Small Website Hosting - Internet Marketing and web development » SEO

Google Keyword Tool for the Novice

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:01:30 +0000

When you set up your own website your biggest challenge will be in getting visitors to come to your site. One of the more successful ways of doing this is through what is known as search engine optimisation (SEO). Some search engines list their content on the basis of keywords contained in the website. These keywords are picked up by a search engine crawler. Google is a crawler based search engine which automatically places the various websites in an order of preference based on the strength of its keywords. It is your aim to have your site listed on the first page of any search engine result when your potential visitor types in your particular keyword, preferably at the top of that page. When you make changes to your website the crawler will eventually run across these changes and adjust your listing to reflect the changes.

Finding the most effective keywords is one of your biggest tasks if you are going to be successful in getting a high listing and this is where the Google keyword tool comes into its own. It assists you in seeing the search volumes, any estimated cost per click and the keyword competition. Carrying out keyword research in this way means that you can check the search volume of any specific keyword you might have in mind. For instance if the keyword you are thinking of using only gets eight or nine searches a month it will be of no value to you.

The Google keyword tool will also tell you the amount of competition your keyword might have to contend with. If it happens that your competition is going to be quite high then it indicates a lot of hard work before you will be able to get to the front in any listing. This means you will have to attach more information to the keyword to make it stand out better. For instance if you are selling vacuum cleaners, you would probably find a million other people are already using the words vacuum cleaners. If you want to target your particular sales to a certain area you would be better off prefacing your keywords with ‘your town’ vacuum cleaners, replacing the words ‘your town’ with the name of your own city or suburb. To get this type of assistance all you need do is to sign up to a Google account where you can see the keywords with the most value for your specific type of interest.

Using the Google Keyword Tool

Once you have successfully opened your Google account all you need do is to log in and take the following steps:

Choose your country and language. Open the Advanced Option and Filter tab and choose whichever country you want to appear in. This cuts back the competition from other countries around the world for which you would be wasting your time competing with for a higher listing.
Choose your keywords. If you are starting out and not quite sure at this stage what keywords would suit you best you can ask Google to do this for you. You do this by opening ‘Website Option’. This allows you to type in your URL and Google will come up with the keywords it thinks would be most appropriate for your site.
Matching your keywords. Your next move will be to target your keyword or keywords more precisely. After you click on search you will see a list of all your keywords come up on your screen as well as some others that Google thinks would also be of benefit. On the left hand side of this list you will see a box which has ‘exact match’ as one of the options. Click on this option. If you don’t do this you will be stuck with a broad search that will pick out your keywords wherever those words come up in the millions of websites out there. By refining the search to exact, only the words you have chosen will be picked up on. For instance ‘your town vacuum cleaners’ as against ‘vacuum cleaners.’ You will now see your exact keywords appear in brackets. The broad keyword option is better used if you are fishing around in the market and not quite sure how you want to target your site into any specific niche. For instance if you want to be listed more widely than being restricted to your own locality in selling your vacuum cleaners you will broaden your market, as every time someone uses the words vacuum cleaners, no matter what other words are used before and after, your keywords will be activated.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is an independent site where you can easily check if your keywords are working for you and find out how your competitors are going. All you need do is to enter your URL and click on ‘search’ then click on ‘anchor text.’ The page that now comes up will display all the anchor texts being used, a feature you might be able to use to give your site a better chance of beating the competition.

The best way to learn how you can use the Google Keyword tool to your best advantage is to open an account and put it to use. You will become more competent as you become more familiar with its many advantages in helping to get your website a higher listing where it is exposed to more traffic.

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How to Drive Massive Traffic to Your Blog

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:27:00 +0000

Driving traffic to a blog actually not as hard as you think. All you need to understand is:

To find out where people are looking for blog posts or articles to read
To know what type of headline and content teaser can attract people to visit your blog.

Of course, content is important. But you must understand that in order to let people know that your content is important, you need to take care the two things above, that evolve around one single focus:

Get your content to as many eyeballs as possible.

That being said, I found out from my experience that good blog traffic is mainly coming from blog posts, not from the homepage. “Good” means targeted and unique visitors (visitors retention is another issue…) Therefore, search engine result pages placement is very, very important, as having your blog posts in Google or Yahoo! first page is a massive organic traffic generator.

Here are some simple, logical and practical tips on how to drive traffic to your blog – Please note, I have tested these tips and succeed in increasing my blogs’ traffic:

Whenever possible, create a list or how-to blog post. “List” blog post type, such as “10 Steps to increase your blog traffic” or “Top 5 blog traffic ideas” and “How-to” blog post type, such as “How to drive traffic to your blog” or “How to do SEO” are two of the most successful content type in driving traffic. Use them sparingly in between regular, newsy or opinionated, blog post to give more flavour for your blog.
Social bookmarking is a must. This is what people are still overlook today – You have to bookmark your own content (You’ve got to like your blog post – If you didn’t, then how can you expect others to?) My strategy is to bookmark to about 5 social bookmarking sites, 4 to high-traffic sites, such as Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Delicious, and 1 to dofollow bookmarking site, such as Blinklist. Mix the use of those social bookmarking sites with hundreds of others to get your content to as many communities as possible.
Blog commenting, forum posting, Yahoo answers.

Use these wisely, as no comment and posting are created equal – You shan’t spam with “check this out!” or “good blog post. Thanks!”-type of content. They are simply useless (maybe for backlinking purpose, they still hold value.) Provide valuable and smart opinion, and others will soon see that your comments or threads are useful and will try to find out who you are. This leads to another tip: Always leave some form of contact info, generally your website address.

Create content in high traffic content directory. Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages and Google Knols works well, and having your links in them will benefit your search engine rank greatly. Writing useful content in them, of course, is a requirement – Great content will drive thousands of page views that will lead to visitors clicking on your links.
Get others to review or mention your blog or blog post. People use this mainly for link building purpose, but I see reviews as double-benefit. First, getting your blog or blog post reviewed by related, quality sites will jump your rank in search engine result pages. Second, well-written review will entice visitors of the blogs or sites reviewing you to visit your blog.
Support your blog with useful, traffic-generating services. Having a web directory attached to your blog works wonder for me. If your blog is about pet, having a pet doctor directory will drive massive traffic to your blog. This is also true for other traffic-generating services, such as press release services, classified ads, forums, and other similar type of services.
Last but not least, never forget your own on-site SEO. Implement best SEO practices on your blog, such as using keywords in blog post title, signing your blog post with keywords, tagging each blog post properly, etc. Those will definitely work well, but not on their own – You need to do the above tactics to mix and match.

I GUARANTEE the results of the above tips, if done correctly and regularly.

SWH Web Directory

admin — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:46:40 +0000

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce our newest resource: SWH Web Directory.

SWH Web Directory is, obviously, part of Small Website Hosting site (hence the name: SWH) offering website listings services that list strictly approved inclusion requests (In our pre-launch, we have rejected about 35% of incoming link submissions). So, yes, we do whatever we can to ensure that the links within our directory are quality links.

What SWH Web Directory offers webmasters, link builders and website owners

We are currently offering both free and paid listing. We do offer what other web directories don’t – You can feature your website for as low as $4.95/month and get your website reviewed for free. What’s more, we will feature one randomly chosen website from our latest approved submissions every week.

The review above will include a maximum of two links to your website – One to your detailed website info in our SWH Web Directory, and the other one to your website with the text link we think optimal for link building purpose (yes, our outbound links – external and internal – for the review are dofollow).

Submit your link now »

Submit your article now »

SWH Web Directory Featured Member: SEO-WATCH.COM

admin — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:10:19 +0000

As we might already know, search engine optimization or SEO is important. But did you know that overdoing SEO is actually worse than lack of SEO?

Here’s what SEO-Watch.com, our directory’s most recent featured member can do for you – Helping you with the right SEO campaign that will give your website an optimal impact in search engine result page (SERP) placement.

SEO-Watch.com offers various SEO services, such as web promotion, Google AdWords and link building services, as well as other supporting services such as shared web hosting and search engine submission services.

If you in need of a pro to help you with your website’s SEO, you should consider SEO-Watch.com services.

Why Relying on Google PageRank is Wrong

admin — Sun, 03 May 2009 01:56:34 +0000

During my journey in make money online, I have concluded that one of the major mistakes that people are keep doing is to rely your online money making campaign on Google PageRank.

Totally misleading and entirely wrong decision. Why?

PageRank, as you might already knew, is a measurement from 1 to 10 of how Google rank sites based on their popularity, of course, in the eyes of Google. Having a PageRank 7 is way much better than having a PageRank 3.

Does having a high PageRank help you rank higher in search engine result pages? Not necessarily.

There are PageRank 0 web pages that rank #1 on a certain keyword, because it’s popular in the eyes of Google. For instance, getting linked by an .edu (educational sites) is worth more than even 1000 .com links.

So again, PageRank is not related to your ability to rake in traffic.

One of my blogs received about 700 visits with 400 uniques every day with a PageRank 3, while my other blogs only receive about 100 visits with 50 uniques every day with a PageRank 5. Who makes more money? No brainer – the former one.

You see, all I can do with a PageRank 5 is selling links (90% links with dofollow attribute,) while I can do much more thing with my PageRank 3 site with good incoming traffic from search engines.

Of course, having a PageRank 5 with high traffic is very desirable, but it’s not the case that everyone can achieve

So, a conclusion: Will having a high PageRank help? Yes – It might get you good money on limited time (until you get caught by Google selling links, and penalised your PageRank) and it’s good for your ego (It’s a standard uses by many to measure SEO and link building success.)

Having said that, can I rely on PageRank? Of course not, if your vision is long term. If your make money onilne method involves buying dropped domains with high PageRank, sell links, and forget, this could be very, very lucrative

I do try that before – buy a PageRank 5 domain name, set a simple site, sell links, and rake in dollars after dollars, until it gets Page Rank 0 – penalised by Google for selling links

Believe me, link building and SEO are worthless in the above case – On that site, I’ve build well from nothing to something and have several PR6 backlinks with almost 15,000 in back links. Plain useless, if you sell links…

So, there you go. Will you rely on Google PageRank to make money online? You could, but you will become what a colleague called me before: A link pimp. ‘Your choice…

WordPress tempate for SEO

admin — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:57:01 +0000

I have created a wordpress template optimized for SEO. I’ve used it on my other blog. It has 3 columns, sidebar on the left and right side.

Installation

1. Download and extract the zip file.
2. Upload the theme file to your server at “/wp-content/themes/” folder.
3. Activate the theme. (Admin Panel -> Presentation -> Themes)

Getting traffic from commenting

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:52:26 +0000

Leaving comments on other people blog can be source of traffic to your blog. You can also get
backlink, if they are do follow blog. By posting a controversial comment, you might have lots of
traffic. Here are comments tips so you get maximum result:

What is you target on commenting? Is it SEO reason or is it branding your self. If you want to
brand your self, it is better to use your own name instead of using your keyword. When you use
your name, people will remember you more easily. If you have common name, change your
name just like celebrity change their name. If you want back link, you should check their page
source code. Search the source for ‘nofollow’. If it exist, then you will not have back link to
your blog.
Make a good comment, which is clear, and relevant. Make your comment useful for other
people reading it. Don’t just say “Good post”. Write why it is good?
Try to be the top commentators, because it will bring you many traffic. You will get link from
their home page.
Choose your words wisely. You don’t want to create trouble that could make someone hate you.
It is good to write constructive criticism that doesn’t hurt others feelings.
Be the first commentator. People usually pay more attention to first poster.
Do not put your signature in your comment. I think it is unnecessary. Your post usually have
your name in title link. So don’t be greedy.

Commenting is also a link building activity, so you need to comment on DoFollow blog to gain back link benefit. Here are the top 50 of my DoFollow blog:

My top 50 directory

admin — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:28:11 +0000

One way to increase your traffic is by submit your blog to directory. You can add back link this way, and can increase your SEO result. Here’s my top 50 directory:

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

admin — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:46:10 +0000

Two weeks ago, Google released a search engine optimization starter guide for webmasters.

Here are guide taken from there:

Pages Title

Create unique, accurate page titles
Accurately describe the page’s content
Use brief, but descriptive titles

“description” meta tag

Accurately summarize the page’s content
Use unique descriptions for each page

Structure of your URLs

Use words in URLs
Avoid having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/
page.html”
Avoid using directory names that have no relation to the content in them.

Site navigation

Create a naturally flowing hierarchy
Use mostly text for navigation
Use “breadcrumb” navigation – A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom
of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root
page.
Put an HTML sitemap page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file
Have a useful 404 page

Content

Write easy-to-read text
Stay organized around the topic
Create content primarily for your users, not search engines

Anchor text

Choose descriptive text – The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic
idea of what the page linked to is about.
Use short but descriptive text

Heading tags

Avoid erratically moving from one heading tag size to another
Avoid excessively using heading tags throughout the page

Images

Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text
Avoid using generic filenames like “image1.jpg”, “pic.gif”, “1.jpg” when possible
Supply alt text when using images as links
Store images in a directory of their own

Building links tips

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:41:00 +0000

I just want to share how I build links. First you need to find out which website or blog which have high PageRank. High PageRank usually have many backlinks. To find out how many backlink from Google, search for “link:domainname.com”. Change the “domainname” with the domain name you want to find out.

You will find out which blog or website that gives link to the domainname.com. If it is somebody’s blog, you can try comment on that blog. You just need to follow other successful blog.