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12 Mar 10 What is the Single Most Important Thing in Keyword Research?

This is tricky, isn’t it?

So, what is the answer…?

Is it the search volume? Or is it competition volume? Better still, is it the nature of keywords? Or is it the intent behind the keyword search? Or is it the title competition? Or what?

Whew! Too many to juggle with….

Well, do not waste your time on thinking hard in the solitary corner of your messed-up room (messed up room is common with all the webmasters, do not get sold for the sleek, and well-arranged rooms that you see in the A-listers videos; they are done on a purpose) because the answer to the above question is none of the above.

All of these things are important, very important, but nothing is half as important as important for a successful keyword research as is the common sense. You knew the answer? Hey, Einstein, why didn’t you tell me so? J

Now, let’s get serious.

Keyword research is a process of funneling down the information searched by the customers in your niche so that you can come up with terms that are searched by the many users and have fewer competitors.

The definition is sweet and sleek. Take a note of it. But, keep in mind that this definition rests on two variables: information entered by your customers and process of filtering down.

To get what?

To find the right keyword for your website or campaign, and in both the cases you will need to use your common sense. It is your common sense that will tell you how much a keyword is valuable. For example, let’s say you have optimized your website for “beach hotels” seeing its volume and competition, and despite everything being just right you are not getting any traffic, at least not substantial. Why?

Because you may have been suggested by your keyword tools that “beach hotels” is the most searched term in your niche, but it didn’t say that no one searched for “beach hotels”. Rather people searches for terms like “Miami beach hotels”, “OC beach hotels” “beach hotels in Florida”, etc., as “beach hotels” is a local keyword. And people search this keyword as a compound keyword along with some city, county, or state’s name.

This is all common sense. Take it out of equation, and you end up getting no traffic, regardless of your ranking.

Say again, which is the most important factor in keyword research?

Well done! You got it right this time.

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26 Nov 09 SEO Tips – Optimize Your E-Commerce Website – IV

In the first part of SEO for e-commerce website, I talked about how to use keywords in your e-commerce website, in the second part, I dealt about the nuances of writing proper tags, and the third part talked about how to avoid duplicate content. This is the fourth part of the series, and in this part, I will talk about internal linking. I hope, you are applying these practical tips in your e-commerce website, if you are not then today is the day to start doing it.

Contextual linking

Navigation links do not tell any story to sooth the search engine crawlers’ pain caused by constantly crawling through the pages. It just says: here is page A and here is page B and road to both places goes from here. How can you expect to derive any value from this? You need to inject links to different pages in your website within the content to get link juice. This will build contextual link which will tell the search engine crawlers a story they will love.

Link in product description

Interlinking two products by placing links within the product descriptions of the product is a nice little way to make all the pages visible to search bots and it provides an opportunity to squeeze juices out of long tail keywords.

Avoid using “View” or “More” words as anchor text

This is most common mistake committed by most of the e-commerce websites. Many webmasters put a brief description on the product category page about various products and use “View”, “more”, “click here to read more”, etc., beneath every brief description to direct the users to the product pages.

Avoid using such generic terms, instead, use a proper keyword (or even a long tail keyword) to link every product pages with the product category page. This will inform your prospects as well as search bots about the content on the next page. This strategy will help you a lot in improving your website ranking.

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11 Sep 09 SEO Simplified: What to Do to Rank in Google, Part – IV

In this part, we will talk about the quality guidelines set by Google to control the way webmasters build their websites. The guidelines include all the manipulating behaviors adopted by webmasters to bypass their way to the top in Google’s result page. Do not try to trick or deceive Google, the search engine does not look upon these acts kindly. And I must add here that your website will be blacklisted even if you come up with a deception technique which is entirely unique and never mentioned in the guidelines, so avoiding any such things is suggested.

To help make the Internet a better place to be in, you can assist Google by reporting any website that is indulge in any spammy behavior by reporting the site to Google Spam Department.

Quality guidelines

  • Make WebPages for users and not for the search engines. Do not use cloaking to show one thing to the users while something entirely different to the search bots.
  • Run a “Does This Help My Users” test before going live with your design, content or whatever. No short-cut should be taken. Black Hat SEO technique should be avoided at all cost.
  • Do not become a part of link schemes designed to better the page rank of the website. Avoid link spammers.
  • Do not use any unauthorized program to submit pages, check ranking or to do anything that will cost Google immense resource. Your site will be blacklisted.
  • Do not use sneaky redirects or cloaking.
  • Do not overload your pages with keywords.
  • Creating multiple domains or sub-domains with same content is a surefire way to get blacklisted in Google.
  • Doorway pages created for search bots will take your website to the blacklisted list on Google.
  • Do not send automated queries. This is spamming the system.
  • Do not use your website as a platform to install malware, viruses, Trojans, badware or for phishing attacks.

As long as you are adding value to your visitors, you are good to go, and the moment you started taking your visitors for a ride, you are doomed, so avoid doing that.

In the next couple of articles, I will try to describe some of the quality guidelines written above.

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