Google Pagerank explained
January 4, 2008 by Kylie Short · 2 Comments
Over at Virtual Assistant forums, one of my fellow members pointed us to this great article about how the internet is just one big popularity contest.
If you’ve ever wondered exactly how your Google pagerank is calculated then head on over and read for yourself.
How To Use Keywords Effectively In Your Copy
November 5, 2007 by Kylie Short · Leave a Comment
With more and more people using search engines every day, using keywords effectively in your website text is more vital than ever before. Let’s discuss some of the terminology and concepts behind copywriting and using keywords properly.What Are Keywords?
Keywords are simply the words and phrases that humans use when they search the web. That’s it! Somewhat confusing, a keyword is not necessarily a single word, but can be a phrase or list of several words, but we still call them keywords.
Short Tail
The shorter, more competitive keywords are sometimes referred to as the “short tail”. An example short tail keyword that we optimise our site for is “internet marketing”. As you can imagine, this is a quite competitive term, with many internet marketing companies competing for high rankings on this term. Other example short tail terms in this area are “SEO”, “online marketing”, “search marketing” and more. So the short tail keywords are usually very common searches, being searched for many times per day.
Long Tail
The long tail of search can be a gold mine for search traffic. These are less competitive terms that are not searched for as often. Usually they are longer keywords, like for example “internet marketing company dublin ireland”. This is likely to be searched FAR less often than the short tail terms I mentioned above. In fact, a Google employee reported said recently (and I’m still looking for the source on this) that “40% of all searchs on Google everyday have never been seen before”. These are long tail keywords, most definitely!
How You Can Use This Information
We know that both these short tail and long tail ideas exist - how do you take advantage of this for your website? Lets deal with the short tail first - what you should do is create webpages/blog posts/articles (”pages”) targeting each one of these short tail terms. It may seem like a lot of keywords but there are a finite number of short tail terms so it’s possible to hit them all. Start out with targetting only one, e.g. my company started targeting “internet marketing” first, and will expand to others later.
It’s not actually possible to target long tail keywords, yet we will still try, and what’s more, succeed! How is this possible? Simply by adding naturally written content to your website you will be hitting tens and possibly hundreds of long tail terms with each article. Each one of these keywords will be searched very rarely, but the cumulative effect of hundreds, and eventually thousands of long tail terms will be a lot of visits to your website. So keep adding interesting and valuable content to your website as often as possible. This is why I love blogs!
Write Naturally and Avoid Keyword Stuffing
Search engines count the number of times a keyword appears on a page. The more times a term appears, the more relevant the page is to a search for that term - up to a point! That point is when your webpage starts reading like it was written by a marketer on speed and the keyword appears every 3rd word. The best advice is to write naturally - for humans! Write your copy for humans including your keywords a few times and the search engines will take care of the rest. There are also concepts like “stemming” - where search engines know that “target”, “targets”, “targeting”, “targeted”, etc all have the same stem and are related. A similar, more advanced topic is Latent Semantic Indexing which is outside the scope of this article and deserves one all of it’s own!
Keyword Percentage
Some people ask me “what percentage should the keyword be per page”. The way to figure this out is to count the total number of words on the page, and count the number of times the keyword appears, as a percentage of this. Search engine optimisation consultations often quote numbers of 6-8% with a maximum of 12-13%. I would definitely recommend sticking to the lower end of these numbers, but again if there’s one thing you should take from this article it’s write often, and naturally, for a human audience and let the numbers take care of themselves.
About the Author - Alastair McDermott
Alastair is the founder and Managing Director of Log On. Alastair loves generating ideas. He is the left-brain of the company, with a love of problem solving, data analysis and business strategising.
Managing Director, Log On Internet Marketing Ltd, Dublin, Ireland.
So what is Search Engine Optimization?
April 14, 2007 by Kylie Short · 2 Comments
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring your website is search engine friendly. After all, if the search engines can’t find you, how will your target market?
On doing a quick Google search, I found a huge number of websites and articles all proclaiming to tell all about SEO and its secrets. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s no secret at all and that you shouldn’t have to pay someone to optimize your website. In fact, with a few simple steps, you can do it yourself.
When designing your site, you will need to confirm with your designer if they will optimize the site prior to signing off the project. Be aware that most designers are just that…designers. SEO is an additional service that may require additional payment. As I mentioned before, you do not have to pay someone to optimize your site although you can do so if you wish.
The basics in SEO include:
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the inclusion of metatags and meta keywords.
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selecting and using keywords that relate to your site, using them in your content and meta keywords.
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ensuring your site is content rich. Search engines can’t read images, only text, so if your site is high in images you may want to think about adding content that is rich in the use of your keywords.
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using your keywords in labeling your ALT tags.
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submitting your website to the major search engines.
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listing your site on relevant, quality websites to increase your backlinks.
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making changes to your site and your content regularly. Search engines LOVE fresh content and will keep coming back to index your site if you make changes regularly.
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using your keywords in your title tags for each page in your website.
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avoiding the link farms and exchanging links with ‘anyone’. All this will do is damage your potential for search engine ranking.
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listing your web site on all your marketing materials including business cards, letterhead, invoices, your car…. the list is endless.
I know this list seems like alot of work but with time and effort you will be able to increase your search engine ranking. Once the visitor is on your site, it is up to you to ensure your copy will entice them to stay and purchase.