Tag Archives: Search engine optimization

Keyword Research: Using Google Adwords

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This is a guest post by Mariana Ashley

In any search engine optimization (SEO) guide, they will tell you to do keyword research, using Google Adwords. Most guides won’t give you any more detail than that. “Just type in your keywords and Adwords will give you keywords,” or something to that extent, is the general gist. In actuality, keyword research is much more complicated and requires a complete understanding of the function of your site as well as your potential readership. There are a variety of steps that go into keyword research.

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Users Or Search Engines Is A False SEO Debate

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Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London, England is an amusing place to visit if you like to hear empassioned debaters. They often take up extreme positions so as to attract the crowd. Ideally if a few hecklers join in with counter-positions, it all adds to the fun.

You might imagine that Speakers’ Forum was not a suitable place to discuss how best to make websites perform well on the Internet. You would be right except that the online debate often resembles that Hyde Park scene.

That image came to mind in a recent post by Jill Whalen that talked about A Fatal Flaw In SEO. Those are dramatic words and you might wonder what would elicit such a headline. It turns out that Jill was incensed by a post by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. This had included in the title equally inflammatory language with the words, Terrible SEO Advice.

Jill said that Rand’s advice could

… potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.

In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”

If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.

This is certainly soap-box rhetoric. Both have taken extreme positions. After all that’s what attracts the crowds, … and the comments, … and the backlinks, which is what SEO is all about, at least with Google.

Whichever you would label Black or White, neither is correct. The truth as usual is a shade of grey. You need a balance and should be considering both Users and the Search Engines at the same time. It’s probably 70% Jill’s advice and 30% Rand’s advice. The problem is that such a shade of grey will probably not stand out against the simple Blacks and Whites.

Equally if the best advice is somewhat more complex, some will opt for a simple approach that is supported by one of the luminaries of the SEO world. After all, that is what a Google search may indicate is the most relevant advice. The only saving grace here is that hopefully these contradictory positions will make some people realize that the true answer may lie somewhere in the middle.

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Natural Links Bring Search Engine Visibility

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Create an Online Presence and A Linkable Brand is the advice from Loren Baker in order to help with natural link building.

Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.

That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle

The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.

Creating Link Value

A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.

The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.

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Content May Be The SEO King But Check The Palace Architecture

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Where should effort go to be highly visible in keyword searches with Google? A precise answer probably demands an evaluation of all the Google Search Engine Ranking Factors like that done by SEOmoz. However the Google search debate normally seems to revolve around Content or Links.

Mark Jackson stated quite categorically The Golden Rule of SEO: Content is King. Aaron Wall also commented that although there are those who push for linking, Content is King when you get down to it.

The debate is ongoing and there are even those who stay on the fence and declare both content and inbound linking is king.

How should you budget your effort then in trying to improve rankings in Google keyword searches? Should it be equal effort on content and links or some other ratio?

That is a false dichotomy since there is another equally important website dimension that does not even feature in this debate. Indeed if you look at the hot issues in the past two months in SEO, that third dimension has been the one the experts have been talking about. The third leg of the tripod is the website architecture. It deserves equal effort as illustrated in the following table, which is derived from a chart in an article on Key SEO Services. In this table, the Plus value is a reminder of the Upsides that can be created by working on this aspect. The Minus value indicates the Downsides if this aspect is handled poorly.

Triple Power SEO
Architecture Content Links
SEO Trio
Plus – Visibility Plus – Appeal Plus – Authority
Minus – Barriers to search engines Minus – Spam Minus – Penalties
eyes
Monitor     >>     Measure     >>     Manage     >>     Improve

It is somewhat surprising website architecture gets so little air time given its importance. It can be complex but a great deal of improvement can be obtained with very simple methods. It is likely that the vast majority of websites that do not perform well in Google keyword searches suffer from website architecture problems. Yet much progress can be made with some of the most basic tools.

For example, the Xenu Link Sleuth (TM) will find broken links on web sites, which can be a major problem for the search engine spiders. It crawls the website in exactly the way a search engine spider does. Google itself provides a great deal of information through its Google Webmaster Tools website. If you have Google Analytics or Google Adsense ads on your website, then both give statistics that often pinpoint problems in the website architecture. Efforts put into correction efforts will have clear and certain results, unlike those hoped for when efforts go into content or links.

The aim of this article was to discuss the high level allocation of effort rather than to provide a compendium of website architecture problem areas and solutions. For the latter we can recommend an article by Richard Baxter, Diagnose Critical Website Architecture Issues for SEO. He also has a slide show of the presentation he gave at SMX London 2009 on the same topic. It’s very good value if you want pointers on how to put effort into this priority SEO dimension.

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