SiteProNews

As more websites compete for valuable search engine “real estate,” Search Engine Optimization is becoming much more complex.

And *keyword selection* remains one of the most important (yet least understood) pieces of the puzzle.

“Why keyword selection is so important and how to select the best keywords for your website”

To clear up the mystery, let’s break it down into bite-sized pieces by answering our most frequently asked questions about keyword selection:

“What’s the difference between a keyword and a keyword phrase? And which should I use?”

Put simply, a keyword is a single word, like “Maui.” But a keyword phrase is a more descriptive string of two or more words, like “Maui vacations.” Your approach to keyword selection will vary, depending on your industry. For certain niche markets, using single words can be a good strategy (as long as they are specific to your product or service). But regardless of your industry…

Well-researched keyword phrases will attract quality, targeted visitors to your website who *specifically* want what you are selling.

Let’s assume you sell Maui vacations, and your website is listed at the top of the search results for the keywords “Maui” and “Maui vacations.” Let’s look at the characteristics of two groups of visitors you’d attract.

Those who perform a search on “Maui” are searching for a wide variety of topics. Such as Maui’s history and culture, snorkeling, botanic gardens, hiking trails, sailing, golfing, and yes - some will be looking for Maui vacations. But only a small percentage of the people who perform a search on the keyword “Maui” are qualified prospect for your vacation packages.

Now think about the prospects who find you by searching for “Maui vacations.” Every prospect who performs this search is a qualified prospect for you. And by getting a top ranking with this more descriptive keyword phrase, you attract people who are more likely to become paying customers!

You see, someone who wants to take a vacation to Maui is not likely to search for “Maui.” They’re not going to search for “Vacations.” And they’re not going to search for “Hawaii” either. They’re much more likely to enter a keyword phrase like “Maui vacations.”

Today, more than ever, your ideal prospects are going to enter precisely what they want to find, rather than general, open-ended terms. Which means your keyword selection must target your ideal customer with laser-beam focus.

At the same time, the search engines and directories themselves are also becoming much more strict with the pages that they’ll accept and index. They’ll be watching your submissions like a hawk to make sure that they’re completely relevant to the topic reflected by your keyword phrase.

In a previous article, we weighed the pros and cons of doing your search engine positioning yourself versus hiring a reputable company to handle this time consuming task for you. Many of you have wisely realized that it can be much more time-effective and cost-effective to leave your search engine placement in the hands of experts, so you van focus on your core business.

So the most important question of all now becomes:

“If I hire a company to do my search engine placement for me, should I be expected to provide my own keywords and keyword phrases, or do they have a responsibility to advise me?”

Frankly, any company that doesn’t provide hands on consultation in this area is not helping you to maximize your search engine rankings. Keyword selection is the entire foundation on which your search engine campaign is built. Can you imagine hiring a contractor to build your house… only to have him say, “Okay, YOU lay all the bricks and pour the concrete - then I’ll do the rest?”

It’s senseless.

---

Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing for EcomBuffet.com. Over the past 10 years Jennifer’s expertise in marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on SEO and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Jennifer is the editor of the popular Spotlight on Success: SEO and Marketing newsletter. Follow Jennifer and stay current on SEO, marketing, social media and more. http://twitter.com/EcomBuffet

Tags: keywords, Writing

Back links are really important in the world of Search Engine Optimization. If you want your site to do well in search engine listing results you have to have a good page ranking. If you want a higher page ranking you’re going to need to create lots and lots of back links.

It takes time and talent to do this but it will be worth it. Google receives 3,000 search inquiries a second. That’s 180,000 per minute. If you want your share of this avalanche of free business, you will need to work hard and work smart.

Back links are simply a link from somewhere else to your site. It sounds easy to create them and it is easy, but you will need thousands of these links and you will need new ones every month. They may only take a minute to create but to create hundreds or thousands take lots of time and talent.

How Many Links Do You Need?

Lots and lots. You need more than the competitor that is ranked number one with Google. If you do that, you will be number one. Let’s take a look at a few areas and see how many we would need to dominate that field. - Top company in “search engine optimization” had 52,100 links - Top company in “web site design” had 54,200 links - Top Company in “custom T-shirts” had 72,000 links - Top Company in “Tiffany Lamps” had 825

As you can see, the more competitive the area, the more links it takes to be number one. Plan to add as many links as you can every month for as long as you stay in business. Remember that your competitors are adding new links every month too, so the number of links you need keeps growing.

Beware Of Short Cuts To Success

As you surf the web, you will see sites that advertise short cuts to link creation. They offer to sell you hundreds of links. As you evaluate these services, realize that the quality of your links is important to your success. The sites you link to must concern themselves with similar topics to your site or they may be disregarded by the search engines. Also, the quality of the linking site is important. If the site is known for spam or porn, you may be seriously penalized search engine rankings just for being associated with it. Buying back links is fraught with danger. Choosing the site you link and actually creating the link to is a much better alternative.

Using Articles To Create Links

Writing informative articles is a great way to create back links. You can use the articles on your site and publish them to article directory sites. Every site that publishes your article will create a back link to your site. Other sites may pick up your article and publish it creating “viral” publishing and more links. You should assign someone to write one or two articles every month without fail or hire an outside source to do this for you.

Using Video To Create Links

Another great way to create links and sell as well is to create video clips that tell your story or sell your product in an interesting way. You can use these clips to sell on your site and you can publish them to video sites like youtube.com, metacafe.com, viddler.com and many others. These get great rankings in the search engines. You should assign someone to write one or two articles every month without fail or hire an outside source to do this for you.

Using Social Networks To Create Links

Social networks like myspace.com are great ways to create quality links. Myspace is one of the most visited sites on the web, so links from it make your site rank as very popular. To create links from social sites, open an account , link to others with similar interests, and make comments that include a link to your site.

Using Blogs To Create Links Blogs want comments from readers. Visit blogs on similar topics to yours and on any popular blogs, leave a comment on a posting. Your comment can contain a link to your site. This should not be just self serving but should continue the dialog. For example, if your site deals with web marketing and you see a blog article on meta tags, you might make a comment like, “excellent article with good points. I also found good meta tag tools at www.yoursite.com” One great way to find good blogs is to set up a Google alert for all keywords you use and you will be notified anytime a post is made with those key words. Then, you simply visit the blog and make a comment.

That Sounds Like A Lot Of Work

It is a huge amount of work but just keep remembering those 180,000 inquiries per second. If you do not have the time to do this kind of work, there are micro ad agencies on the web who can do it for you. Outsourcing this work is very cost effective as it allows you to keep selling and managing while someone else creates the links that drive your site to the top of the inquiry list.

---

Carl Davidson - This article discusses how to create profitable back links for generating web traffic through content creation. It disucsses using artilces, videos, blogs and social networking to create web traffic and successfully create web traffic though mweb marketing that does not cost time. Many companies outsource this work to firms like ours. Visit http://www.proto-sell.com . This article was produced by Sales And Management Solutions Inc.

Tags: backlinks, Linking Strategies, Web 2.0

Over the years, webmasters have been told that they should want to avoid Blackhat SEO techniques in connection with their own websites. In general, I agree with this statement. But, by obtaining a deeper understanding of Blackhat search engine optimization, one could actually learn a bit about how to better his or her own positioning in the search engine results.

White Hat vs. Black Hat Search Optimization

Whitehat and Blackhat SEO is a comparison that is a take-off from the old cowboy westerns, where the good guys always wore white hats and the bad guys always wore black hats. So, in theory, we can assume that Whitehat practitioners are the good guys of SEO, and Blackhat practitioners are the bad guys of the industry.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: black hat seo, SE Optimization, seo

In an official post on the Google Blog called Introduction to Google Ranking, Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team, has revealed some fascinating insights into the way Google search results are collated and ranked. In the process, he’s also busted a few common myths surrounding their elusive algorithm.

Here are some of the tidbits from Amit’s post that I found most interesting:

• While web search is the most used Google search service, the same ranking algorithms are also used, with modifications, for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search and Book Search.
• Amit claims there is no manual intervention of search results, meaning that the final ordering of the results is decided by their algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by Google.
• Whenever Google return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country, they use that as an inspiration for future improvements. In Google’s opinion, a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to their ranking algorithm.
• Google make about ten ranking changes every week and their engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query.
• Google stand by their clear written policies for websites and do take action on sites that are in violation of those policies or for other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc).