SEO Strategy

Search engine spiders absolutely love sites with well-chosen, well-placed and well-used keywords and key phrases. You can find information about the correct use of  keywords and key phrases in many other places, so I’ll just briefly touch on it here.

If a website or blog is generally about some topic such as “dog care”,  or “home repair”, then articles, posts, comments, and products found on the site will reflect that focus through the use of terms or phrases related to the general topic. This is the basic assumption made by the search engines when analyzing the focus of your site. It the SE finds lots of “dog care” terms, then your site will be considered relevant to “dog care”.

A “dog care” blog, for instance, will contain many different but related terms such as “dog health”, “pet care”, “dog food”, etc., not to mention products related to dog care.

A “home repair” site will contain different terms such as “home repair”, “home renovation”, “bathroom remodeling”, “kitchen upgrade”, etc., etc.

So when writing content for your site, be sure to focus your content on the correct keywords or keyword phrases. Bear in mind that the search engines focus on specific terms when deciding who will score well in searches. It is not good enough just to be vague and use general terms relating to your category.

Marketers who want to reach a specific “niche” will often start with a set of popular keywords, and then build their site around that set of terms.

For instance, if you have reason to believe that a lot of people are interested in ”kitchen renovation tips”, then you can build your entire site or blog around that keyword phrase and others closely related to it.

This process should begin with detailed keyword analysis. Most online publishers or marketers have a rough idea of what they want to focus on. A keyword analysis tells them how to narrow their focus to specific terms within their general area of interest.

That is the best way to gain traffic from the search engines.

You can find many more articles and products related to keywords and keyword research in the Linknet Bonus Vault.

I’ve put together a short video showing how the Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast tool works. It gives you the same sort of data you get from Google Trends - it shows you how searches on specific keywords have trended over the last few months, and this lets you do a rough and ready prediction of where that keyword is going in the near future.

This Microsoft offering is quite different from Google Trends. First, the data used by MS (right now anyway) seems to be at least 6 months old. Google Trends gives you a more current trend line.

But Google Trends doesn’t give you any actual search volume numbers. They removed this information from Adwords about a year ago, and they don’t provide it here either. So in GT you can see the “trend”, but you have no idea of how many searches are being done on a search term without using another tool that actually gives you those numbers.

MS Keyword Forecast gives you the numbers, although they don’t tell you where they come from, and it is not likely they are very accurate. The same can be said of the numbers you get from other tools such as Wordtracker or Adwords Analyzer. The search volume numbers are really only useful because they show you relative search volume numbers. For example, in the video linked above we see that “sending flowers” gets much less search volume than “send flowers”. Google Trends doesn’t give us that information.

The MS tool will also let you graph two or three search terms together so you get a direct comparison of the search volume for the terms, and the way they are trending.

Click on the image above to watch a short video about MS Keyword Forecast.

Here’s the first step in creating and implementing an effective SEO strategy -  Do a preliminary keyword analysis to find the most potentially lucrative search terms.

A good search term is one that

1. gets some searches and
2. does not have a ton of competition.

Here are some tools you can use to find keywords like this:

1. Adword Analyzer
2. Google Trends
3. Google Adwords Keyword Analysis Tools
4. Microsoft Keyword Forcast Tool
5. Wordtracker

If you don’t want to do the analysis yourself, contact us for a <a href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php” mce_href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php”>Free Keyword Analysis</a> and we’ll suggest some keywords that are likely to work for you.

You don’t usually want to go after the most popular keywords because the competition will be fierce to get good Google ranking for these terms. Choose “long tail” terms - usually consisting of 3 or 4 words - that you have a chance of scoring well on and that will get you good ranking.

Remember, these are the kind of keywords you are looking for:

1. Keywords that get some searches and therefore can generate some traffic, and

2. Keywords that do not have a lot of competition - the fewer websites chasing ranking for them the better.

Once you find some good keywords, then you’re ready to go to town optimizing some webpages for them.

As you probably know, the point of SEO is to get the search engines to send visitors to your website. Traffic is what it’s all about, and SEO is meant to generate traffic.

SEO accomplishes this by helping you come up high in Google’s search results for your most important keyword phrases.

But is SEO difficult? Do you need special skills to be effective? Is it a mysterious art that only a few understand?

Not at all. Getting good search engine ranking is not as difficult as you might think. Even if you have failed miserably in the past, you can be successful right now by applying some very basic principles.

SEO is really just common sense once you understand it.

So how DO you choose the right search terms and then come up high in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords?

You have to think like a search engine.

That’s right. You have to think like a search engine.

And the most important thing to understand is that search engines only read what is there on the page. They do not read between the lines or make assumptions about your content like humans do.

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