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A fast, simple albeit effective way for increasing your AdWords efficiency is to add sitelinks to a campaign. If it’s eligible to display sitelinks but it still doesn’t have them up as yet, it’s perhaps missing out on a good business opportunity. To overcome the problem, sitelinks have been added to the Opportunities tab.
The Internet is akin to a permanent storehouse of our past and present interactions. It won’t forget anything posted about you in a hurry. So it is absolutely vital to refurbish your professional reputation by constantly publishing positive information about your business. To put the best foot forward, create an identity you want others to view favorably. Link anything positive you publish to your business site so that opinion makers, bloggers, and influencers can take a cut and take it forward.
One issue that anxious site owners and webmasters often face is getting relevant insights about Google Analytics data. They all have created an Analytics account, but look merely at page views or the total number of visitors that they draw. This is not a correct approach, when it comes to leveraging the potential of this powerful free Web Analytics tool to know more about their users. The in-depth data dug out from it can definitely help better target the prospect for enhanced conversions. That is what we shall try to check in this particular post:
Here are a few practical concepts related to setup goals:
For YouTube, the clicks’ game and popularity stakes are based on audiences’ willingness to subscribe to the channels in large enough numbers to prompt advertisers to shell out higher rates. Google, alongside Yahoo, AOL, Hulu and Microsoft is all set to showcase these channels to top advertisers in New York at the Digital Content NewFronts in May.
As was the buzz in social media realms, Twitter just welcomed ‘a very talented bunch of people from Posterous’ to it. The unconventional and promising online venture, as the popular social site stated, had carved out a highly innovative product, to make sharing all across the web as well as mobile devices quite simple – a goal that the former also shared.
19
A fast, simple albeit effective way for increasing your AdWords efficiency is to add sitelinks to a campaign. If it’s eligible to display sitelinks but it still doesn’t have them up as yet, it’s perhaps missing out on a good business opportunity. To overcome the problem, sitelinks have been added to the Opportunities tab.Basic ideas to improve performance of your ads
So now, when Adwords finds that your campaign is doing well to show ad sitelinks, albeit doesn’t have them set up yet, it will highlight that particular idea in the Opportunities tab for you. You will get a personalized approximate estimate of the favorable impact on clicks and cost factor if those sitelinks were implemented. This will be done on basis of your previous week’s campaign stats.
You should also keep in a mind a few things while setting up ad sitelinks. Firstly, AdWords systems determine automatically as which sitelinks would perform better and then feature them more frequently or prominently. So inserting more than the threshold number of suggested sitelinks can enhance performance.
The sitelinks ad extension allows you to show links to pages from your site, apart from the main landing page, just beneath your ad text. As you know, sitelinks are featured in ads at both top and bottom of search results. You can activate them– creating up to ten sitelinks – when you choose settings of your campaign. From Ad extensions tab present in your AdWords account, you can edit link text and URLs and check how ads, which contain sitelinks performance.
Ads on results pages displayed on computers tablets and mobile phones can show as many as six links apart from the display URL. Ads on results pages on mobile devices with full Internet browsers can feature up to two additional links.
Reasons to add sitelinks
Let us try to find out how it helps to use sitelinks. Following are the key reasons to add sitelinks to ads:
- Feature shortcuts: Let target customers quickly view and click to popular or important sections of your business site.
- Reduce efforts: Independently create sitelinks from text ads, activating them from the campaign’s settings page. Basically speaking, you are not required to create new text ads or also edit them to incorporate sitelinks.
- Easily update sitelinks: Alter link text and URLs as and when you wish, keeping your ads up-to-date for sales and offers.
Steps to activate/ create sitelinks:
Here’s how you can enable and generate sitelinks for a new ad campaign:
- Sign in to AdWords account. Click +New campaign from your Campaigns tab to create a campaign.
- Scroll to Ad extensions section on ‘Select campaign settings’ page. Check the box just next to ‘Sitelinks: Extend ads with links to sections of my website.’
- Enter link text plus destination URLs, removing ‘http’, in the relevant boxes. Add desired sitelinks per campaign (up to ten), letting AdWords have as much scope to feature them. The sitelinks’ order and how they pan out factor into how frequently it’s chosen to show in a particular ad.
- Enter link text as well as destination URLs. Just click Save and you can proceed further.
Another important tip to keep in mind is to minimize link text and add a reader-friendly touch to it. It should be catchy and attention grabbing. This sure will increase the number of links, which can show and provides AdWords with more sitelinks to pick from. Look at navigation bars of your website for easy albeit effective sitelink ideas.
MAR
17
The Internet is akin to a permanent storehouse of our past and present interactions. It won’t forget anything posted about you in a hurry. So it is absolutely vital to refurbish your professional reputation by constantly publishing positive information about your business. To put the best foot forward, create an identity you want others to view favorably. Link anything positive you publish to your business site so that opinion makers, bloggers, and influencers can take a cut and take it forward.To start with, be an active participant in a professional network like CareerBuilder or LinkedIn. Establish meaningful connections with business contacts there. Seek recommendations from those who know you well so that you reputation is enhanced. Make comment on widely read professionally-oriented blogs, join online forums, contribute informative articles, review books on topics of your interest. Invite people to make comments and initiate a conversation. Gradually build a community of followers on a subject about which you can claim to be knowledgeable.
Start a blog in your own name. Enhance reputation through precise information, solid arguments, reader friendly approach, unique writing style, neat design, high quality images and good presentation. Keep your profile page, site or blog active by writing regularly.
At the outset, separate professional and personal identities. For each profile, use different screen names, email addresses and tone of communication. Do not link your business associates or divulge sensitive information with other profiles you create. Fill personal details to your professional profile in a judicious manner and only as it jells well with that image. Try and build distinct friends lists on social networks – for family, your office team, and so on – in order to manage what you opt to share within one page – professional or personal.
Manage who can check your respective profiles, how people can find you, and how to block access by unwanted people. Of course, despite every precaution that you take, adverse material about you or your business is bound to surface on the Web. In such a scenario, you cannot simply shift blame to your competitors. Instead you should be proactive in restoring your online reputation
An array of Web services are available to deal with a peculiar problem of online reputation. Over the past few years, several self-proclaimed experts have cropped up, promising to manage this one major negative area of online world: As rapidly as commentary, user feedback, blog posts, status updates and images are put up on the Web, especially the problematic ones get spread by search engines and algorithms, producing an undesirable viral effect. Look for an online reputation management service that meets your expectations.
The choice does matter a great deal in an age when a professional’s identity is increasingly shaped by Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn. Improving how your image reflects on the Web is invariably managed by concealing negative features and spotlighting flattering ones.
MAR
17
One issue that anxious site owners and webmasters often face is getting relevant insights about Google Analytics data. They all have created an Analytics account, but look merely at page views or the total number of visitors that they draw. This is not a correct approach, when it comes to leveraging the potential of this powerful free Web Analytics tool to know more about their users. The in-depth data dug out from it can definitely help better target the prospect for enhanced conversions. That is what we shall try to check in this particular post:Let me share some handy Google Analytics usage ideas you can bring into play for your business site. Firstly, if you do not use the Analytics latest version, login into the account; click ‘New Version’ link at he top right corner. This will ensure you are using the latest interface and enhanced features for optimizing the tool.
Though it’s quite a straightforward and simple process, this is an aspect often neglected by many webmasters. Once you install tracking code on your site, you need to focus on ‘setup goals’ element. The goals that you setup for your site act as the cornerstone of your analysis since every other aspect will gravitate around your core goals and ultimately conversion rates, beneficial for your business.
Basic of goal setting
If you’re wondering what kind of goals you should setup, start by working out the basic purpose or idea behind your site. Ask yourself whether you are seeing it as an eCommerce platform, is it a blogging avenue to generate revenue from ads, or you want to sell some sort of services? Once you define the main purpose, you can setup goals for your site.
Here are a few practical concepts related to setup goals:
- Engaged visitors: Those spending more than a minute or longer period of time on your site can be termed as engaged visitors.
- Curious readers: Visitors who check two or more pages on the site.
- Calls to action: Use event tracking in order to pinpoint calls to action.
- Best performing ads: Employ event tracking for measuring best performing ads
- Subscriptions: Check how the site users, subscribing to your list, behave
- Actual purchases: If you are selling eBooks or online courses, you can get deeper insights about your prospects.
- Last but not the least, enable eCommerce tracking to gauge the conversion rates.
Parameters to be followed for goals setup
Later, these goals together will help you get a grasp of conversion rate percentage and draw more insights on the key traffic triggers and sources, which direct you target visitors, the keywords that attract your customers, where they are from, pages that your visitors tend to use the most for signing up for newsletters.
Of course, you must bear in mind the fact that each site is unique in nature. Accordingly, your goals will change.
MAR
15
Will new mix of content add to YouTube revenue?
Tagged Under : AOL, Hulu, Microsoft, Yahoo
For YouTube, the clicks’ game and popularity stakes are based on audiences’ willingness to subscribe to the channels in large enough numbers to prompt advertisers to shell out higher rates. Google, alongside Yahoo, AOL, Hulu and Microsoft is all set to showcase these channels to top advertisers in New York at the Digital Content NewFronts in May.The YouTube channels are dedicated to a wide range of topics such as news, music, fashion and gaming. They are part of an intensifying battle among the world’s leading Internet platforms to grab more of television’s ad dollars by producing original content. A research by media research firm eMarketer estimates the spending for online video to go up by 55% this year, or more than $3 billion. But that amount is still only a fraction of the whopping $60 billion spent on TV.
Though the plan for the new channels was publicly announced a few month ago, many of the proposed outlets are only taking off now, with music-related ones among the first, including MyIsh; the Warner Sound; Bonnaroo365 & the Bowery Presents for live concert streams; Pitchfork.tv and Noisey for alternative music, among others. They will be partly promoted by YouTube through placement on its home page.
Google has been helping the partners and guiding them assiduously on the finer aspects of online self-promotion, with steps like the usage of annotations and search-engine optimization, and the links and text, which pop up as a video plays. Defining the core of the move, YouTube’s global head (content) Robert Kyncl, has been quoted as saying that we wish to make it easier and easier for viewers to get the content they love, something which is challenging especially when you’ve a lot of it pouring in every second.”
And then the content is obviously in the partners’ hands, which for some of them means a touch of cultural adjustment. Partners like IconicTV are trying to play by YouTube rules. For those like MyIsh, the production budget comes wholly from Google. Its investment in the channels is construed as an advance against ad revenues. Vice, the entity behind Noisey is looking at its deal with Google as a way of going for rapid timeliness, grabbing a potentially huge target audience – through volume and quick turnaround. Some are banking on higher production values.
The ultimate payoff for these channels is yet not clear. YouTube will enjoy exclusive rights to the hosted videos for a year at least. It has not specified so far whether the company will continue to prop up the channels after the rights period is over. A popular channel might fetch enough advertising revenue to well justify continuing with the production. And Google’s MAR
14
As was the buzz in social media realms, Twitter just welcomed ‘a very talented bunch of people from Posterous’ to it. The unconventional and promising online venture, as the popular social site stated, had carved out a highly innovative product, to make sharing all across the web as well as mobile devices quite simple – a goal that the former also shared.Twitter claims its user-friendliness will increase and its efficiency will improve with Posterous engineers, technical experts and product managers joining its core teams working on key initiatives. In its quest of getting innovative products and bringing into its fold more talented people, Twitter claims to have taken a step further with its latest acquisitions. An official Twitter post adds:
“Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We shall give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we shall share clear instructions for doing so.”
Posterous: The journey thus far and road ahead
A section of social media observers point out though, this would probably mark the beginning of an end for the blogging platform, and the brand behind it. It will be providing its users specific instructions to export their content to other services, dropping enough hints regarding this.
Since being launched in 2008, Posterous invariably aimed at finding newer ways of make social sharing more fun – sharing everything from photos and video to exciting ideas. The post-via-email feature was the one that set it apart from immediate competitors including Pownce and Tumblr. Over the last couple of years, The platform made incremental improvements, with each feature release leading to more and more simplification of blogging.
Some of the noteworthy features on it are:
1. Post tagging via e-mail
2. Autopost everywhere
3. Group blogging
4. Group blog doubled as e-mail list
How does Posterous fit in with Twitter strategy? Here’s a clue:The network focuses on making its site a destination portal even as it continues efforts to ramp up advertising revenues (expected to touch $260 million this year and close to $540 million by 2014). Twitter will eventually look to embed the Posterous experience into its own operating environment in order to expand further the microblogging platform’s experiential and functional values.
For instance, with Posterous Spaces, Twitter users can easily favorite and pin tweets. Social contents curation as a trend is fast catching up as indicated by the success of Pinterest. Spaces feature can offer group tweeting set within a private environ on Twitter. Many other interesting possibilities abound with the acquisition of Posterous. It may well become one of the strategic pieces, essential piece for Twitter in terms of the development of a universal platform for both creation and curation of contents (short form and long form).
Bing, on February 22nd, announced a new feature “Linked Pages”. This customizes your search results to integrate / highlight social (Facebook) connections and enhances “People Search”.
Some Key Intakes about this feature:
A) When you perform a search in Bing, pages which have been linked to your Facebook friends will be displayed.
B) It allows you to Link search results to your Bing Profile. Bing Profile includes your Blog, Articles, Company Website, Videos, etc. This is quite similar to Google +1.
C) You can link your Friends Profile to a particular search result. If you don’t consider these links to be correct, you can always unlink these pages.
D) If you build on it positively, it can turn out to be a good choice for your reputation management.
As per our research, this update seems to be entirely about personal profiles (people), not businesses. Nevertheless, we are quite hopeful that it will soon open business pages, as well.
Here’s a video link from Bing, on the new feature for further review.
So what do you think about the inclusion of enhanced social connections to Bing search results? Is this the answer for Google’s “Search Plus your World”. Let us know what you think by commenting below.
On February 28th, Bing launched a new keyword research tool, which is different from Google in terms of data and demographics.
Unfortunately, we do not have an official screen-shot to show you for now. However, we will be briefing you about the new layout standout, extensively.
Here, is our review of this tool:
- Export Data in various widely used formats
- Search for any Phrase. With Google’s Keyword Research Tool; you can filter by Broad, Exact or Phrase match only
- Keyword Data will be saved for 6 Months
- New API functionality to use data in other applications
You can access the Bing Webmaster Tool at www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/
Click on the “Keywords” Tab at the Top.
It will take you to a form, as seen below:
Key points, you should make a note of:
A) You can filter your search by Country, Language and Date range. It seems they have data back to around August 2011, available in the tool.
B) Strict Mode function – According to Bing, if you select this function, it will filter the results to show you only search volumes explicit to the keyword or phrase. This will exclude phrases which may include the original keyword.
Again, in strict mode, the results are not as expected. Again, in strict mode, the results are not as expected. Although the change in query volume can be noticed, it still shows broad keywords.
For example, perform a search for “Car Brakes”. It returns “car games” and “car rentals”, which is a bit weird. Inclusion of rentals or games is not what the end user will expect from a keyword suggestion tool.
C) Graphical Volume Trends – There is an inclusion of a few little graphs that indicate volume over time, next to the suggested keywords. It gives you an idea of how the keyword is trending. While it looks good, we cannot rely on it completely. This is because, even after modifying the time frame of our Keyword Search, we got the same little graphs regardless of the search dates entered.
Our final thoughts would be, to use this tool as a keyword research source for Bing.
standard agreements offer content owners a larger share of ad revenue.
5 Secrets to Selecting Highly-Effective SEO Keywords
How many keywords should you assign to each page on your website--and how should you pick them? An Inc. 500 CEO offers his advice on SEO.
Courtesy company
Wpromote founder and CEO Michael Mothner
If there is a single concept that is the driver of much of the Internet's growth over the past decade – not to mention nearly all of Google's annual revenue of $25 billion – it is the concept of keywords. Keywords are what we type in when we are searching for products, services, and answers on the search engines, an act that Americans performed 15.5 billion times in April 2010 according to ComScore, the web research firm.
Companies optimize their webpages for search by assigning keywords to those pages. The implications for a business of picking the right keywords are therefore huge. Keyword selection is fundamental to success when it comes to executing a paid search or PPC campaign. It is also integral to a website natural or organic ranking on the search engines.
But keywords are not just about SEO. They at the heart of a company's marketing campaign at its most granular level. Do our customers love our product because it is fast-acting or because it is long-lasting? Are we cheap or the best? Do we provide people with ideas or with help? If you can't immediately identify the most important keywords for your company, it is doubtful that you can effectively market your products and services to your target audience. The following guide will provide you with 5 ideas to keep in mind when you are selecting keywords on which to build your online marketing.
Picking SEO Keywords: Focus on Good Phrases
When it comes to search engine marketing, there may be no larger misnomer, no more archaic term than the ubiquitous keyword. In my view, there should be an official migration to the more accurate term keyphrase, but for now I will be forced to use what I consider to be an inaccurate term. My frustration with this term is that it quite simply implies a single word, which is rarely the strategy that we employ when doing keyword research and selection in the service of PPC and SEO campaigns.
All too often, people dramatically overthink the most basic keyword research concepts; keyword generation should start simply with answering the question of "What products or services do you sell?" If you sell dog food online, the root words dog andfood alone would be very poor keywords because on their own, neither dog nor food do a remotely good job at describing what you sell. Though this example makes it obvious, many times we have to fight through our urge to include those bigger, broader root keywords.
Dig Deeper: How to Be Keyword-Savvy
Picking SEO Keywords: Avoiding "Vanity" Keywords
Now let's look at a trickier example—one where the root keyword arguably does a good job describing what we are selling. Say I own an online jewelry store that sells all types of jewelry. To rank highly for the keyword jewelry would probably be at the top of my search engine marketing goals. And yet this would probably not be a profitable keyword that will drive relevant traffic to my site. That is because, from an organic SEO perspective, you are unlikely to rank highly for this term unless you are a huge, highly authoritative site—or lucky enough to be Jewelry.com, knowing that Google rewards keywords that match website addresses.
In this case, you would do well to go after more specific keywords such as gold jewelry, silver necklace, or women's Rolex watch. Not only is the competition for these terms less fierce but, from both an SEO and a PPC perspective, those more specific keywords are going to have a significantly higher conversion rate to purchases on your site.
Sometimes we refer to those root keywords as "vanity keywords," because if you do just one search to see who seems to be winning the space, you are likely to pick the single broadest keyword and see who comes up ranked highly. In nearly every case, however, we have found it to be more successful and deliver a significantly better return on your SEM investment by focusing on the hundreds or even thousands of more specific keywords that more closely match the services, products, brands, and locations that you sell or serve.
Dig Deeper: What You Need to Know About Your Website
Picking SEO Keywords: Using Google's Wonder Wheel
This is in my opinion the best little secret of everyone's favorite search engine: the Google Wonder Wheel. Released about a year ago but virtually unknown compared with Google's much more visible search tools, the Wonder Wheel can be accessed by doing a search and then selecting "Wonder Wheel" under the filter options on the lefthand navigation.
What you are presented with now is a visual representation of the way that Google groups together keywords. (Indirectly, you can also deduce how users themselves perceive search terms.) This alone can become the basis of your PPC and SEO keyword research.
Starting with the search term dog food, I see related more specific terms like dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food brands, which can help identify other keywords to focus on. Then, clicking on dog food brands, the search engine automatically expands that keyword to be another hub, with more specific keywords related to dog food brands such as nutro dog food, Purina dog food, and so on.
At my comapny, Wpromote, we use this tool to help shape overall content strategies. Continuing with the dog food example, we can see that ratings, comparison, and reviews all were all grouped as closely related to dog food in general, implying that people that are searching for dog food are very interested in the comparison and review side of things. So from a content strategy perspective, it would be a very powerful takeaway to include a heavy emphasis on customer ratings, third-party reviews, and side by side comparisons to help the consumers make their dog food selections while shopping on our site.
Dig Deeper: How to Take Advantage of Online Reviews
Picking SEO Keywords: The Value of Repetition
One concern we hear frequently is whether it is beneficial or harmful to repeat keywords. In other words, should we vary keywords (dog food, puppy food, andPurina) or repeat keywords (dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food rankings.) The short answer is that the repetition is just fine, as long as the meaning of the phrase as a whole is sufficiently varied. In other words, dog food and dog food online are basically synonymous, and the content that one might expect to find associated with both keywords is the same. However, dog food reviews and dog food comparison indicate somewhat different content and therefore are appropriate to be used in tandem as keywords.
The more important concept to keep in mind is that you want to choose keywords that best relate to the content present on a web page and on a website; if you don't have a dog food comparison matrix, then don't bother including comparison-related keywords; you are misleading your users, and certainly not fooling Google. So in an ideal world, you do have a comparison section, a reviews section, and a rankings section, housed on different pages or sections of your site, with each one tagged with the appropriate keywords. Correspondingly, your SEO and PPC search engine marketing efforts should that content by driving review keywords to the review pages and so on.
Dig Deeper: The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power
Picking SEO Keywords: Guiding Your Content Strategy
Keywords should guide your overall content strategy. We have referred to this concept several times in the preceding tips, but it is important enough to leave as a final guiding paradigm.
Conventionally, we think linearly about content and keywords; we build a website, and then launch search engine marketing campaigns to drive users to our content. That approach has its limits. When we think about strategy at Wpromote, we think about a circular process; since our keyword research reflects both what users are seeking and the way that the search engines (particularly Google) "think" about keywords, we let that help to drive our content strategy.
Put differently, to be phenomenally successful, we seek not to take static content and try to pry greater results from it; instead, we leverage the existing needs of the users, and use that knowledge to help us create the best possible user experience. That, in turn, will be rewarded with higher rankings, greater traffic, and a higher ROI from our marketing efforts.
Dig Deeper: The Character of Your Web Content
Picking SEO Keywords: Additional Resources
1. Check out monthly search stats from the invaluable Google Keyword Tool.
2. Google's Wonder Wheel is awesome; an engineer walks through how it can be used in this Google Wonder Wheel video.
3. Wordtracker is a paid but widely used keyword and competitive intelligence tool.
Michael Mothner is the founder and CEO of Wpromote, a search-engine optimizationand pay-per-click management consulting firm based in Los Angeles.
Keyword Density: The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power
We've covered a lot of ground so far in this SEO Guide. From a definition of Search Engine Marketing, to deciding whether SEO is worth it for you, and if it is identifying the 3 elements involved in SEO:
- your keyword list — the list of phrases you'd like to be found under
- your site's keyword density — how often your keywords appear in your Web site
- link building — getting other Web sites to link to your site
Last time we covered how to create your keyword list - the foundation of all of your other SEO and SEM efforts.
Now let's talk about what to do once those keywords are selected — step #2 is building keyword density.
According to Wikipedia, the definition of keyword density is: "the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase."
Basically - on a given page, what percentage of all the text is used by a specific keyword phrase? So for example, if a page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase is used 5 times, that keyword's density is 5% for that page.
The part that small business owners sometimes don't know is when we say "text" that doesn't only mean the readable text on the page. It also includes text that is found in your HTML code.
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In a shout out to readers Sherri and James R. who appreciates the practical and tactical, (thanks for your comments! How am I doing?), here is a very specific rundown of what elements of your HTML code are recognized by search engines. You'll want to put your keyword phrases in these places to ensure the SEO power of each of your pages. Note that depending on how your site is built, some of these places you will have access to and some you may need your developer's help with:
- Title Tag — not to be confused with your "Page Title," the Title tag text shows up in several places including as the bolded blue text on Google Search Engine Results pages.
- Meta Description Tag — like the title tag, this tag is important because it appears on the Search Engine Results page right underneath the page title. Sometimes a snippet of your text will appear instead but you always want to have a meta description on every page and it's usually a good idea to customize it for each page.
- Page Title — this is the actual page title your visitors will see when they visit the different pages of your site. Avoid using images, try to make your page titles text, include your keywords in them, and try to put them inside an H1 tag. This will give them greater SEO power.
- HTML vs. JavaScript — part of the SEO ranking calculation is how high up on the page do your keywords appear? Because of that, it's a good idea to take as much as possible of your JavaScript code out of your site's pages and put them in a single, common JavaScript file. This will make your site easier to maintain and boost it's SEO power.
- Your Site's Text — include your keywords repeatedly in the text of your site, but the text still needs to be readable. A good rule of thumb is no more than 3-6% density. Any higher than that and you risk labeling as search engine spam.
- Keywords in Repeated Links — using your keywords in the links on your site is a great way to show their importance to search engines. In addition to doing this in your text another great place is in your sidebar or footer. Also consider using the "name" attribute of your link tags.
- Alt Tags — each image on your site has the ability to define "alternate" text. This is originally intended for Web site "reading" machines that read out Web pages to those who might have difficulty seeing the page. Instead of leaving the alt tags blank, fill them with descriptive text of the image that includes your keywords.
- Filenames — your filenames for both your individual pages and your image files can be fantastic places to include your keywords. Your page filenames will actually show up in the URL for that page for example last week's post has the file name "10_tips_to_avoid_the_biggest_s.html" and the URL for that post is http://blog.inc.com/e-commerce/2009/04/10_tips_to_avoid_the_biggest_s.html. Using your keywords in these filenames can really help your rankings.
- Your Domain Name — if you can get a domain name that uses a primary keyword this will give a big boost to your rankings. The implication is that this the entire content of your site is centered around this keyword.
A big note - this list does NOT include the Meta Keywords tag. While that used to hold weight with search engines, it's pretty much ignored now. It's too easy to put whatever you want in them, so companies used to stuff them with totally unrelated but super popular terms like Janet Jackson or Britney Spears. Search Engines got wise to that scheme and stopped paying attention to them.
Keyword density is where large, content focused sites have an absolute advantage. The more text or pages you have the more you can repeat your keywords in all of the places outlined above. If you have a 5 page site there's only so much you can do against a 500 page, optimized competitor.
Incidentally, this is one reason why businesses blog. Frequent blogging is an opportunity to create many pages of content that can use your keywords. But you have to believe that SEO (and blogging) is going to be a valuable way to generate new business for you in order to use this tactic. Read my post on that here.
For some additional research get it direct - try Google's Webmaster guidelines and their answer to the question: How can I create a Google-friendly site?
Now here's an offer - do you have questions about keywords and keyword density? Post them over the next 7 days by Thursday, May 7th and I will try to answer as many as possible and encourage everyone to join in the discussion!
Tools to stay up to date:
Tools to stay up to date:
Style This Spring
