Posts in the SEO 101 Category at Website SEO Tips and Tricks

In Part 1 of this introductory tutorial series, we used an example business type to discover how to create an overall theme for the example website, “John’s Auto Repair”. In this article, we’ll learn to use some free and simple tools to help confirm our keywords are good to use and maybe even find others we didn’t think of.

By far, my favorite tool to use is Google Keywords. This tool is actually to help users figure out what keywords would work best for Pay Per Click campaigns. But I like to use it to spot popularity of words, monthly search volume using them, etc. So to use it to help John’s auto shop website, let’s use this tool to see just how much these words are used in a search. I typed in “auto repair” on the first line then “Penfield NY” on the next line.

Enter one key word or phrase per line

The results will filter a long list of actual search result in the last month using those terms. Notice “auto repair” is quite popular! But using just this key phrase would mean John is trying to compete with the entire world of auto repair – not a wise choice.

Google's results for your search for keywords and phrases

Looking down this list, other related search terms are also displayed. The key here is NOT to pick the most popular keywords and phrases, instead, try to find a way to make use of several popular and not-so-popular terms together. The more specific your keywords are to your website, the more likely you will get great search results!

So for John’s website, I want to be sure to include “auto repair” in his title because I certainly know people are using those words when searching, but just not by itself. I want to combine “auto repair” with “Penfield” and “NY” or “New York”.  If you remember from the last article, without doing any research, I already mentioned what I would use in John’s home page title:  “Auto Repair Penfield NY | John’s Auto Repair”.

What About Titles for the Other Pages of the Website?

John will have services he’d like his customers to know about, therefore he will need more pages to describe them – all separately! The home page established the website’s main theme (or book title and location inside the book store) but the sub pages need their own titles (or chapters of a book).  If his first service page is about brakes, then keywords describing brake servicing, auto repair, and Penfield should all be in the title too. For example: “Brake Service Penfield | John’s Auto Repair”. Notice the use of the “pipe” character between the key phrases. This divided the key terms and avoids the use of what are known as “stop words” like: “in, the, at, and” etc.  Stop words is the name given to words which are filtered out prior to, or after, processing of natural language text.  So help out by not using them in your page titles.

What Keywords are Your Competitors Using?

Another interesting and free tool is called a Keyword Cloud.  This tool is great for looking to see word density on a page. Just find your competitor highest in the free search results for the search terms you want to be found for, copy the URL (the entire website address in the address bar) and paste into the search bar. What’s shown next is a visual representation of how dense the words are on the page as well as their placement. Now try other sites in the search results. You may notice the sites with the higher keyword density sometimes appear higher in the search results.

Now before you get all excited here, stuffing your content with search keywords may not necessarily help you. In fact, it could hurt you if you over do it. The last thing you want to do is make it obvious you’re using those words to enhance your search. The copy reads bad to people and search engines alike. What you do want to do with this tool is find a correct range of keyword density and try to keep your as close as possible and a little higher than the competitors.

I hope you found this series helpful. Again, keyword usage  is only a small part of the world of search optimization, but a very important part none-the-less. Feel free to leave me your thoughts an discoveries of your own research.

In the last article, I talked about introductory SEO titled “Search Engine Optimization and Your Business 101” where i focused on an understanding of search engine use and how content impacts your website search results. In this article, I want take this to the next level and focus on how to run a simple “do-it-yourself” approach to researching your website’s keywords and content.

To do this, we’ll use an example business and come up with keywords to make a list of and consider using. Note is said “consider” using. Not every word you think of can or should be used. Don’t worry, we’ll get there and explain that more! Something important to note here: when people search for something, they search using words describing the topic and location.

Keyword Discovery

Let’s call the example business “John’s Auto Repair” and say his repair shop is in Penfield, NY. If I was hired to perform SEO on John’s website, the very first step is to identify his website theme and specific content details. Here’s what I’d list to figure out keywords to use:

• Theme: Auto Repair
• Location: Penfield, NY
• Services: Alignments, Brakes, Tune-ups, Diagnostics, Import and Domestic service

Something important to note here: when people search for something, they search using words describing the topic and location.

If you remember from the last article, I said a website is like a book when it comes to organizing content. The title of this website IS NOT to be “John’s Auto Repair”! If people knew who John was, and that he had an auto repair shop, they wouldn’t have to search for him now would they? No, John wants a website for advertising his shop in the free (organic) search results to new customers or maybe those looking for specific services he does. So what should the title be? Well to know this is to know how the title is used in a search.

Selecting a Page Title

The text that appears in the blue link within the search results is actually the website or web page title!

The link shown was clicked already but it shows the actual website page title for this auto repair shop in Rochester NY

Underneath that is the page description text put in place by either the search engine or the website developer.  An SEO specialist or any knowledgeable web developer will create a page title and description for every page within the website’s code.

You will also see this in the top of the browser window:

Web page title is always shown at the top. This example uses Internet Expoler's browser.

The title of the website generalizes the entire website and should be something different on every page of the website. The reason being is to identify the content on each page of the site. The added benefit is having more potential pages showing up in the free search results.

You can see we just avoided a very BIG common mistake already. Most newbies would have name the website home page after the name of John’s business. Instead we learned that people who don’t know John will search for repair shops in his area. His business name does contain two important search keywords “auto repair” but without a location added to his page title, he would be competing globally for the search term “auto repair!

In this case, I would name the title of John’s website page: “Auto Repair Penfield NY | John’s Auto Repair”.  Notice I used the main keywords first then the business name last. In fact, the business name doesn’t really need to be there but it does add more keywords in this case. Using keywords too many times can backfire too and get you penalized or even banned from the search engine altogether for spamming! In the case of the title, the keywords shouldn’t be used more than three times each nor the search engines may consider you as a spammer!

In Part 2 of this topic, we’ll look at free online tools to see what keywords people actually use when they search and whether or not they could benefit you!

Before you panic, this series of articles is for someone who knows nothing about websites or how to get one found, but would like to have some knowledge about it for their own benefit. If you already have some knowledge of SEO, this is a great refresher. I’m not promising every detail here, I’m just trying to help you digest how and why SEO and search engines impact your business and what you can do about it.

There are many, many aspects of proper SEO and different techniques for different websites. However the basic topics discussed here are by far the most useful and universally accepted practices any website owner should know.

Know the Types of Search Results

Well you probably know a search engine delivers your search results based on what keywords you type in, but which results are the best to click on? What’s the difference between those “sponsored results” links at the top and side of the page and those others on the left under the sponsored results?

Well first, make sure you know which is which. This short video to the right is a little hard to hear but it does explain and show the diferences.

Pay Per Click Search Results

Pay Per Click (PPC), also knows as Cost Per Click, is the search results shown in the upper most part of the page or to the right. These results are labled “Sponsered Links” because businesses pay to have these links here. This is mainly how search engines like Google make their money. Every time you click one of those links, the link owner pays.

Free Search Results, or “Organic Search”

This is the remaining group of links with descriptions on the page to the left, sometimes under a local map (which is free to). These are free results because websites that appear here did not have to pay the search engine to be here. They get here by merit, quality of their content and sometimes popularity of search visitors. This is the main point of understanding SEO in the first place – getting to the top of the free results. By the way, don’t ever believe everyone clicks the top link in the sponsored results. These are often biased ads and not always relevant search results. Most people have already learned to ignore these just for this fact. I tend to get better results with the free search anyway so I ignore them. In fact, over 70% of regular internet users IGNORE the sponsored search all together!

So How Are You Searching the Internet?

Let’s get started. To know about SEO means you know about search engines and how to properly use them. Think you know already? Be sure you do and watch this short but highly effective video, compliments of CommonCraft.com, on how search works before you move on. You’ll probably see search from a whole new perspective.

The whole idea of getting your website found revolves around the principle of having quality, unique content.

First Thing to Know: Search Engines Look at Everything

Search engines use highly sophisticated programs to “crawl” the internet to find web pages containing text. Notice I said “text” and not “content”. Your content could contain images, videos, audio, flash animation, and text. But everything besides text is meaningless to search engines unless it has description text assigned to it. The whole idea of getting your website found revolves around the principle of having quality, unique content. So let’s lay down some simple ground rules to remember:

1. Content for a website is considered to be “text”.
2. A pretty website is useless for searchers and search engines trying to index your website. Pictures, flash animation, colors and videos cannot be seen by search engines unless they have alternate text assigned to them.
3. Search engines look at your content (text) and try to make sense of it.
4. Search engines file away (or index) your content into search categories.
5. Search engines like Google filter the search words you enter and provide you with the most accurate and relevant results it has stored away in it’s index.
6. Your job is to provide search engines the proper organized content if you want your website to be found.

Keywords

When you perform a search, you are actually typing in keywords. Keywords don’t have to be just a single word either. In fact, they are most effective when in combination with other words, or search phrases. For example the video above reference “fish” as the keyword but it brings up way too many results. It wasn’t until they used search phrases to get the optimal results.

To find exactly what you’re looking for, you need to be more specific in your search terms. An important function for getting traffic to your website is to properly place the keywords within your website’s content so search engines learn what your website is all about. That’s what we’ll discuss next.

Pretend Your Website is a Book in a Bookstore. How Will People Find It?

The idea of getting quality content on your website revolves around the main theme of what your website is all about. For example, let’s compare your website to a book in a book store, and the search engine’s index of files is the book store. How do you make your book (or website) stand out from all of those other books? Ah! The burning question of every author! If you want exposure for your book, you have to know some important stuff: (go get your notepad and jot down your book ideas while reading this)

1. Don’t think about advertising, shelf placement, or the color and design yet. Think about what your book (website) is about and who would look for it — your target audience. Create a general theme for your book (or website/web page title) to be placed on the book’s front cover and spine. Notice my web page here is about SEO 101. This is the general theme of this page. What you’re reading right now is some content detail to compliment the theme.
2. Break down the theme of your book (website) into chapters (sub pages of a website). When you look at your book’s title, the book shopper (or search engine) should get a general idea of what it may be about. Next, open the cover and find the table of contents. This represents the pages of your website! This is important to understand: A website theme (or book title) generalizes your website’s content. The home page of your website should just give an overview of what is on the other pages! The pages of the website must contain individual and detailed information (or book chapters). This organization is exactly what search engines want to find. The more organized your content is, the better the search results will be for the searcher.
3. After your book (website) is well written for an intended audience, is categorized within the book store’s filing system (or search engine index), is placed into the proper shelf within the store (again, the search engine index), only then will your book (website) be marketable. Otherwise, look for it on the discount rack (or beyond page 3 of the search results).

A website theme, or title, generalizes to website’s content. The home page of the website should just give an overview of what is on the other pages. The pages must contain individual and detailed sub themes (or book chapters)which take a general theme to a specific detail.

What About Looks?

You may notice I didn’t mention much about website looks, design, style or navigation yet. Yes, this is important to create the right perception to the site vistor, but ONLY after they have found your site in the first place.

You see, most website owners (and website designers too) focus mainly on how the pages should look. As my slogan says, “What good is a website if nobody knows it exists?”.

What’s Next?

The next article is devoted to researching tools and techniques to write your content with.
[ConstantContact]