SEO Blog

When you choose the keywords that you want to target, you will probably use a fair amount of common sense, logic or whatever else you might wish to call it. In addition though, you should look to add some statistical evidence to support these ‘theories’ and provide them with a little substance. This is where keyword research comes to the fore.

However, even when the theory is absolutely rock solid and it supports your own beliefs, this doesn’t always mean that it will work in practice. So how can you tell when it’s actually falling flat and how easy is it to identify?

Well, your first indicator is always going to be your search rankings. This doesn’t mean having a look on your own computer, where results are likely to be personalised and highly skewed. You need to find out your exact ranking, the one which Joe Average will find if they search for your target term.
(more…)

It might sound a little convoluted, but PPC can be an extremely valuable SEO tool. If you’re looking to test the effectiveness of a keyword, optimising a page and waiting for rankings to appear can take time and prove ineffective. However, with Pay per Click advertising you can get strong results in a matter of weeks.

So how does it work?

Well, imagine you’ve got a few keywords that you’re toying around with for your homepage. How do you know which one will actually convert? Of course you can have an educated guess, but sometimes that’s simply not enough. If you get it wrong, you could attract traffic, but not get the conversions that you’re looking for. This can quickly become a major issue.
(more…)

Most website owners have a clear idea about what keywords they are looking to target. Usually it is painfully obvious in fact – I sell laptop cases, therefore I want to optimise for ‘laptop cases’. However, there are occasions where this simplistic short-sightedness can lead to some pretty poor results.

Let’s stick with our ‘laptop cases’ example. Now imagine I have a brand new domain and very few inbound links; essentially I’m invisible to the search engines. If I target ‘laptop cases’ as a primary keyword, the likelihood of my site hitting the first page of Google is hugely unlikely. Why?
(more…)

Sometimes the focus of a page will shift. Not always, and certainly not by a great deal, but changes do occur you need to be able to review your keywords to ensure they are still representative.

It sounds a simple thing, but you’d be surprised how many sites cling on to their outdated key terms and phrases in the hopes of attracting traffic. The trouble is, as we all know, if a keyword isn’t representative of a website, the traffic it receives won’t be as targeted. So getting visitors through the door is always good, but if they aren’t converting you could be wasting a page.

So whenever you have a change of direction for a page, re-evaluate the keywords that you use to maintain decent levels of relevance. Although of course you don’t have to wait. If you feel that some keywords aren’t performing as well as they could be don’t be afraid to make changes.
(more…)

So you’ve been slowly working your way up to the top of Google for a keyword. But you’ve become stuck on page two or aren’t getting the traffic you want. What do you do?

Well, it comes down to research. You have to find out what your competition is and find out what the traffic levels are likely to be like if you do get to the top. High competition and low search volume are a disaster waiting to happen for any site.

Sometimes keywords just aren’t quite right. Maybe there are a good few terms that adequately describe what your page offers, which do you choose? Instinctively you could go for the most commonly used, but that might also be the one that is targeted most by your competitors. It could take you weeks or even months to make a dent on the first page rankings, all of which is largely time wasted.
(more…)

When it comes to SEO, one of the most important things that you’ll need to do is to define your keywords. Whilst you might already have some in mind, if you are starting from scratch there is every chance that the competition rate might put them out of reach.

Imagine you’re a new online store offering designer clothing. You will probably have already established that there is a fair amount of competition out there. When you come to decide on your keywords, a generic phrase like ‘designer clothing’ is going to be difficult to achieve.

A quick search on Google reveals that there are around 38 million other sites currently ranking for the phrase. Among these will be some strong pages that will have many years of optimisation behind them. Inevitably this will be a very difficult phrase to gain a ranking for, especially at this stage. So when you’re starting out on your SEO journey, you might want to consider some long tail keywords.
(more…)

Newcomers to SEO often make the mistake of blanketing their website with a specific keyword. This is mistakenly seen as a way of improving the site’s overall position within the search engines; but of course the truth is very different.

Each individual page needs to be viewed as its own mini-website within the wider network of your sitemap. You aren’t optimising a website, you are optimising a web page; therefore the terms that you optimise the page for need to be specific to it.
(more…)

We all have ambitions to get to the top of Google for the short terms that are searched for most. But in reality these are often highly competitive phrases that will take a concerted effort over a long period of time to get anywhere near the summit.

As Internet marketers are always at pains to clarify, SEO is very much a long-term solution and should certainly not be seen as a quick fix for your traffic woes. With this in mind, short tail phrases ought to be a part of your wider strategy; but if you are to get yourself noticed on the search engines in the reasonably near future, you might want to consider long tail phrases.
(more…)

Marketing yourself online is by no means an easy process. If you haven’t had too much experience developing successful sites, then the idea of gaining links and the importance of doing so is probably slightly lost on you. But don’t be fooled, link building is absolutely essential to your website’s future success.

Most search engine algorithms, the mathematic protocol in place to determine rankings, are built on the strength of links. Each link passes on some strength, which in turn is assigned to the page in question. Of course the pathway of a link can be long and stretch across numerous websites; however the first thing that you need to sort out is your own internal linking structure.
(more…)

When you’ve just set up a new website it can be difficult to keep on top of everything and find out exactly what tools are out there to help you. With so many companies offering similar, at least on the face of it at any rate, services, choosing the right one for your needs can be tricky.

(more…)