Target the right keywords

For those of you who are new to search engine marketing, a keyword is simply a word or phrase that people would search on to find your web site. You might think that choosing the right keywords to target would be a no brainier. However, you’d be surprised at how many people jump in, optimize their web site, and achieve top rankings. They then cry out in dismay when their hit registers no more visitors than it did before they want to all the work to tune up their site.

What happened? They failed to choose keyword that people were actually looking for. Therefore, I recommend you:
 

• Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases that apply to your web site’s products and services. Try to place yourself in the shoes of the web searcher. Avoid generalities like “small business”. Yes, you may sell a product for small business, but who is going to search for “small business” when they are looking for a new windows accounting program?
   
• Take advantage of excellent services like word tracker  to tell  you which keyword are popular but not so competitive as to make a top ranking next to impossible. There’ a fine line between targeting keyword that are too general or competitive versus keyword  phrases that are so specific that few people ever think to search for them .word tracker handles both with ease. In addition, word tracker will do much of the brainstorming for you by taking a couple of keyword and producing a broad list of related words and phrases from which to choose.         

Again. Please don’t make the mistake of picking wrong keyword. Nothing is more disappointing that taking the time to achieve top ranking and then seeing   no increase in traffic form all your efforts.   Also, don’t pick keywords that are too popular or broad like” games “or “Entertainment.”  You’ll not only get visitors that are likely to buy product, but you amount of work needed to again that ranking will not be worth the trouble.  You’ll then join the ranks of misinformed critics screaming” search engine” optimization doesn’t work –don’t waste your time “search engine optimization works and works well, if you take time to do it right.

Link partners

Another factor that some search engines consider part of the link popularity equation is link relevancy. When an engine finds a link from one site to another site, it compares the content of both the sites to determine if the sites are thematically similar. A link from a site that contains similar content to your site is assigned a greater weight than a link from an unrelated site.

Let’s look at silver platter foods again. Silver platter is a web site consisting of a number of pages offering gourmet foods and goods. A search engine will look at its web page and see that they are well optimized and targeted. But how does the search engine know silver platters foods is reputable com- pany worthily of high rankings? The completion for gourmet foods companies on the internet is intense. How can search engine determine which sites should be assigned the highest rankings for searches relating to gourmet foods?

It makes sense for search engine to look beyond the optimization of silver platters pages and consider the quantity and quality of incoming links to the silver platters site. If mike Merlot perfected a web page pertaining to pinot noir wines sense and also had links to this page from various well-known vineyards in Napa valley and Italy and form large gourmet web sites such as gourmet.com, that page would probably score highly for a search on pinot noir. Search engine would see that other related sites with high link popularity considered the silver platter site to be worth linking to. In a sense, having a large, well known site in your industry linking to your site can be considered akin to an endorsement of your site from a reputable source.

The best way to increase your site’s link popularity is to find web site within your industry and persuade them to become one of your link partners, meaning that they will link to your site in exchange for your site linking back to theirs. Link partners do not have to be limited to commercial sites. In fact, some of the best link partners are educational or information sites. As long as the site contains content that is related in some way to your site’s content, it can be a worthwhile link partner.

Ranking Factors

Description Meta tag

This is used to specify page descriptions. It does not influence the SEO ranking process but it is very important. A lot of search engines (including the largest one – Google) display information from this tag in their search results if this tag is present on a page and if its content matches the content of the page and the search query. 

Experience has shown that a high position in search results does not always guarantee large numbers of visitors. For example, if your competitors' search result description is more attractive than the one for your site then search engine users may choose their resource instead of yours. That is why it is important that your Description Meta tag text be brief, but informative and attractive. It must also contain keywords appropriate to the page. 

Keywords Meta tag

This Meta tag was initially used to specify keywords for pages but it is hardly ever used by search engines now. It is often ignored in seo projects. However, it would be advisable to specify this tag just in case there is a revival in its use. The following rule must be observed for this tag: only keywords actually used in the page text must be added to it. 

Site structure

Number of pages

The general SEO rule is: the more, the better. Increasing the number of pages on your website increases the visibility of the site to search engines. Also, if new information is being constantly added to the site, search engines consider this as development and expansion of the site. This may give additional advantages in ranking. You should periodically publish more information on your site – news, press releases, articles, useful tips, etc. 

Navigation menu

As a rule, any site has a navigation menu. Use keywords in menu links, it will give additional seo significance to the pages to which the links refer. 

Keywords in page names

Some SEO experts consider that using keywords in the name of a HTML page file may have a positive effect on its search result position. 

Avoid subdirectories

If there are not too many pages on your site (up to a couple of dozen), it is best to place them all in the root directory of your site. Search engines consider such pages to be more important than ones in subdirectories.

Keyword Density and SEO

Keyword page density is a measure of the relative frequency of the word in the text expressed as a percentage. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%. If the density of a keyword is too low, the search engine will not pay much attention to it. If the density is too high, the search engine may activate its spam filter. If this happens, the page will be penalized and its position in search listings will be deliberately lowered.

The optimum value for keyword density is 5-7%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits. In practice, a keyword density of more than 7-8% does not seem to have any negative seo consequences. However, it is not necessary and can reduce the legibility of the content from a user’s viewpoint. 

Location of keywords on a page

A very short rule for SEO experts – the closer a keyword or keyword phrase is to the beginning of a document, the more significant it becomes for the search engine. 

Text format and SEO

Search engines pay special attention to page text that is highlighted or given special formatting. We recommend:

- use keywords in headings. Headings are text highlighted with the «H» HTML tags. The «h1» and «h2» tags are most effective. Currently, the use of CSS allows you to redefine the appearance of text highlighted with these tags. This means that «H» tags are used less than nowadays, but are still very important in seo work.;

- Highlight keywords with bold fonts. Do not highlight the entire text! Just highlight each keyword two or three times on the page. Use the «strong» tag for highlighting instead of the more traditional «B» bold tag.

Introduction to SEO

This document is intended for webmasters and site owners who want to investigate the issues of SEO ( Sarch Engine Optimization ) and promotion of their resources. It is mainly aimed at beginners, although I hope that experienced webmasters will also find something new and interesting here. There are many articles on seo on the Internet and this text is an attempt to gather some of this information into a single consistent document.

   Information presented in this text can be divided into several parts:

   - Clear-cut seo recommendations, practical guidelines.

   - Theoretical information that we think any seo specialist should know.

   - Seo tips, observations, recommendations from experience, other seo sources, etc.