SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

Targeting keywords for your website can be rather difficult at times. There are a lot of direct keywords that you’ll want to focus on as a long term goal, but what about keywords that you can capitalize on in the here and now? Long tail keywords, or basically search phrases, often include your keyword or synonyms for it and are searched by individuals looking for something specific. "Toyota" probably wouldn’t be the term you start with when searching for a new car, but what about "Buy Used Toyota Yaris In Massachusetts"? That’s a perfect example of a long tail keyword. If your site fits that keyword phrase and you can capitalize on it, the visitor to your site is infinitely more important than the one who trails in from "Toyota". Your site isn’t about Toyota, is it? But it is about selling cars in a specific place.

It’s become a rather popular topic recently that as searchers become smarter, one word keywords are becoming less cost efficient and/or useful to go after. The example above shows the difference between someone looking to buy and someone looking for information. If you think about how many different things you could be looking for when you search "Eee PC" in Google (reviews, places to buy, software, accessories, and plenty of others), if you’re trying to make a sale and that’s the word that’s bringing in the most traffic, your sales potential is cut substantially. But if they searched "Buy Eee PC" and found you, you’re sitting on at least a 50% chance of them purchasing from you (depending on how high you rank).

The power of the short tail keyword is heavily dependant on the experience of those searching within your niche. More technical and research related fields will bypass the short tail to find exactly what they are looking for, but that’s not the case for all fields. The industries dependency on short tail keywords is decreasing, but that simply means you have to diversify your approach to gaining a top 10 on the SERPs for multiple terms. As this practice catches on, it may become increasingly more difficult to accomplish, but the benefit of getting started on it right now is very strong.

If you’re looking for a good long tail keyword tool, take advantage of the free service provided by Google Adwords that allows you to search for synonyms and the like for your keyword.

Some companies have the misfortunate of unsatisfied customers who just love to post online in a very negative tone. Whether there post is in your comments section of your site or on a review site, some of these posts can be powerful enough to hit the top ten spots on Google for your keywords or for your company. This can be a dissaster for a company who is not prepared, but by taking a few quick steps, you can make sure that you have any situations like this that arise completely under control.

The first thing you should do is set up a Google Alert for your company name. Set it to as it happens so that you can keep up to date and thwart anything that happens as it does. This can be overwhelming, so you may want to set up a secondary email for this project, but make sure to keep it checking very often.

Once your companies name pops up, stop by and check on what was said. If it’s negative, figure out what the issue is. Can you solve it? Has it already been solved? And most importantly, can you prove any of that? Once you figure out your answer to those questions, it’s time to address that person directly on the board.

Your goal here is to make the situation better. If you’ve fixed it, show everyone how you did and offer even more support or more free things. If you haven’t, do so, and provide contact info so it can get done quickly. If you can’t prove your company already did something, don’t fight it, give in, this site could bring all your hard work down.

The speediness of your post coupled with the proper tone can defuse a hairy situation and also give you a really good public relations image as this page gains more steam from the search engines or even just from the community already there. Having a bad post about your site on the front page can be instant death if not handled correct.

An alternative method, yet harder and still leaving holes, is to simply build up a blog for your site to out power those top 10 and just hope nobody goes further back. Not the greatest idea, but if you just can’t budge on helping those people, it’s better than telling them off.

Call it whatever you like: PageRank Hording, PageRank Siloing, or it’s latest name, PageRank Sculpting. The truth of the matter is, it’s all the same thing. The idea behind it is that, instead of allowing all your site links and outbound links to be dofollow, you cut off the unnecessary ones by using a nofollow tag.

Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, and Bruce Clay have all had a say about the practice, and in general the SEO community had entered a into a hype over it. But it seems that the success has been as marginal as those three voices had explained while the community jumped the gun.

It’s understandable why people dove head first into it. The idea of saving your link juice from other sites or even your About Us page seems like it would make a big difference if you cut out enough fat. With little to none spilling over an Google not crawling those links or pages, there would be more juice where you need it. You could even redirect your links from a high PageRank page to another you want to boost up, nofollowing the rest, and the idea should really make a difference.

But unlike the difference you receive from incoming links, this method provides marginal results. On an established website, this can be a project that is worth the time it takes to do correctly. With people like Nathan Buggia from Microsoft and Matt Cutts from Google speaking up about it’s benefit, if you have the time to build a sculpting plan out, why not?

The practice is in no way penalized either. You could easily achieve the same effect by setting the page to not be crawled by the robots.txt file, or even setting the entire page to nofollow through the use of meta tag data.

It would be very interesting to get a survey going and see the results of how PageRank Sculpting helps a website. If you’re interested, please answer the following questions below in our comments section.

• Do you currently utilize this method?
• Have you seen an increase in rank or traffic due to using it?
• Has the rank or traffic advanced at a higher level than that of other pages on your website?
• Have any of the websites that use to be dofollow links from your blog removed your link or altered yours?

Looking for natural links? Here are some ideas:
Create a free ebook for users that is focused on the niche the site is about. For example see http://www.tape-finish-texture-drywall.org This site has an ebook available that is focused on avoiding common mistakes people make when finishing drywall. The webmaster made the ebook available for downlaod from the index page and also from the Learn To Drywall page so readers will be more likely to see it.
Another way to gain natural links is to offer tips that are focused on the niche the site is about. Looking at the same site, there are pages devoted specifically to Drywall Mudding and Drywall Sanding These pages offer tips with detailed explanations and images which is great content and will likely help the site gain natural links from others with home improvement sites.

In your attempt to rank for competitive keywords for your site, you’ve surely considered purchasing high quality links to send you some traffic and link juice. But did you ever think about buying sites instead of just links?

A website within your niche is a competitor. But if you own the website, it’s a resource. You’ve now got the potential of additional site which could generate revenue on its own, you can easily restrict it’s outbound links from other competing sites and just point it towards your main site, plus it can occupy another spot in the SERP that your competitors will no longer have.

But sometimes managing another site can be more effort than you’re interested in. So while you can simply leave the site and just redirect all the links over to you, you could always redirect the domain name and links to your site as well, passing the value along with it. The first method is by far the most favorable of the choices, providing you already indexed content and anchor text that can help your site almost instantly.

Even websites that are relevant to your content, but not identitical will be beneficial in this method, allowing you to rank for even more keywords. The power that setting all other links on a high pr page to nofollow are remarkable in how fast your site would receive credit for the new link juice. But before you take the plunge, remember to verify all the important aspects that the specific site has to offer, such as PR, domain age, alexa index, and so on.

And if you’re just considering this method as a way to make money, you could always buy out a site and charge those listed as links from the site a fee for the link they’ve already had!

The first step to building a website or blog is to, of course, do keyword research. You want to establish your primary keywords and their long tail variations as well. This will allow you to determine the type of competition you’ll be going up against when striving to hit the #1 spot on the SERPs, and for many, this is all they focus on.

Recently, light has been shed on a practice that Google has been taking part of, known as latent semantic indexing. Few webmasters and SEOs actually know about this type of indexing and even less actively use it.

So what exactly is latent semantic indexing, and what makes it so important?

Have you ever thought about how Google differentiates between two words with exactly the same meaning? When your site is indexed by the Googlebot, not only does it pick up on your keywords, but it picks up on the context as well. This allows it to understand that your website about Microsoft Windows shouldn’t show up in the SERPs for Home Windows.

When you enter a search into Google, you’ll notice that your keywords searched are in bold in the title and description. Now take your specific keyword and try the following:

~”keyword” -”keyword”

The Tilda key tells Google to search for synonyms of that word. The minus key tells Google to the keyword from the search. The results you’ll get will be full of appropriate information for your keyword, without using your keyword in the search.

Instead of spending all your time on your specific keywords, make sure to search for synonyms for them. Use this process for the keyword list you’ve already built, and take note of the terms that Google chooses to highlight. Next time you add content to your site, start using a few of those here and there and watch as your ranking for your main keyword begins to improve.