Every webmaster needs some form of web analytics software on their site because it's impossible to check whether your strategies to improve traffic are actually working without some statistics.
Most webmasters use Google Analytics, but is this wise? If you are building backlinks, as advised in my previous post, and doing so by building a blog network of related sites, then using Google's analytics package is not the smartest idea. Google can track everything that goes on in your site with Analytics, and as you can only set up one analytics account, with all your blogs in there, it's a cinch for them to realise that all your backlinks come from blogs you own, and then to penalise you in the search engine results pages (serps).
It's fine to have Google Analytics on your main website (the one you are promoting). But on the supporting network of blogs, use another package such as StatCounter. StatCounter is free to join and use, and provides a huge amount of data in real time. Once you have an account with them, you can track any number of sites (they call each site tracking a "project"). I actually prefer it to Google Analytics, as it is laid out better and easier to delve deeply into how readers have navigated your site. In addition, they provide statistics in real time, which is something Google's package does not.
Saturday, 21 February 2009
Thursday, 19 February 2009
BackLinks
In my previous post about keywords, I mentioned checking out your competition by Googling sites with keywords inanchor. These are backlinks that are incoming to your site from other sites, and the link is embedded or anchored on a keyword.
Now the backlinks you get naturally from other sites who have discovered your material rarely get anchored on specific keywords. It happens sometimes if the writer of the other site is imaginative, but most of the incoming links will be embedded on anchors such as "click here" or "this article" or even the name of your site. Now it's always nice to have as many backlinks as possible, and the search engines expect that links to your site will have a large variety of words (and will be suspicious if they were all anchored on keywords), but the most powerful incoming links are anchored on popular keywords.
If you get sufficient numbers of incoming links anchored on specific keywords from decent authority sites, then you shoot up the search engine results pages (serps for short) for that particular keyword. Backlinks and backlinks anchored on keywords are key to getting traffic from search engines.
This post will concentrate on getting the links anchored on the keywords that you are targetting. The only way to get incoming links anchored on your chosen keywords is to do it yourself. The most popular way to achieve this is through article marketing. This is where you write articles on various sites with a backlink to your main site anchored on your keyword.
Article writing can be timeconsuming, especially as each article needs to be unique, but it's well worth doing, as once the articles are in place, you should start getting steady traffic based on the backlinks, but sometimes additional redirected from the article itself.
Where can you publish articles online? One site that accepts articles with no charge is ezinearticles. They will place ads in your articles (that's how the site pays for itself) but from your point of view, you get an online article that you have written with a backlink to your main website. Another site that allows you to write articles and place links in them is Helium. Helium doesn't like blatant self-promotion but they allow you to place links on articles where they are relevant to the subject written about. Helium also place ads near your article, but they share revenue with the writer. You can also write articles with links on sites such as Gather and some of the newer social bookmarking sites such as Newsvine allow members to write original articles with links.
When writing articles, make sure you optimise it. You want the article to have value in it's own right, so that it directs traffic to you in it's own right as well as providing a backlink.
Another alternative to submitting articles to the article sites is to set up a network of blogs. This is easy to do with free blogging services such as Blogger and Wordpress. The idea is to set up a series of standalone blogs, which you build up in traffic and pagerank authority in their own right (it usually takes about three months). Once the blog has authority, you can include links to your main site in the blog posts and in the blogroll in the sidebar of the homepage.
Note that if you are using a network of blogs to promote your site, the blogs must be related in content to your main site. The search engines get very suspicious if you have a blog about say gardening, and it links to a site about car parts.
The other thing to do when setting up your blog network is to spread the blogs far and wide across several platforms. It's no good setting up a dozen blogs on Blogger all under the same login, as it is easy for Google to realise that all the linking to your main site is coming from one user. Therefore spread the blogs out on different platforms, and under different user names, and make sure that each blog has unique content. There are plenty of free blogging platforms out there. Aside from Blogger and Wordpress, try Blogsome, Xanga, and others. The more the merrier really - the only caveat is to take some trouble to ensure that each blog gains pagerank.
Building backlinks via a network of blogs with decent pagerank is more powerful than simply through article submission so if you are short of time try the blogs first. Of course always remember that the more backlinks the better, so if you have time, try everything.
One final thing - try to do this slowly over several months. The search engines are looking for a natural increase in backlinks. If you suddenly get loads of links in a couple of days they will ask why. Now it might be because you got mentioned on a national newspaper website or social bookmarking site and lots of other webmasters then wrote about you and linked to you - or it might be because you went out and bought a whole bunch of links (which the search engines frown upon). Just be aware that if you build links too fast a flag will get raised. Be patient and do a little every day.
Now the backlinks you get naturally from other sites who have discovered your material rarely get anchored on specific keywords. It happens sometimes if the writer of the other site is imaginative, but most of the incoming links will be embedded on anchors such as "click here" or "this article" or even the name of your site. Now it's always nice to have as many backlinks as possible, and the search engines expect that links to your site will have a large variety of words (and will be suspicious if they were all anchored on keywords), but the most powerful incoming links are anchored on popular keywords.
If you get sufficient numbers of incoming links anchored on specific keywords from decent authority sites, then you shoot up the search engine results pages (serps for short) for that particular keyword. Backlinks and backlinks anchored on keywords are key to getting traffic from search engines.
This post will concentrate on getting the links anchored on the keywords that you are targetting. The only way to get incoming links anchored on your chosen keywords is to do it yourself. The most popular way to achieve this is through article marketing. This is where you write articles on various sites with a backlink to your main site anchored on your keyword.
Article writing can be timeconsuming, especially as each article needs to be unique, but it's well worth doing, as once the articles are in place, you should start getting steady traffic based on the backlinks, but sometimes additional redirected from the article itself.
Where can you publish articles online? One site that accepts articles with no charge is ezinearticles. They will place ads in your articles (that's how the site pays for itself) but from your point of view, you get an online article that you have written with a backlink to your main website. Another site that allows you to write articles and place links in them is Helium. Helium doesn't like blatant self-promotion but they allow you to place links on articles where they are relevant to the subject written about. Helium also place ads near your article, but they share revenue with the writer. You can also write articles with links on sites such as Gather and some of the newer social bookmarking sites such as Newsvine allow members to write original articles with links.
When writing articles, make sure you optimise it. You want the article to have value in it's own right, so that it directs traffic to you in it's own right as well as providing a backlink.
Another alternative to submitting articles to the article sites is to set up a network of blogs. This is easy to do with free blogging services such as Blogger and Wordpress. The idea is to set up a series of standalone blogs, which you build up in traffic and pagerank authority in their own right (it usually takes about three months). Once the blog has authority, you can include links to your main site in the blog posts and in the blogroll in the sidebar of the homepage.
Note that if you are using a network of blogs to promote your site, the blogs must be related in content to your main site. The search engines get very suspicious if you have a blog about say gardening, and it links to a site about car parts.
The other thing to do when setting up your blog network is to spread the blogs far and wide across several platforms. It's no good setting up a dozen blogs on Blogger all under the same login, as it is easy for Google to realise that all the linking to your main site is coming from one user. Therefore spread the blogs out on different platforms, and under different user names, and make sure that each blog has unique content. There are plenty of free blogging platforms out there. Aside from Blogger and Wordpress, try Blogsome, Xanga, and others. The more the merrier really - the only caveat is to take some trouble to ensure that each blog gains pagerank.
Building backlinks via a network of blogs with decent pagerank is more powerful than simply through article submission so if you are short of time try the blogs first. Of course always remember that the more backlinks the better, so if you have time, try everything.
One final thing - try to do this slowly over several months. The search engines are looking for a natural increase in backlinks. If you suddenly get loads of links in a couple of days they will ask why. Now it might be because you got mentioned on a national newspaper website or social bookmarking site and lots of other webmasters then wrote about you and linked to you - or it might be because you went out and bought a whole bunch of links (which the search engines frown upon). Just be aware that if you build links too fast a flag will get raised. Be patient and do a little every day.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Keywords
What are Keywords?
Keywords are the words or phrases users type into search engines to find content. So someone wishing to go to a Shakira concert will type in "Shakira concerts" and will get results listing pages showing Shakira's concert schedule for the year and sites selling tickets to these concerts.
Now Google and the other search engines will want to return relevant pages - not pages such as this one which happen to mention "shakira concerts" as an example illustrating keyword optimisation. The search engines do assume that pages with certain keywords mentioned are automatically relevant and that keywords arn't being included as bait to sell something completely different (or something illegal). But just to be sure, search engines such as Google add other algorithmic checks to ensure they are returning relevant pages. We will get onto that in a later article, but for now, we will concentrate on ensuring you include the correct keywords on your webpage.
Which keywords should I use?
Choosing keywords is the hardest part of search engine optimisation. Your first port of call is old-fashioned brainstorming with a pencil and paper. Ask yourself what you would type into a search engine to find your site if you were a user. Once you have generated your list, type the words into this free keyword suggestion tool. The tool should return a list of related keywords and tell you how many people have searched using those phrases - i.e. you get to find out how popular the keywords are.
The temptation is to go for the most popular keywords - but be warned that everyone else is probably doing the same, and the competition will be fierce. It is better to go for a number of the less popular keywords (the so-called "long tail") where you are more likely to feature on the first page of the results.
How can I tell if there is competition from other sites for a particular keyword?
Simple: just type the phrase into Google to see how many pages are returned. That's every page that has the keyword mentioned. You then want to find out how many webmasters are actually optimising for that particular phrase. Say your keyword is "shakira concerts". Type the following into the search engine:
intitle:"shakira concerts" inanchor:"shakira concerts"
Put your keyword in quotes as illustrated above and lay it out exactly as shown above (no space between the colon and the keyword and a single space between the intitle sequence and the inanchor sequence).
Intitle searches for every site that has those keywords in the title of their page. Inanchor searches for every site that has links to their page from another page using that particular anchor. The number of results returned will be smaller - but these are your competition, as these sites are actively optimising for that word.
Now do the same without the quotes:
intitle:shakira concerts inanchor: shakira concerts
This will return a greater number of results, as the above search is looking for the words, but not in any specific order.
Go through all your keywords and note down the results. You now want to optimise for the keywords that have the least competition that are the most popular.
Once I have my keywords, how do I use them?
The most powerful places to place keywords are in the title of your site or article and in the url. They are always picked up by search engine spiders when they index your site.
The next most powerful place to put keywords is the top third of your site/article. Most search engine bots do not do "deep" indexing, they do not scan your entire text. Instead they look at the first paragraph (some will look at the top third of your site), and decide what is in your page from that. Therefore you need to include your keywords in that area. It's no good having a lengthy introduction to your subject matter and introducing your keywords half-way down your page - by then you will have lost the bots and hence lost the chance of a human reader seeing your work.
What is keyword density?
Keyword density is the frequency the keyword appears in your text. The search bots are looking for words that appear close together e.g. they won't associate the word "shakira" with the word "concert" if they are separated by a hundred words. However if they are next to each other or separated by on a few words, they will link the two as a keyword when producing results. They also look for how frequently the word or phrase appears in a passage. The more frequently it appears the more likely that the text concerned is what the user is looking for, whereas if a word just appears once, it's likely that the word was just used incidently.
The temptation is to realy lard your copy with keywords - but don't. Because the search engines know that webmasters are doing this, they have built into their algorithms checks that reject any page that has a density of more than 4%-7%. So your aim is to have a density that is higher than that of your competitors but less than 4%. (Find your competitors by simply typing the keyword into the search engine and looking at the pages listed above yours)
You can check your density (and check out the density of your competitors' sites) by using this free Keyword Density Tool. Type in the URLs of the pages you are comparing into the box and it will return the frequency each word appears in your text.
Keyword anchors
Finally, to optimise your site fully for the keywords you have chosen, you need to have pages on other sites linking to your site using the particular phrase you are targetting. This is very hard to do as other sites will link to your pages haphazardly, often putting your link on an innocuous (and useless) word such as "click here". It's tempting to pay to have posts that link to your site on specific anchor texts, but note that search engines like Google will penalise you if you do this. There are two ways of getting links to your site using specific anchor texts: one is to attach a blog to your site that links back to the main webpages using the anchor text (a variation is to have a series of articles on your site, all of which link to particular areas of your site using specific keywords as anchor text - this is known as "deep linking". You can also write a series of articles and submit them to article directories, with links to your site on a specific anchor text - this is known as article marketing and I will be covering this in a later post.
Keywords are the words or phrases users type into search engines to find content. So someone wishing to go to a Shakira concert will type in "Shakira concerts" and will get results listing pages showing Shakira's concert schedule for the year and sites selling tickets to these concerts.
Now Google and the other search engines will want to return relevant pages - not pages such as this one which happen to mention "shakira concerts" as an example illustrating keyword optimisation. The search engines do assume that pages with certain keywords mentioned are automatically relevant and that keywords arn't being included as bait to sell something completely different (or something illegal). But just to be sure, search engines such as Google add other algorithmic checks to ensure they are returning relevant pages. We will get onto that in a later article, but for now, we will concentrate on ensuring you include the correct keywords on your webpage.
Which keywords should I use?
Choosing keywords is the hardest part of search engine optimisation. Your first port of call is old-fashioned brainstorming with a pencil and paper. Ask yourself what you would type into a search engine to find your site if you were a user. Once you have generated your list, type the words into this free keyword suggestion tool. The tool should return a list of related keywords and tell you how many people have searched using those phrases - i.e. you get to find out how popular the keywords are.
The temptation is to go for the most popular keywords - but be warned that everyone else is probably doing the same, and the competition will be fierce. It is better to go for a number of the less popular keywords (the so-called "long tail") where you are more likely to feature on the first page of the results.
How can I tell if there is competition from other sites for a particular keyword?
Simple: just type the phrase into Google to see how many pages are returned. That's every page that has the keyword mentioned. You then want to find out how many webmasters are actually optimising for that particular phrase. Say your keyword is "shakira concerts". Type the following into the search engine:
intitle:"shakira concerts" inanchor:"shakira concerts"
Put your keyword in quotes as illustrated above and lay it out exactly as shown above (no space between the colon and the keyword and a single space between the intitle sequence and the inanchor sequence).
Intitle searches for every site that has those keywords in the title of their page. Inanchor searches for every site that has links to their page from another page using that particular anchor. The number of results returned will be smaller - but these are your competition, as these sites are actively optimising for that word.
Now do the same without the quotes:
intitle:shakira concerts inanchor: shakira concerts
This will return a greater number of results, as the above search is looking for the words, but not in any specific order.
Go through all your keywords and note down the results. You now want to optimise for the keywords that have the least competition that are the most popular.
Once I have my keywords, how do I use them?
The most powerful places to place keywords are in the title of your site or article and in the url. They are always picked up by search engine spiders when they index your site.
The next most powerful place to put keywords is the top third of your site/article. Most search engine bots do not do "deep" indexing, they do not scan your entire text. Instead they look at the first paragraph (some will look at the top third of your site), and decide what is in your page from that. Therefore you need to include your keywords in that area. It's no good having a lengthy introduction to your subject matter and introducing your keywords half-way down your page - by then you will have lost the bots and hence lost the chance of a human reader seeing your work.
What is keyword density?
Keyword density is the frequency the keyword appears in your text. The search bots are looking for words that appear close together e.g. they won't associate the word "shakira" with the word "concert" if they are separated by a hundred words. However if they are next to each other or separated by on a few words, they will link the two as a keyword when producing results. They also look for how frequently the word or phrase appears in a passage. The more frequently it appears the more likely that the text concerned is what the user is looking for, whereas if a word just appears once, it's likely that the word was just used incidently.
The temptation is to realy lard your copy with keywords - but don't. Because the search engines know that webmasters are doing this, they have built into their algorithms checks that reject any page that has a density of more than 4%-7%. So your aim is to have a density that is higher than that of your competitors but less than 4%. (Find your competitors by simply typing the keyword into the search engine and looking at the pages listed above yours)
You can check your density (and check out the density of your competitors' sites) by using this free Keyword Density Tool. Type in the URLs of the pages you are comparing into the box and it will return the frequency each word appears in your text.
Keyword anchors
Finally, to optimise your site fully for the keywords you have chosen, you need to have pages on other sites linking to your site using the particular phrase you are targetting. This is very hard to do as other sites will link to your pages haphazardly, often putting your link on an innocuous (and useless) word such as "click here". It's tempting to pay to have posts that link to your site on specific anchor texts, but note that search engines like Google will penalise you if you do this. There are two ways of getting links to your site using specific anchor texts: one is to attach a blog to your site that links back to the main webpages using the anchor text (a variation is to have a series of articles on your site, all of which link to particular areas of your site using specific keywords as anchor text - this is known as "deep linking". You can also write a series of articles and submit them to article directories, with links to your site on a specific anchor text - this is known as article marketing and I will be covering this in a later post.
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimisation", which is the art of organising your website so that search engines can find material on it and then rank your site high in search results.
The web is extremely crowded and without search engines finding and listing your material high in search results, you won't get any traffic and no one will read what you have to say, much less buy anything from your site.
This blog aims to give advice to on how to lay out and optimise your site so that it will feature well in search results. All advice given will be "white hat" and this legal and in accordance with the rules of the search engines (breaking the rules can result in your site being de-indexed from the search engines, which rather defeats the whole purpose of the exercise)
The web is extremely crowded and without search engines finding and listing your material high in search results, you won't get any traffic and no one will read what you have to say, much less buy anything from your site.
This blog aims to give advice to on how to lay out and optimise your site so that it will feature well in search results. All advice given will be "white hat" and this legal and in accordance with the rules of the search engines (breaking the rules can result in your site being de-indexed from the search engines, which rather defeats the whole purpose of the exercise)
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