6 Tips To Improve Keyword Research for SEO Content
Guest Post by Sam Mauzy.
Keyword content creation is one of the best ways for people to increase their search engine rankings. However, it is important that you chose the right keywords to focus on for the best ranking results. Here are some tips for determining which keywords you should use as a part of your SEO strategy.
Long Tail Keywords
Instead of focusing on direct keywords, like “cars” or “cats,” websites are far better able to get traction with long tail keyword searches. To begin with, most people are more likely to search specifically than broadly, so it makes more sense to create content for phrases like “cheap used cars” or “long-haired cats.” To find the most popular terms related to keyword bases, simply type in a keyword and Google will provide a drop-down list of the most popular long tail searches.
Localize Your Keywords
One of Google’s recent updates was to prioritize local search results. This means that if you have a physical storefront, you will want to create keyword content that includes your location. This also ensures that you are getting your target demographic to your website. If you sell used cars in California, visitors from New York are likely to be simply taking up your bandwidth.
Focus on Keywords that Improve Your Conversion Rate
Related to localized content, you want to try to hone in on keywords that will not only increase the number of visitors to your website but keywords that will improve your conversion rate as well. Creating keyword content for things that have little to nothing to do with your site will not improve your conversion rate and could hurt you in the long run as it increases your bounce rate.
Take Advantage of Analytics
One of the best ways to do keyword research and track your progress is to look at analytic data. The information provided by Google Analytics alone is both extensive and valuable. Some of the things that you should be looking at specifically are your pages with high bounce rates and your pages with high conversion rates. High bounce rates mean that people aren’t finding what they are looking for, meaning keywords used on these pages are probably not your best bet. Conversely, landing pages with the highest conversion rates are those that you should use as a base for additional content.
Use PPC Data
PPC ads are a great way to do a test run on a keyword selection. Since keyword content can take weeks or even months to turn into search engine ranking improvement, PPC ads are a quick way to see if new keyword content will improve your conversion rate. Used correctly, PPC ads are a great source of inexpensive and real-time market research.
Make Your Keyword Goals Attainable
Finally, make sure that you are choosing keywords you can realistically achieve high search engine rankings with. It is better to achieve a high ranking with a few long tail keywords than spend months achieving little progress with a highly competitive keyword. That is not to say that you cannot ever achieve top rankings with a particular keyword, but you should consider it a long term goal and put your effort into several keywords at the same time.
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Sam is a blogger with a background in SEO. His latest challenge has been learning how to make iPhone apps which he has found to be a great new marketable skill to have.
Read MoreUnderstanding What “Deep Link” Means And How To Get More For Your Site
Guest Post by Sam Mauzy.
Deep links lead clients to specific pages that they are looking for without having through the entire content. They are quick links to various areas of interest in your web page. To understand how to use these links for your benefit, you need to take some time to consider their advantages.
Increases relevancy of the website
By using chosen keywords as your anchor text, you enable users to directly access the relevant pages without bouncing around in your main page. It’s easier to rank the pages with the anchor text instead of the whole page. This makes your web page more relevant and highly ranked.
Ease of page navigation
Deep linking provides a simple way of navigating through pages and pages of content. By giving users means of going direct to what is relevant to them you make it a pleasant journey going through your webpage. It saves them time and the search engines will return better rankings for your pages. A good navigational structure for your webpage attracts traffic and makes your web pages trustworthy.
Search rankings
Use of deep links ‘tell’ the search engines that other people are interested on the pages of your website, not just the homepage. It goes to show that they regard the content of your website highly and go beyond looking at your attractive main page. Search engines will therefore rank your site and specific pages as important and put them high in their rankings of useful sites. Of course this translates to more traffic and business for you at the end of the day.
Increase in traffic inflow
Deep linking increases traffic flow to your pages and your website. This is because search engines will rank your page high as they take your site to be important depending on the number of deep links you have. Also, when clients get what they want with ease, they also rank your site as useful and pass the word around that your website contains specific content that they want. This automatically opens your site to more clients and more opportunities. Increased traffic for any website is good business.
Domain authority
External deep links coupled with internal ones make your webpage have authority over other pages. Remember the search engines highly regard sites that have a lot of back links and they rank them high up. When other highly ranked websites have your links, the search engines are convinced that your website has authority over the others and that your content is more important. For example, Wikipedia can be said to have authority over other similar sites and that’s why it’s ranked so highly by most search engines, all these thanks to deep linking.
You will boost your search engine ranking if you are able to get more for your site. Another thing that most website owners also do today embedding back links to other pages apart from the home page, and submitting those link pages to different directories. This is a great way of having your website to have more traffic through the search engines. You don’t even need to do the job yourself, as there are service providers that can do deep link submission for you, giving you an opportunity to take advantage of this important SEO marketing strategy. You only need to look for providers who can do it in a way that does not appear as spam to the search engines.
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Sam is a contributing blogger for a site that specializes in ecommerce conversion rate optimization.
Blogging for Geniuses
Sometimes the element of blogging that holds people back the most is over-thinking their blogs. That’s why this post is entitled “Blogging for Geniuses” as opposed to ‘dummies.’ Many companies will engage in paid search management or marketing analysis to determine what topics to blog about on their corporate web pages. But for individuals looking to get their voices out into the blogosphere, sometimes the easiest way to get started is to shoot from the hip and write from the heart. Here are some practical tips for the wayward blogger to get started, or to augment their productivity and blog performance:
Don’t tackle subjects that are beyond your area of expertise.
Most any subject you can think of will be covered six ways to Sunday by people who probably know the facts a little better than you. Stick to topics that you know about from experience. It will imbue your posts with an air of authenticity that speaks to Internet readers who are already inundated with duplicate material on a daily basis. Be sure to include links to the articles from your research, especially if they’re from sites with a high page rank.
Research before you write.
Even though you should blog from the heart, you still want to have your facts straight. It’s also good to be able to bring interesting historical perspectives to contemporary issues. Research is the best way to fact-check your blogs and give them original angles.
Use keywords to make sure your blog is optimized for search engines.
Keywords are excellent for SEO, as they give weight to your blog in popular search engine results, and they also help you to keep your writing focused. Blogging is not rocket science, nor is it brain surgery, but it is a powerful Internet tool. Combined with email marketing, SEO on your blog can earn you cash, prestige, and a loyal readership.
Use social media to promote your blog.
Once the writing on your blog is focused, it’s time to focus your blog as a whole by getting it into niche corners of the Internet. The best way to do this is with social media sites like Twitter and Reddit. They allow you to highlight links to your blog among relevant readers. Plus, you can have your blog shared, reTweeted, and listed by others.
Blogging is not exactly an art form—or rocket science—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some complex tasks you must face when you get going. Many of the tasks involve writing in such a way so as to connect with your audience. Focusing your subjects, researching your topics, using appropriate keywords, and promoting with social media are the right ways to enter the blogosphere.
Read MoreKeywords to Highlight Your Site
Guest post by Pat Tate.
In today’s world everyone has a website. Whether it’s a business, organization or individual, the Internet has made it possible for users to sell products, share information and express themselves on their own webpage. Whereas it’s more accessible and easier to create a website, it’s harder to generate visitors due to the fact that there’s a high volume of competition. By following these quick and simple tips, you’ll be able to have a website that stands out amongst your competition.
To start, the core of your website should center on keywords. Keywords are the words people use when typing into the search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc.). For example, if you’re looking for golf equipment you may want to type in “golf equipment” (golf and equipment are keywords). The search engine will then display a list of websites that sell golf equipment. If you want to make your search more specific, you would enter in “women’s golf equipment” to get a more detailed list of golf equipment specifically geared towards women. Your keywords also tell Google what your site is about since Google uses a complex algorithm to determine which sites are relevant or not. Another reason why keywords are important is that most website hosts use them. So if you’re not utilizing keywords, you’re only giving your competition more of an advantage.
Quality content is always important when building your website; however, with the right keywords, your content is more likely to be seen by users. Instead of assuming what keywords are useful, it’s more effective to research and find the best keywords. When researching, you’re looking for keywords that are:
- Relevant to your website topic
- Get a certain percentage of searches in the search engine
- Profitable
The amount of traffic a keyword gets tells you how popular that word is. One easy and free program that allows you to search words is Google’s Keyword Tool. The keyword tool will give you an estimate of how many times a keyword has been searched and will propose alternative keywords that are similar. In addition, Global Monthly Searches, which is located at the bottom of the page, tells you the amount of hits a keyword gets from every country per month. If you want a more selective search, you can limit it to a particular location.
The tricky aspect of keywords is making sure a keyword gets enough searches but not too much. If you select a keyword that is extremely popular, then your website will most likely have more competition. For example, if you type in “cats” into the keyword tool, you’ll see that “cats” gets over a million searches per month. When selecting a keyword, you want a word that gets around 10,000 hits per month, which equates to 300 give or take pr day. As noted earlier, the Keyword Tool is a reliable source to find related keywords. As with a thesaurus, you can type in your keyword and obtain a list of similar words that might be more helpful in generating visitors to your website.
We’ve covered what makes a keyword and how to find popular but not over-used words, now let’s see how we can obtain profitable words. You can determine if a keyword is profitable by the amount of monthly searches it generates. The more searchers a word has, the higher probability that users are looking to purchase what they’re looking for (golf balls, golf bags, etc.). Yahoo Overture offers advertising on Yahoo and is a great source for finding profitable words. You have to pay to advertise but you don’t have to pay to research! On their site you can enter in a keyword and see how much money they charge customers to use that keyword; the higher the cost, the more profitable the word. Once you’ve found a few high-cost words, you can take them as use them as your keywords.
Along with researching the cost of a keyword, see which advertisers and affiliates are using this word. If you go to your basic search engine and type in the word, you’ll see multiple ads displayed on your page. These advertisers appear every time someone searches their keyword. Also check out ClickBank, where you can see if a word is profitable or not by counting how many affiliates are promoting that word. ClickBank’s “Gravity” tool displays how many affiliates are signed up for a product.
Finding the right keywords is only half the process, now it’s time to circulate them throughout your website. The way you utilize your keywords will play a crucial role in determining whether your prospective visitors find you. Keyword density refers to the amount of times you use the keywords in your text. A few guidelines to keyword density are:
- Place your keyword(s) in the title of each page.
- Insert your keyword(s) in the first and last paragraph of every page with content.
- Place the keyword in the upper left-hand corner of the page (Google reads from left to right).
- Your primary keyword should be in your domain name.
- On each page, insert your keyword in the title, first paragraph, last paragraph and within the middle paragraphs (every other paragraph).
Keyword density, expressed as a percentage should be less than 2%. A 2% keyword density means that for every 100 words, your keyword is listed twice (or that 2% of your text is your keyword). The reason you want less than 2% keyword density is that if your density is too high, Google will ignore your website thinking its spam. By using a variety of different keywords related to your website, you’ll be able to expand them more throughout your page will gaining a higher probability that visitors will find you.
The last ingredient to creating a successful website is anchor text. Anchor text is a link on your page that may look like “click here” or “join now”. To maximize your keyword, include it in the anchor text, such as “click here for the Ping Faith Golf Clubs”. Anchor text is valuable to your success rate in that Google uses anchor text when determining which sites are relevant to a keyword.
These tips and guidelines will give you the assistance you need in creating a website that generates visitors. The main components to remember are keyword, keyword density and anchor text. Utilize Google and Yahoo for their free and easy-access tools that will help you select the right keywords. Remember, that whereas keywords are important, they’re useless if your content lacks quality. Make sure to spend as much time and effort on your design layout and text so visitors will stay on your website and hopefully notify others about your site as well.
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As a senior Pat Tate started to explore Internet Marketing. She uses her blog as a journal to keep track of the people and programs that she has met along the way. Grandma’s Internet Marketing/blog. She is an avid golfer and invites women to join her to talk golf at Women’s Golf Center. She has always loved toys and as the proud Grandmother of five beautiful Grandchildren she gets to play with new ones at Grandma’s Toy Review
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Keywords
Keyword(s):
- The word (or words) a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box. Also the term that the marketer hopes users will search on to find a particular page.
I think keywords are pretty self explanatory and don’t need my take on it :).
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Keyword Popularity
Keyword Popularity:
- A measure of the most frequent words and phrases used in web searches. Marketers can use KP to determine which keywords bring large numbers of potential customers to a website. Keywords are stored in the meta tags or text of a web page.
The first step to successful SEO is to identify the KP of your keywords and be sure to include them in the meta tags of your website. From there you can craft ways of working the most popular keywords into your content.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
