Choosing SEO Keywords

The success of a SEO strategy often starts with the right selection of keywords it will be focused on. No matter the size of your website, there's a limit on how many keywords can you optimize any page for, and you will be better focusing on a list of 10 to 15 keywords instead of trying to optimize for everything and getting only half way there. Learning how to choose SEO keywords will give you the best results for your SEO efforts.

Choosing the right SEO keywords starts with knowing your audience and what kind of keywords are they going to enter on a search engine query box when they are interested on your website products or services. The best way to start is making a list of all the words you would use to search for your products, even asking other people what they enter on a search engine when shopping for whatever you offer or looking for the information your website provides. It doesn't matter if it's a big list, since you will refine it later. At this stage, a keyword analysis tool such as the Google Keywords Tool can be useful as well, as it will suggest related terms that you may not have thought about, and you can use it later on to refine your search as well.

After you have the list you need to cut it down to about 15 words or sentences to focus on. There are two aspects that need to be considered, the competition and the number of searches for that keyword (though they are both closely related). Enter your full list of words into the Google Keywords tool, or if you are willing to invest some money use a commercial keyword research tool for even more information. This way you can see how many searches a month a keyword has, and how much money people are willing to pay for using it on a PPC campaign, which is usually a good guideline to see how competitive a keyword is.

Keep in mind that many one word keywords competition is really strong, and that most people never uses a single keyword to search for the things they need. For example, a person looking to plan a holiday will look for hotels in a particular city or area, and not just search for "hotels". Think of factors why people would search for your site, such as your location or distinctive things such as "growth locally" for food products, "quick delivery" on physical products or "direct download" for software if you offer that form of delivery. Do you offer a very specialist service, such as legal advice on a very specific area? That would be a good selling point and will improve your chances of selecting highly effective SEO keywords. Add those keywords to your existing suggested list, and look for long tail keywords (sentences as opposed to single words) that have a high enough volume of searches and not too much competition. This way you can reduce your list to about 20 keywords. You can Google Keyword Tool.

To finally choose the SEO keywords you want to focus on, take a look at the competition by doing a Google and MSN search for each one of them. There's some battles that are best not fighting over, and if you see that the top ten spots for a keyword are taken by really big websites such as Amazon or Ebay you may prefer to remove those from your list. Order your existing list of 20 keywords based on the amount of searches and how likely you are to overcome the competition that shows up on a Google search for those keywords. If all your keywords have very strong competition, you may want to go back to step two and choose different ones or think seriously about a really strong SEO strategy that would include adding lots of content to your site and a very strong link building campaign that may better be undertaken by a professional SEO agency.

After you have ordered your list you should focus on your first 15 options, and focus on about 3 for every page on your website. Since they all should be related to each other every page of your site will add value to the other pages, even if they aren't specifically focusing on the exact same keywords. After your website is optimized, remember that results can take a while to materialize. You should refine your SEO campaign by using a web analytics tool such as Google analytics and see what searches are sending you the right kind of traffic, and focus any further effort on them. The right kind of traffic is the one that actually stays on your site and fulfils the goals for your website, from registering to read your articles to actually buying your items.

Tricks to Attracting New Visitors Using SEO

Internet marketing is a vast and quickly-evolving world. One of the most prominent components of this world is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Search engine results are based on a collection of keyword phrases that bots use to determine how relevant information is according to an inquiry. SEO is a process that involves writing articles that you feature on your site that will attract the bots to your business. This is what is known as "search engine friendly." The better your SEO performance, the higher your page rank and the higher your site will appear in a search result. Many people hire experts to help them capitalize on this system, but you can learn to do it yourself with a few easy steps.

First of all, the most important thing you need to know is how to determine the importance and relevance of keywords. Not all words are created equally, and not all combinations will provide the best result. Unfortunately, the more common the phrase, the harder it is to use it effectively. Your goal should be to find unique words or phrases that are somewhat familiar, but trying to predict what people will actually search for can be difficult. Without a SEO expert, you can do this by using software like Google's Adwords Keyword tool. This is a free program that is quite effective, but for the best results, you should invest in a higher quality program.

With a good keyword tool at your disposal you should be able to find high-volume, low-competition words. This means that you will be able to write articles that feature popular keywords that are not already recognized on many other pages. This will automatically boost your page rank.

Now that you have the right keywords for your site, you need to reconstruct your site to accommodate them. This involves writing an exclusive Meta tag, html title tag, and Meta description for each page of your site. If you don't understand this, it's ok, but you may need to hire someone who is adept in web programming to help you. Once you have these coded, you should put the main keyword or featured phrase at the top of the page, as a title perhaps, and feature it in a few places in the body, and be sure to be as original as possible without sounding contrived. You should also make sure that you do not overuse the keywords, which is called "stuffing," and is frowned upon by search engine providers. This will result in your ranking decreasing. Simply italicize or bold your keywords so the bots can find them and only feature them a few times on your page.

Follow these easy steps and you on your way to a more attractive and friendly website. Though there are more things you could learn, this is a good place to start.

How SEO Boost Your Traffic Website

Learning a decent amount of SEO can be worth it's weight in gold and it can definitely make all of the difference in terms of your online success. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that you need to go out and buy every little eBook and course on SEO but it is worth getting to know. In my opinion SEO is a very logical thing to grasp and certainly something that can be achieved on your own if you use your own initiative. It's not easy, but consulting the right websites and forums should get you on the right track.

"In my opinion SEO is a very logical thing to grasp and certainly something that can be achieved on your own if you use your own initiative"

If I'm honest I have learnt a majority of my SEO knowledge from attending seminars. Many of the speakers at these seminars will give you small nuggets of information regarding SEO but if you bunch all of that quality information up into one SEO knowledge base you will have yourself a fair amount to work with. Similarly some beginners will look at SEO as this massive mountain that they are going to have to conquer before they see any sign of success - don't think this way. Good SEO is merely a beneficial thing for your site to have but if it is going to get in the way of building the site that you want, it really isn't worth that much. Productivity is crucial when you start out on the Internet and should come first, SEO can wait until you are up and running.

As James Schramko said in the recent interview I did with him, "I don't think you have to master SEO to have an online business but you have to recognise its importance in the business". This was very nice to hear from such a successful guy and a guy who displays such great SEO knowledge and even has his own SEO business. There are some things that you should know before actually getting started with Internet Marketing in order to gain better search engine rankings in the future, when your website is finished and they are...

1) Get a keyword rich domain name - By this I mean to basically buy a domain name that has as much relevance as possible to your online business or your chosen niche. For example if you sell an eBook which outlines exactly how to hang a door for DIY beginners, why not try and get the domain www.howtohangadoor.com - this will go down very well in search engine listings when someone types in "How to hang a door", and it is highly likely that you will in fact rank #1.

2) Think about page descriptions - Similar to the domain of your website it is crucial that you also have a keyword rich 'meta name description'. When Google's robots crawl the web and find your website your description will play a big part in determining your search engine ranking for certain keywords. Use Google's Keyword Tool to find a keyword that generally receives a lot of searches per month (over 20,000 is always a winner) and drop that keyword into your description a couple of times. Although this tip alone is not enough to get you ranked #1 for your chosen keyword it will certainly contribute to your search engine ranking.

"You want to aim to keep every visitor interested and staying at your site for as long as possible"

3) Carefully choose your keywords - The third part to my quick tips to better SEO before you have started building your website is to carefully pick your chosen keywords which you are going to use to advertise your website. Relevancy will play a huge part in this, you must choose keywords that best represent your site/blog otherwise people will find your site and very quickly click back to the search engine because your site wasn't the one they were looking for. Every time this happens you are losing a potential buyer so this is a complete disaster because you have the traffic, you just don't have the right website that answers the person's questions enough for them to want to buy your product. Although it is hard to do you want to aim to keep every visitor interested and staying at your site for as long as possible, therefore they are more likely to click on your AdSense or affiliate links.

4) Write content that search engines will love - Although this would seem very obvious and easy to do it actually proves to be a lot harder that initially expected. What I mean by this is write keyword dense content so that the search engines robots will find your page over other people's websites. This way your site will stand out as being more relevant for a certain searcher than others.

If you apply all of the above 'quick tips' to SEO you will be well on your way to achieving that #1 spot on Google before you have even started building your website. Many people who don't take the time to implement these tips within the construction of their first website will find it extremely hard to succeed online - I even did it when I started. Another great reason to follow the above steps is that, when you decide to take on PPC advertising such as Google AdWords your website/landing page will receive a much better score because your chosen PPC keywords will show more relevance to your site content - thus resulting in lower bid prices and less costs.

Google Page Rank Explained

One of the criteria used by Google when displaying search results is the Page Rank (PR). The higher the PR, the higher a page will be shown in search results. In this article we explain how Google calculates he PR and how you can optimize your website for achieving a high PR. Google also uses factors like relevance for the search - this is not discussed in this article.

This article is based mainly on an original article by Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page but also on hearsay, speculation and rumours. Google is not interested in allowing the public to know exactly how the PR is calculated since it is then easier to trick or cheat the search engine and since this would undermine its credibility. It does however appear that a variation over the basic formula is still used.

Google assigns a PR of between 0 and 10 to all pages which it indexes. It is possible to install a Google toolbar which shows the PR when you visit a page. The toolbar can be downloaded from http://toolbar.google.com/.

In reality, the PR is a value between 0 and "very large number". Algorithmic scale is most likely used to translate the value into the PR we know. A logarithmic scale works so values may be translated as follows:

Values 0.1 to 1 results in PR 0
Values 1 to 10 results in PR 1
Values 10 to 100 results in PR 2
Values 100 to 1000 results in PR 3 etc

What we'll look at in this article is how the value is determined. The actually scale used is not important to understand the concepts and it is not known to the public. It is likely that the scale is changed regularly.

Before looking at the actual formula - which may seem a bit scary - we'll discuss the basic idea by which the founders of Google wished to set importance - expressed in PR - to webpages.

The basic idea is that a link from a page A to a page B indicates that page A casts a �vote' for page B. The link from page A to B indicates that page B has something important on it which means that page A endorses page B. The basic idea of Google PR is that the more votes a page have, the higher the PR it should get. There are however different weights assigned to the votes cast. A vote from a page with a low PR is less important than a vote from a page with a high PR and therefore has less weight. If a page A casts many votes to many pages by having links to a number of pages, then the vote of page A is divided into small parts and each part is then assigned as a vote to each of the pages which page A links to. As you may have deduced from this explanation, the PR then expresses - to some extent - the likelihood that someone surfing randomly on the web will end up on the given page. A probability is therefore expressed in the PR.

Before looking at how this works out, we'll look at the exact formula used. You need not understand the formula as long as you understand the basic idea, but we will add it here for completeness. We'll look at what the basic idea and what the formula means in terms of getting a high PR a bit further down.

The basic formula is the following, where A is the page we wish to find the PR for and pages T1 to Tn are the pages linking to page A:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + PR(T2)/C(T2) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Where:
1) PR(A) means the PR of page A. Subsequently, PR(T1) means the PR of page T1
2) C(T1) is the number (count) of links going out of page T1.
3) PR(T1)/C(T1) - it follows from 1) and 2) that this is the page rank of the page T1 divided by the number of outgoing links from page T1. In other words, PR(T1)/C(T1) expresses the part of the vote of page T1 that is awarded to page A.
4) d is a damping factor which is probably set to around 0.80 to 0.85. We will not look into details as to why this factor is needed, but just state here that it has to do with probability distribution.

You may want to make a few examples and you'll see how it works out.

If you are bright, you may have noticed that you need to know the PR for all the pages linking to page A in order to work out the PR for page A. This may however not be possible as some of the pages are new and were never indexed before by Google. For this reason, Google assigns an initial value to all pages and after a few iterations where the PR is recalculated, an appropriate value is determined.

From the description of the basic idea and the formula we are now able to look at the factors which result in a high PR and thus give guidelines for achieving this.

The more webpages linking to your website the more votes will be cast upon your website, so the higher PR you will get. Links from pages which a high PR and with few outgoing links count higher than other links. How to achieve this is the subject of many articles on their own and we will not dwell into this further here.

If you have links to external sites from a page A on your own site, then you will be casting your vote to other sites. If however you also have links from page A to your own other pages, then you will be sharing the vote for page A with external sites and your own pages. This way, you will keep part of your own vote within your own site. For this reason, it is recommended that you link from each of your webpages to your main page or even link from each page to all your other pages.

Note that Google may penalize a website which tries to achieve a higher PR by what Google considers an inappropriate means. If for example you purchase links from a link exchange provider, Google may see this as a form of spamming and reduce your PR as a result. Playing fair seems to be safer than trying to "cheat"

In this article we have discussed how the Google page rank is calculated and what you can do to increase your page rank. Equipped with this information you may be able to improve your presence in search results.

The original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page can be found here: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Search Engine Optimization - 4 Basic Rules for Quality SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is considered by many to be a subset of search engine marketing, a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from search engines usually through search results. Search Engine Optimization has been the focus of a field of marketing research wherein methods have been explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines. In a broad sense, SEO is marketing by understanding what Internet visitors might search for, to help them with sites offering what they are interested in finding. It doesn't have to be complicated. The key thing is to remember that each and every page of your web site is a unique entity and has to be treated appropriately for search engine optimization.

Here are four basic rules that can guide you:

1. Use keywords with one's web page titles. In the Internet language, keywords are words used to find useful results in while searching. Think and plan of the best descriptive keywords for your webpage titles. Many web site owners use inappropriate names or their company name in the page titles. Yet, it might s not be the best way people search. Each page should have the keywords for that page appropriately.

2. Get the keywords right. Make sure you've selected words that meet your marketing criteria and needs. Choosing words that are too general will only result in being one of millions so be more specific with your words. The more specific they are, the more it will result in higher rankings. Ensure however, that the words you choose are usable. Example: 'kakoru puzzles' and 'kakoru games' have two completely different rankings; 'search engine optimization' and 'search engine optimizers' do too. Even 'writers' and 'writing' can have varied rankings.

3. Use keywords in your title tag, and meta tags. A tag references to the semantic structures delimiting the start and end of an element or elements in the HTML code. Meta elements provide the information about a given web page, and most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML code, but are not visible to a user looking at the site. For each web page, be sure to include the appropriate keywords in the all the page tags. Make the description as interesting and stimulating as possible including the keywords. Many search engines actually use the meta description as the citation displayed on a search!

4. Use the keywords in your contents. Make sure that the content of each web page contains relevant citations to your keywords. This is important. However, be warned not to overdo them either. Too much of them and your webpage will get discounted by the search engines.

And yes, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does work! I have seen my own web pages progress from virtually nonexistent ranking to a soaring one. Perhaps not to the top as yet, but still the effect is tremendous, and in a positive way.

The Pros and Cons of Organic SEO

There are many benefits or pros for utilizing organic search engine optimization. Some of the main pros are ones that are usually of main concern with most people starting a business, and that is cost. Organic search is generally not as expensive as other means of search engine optimization such as a campaign that is sponsored. If you are able to implement the means of the organic search engine optimization yourself then you are really in the clear for saving money. The only costs that are usually racked up by organic optimization are from bringing in an outside company to do the work. Of course if you don't know what you are doing when it comes to SEO then this might be your only option. While it is not that difficult it can be time consuming and you do have to know how to do it right.

Why is Organic search engine optimization better?

* Organic listings usually result in more click throughs by web searchers as these listings are usually pretty objective and unbiased. The fact which has been determined by statistical analysis is that more people do click on organic searches than on the sponsored or paid for listings. Most results in the search engines, especially Google tend to be organic. Organic results are also seem to last longer. If you spend the time and the work then you have a greater shot at staying on the top of the searches. It beats hoping that you don't run out of money to pay for your listing. Some organic searches have lasted for months and even years. The fact that they are so cost effective makes organic searches a great ROI or return on investment.

So What are the Cons?

There seem to be many more benefits of using organic search than there are cons; however, there are some cons. Organic results can be hard to measure in the way of analytics. This is a pain for some people especially ones that want to have everything documented and analyzed. Organic search engine optimization can also take a lot of time. The paid campaigns are immediate but for organic results you have to learn to be patient. It can take weeks and even months to start to see your rankings start to go up. The fact that it is hard to put a dollar value on organic searches can make it difficult for a company to justify spending money on it. With some people it is all about what can be seen on paper and this is not always something that can be shown with organic searches.

Is it worth it or not?

Whether you use organic search engine optimization or if you decide to go ahead and pay for a campaign, such as a pay per click, it really up to you and your circumstances. Organic searches have many pros and also some cons. You have to decide if the pros or the cons weigh heavier for you. If you have the time to put into making yourself a successful seo campaign then it seems that organic searches might work for you. If you don't have the time but perhaps you have the money then you can pay an outside company to take care of this for you. However if you want to jump right on up to the top of the list, you can pay for a pay per click campaign. Just remember that if you don't optimize your site if you run out of money then you are going to plummet in ranks.

How To Get High Page Rank Links For Free

Using social bookmarking or social media websites is a relatively easy way to get traffic to your website. These resources can be used very successfully to not only help your website with getting direct traffic from these sites, but also help with getting your website into the search engines for the keywords you’re going after.

The first thing to do is to compose your article, your blog post, or your web page. You can use any number of free websites to create your content. This is the first thing that needs to happen before you’ll get the benefits of social networking for your site specifically. You can always start with other people’s websites or web pages, but typically you’ll get the most benefit by doing some of both.

Once you’re ready to go with your blog post or article, you’ll need to setup new accounts with the social bookmarking sites you can find on socialmarker.com. The advantage of using a service like this is that you’ll be able to bookmark your articles or blog posts with one main website instead of having to repeat the process and visit multiple websites with each bookmarking process.

The title should have your main keyword phrase and the title of your blog post or article. These may match some of the time, or most of the time, but when you don’t have the keyword, add it unless it makes the keyword too long.

The description is another part of using socialmarker.com. Use this description as a strong call to action to get people to your website. You obviously don’t want to deceive people into visiting by promising them something that isn’t there, but make sure that in the description, you give a compelling reason for people to want to read more or find out more information.

The url or web address that you’re prompted for should be relatively self-explanetory. In any case, you need to make sure that you’re using the web address of the exact blog post instead of just the main domain name of the website.

Tags are also important because they are what you’ll use to get the individual “tag” pages ranked. These tag pages, especially using the long tail keywords or keyword phrases with little competition. This means that you can leverage the search engines to the point where you get not only your blog post ranked, but possibly several of your individual bookmark pages ranked including the tag pages.

These are some relatively easy ways to get traffic back to your website. One of the things about this is that it becomes difficult to stay organized. I personally don’t try too hard to stay organized on this as I do have analytics installed on my website so I can track where most of my traffic comes from. You’ll tend to see patterns that some sites will work better than others at generating traffic.