SEO – Keywords Part 15
I seem to think everyday, “This tip is pretty straight forward.” When it comes to SEO, none of the techniques are rocket science. The hard part is just making sure that you get all of the little details put together. It’s like a puzzle. Look at two puzzle pieces that fit together. Taken by themselves, they’re relatively simple. Just a couple pieces of cardboard with notches cut in them. But toss them in the box, shake it up and the problem becomes a little more complex. SEO is very much the same. Each of the little pieces, by themselves, are relatively simple. Really, how hard is it to put your keywords in your headline? Or how about remembering to make them bold in your page? Not too hard either. But when you get a list of hundreds of things like that, SEO becomes as complex and time-consuming as a 1000 piece puzzle.
So for today’s topic, let’s talk about phrase order. It’s pretty straight forward.
It’s important to make sure that you try as much as possible to make your keyword phrases on your page, match the order of the words in the search query. But how will you know what people are searching for? We’ll get into that more in the next few weeks, but for now, let’s just say that you have to do your homework and do the research to discover first what people are searching for. It does you no good to build a site that’s optimized for a phrase that no one is looking for. You have to be sure that people are looking for the phrase first.
Or, you may find out with some research that twice as many people are looking for one phrase than another closely-related phrase. I see it all the time. Let’s say you’re going to make a site about cats. But after doing a little research you may find that twice as many people are looking for kittens as cats. Or maybe 4 times as many people are looking for “dogs.” If that’s the case, you may change the direction of the site. There are a lot more considerations to take into account when doing keyword research but we’ll talk more about that later.
To begin your research, just check out Google’s page where they tell you how many people are searching for each phrase last month.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
So now that you’ve looked into the most popular phrases, let’s get back to keyword order. If you see that 120 people a day are looking for “food for cats” and 276 are looking for “cat food” it only seems logical that you’d want to optimize the page for “cat food.” Mentioning the alternative phrase helps a little because the same words are still used in the phrase “food for cats” but it’s not as relevant as a direct match for “cat food.” Therefore sites that mention “cat food” more will be seen as a better match for the search query and will likely come up higher in the search results pages.
Chadd Bryant
SEO – Keywords Part 14
After a little break yesterday, let’s get right back into it. Keyword proximity. This one’s really straight forward. Keep your keywords close to each other if they are related in the same phrase. Let’s say you’re looking to optimize your page for the phrase “keyword proximity.” It seems obvious that if your words are not close enough to each other, Google won’t see them in relation to each other and will not rank the page well for that phrase.
Here’s an example. You write a paragraph about keyword proximity but you don’t want to sound too repetitive so you try and mix it up a little bit. Great. However, if you talk a lot about the “proximity of keywords” that’s great because “keyword proximity” and “the proximity of keywords” are relatively close to each other. Google sees that and can put 2 and 2 together.
On the other hand, if you just mention the word “proximity” a few times and then later in the document talk about “keywords”, they’re not close enough to each other to cue Google into seeing the correlation, missing the theme of the page.
Even worse, if you change things up too much and only mention “keyword proximity” once and then use the phrase “keyword location” the next time and then say that “you need to make sure that your keywords are close to each other” the last time, only a human is smart enough to see the common theme. Google’s computers won’t catch your drift and they’ll just see a page that mentions each of those phrases once, not really placing emphasis on any one of them. Repeat the phrase several times, place importance on the same phrase by putting it in your headline and title and Google starts to think, “Now this page is about keyword proximity.”
Chadd Bryant
SEO: Keywords Part 13
Some people are superstitious and would skip over Part 13. I’m not. I do however, enjoy watching “The Office” on NBC. Michael Scott when asked if he was superstitious, replied “…no, I don’t consider myself superstitious… just a little stitious, maybe…”
So for those of you who are even a little stitious, we’ll just leave Part 13 at that so your not always afraid of “keyword proximity.” We’ll cover that one tomorrow.
My apologies to those of you who would have been unaffected by the number 13.
Chadd Bryant
A Scary Halloween Nightmare
Imagine the horror when you learn that your site has been removed from Google’s listings and your company begins to bleed. That frightening scenario happens everyday for companies around the globe. Google has become such a monster that many businesses are completely reliant upon them for their revenue stream. How can you avoid becoming the next victim?
Diversify. If your company is like many others, your livelihood may revolve around Google and the traffic that they are sending you. But when Google shifts their algorythm, and they do it all the time, your site could fall off and your traffic and sales will follow. If you diversify your traffic streams and get a little from affiliates, a little from smaller search engines, a little from other sites that link to you and some from Google, you’ll be in a much better position to defend yourself when the moster decides to attack.
Wishing you a happy Halloween…
Chadd Bryant
Focus Your Keywords – Part 2
It’s ironic that as I was sitting down to write this post, I just received an email from someone asking for assistance. Unfortunately, their company purchased a website from one of the nations largest, and well-known web development companies (also known for their SEO services), but the site was a disaster. If you had a chance to read yesterday’s post about keywords, you know now that using the same list of keywords on every page is a no-no. Well, that’s exactly what this so-called SEO firm did. Now this poor company has spent tens of thousands of dollars and has a site that’s programmed poorly, has keywords that are potentially harming it in Google’s rankings and frankly, looks like trash too.
They’ve come to the IBCC looking for assistance as they begin to fight the invoices that keep arriving. They’ve paid everything except for the final bill, but now that they have the website in hand, feel that they shouldn’t have to pay the final bill because they are going to re-do the whole site.
The IBCC generally doesn’t get involved in litigation matters but this case seems blatantly negligent. This company has definitely become the victim of SEO malpractice and needs our assistance. I’d welcome your thoughts as to whether or not a company should be held responsible for final payments if they are dissatisfied with the final product. Is the web development firm responsible to assure that the client is satisfied before they send the final invoice. Let me know your thoughts.
Until tomorrow…
