Well well well. Is google trying to destroy comparison websites? Comparsion websites spend millions a year with Google and once again google try and screw them over. (…)
Check out this article on Matt Cutts from Googles blog. Its a basic guide to SEO.
Here it is….. (…)
Friends and family often ask so what is it exactly that you do. Well its sometimes not that easy to explain when it comes to search marketing. There are many elements to search including paid advertising and organic search. Found this article in The Age today that sums it up well.
This is my new site full of search engine optimisation tips and advice If you need help with SEO, PPC, site design for SEO or advice on creating or bettering revenue streams give me a call.
Selecting the right keywords for your website is crucial to a good search strategy. Often in SEO people neglect the keywords that are the most relevant. They will often go for the most popular keywords rather than the ones that best represent the site or service they offer. They are a few techniques to picking your keywords but normally the best way is to go through the list of keywords in order of the most common searched words in your industry. Look at each keyword and rank them from 1 to 3 as to how relevant that keyword is to your site (1 being the most relevant, 2 being some relevance and 3 being no relevance).
People often ask me where is the best place to gather your keyword lists. It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are building a list for your SEO strategy you don’t need a list of hundreds of keywords. If your building a list for your Pay Per Click campaigns and wanting to target thousands of keywords then something www.wordtraker.com or www.keyworddiscovery.com may do the trick. You can also use a program like Keyword Elite which is fine for small projects. When building a list for SEO i believe that the best source of keywords is Google. As you re most likely optimising for Google anyway what better source is there? For a site that already exists this is easier than If are starting from scratch and if you already run a Google ad-words campaign and track the results with analytics it become evan easier as you will probably already have enough data to pick your keyword list. If your site is brand new and you don’t have an Google Adwords account should should sign up to adwords to get access to the google adwords tool or use something like Keyword Elite.
From Google Ad-words you can run a keyword report on all your keywords to date. Make sure you set the time frame to “all time”. You can then download the file as a .csv or in an xsl format. Don’t worry if your keyword list is not that comprehensive as we will build it out later.
From the list rank each of the words from one to three based on which of the terms are most relevant to your site. You may also want to pay close attention to the CTR (ad impressions to clicks %) as the higher clicked through keywords will generally be the words that users find more relevant to your website which is very useful information. You can also take a look in analytics at that keywords and see how long visits where for that keyword. Normally the longer the visit the more relevant the user found the keyword to your site. If you have goals or events set up in analytics take a look at which keywords result in goals.
If you think your list is light on take the top keywords you ranked at 1 and 2 and feed them in the the google keyword tool in ad-words. Once you have more keywords download them into a spread sheet and repeat the ranking process. Note that google will also give you the search traffic for each keyword. Although the don’t give you exact search numbers they are still very useful when selecting your keywords.
Now you have a basic keyword list in the next blog we will take a look at how to implement them to your site.
Part One – Site Design
In the web marketing business you hear and read about all sorts of crap regarding the best way to optimise a website. Some will tell you that all you need to do is change a few page titles and keywords and your sweet. Unless your optimising for term "Crap SEO consultant know nothing know it all" you will probably need to so more that this.
Search optimisation is so much more involved and it starts with a good well designed / coded website structure that is friendly to humans and search engines alike. Up until recently search optimisation was an after thought and many try to implement there search strategy after they have built there site. This is normally very bad and a costly exercise if you are committed to your search strategy as you may need to redevelop large parts of your site.
Many SEO consultants skip this step as its to hard to convince there client that they may need to rebuild there website. Its sometimes easier to spend more on cost per click campaigns than it is to redevelop a site. Unfortunately site design and cost per click campaigns are closely related. I can totally understand this but if you don't do it right and you competitor does you are already behind.
If the site structure is not to bad you may get away with just redeveloping small elements of the site which should have a big impact on overall search results so its not always bad.
These are the main reasons your site needs to be structured right.
It will go along way to achieve good organic search results in Google
It will help drive your Google ad-words campaign cost per click down
And most importantly it will help users find what they are after on the site
Tips to designing a site for search marketing
Most web developers will often tell you that the also are experts in SEO. This is very rarely true. Building a site for search can take time depending on the complexities of the site. If you are lucky enough to find a developer that really understands SEO then you have done well. What you probably should do is get someone in to work with the developers to ensure that the structure is search friendly.
Make sure the actual web designer is really good (the person that designs the look and feel of the website and also builds the HTML templates for the web developers). What i mean by this is not only does the designer need to understand user behavior to help build a user friendly site. They also need to have a very clean coding style with excellent CSS / mark up skills. If they are any good they should also understand SEO best practices for site design. If they don't it is easy for an SEO specialist to help them.
When it comes to developers normally you get what you pay for. This does not mean you should go for the most expensive developer either as that may also be a disaster. You need to make sure that the developers have experience in developing websites with SEO in mind.
This a basic list of questions that should give you some idea of there knowledge and experience when it comes to site optimisation.
How do they handle dynamic url's? Every single page on the site should have a unique url that is easy to under stand and helps tell the search engines what the page is about. So instead of have a url that reads www.YOURsite.com/ad345538stuffhere888 . It would read www.YOURsite.com/Nice-URL-Title
Do you have the ability to manage Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and keywords from the CMS (content management system). This is hugely important to let Google know what the them of the page is.
Can they build template to populate the Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Keywords and content for less important pages or shopping cart pages by using sections of the database to piece together content? (its also important the the database is structured correctly to help this). This is important if you have a very big site (500+ pages). If they cant do this you will need to right Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Keywords and content for every single page.
Are they building you a custom website our using open source solutions like Joomla or Dot Net Nuke ? If they are using an open source solution there a many add on components that can help with SEO. Open source and components are not always to most SEO friendly but done right it can be pretty good. The other thing to take into account with open source is that it should not cost more than around $10,000 tops (really should be much less if they are not customising anything)
If you require a shopping cart make sure that they use the right one. You may need to do some research here or get someone in that knows which ones are best based on what you want to achieve. Many shopping carts need allot of customisation to be SEO friendly. Just cause the say they are SEO friendly does not mean they are.
Can there web designer produce clean mark up and build valid xhtml pages? This means no ugly tables tags inside the code, optimisation of source code to ensure that the they use minimal lines of code to build the pages. This makes it easier for search engine robots to find your content.
Define your goals and spell out exactly what you want. Don't leave anything to the imagination or you will end up with something thats not right. In many cases this is not the developers fault. Generally developers are good a putting things together but not necessarily that good at coming up with the best way to do things. A good web designer can help hugely in this process as they can show what things should look like and if the understand UI (User Interfaces) they well be able to help with website workflows as well. If you have a good plan it will help.
Thats it for now.
SEO Basics Part two – Building Keyword List for your Site
I am getting sick of seeing page titles like this.
"Website Design Melbourne, Web Site Development, Web Sites, eCommerce Shopping Carts, CMS, SEO, PPC, SEM"
Every second web designer claims to be an SEO specialist these days but often thats how there page titles are written. Anyone that has a page title like this knows very little about SEO and if you hired them for SEO your wasting your money.
Firstly its spam. Secondly it does not invite me to click on the link. This may have worked in 2001 but not now. Google is so much smarter than it used to be and this kind of page title would set off all sorts of spam filters.
Its not that hard to make page titles with keywords that humans will click on. Your page title needs to make a brief statement about what the page offers (with well thought keywords of course). Done right, this will not only help towards getting the page ranked but also ensure that humans are more likely to click on the listing.
You would probably go for something like this in as a page title instead of the above.
"Melbourne Website Design – Specialists in Web Development, eCommerce & Content Management Systems."
Google will only display the first 7 or so words in its search results anyway so you need to ensure that you message gets across in the first part of the sentence.
If you really want to target all those terms you will need to break that title up into 4 or 5 new pages and have a descent internal linking strategy to ensure that the related pages are linked to each other properly. The more relevant pages in your website the better off you are in terms of search engine optimisation.
One of the newer features from google that seems to be getting more traction as google improve the algorithm is site links under your website listing in the organic search results. You will mainly see them attached to sites with big brands and until recently i have not seen them on generic non brand keywords.
The basic rule is you need to be the number 1 result and you also need be an authority website for that keyword (example here Broadband Internet)
With plenty of research i think i have nailed the formula to getting the links under your site listing as i have now achieved this for 6 very competitive keywords that i have optimised for. Its not easy and it will take time but it can be done.
Setting up regular expressions in Google Analytics to track common goals and conversions can be a real pain in the ass. The more complex the site and the url structure, the more complex the expression sometimes is. Google provide very little information on how to set up regular expressions in analytics and its hard to find good resources on the net.
Regular expressions can also be very confusing and even good coders sometimes struggle to figure out how to get the best from it. Some time ago i came across this site that helps put it into layman's terms http://www.lunametrics.com/Regular Expressions. Have a good read of this site as it can really help in setting up your regular expressions.
After you have created your regular expressions one of the best ways to test them is in Google Analytics under the "Content" menu then click on the "Top Content" sub menu. You can then use the "Find URL:" search box at the bottom of the page. Type your regular expression in here and if it returns the results that you targeted in your expression then your on the right track.
Hi There,
I am an independent search marketing consultant based in Australia. Over the coming months i will be regularly posting tips & tricks on topics such as SEO, search marketing, pay per click and general news on what happing in the world of search marketing. Just wanted to say hello and welcome to the SEO Expert blog.
Cheers
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