Google has finally come good about the number of times your keywords are searched for. This makes google the ultimate keyword research tool and probably puts the nail in the coffin of plenty of paid keyword research tools.
All you need to do is goto the adwords keyword tool and enter your search terms and bingo, the monthly search numbers are shown. This can even be customized to your language and region! This is now surely the ultimate keyword research tool.
To build a successful website you will usually need to rely on search engine listings. To do this research is essential, there is no point targeting a word that generates little or no search results.
To aid in this there are a number of tools available to find and evaluate keywords. One such tool is Wordtracker and although you need to pay a monthly fee, with the right keywords it easily pays for itself.
Take this article for instance; I knew I wanted to write about keyword research. I used word tracker to come up with the title of this post “Keyword Research and Optimisation”, and hopefully I will now get some traffic from Google. Where Wordtracker came into its own was that it not only suggested this title, but also told me that over 40 people a day search for it and that this title is a more popular search than “Keyword Research”.
There are of course some free tools available. One example is provided by SEO Tools, this provides a number of the features from Wordtracker. However it did not come up with the title of this article. In fact it didn’t come up with anything!
Currently Wordtracker does offer a free seven day trial. You will need your credit card to sign up, but if you do not like it then it is easy to cancel, although the chances are, like me, you will not want to.
I will detail my success with Wordtracker in future posts, so if in doubt, keep reading this blog and hear about the success I have had with it.
Has this ever happened to one of your sites? You go from a pagerank of 3 or 4 to 0 all of a sudden. The next few updates happen and you stay at zero?
This happened to a site that I recently purchased, Poultry Pages. In fact when I purchased it the pagerank was zero and it had a few other problems but that’s a story for another day.
The site had previously been selling links. Google does not like this and so manually they removed the pagerank. Reading various forums told me to build quality backlinks and it will come. This also made no difference; the site has links from education sites and DMOZ, which in my opinion are strong links.
Anyway I eventually found the solution under Google webmaster tools. They have a link there called “request reconsideration”. Here you can have your say about your lost page rank. I wrote a quick note to say that the site had previously been selling links but does not anymore and that all links on the site were now no-follow links. Just three days later I had the page rank back!
Article directories have been a great source of back-links and visibility. Am writing this article as am running an article directory myself for the last few years, and I do feel that this section of the web needs lots of improvement. The following tips will not only help the article directories but also it will help the article submitters.
1) Technorati Indexed: Get your directories indexed and claimed at Technorati, that way people submitting their articles will get Technorati votes and authority.
2) Do you accept those articles with links inside the article, this might be a risk, as Google might find this as a paid post and give your article directory a penalty. Even if it’s not your fault as the article if free so no paid links stuff but you still don’t want to get penalty due to poor and in-efficient google’s algo.
3) Is your site properly cashed? Check your last 50, 100 or 200 article, and see if they are even indexed by Google or not. When was the last time Google bot gave your site a visit. This problem is mainly because article directories don’t add unique content, so search engines don’t find anything useful in these sites and stop visiting frequently. So I suggest article directory owners to buy unique and high-quality articles from time to time, so that your sites get properly indexed.
4) Do you accept every article that is submitted? So far I have seen that many submitters use article-spinning software and submit those articles to directories, this is the reason why I say that at least read a few lines from the article before approving it.
5) Research on the keywords for the articles submitted. Then re-write or at least edit the title of the article with a good, low competitive keyword. That way you will have some occasional traffic coming from every article.
6) Get your article directory some quality back links; try social bookmarking if you want free back links. That way your site will gain authority and your over all traffic will increase, as you will be beating your competitors on competitive keywords.
7) Keep adding content yourself, not a bad idea. Just do some research for low competitive and high searched topics and add some small articles by yourself, this way your site will have unique content and your writing ability will develop which will help you in the long run.
Promotion is the key. If you have a good site with good content, but it is not promoted then it won’t get traffic. Do social bookmarking, directory submissions; press release submission and distribution, forum signatures; blog posts etc. do it slowly and continuously. If you have a budget for promotions then things will become lot easier, else you will have to do the hard work.
After going through various aspects of the “keywords”, I would like to finally touch upon the significant role of the “keyword prominence”. This is crucial for the ranking of the web page. Now, it totally depends on you whether it is ranked in the upper tier or the lower one. So, just read on for the better ranking of your sites.
One of the main factors affecting keyword ranking in SEO is keyword prominence. This refers to the location of your chosen keyword in Meta tags and body copy. Any Webmaster or SEO cannot underestimate the importance of keyword prominence. Along with selection and density this is one of the primary considerations for SEO.
Location of keywords in tags and body copy affects the importance of keyword prominence. If the keyword or key phrase occurs at the beginning of a sentence, paragraph, or body copy then more importance is placed on that keyword.
For Meta tags more weight is placed on the first word or term. The importance of keyword prominence in Meta tags cannot be underestimated. The primary term should come in the beginning of the title, description, and keyword tag.
The importance of keyword prominence in body copy is just as significant. When placing keywords in the body of a page they should occur in the beginning, middle, and end of the body copy. These are especially important areas. The search engines will place more weight on the beginning and end, and the keyword should be supported in the middle of the copy.
After you have gone through all these little facts about the keywords, I’m sure that you’re going to benefit a lot. So, just keep visiting this site for more such useful tips on a range of topics.
Now that you all know the importance of keywords, its time to know what “keyword frequency” does to the benefit or rather in most cases, to the detriment of a particular site. Sad, but rather painfully, its true. Most of us lose out on this account & end-up getting no-where. So, I will just explain it in detail for your benefit.
One of the methods that search engines use to determine relevance for a keyword is by counting keyword frequency. This is not like keyword density where a ratio is taken but rather an absolute count of the number of occurrences of your primary keyword or phrase. There are a couple of rules to remember about counting keyword frequency.
First, since keyword frequency is an absolute count it does not matter how many words are on the page, the total number of occurrences will remain the same. So if the term occurs seven times this number will be the same if you have 100 or 1000 words on your page.
Second, counting keyword frequency helps determine relevance as well as Spam. What this means is that if your keyword occurs 70 times in 100 words your page will most likely be considered Spam. If your keyword occurs only once in 100 words more than likely your page will not be considered relevant and thus will rank lower in the search results or not at all.
If your content is well written and targeted toward a specific theme your page will most likely contain the correct number of occurrences of a term. With well thought out content this is natural. In most cases, appropriate content will not require counting keyword frequency to ensure correct distribution.
If you want to promote your business online, it’s not enough to increase traffic – you would also need to attract site visitors who are likely to become customers. The use of appropriate keywords is one way to achieve that aim. You could achieve this in numerous ways.
Firstly, you can purchase keywords & then you should try to monitor it. Essentially, the major search engines allow you to bid on terms relevant to your business. When a user searches one of these terms, your link will appear higher or lower on the sponsored list, depending upon whether you’re the highest bidder. Each time a user clicks on your sponsored link, you pay the amount that you have bid.
Of course, the more generic the keyword, the more expensive it will be. But don’t fret – as it turns out, more specific (and less expensive) keywords can be the most valuable for local businesses.
However, this is obviously going to cost you a little. Henceforth, i will add another way so that you can maximize your profits without actually investing a single penny! You can regularly check various searches - engines for priorities, which they give to different words. This helps in a way that you would know which kind of topics are “in demand”.
A well-known saying among online marketers is that “content is king.” There’s a reason for that. As online search becomes a bigger and more lucrative business, the algorithms used to determine rankings have grown more complicated, and the extent to which content relevance is analyzed has grown. To complicate matters further, each search engine uses its own formula.
So, with the second method you will be able to maximize amount of traffic to your site by filling it with well-crafted, keyword-rich content. As you might expect, the best overall online marketing strategy includes keyword efforts both paid for and organic. You should invest in the promotion of your site through “pay-per-click” management, while also improving the organic ranking of your site by way of keyword-rich content. It takes a little work, but the payoff can be tremendous.
Link building is a work that involves lots of skills and tricks, if not done correctly then it can bring more bad than any good. .edu and .gov back links had huge importance in search engines previously; even today their importance cannot be ignored. Bloggers and other webmasters have searched these links for years, but most of them did not find any. Most people will quite clearly say that getting these back-links is very hard, which is absolutely wrong. Today am going to share a technique by which you can find these back links for free.
The idea is simple, if you don’t know where to look for these links, just check others how they are finding these links. I know a few places where we can get .edu or .gov links easily, but I was actually stunned when I found that my competitors has a lot of this kind of back-links. So the point is clear, do some research on other websites. Now you must be asking, how you are going to find out what back-links other successful websites have, and this is exactly why I started this post.
Ever heard about linkdomain, it works only on yahoo search engine. Just go to yahoo.com and put this small piece of code in the search, linkdomain:sitefunda.com AND (site:.edu OR site:.gov) -site:sitefunda.com Simply remove the sitefunda.com and put your own sites or your competitors website their and see where they got their edu and gov back-links. And do exactly what they did and get your own back-links. I would definitely suggest you to put some really popular sites there like shoemoney.com or johnchow.com and check out how they are doing, and just do exactly that and be the winner.
If you have liked this post, please give us a back-link from your websites and blogs, this will keep us motivated. Please subscribe in our feed so that you can get the latest updates from our blog. In the next few posts I will be talking about social book-marking, I will leak out some of the ways to get free and cheap bookmarks from sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, Technorati etc.
So, you have started out a new blog, or you are planning to make a blog. Then here are a few tips for you that will help you to get a nice start.
1) Start a blog on your favorite topic, else you will always run out of content.
2) First write down 10 blog posts offline and see how you are doing. If you find difficulty to write enough content on that topic, then try to write on some other topic. The best think to do is, first read some blogs on that particular topic. Do some research, search for blogs on that topic and see what others are doing. Then don’t just copy other blogs, but understand that topic properly. After that you will find it easy to write more on that particular topic.
3) Choose a blogging platform. For blogs I always prefer wordpress, a self-hosted wordpress is the best option for blogging. This is a blog running on wordpress.
4) Don’t start a blog with one or two entries. At-least make 10 posts on the blog’s launch day. A blog with some decent content always makes a good impression. If you do this, then you will have nice readers from the first day of the launch.
5) Content is king, so make nice content. Check for grammatical and spellings errors off line, before publishing the blog. Good content brings natural links, so it is always advised to write properly. If you are not good at writing, then hire a writer. Pay someone who writes well.
6) The next step is to add the feeds. Check out feed burner and get your feeds running. You can see on the left sidebars, I have the feed subscription buttons placed there.
7) Try the blog top sites. This is a good way to show the world how popular your blog is. This also brings some traffic. Check out my blogs ranks on the top sites, the ranks are visible on the sidebar.
Promote your blog with the power of social bookmarking. To start with, join technorati, it’s a blog search engine, and it is huge. Then try del.icio.us it is another social bookmarking website which gives a lot of traffic. There are a few more like this, digg, stumbleupon, reddit etc, I will make another post for this topic, let’s not get too deep into this here.
9) Frequently visit blogs of your niche, even subscribe to it. When ever you see a new post, read it properly and give a good comment on it. Don’t post spam comments; make a nice comment that gets accepted. Some blogs are no-follow and some are not. But remember the no-follow is only for google and there is msn and yahoo also for the search. This step can help you get a lot of targeted readers apart from the link popularity. You can even give blogroll links to a few of the good blogs that you regularly visit.
10) Try to post regularly, if you don’t post for sometime long, then you will lose a lot of subscription and regular readers. Blogging is a passion, don’t just blog for the shake of it.
Blog rush is a new website that got popularity very soon. On most blogs that I visit has the blog rush widget on there sidebars. This is a unique way to drive in targeted visits from other blogs on the Internet. The idea is pretty simple; you keep the blog rush widget on your sidebar. The widget automatically displays five blogs from your category, this way you get give related links in your sidebar. now for the traffic part, say you have 100 page views a day, so your blog link will be displayed 100 times in other blogs. This will drive unique and targeted traffic to your blog.
The website has a cool video that explains everything, but if you still miss anything, feel free to post that in your comment, and I will try to help you. This is a very good method to generate unique visitors for your blog, for free. Am testing it out now, and I will update you with the results, so far the experience with blog rush is pretty good, the traffic is already coming.
It takes about 24 hours to start generating reports, the system has a dashboard which tell your how your blogs are doing, how much traffic your are generating etc, it takes just a second to register, and the registration is absolutely free.
