google rankings

The second installment of Stickyseed’s SEO for Beginners Guide, we’ll show you how to find and use the best keywords for your site. Keywords are how people find your site. If you don’t invest time into researching the best keywords for your site, the wrong terms and phrases will hurt you in lost rankings and no one even finding you.

To give you the best ROI on your site, here’s some simple steps to take.

Six Steps to Effective Keyword Research

1. Brainstorming. Think of all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. Come up with any words that describe all the services your site offers but avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. Be sure to include alternate spellings, wordings and synonyms too.
2. Survey Your Target Audience. Get in touch with past or present customers and ask them for input. This is an excellent way to expand your list.
3. Take advantage of keyword tools. Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site. There are a number of great tools that offer concrete data about a keyword trend. Here’s a few, starting with the freebies:
   • Google Adword Keyword Tool
   • Google Suggest
   • Thesaurus.com
   • Check Traffic Tool
   • Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool
   • SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
   • Wordtracker
   • Yahoo! Search Marketing
4. Finalize your list. You should have a lot of data now about all your keywords. Put it into a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and help you narrow down your focus to 10-20 highly successful keywords.
5. Use Your Keyword List. Include three to five related keywords per page. Any more and you run the risk of diluting your page and ruin your rankings. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming.
   Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
   • Title Tag
   • Meta Description Tags
   • Meta Keywords Tag
   • Headings
   • Alt text
   • Anchor Text/ Navigational Links
6. Monitor Results and analytics. After a few weeks of giving the bots a chance to pick up your keywords, use your analytics tool to monitor results. Google Analytics is an excellent freebie. It will give you hard data about how your keywords are performing in regards to increasing traffic, activity and conversation rates. Pull out the words that aren’t doing much, and put in new ones as your site grows. This is an ongoing process that needs plenty of weeding and watering.

What to Measure

• Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of users searching with a keyword that convert by clicking on an ad, but a product or complete a transaction. They were converted to another level other than looky-loo.
• Predicted Traffic. This is an estimate of how many users will be searching on a given keyword or phrase.
• Value per Customer. This is the average amount of revenue earned per customer using a keyword or phrase.
• Keyword Competition. This is a rough measurement of the competitive environment and level of difficulty for a given term/phrase.

Next: 10 Questions for Site Optimization

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Back to SEO for Beginners.

There are only a handful of search engines you truly need to focus on and those are Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, and AOL. All of these search engines have the same critical features that allow them to provide relevant web results:

How Search Engines Operate

1. Crawl the web. Using automated programs called “bots” or “spiders” search engines crawl through 8 - 10 billion web pages.
2. Index Pages. Once a page is crawled, it’s contents are stored in a gigantic database which make up the search engine’s “index”.
3. Process Queries. When the search engine receives a request for information, it pulls all the documents that match that request from it’s index. It does this in tow parts:
   • Findall Mode - Google returns all the documents that match a term
   • Second Search - only those pages with the exact phrase are returned
4. Ranking Results. It read the query and processed some results, now the search engine uses special algorithms to determine which are most relevant.

Things Search Engines Don’t Like

There are certain pages that search engine spiders and bots don’t find. As they crawl the web, they will skip sites that:

1. Complex URLs. Spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs because humans can’t read them the same way so can result in errors.
2. Pages with more than 100 unique links. Spiders may only follow a few of the links.
3. Pages more than 3 clicks from home page. Unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages.
4. Pages with a Session ID or Cookies for navigation. Spiders may not be able to hold these elements in the same manor as a browser.
5. Pages with frames. Confuses the spider as to which page to rank.

Things Search Engines Won’t Find

Spiders and bots won’t find pages that need the following to access the page:

1. Select form or submit button
2. Drop-down-menu
3. Search box
4. Blocked purposefully (using robots.txt file - more on this later)
5. Login required
6. Re-directs before showing content

In a nutshell, if a page cannot be access from the home page, it most likely won’t be indexed. The best way around this is sitemaps which we’ll talk about later. They’re the best way to help search engines find their way around your site.

Relevance & Popularity

Search engines care about two things. Is the content relevant and is it credible?

• Relevance - the site’s content match the user’s query
• Popularity - how many other credible sources are linking to the content?

Search engines first look to see if the user’s search terms are found in important areas of the sites such as the title, meta data, heading tags, or body text.

Search engines also measure who is looking at a site or page. As well as what they are say about the site or page. Clever as they are, they also keep track of who is affiliated with whom and how credible all the sites are.

All of these factors go into an algorithm that tells the engine how much importance to assign to each of these elements. This then determines a core for the page and lists the results in order of importance.

The Value of a Trustworthy Site

If hundreds of thousands of websites link to you, your site must be popular and therefor have high value. Now if those links come from very credible sites (such as .gov or BBC news), their power is multiplied.

On the other hand, search engines place a lower value on links from link farms (automated links or interlinked sites).

How to Increase the Link Value

1. Quality anchor text. The words in the hyperlink account for a lot. Search engine use this text to help them determine the subject matter of the link text. “Click Here” should be replaced with your key words.
2. Site Popularity. This accounts not only for the number of links to your sites, but the quality of the source. Highly credible sources linking to your site is extremely valuable.
3. Text Directly Surrounding the Link. A link from inside a paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer.
4. Links from Sites with Like Subject Mater. It’s more valuable to have links from pages that are related to the site’s subject matter.

These are only a few of the very many factors search engines us to measure and weigh evaluating links. Remember, search engines are there to provide quality and usable results to the user. That’s their first concern.

What next?

Next: Six Steps to Effective Keyword Research

Back to SEO for Beginners.