Optimizing for Search Engines, Where to Start, Keywords - Part One.
Search Engine Optimization, Where to start?
I am going to try to explain in simple terms how to get your website optimized for search engines and get a better position for your search terms in Google, Yahoo and other major search engines. Google’s ways are not a complete mystery if you do your home work. Spend a day searching around on the Internet and you should be able to find your way to the “truth”.
So the first thing you need to do is determine what you are trying to achieve. Put together a list of key words or terms that you think person would be searching your product with. Just start writing them down. Imagine you are running an online shoe store. What word or term would one use to search for shoes? Nike shoes, Nike air force one size 12, red Nike shoes, cheap Nike shoes. What else, think creative. Be sepecific. Your main objective is to drive traffic to the products or service pages. The home page will probably feel like it’s being neglected but it will later get traffic from the product pages.
If you focus on words like shoes, nike and so on, you will have little success because there are sugnificantly more websites tryging to rank high for these keywords. You have a much better chance of ranking high for more specific terms like I brought up earlier.
Lets say you brought a visitor to your site that searched for the word “nike”. What are the chances that this person is actually looking to buy a pair of shoes? He could just be looking for corporate information. If you get a person to your site that typed in “Nike shoes size 12″ or “buy Nike air force one shoes size 12″ you can be sure that the only thing standing between him and a sale is probably your price.
So write up as many keywords/terms as you can, as specific as you can. think of every product you have, every size, color, shape and describe them in 2 to 4 words.
Now go to Google and search for your top search term that is on your list. Just pick the one that you think best applies to your product. In the results pick a site that is your top (realistic) competitor. Don’t pick eBay, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or any other huge company. Go look at their site, examine it.
Look for the following and make notes:
- Notice how easy it is to use
- Is it easy to tell what this site’s objective is
- How much descriptive text is there
- Are there any advertisements on the page
- Is the navigational bar on top, left or right
- Does the domain contain a keyword
- Make notes and think how you can use this information.
We are now going to get a bit more technical. If you are attempting to do this yourself I assume you know a bit about HTML and how a website is structured. Right-click on the white space (where there is no text or images) on the page and select View Source. Look for the META tags, they will look something like:
<meta name=”title” content=”Search Engine Optimization Done Right | notSEO.com”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”search, engine, optimization, seo, notseo.com”>
<meta name=”description” content=”Search Engine Optimization Done Right | notSEO.com”>
This is where you will want to write down what it says and will later need to modify it to apply to your site.
For now you need to look at the keywords. This is a great source of keywords that you haven’t though of that may apply to your situation. Add the ones that apply to your list.
There is lots more to learn about keyword, if you want to know more I recommend reading SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide - How to Conduct Keyword Research.
Picking out the best ones of the bunch.
You’ve got a list of keywords that may or may not have demand for them, and now it’s time to pick out the best ones. To do that you will need to find out what the demand for that key word is. Yahoo Marketing, formerly Overture has a tool for that. Click here for the keyword suggestion tool.
UPDATE: Yahoo has decided not to update this tool anymore so the results there will not be current but it should give you an idea.
Enter your keyword and hit enter. The results will show you how many searches were done for that keyword last month. It will also show you other keywords that are related to the initial keyword that you might want to consider using. Look at the demand, if it is over 1000 and it applies to your site, write it down.
I actually created a spreadsheet in Excell that holds the information for me and it also calculates it all. Click hereto download it. If you are using this tool, enter the value from the Overture tool into the demand field, if you are writing it down, make sure you write it down exactly as the keyword/term is in the overture tool.
Once you run all the keywords through this tool now you need to find out the supply. To do that I use both Google and Yahoo. First go to Google and do a search on your keyword. Once the results come back you will see on the right side it will tell you how many results there are for this keyword. Write that down next to the demand or if you are using the spreadsheet, enter this value into the G Supply field. Once all the keywords are recorded, do the same thing in Yahoo for Y Supply.
The spreadshee should have already calculated the values for you but if you are not using the spreadsheet the formula to calculate the s/d ration is:
(Google Supply + Yahoo Supply)/2/Demand = S/D Ratio
You want the S/D Ratio to be lower than 100, if you have very popular keywords you will need to compare the S/D Ratio for all and pick the one that has the lowest value.
This may not be the most accurate data but it is an effective way of picking out good search terms.
Applying the keywords to your site
There are two ways you can apply these keywords to your site. You can base your page on these words or you can develop content based on these words.
I will go into detail about building or editing your pages while keeping these keywords in mind in my next post.
I’d like to hear what you think about this, how you go about finding keywords and how you weed out the low quality ones and pick out the gold nuggets.