The Anonymous Search Query
Many small business owners, and search engine optimisers for that matter, believe that if they just optimize their websites for the right keywords then the traffic will just show up on their website and they’ll get loads of business. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily the way it happens.
Here’s a universal truth: When you optimise your website with your chosen keywords, that’s not when the search engines make their magic happen. Search love happens when searchers enter search queries.
That’s why you can be found for keywords that you didn’t intend to target. Check your referral logs and you’ll see search queries that you never thought of. That’s a good thing.
So why does any of this matter? It matters because you don’t have to chase keywords to be effective with your search engine optimisation. What you should do is identify the ideal customer, then figure out what they want. If you can figure out the search queries they are likely to enter into a search box (good luck!), then you can target those keywords.
The best way to conduct your website SEO is to use language in your website that will appeal to your ideal customer. That is language they are likely to search for when looking for a business that does what you do. Even then, you can’t predict what people will do.
The search query is the variable in your SEO. You can’t predict it and you can’t force it. But you can learn from it. Check your analytics reports and your referral logs, then move forward.
Are Keywords Important?
So many SEOs, and small business website owners too, spend so much time chasing keywords that you wonder how they get any work done. Keywords serve a purpose, but don’t put too much emphasis on them. The reason is because people don’t search for keywords.
If you’ll check your website’s referral logs you’ll find that people are finding your website for some really oddball phrases. Some of those phrases may not have anything to do with the topic you are writing about. But people will go to your blog and spend a lot of time there.
The reason that happens is because people get sidetracked by good content. They’re looking for something but when they search for it they find you instead. They stay on your website because your website interests them. It’s good content.
Now, I’m not saying to trash all your keywords. But I want you to understand that good content doesn’t necessarily base itself on your keywords.
The bottom line on copywriting is you have to be able to write great content with or without keywords. Journalists and magazine writers have been doing this for hundreds of years. Print content doesn’t rely on keywords. Online writers should not spend all their time obsessing over keywords either.
Should you use keywords? Yes. But don’t chase them. Just realize why you are using them and don’t overdo it.
Why AuthorRank Is More Important Than Links
AuthorRank is more important today than links. Of course, AuthorRank is a type of link authority, but let me explain.
In the old link building scheme of things, links were important for measuring a website’s authority based on the number, type and quality of inbound links to its pages. The problem with that system is that many SEOs and webmasters were able to manipulate their own authority by chasing links from the best sites. Google got caught indexing loads of spam.
With AuthorRank, spam is less likely to be a problem. Google will measure an individual’s authority based on a number of factors including quality of content, places that content is published, and their social connections. Then, a link from a person with a high AuthorRank will be more beneficial than a link from a person with a low AuthorRank. But will that solve the spam problem?
Not likely. Not entirely. But it will go a long way to fixing the problem with link spam.
The big benefit to AuthorRank is that Web authors will be able to manage their own authority whether they publish on their own blogs or someone else’s. The downside is that you will have to manage your personal authority just like you manage your credit score. But that’s not much of a downside.
For webmasters and website owners, it will mean you’ll have to seek out links from people with high authority, not just websites with high authority.
I kind of like the idea, but it’s a little frightening too. What do you think? Will be an improvement over the current system of chasing links?
Why Content Is Your Ace In The Hole
Some people ask me, “What is the most important SEO activity that I can be performing every day?” And the answer is very simple. Content.
That content is the most important SEO activity that you can perform on any given day of the week should be painfully obvious, yet many people still ask the question. I think the question arises because there are some very well known SEOs who have muddied the waters by suggesting – or outright saying – that link building is far more important.
Link building can only take you so far, but you can’t – and you shouldn’t – build links to an empty page. What would be the point?
Content without links can still rank, but links without content never provides any value. And that’s why I say that content creation is a far more important SEO activity than link building, keyword research, analytics, or anything else.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do any of the above. Rather, you should incorporate all aspects of SEO work into your daily routine, but if you can only perform one SEO activity every day, then you should focus on content.
Content provides more value short term and long term than any other SEO activity. If you do nothing else today, write one 500-word article. That’s your best SEO bet.
SEO Ranking Factors And Domain Names
SEOs like to talk about search engine ranking factors. It’s like a second hobby.
A recent article on a popular SEO news website says that keywords in your domain name could be the most important SEO ranking factor. I’ll have to agree.
I think the truth is, the most important SEO ranking factor changes from year to year and season to season. Long term, however, I think your domain name could possibly be the most important SEO ranking factor. It’s not just a passing fad.
If you look at other ranking factors that have been high at one time or another, Google eventually finds a way to diminish their importance without totally obliterating them as ranking factors. But not your domain name.
When domain names seemed to be less important as ranking factors it was because something else – like link building – was considered of too high importance and so it seemed that your domain name wasn’t as important. But as soon as those other ranking factors start to decline in stature, there is that domain-name-as-a-ranking-factor again. It seems to be a constant.
Keywords have always been important. At various times, how often you employ them and where you place them have determined their level of importance. But they’ve always been important in a domain name.
That’s not to say that a domain name without your key phrase in it can’t rank well. But I have noticed that many domain names with the proper keyword phrase in them need not have a lot of other things going for it. If the keyword is there and the content is high quality, it will rank.
It’s getting harder and harder to find good domain names that utilize the proper keyword phrase. I think that might be a reason Google likes it as a ranking factor.
Search Is On The Rise
Since 2008, search has increased by 68%. If you ask me, that’s evidence that search engine optimisation is still as important today as it ever was.
The interesting thing about this news is that there are two winners in the search engine race to the top: Google and Bing, or Microsoft.
Google’s share of the search market has risen to almost 70%. Bing’s has gone from 10% to almost 20%. From the looks of things, the two search engines increased their market share at about the same rate while Yahoo!’s share of the search market went down. For the first time in history, Microsoft’s share of the search market is greater than Yahoo!’s.
Both AOL and Ask lost a share of the search market, but they’re still hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
Still, if you are building a website today or entering the online world to start a business, then you’ll still need search engine optimisation. You might need it more today than you’ve ever needed it in the past. While search is still growing, so is your competition.
In raw numbers, the number of search queries rose from approximately 11 billion in January 2008 to roughly 17 billion in February 2012. Interestingly, February shows fewer search queries than other months in every year. Judging by the graph at WebProNews, we could be seeing record numbers of searches by the end of this year – maybe 18 billion or more.
All of that spells one thing – a greater need for professional search engine optimisation specialists to help business owners become better online marketers.
A Cheap Link Building Tactic To Try
Link building can often be time consuming and expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. If you don’t have a huge budget or a lot of time to spend on building inbound links to your website, you can still get some links by being aggressively creative. Here’s a method you should try.
Start by building a guest blogger page on your blog and invite people to be a guest blogger. Offer them topics to write about but be open to other ideas. Insist on high quality content only.
Promote all guest posts through your social accounts and follow your guest bloggers. Connect with them through social media, sharing their posts and tweets through retweeting, liking, etc. After building those relationships for awhile, ask if you can write a guest post on their blog.
This is where you’ll get your back links. In your author bio, link back to your website, but also link to your Google+ profile using rel=author. Don’t forget to link to the guest post from your Google+ account. This will associate your name with all of your articles at Google.
That’s it, in a nutshell. Pretty simple to implement and it doesn’t take a lot of time. However, it won’t happen over night. It does take time to build relationships so don’t get overly excited if it doesn’t happen quickly. Be patient. The upside is that it won’t consume your time while continuing to provide the benefits of link building.
5 Killer SEO Tweaks To Implement Right Now
Webmasters and website owners are always looking for ways to increase their search engine optimisation. I know of 5 very easy-to-implement SEO tactics that you can perform on your web pages and each one only takes a few minutes but offer incredible opportunities to increase your website’s search rankings.
Here are 5 ways you can improve your website’s SEO right now in under 5 minutes.
- Write a unique meta description for every page – If you have several pages on your website that have the same meta description, rewrite them. The search engines use those meta descriptions as snippets in their search results. If you have two or more pages with the same meta description, then they likely will not use it and your pages might not rank as well
- Keyword-optimized subheads – If you have long blocks of text on your web pages, break it up with subheads. But be sure that those subheads use your primary and secondary keywords. Optimize your headings as well as your text.
- Use alt tags for your images - Images cannot be crawled. Tell your search engines what your images are about by using alt tags and be sure to use your keywords for those alt tags.
- Unique optimize meta titles – Like meta descriptions, your meta titles have great potential. Instead of copying and pasting your page headline, write a unique meta title with your keyword in it.
- Inline JavaScript - JavaScript isn’t crawlable and it adds unnecessary code to your pages. Put that code into a separate file and call it in with one line of single code instead of the endless code on your web page.
Don’t kill your website’s SEO. Implement these 5 changes today and improve your search rankings.
Do Microsites Really Sell?
One of the trends over the last couple of years has been the building of microsites. These are 3-5 page websites that serve a particular niche, a very tightly targeted niche. Is it a good strategy.
I’d say it depends on the niche.
One area where microsites really work well is when you want to geotarget a particular key phrase or business. For instance, let’s say you own a plumbing service and you service all of Scotland but you have satellite offices all around the country in various cities. You could have your main website that targets plumbing in a general sense and even mentions where your satellite offices are located, but for tighter marketing you should build yourself several microsites – one for each location you serve.
Let’s say you have a local office for your plumbing business in each of the following Scotland cities:
- Aberdeen
- Ayrshire
- Dundee
- Edinburgh
- Glasgow
- Inverness
- Stirling
You could build a microsite for each city that targets your plumbing service keywords and the local area. You are more likely to see each of those microsites rank for a search with “plumber” and the city name if you perform your SEO effectively. Why is that?
The reason this is effective is because someone searching for a plumber in Stirling, Scotland, for instance, is someone who likely lives or runs a business in Stirling. Why would someone in Dundee be looking for a plumber in Stirling?
Because searchers are likely to be local, your locally optimised website will rank better for people searching for your business in those locations. That’s why microsites can be see effective.
Why Web Design Is Optimization
In the old days of search engine optimisation you would spend most of your time trying to optimise your web pages by writing great titles and headlines, making sure you used your keyword in your content just the right number of times (not too much and not too little), writing a killer meta description, and optimising your images with alt tags. If you had design skills you might spend some time making your pages look pretty, but that was an afterthought.
Today, web design should be your primary concern. It should not be an afterthought.
So why is web design more important for search engine optimisation today?
I think it has to do with the fact that Internet users are more savvy now and the level of competition is stiffer for all niches. If you and a competitor are equal in every area, but your website is prettier than theirs, then you are likely to get the traffic. People care about attractive websites.
That’s not to say that functionality and user-friendliness aren’t important. You should still make sure your website is easy to navigate and easy to interact with on a basic level. But if your website isn’t attractive, then users may not give you a chance to prove how functional it is. You could be experiencing a higher bounce rate than you deserve.
The best place to start for effective search engine optimisation is with your web design. In fact, today’s SEO is as much concerned about website attractiveness as he is with search engine rankings and social signals.