Author Archives: SEO Expert

SEO Metrics Monday: A Look Into Our Stats

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This week has been moderately productive for SEO Website. We have some new articles posted on the blog, and older ones distributed in article marketing tools. Overall, the progress is quite slow.

So how do we know if an action we take on the blog is doing it any good? We check the stats. Google analytics is a widely used analytics tool because it presents a lot of information for free.

Here a quick peek of what our stats look like since we installed Google analytics until the end of last month – The pageviews aren’t really that much and we could really use more new visitors.

This week’s goal

  • Continue with last week’s goal, which is to reach top 10 pages of Google SERP for our target keyword (this can take a few months).
  • Reach a modest 100 visitors per day, to start with.

You may have noticed a blogroll section on the sidebar. Right now, it only has a few websites, but sooner or later, we can expect to receive link exchange offers for it. Those kinds of things are good for link building.

SEO website is still on its infancy, so it will take more hard work to put this on top. In the coming weeks, we will post more SEO tips and techniques, so keep posted for more articles and updates.

 

Keyword Research: Google Keyword Tool Basics

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Keyword research is a standard task in website SEO. You can keep churning out content but the effort can prove to be half-futile if the wrong combination of words are used. Selecting good keywords increases the chances for visibility, and more importantly, profitability for a website.

We don’t need to have a degree in psychology to find out what goes on in people’s heads when they go to search engines to seek information. The largest search engine actually shares that information for free.

Google keyword tool

Every word entered into the Google search box is recorded somewhere in their servers. Google can tell how many times a certain string of words are searched for, what their arrangement is, and where those searches are coming from. The compiled data is given away in the Google keyword tool.

Search engine optimizers consider this tool as indispensable because it provides a wealth of information for their optimization exploits. Other keyword research tools out there somehow rely on this basic keyword tool, too!

The basics

The interface is pretty straightforward. First, list down some possible keyword candidates you want to start with. If you’re working on a website about orthopedic pillows, your initial list may look like this:

  • orthopedic pillows
  • neck pillows
  • memory foam pillows
  • travel pillows
  • pillows for neck pain

Enter your list on the “word or phrase” box then click on the search button (you’ll need to copy a  captcha code at the beginning of every session). Google will list down the monthly search frequency of those words. The data shown may not be up-to-date, but it will surely give you an idea whether the keywords are actually being searched for.

Keyword ideas

Google keyword tool will also match your entries with relevant keywords in their data bank and list them down (under Keyword Ideas). You may want to tick on the “exact” match type to see the data for keywords that are in exact arrangement as they were entered.

Keyword ideas in Google keyword tool

The great thing about it is that it can help you discover new keywords that may have not crossed your mind the first time. Some examples of new keywords for our sample list are:

  • travel neck pillows
  • foam pillows
  • neck roll pillow
  • contour neck pillow
  • cervical pillow

These new keywords can then go into the search box, so you can get a new set of keyword ideas. Rinse and repeat the process until you are satisfied with your list.

Data usage

The next thing you’d want to do is refine your list. Here are some things you can do:

  • Find out which keywords have the most global or local monthly searches, depending on your target audience.
  • Check the level of competition.
  • When in doubt, go ahead and do a search in Google for your chosen keyword.
  • Take out the keywords that are too general – these will come naturally as your target keywords anyway.
  • Put yourself in other people’s shoes (or fingertips) — do you have your website in mind when you type this or that keyword on the search engine?

Keyword research is vital for SEO. It wouldn’t hurt to test out and get to know the other functions of Google keyword tool. In the meantime, go ahead and bookmark it – here is the link again.

SEO Metrics Monday: Setting a Goal in Search Engine Ranking

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SEO Website introduces SEO Metrics Monday – A weekly progress report of the SEO efforts done for this blog.

Search engine ranking is the main reason why webmasters turn to SEO. We want to be seen on the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs). Getting on page one of the SERPs means a lot of hard work, but for SEO experts, it’s simply a challenge!

Right now, seowebsite.com is nowhere near page 1 for our target keyword. Heck, it’s not even at page 20! Considering its domain name and age (7+ years), it should not be so hard to pull it up from the ‘sandbox’.

But before getting our hands dirty, let’s look at the trophy at stake. In any endeavor, big or small, setting a goal is important to have a better direction and source of motivation.

This week’s goal

To be transparent here, the current goal is to make it to the first 10 pages of Google. This is really modest, but sometimes it’s a good thing to set low expectations. Besides, we want something doable at this stage for the blog.

What we are doing now

Here are some of the recent activities on the website:

  • Article Marketing – This week, we started marketing articles using SEOLinkvine and SubmitYourArticle. Using these paid services is convenient for syndication and distribution to article directories.
  • List building – If you have noticed, an email opt-in box has been added. This is in preparation for future goals for this blog.
  • Blog posting – Regular blog posting as usual. The addition of a weekly blog topic is another reason to add more content.

The next coming weeks is going to be busy as we have many more improvement plans for the blog. So, what goals have you set for your own website?

On-Page SEO: Website Title Tag

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Before meta tags, the more important portion of a website’s header tag is the title element. This defines a web page in one quick glance, which is essential for overall user experience.

The title of a web page is displayed on the topmost part or on the page tab of a browser (Google Chrome in this example). Content management softwares like WordPress automatically formats this useful header element. But if you want to get down and dirty, you may manually edit the HTML document.

<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3" />
<title>On-Page SEO: Website Title Tag</title>
</head>

Title element, aka the “Title Tag”

Optimizing the title tag is an important step when doing on-page SEO because it is the first thing that search engines display in the results page. This is one way of measuring a web page’s relevancy to the search keyword.

Searched for keywords are shown in bold (or strong) font in the SERPs, in this case “places to get social traffic”:

Without a title, search engines will not have anything to display. Well, technically the browser will display “Untitled Document” as a default, but nobody’s gonna want to click on something that seems to lack information. Besides, the webpage may not even make it to the results even at page 100!

SEO-friendly title

A well-written title can do wonders to a website’s search engine ranking and click-through rate. As a rule of thumb, it should be concise but still carries your target keywords.

Sure, it would be fun to create vague titles like “Ink stabbers in LA” but from the SEO point of view, “Tattoo artists in Los Angeles” would be more appropriate because the terms in it are more likely to be used in search engines.

Keywords in the title tag

Many SEO experts advise to place keywords close together within the beginning of the title phrase. This keyword positioning technique helps search engine crawlers to easily pick up your target keywords.

Doing multiple keyword combinations may also work, but don’t overdo it because the focus will be lost.

So, If I’m going for the keywords “Tattoo artists Los Angeles”, the title “List of Tattoo artists with a studio in downtown Los Angeles” could be written better as “Tattoo artists in Los Angeles area, listed”

Doing just the keywords in themselves won’t do because the whole phrase wouldn’t make sense. We want to create a title that is simple, yet informative at the same time.

Branding in the title

There only one thing you need to keep in mind when faced with a decision of branding versus keyword. If you think users will search for your brand (are you popular enough in your field?), then go ahead and position your brand name at the start of the web page title. Otherwise, you’re better off with using well-researched keywords in there.

Creating the perfect web page title requires a little bit of attention but the effort is worth it. This is one of those website SEO techniques you should pass on.

On-Page SEO: Meta Tags

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It has been established in SEO that meta tags do not benefit a website in terms of search engine ranking. This is because search engines have long removed meta tags as a part of their ranking factor (at least the vast majority of the search engines have).

So why bother with meta tags, you ask? Even without ranking incentives, these HTML header settings can help make a website look better in search engine result pages (SERP). This seemingly aesthetic purpose can actually make your website look more professional and organized, hence more clickable.

Meta data

For the purpose of website optimization, we should only be concerned in tweaking two meta data:

  • meta description
  • meta keywords

Let’s just say that the other meta attributes are not worth looking into. Besides they’re probably taken care of by your content management software (ie. WordPress).

Meta description

The description attribute provides search engines a proper description for a web page. If this tag is empty, the first paragraph from a static text or the latest blog entry (since the page was last crawled) is usually displayed on the SERP.

Instead of letting the search engines pull a random sentence from you web page, why not create one for them to use?

In the example below, a truncated paragraph is displayed in the result after making a search for seowebsite.com.

For somebody looking for SEO tips and related information, this sentence may not be so convincing to warrant a click.

In the next example, however, a user can have a slight idea of what the website indieescape.com is all about, just by looking at the short data displayed.

To create a meta description. add the following code within the <header> tag:

<meta name="description" content="Write your description here" />

Meta keywords

Meta keywords provide search engines some idea of what your site is about. This used to be a free-for-all keyword stuffing technique, before search engines decided to drop it from their ranking factors.

Today, the keywords attribute may still hold some importance in SEO. It helps search engines pick out a website to display in the results, but not put a website on top of the list. Keyword stuffing in this level may also be considered spam. In the end, just putting the right amount of relevant keywords would do.

To create meta keywords. add the following code within the <header> tag:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, and so on" />

If it’s too much trouble to create this attribute, then it probably is, because quality content speaks well in itself for a website to get picked and ranked by search engines.

Adding meta data on a website may not be of much importance, but it can still help in your overall SEO efforts.

Expired Domains: What To Look For, SEO-wise

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Sometimes, buying an expired domain is preferred because it carries some attributes that cannot be earned up front when registering a web address for the first time. SEO experts look after these characteristics to see if a domain is good enough to buy for future re-selling or personal usage.

When a domain name you’re after has been previously registered, you’ll need to do a background check before buying it. Most expired domains are auctioned off, so knowing these things will help you determine which ones are worth your money. At the same time, you can also find out if a domain is hiding any skeletons in its closet.

Domain age

No matter what others may say, it is obvious that search engines consider domain age as one of their ranking factors. Simply put, domain age is one way of measuring authority and trustworthiness (spam sites generally don’t last long).

Take this example, a query for the keyword “corporate giveaways”. The top spot belongs to a website which has been around since 1999 – the oldest among the others on page 1. On the second spot is a website from circa 2006, while the third spot is a 10-year old website.domain age as ranking factor SERP

Looking at these results, it is obvious that domain age does have some control over search engine rankings. From what we can see, it looks like the second website was given priority because the keyword is in the domain name itself. Overall, the trend shows that older websites have a place in the first page of SERPs.

Previous penalties

A website involved in spam activity or other indecency is not tolerated by search engines. These websites are penalized. Suffice to say that a penalized website will not be able to perform SEO-wise for many months.

Right now, there is no standard way to check whether a website has been penalized. You’ll have to rely on the transparency of the previous owner. In any case, if you think you bought a penalized website, you can simply send a reconsideration request or re-inclusion request to the search engine. Google provides an online form for this purpose (log-in required).

Established backlinks

A previously active website must have a portfolio of past promotions done by its webmaster. Established backlinks remain active even after a complete management turnover. Those wanting to buy an expired domain for SEO purposes look for a website with a good number of established backlinks to benefit from its leftover link juice.

Some type of backlink analysis should be done just to see what kind of promotion has been done in the past on a domain. Was it linking to quality websites, or is it involved in sketchy link exchange programs? You also want to look for relevant backlinks, so it can still benefit the new website.

Others

There is no telling how much people are willing to pay for an expired domain. It really depends on how much they are bent on having it. Sometimes you may have to weigh branding with cost because some domains sell for over $200.

Buying expired domains can be a lot of work than you initially thought, but the job can be easier if you know what you are looking for (and how much your budget is).

 

How To Choose A Domain Name For SEO

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Choosing a permanent web address is just like buying a new home in the cyber world. It requires some consideration, especially if you have SEO in mind. Besides branding and long-term commitment (a domain name must be registered for at least 1 year), a domain name can also make or break a website’s search engine ranking.

What’s in a name?

A good URL should be simple and straightforward so users can easily remember it. Take Yahoo! and Google, as examples. The company name is the first priority, but a word or words that can easily be identified with the business is also commonly used.

Try to think what words your users would most likely enter into the search engines when looking for your website. Such words are referred to in the SEO world as “keywords”. Having your target keyword on the URL makes it easier for search engines to identify your website as an expert on the field. These keywords would also most likely end up in the anchor text that other people will create, when linking to your site. So, why else did we name this site “seo website“?

Quality check

Just because your keyword is “death defying stunts of the 21st century”, it doesn’t mean that you have to dot-com the whole phrase. Long phrases are generally harder to memorize, and search engines also do not know how to separate each word in a URL.

Case in point, domainsextension.com can be interpreted as “domains extension”, or “do main sex tension”. So, try to stay away from domains like these because search engines tend to block websites that have the slightest hint of indecency.

If you won’t change your mind about the choice of words, better use hyphens (domains-extension.com) because these are seen as blank spaces by search engines. Copyrighted words must also be avoided because these may result to copyright issues later on.

Picking a TLD

Any SEO expert will tell you that a .com is the best top-level domain (TLD) to get. This is because .com is widely used and easy to remember. It is also the most appropriate for commercial business entities.

You may encounter others who would say that search engines put more importance to .com sites over others, like the .info. Although there is no real proof to this, it is a fact that .info domains are cheaper, and so these are more likely to be used by spam creators. We know that search engines do not like spam, so it could possibly be one of the reasons why .info seems to rank low in SERPs.

The domain name is only one of the many factors that search engines consider when ranking search results. Beneath its face value, there are still a few more things to learn about domain names and SEO. In the meantime, start creating quality content. After all, content still holds the top spot in ranking a website.

 

 

 

 

Top 5 Places To Get Social Traffic

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After search engine traffic, web 2.0 is the next best place to receive traffic. Web 2.0 is comprised of websites that allow its visitors to do more things than just read a page from top to bottom.

These emerging websites let users manage content by creating, sharing and interacting with other users. Otherwise known as the social web, visitors coming from these avenues are referred to as social traffic.

Social traffic is important for SEO because it brings targeted users. Links are passed on through cyber word-of-mouth. The backlinks formed through these media are accessed by users having related interests – which make them good quality backlinks.

Here’s a rundown of my top 5 ways to get social traffic:

1. Social bookmarking

Those small collection of tiny buttons you usually see at the end of an article are quick links to social media sites – an easy one-click promotion for your website. Social bookmarking sites provide instant backlinks to each of your pages.

These sites not only allow users to keep their bookmarked pages on-the-go, but these also foster sharing of bookmarks through tag labels. There are so many bookmarking sites out there, but right now, the ones worth bookmarking to are Delicious, StumbleUpon, Diigo (formerly Furl) and Pinterest because of their popularity (= wide user base).

2. Social news

Similar to social bookmarking sites, social news sites focuses more on article promotion. Digg, Newsvine and Reddit are some examples of social news sites out there. Users can share a links to interesting articles and promote them through the a voting system, which at the same time, can also sink unpopular articles.

Similar sites like Technorati, Squidoo and Buzzfeed allow users to create their own content right on their website.

3. Social networking

We have seen the influential power of social networking. It’s no longer a popularity game, where you want to have as much friends as a rock star (hint: MySpace). Social networking now functions as a real venue for people to socialize. Facebook, in particular, has already become a part of most people’s daily lives.

It is easy to share information through social networks, so website promotion is less tedious. An example of this is FB’s “like” button or Google’s “+1″ button. When a user clicks on it, all his friends get notified and so they gain access to the new information. This button can be embedded on to any webpage, so the users are essentially doing the promotion for you. Additonally, in FB, webmasters can create a fan page for their site which can be linked to the main website as well.

4. Microblogging

What seems to be only an offshoot of blogs and social networking sites, microblogging is also another way to reach out to your target audience. It doesn’t require as much work as full-on blogging, or maintaining a profile page. Just embed your link from time to time when posting a blurb through sites like Twitter, Plurk or Foursquare. When posting a photo, through Tumblr for example, you can just as well watermark it with your URL.

5. YouTube

A household name in its own right, YouTube is the place for user-generated videos. Thousands of how-to tutorials, funny videos and presentations are uploaded on this website. It is not a search engine but users frequent YouTube to search for content.

There a few ways to channel traffic from YouTube to your website. First is by creating a how-to video that’s so helpful to users, they’d want to share it. Second is by creating a viral video, usually a funny video and embed your website on the notes or on the credits. The problem with this is that it may not be related to your content at all. Third is by posting a video response to an already viral video, which is basically riding the popularity wave.

Social media can be a powerful tool to make your website viral. In SEO, viral is good.

What Exactly Is The Deal With PageRank (And How To Improve It)?

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Many of the SEO concepts we encounter are under debate. One such topic is the importance of Google PageRank.

Overview

Every search result that Google churns out is a result of over 200 factors that govern their algorithm. One of these factors is the so-called “PageRank“.

As Google puts it:

“PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank.”

Of course, big G knows more than just to credit each and every link that points to a website. Spam links are isolated, together with other links that are manipulated and doesn’t seem to be relevant (an effect of abusing link exchanges and link farms). This is why SEO specialists are always on their toes to build quality links.

PageRank (PR) is presented as a numerical grade system, 0 being the lowest score and 10 as the highest. A fresh new website will have a PR score of 0, while a large authority website will most likely have a score of 8 to 10.

PageRank and SEO

There was a time when PageRank was believed to be the driving force in SEO. It was thought that Google derives its search results according to PR score (PR 10 on top of the list, and so on). But if we do some tests, we will find that the first page of Google results may not necessarily display websites in descending PR order.

Here, a search for “Womens Hiking Shorts” pulls up websites of varied PR scores:

SEOQuake PageRank check in Google SERP

This is why some SEO experts do not even bother to check their website’s PR; as long as they take care of the other tasks that help improve ranking such as article marketing, link building, on-page SEO and others.

Is it still important?

These days, we know that it takes more than just a PR score to lay the groundwork for good ranking. However, we know that it still carries some weight in website optimization. Domains are sold according to their preexisting PR value and high PR backlinks are sought after because those may guarantee a priority spot in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Website optimizers often target at least a PR 4, which is more often than not, a ticket to the first page of Google results. This ranking factor works on page-level statistics, so a domain.com PR score may be different from a domain.com/page PR. At the same time, the PR value of a webpage may be different at any given time, but Google does not let webmasters take a peek at its actual value. In fact, the PageRank values displayed on Google toolbar or SEO Quake (in the illustration above), for example, lags at least a month behind.

Improving PageRank

SEO experts may have different takes on how to increase PageRank, but here are some things that are consistent across the board:

  • build relevant, and quality external backlinks
  • build internal backlinks (links between pages in your site)
  • Use an SEO-friendly template
  • limit links within a page (too much links might look bad)
  • submit only to link directories with high PR
  • continue creating quality content (so readers will want to share your page)

With all that being said, PageRank may just be a way for Google to classify a website but may not really have a direct effect on ranking. In any case, websites built with good intentions will sooner or later place on top of the SERPs.

SEO Writing: Keyword Density FAQ

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Keyword density was all the hype many years ago, when search engines worked on much simpler algorithms. Just sprinkle your content with enough keywords and phrases and you will see your website rocket to the top of the results page.

Nowadays, SEO work is more complex and to check keyword density is on the bottom of the to-do list. It’s mostly because the practice has been abused to the extent that search engines penalize pages with overly redundant keywords.

What is keyword density?

For those who are new to this, keyword density is the ratio of keywords or phrases to the total number of words in an article. Back then, topic relevancy was gauged on the number of times a keyword appears in an article.

What is the best keyword density ratio?

Now, the tricky question. Many SEO experts keep a keyword density of around 2 percent (calculation details explained in Wiki). This is not bad, nor is it a cut and dry figure.

The relevancy of a page to a search term has evolved to include more defining factors, not just a single set of words. Search engines know better than to pick webpages showing the same key words or phrases again and again (which sounds too fabricated).

How to use keywords wisely?

Somebody masterfully writing about a subject would write variations of a key phrase and even include related terms in a single article. This means that an article merely mentioning laptop coolers in a blog is different than an article review for the same thing because the text would most likely have other related words like “USB”, “fan”, “temperature” and even a mention of brand names.

Is keyword density outdated?

If there’s one thing you can do to optimize your target keywords in an article, it is to include them in the header tags – h1 and h2 (title and sections) and so on. Words put into header tags convey importance, and this is exactly how search engines see it.

Similarly, emphasized (html tag <em>) and strong (html tag <strong>) words provide the needed highlight for crawlers to easily spot them.

To say not to check keyword density anymore may be too extreme. There is still some importance in checking keyword density. First, to know whether your article is keyword stuffed (which is not good); and next is to check whether the text is highlighting the wrong terms – a result of consciously avoiding the keyword you’re supposedly running after.

Whether you actively check keyword density or not, as long as you write naturally and the article flow is good, they keyword density will most likely fall within the 2% range.