SEO Basics (Keyword Research)Written by Dane Lyons
Definitions: SEO (Search engine optimization): The process of building a website to pull maximum amount of relevant traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves… Keyword Research: The process of researching terms to be used in SEO for a given website.The first step to successful SEO is always keyword research. Without it you are shooting from hip. If, for example, you would like to create a website about cooking you could optimize your site for generic “cooking” term but how well is that going to perform? Well according to Overture there are 8,233.8 searches /day for “cooking” sounds good right? Not exactly…in order to rank high for this term you would have to compete with high end websites such as cooking.com and foodtv.com. Now that might be your ultimate goal but if you are just starting there is little to no chance you will be ranked high enough to receive any traffic for term. If you were to do a little keyword research you might find more specific terms with much less competition like italian cooking 344.3 /day or crock pot cooking 253.5 /day. Now obviously number of daily searches is much less with these terms but your chances or ranking will be much greater. Its always a good idea to start off with several low competition terms and as your site builds start optimizing for larger terms. Step 1: Create a list of related terms Open an excel spreadsheet and start making a list of all major industry terms and buzz words related to your site in one column. The list doesn’t need to be extremely detailed quite yet so don’t add part numbers, brand names or several variations of each term. For example if we want to remain on cooking theme our list might look something like this. Cooking, chef, cutlery, foods, meat, dairy, wine, seasoning, poultry, fish, dining…(simple generic terms) Step 2: Expand list Now its time to start adding all those 2, 3 and 4 term combinations along with other very specific terms related to your site. For this we will employ a few web applications to speed up process. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion and http://nichebot.com are two of best free tools at your disposal. Simply type in your first generic term and tool will list several related terms. Add each new relevant term to your spreadsheet. Do this with each generic term and you should end up with a list of at very least 50 possible terms to optimize for.
| | What you can expect from Search Engine Written by David Bell
Search engines will be a way for you to generate from as little as 20% to as much as 60% of your business online (depending on what other marketing techniques you use). Since there are over 130,000,000 webpages in existence (yes that is 130 million!), it is extremely important to understand how they work and how to increase your chances of being placed in top 20 of search results. For example, if you were to type "music" and "CD" into AltaVista search engine as a keyword result would be over 1,000,000 related site URLs. Search engines are a very powerful tool if you are in top 50 results (preferably top 20), but are completely useless if you are listed further down. You can bet that if you are further down than 50th result, searchee will not even see your site listing, much less be able to visit it. As we all know, beauty of search engines is that they can bring you a large amount of targeted traffic and it will not cost you a cent! It is crucial you understand basics of how search engines work if you want to get traffic to your site from them. There are three main types of search engines/directories. The first is a directory (sometimes called a category database). This is not a true search engine, but a listing of webpages by category. Many directories allow you to enter in description and keywords for your site exactly as you would like them to appear. You usually have to select category you want it cited under, too. A directory will not list your URL and will never become aware of your site if you do not register with them. They do not make use of "indexing software" (robots that crawl web looking for new sites and indexing them). An example of a directory is Yahoo. Search engines (also called crawlers, spiders, robots, and worms) vary to a large degree. They will automatically index your site using "indexing software" or "indexing robots".
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