Most Burning Question:
I have a question… we are told to use keywords (hypnosis)!! in headers in content etc. What I am confused about is that at the same time we are told that because of the number of hypnosis sites (already ranked on first page with those keywords)we need other keywords to be distinguished and noticed. Then should we be using hypnosis on every page?????
From what you write, it sounds like you are trying to Optimize your site for Search Engine placement. Otherwise known as SEO.
I’ll explain about keywords in a minute, but let me get this very important point across.
SEO is a moving target. There are people who spend all their waking hours trying to get listed on the front page of ‘organic’ search results.
Google (owns about 70% of the search market) changes their rules all the time to keep people from ‘gaming’ the search engines and using ‘black hat’ techniques to get listed on the front page.
Every time they do it changes the game and who is listed on top.
So here is the key learning for today…
If it’s important to you, pay someone who knows what they are doing. Really good keyword research involves hours of time and you need to know just what it is you are looking for.
It’s not just the number of searches per month. You need to know how to evaluate if you a have snowball’s chance of getting ranked high for the keyword.
This means you need to know how to evaluate the competition for that keyword AND what tools to use to get data you can trust.
This kind of market research is a skill all it’s own.
Now, some important things to know about keywords, web pages, and search results.
1. It is generally better to work with keyword phrases than single keywords.
Trying to get ranked for a word like golf, car, pets, hypnosis is a complete waste of time. If you want to be ranked highly for words like that… just buy the website that is already ranked. It’s the most effective strategy and likely the less expensive one over time.
Cal Banyan recently did this when he bought Hypnosis.org
2. On any web page you can only get ranked for one keyword phrase, possibly two.
Search engines look at context, not just keywords. They can tell when you are ‘word spamming’ to get ranked. Real content has semantically related words and is linked to related content.
One topic per web page, one keyword phrase.
On a website you could get ranked for only a handful of topics and they would need to be tightly related.
Lesson: It’s like I teach in how to position yourself… what do you want to be known for?
3. As a small business, your best hope lies with ‘long tail’ keyword phrases.
Instead of hypnosis, you should try to get ranked for “san mateo hypnotist”
Instead of stop smoking, you should try to get ranked for “stop smoking delray beach Florida”
There are two reasons to do this, first the competition for those phrases is much lower, second people who type in 3 or more words are usually looking to BUY. People who type in one word are looking for information, a different part of the buying process.
This is how I got my blog ranked #1 in Google and Yahoo. I picked specific long tail phrases and worked at putting articles on my blog with those phrases. And I used a blogging tool highly SEO optimized so all the work was done automatically for me. It took me about 4 months to get on the front page and 6 months to get to #1.
4. It is good to do basic SEO to every web page on your site (once you know what you want to optimize for). But again you can PAY someone who knows what they are doing. You should NOT be doing this yourself.
Here is a list of basics:
* Primary objective should be accomplished from the homepage
* Keyword in title (unique for each page, include keywords)
* Keyword in h1 on each page
* Keyword in text
* Optimize URL architecture (www.website.com/birds/eagle instead of www.website.com/allanimals/?type=bird&species=eagle). Use 301 redirects if you rename pages
* Information architecture – as few clicks as possible
* On relevant images include keywords in alt tags in filenames
* No-follow appropriate links
For those of you who can’t resist tinkering, or want to know how to direct your web monkey to do it for you… download a copy of the SEO web developer’s cheat sheet.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
Or if you are really masochistic and want to try to do it yourself… here is a link to the SEO beginner’s checklist.
5. You can BUY traffic much faster than you can ever hope to get a top ranking in Google
by using Google’s adwords advertising system.
In less than 15 minutes you can create an ad with adwords and have it on the front page of Google. You can target ANY keyword phrase you want, and then send the traffic to any web page on your site.
[Note: I’ll be teaching a course in how to use Adwords at the National Guild of Hypnotists 2008 Convention]