Content Writer Micky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Content Writing & SEO Tips’ Category

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 obviously 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 they are in 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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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 10% 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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Have you ever wondered whether you should set your blog homepage to show full blog posts or post extracts/excerpts only with a link to read more? Or maybe a combination?

What do most blog readers prefer? I asked myself this question recently and some quick online research didn’t give me a definitive answer.

I asked around on Twitter, but got mixed responses. So I set up a survey (in the form of a quick poll question, with an optional field for comments) to try to get a better idea of what blog readers prefer.

The outcome may surprise some. And the comments help remind us that everyone has different habits and preferences and that includes the way people like to read blogs.

Recommendations are at the end of this post.

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When you visit a blog, do you want to see only extracts of blog posts (with a link to read more), or full posts right there (so you don’t have to click again), or some kind of combination of both?

I was wondering if there’s a clear preference among blog readers. Asking around on Twitter resulted in a mixed bag of results, so I decided to put up a poll and ask more people.

Let’s try to get a clear answer to this question. Other people are wondering too. Once we know what people prefer on blog homepages, we can give our blog readers what they want.

To help me get to the bottom of this, please take a few seconds to answer my poll question:


I will blog about the results next week.

Thanks!

In March this year I was honoured to be invited to submit an article as a guest blogger to Canada’s largest internet marketing company, Search Engine People. My first guest post was published on Search Engine People’s high-profile blog on April 5th 2011 and has received some great responses.

The article identifies common website performance problems and gives a checklist of potential causes and solutions.

Read my guest post on the Search Engine People Blog here: Website Performance Troubleshooting Checklist.

Why would you write a guest post for someone else’s blog?

Having informative, well-written guest posts published on blogs of other websites or companies is a great way to:

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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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Sometimes, website owners want their website (read: 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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If your company or brand name is commonly misspelled, you may miss out on targeted visitors to your website.

Why don’t you try it out?

Go to Google, Bing or Yahoo and type the common misspelling of your name into the search box. What results do you get?

Don’t worry: If your site is still right there as the top result because there is simply nothing else out there that has that misspelled word in it and outranks you, then you don’t have to worry about it – for the moment.

Worry: But what if other websites come up instead of yours and your site is nowhere to be seen? We already know that most people are either impatient or lazy online, so those are visitors – yes: potential paying customers – that you have lost, perhaps forever. Especially if there are competing sites above yours in the results.

Remember, these people are searching for your brand or company name. That means they are already highly qualified visitors who know about you and want to find out more about you. You can be sure you’re losing money if these people cannot find you easily.

So what can you do?

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