Use Your Keywords Carefully

There isn’t any universally accepted formula for using keywords for SEO. However, most experts agree on these guidelines:

Focus on one keyword per page, along with a few variations.

Place your keyword at the beginning of your Web page’s HTML title tag. The title tag is extremely important in telling search engines what a page is about. Don’t use the same title tag on all your Web pages, either. Instead, develop keyword-rich title tags that describe each page. Include a call to action, and explain a benefit of your product or service.

Use your page’s keyword again in the page’s HTML header tag,

, and subhead tag,

.

Place your keyword near or at the beginning of the page’s body copy. Sprinkle the keyword a few more times throughout the text. But don’t use a keyword in a way that appears gratuitous or unnatural when someone reads your page. You’ll turn off readers. And you could even get penalized by Google or other search engines.

Add the keyword to anchor text (the underlined word or phrase that appears in a clickable link). Too often, inexperienced Webmasters will use click here as the anchor text for a clickable link to, say, a blog post they wrote, said Joe Mancuso, search engine marketing expert at SEO Research. From an SEO standpoint, that’s a missed opportunity. One reason is that anchor text helps tell search engines what a page is about, which in turn helps the engines determine how relevant a page is to a particular query.

Get Specific with Your Keywords

The more specific you can make your keyword phrase, the better your chances of ranking highly in searches for that phrase. This is especially important if you’re in a highly competitive field.

Take real estate, for instance. The generic keyword “real estate” recently had a Google KEI of just 0.09, according to Wordtracker. No fewer than 413 million pages in Google’s index used the keywords real estate—meaning your page about real estate is competing with 412,999,999 similar pages for eyeballs. It’s extremely unlikely, then, that your page will show up anywhere near the first few results pages of a Google search.

For best results, use keywords with a Wordtracker KEI of at least 100, said Thomas W. Petty, CEO of the Bay Area Search Engine Academy, which offers SEO workshops in Sacramento and San Francisco. A KEI rating of 400 or higher is even better, Petty said.

Taking the real estate example further, the phrase “commercial real estate logos” recently had a Google KEI of 2,921.00. While there are fewer people searching for that term, your chances of ranking highly in search results for that term are excellent.

Optimizing for this phrase is unlikely to help the average realtor, of course. But it could represent an untapped opportunity for a graphic artist who designs commercial real estate logos. In fact, some entrepreneurs get ideas for new businesses, products or services to launch just from studying KEI and performing other keyword competitiveness research.

SEO Tips: How to Increase Traffic With Keywords

By James A. Martin
October 7, 2009

As a small business owner, you’ve already got way too many items on your to-do list. So how do you add yet one more thing—search engine optimization—to the list?

“If you have more money than time, hire someone to do SEO for you,” said Matt McGee, a Search Engine Land editor, search marketing consultant, and author of the Small Business Search Marketing blog. “But if you have more time than money, try to do it yourself. Ninety percent of SEO isn’t all that difficult, as long as you can take the time to learn it.”

One do-it-yourself method that any small business owner can do is to use relevant keywords when writing blog posts or creating other Web content.

As defined by Search Engine Watch, a keyword “is a word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results.” Ideally you should have three goals in mind when selecting keywords. You want to use keywords that accurately describe your content, words that people actually type into search engines when looking for something online and keywords that aren’t found on millions of other Web pages.

For best results, your keywords should be part of a larger, on-going online marketing plan that takes into account your business’s branding, goals, and challenges as well as your customers’ needs, advised Martin Falle, CEO of SEO Research, a search engine marketing company. Also, pay attention to what your competitors are doing, in terms of optimizing their sites for the search engines.

You can use the following keyword-related techniques improve your page ranking in search result pages.

Adsense tips for successfull marketing

If you're launching a new site, or new content, write an introduction and submit it to share sites like Digg (http://www.digg.com/), Reddit (http://reddit.com/) and Now Public (http://www.nowpublic.com/).
Create a Yahoo Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/) in the niche your site sits.
Create a MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/) account and use it to publisise your site.
Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) and if you're really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
Create a Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/) account and "claim" your blog.
Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories. An excellent list can be found here (http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.ph...endly-list.php).
Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline publicity.

Place a free ad for your company

Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree (http://www.gumtree.com/).
Syndicate your site's content by using an RSS feeds.
Submit your RSS feeds to agregator sites like FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com/), Squidoo (http://www.squidoo.com), Feedboy (http://www.feedboy.com/), Jordomedia (http://www.jordomedia.com/), FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, feeddirectory and feedfury. Stolen from DigitalPoint (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=195250)
Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
Sign up to StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com) and get your friends to Stumble your site.

Create a custom 404 page

Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. See here (http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articl...1-redirect.htm) for more info.
Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on.
Tell your friends about your site. It's free advertising init.
Speel cheek ur stie. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers.
Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
Don't worry about PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*
Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff.
Tell your neighbours, you never know what contacts they might have.

Offer your users as many ways

Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype, Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
Advertise your site on Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org). It's free, relevant and localised.
Do NOT use frames.
Submit your site to DMOZ.org (http://dmoz.org/). It may take time, but it's worth it.
Create an XML sitemap (http:/www.xml-sitemaps.com/) of your site and submit it to Google (http://www.google.com).
Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
Sign up with an affiliate programme to sell your product, or if you're a publish, make some cash!
On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
Send out a newsletter!