So What Are Keywords?
To determine which keywords are most important for your site, use an online keyword tool:
www.keyworddiscovery.com ($50 per month)
www.wordtracker.com ($50 per month)
or Google Adword (Free)
Later on, analyze your website traffic statistics to validate the results of the previous step.
Using Keyword Research Tools
- Pay attention to the word form (plural, singular,… etc)
- Don’t get hung up on KEI
- Export your results to Excel (helps you fiddle and sort the data as you wish)
What is your Primary Keyword Phrase?
After you make your list of keywords, you will have a single keyword phrase that sticks out from the rest that best represents the category of what your website provides.
This is your “Primary Keyword Phrase”, it usually is your most generic and competitive phrase, hence will be challenging to rank well for.
Going off from that Primary Keyword Phrase, you should have several “Specific Phrases” which are variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase (it has to be included in them), they will be used in content pages.
Example:
"Primary Keyword Phrases" house plans
"Specific Phrases" country house plans
luxury house plans
Cape Cod house plans
....
What are your Secondary Keyword Phrases?
They are lists of phrases that dont have as high of a search traffic number as your Primary Keyword Phrase but are nonetheless also relevant
Example:
“home plans”
“home designs”
“houseplans”
Specialized Keyword Phrases Conver Better
The more specialized or targeted your keyword phrase is, the more targeted your audience, try 3, 4 and 5-word phrases. These are MUCH easier to rank well for.
General Keyword Strategy
The general rule of thumb is that you optimzed each page for ideally no more than two different keyword phrases, the Primary Keyword Phrase and a Secondary Keyword Phrase. Each content page should also contain the best specific variation to your Primary Keyword Phrase.
Place a special emphasis on the use of your Primary Keyword Phrase in the Home page. Primary Keyword Phrase only for pages similar to (About Us, Contact Us).
Structure by Theme and Topic
Separate content onto different pages by topic (keyword phrase). Next, add links on each page so that “garage plan” pages link only to other garage plan pages.
Keyword Density = Keywords count / Total words count
Structuring Your Internal Links
- Hierarchical linking: One or more pages are important than other pages. Important pages are linked to from all other pages in the site.
- Mesh linking: Where all pages are considered equally important (to theme, topic, and keywords) each page links to each page on this site, distributing the PR among all other pages in the site, which is not ideal!
Characteristics of linking-pages:
- Quality: contains or relevant to your keywords
- Strength: contains fewer links
- Quantity: as many pages as possible
The PageRank Equation
Your-PR = 0.15 + 0.85 [(A-PR / A-totalLinks) + (B-PR / B-totalLinks) + … ]
Site Research for Linking
- Using Google, check:
- If linking-page is indexed in Google
- Links should be displayed in the cached version of the page
- View Source of the page, check:
- No JavaScript links
- No link redirection
- No NOFOLLOW link attribute
- No META NOINDEX
- Using SEO Elite, check
- PageRank of the linkin-page
- Alexa traffic rating of the site (lower numbers are better)
- How many backlinks the site has
- Links are few and are in the same general category as yours (few ads too)
- Right before adding the link, check if the page allows to use your keywords
Adding Links to Famous Search Directories
- ODP
- Yahoo!
- About.com
- Business.com
- Microsoft’s sdb.bcentral.com
- Others: Gimpsy, GoGuides, Joeant, Best of the Web, ExactSeek, WoW Directory, Skaffe, Abilogic, Anthony Parsons, Greenstalk, InCrawler, Info-listing, Seoma, Sitesnoop, Subline, World Site Index, Yeandi
- Yellow Page / Internet Yellow Page (IYP)
Yahoo Local http://local.yahoo.com / “Add/Edit a Business”
Google Local http://local.google.com/help/faq_local.html
AOL YP http://yp.aol.com
Verizon SuperPages http://www.superpages.com/about/new_chg_listing_business.html
Switchboard.com http://www.switchboard.com/adproducts.asp ($35 monthly)
MSN Yellow Pages http://yellowpages.msn.com ($400 per year)
Best Article Sites
www.amazines.com
www.articlecity.com
www.businessknowhow.com
www.ezinearticles.com
www.goarticles.com
www.ideamarketers.com
www.knowledgebed.com
www.netterweb.com
Things to avoid during linking
- Getting more than 100 new links each month is probably not OK
- Free-For-All (FFA) sites and link farms should be avoided
- Run-of-site links (ROS): avoid having the same link on each page of a site (e.g. footer link)
- Cross linking: avoid cross-linking each site you own or manage together
- Triangular Linking Schemes: avoid unnatural linking schemes (i.e. A->B B->C C->A)
- Mostly Reciprocal: avoid having most of your links reciprocal
- Not all links to Home: some links should point to pages other than your Home page