Small Business SEO - Small Business SMO

So, where did we leave off? Oh, yes now I remember, it was keywords in urls and registration length.

Anyone ever hear of the “bad neighborhood” thing Gooogle has been on about for a while? According to Google, if you are sharing a host with a bunch of spammers, then you will more than likely get wacked as well.

Because your site lives in a”Bad Neighboorhood”.

On the flip side, you could live on the proverbial Friendly Neighbor Lane where it’s going to cost you more but you will get it all back in droves.

The way to do this is to get a dedicated IP address for your site from a reputable host. I don’t always practice what I preach, as this blog is NOT on a dedicated IP, but I’m cheap sometimes and this host is great.

Few business owners know about this, and it is probably one of the last things that cross their minds, but if you’re struggling in the search engines, and you’re doing everything else right, then this maybe something to consider a little deeper.

It’s wild. I read somewhere that Google looks for over 100 criteria when it evaluates a page, and where to put it in its index.

So let’s start with the domain registration process.

How long did you register your domain name? 1 year like most folks? I mean why spend money registering your site for 2-10 years since you may not need it that long from now? This is a question search engines ask, too. Yes, they have that information (at least Google does, since they are an official ICAAN registrar) and they give points to the sites that have a domain name registered for longer than the standard one year.

Here’s one that alot of businesses get hung up on, the keywords in the domain name. Google any term, any term at all. How about, oh I don’t know, let’s say “hoaxes” for example.

(It really doesn’t matter what you search for, is my point. Search for anything, I promise that the main keywords are going to be found in the domain names, but seriously for for kicks and giggles, search for the word “hoaxes”.

Done? Ok, let’s see what you found!

(Play along, guys, I want to see some searching..)

Whoa, how about that? Basically, the keywords being in the url is very important and it’s even better when the domain name itself has the keywords in it.

This tells the search engine “this site is so relevant for this word, I even put it in my domain name, ha!”

Hello. My name is Steve Driskill with Searchengineblueprint.com and Melberg.com, aka Melberg Marketing. And today we are doing some research on the “The Keyword Conundrum: Optimized Keyword Analysis”. This is to really explain the keyword process and the methodology behind keyword analysis and keyword selection.

To start off with, keywords are what search engines look for and use to catalogue your web pages. They don’t catalog your site as a whole, but they catalogue each individual pages based on the keywords.

Keywords occur naturally on every web page, and keywords are there whether you like them or not, whether you want them or not. The search engines naturally grab what they think are keywords and they catalog your web page by those, what it thinks are keywords.

The good news is you have the ultimate choice over what keywords you use on your site. And that gets into another thing. We talk about making a choice: you have good keywords versus bad keywords. There is a very big difference between the two. It’s very important, because after all, keywords are the key to your success on the web.

Good keywords bring both traffic and sales, but good keywords take time and effort to find. However, bad keywords are very easy to come up with, but will ultimately make your site obsolete.

In this diagram, we’re going to show an example of how keywords work between search volume and competition.

Now, competition means the number of pages who are competing for a spot in, say, Google’s index for these keywords. And you have high search volume; you’re also going to have high competition. The sweet spot is when you can find a place between high volume and low competition. Those are the keywords that you want to optimize for.

In this diagram, we’re actually expanding upon that, and we’re going to insert some keywords.

Here you see the very basic, very general “gardening”, with again high search volume, high competition. It gets a little more specific with “indoor hydroponic gardening”, and finally very low search volume, very low search competition for the words “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges”.

Now the sweet spot is “indoor hydroponic gardening”, because there is going to be much lower optimized competition than for the keyword “gardening”.

And also, we’re going to have a decent to fair to really good amount of traffic. Not at much as the keyword “gardening”, but we’re still going to have plenty of traffic in order to optimize for and to actually make sales with.

And after all, sales are what we’re ultimately after. And that brings us to the “keyword conundrum”. Now the keyword conundrum is where you bring in the conversion rate, as opposed to search volume and competition levels.

Now as the keywords get more specific, the easier it is to make a sale. You’re going to have less traffic, but since you have what that person is looking for and there’s also very little competition, you’re going to find it much easier to makes a sale for the keyword “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges” if you in fact sell indoor hydroponic gardening sponges than if you were to try to sell somebody something very general about gardening, for example.

The person searching about gardening, there’s a lot of information out there and a lot of books they can buy in the bookstore, they can buy online, and your competition is tremendous, so the buyer has a lot of choices. However, not many people are competing for the term “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges”, which means if you were to happen to sell that and someone happens to search for that, they’re probably going to buy something from you.

Now, however, to really generate revenue, you’re going to have to have more traffic than what you’re going to be able to generate just by the term “indoor hydroponic gardening sponges”. And so the sweet spot comes back into play with “indoor hydroponic gardening”, because somebody looking for indoor hydroponic gardening sponges is probably looking for other information and products for indoor hydroponic gardening as well. So you can probably sell that person quite a few things. And that’s what makes this truly the sweet spot in the keyword conundrum.

Now let’s go over a few keyword rules. You want to optimize for between one and three keywords per page max. And the keywords that you choose to optimize for must be relevant to the overall theme of your site. You also need to have a keyword density on your page between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent of your total content.

Remember, we’re looking for keywords with the highest search volume with the lowest optimized competition. And once we have those keywords, we’re going to use them in the page title, in the alt tags, the meta tags, the anchor text of our links, and our headlines and sub-headlines.

That brings us to the “golden rule” of keywords, and really optimization in general, which is do not overdo it. Over-optimizing your site, trying to stuff too many keywords into a page, really being over-aggressive in the keyword aspect, really is going to hurt your site a lot more that it’s going to help it.

Search engines are pretty sophisticated, and they know when someone is trying to manipulate them, and they don’t like it. And so therefore they penalize the pages and the sites that try that. So there is again, a sweet spot with optimization, and that is to know the right amount to optimize without overdoing it.

The web started out as a single web page in 1990. As more web servers and web pages sprang up, Mosaic and later Netscape became the first browsers that would let everyone be able to ’see; webpages as they were available for every type of desktop configuration. Bear in mind this was in 1993, a full three years after the first ‘webpage’ was put up.

Soon after the first ’spider’ was developed and did little more than collect urls, but paved the way for others to create programs that used word associations to search document collections.

Then In 1994 a bunch of Standford students created the search engine Yahoo, which was the first to assign hierarchical status to each document in their directory based upon the “search parameters”.

Search engines and their spiders proliferated without too much distinguishing traits, except for the fact the full text from pages and even user feedback could now be indexed and used in the search results to determine relevancy.

Then Google was born. Or rather started by Larry Page (who invented PageRank while at Standford University) and was used as the official search engine of Standford University.

Google indexed pages much differently from the competition and had a drive for maximum usability and relevance. They didn’t flood their sites with text, banners, and ads. Nor did they include sponsored results inside the organic results.

By this time it is 2003, and Google not only had the lion’s share plus some of the world ’search’ market, but they also licensed their algorithm to other search engines.

So this is why Google is the king of search, at least as of writing this in early 2008.

The only difference between 2008 and 2003 is that Yahoo and MSN have stopped using the Google algorithm and have started their own. Too little, too late.

Search Results

What you see when you go to any search engine and search for anything is the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

This is a mix, in one way or the other, of organic (natural) listings for the search term and sponsored results for the search term.

Without the sponsored results, search engines could not turn a profit.

Basically web spiders crawl from page to page through links and index the content and details of each page and assign it a score based on different criteria. Then when a user searches using a keyword, the hierarchical results are displayed along with the ads or sponsored results. They might be mixed together, or they might be kept somewhat separate (as in Google’s case)

This brings us to where we are presently at in the History of Search Engines

The first myth of SEO is that you need to submit your site to search engines.

No way, Jose! Trust me, they want to come find you. You don’t need to pay anyone to do this for you.

Real SEO is much, much more than that and is worth the money…most of the time…but we’ll get to that part soon enough.jus

The other myth we need to  just mention (there is a whole section devoted to it: Social Media Marketing). The myth is that Facebook and MySpace are going to make you rich overnight. Or at all. If you don’t even own them.

But, I promise there is much more in store…

This is the part of building this that I was looking forward to! More soon…