May 2008 Archives

Page ranks, links, traffic, keyword phrases, anchor text, and a lot more comprise the Search Engine Optimization, aside from its sibling--Link Building. It is often referred as SEO in the industry. What does it do to you? Well, if you're an entrepreneur (be it small, medium, or large-scale), definitely SEO is the best thing for you.

Nowadays, according to current researches that more than 80% of people, regardless of professions and ages, are relying to the Internet for daily information needs. This attracts money-makers from around the globe to put their products and/or services in the World Wide Web. There is no more practical than to have your business exposed in the monitor of every home anywhere in the world. Your business will not only be locally known: through the internet, it gets global exposure to your product or services. More likely, your business, the products or services it offers will be potentially sold in this kind of setting.

How then would SEO help in your business? Here's how.

It is a great advantage if you have your business website well-designed and well-developed. However, the beauty of your website would be nothing as a dust on an ancient table if it does not appear in the search engine. Search Engine Optimization helps your business visibility that brings forth its popularity in the internet. Of course, the very first thing that entrepreneurs do to sell their products/services is through advertising. The purpose of advertising is to expose the face of your products or to give the targeted market an idea how they will be beneficial if they purchase them. As an entrepreneur, you must know that the customers' concern is not the progress of your business. Try to venture on other fields if you think that way. There are only two things that customers consider in buying a product/service: (a) the benefits they can get out of that product/service and (b) the price if it is worth buying for. These two things must also be what you must consider to attract potential customers. If your business website appears in search engine results page (SERP), ranked 700th out of 300,000 results, that's a good start. However, to entice customers to have your product sell would be hard in that condition. Entrepreneurs have the spirit in striving to top over his or her competitors. If you don't have that spirit, stop your business before further financial damages can be done. Your goal must to top over any other businesses of the same kind, being in the top 10, or at least in the top 20 of SERP. It would be best, if you can make it to Top 1 or 2. And only SEO can help you.

SEO can be done through link building. Link building is a positioning technique in the search engine results page (SERP). It is done by directory submissions, blogging, forum postings and blog commenting, reciprocal link campaigns and many others. The goal is to improve link popularity in which page rank (PR) increase follows. The basis is quality, not merely on quantity of links. Link building used to be a number game but due to further development of search engine technology, here comes the qualitative basis for ranking. A good link builder optimizes a website the right way. The only way to check if a link builder is doing well is to check the SERP (by searching the right keyword) if the websites he/she is optimizing has a good page rank.

Competition for gaining a higher PageRank (PR) in search engine results page (SERP) is getting harder and harder. Now, it takes only as quick as days or hours that ranking in the SERP changes. Therefore,link building (SEO's backbone) should be excessively and carefully done. The process such as reciprocal link campaigns is comparative to the act of mining in which a link builder is looking for precious websites as link partners. Link building and mining are both using the same principles which is looking and digging for a precious stuff. In the case of mining, it is precious metals or minerals while in link building, it is quality links.

Why digging for quality links? Basically, quality links are the ones that you can be used to improve your site's PR. We can compare them to food enhancers that make a certain dish more palatable. To determine a quality link, lots of things must be considered. Factors such as anchor text, semantic relevance and page relationship matters. According to SEOmoz Professional's Guide to Link Building, before deciding what website will be used as your links, they must be trusted and valuable. "The more trusted, valuable links your site receives, the more trusted and valuable your site (and the links you give) becomes."

We must also consider three fundamentals of a link: anchor text, link location and link intention. Anchor texts are the words used within the link. Usually, we encounter hyperlinked text such as Click Here, that when clicked, leads us to another website. That is the "traditional" and recently declared as not as effective as the one that is described by the SEOmoz Professional's Guide to Link Building--the ones that provide not just the link but also offer additional semantic relevance. More chances for your site that it will be indexed and later, be ranked since search engines are picky when it comes to words. So, anchor text itself, as advised, must carry semantic value to the site it is leading the internet users to. Link location or URL location is where a site's page structure your link is found (SEOmoz). It has two kinds, the shallow and deep links. Shallow links are the ones that lead to homepage, while the deep links are those that lead to a more specific page. It is said that is preferable to have deep links because the search engines are always considering the relevance of the page's content from the linked text. Lastly, the link intention must be in accordance with the need of the searcher. Your intention should serve as the link to give additional information on the topic that your site is linked to. Otherwise than that, such as to serve only as advertisement, then your PR is in danger.

One thing is clear here, everything must be relevant to each other, the content to anchor text to link and to all other elements within the website.

Just like mineral mining, a miner has to encounter large boulders and pieces of rocks and pebbles but he has to carefully examine every rock if they contain mineral which will be further process to extract only the pure. If the rock indeed contains mineral, then it means money is at hand. Relevance also plays a role in the act of mining as with link building. If you are working in a gold mine company, then it is out of your job to mine copper or silver beneath the earth.

Gaining visibility and direct traffic of the website being optimized (be it for the visibility in search engine or social networking sites) are the main goal of link building. Once your site gains traffic, you gain money--in which what business is all about--just like mining.

Keywords are words typed in by the searchers in looking for websites that contains information they need. This means that they are the blood that gives life to optimize a website. They are what Search Engine Optimizers are very particular of; just like how particular fishermen are with fishes.

Website without proper keywords to drive traffic and returns of investment (ROI) is like catching a school of fish that draws nothing at all but empty fishnet. Efforts and time are wasted. In business world, that is a serious failure that may remain permanent if not remedied.

How is choosing the right keyword done? Three things must taken into consideration on the process namely; keyword popularity, competitive value of the keyword, and relevance. These elements are important while doing the following three general steps of choosing the right keyword.

Step 1. Keyword Research and Analysis

The keyword researcher should have a mind of a customer or potential customer, not a curious researcher because "business" is what you are dealing here and not "science." Bear in mind that we are inviting potential customers, not information-hungry internet savvies or lookers. To start, type in words that are more possibly used in accessing products or services offered by your company to test the visibility of your website on the SERP. If it appears on the first page and has good ranking over more than 100,000 websites, it means that you are doing well on the optimization, if otherwise then it's time to alter or improve the keywords or keyword phrases you used. Keyword popularity is the frequency that words or phrases are used by searchers on a given period of time. This is the basis of knowing the keyword value. The more popular your keyword, the better, but the disadvantageous part is that achieving rankings is very difficult.

It is impractical to have more competitors over the same keywords, so searching for another potential query words or phrases that are popular and not competitive is highly advised. How is it done? It's easy with the help of WordTracker.com, Google Sandbox Tool, Search Term suggestion tool from Overture, and many more. These tools help you find keywords and decide which of them are appropriate for your web page. Popular keyword shared by a large number of your business competitors in the search engine is not always a good thing unless you top. Remember that the main goal of optimizing your website is traffic with sales conversion and not ranking or traffic alone. Being ranked 10th in the second results page over 30 SERPs is better than being ranked 1st in the keyword that nobody uses at all. Worst, if you're getting more traffic without conversions happened. Website with high popularity and more traffic is as useless as catching dead fishes if there are no returns of investment (ROI). In addition, the relevance of your keyword is also important. It is tested by this step. Your website must be seen together with the websites having the same theme with yours on the results page.

While doing the keyword research, please avoid single word keyword. Internet users tend to use phrases than single word queries. Being specific, but not too much, is the best way of attracting target audience (potential customers of your products or services). Your company name or trademarks as your keywords must be added with generic ones to make it more accessible to large number of targets, but consider also your unique products or services as well as regional keywords (specified by location). Though it's difficult to get good ranking in this case, do not worry because SEO companies exist for that purpose if you cannot do it all by yourself. Seek help to trusted SEO companies.

Step 2. Keyword Selection

You must come up with at least 30 keyword phrases that best represent or describe your website after doing the previous step. Keyword selection is done by scrutinizing potential keywords that will drive more traffic and ROI. For instance, a keyword phrase that drives 4000 hits with 20% sales is far better than the other keyword phrase that drives 40,000 hits with .02% sales only--that's 800 vs. 8 sales. Thumbs up for you if you got 40,000 hits, and for 8 sales, definitely thumbs down.

In this process, more things will be considered such as regional differences of words: "panties" in the Philippines is called undergarments in UK, and "jumper" in UK is called "sweater" in US. Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) measures the value of your keyword and is done with the help of tools mentioned previously (WordTracker.com, Google Sandbox Tool, Search Term suggestion tool from Overture). KEI helps you decide which among the 30 keywords are best for your website.

Step 3. Keyword Placement

SEO experts affirmed that this is the most difficult process because it is done continuously. The keyword density is determined to avoid keyword stuffing. Density range must be 4% to 9% only, or else Mr. Spider will accuse you of spamming. The right placement is decided after seeing results that would take months long. This involves series of experimentation and analysis of results wherein careful iterations are made.

The placement takes place in the Meta Keyword Description, Title Meta Tags, Anchor Text, Title Tag in Anchor Tags, Header Tag Content, Header Tag Content, Alt Tags in Pictures that are Links, Alt Tags in Pictures that are not Links, URL/Filenames, Bold/Italic Tag Content, and Body Text. The keywords in each page of your website must be evenly distributed without exceeding the 9% limit.

If choosing the right keyword is done accurately, expect to bring in more Returns of Investment like tons of fishes that a fisherman draws after the intensive effort of patience and perseverance.