Article Categories

• Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogs & Podcasts
• Branding
• Business
• Cloud Technology
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Google
• Keywords
• LinkedIn
• Linking Strategies
• List Building
• Local Search
• Marketing
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile Applications
• Page Rank
• Pay Per Click
• RSS
• Sales Copy
• SE Optimization
• SE Positioning
• SE Submission
• SE Tactics
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking
• SPAM
• SPN Featured Articles
• Technology
• Video Marketing
• Virtual Office/Telecommuting
• Web 2.0
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Webmasters
• Website Promotion
• Website Traffic
• WordPress
• Writing

SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

Holiday Tales: 10 SEO Search-Ranking Myths

By Tola Ajayi in Featured

SEO myths become larger every year. Some are based partially in reality, and others have spread because it’s often difficult to prove what particular SEO action caused a resulting search engine reaction.

For example, you might make a change to something on a page of your site, and a few days later notice that your ranking in Google for a particular keyword phrase has changed. You might naturally assume that your page change is what caused the ranking change. But that’s not necessarily so. There are numerous reasons why your ranking may have changed, and in many cases they actually have nothing to do with anything that you did.

Mixing up cause and effect is one of the most common things new SEOs do. If it were affecting only their own work, it wouldn’t be so bad, but unfortunately, the clueless often spread their misinformation to other unsuspecting newbies on forums and blogs, which in turn creates new myths. It’s always interesting to see how people are so willing to believe anything they have read or heard without ever checking it out for themselves.

Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines. This may have helped once upon a time, but it’s been at least 5 or 6 years since that’s been necessary.

Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap. If your site was built correctly, i.e., it’s crawler-friendly, you certainly don’t need a Google Sitemap. It won’t hurt you to have one, and you may be interested in Google’s other Webmaster Central Tools, but having a Google Sitemap isn’t going to get you ranked better.

Stirring Up SEO Trouble

By Jill Whalen in Featured

Hi, my name is Jill, and I’m a %#@$ stirrer!

When you’ve been in any industry as long as I’ve been in the search marketing industry (going on 16 years now), it’s easy to get bored occasionally. At those times I find myself stirring up the sh… stuff on Twitter or in comments on others’ blogs, forums, etc. You’d think at my age (I’ll be 50 this summer) I’d know better. And yet, I continue to do it. I’m not sure if it’s a conscious choice, or just a crazy compunction, but no matter the reason, I’ve been on a roll the last few weeks.

As part of my stirring, I often write what appear to be outrageous tweets and comments on a subject near and dear to SEO hearts (a few still do have hearts, you know . The funny part is how quickly people will jump on a comment that seems a little “off” to them. I imagine it’s partly their own boredom or perhaps they’re trying to find the next interesting thing to blog about. Others surely just enjoy saying, “Jill Whalen has finally lost her marbles!”

It’s Hard to Argue With Logic

But I love it when they challenge me on my little points of outrageousness because every seemingly nutty comment I write is backed up by a well-reasoned, logical message for which I’ve spent ages preparing — usually in the form of an article I’ve written in the past. While they can challenge the kooky sound byte by using it out of context or saying it’s so stupid or how it’s finally time to lock me up in a mental institution, they can rarely refute my actual reasoning – if and when they read it. It’s much more fun to trash what they *think* I mean.

Reader Rescue : How Do I Tackle Regional Keyword Issues in SEO?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Hey Kalena,

I’m trying to optimize a site for the first time. Its a fashion jewelry site. I have come up against a couple of stumbling blocks that I need a little clarification on. One is the target market – its a New Zealand website, but we want to target New Zealander’s, Australians and the rest of the world this brings up issues of spelling – do we focus on Jewellery (New Zealand/British spelling), Jewelry (US spelling, but where a lot of the current customers come from) or Jewellry (a common misspelling).

Secondly, I’m having a hard time trying to choose my keyword phrases. Silver jewelry and costume jewelry (which seems to be the most common way people search for fashion jewelry, even though fashion jewelry sounds so much more modern!! – found out through the Google Keyword tool) seem to be the best as they are well searched for. I want to be more specific however i.e *women’s silver jewelry*, or *silver jewellery nz* or *buy silver jewelry* etc. but the search volume according to the Google Keyword tool is well below 20 per day.

Can you please suggest what I should do in this situation?

Thank you!
Mitchell

————————————–

Hi Mitchell

To answer your questions:

1) The regional spelling issue is a tricky one. There are a few ways you can approach this – do you have the .com as well as the regional Top Level Domains (TLD)  .co.nz and .com.au? If so, you can use the American spelling on the .com domain and the British spelling on the regional domains. However, this may create duplicate content issues unless you block robots from the near-duplicate pages.

Alternatively, you can simply use the appropriate language version for your largest target market as the default throughout your site. For example, although we are based in New Zealand, our main target market for Search Engine College is the US, so we use American English throughout our web site. Most regional markets will understand that American English is common on the Internet, so you should not isolate them by doing this.

Another, trickier, option is to use British English on your main site to attract organic local search traffic and then create a Pay Per Click advertising campaign (e.g. Google AdWords) with tailored landing pages and ad text using American English to suit your other markets. Then, run your PPC campaign targeting only those countries where American English is used more commonly, making sure you block search engine robots from indexing your American English landing pages. You could do the reverse if you decide American English should be your default language.

As for misspellings? Those are fantastic for picking up extra traffic your competitors are missing. Best way to get that traffic is by targeting the misspelled keywords within your Pay Per Click campaign or by including the misspellings in your Page Titles and META Tags (the META Keywords tag is a particularly good place for them if you don’t want human visitors to see them).

2) You are spot on wanting to target the longer tail keyword phrases such as *women’s silver jewelry* and *buy silver jewelry* because it is these specific phrases that are more likely to bring you qualified visitors who are more ready to purchase. But the beauty of targeting these longer phrases is that they also contain the more popular shorter search terms such as *silver jewelry* and *women’s jewelry*. So, by default, you are also optimizing your web site for these shorter phrases by integrating the longer ones into your tags and page copy.

Choosing long tail phrases that contain more generic popular search ones is a great way to save valuable keyword real estate in your page titles and meta tags. For example, instead of having to include both *buy silver jewellery*, AND *silver jewellery* in your meta description tag, you only need to include the longer one as it covers both. A META Description tag of “Buy women’s silver jewelry from French Fashions” sounds a lot less redundant than “Buy silver jewelry and women’s silver jewelry and silver jewelry from French Fashions”, don’t you agree?

When researching keywords for multiple international markets, remember to use a keyword research tool that offers regional search data so you can pinpoint what persons are searching for in each country. Apart from regional spelling, regional jargon such as (accommodation vs lodging) can impact keyword search trends considerably.

————————————–

Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

The Importance Of Long Tail Keywords Since The Last Google Algorithm Update

By Jackie de Burca in Featured

Google introduced another algorithm update in May 2010 and many webmasters have seen a huge drop in traffic from Google for keyword phrases that are three or more keywords long, known as long tail keywords.

Google is now able to index longer keyword phrases more accurately. It seems that Google guessed the best pages for long keyword phrases until recently based on other signals and keywords on the indexed pages. The new Google patent indicates that Google now has the computing power to index longer keyword phrases on web pages instead of guessing them.

What does this mean to business owners, webmasters and SEO companies? It means that those who have taken the time to anticipate the need of their customers and Google’s customers will be rewarded.

Whether in SEO terms or in pay per click advertising terms, longtail keywords are highly valuable. Think about what your search process is yourself and you will more than likely realise this.

The average person searching at the research phase will use a competitive generic keyword such as “party dress”. Not long after searching and seeing some high prices they will modify their search to something like “cheap party dress.” Now we are already into long tail keyword territory but it can go further. As the search deepens the searcher realizes that pink is the trendy colour at the moment, or pink is what she fancies wearing on her next night out, so then she is using the long tail keyword “cheap pink party dress.”

The more experienced the searcher the more likely she will start off with this right at the beginning so as not to waste any time. And in general people are becoming far better at searching as the search engines continue to improve the results they show to us.

A long tail keyword means one of two things; either the person is close to making a buying decision or is an experienced searcher. Now with the Google algorithm update of May, combined with the buying profile of a long tail keyword searcher being stronger, and add in here the fact that a well optimised page for a long tail keyword has a far higher chance of getting to the first page of the SERPs then it is what they call a no-brainer.

Think about it logically, when you want to find information online on products, services or for research reasons, you want to find it quickly, you want it to be as precise as possible and give you something extra that other information has not up until that moment.

Long tail keywords can be optimised in this way. The trick here is getting into the mindset of your customer and pre-empting all the possible things they would like to know about whatever the subject of the long tail keyword is and then going at least one step further. You will create a page which is resource, which means customers will like it and sites which see it as an authority may link to it.

On some of the search engine forums SEOs have stated that this algorithm which was named Mayday by some and Black Tuesday by others has had a disastrous effect on some well established sites which did not have enough content in deep pages.

Whether you are a small business owner, or a medium to large business owner, all the signs show that drilling down into your site with niche information across all aspects of your site based on long tail keywords is a good way to go. Long tail keywords are important both to your customers and the search engines; ignore them at your peril!

---

Jackie is co-owner of CWA Europe which is an International Search Marketing Agency. If you are not already doing it she highly recommends building long tail keywords into your online marketing strategy. http://www.cwa-europe.com/search-engine-optimisation/the-importance-of-long-tail-keywords-since-the-last-google-algorithm-update/88-10.html

Never Underestimate the Real Power of Long-Tail Keywords

By Hunter Waterhouse in Featured

Before 2010, May Day simply referred to May 1st, a celebration of the beginning of Spring, or International Workers’ Day (Labour Day), as practiced in many countries, most notably in Russia… The alternate spelling Mayday was a signal used by ships’ captains and airplane pilots to announce “Come and Help me!”, as derived from the French word, “m’aidez”…

Google’s Mayday Update

Beginning in May 2010, Mayday became the code word for a major ranking change in Google and new attacks of “Google paranoia” by webmasters everywhere…

As webmasters, we should leave the paranoia to those who truly have a reason to be paranoid, like my ex-wife and her family.

Long Tail Keyword Choice for Niche Marketing

By Dr. Christopher in Featured

Long tail marketing consists of niche marketing to a great many niches, selling small quantities of many products or services to each. Customers are targeted with “long tail keywords.” What does the term “long tail” refer to?

Chris Anderson popularized the “long tail” in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. Long tail keywords and niche marketing go together on the Internet. To see the long tail, get a spreadsheet of related keywords with their monthly searches, sort the keywords in decreasing order by searches and make a graph of the searches. You should find a very few keywords with many searches and a long tail of the distribution with few.

Most of us can successfully compete only for keywords in the tail of the distribution. The questions are: Which keywords in the tail? And compete how?

You can divide the keywords four search bands: the super, the high, the medium, and the low search keywords. The border between low and medium searches can be set to somewhere around 500 searches per month; between medium and high around 1000; and between high and super around 10,000.

You can divide the keywords into four competition bands as well: the super, the high, the middle, and the low competition keywords. The border between low and medium competing pages — pages containing the exact keyword phrase — can be set to somewhere around 10,000 searches per month; between medium and high around 20,000; and between high and super around 35,000.

To use a metaphor, the number of searches is the quality of the fruit — the higher the number of searches, the more ripe, plump, and tasty it is. The level of competition is where the fruit is on the tree. The super competitive keywords are on the tip top branches. The low competition keywords don’t even require you stretch. There are two not perfectly consistent principles for harvesting the fruit: (1) harvest the best fruit you can, and (2) pick the low-lying fruit first. Here are some suggestions on how to do that:

1. Remove the super high competition keywords from your list. You will not get that traffic.
2. Remove keywords with too high a level of competition for the number of searches. Why bother competing for them?
3. Do not target the high competition keywords first. Devote your time where it will do more immediate good.
4. Usually it is worth optimizing web pages by hand only for middle- or higher-band keywords. An exception might be for selling products with a high profit per sale — provided also the searcher is intending to buy.
5. You can devote web pages to low search and competition keywords if you generate the pages. That way, you only have to create the template once, but you get to reuse it for many keywords. It would not be worth your effort to write each one individually.
6. You can use the high end of the low band keywords in alternative titles of ezine articles. When you submit the articles through a submission service such as Submit Your Article or Unique Article Wizard, those services submit randomized variations of a your article to hundreds or thousands of article directories and blogs. They permit many alternate titles. You can have many articles spread around the web with titles including the low band keywords, all with less than twice the effort of submitting a single article. All these articles invite interested people to come to your web site. For the low competition keywords, appearance in a page title and page name (both of which you typically get in an article directory) may be enough to get the article listed on page one of the search results. Many page-one listings with few searches apiece is in the spirit of long-tail marketing.
7. There are a lot of searches for phrases the search engines have not seen before. You can devote a page as a destination for these very low frequency keywords. Create a page with a couple of thousand words of text filled with words and phrases related to your topic. When the search engine encounters some semantically-related but not yet indexed query, your page would be a good recommendation. You can also drop low-competition keywords into the text. They will bring a few searches themselves as well as contribute to the semantic classification of the page.

Divide your keywords by search frequency and by numbers of competing pages. It will help you plan your long-tail marketing.

---

For more information on using long tail keywords for ezine article marketing or to improve web site traffic, visit the web site http://ezinearticleshow.com/ created by Dr. Thomas Christopher, a Colorado Front Range public speaker.

7 Secrets to Successful Keyword Research

By Donna Gunter in Featured

As people search for information online, they use a series of words, what are referred to as keywords, to find the information that they are seeking. Keywords are the core of any market research conducted by an online business owner. Just like the Yellow Pages Directory groups listings by category, like “auto body shops” in the “automobile repair” category, search engines like Google and Yahoo sort by keywords so that auto body shops are found under “auto body shop” in their database.

In order to be found online by your target market, you need insight about the terms that they are using to search for a business like yours. The quickest way to gain that insight is by conducting research on possible keywords they use. However, so many of my clients conduct only very basic keyword research and miss many keywords because they don’t really delve into the problems and needs of their target market, which contain prime, keyword-rich topics they can use to be found online.

Here are 7 secrets to a successful keyword research campaign:

The Quick And Easy Way To Really Understand Long Tail Keywords

By James Gladwin in Featured

Have you heard of the 80-20 rule? Well, an Italian economist called Pareto noticed that 80% of land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. His work was taken up by others until it entered mainstream thinking. You’ve probably heard variations of what’s now become known as the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto principle. They go like this: we spend 80% of our time with 20% of our friends, or we wear 20% of our favorite clothes 80% of the time.

More generally, of course, it is a common rule of thumb in business: e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.” In business, for example, Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% percent of the errors and crashes would be eliminated.

Choosing Successful Pay Per Click Keywords

By Carl Davidson in Featured

When you choose key words for search engine optimization of your web site, it’s a good idea to choose general keywords that will draw a lot of exposure. After all, you aren’t paying for each site visitor, so the more the better. For example, the keyword “internet marketing” gets about 22 million searches per month. This is a very general keyword, but the idea with free searches is to draw even a small portion of these prospects to your site. Since it’s free, the more the merrier.

Long Tail Key Words

However, when you are paying per click, your strategies should be different. General keywords draw lots of clicks (that you pay for) but usually result in low conversion rates as they draw people with a very wide variety of needs. A better strategy is to use “log tail key words” that less people will click on but those who do will be more interested in your products or service. For example, if you set up a pay per click campaign for the keyword “internet marketing”, you would show your ad to about 22 million web surfers a month. This would be very expensive if used in a pay per click campaign. How do you choose successful long tail keywords that will draw a crowd of better prospects without making you pay for thousands of tire kickers?

Number Of Impressions

Long tail keywords draw less impressions and may seem “puny” when you look down a list of words. We are often mesmerized by key words with millions of impressions per month. The truth is that a long tail keyword that is specialized to your service is far more profitable. Remember, keywords that get 3,000 impressions per month get 100 per day. If you get 4% of the people to visit your landing page, that means 4 visits per day. If you get 10 specialized keywords at 100 per day, you are getting 40 visits per day at a much lower cost.

Cost Of Clicks

Smart keywords mean much lower cost per click. For example, the keyword “internet marketing” gets about 1 million impressions per month. The be in the first three positions for this key word costs about $6.10 per click. However, the key word “internet marketing system” gets about 2,000 impressions per month costs only $2.40 per click to be in the top 3 positions. That’s about 66% off the cost of advertising AND if you sell an internet marketing system, you will get leads that are much more qualified and ready to buy that those who click in from the general keyword.

Higher Percentage Of Clicks Lowers Your Cost Per Click

Another benefit of really focused keywords is that Google actually rewards you for high click through rates by raising your position in their results without charging more. Conversely, they charge you more per click of your ad draws a low percentage of clicks per impression. For example with the general keyword “internet marketing”, you may get less than .5% of the impressions to click. With “internet marketing systems” assuming you sell such a system, you may get 2% to 4% click through rates. Google will adjust your position accordingly. High click through rates move you up and low click through rates move you down in the results position. A good indicator of your success is your click through percentage. The higher the better. We suggest you initially set your bids for about 5th position. After a few days, if your click through percentage is high, Google may have moved you up to the third or forth position at no extra cost. This gives you a huge advantage over your competitors.

Different Ads For Different Needs

Many of our clients do not have enough ad groups in their campaigns. For best results, you need to have separate ad groups for each need you address. In our current example, let’s assume you have an ad group for “Internet Marketing System” but you also want to use the keyword “systems that sell online”. You will find that a separate ad group works using those keywords in the headline work best. You can’t fit both keywords in one ad, so we suggest different ad groups that have ads with the keyword used by the prospect to find you is in the headline of the ad. This always results in much higher click through rates,

Different Landing Pages

With ad groups designed for specific key words, you can now build separate landing pages for different keywords. Landing pages with the same heading as the headline in the ad are much more successful. Ads with a headline the same as the keyword used to find you are far more effective as well. In our example with “internet marketing system”, an ad that starts with “Internet Marketing Systems” will draw much better than any other headline. A landing page with the title and headline “Internet Marketing Systems” will also be far more successful because people looking for “internet marketing systems” will feel they have finally found what they are looking for. Most visitors will not read your page if the headline does not address their interest.

Choose more specific three or four word keyword phrases and you will make money with pay per click advertising. If you stick to general words, you will get lots of impressions and lots more clicks but your clicks will cost more and sell less.

---

http://www.webstar.biz The article by Carl Davidson discusses how to choose keywords for pay per click campaigns. If your keywords are too broad, you will be paying for click that don’t sell. If your keywords are too narrow, you will have low impressions and sales. For a free analysis of your keywords, call us at 716-504-0314

Adsense and Keywords

By Phillip Booker in Featured

I need to start with an analogy to explain the importance of keywords. Your selection of keywords is the ‘heart of your business’ as far as adsense income is determined. The heart, yes the most important organ of your body, not your leg or your wrist, but your heart. If your heart is failing, putting a bandage on your wrist isn’t going to work.

So here is the crunch… If your adsense income has dropped or you need to build an adsense business, then look after your heart. It is the life blood of the system, it pumps the money into your adsense account.

It has taken a few hard lessons for me to understand this principle. This is how I felt the pump, pump, pump send a light bulb moment to my brain. It started when the town I live in lost the internet connection. Phew… I’m sure that everyone has lost a connection for as little as ten minutes and thought their world had ended. But I lost the internet connection for three days. I got on with other stuff as you do, but what I did do is re-read some of the books I had purchased.

Of course, years on from getting more knowledge, to re-read an ebook generally is boring; and most of it was, but I kept stumbling, pausing and contemplating on the keyword section of the ebooks. If keywords are the heart of a business you need to dedicate more time and effort to keep them healthy.

If you are starting out, use the system below. If you already have adsense websites and the income has dropped, you need to be aware that trends change and the keyword you chose a year ago may not be the major one being searched for today. Go through this procedure and add another 250 pages.

We all use the keyword tools available and knock up a 5,000 keyword list in half an hour, spend another hour sifting through and choosing our prime keywords. That’s it we’re done. But… would you take an hour and a half to mould and create a heart and expect to live beyond a few months?

Once your website is up and running, I would guess you must spend 2 or 3 hours a day trying to get traffic to your website. This effort could be a little wasted if your keyword choice is hurried.

Here is the best way to choose keywords to maximize your search engine positions. Let’s assume that you need 250 keywords. Up to 50 of those should be first tier. These should include all the main associated keywords and most important should be ‘high’ paying keywords too. These you can check through either the free Google Keyword Tool or through varying software keyword tools.

These first 50 keywords will be the fiercely competed words and as a consequence you’ll not rank very high for them initially. Yet long term, the optimization, the blogs, social networking and bookmarking should help rise those 50 web pages nearer the top of the search rankings.

The other 200 keywords you choose will be ‘long tail keywords’. You may start with a 1,000 to sift through to finish up with 200. First you need to check each keyword separately. Allocate a day to do this, because the effort you put in now will serve you well. The purpose of checking as I’m going to mention is so that you get onto the front page of Google as soon as the search engines crawl your deep inside pages.

The first thing to check is if that long tail keyword gets traffic each month. Between 50 to 500 hits per month is fine for long tail keywords. Above those hits per month and you’ll probably find that too many other websites are competing for that keyword. Below that amount and you may find the quantity of hits vary from a few hits a month to zero hits.

Once you have a selection that meet the first criteria, then you need to check the competing sites. Is there 2,000 or is there 8? To do this you need to put this search query into Google – inurl:my-keywords – replacing my-keywords with your own of course. Use both variations, with dashes separating the words and without dashes. Make a note of the total of competing websites. Once you gone through them all you can make a decision on which keywords are going to get you on the front page of Google.

Even if your web page isn’t optimized too well, if there are only 8 competing websites, you’ll appear on the front page. This will mean a steady but small flow of traffic 50 to 500 hits per month. Multiply that by the sites with long tail keywords and the minimum you could expect, once the search engines have listed the inner pages, is 200 x 50 = 10,000.

There are also other options to consider if you are adding web pages slowly. Use in the Google search box “allintitle: and allinanchor: keyword”. Extra work, but will pay off in the long run.

A reasonable time limit to expect all 250 pages listed in Google, so long as you’ve done the necessary blogging or bookmarking, should be 4 to 6 weeks; it can be done quicker but more work is involved.

Don’t just rely on Google, you’ll need to submit your site to other major engines as well. Plus if you are by chance one of eight on that first Google page, you’ll need to make sure that your description tag is better than all the other tags on that Google page, as they often use that tag to display to content of the site.

10,000 possible hits per month within the first 10 weeks, not bad for a beginner… Realistically if you shared that with the other sites, you may only get 2,000 visitors enter your site per month, but that is still good. Of course… the visitor who clicks your web site link is relatively targeted by this stage and your conversion rate for clicking on adsense ads could be between 10 to 20%. 10% of 2,000 clicks is 200, which could be worth $50 to $200. The day’s work you spent on sifting these keywords has paid for itself. Then you can expect more of the same the following month. As many adsense professionals have 5 to 20 websites, multiply the expected earning by the websites and suddenly you can see the potential, and I may add this is before you start trying to get traffic. Glory days… if you get the job done right.

---

Phillip Booker – Senior Adsense Adviser. For more free advice tips and tricks for Google Adsense, please visit my site by following this link: Adsense Advice, Tips and Tricks

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

Home Newsletter Archives SEO Forums Webmaster Tools Webmaster Resources Link to SPN Top SEO Tools Website Templates SPN Partners Contact Us Privacy Advertise

ExactSeek SiteProNews MetaWebSearch SPN Videos EzineHub ISEDN DropJack NewWebDirectory.com SEO-News SEO-News Forums Blog Search FreeWebSubmission SmartWebGadgets