JaxWorks SEO & Web Blog

SEO is a continuing process and one that should not be ignored.  As you know, or will soon realize,  search engines are the main entry point at which your customers will find your website.  But there are other issues you must be aware of to get the targeted customers that you want.

You may have optimized your webpages and people are coming — but not many.  Why? One of the reasons could be the keywords you are choosing.  Choosing the right keywords take time and effort, and it is an important factor to consider. When choosing keywords you should ask yourself:

1.) What are the exact words people are using to find the product or service that I am offering.  For example: is it refurbished tools, cheap tools, free tools, red tools, ugly tools …?

2.) Are my keywords too general, or overused. If the keywords are too general, you may receive visitors that are not buyers, just browsers. If the keywords are overused, you may be so far down in the search engine rankings that your site will never be seen.

3.) Do I have my keywords or keyword phases in my Title Tag and other metadata, including keywords and description. Your keywords in the metadata  should be relevant to your web copy and should include the keywords you have chosen. If they don’t, you’ve just wasted an important  tool that the Search Engines utilize.  Some people use the meta keywords tag and others say that the search engines no longer use them.  And still others claim that it gives their competition an unfair advantage. I personally will continue to use them, because I don’t believe all the search engines ignore this tag.

Finding the correct keywords is no easy task.  Did you think of asking the people around you what keywords or phases they would use to get to one of your web pages?  You might be surprised — it may not have been a keyword or phase that you even considered.  Another good way to find the keywords you need is to use the Google search-based keywords tool or the SEO Book keyword tool.

Even though a keyword may be popular to the masses, you also must consider if it is targeting your specific market.  Why?  You may begin to get the traffic, but not the specific target market that will buy your products. And that is the bottom line, not so much the popularity of the word, as the quality of the traffic that the keyword brings.  If the keyword is popular, you may find your web page competing with established websites — which translates into poor positioning.  Thus, you could consider other smaller niche words, and still get the ranking you seek.

You will have to experiment with the keywords that you use on your webpage/website, to determine if the keywords you are using is giving you the sales you want.

I have found testing, evaluating, and re-evaluating is the name of the game of SEO. If you keep that in mind, you will begin to see the results you want.  However, once you are in the top ten of the search engine results, do not think your job is done. You must continue to monitor — because the Internet is not a static environment — and people can come online that can slide your web page or website down the line in the search engine rankings.

Please let me know if this helps you with choosing keywords for your webiste. Also, if you like this post, please see below and share this post on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media site!  Thanks.

When you first launch a website, you naturally want all the content crammed into it that you can lay hands on. But if it’s real traffic you’re looking for, consider taking a more patient approach.

Anyone involved in search engine optimization can tell you that organic growth of relevant content is the most successful long term strategy for search engine placement. When people read that, however, their brains toss the part they don’t understand or want to deal with: “organic.” What they see is “successful long term strategy” and “search engine placement.” And that’s where the trouble starts, because it’s the organic growth that does the work.

What do people mean when they talk about organic growth?

Organic growth means slow, steady, continual growth – the way plants and animals grow. When Google ranks your site they look for this pattern of growth to help determine whether your site is “for real.” Think of an informational site you visit a lot, a forum perhaps, or a site like Wikipedia. Those sites did not spring into being overnight, chock full of content and with a hundred links pointing to them. They started as miniatures of themselves, and as people posted messages and articles they got bigger and bigger.

How can this be harnessed to help promote a website?

Timing of updates can be more important than size of updates. A lot of webmasters have a hard time updating their site regularly. They have day jobs, families, and other websites to run. This can lead to a tendency to update sites in large infrequent chunks.

To get the maximum benefit from your updates, do this instead: When you get time to update your site, prepare and arrange your new content so that it can be uploaded in small pieces. Get everything ready to go so that the only task remaining is the actual publish. Then upload each small piece separately, allowing a day or two to pass between each upload.

By doing this your website ends up with the same content, but search engines monitoring how frequently you update will see a pattern of steady growth. You can still write or gather all your content in one fell swoop, just dole it out to your webserver slowly instead of as a single publish. You won’t see immediate results, but give this a month or two and search engines will take notice, to your benefit.

If you were writing a book on Search Engine Optimization linking circa 2001, you almost certainly would have included a chapter on web directories. They used to be the primary way of actively acquiring one-way inbound links, before content syndication, blogs, or the paid link market really took off.

Web Directories and SEO Links: What Went Wrong?

Fast forward a few years, and you’d have to rewrite the chapter on directories and web links. In fact, you would probably downgrade web directories from a chapter to a page or two. In the SEO world, nothing good ever lasts long, and so it is with web directories.

* Traffic. With Google more accurate than ever, there was no more reason to turn to a human-edited list of websites. A directory might get you one or two click-throughs a month–or none at all.

* Redirects. Once directory owners realized their link popularity was valuable, they started hording it. Overnight, many, if not most, directories switched their HTML links to search-engine-invisible redirects.

* Fees. Most directories started charging for inclusion, or at least, for inclusion with a link rather than a redirect. If the fees were reasonable, that would not be so bad. But why would you pay $35 for a link on a PR 3 page with dozens of other links and virtually no content, on a site with dwindling traffic?

* Corruption. In the search engine optimization world, low-hanging fruit quickly goes rotten. Any volunteer-edited commercial category in a link directory runs a very real risk of being taken over by a corrupt SEO.

* Dubious link popularity. Given the notoriety of many directories for selling or inappropriately bestowing links, it’s not hard to imagine a search engine quality control engineer turning the link popularity juice off from these sites.

* “Welcome to our list.” If a directory doesn’t charge a fee to enter, it may ask for payment in the form of an email address. You’d better use your special Hotmail account for that one.

* Anchor text. Many directories do not allow for anchor text to be specified, delighting in providing as little SEO value as possible for the effort involved in submitting to them.

* Time. When link directories really were vital efforts to categorize the web, getting a link in them was as simple as having a good website and letting them know about it. Now that they’ve turned into tightly rationed supplies of link popularity, that kind of responsiveness is out the window.

* Idiosyncratic applications without any promise of timely follow-up.

* Application forms that often empty straight into a black hole:
* No way of checking on the status of submissions.
* Threats of scuttling submissions that are re-submitted when there is no response.

Web Directory Linking Alternatives for the 21st Century

* Reciprocal linking with a twist. If you network with other site owners, you can triangulate link trades so that they are not direct. If you really like each other, you may just link to each others’ sites for the sake of it! It’s worked for me with some high-PR links.

* Blogging. Blog early, blog often, and someone is bound to link to you. It’s the nature of blogging. The fastest way to get inbound links from your blog? Write about other blogs. The more controversial, the better. Post this article on a webmaster blog, and in the same post, reference the blog of someone who thinks link directories are still a good idea! In the blogosphere, arguments mean lots of links.

* Article directories. These are the closest things to link directories, from an SEO standpoint, to emerge in the 21st century. You submit an article to one of these sites (of which there are over 200). In your article you include a link to your site. Article directories are everything link directories used to be: responsive, fair, fast, no-fee, relevant, and quality sources of not only links but information. OK, most of their pages are PR0 and the rest tend to be PR 1-2. But with most article directories, you can choose your exact anchor text for the link–often more valuable than PageRank for non-competitive search phrases. Besides, if most of your links are on PR 4+ pages, how natural will that look?

In short, even if a few web link directories do still have  SEO value, they should no longer be your first stop for one-way inbound links. There are much better, and much less aggravating, linking methods.