The way search engines provide search results has change dramatically in the last years. Custom search is something that you need to be aware, together with custom social search results. In case you didn’t knew until now, here are some factors that influence the search results:

-          Location, time of day, browser settings, profile settings and preferences

Also, there is a new feature from Google where you can link your social accounts and when you perform a search Google will also display results from your social network related to your search term. That is why a top ranking on your computer might not even make it to page 10 for someone across the globe.

You can create a special filter, if you’re using Google Analytics to see the rankings for each keyword. Then you can check the country and city, landing page and bounce rate to have a full image of what that keyword is really bringing you. I have a full article about how to create a filter to check your rankings in Google Analytics.

People post comments on blogs and think this is SEO (because they post a link to their website). It’s not. Why? Because 99.99% of these links are nofollow. And in case you don’t know what a nofollow link is here is a short definition: a nofollow link is not pursued by search engines and it doesn’t pass link juice (but retains some of it).

Links that point back to your website are extremely important. This is what makes your website outrank others. Links basically means people that talk about you. Let’s make a short exercise. If you hear the girl that serves coffee talking about stock evolution do you trust what she says? Probably no.

If you pay a photographer to shoot your wedding and he shows up with a common point and shoot camera, do you trust him? Probably no. The conclusion is that it matters who says the words: how trusty is that person.

Now let’s get back to our websites: it’s the same thing. It matters the authority of the websites, the degree of related-subjects, where is the link placed, on what page and what is the actual text of the link.

If we’re talking about top-authority websites then it doesn’t matter if the website has any kind of relevancy to the content on your website. This is the biggest kind of link that you could get.

If we’re talking about normal websites then there are some rules of thumb that you could check to see if it’s really worth the effort to get a link from them:

1. Does your content have any kind of relation to the content posted by the website that will link back to you? Search engines like to see topic related websites linking. The reason is that this way they can assign relevancy points to your content. You say that you target a keyword by placing it in the title and content but search engines can’t evaluate more than that. It needs other websites that already develop some trust to link back to you and tell the search engine that you really “talk” about what you say you talk.
2. What will be the words used for linking. If it’s a word like “here” (used in Read more here…) or other irrelevant word then the quality of the link it’s certainly diminished. The best would be to have the text of the link containing keywords you want to rank for. That is why you should never link to other websites with the keywords you want to rank well for.
3. Where that link would be placed. It’s much more useful for you to have a link from a particular page (placed naturally in context) that talks about a related topic rather than a footer link. A footer link caries low value because it’s not placed in a context: that is why search engines can’t assign any kind of relevancy between your page and the keywords you target (because the point from where you received the link isn’t descriptive enough)

What not to do:

1. Submit your website to web directories that accept all websites with no restriction
2. Submit your website to farm links
3. Build dozens of websites and cross link it (NOTE: if you have a decent number of websites and if there is a relation of topics between them it’s ok to cross link)

If you have something to add or a question, please use the comments bellow. Don’t forget to subscribe if you liked the article.

Did you ever wonder what is going on in your website? What the users click, or what other pages do they visit after seeing a particular article? Here is how you can access that information. First you’ll need an analytic software installed on your website. This article is about how you can view this kind of information in Google Analytics.

Log in into your Google Analytics account and identify in a report the link to a page you’re interested in. Here are some ways to go find a specific page in a report. Go to Content, Top Landing Pages or Content by Title and search for your page. Once you find it click on the link displayed in the table.

A new page will open with few very important links in the right:

1. Navigation Summary. By clicking this link you’ll see what other pages users visited before the specified page and what other pages visited after. Also you’ll see the percentage of users that exit the website.
2. Entrance Sources. The information displayed will let you know how people arrived to that page. From the table that opens choose as secondary information to view Medium. This way you’ll be able to see if the source is a referral, organic search, direct or e-mail.
3. Entrance Keywords. Knowing what keywords sent traffic to that page can be extremely useful. Especially because many times a page might receive traffic from keywords related to the subject but that we didn’t planned to optimize for.
4. Site Overlay. This feature will open your website in a new window with an overlay on top of it from Google. The additional information displayed will tell us, for every page, where users clicked.

Let me know if you find this article useful and what is your opinion or questions on this. Also consider subscribing to the blog and receive my articles directly in your e-mail.

Developing keyword orientated content for your website means to have a vision of the whole. It’s a matter of knowing the main keywords you want to target, the derived long tail keywords for each main keyword, how to use it in articles and how to link articles to get the results you want. Don’t make the mistake of paying too much attention to only one article and not realizing the importance of the whole.

The First Connection

This is basic knowledge for keyword targeting. Choose the keyword you want to target in an article and then make sure you use it in title, first paragraph, anchor text and the content of the page. This is the first connection: having the keyword present in all those places.

When you’ll use the keyword for that page in anchor text link only internally: you don’t want to help other websites outrank you, do you? It’s very important to use the keyword in the first paragraph and also in the rest of the content.

My advice is to use it naturally, as you would do it a real conversation with someone: don’t force it and don’t try to do keyword stuffing or achieve a certain keyword density. Although you follow some technical rules for search engines, in the end you write for people (those that will link back to you if they like your content – so keep this in mind).

Don’t limit the use in content to only the exact keyword: experiment with singular and plural form, synonyms or related words. This way you escape the danger of repeating the keyword too many times.

The Second Set of Actions

You can also use keywords in other places as well, to enforce the relevancy of the page to that specific keyword:

-          Description metatag: although using the keyword here will not improve your rankings it will help in attracting the eye on your link since this piece of information is displayed by search engines right bellow the title of the page and with the keywords in bold

-          URL – using the keyword in the actual URL of the page can have a positive impact on your rankings but it’s not a decisive factor

-          File names, especially images and the ALT property of the images can help with image search or different other file types search

-          Bold and italic text suggest some sort of importance of that text so use it wise

-          Subheading like h1, h2 and h3 can help especially when someone reads your page: it will be easier to follow the main ideas

The Third Factor – Internal Linking

It’s common knowledge that two is greater than one. More pages from your website linked in a logical hierarchy can greatly improve the relevancy of a page to a certain keyword. There are some rules that you need to follow in order to avoid penalties from search engines and to get the results you want:

-          Don’t link with the same anchor text

-          Concentrate on groups of articles: one main keyword and few long tail derived keywords

-          If you link to a page multiple times from the same article search engines will count the link once but you could get some improvement in functionality

-          Use relevant keywords as anchor text

-          Expect benefits from internal linking only when you link between related pages

What do you think about all this? Share your experience and questions in comments bellow.

Google Analytics shows you reports about 3 kinds of traffic: direct, referral and search engine. It’s important to understand how to look at these reports and how to spot problems.

Direct traffic comes from people that type your website address directly in the browser or click on a bookmark.

Referral traffic is traffic send from other websites. This means that you have a link on another website, or you post a link or an article on another website.

Search engine traffic is traffic that your website receives from search engines. Here you can see the non-paid traffic or paid traffic. If you pay for a service like AdWords knowing what paid keywords sent you traffic and what was the bounce rate could be useful.

For paid keywords you can evaluate the landing page relevancy for that keyword by analyzing the bounce rate. If the bounce rate is high you should ask yourself if it’s worth paying for those keywords or you should work some more on the landing page to increase the relevancy towards that keyword.

You can also look at All Traffic Sources to see what kind of source send you most of the traffic. In the table you’ll see the source of the traffic followed by its type: /referral, /direct, /email or /organic (traffic from organic rankings on search engines). Looking at all the traffic is a good method to rapidly spot the big areas that need improvement.

While looking to the All Traffic Sources, you’ll see in the right-up corner of the table few visualization options, Views. Choose the forth icon from the left that says Comparison. For all traffic sources you’ll see now its performance compared to the sites average.

This way you can see what traffic source helps your site average performance or its pulling you down. You have different options like Visits, Pages/Visits, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits.

NOTE: If your website is a blog then a high Bounce Rate can be normal. You can improve it by writing more articles on the subject and link between content in a natural and logical way.

When you look at the Keyword report an interesting option to View the table is Pivot (right-up corner of the table). For each keyword you’ll see how many visits you received and from what search engine. With this viewing option active you can select to see Visits and Bounce rate and you can see the bounce rate from each search engine, for every keyword. For example I have a keyword that send me traffic with 100% bounce rate from Google and 0% bounce rate from Bing.

Let me know what you think about this article. Share your ideas and thoughts in comments bellow and if you find it useful please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my content directly in your e-mail.

Usually people talk about SEO and SEM and sometimes they think it’s the same thing. Simply put SEO refers to optimizing your website for ranking on organic searches and SEM refers to getting traffic from PPC, CPC. The big difference between these two methods of getting traffic is this: SEO is more a mid and long term solution with long lasting results while SEM usually provides fast results that stay as long as you pay for the service.

Even if you prefer SEM solutions you should also invest in SEO because in time it could reduce your costs by provide your website with free traffic from organic searches. Another thing that you should know from start is that if you choose organic SEO then you should be aware of white hat techniques and black hat techniques.

Black hat techniques will not get you too far since search engines are better in spotting these things. Anything like hidden text, lots of links in the footer, fake backlinks from websites hosted on the same server or that have the same owner or IP, link farms, css styling that is meant to deceive, all these are black hat techniques.

White hat techniques mainly concentrate on the phrase “provide value to the web”. Usually, if you ask yourself this question you stay on the right track. Still, there are some things that might get you a penalty from search engines although it doesn’t seem that obvious:

-          all of your pages link to the main page of your website with the same keywords

-          many of your pages link to another page of your website with the same keyword

-          reciprocal links

-          too many links to other websites on the same page (might lead to the conclusion of payed links)

Other times you may think that you’re doing SEO when in fact you’re not (common mistakes):

-          all your pages have the same title

-          the keywords from the title are nowhere to be found on the page, anchor text, file names, alt property or subheadings

-          multiple links placed on a page that point to the same page: this might offer good functionality for readers but search engines will count only one link

-   target keywords that you don’t know anything about: competition, monthly searches, related long tail keywords

-   there is no sitemap or analytic software

-   pages have few text content

-   pages don’t have descriptive titles and are not keyword oriented

Here are some organic SEO techniques that any SEO campaign should contain:

-    Website Analysis. This task involves analyzing all the basic things of a website: internal linking architecture, generated code, text vs html, basic SEO rules for pages (titles, description metatags, first paragraphs, anchors, anchor text, file names, image alt property, subheadings, bold and italic text), pages indexed by search engines, titles for the menu pages and so on.

-    Keyword Research. When you think about building fresh content it should always be based on a list of keywords. This list should contain detailed information about the competition, monthly search volume and related long tail keywords.

-    Keyword Relevancy. Every keyword has to be checked for relevancy. For example, if you blog about photography it doesn’t necessary means that the keyword “wedding photography” is relevant to you.

-    Content Development and Planning. Once you have your keyword list you have to know how to use it in content and how to link between articles.

-    Internal Linking. Proper linking guarantees a complete indexing of your website by search engines and you can also push forward some of your content.

-    Competition Analysis. You have to know what your competition is doing, how they are targeting your keywords and why they’re ranking better.

-   Analysis of Google Analytics Reports. Having analytic software is crucial. You have to understand metrics, how to read reports and how to interpret it, how to make decisions based on that.

-   Stay in touch with your market. Using tools like Google Alerts, Google Insight for Search, Google Keyword External Tool, Google Search Based Keywords and Google Trends will help you pick your keywords and stay ahead of your competition by knowing the rising trends.

What would you add?

I would like you to write in comments what do you think about SEO and SEM, what other organic SEO techniques you use or know, what do you think about white hat SEO techniques, what other common mistakes do you know. Share your ideas or ask your questions.

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Every business has a start. It’s so obvious when we talk about brick and mortar businesses but many people see it differently when it comes about a web-based-business. In fact, when it comes to a web business I think it’s even harder. In real life you’ll open a business in a place where there are already shops and other businesses.

Starting a business on the web can be like opening a shop in the middle of nowhere: there are no roads to you, no buses, nobody knows you exist. SEO and Internet Marketing have to be your main tools: you either pay for ads to drive traffic or you pay for SEO and build optimized content for organic searches.

Don’t Do This Mistake

One of the biggest mistakes that you could do, when you are just starting, is invest time and money to rank well on organic searches for really competitive terms or keywords that are dominated on the first page by high-authority websites.

Some would argue that you should aim high from the first day and go for the big keywords because it will get you big traffic. I don’t want to get me wrong: the final goal will be to get traffic from big terms but, in my opinion, you have to start at the bottom in order to get to the top.

If you open a clothing business, do you think you can do it right next door from (or compete with) Armani, from the first day? Why is it so obvious in real life and people act so blindly when it comes to the web?

Planning and Goals

If you decide to invest in SEO you should think about two main things:

1. Optimizing the content that already exists
2. Building new optimized content

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting your business or not: having a plan and establishing some goals it’s common sense. So, when you start an SEO campaign you should think of some things that you want to improve: metrics like bounce rate, traffic, rankings, returning visitors.

If you want to build new content don’t just go and assume you know what people are searching just because you use those keywords to search for your business. Build a keyword list that has information on the volume of monthly searches, competition, main keywords and related long tail keywords, areas where those searches are being made and so on.

A keyword list should also come with a plan on how to use it: how to target keywords in content, how to link articles, what long tail keywords are related to what main keywords and so on. If you go and skip this step it’s like walking blind on the street: you can bang your head on a wall or you can safely get home – you never know what the next step will bring you.

What Do You Think?

How important is SEO for your business? Are you willing to invest in a keyword list before you start building new content? Do you know what your market is searching for, what are the rising trends and how to properly target the keywords in content? Share your ideas and thoughts in comments bellow.

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I think that keeping it real is a common sense in any business, especially in web-based businesses. This is the big advantage of the web: you can’t fake it. You either have visitors to your website or not; you either get comments or not; you either sell or not – you can’t hide. As a result, you need to stay with your feet on the ground and keep in touch with what your market is doing and searching.

There are lots of ways and tools to keep in touch to what your market is doing: you can listen to social networks, blogs, the web, tweets and so on. There are so many ways that you could get lost. That is why I prefer to use two tools from Google: Google Alerts and iGoogle.

How I use Google Alerts

The process is simple. Create a Gmail account, then search for Google Alerts and set your alerts. My advice would be not to rush into it and create too many alerts. Every day millions of articles are being published, so keep it real. Focus on your top main keywords and some important long tail keywords.

This is not only a way to see what others are publishing related to your keywords in your market but also a way to see how the competition is using the keywords you are trying to rank for. It will also offer you an indicator of how crowded the market is: see how many articles appear in a day, week, month.

You can also use it as a source of inspiration for your own content. I don’t read all the articles I’m receiving but I do a quick scan for interesting ideas and how the keywords are used on the page.

How I use iGoogle

I’m using iGoogle because I can incorporate tables from other Google tools. The most important one for me is Google Insights for Search. What I do is basically incorporate tables to see rising trends in search for different related terms. Why is this so important: many times website owners pay money to have their websites optimized for keywords that no one searches for or have low search volumes.

Knowing what’s hot and what people are searching for and from what location can have a great impact on how you plan your business: content, products, geo-targeting and so on.

How do you stay in touch with your market?

What do you think of all this? Share your way to keep in touch with your market, rising trends in searches, problems people might encounter and so on. If you find this article useful please consider subscribing and receive my blog directly in your e-mail.

I’ll show you how to plan your keywords in a practical way and also a short presentation of how to use your keywords. Basically you need to complete two tasks when it comes to keywords. You have to think very carefully at how to choose your keywords and to develop a plan or a strategy on how to use them.

My idea on how to use keywords is based on few easy steps:

1. Choose a main keyword. Main keywords are keywords with high competition, high number of monthly searches and made out of two or more words. Although ranking for main keywords is extremely difficult you should not overlook using it in your content.
2. Develop a list of long tail keywords for you main keyword. Long tail keywords are keywords with low competition, easy to rank for, usually with high conversion rate and made out of 3, 4, 5 or more words. This will be your primary concern: ranking for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are derived from the main keyword or related to it.
3. Plan an article for each long tail keyword.
4. Plan logical links between articles that will help the reader and the search engine find more on your subject and also evaluate the relevancy of your pages for the subject.
5. Think it like a pyramid, where on top you have the article targeting the main keyword and on the lower floors you target the long tail keywords. And just like a brick and mortar structure plan links between floors and the elements of the same floor.

Now let’s get practical and think a little bit about “photography”. This market is huge, with lots of competitors and high number of searches each month. Aiming for a good ranking on the competitive terms will not be an easy task and you should expect some hard work.

When a market is that big a good thing would be to focus on a niche. Let’s say that your niche is “black and white photography”. This can easily be your main keyword because it has a huge competition of 161 million pages and a high number of monthly searches (246,000 only in US). Now, let’s start and see what other keywords we can derive from that:

-          “Black and white digital photography” with 41,900,000 competition and 2,400 searches/month in US

-          “Black and white portrait photography” with 14,200,000 competition and 1,900 searches/month in US

-          “Black and white nature photography” with 30,700,000 competition and 3,600 searches/month in US

-          “Black and white landscape photography” with 8,370,000 competition and 2,400 searches/month in US

The long tail keywords from above could also be main keyword because of the high competition but the number of searches per month doesn’t recommend it like this. So will consider these to be the first long tail keywords derived from our main one.

A thing about photography is that people are always looking for “tips”, “principles”, “fundamentals”, “techniques”, “lessons”, “free lessons”, “lighting”, “composition” and “composition techniques”. So, these are modifiers that you can add to the long tail keywords from above to go even more specific on the subject.

Remember that each time you add a modifier you should also be able to produce an article on the subject. So modifiers that mean the same thing should be used together (combine it).

You can get more ideas for keywords not only by using modifiers but also by thinking about related searches. You can think about it yourself or you can use the Wonder Wheel from Google Searches. NOTE: you can ignore words like “and”, “the”, “a”, “an” and so on, when searching for keywords. BUT be careful at singular and plural searches: it can make a big difference not only on the number of monthly searches but also on the competition.

Here are some ideas related to “black and white landscape photography”:

-          “black and white wildlife photography”

-          “black and white photography filters”

-          “black and white seascapes”

-          “black and white underwater photography”

Each of the long tail keywords from above can be used in articles together with the modifiers presented a few paragraphs before.

If you want to explore some more:

-          “black and white portrait photography”

• “black and white portrait lighting”
• “taking black white portraits”
• “black and white family portraits”
• “black and white baby portraits”
• “black and white photography kids”

-          “black and white wedding photography”

• “black white wedding theme photos”
• “black white wedding photos styles”
• “black white wedding photos invitations”

Your turn

What you think of all this? How useful do you find this kind of information? I was thinking that besides my usual articles to also write some practical ones in which to explore different markets and to show people how to apply some SEO principles. If you liked this article please consider subscribing and receive my blog in your e-mail.

The way pages of a website link is extremely important for search engines. It’s not only a way to physically link pages but also a method for search engines to establish logical relations based on relevancy between different pages. When you plan your links you have to think not only to the architecture of the links but also to the actual text of the link or where the link will land. In this article I’ll talk a little bit about the natural links: the links placed in content.

Search engines look at these links as a way to further develop the subject presented on that page. That is why a link will carry a certain amount of relevancy and authority. Based on this simple principle, that a link will help the user find more information related to the content where the link is placed, we can make some really simple deductions.

It really matters what the link says. If you have a page where you talk about the general principles of photography, for example, and another page on black and white photography then a link to the second page should have a relevant text, like “black and white photography principles”. The text is related and relevant to the content where is placed and also points to a page that talks about specifically that subject.

It really matters to what page we are linking. Links will carry authority between pages. A proper link will not only create a physical connection between two pages but also a logical one. That is why a good advice will be not to create a link pointing to another website with the anchor text containing a keyword that you want to rank for. The thing you’ll do is offer relevancy to that other website.

It really matters to where, on a certain page, the link will land. It’s important not only to what page you link but also where on that page. Use anchors to improve the quality of a link. If you link with the text “black and white photography principles” to a page that talks about that subject it will also be a good thing to link it exactly where you start talking about those principles. Maybe at the beginning of a phrase like “So here are 7 principles of black and white photography”.

That is why backlinks are so important. By now I think that this is obvious. Having other related websites linking back to you will help establish your content as being relevant to your topic. That is also why it’s more important to have 10 links from 10 different websites rather than 100 links from the same website.

What you think about all this? Share your ideas in comments bellow and lets all learn from your experience. Also, if you find this article useful consider subscribing and receive my articles in your e-mail.