Posts Tagged ‘Google’

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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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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SEO / SEM – The difference between organic search optimisation and paid search marketing

People often mix up the terms SEO and SEM.  They are actually two entirely different things. so I will clarify both terms below. We are basically talking about organic search engine optimisation (SEO) versus paid search engine marketing (SEM/PPC).

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation

SEM, PPC and SEO explainedWhen you do SEO for your website, you optimise it for the search terms (SEO keywords) you want to rank for in the search engines, so that people will be able to find your site better in the ‘normal’ (organic) search results.

If you know how to optimise your website and do it yourself, SEO doesn’t need to cost any money, only time and knowledge are needed.

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5 SEO factors besides SEO content

In this post, I’ll try to take away some of the mystery that surrounds Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and give you some tips on what you can do to further optimise your website and get better rankings in Google and other search engines.

As an SEO web content writer, I specialise in creating clear, professional, persuasive and search engine friendly content for websites.

What I usually provide for my clients is:

  • Optimised Page Title
  • Optimised META Description
  • Optimised Page Content – including headings, subheadings and links to other pages

I will make sure to include the important SEO keywords for that particular page in the page title, META description, heading, subheadings, internal links and several times throughout the body copy, particularly in the first few paragraphs. These are important factors for SEO success.

However, it doesn’t stop there. You can do more to optimise your website.

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