Archive for November, 2007
published by Dan in Keyword Research | SEO Tools
I don’t need to stress the importance of keyword research when it comes to SEO. Below are some tools that you can use to aid in your keyword research. Many SEO consultants use several keyword research tools since each tool has its different strengths and weaknesses.
- Google AdWords Keyword Tool - This will not give you in-depth results but is sufficient for looking up keywords and phrases related to your primary keyword. You can sort the results depending on the volume of actual times the suggested keywords are searched by people on Google.
- Google Trends - Helpful for analysing the trend of your keywords and phrases. By staying on top of which keywords and phrases are becoming more popular you can adjust your SEO campagin accordingly.
- adCenter Labs Keyword Forecast - This offers features similar to Google Trends and contains various keyword analysis tools.
- Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool - Gives 100 related keywords and phrases to the keyword you entered. The results of Wordtracker comes from daily data provided by Dogpile and Metacrawler. The list of words is also ranked using an equation relating the frequency of search for each keyword and the actual number of sites competing for that keyword.
- Trellian Free Search Term Suggestion Tool - Pretty much works the same way as Wordtracker but differs in that the data used to rank the words comes from yearly data. Wordtracker uses DAILY data from Dogpile and Metacrawler.
- Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool (Overture) - Offers keyword suggestions based on actual searches done on the Yahoo search engine.
- SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - Uses the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool but offers other useful information aside from the keywords listed.
Popularity: 31% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Strategy
Search marketing is a great technique to boost your web presence and thus traffic to your website fast. In my opinion SEO is still better but since SEO takes more time SEO marketing is also important to jump start traffic to your site. Even when SEO efforts do kick in SEO marketing can still be beneficial for some sites depending on the keywords they target. If you want to hire an SEO specialist though and want search marketing incorporated into the overall SEO campaign strategy you need to make sure that they also know what they are doing in this area.
According to shor, an SEOmoz member, the top 5 questions to as a PPC candidate during a phone interview would be:
- What is Google’s Quality Score and what role does it play in ranking?
- Our company brand is called “red widgets.” However, we also rank first organically for our brand “red widgets.” What PPC strategy would you propose for the keyword “red widgets” and why?
- Our company has 5 million keywords. How will you manage an account this size?
- I am advertising for “red widgets” but I’m concerned about the increase in costs. What should I do?
- Let’s pretend that I’m from a competitor who is buying the same trademarked keyword that your department owns. Despite a polite email, I have refused to stop bidding on your trademarked term. What steps do you take?
Reading the questions you will see that there really is no standard answer to them. The point is that the questions are probing and will show just how much they know and how the search marketer plans on handling your account.
Popularity: 20% [?]
published by Dan in Black Hat SEO
Early this week Randfish wrote about the “Dark Side of Wikipedia“. Everyone knows how popular Wikipedia is, and though there will always be detractors you have to admit that it is the number online (and maybe even offline) encyclopedia nowadays. So what does Wikipedia have to do with SEO?
Being a such a popular site anyone in the world of SEO knows that getting links from something as popular as Wikipedia is very desirable to say the least. Spammers hoping to to get link juice of course immediately saw the opportunity and thus placed links to their (or their clients’) sites on Wikipedia. To combat spamming Wikipedia gave all external links (for articles in English) the “nofollow” attribute. This helps combat spammers since all links with tagged as such is not considered by Google when raking websites. Hence, SEO-wise spammers have nothing to gain by littering Wikipedia with links to their sites.
However, as Randfish pointed out, “vandalism” still does exist in Wikipedia since “vandals” for several reasons. Furthermore, he says that “Wikipedia is such a reference resource that if your site earns links on popular pages, you’ll find that those links find their way into forums, blog posts, articles, and journalistic publications more often than not. This is probably one of the most clever ways to use Wikipedia, because you’ll need to link to something worthy of being spread, anyway, which probably means that even a heavy-handed Wiki-editor won’t remove it, as it’s typically relevant enough and interesting enough to belong there.” So this means that links in Wikipedia still are valuable.
Obviously, this technique for getting “worthy links” are questionable (downright offensive to many). So you might as well ask yourself, unless the link on your site really is important to an article, should you just ride with Wikipedia’s popularity to get links? If you ask professional and ethical SEO consultants the answer will of course be NO.
Popularity: 21% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Tools
SEOmoz Toolbox contains the basic tools needed by any SEO consultant. The fun thing with the tools in the toolbox is that even non-SEO experts will benefit from the information than can be garnered from the results given by each tool. However, though it will be fun to check out the status of what’s going on in your own site using the tools on SEOmoz Toolbox it will still take a web designer and SEO professional to help you straighten out the kinks in your site. The tools listed below are available to all who are interested and are free tools. However, membership (which is also free) is needed to use some of the tools.
SEOmoz Toolbox Contents:
- Strongest Pages on a Domain - Determines what the strongest pages are on your domain
- Who Else is Hosted on My IP? - Determines what other websites are hosted on your IP address
- Check Inclusion - Shows you whether your URL has been indexed by Google, Yahoo! & MSN.
- Check Backlinks - Reports the number of backlinks to a URL, also shows a historical view of previous backlinks.
- Outbound Link Checker - This tool reports what external pages your domain is linking to.
- Check PageRank - Reports the PageRank of a URL and shows a historical view of previous PR scores.
- Find Domain Age - Find the age of your domain and when it was first spidered by the search engines.
- Check HTTP Status Code - 301? 302? Find out what HTTP status code a website is producing.
- Check Indexed Pages - This SEO Tool looks at the three major search engines and reports back how many pages you appear to have indexed.
- Whois - Find out a domain’s registration information.
Aside from the tools listed above there are other more advanced SEO tools available although some of them require premium membership (not free) in order to use those tools (i.e. Keyword Difficulty).
Popularity: 22% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
Need someone to do your site’s SEO for you? Can’t seem to decide whether you can trust an SEO firm you’ve found? Here are some tips from Google’s Webmaster Central that should help you determine whether an SEO service will really be of service to you or not.
- Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue - If they can’t get clients other than via spam then how good can they be? Obviously, not good at all. The funny thing is that spammers send emails to Google too! Here’s what spam to Google looks like…
- “Dear google.com,I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”
- No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google - An SEO firm that boasts of getting you a #1 ranking on Google is full of hot air. A good SEO service can guarantee results but won’t make vague and empty promises.
- Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do - Transparency is important. You wouldn’t want to hire someone not telling you their techniques because they might be employing black hat methods or simply do not really have the knowledge to explain something they themselves do not have a good grasp of.
- You should never have to link to an SEO - If the SEO company requires you to link back to them this isn’t a good sign. You are their client and your site is not part of their link building campaign. You may link back if you want to but you whouldn’t be forced to.
- Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines - This often repeated advice is just as often ignored by many website owners. Heed this advice!
- Ask for references - You don’t need Google to tell you to do this.
Popularity: 22% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Strategy
From the SEO point of view flash is not best the best format since the text within the flash movie cannot be indexed by spiders. We already know this as a fact and is the reason why many new website owners specify that web designers not use flash to make their website or at least avoid using flash components in their site. However, if your website already uses the flash format (whether in part or the entire page is in flash) should you junk it all and get your website redesigned merely for SEO purposes?
The answer is NO. This might come as a surprise to those who have fallen for the myth that flash movies cannot be optimised for search engine purposes at all. If you want your website optimised ask an SEO expert to do it for you and do not waste your resources on a website overhaul, unless this is really needed. The SEO firm can help you by simply tweaking with the HTML part and adding text to describe the contents of the Flash movie. If the flash movie is of the slide type then the actual text can simply be mirrored in the HTML. If this is the case your page will still be indexed by search engines. Just make sure that the text is optimised and contains the relevant keywords to your site.
Popularity: 22% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
We all know how expectations can help form a person, but do you realize that it can affect your website as well? From the very start what happens to your website depends on how your expectations - your ideas, what you want and expect it to do, how successful you want it to become, and so on. But even with great expectations we see more and more websites each day “going to waste”. Why is this?
I believe that the reason behind this is simple. Unrealistic expectations based on lack of knowledge and/or skill on a website owner’s part. Many have lots of expectations when it comes to how successful they want the site to be but do not know what to expect when it comes to the actual steps required to achieve this goal. This is when web designers and SEO consultants come in. If you are one of the many that have an idea about a website you would like to develop but do not know how to get started then you really need a web designer’s help. If you already have an existing site but it seems to be getting nowhere then a website redesign might be in order. You might also need the help of an SEO service to optimise your existing site. If you hire a good web designer and/or SEO firm you can expect not only to get help with the technical aspects of putting up your site but also, due to their experience with various clients, with polishing your ideas. Web design companies and SEO firms want to see their clients succeed and will help out if you ask. Explain your vision and ask whether your goals are doable. In the end if your expectations are unrealistic they will explain why and will help you streamline your goals and achieve the best results possible. Your website does not need to fall flat of your expectations. You just need to know what you can really expect and how to get what you want.
Popularity: 19% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
I have been giving advice on what you, as a client, can do to get the best service from SEO firms. This time I want to focus specifically on SEO copywriters. All the previous tips still apply but these additional two tips should be something you should also keep in mind.
- Give feedback - Professional copywriters know what constructive criticism really means based on plenty of experience, so don’t hesitate to give yours jusst to save their feelings. Of course tact is good and giving feedback in a nice way is important but make sure that you always give your true opinion about the SEO copywriter’s work. Give feedback about both the work that you liked and did not like. If you liked the way a particular writing assignment turned out then make it a point to tell them SEO firm so that the SEO copywriter can try to replicate the tone and structure of that piece in the future. If you did not like something then point out the reason why you didn’t so the SEO copywriter can go ahead and edit it.
- Avoid rush jobs - On the first part of this series on Making the Most Out of an SEO Service I already mentioned that SEO takes time and that you should give SEO consultants ample time. This is true even if you hire an SEO firm only for its copywriting services. Avoid asking for rush jobs as much as possible if you want to get better results. SEO copywriters achieve results by tweaking with the copy several times. If you give rush jobs they won’t have the time needed to edit the things they need to.
Popularity: 18% [?]
published by Dan in SEO
- Keep an open line of communication – Communication is very important in any collaboration. Although the ideal case would be for the SEO firm to be able to ascertain your needs during the actual consultation or meeting they might need or want to clarify some things with you. By making sure that you, or whoever they might need to correspond with, can be easily reached, you will be helping the entire SEO campaign move forward faster. In the end though you will be giving them ample time you want the campaign to take off as fast as possible.
- Work with them on keyword selection – Although you might have some keywords you already have in mind the SEO consultants will surely suggest other keywords that will be useful to your website. Work with them in selecting keywords. Before the SEO copywriter actually writes the content make sure that you see and approve of the keywords they choose to target.
- Factor it into your overall strategy – Make sure that even though you do not know the details of the SEO campaign the overall strategy is explained to you. This is very important since you want your SEO campaign to fit into your overall marketing strategy. Yes, SEO’s primary goal is to get traffic to your site but in the end it is just one of the steps to a successful overall business strategy.
Popularity: 20% [?]
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