Alt) tags – These appear in place of images when the browser preferences are set
for text only.
While it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords, you may be penalized or even banned by some search engines.
Another important thing to consider when trying to optimize your website for search engines is to have as many relevant links pointing back to your website from other complementary sites as possible. This can be done through link exchanges or by writing articles/posts and submittíng them to article directories or forums. Ensure you include your domain name at the end of each article/post.
If this all seems too overwhelming, you can employ the services of a Search engine optimization company that will make your website’s content more search engine friendly.
Please remember, having your website listed at the top of the search engines is not the only way to promote your website. There are lots of other ways you can get visitors to your site for little or no money.
About The Author
Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small Business makes it easy for you to get your business on the internet. If you’re looking for a professional and affordable website designer.
Keyword Research Basics for SEO
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don’t convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn’t going to help too terribly much so in my opinion – I’d put keyword research higher in importance. In fact, when I’m building affiliate sites my first step is to look up keywords and competition levels – then I look into products and websites and this method has worked very well indeed. It insures that I choose keywords that will both convert and that I can rank for in a period of time and with an effort level that matches the return.
So – if you’re doing keyword research, where should you begin? Unless you’re an affiliate marketer you already have a product and since you’re the target audience of this article – I’m going to assume that’s the case. For the purpose of this article I’m going to pick a hobby of mine and also an area where I don’t have a client and imagine I’m doing keyword research for the imaginary online downhill mountain biking store, DH Mountain Bikes.
So Where To Begin … The first thing one needs to do is try to think up all the possible phrases that might apply. I call this my seed list… it’s the list of phrases that my research starts with and is generally based on brainstorming. In this case the list would be:
- downhill mountain bike
- dh mountain bike
- mountain bike
The keyword tool I generally use first is Google’s keyword suggestion tool. There are other great tools but I’ve found Google’s tool to be as accurate as any other, the price is definitely right (free), and they’re very good about providing the information required to know just how wrong the data is if you know where to look. So let’s do just that.
Before we begin you’ll need to head over to Google’s keyword tool. In the top left (for now) you’ll see a link to a beta version of the tool. Click on the link and you’ll be at the new version of the tool which will provide you easy access to much more information – as long as you know what to look for. So let’s begin with our three seed phrases.
When you see the list you’ll first have to know what the numbers are. This tool is a tool designed for AdWords and the default number is the Broad match which means it includes every phrase with the term. For example, the term “mountain bike” has a broad match total of 2,740,000 which will include “downhill mountain bike”, “mountain bike parts”, “kona mountain bike”, etc. etc.
What we want to know is how many searches are for “mountain bike”. Down the left-hand side you’ll see a set of check boxes. Deselect “Broad” and select “Exact” and you’ll get the Exact match numbers – the number of searches for the exact phrase. You’ll quickly see that 2,740,000 drop to 450,000. This is how many people searched the GOOGLE SEARCH NETWORK for “mountain bike”. Why is this in caps – because it’s so commonly misunderstood that I definitely want your attention brought to it. This isn’t the number of searches on Google.com – it’s the number of searches on all sites whose search is powered by Google. From YouTube to Beanstalk’s blog search – it’s all in there so the data starts to get skewed from the start. Then let’s add in all the automated queries from rank-checking tools and just manual searches from you and your competitors and the data gets further skewed. This skewing will exist in all data – the thing I like about using Google is that at least we know more about what’s adjusting the data.
OK – so from there we need to organize the data into a more useful set of information. To do this one needs to understand the columns of data. The first column is the keyword, the second you’ll see is a link to the term on Google Insights. We’ll get into this later. The next is Global Monthly Searches – this is the average number of searches/mo. worldwide. This can be helpful in some industries but in ours – I’m only concerned with the US market which is where my imaginary store ships to so I’m more interested in the next column Local Monthly Searches which is the number of searches in the US (or whatever region I’ve specified when entering my keyword phrases). This is the data I’m interested in. The last column is the search trend. This is extremely important but often overlooked. It is a column that wasn’t visible by default in the old/current version.
OK – let’s organize our data by search volume. Click on the “Local Monthly Searches” and you’ll see the keywords order by descending search volume. With this data in front of me I then typically look over to the Trend data to see what I can find there. In our case we’re going to see a jump in search volume in the spring and summer. This make sense of course. Think of your industry and see if the trends reflect what makes sense.
I’m also looking for anomalies. Often I’ll see phrases that jump for a single month. One has to know that unless there was a news story or other event that would spark interest in a single term or brand – a tool or some other such incident is likely falsifying the data. You need to look at these trends and see if they make sense. If not – you need to either test the phrases with PPC or just skip over them and select different phrases. There’s little worse as an SEO than focusing energies on a phrase only to find that the search volume is not what was expected based on the estimates delivered.
So now what?
So what do you do once you’ve filtered your data down to just what you’re interested in looking into competition levels on. Well – the first thing I do is to look to the trends to see if there are any phrases that obviously need to be filtered out. In this case there really aren’t any high in the search volume column. So the only thing left is to look at the competition levels to see what makes sense. For our purposes we’ll be dividing the list and research into two categories:
Major phrases – We need to decide what the long-term goals are going to be and the targets for the main pages. These will be the totally generic phrases such as “mountain bike” and “downhill mountain bike” as well as brand or type specific phrases such as “specialized mountain bike” and “full suspension mountain bike”.
Longtail phrases – We also need to look into the types of longtail phrases we’re going to want to target. In this case I know I’ll want to target specific parts which will require new research. I will spare you the details there, but I’ll end up with specific models of components such as “hayes mx2″. You don’t need to know what that is – you need to know the makes and models in your industry (or other longtail opportunities such as “new york hotel with jacuzzi”, etc.)
I generally would gather together a list of 15 or 20 major phrases and 50 or 60 longtail phrases and would then head into the competition analysis to determine which phrases to move forward with.
And next week I’ll have that article for you…
About The Author
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc. On top of providing performance-based organic SEO services, consulting, training and link building – Dave enjoys writing and blogging about SEO as well as affiliate marketing, including his upcoming site on downhill mountain bikes www.dhmountainbikes.com and the hills they’re built for.
5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking
Think you’re doing a good job of tracking and measuring the success of every link to your website that gets announced to the world in some fashion?
While most website marketers are tracking website referrals from search engines, as well as links from other websites and paid search advertising campaigns, a lot of visitors show up as “Direct Traffic.” Do you ever wonder where they came from? I know that I do!
I’ve talked about campaign tracking via Google Analytics before, so I won’t bore you with the mechanics of how to create these links so they don’t look ugly. But do read that article if you need a refresher course. After you have a good system in place for adding campaign tracking codes to your URLs, the most important thing you can do is remember to use them on everything!
So here are 5 categories of links that you may not have thought about tracking, but should be:
1. Email Signature Links
Most of you have at least one link to your website in your email signature that goes out in most every email you send. But how many of you are tracking whether anyone clicks on them or not? I know that I rarely click on other people’s email signature links. With that in mind, I was curious whether mine ever get clicked, so I appended them with some campaign tracking codes. Turns out they don’t get too many clicks (just 8 this past month), but keep in mind that I don’t have any sort of call to action in my signature, as some do. It would be fun to experiment with different offers in the signature to see how those fare.
2. Specific Words or Graphics Within Your Website
Do you have call-to-action buttons or text links on various pages of your website where you’re trying to elicit a specific response from your site visitors? Are you measuring them? For instance, on our website we have an image prominently featured on every page. It rotates between a call-out to subscribe to the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and one that provides more info on our low-end SEO website review. Because I look at the site every day and am not part of our target audience, I’m basically blind to the images.
For a long time I assumed that most who visited our site would never click those images. Well, you know what they say about ASSuming things! After I added tracking codes to those images, I learned that people do indeed click them, and about 75% of those who click the newsletter image end up following through and subscribing. And more than 5% of those click to the SEO review page and fill out our contact form for more information. Hardly what I would call blind!
3. Offline Marketing
You should of course have specific tracking URLs for any offline advertising you do in radio, TV, newspapers and magazines. But remember to add tracking codes to your links from other places where you’re able to list your website URL, such as business cards, classified ads and telephone book ads. Does your business have a sign? How about a tracked URL there? Have a VW Beetle wrapped as a roving ad for your website? Use a tracking URL. Give your website address out on the phone a lot? Provide a tracking URL.
4. Article Bio Links
You all know the power of writing content such as guest articles for other websites, blogs and newsletters in your niche, but are you tracking those links? While you can see the referring URL in your analytics when they come from a specific website, you can get more granular with your analysis when you have added tracking codes to the links back. For instance, with tracking codes in place, you can see which articles, in general, referred the most traffic to your site regardless of where they were posted.
5. Social Media Status Updates
I covered this one in the aforementioned article, so I won’t belabor it, but didn’t want to leave it out because any links that you Tweet, add to Facebook, or leave in a LinkedIn update should have tracking codes. Clicks from social media often come without a referrer for many reasons, making campaign tracking your best bet for measuring their effectiveness. Remember to use tracking URLs in your profile link back to your site as well, so you can easily know which profiles bring actual site visitors and which don’t.
Only with campaign tracking codes appended to any and all URLs can you quickly and easily know what media are bringing visitors to your site, as well as seeing what actions they take (or don’t) once they get there!
About The Author:
Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.
