Are you putting Bad content on your site?
When you start a new site you should start to build your content right away. It will always take a while for search engines to find you and see you as a source of information that should be indexed.
Social bookmarking and web 2.0 sites has made it much faster to get pages indexed than it used to be.
It also takes a while to build incoming links and your need to slowly build the internal link structure. If you suddenly just release a 100 page site search engines will see that as suspicious. There are already way too many sites just created to index and sell adverts. Sites that use ripped duplicate content from other sites. Spam sites using computer generated content created by randomly combining other sources on the internet.
There are even people selling something called Private label right articles, ie article sold for you to use and put your name on. PLR articles can be very cheap, much cheaper than if you had a ghost-writer to create them for you. Let us assume the PLR article is well written, often they are not. When you buy them you do not know since you don’t read the articles before you buy them. The real bad thing with PLR articles is that they are sold and used by many users. The result is that search engines will see them as duplicate content and only index one site that is using the plr article. The engines will pick the site they think is the most credible source of the article, and it will not be a brand new site.
So the sad conclusion is, bite the bullet, and create good content for your site from the start. Once you have the content you can use some of the tips from my daily traffic tips mailings to get more visitors to your content.
5 new ideas for researching keywords
I have written an introduction to keyword research earlier. If you have not read it before take a few minutes and go back and read that post.
Keyword research is important to make sure there is an audience for what you write about. It is also a tool to find new audiences you did not even know existed. If you are selling products it might even reveal large niche markets you have missed.
Use your competition
Find other pages about the same subject you cover. Check their pages, use their meta tags, see what seems like keywords in titles and headers.
Use your imagination
The obvious start is to think about what people would search for if they knew your page existed and they wanted to find just exactly your information.
List all product info
If you are writing about product make sure you include even the very specific information. For example the exact camera model number if you write about a Sony camera. The isbn number if you write about a book. Don’t stuff your page with this but include it somewhere on the page. Some people are searching for exactly what you are writing about; give them a chance to find it.
Use Google suggests
Google suggests shows relevant ideas for what you want to search for as you type you keyword. They also show the number of results for the different suggestions.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
More pages about a subject spell more competition. Aim for low competition and a large number of searches on Wordtracker.
Use Google Adwords
Google Adwords have a build in keyword suggestion tool. Create a campaign and use the tools for keyword research, you even get an estimated traffic volume. If you do not want to there is no need to actually run the campaign.
Google insight
Another great tool you should know about is Google insight.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
Google insight is a free service from Google that allows you to compare search patterns in categories, in specific regions and over time. It also gives a list of search terms related to your keywords.
Enter one or more search term in the search box.
Next, Filter the results from the filter drop down lists. Perhaps you are only interested in results from the last year.
If you are only doing business in one country you can filter on that country and you can filter on a specific category. This might be important if your term could be used in several different contexts.
When you are done click search
First you will see a graph of search trend over time. The scale is normalized so you don’t see the exact number of searches but will see trends clearly. If the keyword is gaining more interest over time or less. If the trend is going down perhaps this is not a good keyword to spend energy on. But on the other hand if the search term is getting few searches today but have a positive trend it might still be worth going after. Use Wordtracker together with Google insight and you have a pretty good idea of the number of the future of the term.
Below the trend graph you see a world map with all different shades of blue depending on how popular the term is in a region off the world. Remember that for search term with low search volume the results may be skewed for the smaller regions regions.
Last, and perhaps most interesting is the list of related search terms. Use these as suggestions of new keywords you might want to target. You also get a list of related keywords that have a positive trend even if they keyword you searched for had a negative trend.
Buzz
So today I am going to be short. I am just going to share one site I discovered quite recently, or rather I known about it for a while but started using recently. Point your browser to :
This Yahoo site is a really nice to keep on top of what is happening now in the world or in your subject.
Another use for buzz is to drive some traffic by signing in with your Yahoo account and submitting your article. The more people buzzing your article the higher it will go and the more people will see it. This works in about the same way as Digg and Stumble.
You can also get a widget with the top stories in a category to use on your site.
Three things you must do before starting your Wordpress blog
Wordpress is a great platform for a blog, hey, I am using it here.
Wordpress is even a good alternative if you want a normal site and not a blog. It is easy to update the content from anywhere and it is very easy to customize the look and feel of your site. There are tons of ready to plug n play themes for Wordpress. And the last good reason, it is free.
Here are three things you should do before you write your first post.
First decide how you want to organize your blog with categories. Do your keywords research on your categories in Wordtracker. Having your categories setup before you start makes you sure target the right keywords that there are readers for, focus on writing about the right things for the site. A good category layout makes it easier and more logical for visitors to find your content.
Setup your ping list. A ping list is a list of sites that will get an update notice every time you publish content on your site. You can edit your ping list under settings / writing. Search for ping list on the internet and paste it into the text window. You should have this setup before the first post you publish or your will miss the old post. If you do forget it you can go back and edit something in all old posts.
Wordpress uses short urls by default. It is much better to have your keyword research categories in your url and the title of your post. It is better for search engine optimization and it generally makes more sense. In Wordpress go to settings and select the permalink tab. There select the custom radio button and enter “/%category%/%postname%/ “. Now each post will get a permanent url with the category and post title in the url.
You are now ready to write your first page. You can write directly in Wordpress but I prefer to write in word and paste it later into Wordpress. If you do like me make sure to paste into the source tab. If you paste in the preview tab you will get hidden extra characters, the bad think is that they will be visible when you publish your post.
Wordpress is a great platform for your site. If you want tips on how to get visitors to your new blog you can signup to me free newsletter and get a new idea for traffic generation every day in your mailbox.
Concepts Instead of keywords
I have written about the importance of keyword research before and it is important. But, the game is changing. First a short background than I will tell you why this is important to you.
One of the new search engine technologies getting talked about lately is LSI. LSI stands for latent semantic indexing and it is a first step toward the semantic web. There are a number of research project trying to manually add semantic data to web pages. But, if this is ever going to work it is a long time away.
A problem with keyword is that it is just that a keyword. With LSI search engines.tries to associate a concept with your web page instead of just a keyword list. The algorithm is based on statistical analysis on terms often used together. For the details you can check out this page : http://lsi.research.telcordia.com/lsi/LSIpapers.html the executive summary gives a bit more information than this post without getting too technical.
But why is this important?
In practice since LSI is a part the secret ranking algorithm used on your web page you should use synonyms when you write. What this in practice mean is that its even more important to focus on the content on your pages and less on the keywords. Keyword research is still important to make sure there is anyone interested in what you are writing about. The basic on-page optimization still applies but after that just write the text good. LSI is bound to be even more important in the future and if you write good content for real persons you are well prepared. LSI is only one step in the way to get rid of search engine spam and to give everyone better search results.
In Google you can try to search for your search term with a ~ char before the keyword and you will get a list with similar terms.
Off-page search engine optimization
Yesterday I wrote about on-page web page Search engine optimization. On-page optimization is required to get your web page to rank well but it is not enough.
The other big ingredient in getting top ranking in the search engines is called off-page optimization. Off-page optimization is about making other pages help increase your pages ranking. In practice it is about getting links form other pages to your page. The higher rank the page has the better.
You want the anchor text used to link to your page to contain your keywords.
The first thing you should make sure is to fix your internal link structure. You want your internal pages to link to your other relevant internal page. When you link from internal pages you control the anchor text so there should be no problem getting the correct keywords there. And again, the keywords you use in the anchor are the keywords important to the page you link to.
Once you have your page create using the guidelines in the on-page optimization text and your internal link structure setup you are ready for the next step.
If you have other relevant web sites you want to add links from these sites as well to your page. Make the links in one direction from your old pages to the new page you want to rank.
There are so many ways to get internal links to your site that I have a dedicated newsletter to give you a new tip each day. Signup to my web traffic tips newsletter, I give a lot of ideas for how you can get more links to your page, one tip a day.
You want the number of incoming links to your site to grow in a natural way. If you get several hundreds link to your page suddenly search engines will notice and you will be penalized. You can check how many incoming links you have in Google by searching for your domain with the link: prefix
On page Search engine optimization
On page SEO is about making it easy for the search engines to index your web page for the right terms. There are a few things you should always do or at least know about when creating a web page.
Use the <title> tag
The title tag is displayed in the title of the web browser. You should always have a title tag and it should contain you most important keyword. Make the title relative short, there is no point in stuffing in all keywords. The longer the title the less weight your keyword in the title will have. Make the title readable and relevant but include the keyword
Use <h1> and <h2> tags
The h1 and h2 tags are probably the most important tags after the title tag. Use the tags for headlines. You can change the look of the tags with stylesheets and you can even use the <h> tags if you write in Wordpress. Make sure your first <h1> tag includes your top keyword.
Use <meta> description
The meta description does not directly affect your ranking but when a page has one it will be used in search engines. The meta description is what shows as site description when someone sees your site in the search engine results. Write it as a advert to get people to visit your site.
Bold and italic
Bold and italic fonts words are important and you want a few bold italic terms in your body text. Bold and italic are given more weight than other words so having keywords as bold and italic is a good thing. Don’t overdo it, remember that in the end someone is going to read your text, always have this in mind, create your pages for real persons.
Body text
Don’t include your keywords more than a few times in your article or your text might be penalized. Try to use the keyword once in the beginning of the text and once at the end of the text and that is it. In the early days of the internet the number of keywords was used to determine how relevant a text was. Now the algorithms are a lot more sophisticated and they are changing all the time.
Write your body about the subject and don’t care too much about keywords and you will probably end up with a better text. Again focus on writing for real persons and follow these simple rules.
Now get my traffic tips newsletter to learn how to get more traffic to your site. And get some ideas where you can apply what you just read in this article.
Search engine optimization – black and white
Search engine optimization is about trying to improve your position in the search engine for a specific web page for a given search term.
Many people see Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as something bad. As something done to spam search engine, an annoyance.
It can be.
This type of SEO is often called black hat SEO. Black hat ideas have to change constantly to stay one step ahead of Google and the others. Black hat SEO often uses tools to automate creation of web pages, to create networks of spam sites, to automate commenting on bloggs and forums. Black Hat SEO is probably the reason Google CEO recently called the internet a cesspool and suggested brands to be the solution.
I would stay away from these Black hat ideas. Making people mad at you is good for no one, as a general rule, any web traffic generation idea that is done completely automatic is most probably not good. The search engines are constantly working on finding ways to get rid of this type of bad content. If you use any of these ideas and get removed from the indexes it will be hard or impossible to get back in.
The other type of SEO can be labelled as white hat SEO. Here you try to optimize your content to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find and index your content for the relevant terms.
Between the black and white there is a grey zone. If you have good content and don’t use anything shady you should be safe.
All SEO activities can be grouped into on-page optimization or off-page optimization.
With on-page optimization you improve the content on the page you want to rank in the engines. On-page optimization you should do once and be done with it. Though, it is important that you get these basic things right. When you have completed your page following the simple rules you are generally done with on-page optimizations and can focus on off-page optimizations.
Off-page optimization is about making other pages on the internet help your page to rank well. Search engine takes into account the number of incoming links to your site and how and where the links are.
When Google started out they had an idea and a patent known as page rank. Here is a simplified explanation. Each site on the internet is given a score based on the content on the page. To this score is added the weighted score of all pages linking to the page. When someone is searching the internet this score is part of what determines how the search results are ordered.
Tomorrow I will go through a checklist of what you must do on your page. Until then why don’t you subscribe to my daily traffic tip and get more visitors to your site.
Compare yourself to your competition
I am always interested in knowing how I am doing against other similar sites in my area. If they are getting more visitors I want to know and find out why. If I am doing better than the competition that is also valuable to know. Besides, it feels good!
Compete.com is a service that let you compare site traffic for different web sites side by side. You enter the top urls of the sites you want to compare. The service present you with a graph of the number of visitors for each site every month one year back in time.
If you signup for their pay service you get results up to three years back in time. The service is a bit expensive at $499 a month. Included with the subscription you also get a complete list of keywords driving traffic from search engines and a breakdown on what sites are referring traffic. You can also find out where visitors are heading after a visit to a site.
I use the free service to monitor my sites.
You have to remember that just as with Alexa the traffic data compete uses is not complete. I have seen months on my sites that have been better than average from my analytics, monitoring all traffic. On compete these month looked like bad months. The more traffic the site has the more correct are the numbers from compete. The same goes for keywords, I have some keywords that did not show up in compete that really where my top ones.
My main use for compete is to check the top competition to get ideas for keywords that I can use on my pages and in articles I write. I find it really valuable as a help with keyword research. Even if the numbers are not 100% accurate I know that at least one person used the phrase and probably more. Then I use the keywords to generate more keywords with other tools. It is also interesting to see if a competition has targeted a completely different niche for their product than I have. In that case it might be worth investigating.
Now you can investigate my free traffic tips newsletter and get more visitors to your sites. No point in monitoring a site if you don’t have any visitors, right?