|
SEO 101:
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Myths & Facts
- Submission and Spidering
- Submission
- The spider keeps on comin'
- Removing barriers to spidering
- Keywords
- Avoid single-word terms
- Avoid terms that are too broad
- Avoid terms that are too specific
- Avoid terms that are unpopular
- Avoid highly-competitive terms
- Mine your server reports
- Target word variants and word order
- Ranking Factors
- Content is King
- One-page factors
- Page Weight
- Dead Links
- META tags
- Unknown Factors
- NON-Ranking Factors
- META Keywords
- ALT text
- Title attribute
- Web Standards
- Dedicated IP address
- Changing hosts or IP's
- Adsense
- Resubmitting a site
- Penalties
- Over-Optimization penalties
- Non-WWW penalties
- Black Hat SEO penalties
- Paid Links penalty
- Duplicate Content penalty
- Why did my site disappear?!
- Black Hat SEO
- Invisible text
- Cloaking
- Keyword stuffing
- Doorway Pages
- Orphaned Pages
- Spam
- Links
- Anchor Text
- Links in the body copy
- Internal Links
- PageRank
- Backlinks
- Reciprocal Links
- Link Farms and Directories
- Buying and Selling Links
- Pages not passing PR
- Link Age
- Relevance and Authority
- Suspicious Activity
- Splitting PR (removing or forcing theWWW)
- Summary of link factors
- Changing domains, and renaming pages
- Move a whole site
- Move a directory to a new domain
- Move specific pages
- Advanced Redirecting
- Hiring professional help
- Summarized recommendations
- Further Resources
Last Update: Jan. 2008
|
|
Keywords are the words
you want to rank well for.
"Keywords" is somewhat of a misnomer, since when we
say keywords we're actually talking about multi-word
phrases.
You may want to put some thought into the keywords you
want to target. Yes, I've said ad nauseum that you should
just focus on building a good website and not worry about
the SEO. That's true, but you can cross that line just a
little bit by thinking about what phrases you hope your page
will match for when creating that page.
|
Long tail
-- search queries that individually aren't searched
that often, but all of which together account for
most of your search traffic.
|
A common misconception is that most of your traffic will
come from a handful of 2- to 3-word "money phrases". But
on a good information-rich site, you'll get traffic from all
many of searches that you never thought of, many of them 4+
words in length.Yesterday the top 5 searches into my site
comprised only 14% of my total search traffic. The
top ten comprised only 20%. Does this concern me? Not at
all. If the only traffic I could depend on were the
few money terms I optimized for then I wouldn't get much
traffic. I love the fact that I get
|
Traffic
-- the visitors who come to your website.
|
tons of traffic for phrases I didn't specifically target.
This is known as getting the long tail. Jakob Nielsen
demonstrates this in
graphical form by showing how most sites could easily
enjoy more traffic simply by adding content.
Even though a good site will get most if its traffic
from the long tail, it doesn't hurt to eek out better
performance by targeting some specific keyword phrases,
and that's what the rest of this page is about. But as you
read, bear in mind that the
keywords you're targeting are not the be-all and end-all of
how you expect visitors to find your site.
Keywords in general
The best keywords are 2- to 4-word phrases that
accurately describe what you offer using everyday language
that searchers are likely to type in, and which aren't so
competitive that you have no chance of getting on the front
page. If your keywords are too general then they'll likely
be too competitive, and even if you rank well on them your
traffic might not convert well, since searchers are usually
looking for something specific. But if your keywords are
too specific then few people will search for your
terms and you'll get few potential visitors.
Note that since the engines rank pages, not sites, you
will target different keywords on different pages. You might
go for a more general term on your home page, and more
specific terms on your inside pages.
Common mistakes in selection of search terms include
targeting:
- Single-word terms
- Terms that are way too broad, and not focused to what
you offer
- Terms that are too specialized, which nobody searches
for
- Terms which are unpopular
- Highly-competitive terms which you can't hope to rank
well for
We'll explore each of these in detail. And note that in
the discussion that follows, when we say "optimize", we're
simply referring to putting the keywords in the
<TITLE> tag and in the body copy of the page.
Avoid Single-Word
Terms
|
SEO --
Search Engine Optimizer, a professional skilled
in getting websites to rank well. Also
stands for search engine
optimization.
The term SEO is somewhat of a misnomer
because improving ranking these days usually
takes more than just optimizing the actual text
on a page, it also involves getting a lot of
high quality, relevant inbound links.
|
Single-word terms are usually a poor choice for
optimizing. That's because they're too broad, and they're
too competitive. Most SEO's won't touch single-word
terms for this reason. Two- and three-word phrases are
not only easier to rank for, they send you much higher
quality traffic.
When we're searching for something ourselves, most of
us know that one-word searches aren't very useful for
getting the results we want. Think about it: When was the
last time you found what you were looking for by typing a
single word into Google? Probably the first time you ever
tried a single-word search you got a list of results that
weren't what you wanted. You then added another word or
two to try to refine your search. After having the
experience of not finding what you were looking for with
single-word searches a few times you began automatically
typing at least two or three words in when doing
searches. (Either that, or you're spending your time
wading through irrelevant search results for the
single-word term you typed in.)
So it's funny that when it comes time to pick search
terms for our own site, many of us magically forget that
we don't use single-word terms in our own searches. But
to have a successful website -- or a successful business
for that matter -- it's important to put yourself in your
customers' shoes, and think like they do. And most of
them won't be using single-word terms. Those few who do
will be lost among the others who are searching for that
same term but had something else in mind besides what you
offer.
Besides the fact that single-word terms are too broad,
they're also almost impossible to rank well for, because
there are too many competing websites. If you want to
rank well for "writer" then you're competing with every
site that uses the word "writer" anywhere on the page --
and there are 11.6 million of them. But target "real
estate writer" and your competition plummets to only 1.2
million. Go with "freelance real estate writer" and now
you're down to 48,700. You get the idea. (Of course, you
don't want your search terms to be too specific.
We'll cover that in a minute.)
Avoid single-word search terms because
they're generally too broad and too competitive.
Avoid terms that are too
broad
Terms can be too broad even if they're two or
more words. But we'll use a single word in our
example, because it's a pretty good example.
Let's say your business is decorating cakes in
Portland, Oregon. You decide you want a top 10 ranking
for "cakes". Will that be good for your business? No,
because the overwhelming majority of your visitors
searching for just "cakes" aren't potential customers.
They're more likely looking for recipes or nutritional
information. Even if they're looking for a cake decorator
they're probably not looking for one in Portland. The
bottom line is, it's not how well your site ranks for a
given term, or even how much traffic you get from your
ranking; it's how many potential customers visit
your site. A thousand random surfers aren't worth as
much as one qualified lead. Ignore the number of raw
hits; you want visitors who are actually interested in
what you have to offer. The raw number of visitors is
meaningless. For you, one visitor searching for "cake
decorator portland" would be worth more than 1000 people
searching for "cake".
And not only is "cake decorator portland" more
valuable to you as a keyword, it's easier to get a
good ranking for. That's because there's less
competition. The more specialized your keywords are, the
less competition you'll have. A search for "accountants"
on Google yields over 1.7 million results. Yet a search
for "naked accountants in albuquerque" yields only 115.
(And no, none of those results are for actual naked
accountants in Albuquerque, but you get the point.)
In fact, adding the city name where your business is
located to your web pages is one of the quickest ways to
bring in more qualified traffic.
Going back to the cake example, and the idea of
ranking well for the one-word term "cake" even though
most people searching for that aren't potential
customers, is there any harm in having visitors who
aren't potential customers? Sure there is. You waste
users' time if you put a highly specialized site in front
of them when they were searching for something
general. If you've ever been frustrated by having to
wade through irrelevant sites to find what you were
looking for, then you can appreciate that it's common
courtesy to not put your site in front of users who
likely have no interest in it.
Getting visitors you don't want to your site also
increases your bandwidth, and possibly your webhosting
bill, and might even slow down your site down so much
that potential customers are frustrated and click off
your site. These are less likely consequences, but
they're possible.
It's not how many people go to your site, it's how
many actually buy something. It's important to stop
focusing on the number of hits you get and start focusing
on the quality of hits. This is hard for many site
owners to do, but it's essential nonetheless.
Back when it was easier to improve your site's rank
(before the search engines started weeding out all the
tricks), many site owners would get their sites to rank
well on porn keywords, even if the sites had nothing to
do with porn, figuring that searches for porn were very
popular. Well, they were right, but all that traffic they
got was useless, since the visitors clicked off those
sites just as fast as they clicked on. What did the site
owners think would be going through the visitors' minds?
"Well, I was looking for sex pictures, but now
that I'm here, I think I will refinance my
mortgage!"
This is so important it bears repeating: Untargeted
traffic is useless. The number of visitors you get is
meaningless. It's the number of qualified visitors
you get that counts.
Avoid terms that are too
specific
As we saw earlier, the more specific the search,
the less the competition for the search term. And the
less the competition, the easier it is to rank well on
that term. Expanding on our example from earlier:
|
Number of Google
Matches
|
Term
|
|
11,600,000
|
writer
|
|
1,200,000
|
real estate writer
|
|
48,000
|
freelance real estate writer
|
|
9,000
|
freelance real estate writer los angeles
|
But of course there's a catch: The more specific the
search, the fewer people actually search for that term.
Which is another way of saying that as competition goes
down, so does the popularity of the search term. We can
graph this concept like this:
Avoid unscrupulous SEO's who don't consider the
popularity of the terms they suggest. Anyone can get a
front-page ranking for "cheap freelance real estate
writer in hollywood california". But since nobody
searches for that, your #1 ranking would be useless.
Terms must be specific, but terms that are TOO
specific are useless because nobody searches for
them.
Avoid terms that are
unpopular
If you pick unpopular keywords, your effort
could be wasted. As an exaggerated example, just because
the phrase "quadraphonic
bluejay" is only two words long doesn't mean anyone's
going to be searching for it. Ranking #1 on terms that
nobody is searching for is just as bad as ranking #300
for terms that everybody is searching for. You can't get
the traffic if people aren't using your search terms, no
matter how well you're ranked.
That doesn't mean you should avoid optimizing for
lesser-used keywords at all. As long as a rare keyword
search brings in some qualified traffic, then it's
useful to your business.
Of course, it might not be possible to find popular
search terms if what your business offers isn't very
popular itself. If your business is refurbishing pogo
sticks, you can't expect to find a search term that's
both relevant and popular. (Though if refurbishing pogo
sticks is your only business, you've got other
problems.)
There are many online tools that can tell you how many
searches are being performed for specific keywords, as
well as suggesting related keywords to optimize for:
- Keyword
Discovery. (recommended) The best
service, uses data from 180 engines including Google
and Yahoo, endorsed by a slew of the biggest names in
SEO. $50/mo. or $400/yr.
- WordTracker.
Similar to the above, but uses data from fewer search
engines, and doesn't include Google. $50/mo. or
$244/yr.
- Google
Adwords. Adwords is Google's pay-per-click
advertising program. In setting up an ad, you type in
a list of keywords that should cause your ad to be
displayed when a user searches for those keywords.
Google then estimates how many clicks per day you can
expect your ad to receive. By comparing which keywords
Google thinks will generate more clicks, you can see
which keywords users are more likely to use for their
searches. You don't actually have to make an ad go
live, and if you don't then it's free.
- Google
Trends. A free tool that lets you compare the
traffic that two different search phrases get.
- Overture
Keyword Selector. Only Yahoo data, but hey, it's
free.
Make certain your search terms are popular, or at
least as popular as possible given what your market
is.
Avoid highly competitive
terms
You might have found a term that's both popular
and highly relevant to what you actually offer. But if
too many other sites are competing for that same term,
you might not be able to rank well for it, or you might
rank lower than you'd like.
Let's look at a practical example. Back when I did
SEO-for-hire, one of my clients who makes hand-crafted
personalized
wedding gifts wanted to rank well for the term
"wedding gifts". I advised that "wedding gifts" was ultra
competitive and that we should also target "personalized
wedding gifts" to have a better shot of getting onto the
front page of Google. Well, as it turns out, I was able
to get "wedding gifts" onto the front page after all. But
"personalized wedding gifts" ranked #2 while plain old
"wedding gifts" ranked #10.
So even if you can get on the front page for a certain
term, you might be able to rank even higher on the
front page for a less competitive term. And of course
some phrases are so competitive you won't be able to get
onto the front page at all. In this case your solution is
to find a less competitive term, usually by making it
more specialized by adding another word or two to the
search term.
Summing it up
Putting it all together, the trick is to find
search terms that are highly relevant to what you offer,
popular enough that they'll result in decent traffic to
your site, but not so competitive that you can't rank
well for them. So how do you find out where all these
criteria these intersect? How popular is popular enough,
and how competitive is too competitive? If you don't
think you can figure those things out on your own, this
is exactly the kind of thing a good SEO consultant can
help you with. He or she can evaluate your search terms
and find those with the best fit for your website.
Tip: Mine your server
reports
Server reports are a good source for keyword
research. If you have a decent webhost such as
Dreamhost,
they allow you to access reports showing such things as
how many people visited your site, which pages they
visited, and what search terms they used to find your
site. The most popular reporting software programs are
Analog and Awstats. If your host doesn't use one of
these, ask if they will install it for you. If they don't
offer it, and they won't, and the statistics they offer
aren't as detailed and easy to use as Analog's or
Awstats, then this is an important enough issue that you
should consider switching webhosts.
Your server reports will show what search terms people
used to find your site. You will probably discover that
they used terms that you hadn't thought of, and that you
happen to have a fair ranking for those terms, perhaps on
page 2 or 3, or maybe near the bottom of page 1. Once you
discover these terms, you can optimize your pages for
them to get a better ranking for them.
Here's a real-world example. I run a
site about Las Vegas. One of the pages was about
roller coasters in the area. When I created the site I
wasn't careful to write good <TITLE> tags for the
pages. In checking my server stats I found that a few
people were finding the site through a search on "las
vegas roller coasters", though my ranking for that term
was mediocre. But knowing I was at least on the radar for
that particular search, I put that phrase in the
<TITLE>, and soon got a #1 match for "las vegas
roller coasters".
Tip: Consider word variants, and
word order
Most search engines treat plurals different from
singular. A search for "wedding gift" returns different
results than "wedding gifts". If you have the resources,
optimize for both versions. If you optimize for only one,
then in most cases you'll pick the plural version, since
that's more popular among users. Likewise, make certain
to optimize for variations of compound words. For
example, to Google, "web site" is different from
"website".
Word order matters. A search for "personalized wedding
gifts" returns a different set of results than "wedding
gifts personalized". Again, if you have the resources,
optimize for all variations. If not, pick what you think
will be the most common term.
Related articles
Now continue this series below...
|
