Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimisation’

Knowing what keywords to optimise for

Is your website optimised for search engines? That’s great. The big question, however, is which keyword phrases your pages are optimised for – and do people actually type those terms into search engines?

Many websites naturally rank well for their own business name, brand or product names. Unless your branded names are incredibly common, it’s not hard at all to rank well for these, particularly if the words are part of your domain name or page URLs.

It’s the more generic keyword phrases your target market may be using that you want to know about, so you can optimise your pages for them and get new people (potential customers) who don’t yet know about you to find your website. You want to find the search terms people use when looking for the type of products/services you offer and target those.

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How often should you repeat your keywords?

Keyword density. That’s a term that refers to how many times you use a certain keyword phrase on a web page as a percentage of the total number of words on that page.

Some people offering SEO services hammer on about making sure your text has a certain keyword density (e.g. that 3% or 6% or whatever of your text should consist of your targeted keywords).

Well, guess what? That’s nonsense. (And don’t just take it from me, listen to Google. See Matt Cutt’s webmaster video below.)

There is NO magic number when it comes to keyword density in SEO.

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Celebrating another successful year in business

The 8th of the 8th marks the anniversary of my business: I officially started my SEO copywriting & web consultancy business on 08/08/2008. So today is Content Writer’s 3rd birthday.

My business has enjoyed steady success right from the start and I’m still really happy doing what I do. There has never been a moment that I have been without work – but luckily enough I have been able to take a few short breaks while putting new projects on hold for a while.

I have however also sacrificed quite a few evenings and weekends to work and my goal for year 4 is to plan my work better and not to agree to deadlines that are too tight, so that there is enough time to finish work during normal business hours.

Because my website continues to perform very well in search engines, more clients than I can take on find me via Google and I have never needed to advertise my business.

Some quick stats about Content Writer’s 3rd year in business:

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SEO: 50 Google Ranking Factors in 2011

You know that Google – and other search engines – use many different signals to determine how to rank websites on their search results pages. But how many SEO ranking factors can you actually name? 10? 20?

Google says it takes more than 200 factors into account in its ranking algorithm while Bing claims to use over 1000 signals. Of course, these ranking factors are not made public. Search engine algorithms also change over time, with new signals being added and others dropped.

SEO experts have managed to get a pretty good grasp on at least the most imporant factors that play a role in search engine rankings.

Below, I’m listing 50 Google ranking factors that are important in 2011. For easy reference, I’ve put them into three different categories:

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Focus on Only 2 SEO Keyword Phrases per Web Page

Sometimes, website owners want their website (mostly their homepage) to rank well for so many different SEO keyword phrases that there is no focus and in the end, the website doesn’t rank well for any of them.

My tips for focusing your SEO keywords so they’re more effective:

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