Keywords and Keyword Research
Keywords are the terms and phrases that your customers type into a search engine in order to find your product or service.
One of the most important things you can do to get free traffic online is to populate your site with the terms that your customers are using to find you.
Planning With Keywords in Mind
Search engines crawl or spider your site and store what they find. Once your site sends clear signals showing what it is all about, you will be found be people searching using keywords you have optimized for.
Unfortunately, these terms are not always what you, as the business owner think they are. The analogy I use is a hot dog cart. Where would you want to put your hot dog cart: in front of people who are full… or starving people?
This is where keyword research becomes important. Keyword research shows you where (the words they use) the starving people are (searching) for what you sell. The Google Keyword Tool is a fine place to start and it can get you going in the right direction. Using the tool is easy. Here's a video on how to use it.
It's labeled as an adwords keyword research tool, but it works just fine for natural search as well. The one serious fault with the tool is that it uses a bar graph to show an estimate of searches. Another free tool that is excellent and has a detailed training program of both text and video training is Market Samurai. Highly Recommended!
So you've found keywords and more importantly, keyword phrases… where do you use them?
First — you must have planned to have text on your pages. How much? 200 – 450 words per subject would be ideal.
Second — More is not better in this case. Do not optimize a page for more then 3 keywords and only that many if they are directly related. Our policy is to not go above 2 keyword phrases per page.
There are "on page" places to use keywords: in the Title tag in the html code; in the Meta description tag in the html; in the "H1" tag on the page; and in the written content, once or twice more.
Keyword research is one of the most time consuming tasks that an SEO company does. It's an art as well as a science to dig deep and find the intersect point of high traffic, high conversion and least competition.
In Part 4 we will discuss Site Navigation.
What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?Filed under Blog, SEO Ranking by . 
Local SEO for Vancouver Business: Quick, down and dirty
How do you indicate to a search engine that your webpage is about a certain (insert your keyword phrase) subject, so you rank well? Here's 11 fresh, "proven to work today Sept. 2009" ways to clearly indicate what your pages are about, so you rank higher immediately.
Bonus New, New Thing: On Site Video and SEO
SEO experts are chiming in that, in as little as one year from today, without onsite video – you will not rank. Wow! Even if it takes longer than that, clearly video is rapidly gaining importance.
Check out Reel SEO for a treasure trove of information about this!
1. More content, and exclusive material
Applicable, distinct information and more of it, always helps rankings. What's new, what's cool, what's secret, etc., these are all interesting to humans and thus, the search engines.
2. Frequency of publishing
Frequent and regular(!) additions to your content is best. How much? As much as you can manage – 2X daily, daily, 3X weekly; more is better! (I know – it sucks!)
3. Keyword Phrases in Your Web Address
Having keywords that describe your site in your URL (website address) helps. For example: http://www.vancouverlocalseo.com Pick your highest traffic keyword phrase, if it is available. This is still an important part of the ranking criteria.
4. Keyword Phrases in Title tag
This tag lives in the Head area of your html code and it shows in search results as your page title.
A general guideline to follow is that the further up a page of code your keyword phrases live, the more important they are. This is like when you start reading a book page and the headline is most important.
So the Title tag is very important and for best effect SEO wise, it should be short with the keywords at the beginning.
5. Keyword Phrases in Anchor text
Keywords in anchor text from other internal pages on your site is an important criteria. It indicates that this page is authoritative on the given subject. Takes some planning, but it works well.
6. Heading tags
This used to be more important than it seems to be now, but keywords in headings is still a useful way to further indicate what your page is about. It is also a great way to create other headlines and sub headlines to make your text more human friendly.
7. Keyword Phrases in Alt text
Search engines do not read images (yet) but they do spider image descriptions in the Alt text. Use keywords in those descriptions.
8. Keyword Phrases in Meta Description tag
This is the only meta tag that does anything. Sometimes a search engine publishes this text on the search result page, so it is worth the effort.
9. Keyword Phrases starting your content
Start your content text with your keyword phrase. Some people will insist you put it also in the middle and at the end, but I feel that once you've started with the phrase just write normally and let it reoccur naturally. Careful about overuse though!
10. "Good" code
Your site must be spider friendly – no broken links, 404 errors (page not found), excess javascript on the page, text alternatives to flash content, etc. Run your site through a code checker to find errors and get them fixed!
11. Sitemap
A fresh, always updated sitemap is very important – html or (better) .xml version.
Call us to help you with this.
What do you think? Please comment below to tell me.Filed under Blog, Local Search, SEO Ranking by .