How to Choose the Best Keyword for On-Page Optimization

Means to find good keywords:

"Keywords" are the words that your potential customer associates with your product or service. You should know what the reader is likely to type into the search engine. You can even try this by typing your keywords the way your site viewers would. Choosing keywords for on-page optimization need not be complex. You just need to take a few things into consideration.

1) Significance: Keywords must be relevant to the business.
2) Magnitude: How important is this core term in relation to the other yet-to-be-optimized keywords
3) Addressee's objective: Will this bring in exactly the aimed-at traffic in comparison to the other keywords?
4) Exploration volume: Will this bring in solid amount of traffic in relation to the other keywords?

The keyword formula:

Keywords for evaluation are usually the keywords that work best for search engine optimization. The number of search results on Google for your keywords are calculated with KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) for each keyword. The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results in which keywords are most effective for your operation.

Finding the best keywords:

The best use of keywords in on-page optimization is best defined by the ratio between relevance, popularity and competition. The keyword which is most related to your business having the largest number of searches and the smallest competition is the best. If you do well in local search, you can easily overcome all the competition and show up in the search engine results for the given keyword.

What you should do:

List the keywords that people use to find your business.

Note how many people use the keywords you have selected.

Classify your competition and make sure the keywords you have chosen are relevant.

Breaking keywords into pages:

Keyword optimization has to be cent-percent related to the content of the page. Choose the best few keywords for the home page and spread the rest on the other pages. Choose one or two keywords that you can use throughout the pages that will act as your main keywords.

Suggestions:

Here are some useful tips for finding the best keywords for on-page optimization.

1) Words you feel people would type in to find the website, its products/services, etc.
2) FAQs that your clients ask you will contain important keywords.
3) What actions do your viewers try to accomplish with your website?
4) Industry glossaries and reference materials
5) Thesauri, taxonomies and anthologies
6) Contents of websites listed in related classes of the directory
7) Geographical dependence on search expressions

The points you learned here should be enough to jump-start you on keyword optimization. Of course, like any other research methodology it requires skill, time and effort. If you feel that your time is best spent on your business then seek the help of a good SEO company. They are experienced in these criteria and will help you on your way to online success!

Content Syndication: Myths busted

Before we dive into content syndication, let’s learn all about what content is.

What Is Content?

Today, everybody talks of having good content in their website. But what is good content? What does it mean? Content is simply the stuff that you have on your site, and good content is the useful information or tool that a visitor to your website might find. Good content entirely depends on the purpose of your site.

Content can be presented in the form of text, audio, video, or applications. In the textual form it could be news articles, blogs, political and cultural commentaries, reviews of TV, music, books, and other forms of media, travel pieces, sports scores and stories, stock quotes and analysis, and even full-length songs or movies. The above list makes it clear that some useful information is provided in various forms to the visitor to make his visit meaningful. It would be a pleasure for the user to navigate such a site.

What Is Content Syndication?

Syndication means distribution and content syndication is distributing or sharing the content available in one website with multiple other sites.

How Does Content Syndication Help You?

When you share the content of your website with multiple other sites it adds great depth and provides the latest information on the web pages of the receiving website thereby making it more attractive to the visitors. In today’s scenario websites need to look fresh and new at all times and content syndication provides a constant source of new material to be published on your website.

On the other hand, it is also a benefit to your website as it gives an exposure to your website across numerous online platforms. The website’s name gains free publicity which leads to more traffic, more contacts, more business, and more profit. This is a free and easy form of advertisement to your website.

What Is the Myth about Content Syndication

The myth is that content syndication may not be of much help as Google dislikes duplicate content and it is best to reduce the amount of content you syndicate (distribute) on the web.

Myth Busted

This is a misunderstanding. Content can be distributed without having an adverse effect on your website. If you have the original content on your website, you can rewrite, reorganize or restructure the original with minor changes and then submit it to various sites. This helps to improve ranks, visits, and sales.

Google being intelligent always tries to look for the site from where the content originated and gives the website “search engine credit” and higher ranking in the organic results listing. It does not matter if your website is not the one where the content originated. You are sure to find a place close to the original website which is going to be of tremendous help to you to increase traffic to your website.

Duplicate content is discouraged by Google only if there is duplication of the content in the same domain. It does not discourage syndication in other websites through article directories, press releases, etc.

Google will consider your pages as duplicates if the page titles and meta descriptions are one and the same. So it is essential that each web page has unique relevant tags and keywords.

If you understand the power of your content and how to syndicate it the right way you will accelerate your way to success.

How to Identify Black Hat SEO?

All roads in search engine optimization lead to the one and only one destination: “higher search engine ranking”. There are several ways of achieving this goal. You could choose the ethical route or the unethical one. If you tread the unethical route then mind you, you have indulged in Black hat SEO. Unethical routes might help you attain your goal fast but will never help you to sustain your success.

Well you might ask me which is an unethical route and how you could identify Black hat SEO.

Activities that do not follow the Search Engine’s rules and regulations and break them are Black hat techniques.

Activities that compromise on quality and provide the user with a poor user experience are again Black hat techniques.

Activities that unethically present content visibly or invisibly to search engine spiders and search engine users are Black hat techniques.

Over-enthusiastic people go overboard with normal ethical activities and turn the entire activity into an unethical one. Here are some tips to identify Black hat SEO techniques.

We all know that the number of times keywords are used really makes a difference. If you find in a website that keywords are repeated several times with no logic behind and provide a very poor experience to the user then you have identified a Black hat SEO. Usually the keyword density (the number of times the keyword is repeated in the content) should be between 4% and 7%. Sometimes, people knowingly increase the keyword density above that limit to make the bots take that word or phrase as an important keyword. This is called keyword stuffing. This is the most common Black hat SEO technique used.

Going a step further, just because they do not want the user to know that they are doing such keyword stuffing but want to present it to the search engine spider to increase rankings, the letters are made to blend with the color of the background. It would look like a plain background and you would never know that the keywords are hidden in it. This is another Black hat SEO technique to be avoided. Search Engines are capable of identifying such cheating.

There could be a doorway page which has no content but is entirely fabricated to suit the requirements of the bots and thereby increase the ranking of the website. This practice is frowned upon and the site may be banned or penalized for such action.

Empty meaningless links from one website to another website is also created.

Sometimes you will find the same web pages repeated in a domain. Search engines are intelligent and can identify such duplication within a domain

These sort of techniques could help you achieve your goal for a short while, but will definitely not help you retain your success. If identified, your website will be banned and penalized by search engines, thereby putting an end to all your online marketing dreams. Just remember that Search Engines are constantly improvised and made more and more intelligent. These short-term successes are best avoided. Aim for long-term success and benefit through White Hat Techniques. White Hat Techniques definitely lead you on the route to long-term success.

Remember, in business it is not enough if you succeed, how you succeed also counts.

Lessons Learnt from Bad SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complicated process and is dynamic. Bad SEO techniques are techniques that spammers use to keep up with the pace. Search Engines have complicated algorithms and hundreds of factors to rank a web page. The idea behind such fast changing and complicated algorithms is to keep ahead of the competition and ensure that web spammers do not get the rankings they are not worthy of. So it is best to bear in mind that what works out for search engine optimization today may not work out tomorrow.

Here are a few lessons learnt from bad SEO.

Lesson 1

Do not rely on keyword metatags as now the search engines rely on the text that is visible to rank your site. Keyword metatags which are not visible have lost their significance as spammers have abused them. So just take the keywords and place them as per the context in the site.
Concentrate on the title metatag as it is visible and can influence ranking. Similarly concentrate on the description metatag as some search engines use it.

Lesson 2

Do not stuff keywords in visible or invisible text as it can get your site banned. Do not ever write text in the same color as the background.

Lesson 3

Do not purchase links as search engines want to curb this practice and are improvising their algorithms to detect purchased links. Algorithms look out for patterns, presence of words like “advertisers” or sponsors”. There are teams doing this analysis. If detected they will flag your site and it will not contribute towards your page ranking.

Lesson 4

Page rank is a very small factor in ranking these days. Have links to pages and sites that are more relevant to you. More importantly, establish and reinforce site relevance as it has a major role to play in ranking.

Lesson 5

Do not swap links to build page ranks. Build relevance in such a way that visitors to your website benefit due to it. Swap links with sites that are highly relevant to your business. It would be great if you could get links to your website without you linking back to them.

Lesson 6

Do not duplicate content as search engines want to rank the same content only once. So avoid having multiple URLs on one site with the same content, as one of these is just a waste of the search engine's time and you will be "leaking page rank" – your own precious page rank is sent to pages that will never rank. "Doorway sites" you could also land you in trouble as it is considered to be spamming. Your site could get banned.

Lesson 7

Do not show different content to the crawlers and some other different content to the user. This is one favorite technique called cloaking used by the spammers and search engines are against it. Crawlers are sent out to detect cloaking and if detected they ban the website. All that you need to do is to learn how to communicate to the search engine what your site is about. Build your site in such a way that search engines can easily determine the unique value of your website.

Put your time to good use. Stop thinking of bad SEO practices and spend your time to provide good content in your website and make the user’s visit to your website a pleasure.

Can You Manage Your Own SEO?

When you hear the fact that “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” could do wonders to your business, you might wonder how. Search Engine Optimization helps you to achieve good ranking in search results when the net community looks out for information through search engines on the Internet. Every website owner wants his site to be known, searched, visited, and contacted. If you are on the 9^th or 10^th page of a search result, the chances of being clicked are very meager. You must get a higher ranking and find a place in the first page. Achieve this by doing search engine optimization for your company’s website by yourself or through a SEO provider.

Here are some tips and tricks of the trade.

Learn the ABCs: Search Engine Optimization is the formula that gets your website ranked higher on search engines. A search on the net will tell you how. If you are techno-savvy do the entire process yourself. All you need is time and constant updating of knowledge as this is a fast moving field and search engines keep changing their search logic to avoid fraudulent practices. Even if you are not techno-savvy, there are a few processes (off-page optimization) that you can do by yourself or you can always seek the services of a SEO company that has perfected this fine art as search engines constantly keep changing their modus operandi to ensure fair play, best results to the searchers, and minimization of fraud.

Understand the art and science of SEO: By now you must have realized that the science is the algorithms and techniques that rate the websites on the search engines, while the art is the way that expertise is used creatively to ensure that your website gets the optimal rating.

Judge how techno-savvy you are: Now take a critical view of your technical skills. Add to your technical skill the finesse of writing the right keyword at the right spot, linking to and from the most appropriate web pages and websites, and highlighting the content where it gets maximum attention. Do a self-analysis and assess how far you will be able to manage.

Analyze your road fitness: Managing your own website could save you money in the short run, but ensure that it meets your purpose in the long run. Strictly ensure that you do not indulge in any malpractices as your site might be totally banned by search engines if detected. Managing the website, updating it regularly but not losing the targeted keywords, keeping track of competition, linking with other websites to get maximum coverage, writing content, bookmarking and getting bookmarked, submitting articles and press releases, social networking, etc. are some of the requisite processes. If you have the time and the expertise do it yourself or else seek the services of a SEO service provider.

Keep a contingency plan ready: Many people manage their websites effectively and successfully, but there are times when you hit a roadblock either due to lack of resources or you are busy managing your other business affairs. At those times you could outsource it.

The ultimate purpose is to promote your business. You can do your own Search Engine Optimization if you have the time and expertise or get it done for you through a service provider if you have more fruitful endeavors to undertake for your business.