Keyword Planning
Before you even consider making a web page, you should research the key words behind it. Webmasters need to know what terms searchers are searching for and how much competition there is for those terms. A good webmaster will make pages based off of keywords that have few competitors and high search volumes. In this article I’ll talk about keyword research. We’ll even go over the best free tool to use to find out how many times a particular key word is being searched for each month.
Find out which keywords folks are looking for before you do anything else. You can do this by using a free tool within Google Adwords. Sign up for a free account with them. Next go to opportunities and click the keyword research tool. Within the tool, type in the search term you want to research and it will tell you how many people are searching for the term. You’ll even get the synonyms to your search term and their search volumes as well. If this already seems like too much work, you can always visit http://www.surgeseo.com . Those that are still with me can learn more in the following paragraphs.
Within the key word tool you will have the option of searching for the exact match, phrase match, and broad match. These different options will be explained with the key word “used cars”.
An example of broad match for “used cars” could be “used up old cars”. As you can see the broad match is not very targeted. If you want customers that are looking to buy used cars from you, you won’t find them with that keyword.
The term “red used cars” is a good example of a phrase match term. Keywords stay next to each other and in the same order as you intend them to be. They will however, have other words to the front and back of them which may or may not be relevant.
The exact match is the match you want to follow. Our minnesota seo company only looks at exact matches when researching clients site. Using the exact match method you’ll get the number of people who are only searching with the term “used cars”. If the numbers look good, you can make a site based off of this key word. If you find the numbers are not as high as you like, you can always try to use one of its synonyms.
Building Links For Better Search Rankings
You have probably heard that search engines like to see links and plenty of them to a website, it helps search engines to decide which sites they should list, because a link to a site is a bit like a vote for a site. That’s a valid point as, spammers networks aside, websites do have a tendency to link most to other sites that are interesting to the first sites readers.
So if you have a small business and work on your own promotion and SEO how do you go about building links to your website? There are many ways to get links but first it is important to understand that not all links are the same, some are much more powerful than others. Just one link from a relevant authority site can be worth many links from other.
The best links to get are those that use your target keywords as the anchor text (the clickable words on the other site) and they come from sites that are relevant to your business or that are powerful for other reasons. (A link from The NY Times to your book-keeping website would be choice even if it is not related to your business!)
Some practical ways to get links to your website:
Firstly, have good content, it does not matter if its a blog or static website, give other website owners something good to link to before you try to get it linked to:
- Mention it and link to it in your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc accounts.
- Leave links where appropriate in relevant forums and comment in blogs that allow it.
- Bookmark it at the social bookmark sites like Digg and Delicious.
- Submit a shorter version to Ezinearticles or GoArticles with a link to the main article on your site of course.
- Blog it anywhere you got a blog.
Try to get your suppliers to link to your site or get links from professional associations.
See if you ca do a deal with a similar service in another city, a mention with a link to them from a blog article of yours in return for a similar mention from them of your website.
See who is linking to your competitors and see if you can get links from them too. You can check your competitor links by typing the following string into your browser location bar:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain:somedomain.com%20-site:somedomain.com
Remember to replace the two ‘somedomain.com’ bits in there with the domain you are examining.
Are there directories that specialize in your particular field? Prominent blog writers? - Try to get links from them or a product review (with a link to your site obviously).
See if you can guest post in those industry blogs with a link or two to your site of course.
Even unrelated sites can have their uses, local directories help to get your name out there have a little link juice and they are good citation references if you are hoping to get a Google Local Business listing (more about that another time…).
If you can write an article on your industry you could also try publishing it on article directories or on social media websites like Hubpages.com. Remember to include a link back to your site of course! Even better write a few articles and submit them to a spread of article directories like GoArticles.com and Ezinearticles.com and some social sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. Interlink them a little and make sure they all have links to your main site.
Do you have an RSS feed on your site? Add the RSS feed to the various RSS distribution services like feedage.com and feedagg.com.
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