So, if you’re not willing to think very seriously about developing new content, that is SEO friendly and that offers quality information to your readers there are others that we’ll do it and get your potential clients.

Here are 12 of some SEO best practices to think about, when you plan new content:

1. Think in groups. This is not only a battle of quality but also of quantity. Only one article can’t get you too much traffic by its own. Articles that target high competitive keywords must be supported by related content that targets derived long tail keywords.
2. Watch for rising trends in news. This is really big because when a news reaches a high volume of articles, searches, lots of tweets and so on, Google will enable their QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) ranking algorithm that is different from the classic ranking algorithm basically because it favorites fresh content that speaks about the rising news.
3. Have small lists of targeted keywords. Each group of articles that you’re planning should have a small list of related keywords behind it. This list will contain the main, high competitive keyword and derived/related keywords. This step is necessary, in order to develop articles that target keywords with at least few monthly searches. Many words can be related to your topic but it’s important to choose the ones that are being searched.
4. Think seriously about long tail keywords. Long tail keywords play a crucial role. The reason is because ranking for long tail keywords depends more on how well optimized your content is rather than external factors. All the good rankings on long tail keywords will improve the exposure of the article that targets the high competitive keyword and will also flow some link-authority to it.
5. Plan how you’ll link between your articles. Internal linking is extremely important not only for SEO but for improving user experience also. Because articles that target long tail keywords rank easier it’s more probably to attract incoming links. If then you link from these articles to the one that targets a more competitive term then some of the link-juice will also flow to that article.
6. Plan your titles. Titles are the most important factor of users clicking your articles. In terms of SEO, I think that titles play one of lead roles. A good title will contain your keywords for that article but also will have something that will trigger the curiosity or interest of readers.
7. Make sure you’re being crawled and indexed. Make sure you don’t have metatags with noindex that will block search engines from indexing your content.
8. Plan how you’ll spread the content. The Internet is like a big playground and if you want others to see “your new toy” you’ll have to go where the big attractions are. This means that you’ll have to identify what social networks host discussions or bookmarkings on related topics.
9. Don’t link externally with your keywords. The reason for this is because by doing so you’ll flow trust and relevancy to your competition.
10. Link internally in a natural way. Internal links should be made in a natural way. This means to have descriptive anchor text (not click here… kind of link) placed inside sentences. Don’t abuse of this and link all your pages to your main page: it will get you penalized. Also, don’t link internally with the same keyword: diversify, use singular or plurals, synonyms, related terms. Very important is to link between topic-related pages: this way you’ll maximize your SEO efforts. Be aware that more links to the same page from the same article will be considered by search engines as one: but use them to improve user functionality.
11. Users and search engines should see the same version of your content. Don’t try to cloak your pages and present different versions of your page to users and search engines. It will get you penalized.
12. Don’t stuff the footer or end of article with lots of links. Placing lots of links in the footer of your website or at the end of your article and thinking that this will improve your SEO and user interactivity is wrong. People will find it strange and will not even bother reading all your links and search engines will not assign any relevancy to those links. Links are meant to be clicked when reason asks for it. Use your links in a logical way to offer more interesting information and you’ll get clicks from your readers.

Let me know if you have something to add. Also, if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

First thing that I consider important is this: any analytic software is meant to suggest some actions. Don’t just read your website reports: you have the answer to some of your problems right in front of you. Take action and then go back and measure it.

Top Landing Pages is a feature that shows you what pages, from your website, are used as entry gates. The tip that I have for you is to use these top landing pages to direct users deeper in your website.

There are two major cases of top landing pages:

1. The main page of your website
2. Particular pages/articles from your website

In the first case you have a lot more choices to direct people to other pages but when it comes to a particular page you have to be careful and direct readers to relevant content. When you want to improve the functionality of a particular page don’t place links to general pages (I mean don’t try to divert readers to your main page, for example).

The reason is that those people arrived on that page because they’re interested in that subject. A logical thing to do would be to direct them to more related subjects and from those subjects to other pages and so on.

So, your top landing pages could be the engine of your website if you know how to proper link it to the rest of your website.

What do you think of all this? Share your ideas and experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

Tracking how effective your actions are on these outposts require different approaches, depending on the social network. In this article I’ll present a quick and easy way to track your impact on YouTube. As you probably know by now, your own video channel on YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool and a great way to drive traffic to your website.

In this article I’ll concentrate on how you can measure the impact of your videos over your website. The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that you need a strategic approach. The requirement for tracking your results is to have some kind of analytic software installed on your website. I personally use Google Analytics.

The simplest thing you can do is to look at your referral traffic and check for YouTube. In order to get some results you’ll have to edit your video description on YouTube and place a link to your website. People will click it and they’ll show up in your Google Analytics reports.

The big disadvantage of this method is that you can’t measure how effective each video is. I think is very important to know how many of your viewers for a particular video clicked the link in the description and not the overall performance of the video channel.

The solution is a small strategic decision. Instead of creating content that you’ll place as standalone videos on YouTube you’ll create video content that will supplement your articles. Each video will be designed for a specific article. And when you’ll edit the description of the video, the first thing to do will be to place a link to that specific article.

You’ll not have all your videos pointing to your home page but each video points to a specific page, where you’ll probably also embed the video. By making this small adjustment you’ll be able to track the impact of each video. You’ll know what videos work and what not and you may also find out that high number of views does not necessary means lots of clicks.

With this setup you’ll be able to go to your Google Analytics account, go to Content > Content by Title, locate a page that has a YouTube video on it, select it and as a second view option you can check for Source. Now you’ll be able to see how people reached that page. Search for YouTube and see how many visits you receive, what was the bounce rate or how much time they stayed on that page.

You can now compare the number of views with the number of visits and you can make decisions on what types of videos to create in the future so that you’ll increase the click rate.

What do you think of all this? How do you track your impact on YouTube? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

The Process of Finding Long Tail Keywords

Just like in the case of main keywords, long tail keywords have to offer a decent search volume/month and also be relevant. Once you decided that a main keyword is relevant to your website then almost all the long tail keywords that are derived from it should be relevant to your website.

Before I tell you the process of how to research for long tail keywords, here are the tools I’m using: Google Keyword External Tool (because it has information on any language or country), Google Sktool and two features from Google Search: Wonder Wheel and Related Searches.

And now, here are the 5 steps that I take in order to find long tail keywords:

1. I start with Google Keyword External. The first search is just using single words. For example for my market I start with words like: seo, keyword, keywords, content and so on. Is very important to let the tool suggest related terms that people are searching. These terms are really the starting point of my search. The same method can be applied using Google Sktool.  I choose one main keyword and then go to step 2.
2. I perform a search on Google for that main keyword. The things that I pay attention are the general competition and title competition. These numbers play an important role in deciding if a keyword is worth targeting or not. So write this down: you’ll have to compare it with the data for the long tail keywords.
3. I use the Wonder Wheel to see what other keywords people searched after the main keyword. Watch the competition and when you find something under 1 million or maximum 2 million you can go for it. Write it down.
4. I also use Related Searches to see what the search engine says that are the related keywords other people searched (these searches are not necessarily performed after searching for your keyword). Again look at the competition and make your own decision: is this keyword relevant and also have a decent competition.
5. I return to Google Keyword External Tool with the long tail keywords that I found. Keep in mind that these keywords were definitely searched by someone but this is not enough. So, you’re checking to see if the tool says it has Not Enough Data or shows you a number. Depending on your market you choose to target a long tail keyword or not. Sometimes a search volume of 100/month can be enough, other times you’ll need a few thousands. It’s relative and depends on the overall search volume trends from your market.

What Do You Think Of This?

Let me know if this info was useful to you and if you have questions. Or maybe you could share your experience. Also, please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my articles directly in your e-mail.

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.

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.

Without thinking about what you did and what you have to do in order to further develop your business I think you’ll not go to far in terms of business. So, use Christmas as a moment to think:

1. Are you happy with your financial results?
2. What do you think was the most important thing you’ve done this year for your business?
3. What methods you used to market your business on the web?
4. Are you using any social network to help spread your message?
5. How many of your goals did you achieved, this year?
6. How many people did you helped?

Evaluate you and your business and also think about the future:

1. Establish goals for the next year and think about the ways of achieving it
2. Plan your SEO
3. Think about your social media activity
4. Think about the kind of content you’re going to produce
5. Think about how you’re going to help people
6. Don’t set goals that are directly connected to money; things like: increase sells. Consider additional things that in time might get more indirect value/money back; things like increasing the number of subscribers

My 10 ideas for 2010:

1. By the end of January I want to launch my Compete Guide to Keywords (for only $10)
2. Increase the number of my subscribers
3. Increase the number of Fans on my Facebook page
4. Continue helping people with problems related to SEO and Blogging, on my Facebook page
5. Produce new content every day
6. Increase the number of requests for my services and also the number of closed deals
7. Increase the conversion of my Work With Me page from my blog
8. Create a small free guide on general SEO issues that will be offered for free to anyone that subscribes to my newsletter
9. Maintain and develop my current relations on Twitter
10. Stay focused and work hard

What is your take on all this? How do you plan your next moves for the next year? Share your ideas, opinions, experience and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog and you’ll receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

You leave me a comment, where you say what your website is and a maximum of 5 keywords you say you target in your website and I’ll take a look and see if you really target those keywords. I’ll perform a quick analysis of your website to see how you use those keywords. Then I’ll post a comment and tell you the result.

There is only one rule and one limitation:

1. The Rule: The comment must be posted on my blog, in the comment section of this article
2. The Limitation: I’ll do my best to answer as many comments as possible. And I will do this only for the comments posted on 20 December 2009 and 21 December 2009.

Depending on the success of this experiment I’ll think about similar articles in the near future. Hope to see your comments on my blog. Also, if you find this article useful you may also want to subscribe to my blog and receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

So, these are the two main directions to use this tool:

1. Enter a keyword or a domain and see related searched keywords
2. Use it to plan your keywords for your adwords

Here is how it works

1. You can enter a domain (yours or the competition) and the tool will generate a list of keywords that are related to the content from that domain. You can specify a country and a language and the list will contain monthly searches, competition and the suggested bid. The really great thing about this tool is the ability to check your competition. You’ll know exactly what they’re doing because this tool is going to show related keywords to the keywords they already use. And this is what Google sees on their websites.
2. Or you can enter a basic keyword and you’ll receive suggestions related to that keyword.
3. Or you can just browse top keywords from different categories and subcategories such as: Beauty & Personal Care, Computers, Finance, Food, Health, Home & Garden, Sport & Fitness, Travel & Tourism and many more.

I tried to keep the description as short as possible and offer you only the basic information about this tool. Now, tell me if you used it and how. Share your experience in comments bellow.

And if you find this information useful you may also want to subscribe to my blog and receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

In this moment I would say you need three basic things:

1. A constant attention to keywords and rising trends
2. A good knowledge of how to use those keywords in your favor
3. A close eye on what the competition is doing

As you can see without analyzing the competition why are you paying for SEO? It’s like saying I have the most beautiful car from an empty parking lot. It’s like worrying about the quality of the water but using a glass you found on the street to drink it. Why do you think there are spies? Because what the competition does matters.

And it matters more then you may think. When you manage to get to page 2 or 3 of Google for some keyword you have to take a good look at what the competition is doing and find the answer to “why they are 5 places in front of me?”.

Here are my questions to you. Do you analyze your competition? Do you know who your competition is? Do you monitor rising trends – what people are looking for lately, related to your business? Share your answers, ideas, questions, opinions.

If you find this article useful and want to get more, don’t forget to subscribe and receive my daily articles in your e-mail.