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Showing posts from June, 2017

How to find keywords for easy rankings

How to find keywords for easy rankings. Now you need to find out how competitive your desired keywords are. Armed with an understanding of how competitive your desired keywords are, you can discover keywords your site can realistically achieve rankings for in Google. Let’s say you are a second-hand bookseller and you want to target “book store online”. It's unlikely you are going to beat Amazon and Barnes and Noble. But, maybe there’s a gem hiding in your list very few people are targeting—maybe something like “antique book stores online”. You have the advantage if your competitors haven't thought of targeting your keyword. You simply have to do better SEO than they are doing and you have a really good chance at beating their rankings. You need a way to wash this list and separate the ridiculously competitive keywords from the easy keywords no one has thought of. There are many schools of thought on how to do this. The most popular competitive research practices are listed b...

How to find keywords that will send traffic to your site

How to find keywords that will send traffic to your site. Now you have a list of keywords, you need to understand how much traffic these keywords receive in Google. Without search traffic data, you could end up targeting keywords with zero searches. Armed with the right knowledge, you can target keywords with hundreds or even thousands of potential visitors every month. First, you have to sign up for a free Google Adwords account, link provided below. Once signed in, you need to access the Keyword Planner tool. To do this, sign in, click on Tools in the top-menu, click on Keyword Planner’ then click on “Get search volume data and trends”, copy and paste your keywords into the box. Select your country, and then click the blue “Get search volume” button. When you are finished, you will have the exact amount of times each keyword was searched for in Google. Mmm. Fresh data. This is just the kind of data we need. Now we know which keywords receive more searches than others, and more imp...

How to generate a massive list of keywords

How to generate a massive list of keywords. There are many ways to skin a cat. The same is true for finding the right keywords. Before you can find keywords with loads of traffic in Google, you must first develop a list of potential keywords relevant to your business. Relevance is vital. If you spend your time trying to cast too wide a net, you can end up targeting keywords irrelevant to your audience. For example, if you are an online football jacket retailer in the United States, examples of relevant keywords might be: Buy football jackets Buy football jackets online Online football jackets store USA Irrelevant keywords might be: Football jacket photos How to make your own football jacket Football jacket manufacturers How to design a football jacket You can see how the first pool of keywords are more relevant to the target audience of football jacket retailers, and the second pool of keywords are related but unlikely to lead to customers. Keeping relevance in mind, you must develo...

What exactly is a keyword?

What exactly is a keyword? If you are an SEO newbie, you may be wondering—what is a keyword? A keyword is any phrase you would like your site to rank for in Google's search results. A keyword can be a single word, or a keyword can also be a combination of words. If you are trying to target a single word, lookout! You will have your work cut out for you. Single word keywords are extremely competitive, and difficult to rank highly for in the search results. Here’s some different kinds of keywords: Head-term keywords: keywords with one to two words, i.e. classic movies. Long-tail keywords: keywords with three or more phrases, i.e. classic Akira Kurosawa movies. Navigational keywords: keywords used to locate a particular brand or website. Examples would be Facebook, YouTube or Gmail. Informational keywords: keywords used to discover on a particular topic. This includes keywords beginning with “how to…” or “what are the best...” Transactional keywords: keywords entered into Google by...

Why is keyword research so important?

Why is keyword research so important? Keyword research is the most important step of every SEO project for two reasons: 1. If you rank your site highly for the wrong keywords, you can end up spending lots of time and effort, only to discover the keywords you have targeted doesn't receive any traffic. 2. If you haven't investigated the competitiveness of your keywords, you can end up investing lots of time and effort into a particular keyword, only to find it is far too competitive to rank, even on the first page. These two pitfalls are often the ultimate decider on how successful any SEO project is. This chapter will cover how to avoid these pitfalls and how to find the best keywords. First, we must define what a keyword is.

How to stay ahead of Google’s updates

How to stay ahead of Google’s updates. Every now and then, Google releases a significant update to their algorithm, which can have a massive impact on businesses from any industry. To hone your SEO chops and make sure your site doesn't fall into Google's bad books, it's important to stay up-todate with Google’s updates as they are released. Fortunately, almost every time a major update is released, those updates are reported on by the entire SEO community and often publicly discussed and confirmed by Google staff. A long extended history of Google’s updates would fill this entire book, but with the resources below, you can stay abreast of new Google updates as they are rolled out. This is essential knowledge for anyone practicing SEO, at a beginner or an advanced level. You can even keep your ear to the ground with these sources and often be forewarned of future updates. Google Updates by Search Engine Round Table http://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates Searc...

How Google ranks sites now— Google’s top-10 ranking factors revealed

How Google ranks sites now— Google’s top-10 ranking factors revealed. You may have wondered if you can find out the exact factors Google uses in their algorithm. Fortunately, there are a handful of industry leaders who have figured it out, and regularly publish their findings on the Internet. With these publications you can get a working knowledge of what factors Google uses to rank sites. These surveys are typically updated every second year, but these factors don’t change often, so you can use them to your advantage by knowing which areas to focus on. A short list of some of the strongest factors associated with high search rankings: - Relevant keywords on the page. - Keyword in internal links. - User signals (click-through-rate, time-on-site, bounce-rate). - Domain SEO visibility (how strong the domain is in terms of links and authority). - Search volume of domain name. - Total number of backlinks. - Total number of referring domains (unique sites linking to your site). - Google+...

Authority, trust & relevance. Three powerful SEO strategies explained

Authority, trust & relevance. Three powerful SEO strategies explained. Google has evolved considerably from its humble origins in 1993. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once reported that Google considered over 200 factors to determine which sites rank higher in the results. Today, Google has well over 200 factors. Google assesses how many links are pointing to your site, how trustworthy these linking sites are, how many social mentions your brand has, how relevant your page is, how old your site is, how fast your site loads… and the list goes on. Does this mean it's impossible or difficult to get top rankings in Google? Nope. In fact, you can have the advantage. Google’s algorithm is complex, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand how it works. In fact, it can be ridiculously simple if you remember just three principles. With these three principles you can determine why one site ranks higher than another, or discover what you have to do to push your si...

Google updates and how to survive them

Google updates and how to survive them. Fast-forward 15 years and ranking in Google has become extremely competitive and considerably more complex. Simply put, everybody wants to be in Google. Google is fighting to keep its search engine relevant and must constantly evolve to continue delivering relevant results to users. This hasn't been without its challenges. Just like keyword stuffing, webmasters eventually clued onto another way of gaming the system by having the most anchor text pointing to the page. If you are not familiar with this term, anchor text is the text contained in external links pointing to a page. This created another loophole exploited by spammers. In many cases, well-meaning marketers and business owners used this tactic to achieve high rankings in the search results. Along came a new Google update in 2012, this time called Penguin. Google's Penguin update punished sites with suspicious amounts of links with the same anchor text pointing to a page, by co...

Old-school methods that no longer work

Old-school methods that no longer work. In the early days of Google—over 15 years ago— Google started a smarter search engine and a better experience for navigating the World Wide Web. Google delivered on this promise by delivering relevant search engine results. Internet users discovered they could simply type what they were looking for into Google—and BINGO—users would find what they needed in the top results, instead of having to dig through hundreds of pages. Google's user base grew fast. It didn't take long for smart and entrepreneurially minded webmasters to catch on to sneaky little hacks for ranking high in Google. Webmasters discovered by cramming many keywords into the page, they could get their site ranking high for almost any word or phrase. It quickly spiraled into a competition of who could jam the most keywords into the page. The page with the most repeated keywords won, and rose swiftly to the top of the search results. Naturally, more and more spammers caugh...

Introduction to how Google works

Introduction to how Google works You can feel like a dog chasing its own tail trying to figure out how Google works. There are thousands of bloggers and journalists spreading volumes of information that simply isn't true. If you followed all the advice about SEO written on blogs, it's unlikely you would receive top listings in Google, and there’s a risk you could damage your site performance and make it difficult to rank at all. Let me tell you a secret about bloggers… Articles about the latest SEO updates, techniques or tips are often written by interns, assistants or even ghostwriters. Their job is to write articles. The majority of blog posts about SEO are rarely written by experts or professionals with the day-to-day responsibility of growing site traffic and achieving top rankings in search engines. Can you learn from someone who doesn't even know how to do it themselves? You can't. This is why you have to take the advice spread by blog posts with a grain of sal...