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Should You Target Competitive Keywords, The Long-Tail or Both?

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

Should your SEO strategy (1) tackle the most competitive vertical keywords (2) pluck the low hanging fruit of the long-tail or (3) employ a combination of both? after deciding which strategy suits your sites ultimate objective, the mental model of the target client and amount of time and content required to accomplish the goal, what are the pros and cons of each tactic?

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Competitive Keywords

Pros: Stable traffic which eventually stems into the long-tail (semantically related phrases). Cons: The process could take up to a year to achieve saturation due to competition and search engine trust.

Also, the results you struggle to maintain are in constant flux (due to high demand), so a defensive strategy is required to maintain your position from scrolling out of the top 10 results.

Isn’t Targeting More Competitive Keywords More Difficult?

Before you get discouraged and give up before even getting started, yes the process for bagging a competitive phrase is challenging. But then again, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it and top 10 search engine placement would not be a crowning achievement, but rather a rotating free for all of inconsistency. For this reason, getting into the top 10 search results is more stringent than less competitive positions for ranking. The bar is raised, but so are the rewards, which is why relevance should not be an afterthought, but rather a central theme that consolidates your pages.

9 Ways to Make Your Site More Search Engine Friendly

By Bjorn Brands in Featured

Search engines want to lead users to the most relevant information that is available online for any given keyword.

So focus on the user and ask yourself the question, “Is my page the most relevant page for this keyword online?” If the answer is yes, and you offer the best content for this keyword then you are well on your way.

The only way to get top placement in search engines is to provide very compelling information. However, search engines don’t read information like humans do.

They follow specific rules. Follow these 9 rules to rapidly boost your ranking in search engines.

1) Optimize your URLs.

If you have not yet picked a domain name for your website, don’t try to go for “mykeyword.com.” Instead, try to pick a name that you want to build your company and/or a brand around.

Yes, having the keyword in your name might help a little but don’t sacrifice your company branding just because of your domain.

2) Optimize your page title.

Create a short relevant title (60 characters max). Have the keywords appear first and don’t add any stuff such as “home page” in the title tag.

3) Optimize your description metatag.

Add the SEO keywords to the meta tag description. The description should be 200 characters max.

4) Optimize your keyword metatag.

Add the SEO keywords to the meta tag keywords. Include 5 keyword phrases max.

Example:

5) Optimize your H1 & H2 headers.

The headline at the top of your page should use the H1 HTML header. The sub-headline should follow the H2 header. Include your SEO keywords in the headline and sub-headline. Example: h1. Enter headline with keyword phrase Example: h2. Enter sub-headline with keyword phrase

6) Optimize your keyword density.

Creating a keyword rich content page is a MUST. Be creative, write good content and make frequent use of the keywords you are optimizing for.

However, make sure that your keyword density never exceeds 5% for pages with long copy and 10% for pages with little copy. If they do, you might get penalized by the search engines.

To find out what the keyword density is on your page use this free Keyword Tool at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

7) Spice up your SEO keywords.

Be sure to have your keywords appear at least once in bold, italics, and underlined in the copy. Again, do this once, but don’t over do it!

Move your keywords up.

Text towards the top of the page, such as in the first paragraph, counts for more than text further down the page. So, make sure that your keyword phrase is included towards the top of your page.

9) Use text links for site navigation.

Do not use image buttons for links. Using text links is far better. Search engines can’t read the text in images.

Search engines want to feed searchers the best information and so do you. Make sure you have the most content, feature it in a search engine friendly site.

We hope that the above tips have demonstrated that SEO does not have to be intimidating or very hard. Sure, there is a lot more that you can learn. For now just take it one step at a time.

Bjorn Brands is a successfull enterprenuer who transitioned from having his own building company to a great online business. Check out his site and see for yourself how his FREE course can help you do the same at http://www.moneyacces.com

Using a Search Engine Optimization Company vs. Hiring an In-House Expert: The True Dollar Cost

By Scott Buresh in Featured

It’s a common question that companies who are considering hiring a search engine optimization company often face - is this something that we can do in-house? More importantly, can we do this in-house and get the same results that an expert search engine optimization company would provide?

As this article will demonstrate, clearly the answer is “yes” to both questions. However, as this article will also demonstrate, getting the types of results that an expert at search engine optimization can provide will cost you - often more than outsourcing.

For the purpose of this article, I’m ignoring the multitudes of companies that decide to dump the job on somebody already in their organization (usually an IT person who already has too much to do) rather than hiring a search engine optimization company. It has been my experience that while some of these people eventually provide decent results, they are the exception. More often than not, the project never leaves the ground, or the effort is halfhearted at best. In a worst case scenario, your internal person may embrace tactics that no expert search engine optimization company would ever use because they can put your site at risk of penalization or outright removal from the engine indexes.

Search Engine Optimization Is Only the Beginning To Online Marketing

By Mason Curry in Featured

Search Engine Optimization is Not Always the Answer

Search engine optimization has a purpose. Keyword targeting lets search engines link their users to your website when they look for your keywords. They will not do this satisfactorily without optimizing your site with proper web design techniques. Unfortunately, however, it is more complicated than that. Have you ever wondered why Google will almost always place Ebay on the first few pages when anything is entered into the search field accompanied with the word buy?The word buy has been targeted from more sites than you could count so what makes Ebay special.

For example, take the word bike. If a person uses Google by searching for the string buy bike, a page from Ebay will usually be listed before any of the major bicycle makers. It goes without saying that any of the major bicycle dealers have spent a great deal more time targeting keywords related to bikes than a site that manages hundreds of thousands of different products. The answer to this problem is the nature of this article.

Can My Website Compete?

The answer is to increase the importance of your site in the eyes of the major search engines. Ebay gets searched before many other sites because it has been decided by the search engines to be more popular with internet users. So what I am offering the little guy is a way to do what Ebay and the other ‘big dogs’ have done to become popular.

The world of search engines boil down to the stereotypical high school hierarchy. Search engines pay more attention to those that are popular. In high school, teens usually become popular by having popular people associate with them. The online world is no different. But how do search engines know that popular sites are associating with you? That is an easy one - they link to your website. The three biggest search engine players all crawl the web indexing links to and from all the websites that they have found. They create a ranking system based on many factors, but the most substantial one is how many sites link to you. It could be argued that an optimized site is key, and my opinion expressed here is based on the assumption that your site has been built with proper design techniques. It is also assumed that you have well written content based on your main products or ideas. If you feel that your website does not currently qualify as well written or properly designed, I recommend that you rectify these issues before attempting to build your popularity as it may turn out to be a waste of time.

Do Not Jump Right into Getting Links

There are many tempting ways to get other sites to link to you that are very unsavory. I choose to address these first. These include:

* sites that promote linking as a primary activity.

* sites that have illegal or inappropriate content.

* sites that are entirely unrelated to your target market

Sites that do nothing more than link to other sites may look like a great option but a site without content is not very popular with the search engines. They need to offer something to internet surfers in order to be important. If they are not important to the search engines then a link from them should not be important to you. Link marketing is based on quality links not the amount of links. I advise staying away from these sites all together. Next it goes without saying, sites with illegal and inappropriate content are never a safe bet.

Getting a Good Start with Link Marketing

Most of us do not have a lot of expendable income starting out so I do not spend much time explaining the options that involve paying large sums of money. In my experience, webmasters with that kind of money contact a company to handle this for them (I have had enough of them as clients to know). I intend on putting out another article to cover this option more in depth, however this article only covers the less costly options.

There are 3 cheap ways to get get some link popularity:

* Ezine articles

* Field related forums

* Banner/Link exchanges

Ezine Articles

Ezines are online magazines. Ezine articles offer two great benefits. First and foremost, they allow you to link to your site from your article or resource area. Also, they offer a chance to show off the knowledge you have in your field. Although this is essentially a free way to get a quality link, it does come with some work. You must be able to write a content rich article on a topic related to your site. Most Ezine sites do not mind giving you the opportunity to get your name out there but you need to provide them with a well written article that offers something to their users. Searching for ezine databases on any major search engine should provide you with a list of great sources for this linking method. Be sure to consult the guidelines of an ezine site in which you decide to submit articles.

Related forums

Forums are another great opportunity to get your site out there without paying up. Again, it does take some time. Find forums that cater to questions about your field. For instance, if you sell natural supplements for joint pain, search for forums related to arthritis. Find strings that are talking about different options for arthritis or ask about what works. This opens a perfect opportunity to link to your site. It is important to know that most forums are not keen on letting sales pitches post for long. The trick here is to offer up quality information on these posts. You could compare your arthritis product to others, you could even provide a plug for a competitor (attempting to prove yourself superior, of course). This makes your post look less like a sales or link pitch and helps make the internet more content driven like it was intended to be.

Banner/Link Exchanges

There are usually two main ways you can get a banner or link on another site without offering any content. You can pay them a fee, or you can offer a trade. Like the other two options, only target sites that are related to you in some way. Exchanges require a little research on your part. You want to search for your potential link partner to see that they are worth the trade. A easy rule of thumb is to check their pagerank compared to yours. You can use this free tool to compare at http://www.checkpagerank.net. Put your web address in and check your pagerank as well as theirs. If you are paying for a link and they have a pagerank of zero it would be wise to save your money. If you are trading links, use your better judgment. If they have a quality site it may be worth the exchange in hopes that their site takes off and they can share a little of their success with you.

Take note that a link from no single site will boost your website’s importance significantly. Every quality link helps a little bit so you need to practice all methods for some time before you see the results you want. Stick with it and be patient.

Mason Curry - Lead Designer, Vexart Studio Web Design Fort Wayne Web Design