SEM 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.

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?

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.

One of the most useful tools that any webmaster can have installed on their site is Google Analytics. Having the power to either personally view, or invite others to view statistics for your site such as the number of visitors to your site, what keywords users are finding your site through, how long they spent on your site, and plenty more. Just like when Google had said “enough” to paying for 411 information, thus releasing 1-800-GOOG-411 for free, this is a fully functional web analytics software that they offer for free as well.

To set up your Google Analytics account, simply register for any or all of your personal websites and then add the html code assigned to each site. After Google Analytics has a chance to gather the information on your site (I recommend giving it at least a day or two before you start following the information), you’ll be given several different options on how you can view the information that it collects.

The Visitors tab shows you everything you could want to know about who visits your site, down to the country and browser that they’re using.

The Traffic Sources tab shows you what sites referred your visitors over and keywords used to find your site, as well as what percentage of your total traffic came directly to your site, was referred to your site, or came from a search engine. This tab also includes your Google AdWords campaign and regular campaign controls, which allow you to monitor the results of specific actions that you’ve done to increase traffic.

The Content Tab gives you statistical information on the pageviews, unique views and bounce rate. It’s very useful to find out which pages people are entering through the most, leaving from, and what ones are viewed the most.

It also has it’s own Goals tab which you can manually configure if you have a specific goal you would like to achieve traffic wise. It provides you with enough information to let you know how close to succeeding you are and how long you have left and what’s working the best to achieve those goals.

There’s really no excuse not to have Google Analytics set up on your site, considering how useful it is and that it’s free. The ability to add another Gmail account on to view your statistics works great too if you need advice or want to hire on an SEO/SEM.

FYI, if your site exceeds 5 Million page views for month, unless you’re a Google AdWords member as well, you won’t see anymore information than the initial 5 Million. Hopefully that won’t inconvenience you too much.

Below you’ll find a screen shot from the Google Analytics page for LeopardDocks.com - Submit, Download, and Search Custom Leopard Docks. Click the thumbnail to see it full sized.

Not performing a general search? Then perhaps Google and Yahoo aren’t the places you should be looking. I know what you’re thinking, not using Google or Yahoo? But when you’re looking for specialized information, such as a job search or housing search, you would want to use a Vertical Search Engine. With the mounds of data that those two major search engines would spit back out at you if you tried to search for those options directly on there, using a vertical search engine like SimplyHired.com for job hunting or ZIPVO.com to find the perfect home, would provide you with results that wouldn’t be cluttered with irrelevant information.

Google and Yahoo send out their spider to retrieve and index information from all of the web. A vertical search engine however, has it’s own specific database that it uses to pull up information from. Instead of this being a dangerous concept for the world of online marketing, it has actually proven to be very powerful. After using the vertical search engine, a user will get information more relevant to what they’re looking for, which means higher conversion and click-through rate for the businesses that advertise on those search engines. As opposed to Google Adwords and Paid Search Listings, you’re not selecting a series of terms and relevance to advertise on, because the site you’re advertising on is already specifically aimed at your businesses niche.

Depending on the type of site, advertising can range from a listing for a used guitar for sale on Gear-Vault.com to a banner advertisement for Justin Williams, mortgage broker from Prosperity Mortgage, under a real estate listing on ZIPVO.com. Your target audience will view your advertisement less as an add and more like a resource that is completely relevant to their search.

By no means am I saying avoid the major search engines and just use this. That would be like Toyota choosing to only advertise in car magazines.

Here’s a list of some popular vertical search engines that Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch has put together.

The title of this post was actually the subject of a Google email I got earlier. It looks like analytics is now offering a feature that allows users to share their data.

Dear Google Analytics users,
We are writing to let you know about a change in our service offerings.
If you have logged into your account recently, you may have noticed
that you can now choose to share your Google Analytics data. By
providing data sharing options, we hope to provide you with transparency,
control, and new services based on your preferences.

There are several options including; sharing “Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking
service” or “With Google products only”.

The big question is how many people will enable this feature. If it is a large percentage of G analytics users then there will be some real data coming out of this feature which will be interesting. What may actually get users to share their data is that by sharing they will get to take advantage the new advanced Google products and services as they become available. I’m going to think for a day and do some more reading before deciding myself.

Here is more info on data sharing:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=87515

Interesting news coming out of San Francisco. I’m not really surprised that these talk are going on. Google has been extremely vocal about the Microsoft takeover. They obviously think a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo would be bad for the internet in general. I wonder what affect this will have on adsense if it ever materializes. At first glance it might be thought that Google’s paid ad reach would sky rocket but that may not be the case because Google already powers such a huge percent of daily searches.

See the link below for details.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080409/bs_nm/yahoo_google_dc

I saw this video on YouTube and wanted to share it here. Google engineer Matt Cutts talks about 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dSMFiCjwwE

Matt again mentions importance of high quality content as well as the importance of targeting a specific niche. He also mentions the Google’s Local Business Center

https://www.google.com/local/add/ and how you can submit for free and show up on Google Maps at no charge. Also mentioned was the importance of having a website well suited for a mobile device. Overall mobile device load time seems like an important issue for 2008 so hopefully we can get some good blog discussion here on that issue.

Many people refer to a site having extra links in Google’s search results as being an authority site. For example see:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS176US215&q=golf+gifts&btnG=Search

The links to the interior pages of a site are given at Google’s discretion when a site is deemed worthy enough to feature them. This is very useful to the site owner because it brings more attention to the search result; it also takes up more of the space on the top of the first page, which is excellent for the site owner trying to drive traffic.

Now check this out:

http://www.google.com/search?q=walmart&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS176US215

Not only does the top result have extra links it also features the site’s search box so users can easily search for merchandise. The buttons are also custom in that they have the site’s name right on the button “Search walmart.com”. Other sites that return a search box in the results include:

Target:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS176US215&q=target&btnG=Search

PetCo:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS176US215&q=petco&btnG=Search