Author Archive

Devise A Good Keyword Strategy For Your SEO Campaign

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Keyword research is often overlooked or rushed in a SEO campaign, when really it is one of the most important factors. Your keyword strategy shouldn’t just be a one off task, it should be constantly being tweaked to find out which keywords perform best and you should be finding new “long tail” and “trophy keywords” for your sub pages and home pages. Having full awareness of what your site is being found for can help when you are choosing additional keywords.

keyword research

How Do I Perform Good Keyword Research?

The key to good keyword research is to think like the customer of the site you are optimizing. So if you are optimizing for a dog accessories website, you need to think “what will the customer search for to find this site”. Well things like “dog beds”, “dog leads”, “dog toys”, would be a good place to start. By entering these keywords into the adwords keyword tool , you could get lost in keyword suggestions and useful information about potential keywords you could use in your SEO campaign.

You should also determine timescales for your keywords; for example you should choose long term, in-between and short term keywords. Lower competition keywords (“long tail”) will definitely be easier to target in the short term.

Here is an example of my approach to devising a keyword strategy:

  • Short term – “dog leads for big german shepherds”
  • In-between – “dog beds for german shepherds”
  • Long term – “dog beds”

Ok so that wasn’t a very good example, but found it difficult to think of keywords off the top of my head and I’m sure you get the idea!

Choose Realistic Keywords

Don’t just choose a keyword because the search volume is high and the completion is low on the adwords keyword tool. Do research on your keyword research, do a quick Google search for the keyword in question, if you find that there are quite a lot of high authority domains ranking for that keyword, it might be an idea to determine this keyword as a long term or if you feel that the domains are of a really high authority, consider dumping it for a different keyword.

Create Pages For Relevant Keywords

If you find a list of keywords that are relevant to your website, but you don’t have very much information about these on your website, it might be a good idea to create new sub pages optimized for these keywords. Only do this if it is going to add value to your website though. The new Google Panda Update is cracking down on content farms, so don’t go over the top!

Posted in Keyword Research | 1 Comment »

Quality vs Quantity Of Content – Google Panda Update

Friday, May 13th, 2011

Ever heard that Google loves regularly updated content? As a result of this you probably integrated a blog to your site and updated it daily with useless posts solely aimed at increasing your websites position in SERPS.

If you are doing this, you are effectively creating a content farm, full of useless content. You are just leaving yourself vulnerable to be penalized by Google.

If you want to spend more time updating your site, you should concentrate on writing quality posts that adds value to your website or blog. Each post should be unique and well written. The better you write your post, the more people will link to it. It is definitely better to write one post and get 100 links, than to write 100 posts and only get 1 link. Content is king and quality is queen, both go hand in hand to give you top rankings and returning readers.

Google Panda Update

Let your content reflect your site

The quality of your content reflects the quality and authority of your website in Google’s eyes. Google’s Amit Singhal quoted that “improving lower quality pages or merging them with higher quality pages could improve the higher quality pages ranking”, so in other words if you have low quality pages, it could be having a detrimental effect on your whole websites rankings in SERPS.

What you should do

You should be pro-active in writing your blog posts. Before you choose something to write about, you should go through each of your existing posts and ensure that you have not written about this topic before. If you have and you don’t feel that the post is up to scratch, delete it and completely start it from scratch, or you could add useful bits into your new post. This is definitely a good idea for webmasters to improve their rankings; go through each of your posts, remove ones with duplicate topics or collate them into new, more useful, higher quality posts. It doesn’t matter if it reduces the amount of pages on your website. Quality beats quantity all the time with SEO.

Rand wrote a good blog on who the winners and losers are from the panda update by having a quick read of this, you will notice that sites with potential lower quality content (such as article sites), have been affected really negatively by the Google Panda Update.

Good ways to find bad content

Google analytics is a great place to start when looking for content that isn’t performing. As Google has access to all this information, it is not impossible that it doesn’t use it as a ranking factor.

Make a list of pages with high bounce rates and low amounts of time spent on them. Then go through these pages to determine which ones you should consider deleting or improving the quality of. Once you have improved the quality, you should keep track of how the bounce rate differs and keep looking to better the quality of content on each page of your website.

Conclusion

The Panda update will hopefully have a very positive effect on the amount of good quality content on the web and reduce the amount of low quality content, content scrapers and low authority websites who get rankings in Google.

Posted in Panda | No Comments »

SEO Experiment: The Effect Of No-following A Link On A Page

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

There has been rumour that if you nofollow a link on a page to another page, all other links to that page will be nofollowed also.
For example if you were trying to beat Google by nofollowing the link back to your home page within the navigation with the anchor text “home” and then having another followed link back to your home page somewhere in the content with your chosen anchor text, this may not have the desired effect.

If the rumour is true, Google will see you have nofollowed the link back to your home page and will treat all links back to your home page from that page as nofollow also.
Here I am going to try a little experiment to see what actually happens if you try and get Google to ignore anchor text such as “home” and “home page”.

Scenario

I have set up two test pages, both are identical and are aiming to rank for the keyword “hoompalart” (random keyword that has no results.. try it).
I am going to link to both pages from this post with that exact anchor text, only difference is that I am going to link to one of the pages twice, one of the links followed and the other one will be nofollowed. If the rumour is true then in theory, the link weight that should be passed to the test page with two links will be discarded and the page with only one link should outrank the other.

Here is the nofollowed link : hoompalart and here are both the followed links hoompalart and hoompalart.
For note and clarification, I have linked test-1.htm with a nofollow and a followed link and test-2.htm with just a followed link, if the rumour is true, then test-2.htm should rank better than test-1.htm for the term hoompalart.

I will post the results as soon as we find something, keep checking back!

Posted in SEO Experiments | No Comments »