Part 5: How do I SEO my Website?

There are a number of factors to SEO, both on-page SEO and off-page SEO, that Google in particular considers. Without getting too much into link equity, and for the sake of brevity, this tutorial will focus only on the use of keywords and their place in on-page SEO.

We will be doing another tutorial for Getting Backlinks, but let’s look at a simplified – though very important – use of the keywords you gathered in the 2-part keyword tutorial.

Once you have a list of keywords (chosen for their low-compete nature, and decent traffic estimates) – you want to give the spiders something to index, to rank, to look at. Your keywords and the content on your site need to have relevance.

If a searcher inputs “red widgets for sale” and you don’t have red widgets for sale, you talk about shoelaces – BUT you saw that “red widgets for sale” gets 47 times more searches a month, so you use “red widgets for sale” on your pages, this won’t benefit you or the reader.

Keep it relevant. That’s step one.

Here is where it’s vital to use your keywords, so be sure you optimize your pages accordingly:

1. Meta Data.

This is the “header” information in your HTML, and in WordPress is usually addressed with one of many plugins, or in the CSS files. The meta data includes your:

Title – Keep this to 60 characters or less for best results, and use the keywords as early as possible.

Description – This is what will be listed under your site in the SERPs, very important to use relevant keywords here.

Keywords – Google’s Matt Cutts and other Googlers have said, “Who cares?” But other search engines use this data, so it’s up to you: just don’t repeat any single word more than once, and be sure all keywords listed appear at least once in the text of your content.

This is pretty important, IMHO, as I’ve had websites where I had used cliches in my title tags and meta description, etc., and ranked for off-the-wall terms solely based on this (oh, and the keyword in question was pretty low-compete, but I ranked at #2 for it…).

2. Headings and Titles

The boldened “H1″ and etc. tags, used to be more relevant but Google says they’re not as weighty. Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to look at them for SEO purposes. Use some keywords…

3. First Sentence, Paragraph

This is more of a hunch, but proximity plays a role in rankings. So if a keyword is found in a prominent position, i.e. higher up, then it is counted weightier than a keyword that only occurs once about mid-way.

4. Last Sentence-ish, Paragraph

The “last paragraph” idea is simply a rounded out version of proximity, and a semantical, linguistic way to end a subject. It follows typical human sentence and essay structure, so it’s made it into this tutorial…

5. Media Alt Tags and Descriptions

This is pretty important, since image searches are very popular as are video indexing and searches. If you want to “score” on your SEO, use the “Alt” text (find it in your HTML code on any given page for all videos and images, it will display upon “hover” when you mouse over an image or video).

6. URLs

URLs give both humans and droids alike a clue what they’re going to find, so use your keywords like an Easter Egg here. Be sure to change your Permalinks structure on your website if using a blogging platform like WordPress – the post slugs are usually in the format of:

www.sitename.com/?p=357/

Changing your permalinks is done in the “Settings” tab, look for “Permalinks.”

Also consider naming your website after the main keyword you are targeting, this is called an “Exact Match Domain” or EMD. This isn’t absolutely necessary for good rankings, but there is still a bonus in SEO for doing so (subject to change when Google darn well pleases).

7. Links and Navigation

Name your links after keywords when it makes sense, and follow conventional naming practices, such as “About” and “Contact” for those pages. Also: be sure you keep relevance in mind for the reader and for your higher rankings.

8. Deep Links and Internal Links

Deep links and internal links are relatively the same shebang. Give your readers as few clicks as possible to get to any page, 2-3 clicks is good, no more than 4. “Link equity” or “link juice” needs to be spread accordingly.

That just means you have to give some thought to what pages you want to rank, or tell the search engines and your readers are most important. This is accomplished on an off-page, backlinking strategy, but is also accomplished with internal links pointing to various key pages.

Assume your website is a champagne fountain – like in the movies. The pyramid of flutes, you get the pic – the “juice” is poured usually to the TLD or top level domain: your homepage. From there the juice trickles to your internal pages, via the links.

The more valuable the page, the more links will point to it. When you have a page that you want to be authoritative and rank higher, you can use your own internal linking structure to give it a boost and make it more accessible to visitor.

9. Catogories and Tags

Use your keywords here, surprise, surprise!

10. Out-Bound Links

Many would want to body-slam me for saying this, but it matters where you link out to. If you are an affiliate marketer, you want to “nofollow” your affiliate links so the search spiders don’t pass your own link juice on to your affiliate company (and Google likes it that way!).

There is another consideration, though, and it is the linking neighborhood – if you link out to a lot of “bad neighborhoods” then you in turn damage your rankings, PR and overall link juice. If you link to higher authority sites, however, then many have seen this is beneficial in the end.

Link to trusted sites that are related to the subject of your blog or site.

Keyword Density needs to be mentioned, as if it’s 1995: do not spam your keywords. Don’t “stuff” your keywords by masking their presence from human eyes (by coloration or placement) – this is a sure quick way to lose your rankings.

Keyword density worked in the days of “Google Stupid,” but now “Google Smart.” Keep your keywords naturally dispersed, so it’s clear what your topic is, and so that your visitors don’t want to wring your neck for awkward sentence structure or redundancy or redundancy.

See? Obnoxious.

That wraps up our 5 part series on SEO Basics with JamesTheJust. Did you like this series or learn anything new? Sound off in the comments below and let us know what you think. We would love to know what you want us to cover next!

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Part 4: Using SEO for Firefox to Analyze Competition

At this point of our tutorial, How to do SEO Keywords research, we left you with the first part: a list of some good keywords. This is the fun part, competitive analysis.

Here is what to do next:

1. Arrange the list. I like to have the columns arranged by search volume to make this next part easier, so I’ll have loaded this into a CSV file like Excel or whatever you use for that after arranging the terms by search volume.

2. Purge the list. Immediately, anything with 6 digits I chop off. I may look into them from time to time just for giggles, but usually these terms are simply too competitive to bother with for my own business.

Yes, you can use these terms once you have an authoritative site, or if you plan on using PPC ads to drive traffic, but this is an SEO keywords tutorial, I’m after the lower compete terms.

I will also get rid of those terms that:

- Are not fitting with my topic or keywords.

- Do not make sense (gasp! yes, Google is imperfect…).

- Are so low in search volume that they register as “Not engough data,” although it could just be that they are too new to the index to have any data to report. Again, this is how I do my research, feel free to experiment with some of these as suits your business.

3. Prioritize and Pick Favorites. You want about 10 or so to work with, at the very least. You will want more to work with when all is said and done, but to get started, choose your top 10. The criteria is:

- 1,000 – 6,000 monthly searches in the country of your choice (you select that in the first tutorial, if you live in the country you’re targeting, then look under the “Local” serarch volume estimates).

- Terms that make sense for your readers: remember these are terms that are searched for, so you want to ask yourself if your content will match the terms. Relevancy is part of SEO!

In other words: think beyond the numbers! Ask: does it make sense to use the keyword? If you come across search terms that do not fit your site but you can use for backlinks or promotional items, then save them in another file for future reference.

4. With SEO for Firefox Ready, Go to Google. Let the games begin! What you will do is to open up a tab in your browser, look up your terms.

Here’s the catch: Use a search operator. These are bits of code or instructions to search engines that help refine your search, and there are a handful I like to use.

I’ll keep it simple here, though. Use the following:

allinanchor: keyword

Replace “keyword” with your keywords, so say you wanted to check the viability of the term “green widget maker,” your query would be:

allinanchor: green widget maker

No need for quotations, this will give you the “exact match” results.

This search query helps to tell you who is optimizing a page for the keywords in question with their backlinks and inlinks, using “anchor text,” and will tell you who is competing for the keywords you’re looking at.

Other search modifiers to consider are:

allintitle: This tells you who is using the keywords in their title tags, again a clue of competition.

allinurl: Maybe less useful, but again an indicator: keywords in URLs are useful for SEO (in particular as “exact match domains,” but not entirely necessary for high rankings.

allintext: This query will show you those pages with the keywords in the text, definitely an indicator of those optimizing for the terms.

This, BTW, is not “all there is” – there are plenty of search operators, and they change per search engine. Google uses “Boolean” operators for you geeks out there. I’ll let Wikipedia tell you all about that.

Keeping it simple, though, let’s stick with “allinanchor.”

5. Use SEO for Firefox To Check PR and Backlinks. Now the fun part: you open your browser’s “Tools” menu, then select SEO for Firefox. You want to be sure it is on, the check box should say, “Enable SEO for Firefox.”

Refresh the search results of the “allinanchor” query (or turn on SEO for Firefox and then look up the “allinanchor”). Underneath your SERP listings should be a blue-colored box with a bunch of abbreviations you want to check.

6. Look for “PR” and “Y!” as well as the .edu, .gov selections.

Considering only the top 10 results, select those parameters. Why only the top 10? Because you are competing for top 10 rankings, nothing more. Debate amongst yourselves, it’s what’s worked for me.

What you are looking for are lower-level competition, so the lower the PR or PageRank (Google’s metric for authority), then the easier you will have it. BUT! Do not be a-feared o’ them bad dawgs.

Translation: be like Marty McFly in the Back To The Future movie series (Neflix that!) – don’t let these high PR sites call you “Chicken.” You can outrank Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay – PR is only one metric to consider.

Check it just to get a feel, but don’t think you can’t out-rank anyone (speaking from experience). The other parameters are helpful, but for now just look at the Y! or “Yahoo!” backlinks by clicking the box. At the time of this article, you need to do this:

- Right click the URLs of the SERP listings, the top 10 sites for your “in quotes” (exact) search in Google. Do this for the organic listings, not the sponsored listings. You can do all 10 or just 1-2 at a time.

- Go to the new tab of your competitor’s webpage. This means you should have at least 2 open tabs: the SERP with the top 10 for your keyword “allinanchor search,” and then the page with the URL you are checking.

7. Begin analysis with the #1 site: PR and Y! links. Looking at the SEO for Firefox toolbar, you want to look at the “PR” bar, and the second “Y!” – should be about the second icon after the “SEOBook” logo.

Explanation: the PR staus will tell you the authority of the page – it’s a secondary metric IMHO, but gives you an idea of what you’re up against. Don’t go turn tail and run just yet.

The first “Y!” denotes the entire domain’s backlinks according to Yahoo! Site Explorer, the second tells you the links to this page you are competing against.

You can click the second Y! in order to open up YSE in another tab, do that. The default is that Yahoo! will revert to the top-level domain, the home page, in YSE. This ain’t good. You only care about the page you’re up against. Do this: copy your competitor’s URL from the browser tab you have open.

This is in the middle, top of your screen. Then go to step 8 below.

8. Go to YSE tab, paste in the URL. You are replacing the “Explore URL” window with the URL you are looking at – it is USUALLY a page or folder, or sub-domain, so NOT usually the homepage.

9. Select “Inlinks -> Except From This Domain.” “Inlinks” is another term for “backlinks,” and “Except from this domain” is a drop-down menu that will rule out internal links: other pages on a domain pointing to that page (and good for you to keep in mind for your own pages, BTW: link to important pages).

10. Translate the Data. Like Obi-Wan told Luke, Trust your instincts.

If you a page has 1000′s or even 100′s of backlinks, you need to ask yourself if you can out-do them. It’s possible with the right tools or services, but depends on your budget and know-how, etc.

Hint about PR and Link Authority:
Sometimes called “link juice” – minus vitamin C – the idea is that authority or PageRank gets passed from an authority site to the webpage it links to. If your website is a PR 0, but a PR 7 links to it (especially without a reciprocal link), this weighty, juicy link just showered your site with link juice.

What this means is that when you are looking at your competitors’ link profile, you want to look closer at those links which are higher in authority, PR 3 and greater especially. It takes fewer, higher PR backlinks to out-do more, lower PR backlinks.

What you want to do actually is look at every one of those links, open them up and see what sort of PR they have – this is done easily with the PR toolbar with SEO for Firefox, and yes: you really do want to look at all the links.

Do you think you can out-rank this page or not? You could just go onto another listing in the SERP to get a feel at this point if you can rank for the term you’re looking at. Keep in mind these are not set-in-stone rules, you can rank on the front page with various methods.

But – if all these sites have 1K+ links to the page for that term, you might just need to consider another keyword from your list.

What you want to do is see the PageRank for all their backlinks, looking for higher PR backlinks. PageRank is measured on a scale of “n/a” – 10, with 10 being higher authority obviously.

With that information in hand:

You try to copy your competition’s higher PR backlinks. If it’s a forum, or a guest post at a related blog, or an article directory – whatever it is, you can try to copy it.

If this sounds like an awful lot of work, it ain’t. Not when you consider how much you have to pay out in backlinking and SEO services otherwise. Do this research well and you’ll make and save a lot of money.

And if you want a short-hand version to do this, see our SEO competitive tools page (Coming Soon). Up next, How do I SEO my website?

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Part 3: How to do SEO Keyword Research for Free!

Part I – Using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool To Get Hundreds of Keyword Suggestions

There are a number of advantages and benefits to learning SEO and finding SEO’d keywords, and to summarize, if you learn SEO you will:

• Get More Searches / Traffic Naturally (FREE)
• Get More Money (IF You Monetize Well)
• Pay Out Less For Advertising Your Sites
• Pay Out Less For Link-Building Software And Services (And You Will Know What To Look For!)

If you don’t learn good SEO, you will be an easy target for link pimps. No offense, link pimps.

SEO begins with finding keywords that are relevant to your website, company, products and content. So you’ll note the title isn’t “how to find keywords,” but rather how to do SEO keywords research. This first installment covers an easy and effective way to generate a list of SEO keywords to work with.

What I mean by that is, specifically, keywords that are easy to rank for. These are the keywords that a niche marketer, or small business person, may want to use. If you want to compete with the hard-to-compete for keywords, that will require more off-page research and advanced techniques, another post later.

For now: How do you do SEO keywords research?

This method is pretty well-known, but only because it works, so why fix it? Here’s an important note, though: this tutorial of sorts will be subject to change depending on Google’s changing algorithm – they love to do that, and this is a Google-focused tutorial.

It’s also (so far) worked well for yours truly, to the tune of millions of dollars a day in income (that is absolutely a possible exaggeration maybe, but these tips do work, and I have profited to the tune of thousands of dollars using these tips).

Step By Step Guide To Do Free Keyword Research

1. Before doing much else, I’d recommend downloading the free SEO for Firefox plugin from SEOBook.com. There are other good ones, such as SEO Quake, but I’ve only used SEO for Firefox just fine and dandy. Download that here.

Why do I want that? Because I said so. Do it, or lose it.
(OK, look: this is my method, these are my tools – you don’t “have” to download that bad boy, but if you don’t, get something that will offer the same metrics I’ll explain in our next post.)

2. Go to Google AdWords and sign up for an account (it’s free) – https://adwords.google.com

Why sign up for AdWords? Simply to get the best use of their free tools, and if you do sign up now, you can at some point break out into the still very effective Google Adwords PPC campaigns – BUT learn SEO first!

3. OK, now that you have those tools, go to AdWords at that above address. Here’s the weird part, IMHO – you need to select the following from the drop-down menu:

Opportunities -> (Sidebar on left) Tools -> Keyword Tool

4. Once there, you will notice there is a “Select Previous Interface.” This is in the top-right, under the green header. Select it, hopefully this one doesn’t disappear anytime soon.

5. From this point you can either select the “Descriptive words or phrases” or “Website content” radio buttons – in the lefthand side. Here’s the difference:

Descriptive words or phrases will allow you to start out with an idea you have for a new blog post, niche or website idea that you want to explore. Say you already have some content you want to cover, you should use this button to help you find keywords to optimize your content for.

Website content allows you to enter any URL – but if you want the most comprehensive returns you’ll need to use your own site. What happens is that Google will look at your URL, then suggest keywords and analyze those it finds.

This helps to build more content, or to discover other keywords you may have missed that Google thinks your website is topically related to. Select whichever you want.

6. Most of the time, I use the “descriptive” selection, then enter some terms – one in each line – to analyze. I usually only enter a handful or less, I like focused pages, but enter as many as you think of.

7. What you see are a bunch of nice keywords – and some estimates according to Google. When you get to this screen with the keywords populated, do this:

Hit “Match Type” in the right-most section of the header, just above the last column. This has a drop-down, select “Exact.”

Why Exact, what does that mean? This will filter out the “broad match” results so that you will get a better picture of the exact phrase, so you will not get too many results that are “related” but not as precise as your keyword phrase.

Normal searched in Google will include a mix of terms, because the algorithm is trying to guess at what you want. If you do an in-quotation marks search, you will get less “noise” and a clearer search. In the keyword tool of AdWords, it gives you a more realistic picture.

Here are the columns to pay attention to for finding low-compete keywords:

Kewords
Local Search Volume
Global Monthly Search Volume

Research Tip: You can add other columns, by the way, with the drop-down menu marked Choose columns to display. This includes Cost-Per-Click estimates, helpful to gauge the potential profitability of keywords.

Also note the green bar, labeled Advertiser competition, another good indicator of ad costs, as higher competition means generally more profit potential.

What you want to do at this point is to know what metrics are most important to you. In any good SEO campaign or web design, you will need a mix of both low-compete terms (usually with lower monthly search volume estimates) and moderate-to-higher-compete keywords.

For the current tutorial, let’s stick with “low-compete.” If you want to know the AdSense cost or CPC estimates, then select that column to display and you can arrange the columns by hitting the title of the column in the header.

Sometimes you want to see things alphabetically, then select the “keywords” column if you want to. Normally, I’d go for the “Local estimates” (be sure to select the country you’re targeting, too from the appropriate drop-down, in case you’re targeting another country).

I select “Local” because I target the U.S.

What to look for? Essentially I look for decent monthly search volume, so if a keyword shows up as “not enough data available,” I usually skip those. What I like are terms that are in the ballpark of 1k-6k monthly searches, as they tend to be low enough in competition that ranking is not that difficult.

Important! Use your own experimentation, however – you can rank for anything with enough knowledge and backlinks.

To make life easier, you can download this data (like I do) into a CSV file (Best!) or text file (Um, OK), this makes checking the terms for competition easier. In the spirit of brevity, see our part two this tutorial aptly named, How to do SEO keywords research (For Free): Using SEO for Firefox To Analyze Competition.

You’re 1/2-way there!

Question:

What are the “Additional Keywords To Consider” at the bottom of the Google AdWords Keyword Tool? Great question, see our “Google Wonder Wheel Orientation(Also Coming SOOON!)” for the full answer, but these are the LSA/I terms, or “Latent Semantic Analysis / Indexing” keywords.

LSA/I…Say What?! Those are terms that reportedly Google looks to find on your page if it’s about “subject X” – usually it’s termed “LSI.”

The thinking is that if your page is about “purple cows,” then some LSI terms should appear on your page. This has been debated by many, but Google’s Matt Cutts and other Googlers and internet marketers (IMers) have found this to be the case.

Some have said they have found that the top 10 results of a keyword search phrase usually have some of these terms on their pages. It’s worth a look-see.

Read our Google Wonder Wheel and LSI Orientation (Coming soon, I SWEAR! No really, like within the next week…).

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