Title Tag Optimization

Posted: Thursday, October 13th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

Welcome back to the second segment of our series on making sure your website isn’t losing out on any of its own important SEO hotspots. Last time we talked about why it’s so important to embed the right keywords into your web pages. Today we’ll discuss the second checkpoint:

2) Are you using keyword-rich title tags?

Are you using keywords in your title tags? It seems almost too obvious, but we feel it is worth saying again because too often new businesses will launch websites with their web pages inappropriately (or should we say, ineffectively) labeled as “page1” or their company’s name. If you’re looking to improve your web marketing and get noticed on the web, then you should make sure that your title pages use some of the keywords that you’re targeting.

Another benefit of having descriptive title tags is that it’ll help users (and yourself) navigate through your site. Ideally, you will spread your services/products across several pages. Make each page distinct, and if you can, try to put only one product/service per page. You should never clump all your products/services together on one page. Doing so dilutes the relevance of your page in the eyes of search engine crawlers. In addition, making each web page focus on only one type of product/service will naturally lead to the use of more keywords on those pages, and this will only help you in terms of content marketing. Read more …

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SEO Keyword Strategy

Posted: Monday, October 10th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

A lot of factors go into search engine optimization, including the design of your website. Check out the following checklist to see if your website needs a few touch-ups to get the most SEO benefits. Are you making sure that you’re…

1) Using the best SEO keywords on your web pages?

2) Using keyword-rich title tags?

3) Minimizing your reliance on Flash?

4) Optimizing your homepage for web marketing purposes?

Let’s talk about the first checkpoint. All SEO companies will tell you that keyword research is a crucial preliminary step towards improving your search engine ranking. However, a lot of times people that are new to internet marketing get distracted by the immediate data offered by keyword analysis tools.

For example, say you just opened your own boutique store and are interested in working content marketing into your business plan. If you care about improving your SEO, then using a keyword analysis tool is definitely a step in the right direction. However, the tool itself is only half of the equation. You, or the SEO company that you hire, make up the other half. Tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool can provide you with lots of useful information about your competition as well as how many global/local searches are made for those keywords. But it is up to you (or your SEO) to figure out what keywords to type in and analyze. If you type in “jewelry boutique shop,” you’ll find interesting data about the competition for that keyword, but it won’t be very helpful to you because 1) the competition for that keyword is very high, making it unlikely that you’ll be able to rank on the first page in a semi-timely manner, and 2) you’re better off targeting other keywords that are more likely to lead to conversion. After all, someone searching for “gold custom bracelet milburne, NJ” is probably more likely to convert and make a purchase than someone who looks up “jewelry boutique shop.” The point of SEO is not to attract more traffic to your site for traffic’s sake. The point is to drive in the right type of traffic that will lead to conversion and more revenue for your business. Read more …

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Importance of Keyword Placement

Posted: Friday, June 10th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

The next step in the SEO process is keyword placement. It is important to realize that stuffing your site with keywords (a.k.a. high keyword density) will not help you with SEO as much as proper keyword placement (in fact, jam-packing your site with keywords can actually hurt you). To get the most out of search engine marketing, you will need to be strategic about where you place your keywords within the individual pages of your website.

First, you’ll want to insert keywords in your

Although SEO keyword placement strategies may appear rather technical/formulaic, it is important to keep in mind the artistic side of web marketing. You can’t artificially sprinkle keywords throughout your content because that will raise suspicion and search engines will most likely flag it as spam. More importantly, if you intentionally clog your content with keywords, your viewers will most likely notice and leave. Although this is common sense, you’d be surprised at how many people get so caught up in the “science” of SEO that they forget that the whole point is to appeal to their human viewers! Read more …

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Analyzing Keywords for Best SEO

Posted: Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 by | Filed under: , , ,

In our last post, we mentioned that there are two things to consider when identifying your SEO keywords. In today’s update, we cover the second half of the keyword identification process: competition analysis.

Competition for the keyword: When dealing with search engine marketing, you’ll want to ask yourself how many other sites are competing to be noticed for your target keyword. It’s not surprising that is a lot more competition for the keywords “bakery nyc” than there are for “bakery union square nyc.” If at all possible, you should target the smaller market because you will have a better chance of standing out among the crowd of listings. It’s the equivalent of holding up a sign at a rally of 300 people versus holding up a sign at a rally of only 30 people. In the first scenario, you are exerting a lot of energy to be heard, but the sheer mass of people you are competing has the power of diluting even your mightiest efforts. On the other hand, in the second scenario, you don’t have to exert as much energy, yet you will still have a better chance of being noticed.

The best SEO keywords are the ones that are popular and have a low rate of competition. As a result, doing prior research before embedding keywords into the various pages of your website is critical and can save you a lot of time/resources. Read more …

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How to Choose Keywords for SEO

Posted: Monday, May 30th, 2011 by | Filed under: , ,

The first step in SEO is identifying your target keywords. Although this may sound like a simple task, it really should not be taken lightly. You want to select the right keywords to target, and to do so, you must take into account two critical things in your analysis: 1) popularity of the keyword, and 2) the competition for the keyword.

Popularity of the keyword: Your list of target keywords should consist of only keywords that users will be searching. For example, if you own a bakery, it would make more sense to target “bakery nyc” than “bakery new york city.” Chances are that most people will not bother typing out “new york city” and will instead use the abbreviation. If you build links around a keyword/key phrase that no one uses, then you are wasting your web marketing efforts.

A common SEO mistake people make is to use their company’s name as a target keyword. However, there is no need to target your company’s name as a keyword. To illustrate why, let’s go back to the bakery example. Say the bakery’s name is called Sugary Smiles. A business practicing flawed internet marketing techniques would make sure that their company’s website is ranked #1 on the results page when people type in “sugary smiles” into search engines. The problem with this is that it is only useful for attracting people who already know about your company, but it isolates an entirely untapped channel of potential clients who don’t know the name of your company. After all, the likelihood that someone looking for a bakery in NYC will type “sugary smiles” into the search engine is essentially null. When creating a list of target keywords, you have to get into the mindset of your user. It’s not about what keywords you would search to find your company, but rather, it’s about what keywords the potential client will be searching that will lead them to your website. Read more …

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