So, What Are Keywords?
In basic form, keywords are terms or phrases, which can be associated with your website and specific content. Without targeting specific keywords, every word on your site essentially becomes a “keyword”, which can be detrimental. The reason for this is that a user may search for a term, and then stumble on your page, only to find it has nothing to do with what they are looking for. At the same time, a user that is searching for the exact niche that your site serves will likely find a competitor’s website as opposed to yours, because they have targeted and placed an emphasis on these specific keywords, and you haven’t.
Here is an example: A “silver jewelry” maker could have a website showcasing their products and services. If they do not target their specific, long-tail keywords, they will have a much harder time getting natural visitors who are interested in their website. Here, the obvious keyword “jewelry” would not be as highly valued as more specific keywords like “silver jewelry”. The keyword “jewelry” can be associated with “crystal jewelry”, “gemstone jewelry”, “pearl jewlery” etc. and these visitors would be useless to a “silver jewelry” store.
What Are ‘Short Tail’ and ‘Long Tail’ Keywords?
Short tail keywords are essentially any keyword or term which is very broad and nondescript. A keyword or term such as ‘Jewelry’, ‘Rings’, ‘Necklaces’ would be considered short tail, as the user that is searching for one of these terms is likely seeking a more exact product or result than simply “jewelry”.
Long tail keywords, on the other hand, are more or less specific descriptive terms or phrases which are more targeted to the specifics of the website itself. An example of a long tail keyword would be ‘women’s gold rings’ or ‘diamond engagement ring’. These keywords are very specific, thus targeting a keyword like “men’s gold watches” on a website that sells gold watches for men would allow the site to be returned in a search for “men’s gold watches”, thus being useful to the user.
Finding and Researching Your Keywords
Now that you know the basics, you need to know how to take advantage of long tail keywords, by researching and selecting the best possible keywords available.
There are dozens of keyword research tools available on the internet, whichever one you choose is entirely up to you. However, our favorite is the keyword suggestion tool provided by Google itself -> Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (who can have a bigger database of keywords than Google itself?). When you use one of these keyword research tools, you are essentially tapping into search term history with multiple search engines, but mainly Google. When you enter short tail keywords into these programs, they scour tens of millions of possible terms and search phrases, and then create a list of recommended keywords to use.
From this point, it is your job to analyze and carefully select each keyword that will be beneficial to you. The simple method in doing this is to compare the ‘search volume’ and the ‘advertiser competition’ for each keyword. You want to find keywords that have a high search volume, and low advertiser competition.
Search volume is, in essence, the average number of searches for that particular keyword. The higher the search volume, the more often the keyword is searched for. Just remember to try and find long tail keywords, as they will be much more beneficial to you that a short tail keyword that has 100 times the amount of searches.
Finally, advertiser competition is determined by how many people are targeting the same keyword with paid search results and advertisements. A keyword result with a large number of advertiser competition is likely to be a very competitive term, thus your chances of effectively using it will might be slim to none. Once again, sticking to a low-medium advertiser competition, as well as a medium-high search volume, is the best method to finding excellent long tail keywords.
]]>The realistic truth about link building is that most SEO companies use arbitrary and unreliable “guesses” when it comes to figuring out the proper metrics needed. While only a limited amount of Google employees know the truth about how the search engines metrics and algorithms detect fishy linking, you can usually play it safe and reduce your risk as long as you rationally look at the methods you are using.
You Need To Deep-Link
While smaller sites don’t really need to follow this, any site with a decent amount of pages should practice deep-linking. If you have hundreds or thousands of quality links pointing to the same homepage, it doesn’t sound natural. Instead, you must link to individual pages within your site as well.
Take Your Time While Link Building
We all get the urge every once in a while to simply go out and purchase 10,000 backlinks from outsourced companies, but you need to be careful. If too many backlinks are created in a very short amount of time, search engine metrics will likely recognize the sudden influx and depending on where the links are hosted, where they point, and what they keywords are, you may be penalized. Take your time when building backlinks, and it will pay off quite well. Be steady and consistent while building links.
Keep Rotating The Anchor Text
Using the same anchor text in every backlink created makes the task much easier to pull off, especially when you are creating links on a large scale, but doing so may have consequences. The main focus when it comes to building backlinks is trying to make the links look natural, like people are linking to you because they like you. When you use the same exact anchor text for a large amount of links, the search engines will pick up on it and quickly realize that something is fishy. Keep rotating the anchor text and your links will do a lot more for you.
Get Links From Low PR Sites As Well
PR5-8 pages are always solid places to get links from, but don’t discredit PR0-PR2 sites/pages either. When links are built naturally (aka without your assistance), there will be quite a large number of very low PR pages that push your links. If you head out and build backlinks on mostly PR5+ sites, it will look fishy, because it isn’t “normal”. Make sure you vary the PR when it comes to back linking.
Switch Up Platforms
A common mistake made by people that are on a mission to build backlinks, is to build a large amount of links, on a small amount of platforms. If you have a huge chunk of your backlinks coming from WordPress sites, for instance, SE metrics will take notice. The reason for this is that there are also way too many spammed backlinks in platforms like this, and one of the best ways for search engines to limit the effectiveness of these links, is to discount links if they are “only” coming from the same platform. Be sure to get links from all types of sites and platforms, because the better you diversify your linking, the better your results will be.
]]>The document given by Google to its manual reviewers containing the “quality rater guidelines” is LEAKED.
The reviewer can mark the site as spam, not spam, maybe spam. The full document is 43 pages long and definitely worth reading. Go ahead and download it here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/99359823/quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf
If the above link doesn’t work for you, let me know.
]]>An easy way to see what people are doing is very simple. Just search on Google for terms like: “buy viagra”, “buy cialis” and the likes. See what kinds of sites pop up. Study their backlinks. You can either use yahoo siteexplorer tool or our analyze backlinks tool. Watching these results closely will give you insights of how people are still able to trick Google. You will eventually get your own ideas with time.
The people are using the “authority” of other domains by creating a page/ad on them, and then link spamming it to thousands of other forums, blogs, guestbook (probably using xrumer).
]]>When you’re working for a company or firm or anything else, the main factors you’re going to fight against are time and money. While these two terms have an interdependent relationship, they both contribute to your professionalism. There will be times when the tasks you’re trying to take care of aren’t from your area of expertise, thus, being more time consuming. These are times when you should try to outsource that work to a more specialized company, saving time and money.
If you are a SEO consultant or a SEO company or someone who is building an online empire, you plan a strategy for your client (or yourself). Now, some of the steps in your strategy are best executed if outsourced. By outsourcing your work you’re not only improving your focus, but you’re also minimizing the hassle at your end.
How your focus can be improved by outsourcing?
These tedious jobs usually take a lot of time and attention from the management’s behalf. Outsourcing all the non-core activities, allows the management to focus on the more important tasks.
Why is this so important? Let’s face it – when you’re trying to grow a business, time is the key factor in it’s ascent. You no longer have to do the tedious jobs.
By partnering up with different companies, you’re also gaining access to their technologies, tools and techniques that your company might not possess at that time. Also, you’re avoiding the costs of having to train the people necessary to handle the job according to your needs, and also saving time by avoiding to learn or understand the job.
Other benefits of outsourcing
- Start new projects fast
A professional outsourcing firm has the resources to start a project immediately. Handling all of the tasks in-house might involve taking a lot more time than estimated. Hiring and training the people for the job and offering them the necessary support might as well be a unpredicted spend.
- Level the playing field
A firms professionalism is nowadays related to their resources. Why? Because bigger companies have access to better paying projects and can play at the high-roller’s table. Many small firms can’t simply afford to match the support services that larger companies have to offer. Outsourcing gives the chance for smaller firms to have access to the same economies and expertise that the large companies are enjoying.
- Focus on your core business
Getting rid of the tedious jobs that are not in your area of expertise saves a lot of time and money, allowing you to focus on your core tasks.
- Control of capital costs
Reducing costs to the minimum might not be only reason to outsource, but it’s certainly a major one. By outsourcing your work you’re converting those fixed costs into variable costs.
- Reduce labor costs
Hiring and training staff for short-term projects can be very expensive and you might end up noticing that the employees you’re training don’t live up to the requirements. By outsourcing you can focus your human resources where they’re needed the most.
– Get rid of all the unnecessary headaches
By dividing all the work that needs to get done amongst the outsourcing companies, you’re also getting rid of all the headaches that might occur in handling those work yourself.
=> Bottom line, outsourcing, when done correctly, can save you a lot of time and money as well as contribute to your company’s growth.
]]>If you don’t have a blog, I would definitely recommend you to start one and do the following:
1. Start a wordpress blog, maybe at www.yourdomain.com/blog/ (blogs are so easy to maintain, even my 8 years old nephew can do that)
2. Install the required wordpress plugins to make your blog search engine friendly.
3. Every week, post at least two relevant and attractive articles on your blog. They should be focused to help your visitors, rather than focused to promote your products. Get daily blog tips here.
4. Submit each of the blog post in social sites like:
Note: If you try and maintain a good network of friends on these social sites, you are bound to have a much bigger success.
5. After a month, submit your blog to 100+ blog and feed directories.
Being consistent in producing good content on your blog and promoting it on social sites, will help you in the following:
1. You will observe more sense of trust/credibility among your visitors.
2. There will be more interaction among you and your audience. You can easily form up an online community too.
3. You will get more and more quality backlinks to your blog as your blog grows. With every blog post, you are giving more opportunities to others to link to you.
4. Regular addition of fresh content will get you repeat visitors and is good for those greedy search engine bots too.
5. Your site gains more authority in its field over time.
6. You can easily syndicate content from the RSS Feeds of your blog to a variety of sources.
7. A blog also proves to increase your contacts in your niche.
Thus, you will observe how the ultimate aim to improve search engine rankings and traffic is achieved by maintaining a blog.
]]>1. Do your website’s pages with ‘non-www’ redirect to ‘www’ or vice-versa?
They should, as search engines consider them as different pages. So, you must consolidate your efforts to a single version.
2. Do your website’s URLs have more than one variable in the URL? (SEs may find trouble indexing your site)
Lately, search engines are getting more and more capable to index URLs with more than one variables in the URL. But, still try not to include more than one variable in the URL.
3. Do most of your pages share more than 50% of the same HTML content? (For example having a BIG menu shared across the site)
If yes, you may find your pages in supplemental index without no reason. Try to avoid that.
4. Does your site contain a valid robots.txt?
It must.
5. Make sure there is no duplicate content generating on your site.
For example: the same content at www.yoursite.com/index.php, www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/index.htm
If yes, redirect all of them to a single page. If you have a wordpress blog, this may help.
6. Make sure your site is xhtml and css validated. This will prevent any crawling issues.
7. Check for broken links on your website. This makes it so damn easy.
8. Make sure to follow the Google’s webmaster guidelines.
9. Never use the same title, meta description/keyword tags on many pages of your website.
10. Keep a check on all outgoing links on your website. Keep only those links which are going to help your visitors. (When you are linking to anything, you got to see from your visitors’ point of view – not from the search engines point of view.)
]]>What search engines love? – They love a good VARIETY of linkbacks. And, we started SubmitComfort.com to provide your site(s) a variety of linkbacks in an economical way so that you get maximum ROI.
Often in gaining visitors to our website, we face a big need of “manual work power”. Submitcomfort.com aims to provide you with such man power at cheap prices. And with time, we are adding more skills to our man power to fit to your different needs.
Let me try to put it in bullet points, what do we aim to provide?
- Manual work power to handle your different online tasks.
- Helping you to build your own VRE (Virtual Real Estate).
- Links from a variety of sources.
- Helping you to build content on your site.
=> We ultimately aim to improve your search engine rankings and increase traffic on your website(s) so that you make much more profits.
And the purpose of this blog – it is only for my rant on SEO. 