SEM Blog

Targeting keywords for your website can be rather difficult at times. There are a lot of direct keywords that you’ll want to focus on as a long term goal, but what about keywords that you can capitalize on in the here and now? Long tail keywords, or basically search phrases, often include your keyword or synonyms for it and are searched by individuals looking for something specific. "Toyota" probably wouldn’t be the term you start with when searching for a new car, but what about "Buy Used Toyota Yaris In Massachusetts"? That’s a perfect example of a long tail keyword. If your site fits that keyword phrase and you can capitalize on it, the visitor to your site is infinitely more important than the one who trails in from "Toyota". Your site isn’t about Toyota, is it? But it is about selling cars in a specific place.

It’s become a rather popular topic recently that as searchers become smarter, one word keywords are becoming less cost efficient and/or useful to go after. The example above shows the difference between someone looking to buy and someone looking for information. If you think about how many different things you could be looking for when you search "Eee PC" in Google (reviews, places to buy, software, accessories, and plenty of others), if you’re trying to make a sale and that’s the word that’s bringing in the most traffic, your sales potential is cut substantially. But if they searched "Buy Eee PC" and found you, you’re sitting on at least a 50% chance of them purchasing from you (depending on how high you rank).

The power of the short tail keyword is heavily dependant on the experience of those searching within your niche. More technical and research related fields will bypass the short tail to find exactly what they are looking for, but that’s not the case for all fields. The industries dependency on short tail keywords is decreasing, but that simply means you have to diversify your approach to gaining a top 10 on the SERPs for multiple terms. As this practice catches on, it may become increasingly more difficult to accomplish, but the benefit of getting started on it right now is very strong.

If you’re looking for a good long tail keyword tool, take advantage of the free service provided by Google Adwords that allows you to search for synonyms and the like for your keyword.

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Some companies have the misfortunate of unsatisfied customers who just love to post online in a very negative tone. Whether there post is in your comments section of your site or on a review site, some of these posts can be powerful enough to hit the top ten spots on Google for your keywords or for your company. This can be a dissaster for a company who is not prepared, but by taking a few quick steps, you can make sure that you have any situations like this that arise completely under control.

The first thing you should do is set up a Google Alert for your company name. Set it to as it happens so that you can keep up to date and thwart anything that happens as it does. This can be overwhelming, so you may want to set up a secondary email for this project, but make sure to keep it checking very often.

Once your companies name pops up, stop by and check on what was said. If it’s negative, figure out what the issue is. Can you solve it? Has it already been solved? And most importantly, can you prove any of that? Once you figure out your answer to those questions, it’s time to address that person directly on the board.

Your goal here is to make the situation better. If you’ve fixed it, show everyone how you did and offer even more support or more free things. If you haven’t, do so, and provide contact info so it can get done quickly. If you can’t prove your company already did something, don’t fight it, give in, this site could bring all your hard work down.

The speediness of your post coupled with the proper tone can defuse a hairy situation and also give you a really good public relations image as this page gains more steam from the search engines or even just from the community already there. Having a bad post about your site on the front page can be instant death if not handled correct.

An alternative method, yet harder and still leaving holes, is to simply build up a blog for your site to out power those top 10 and just hope nobody goes further back. Not the greatest idea, but if you just can’t budge on helping those people, it’s better than telling them off.

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Call it whatever you like: PageRank Hording, PageRank Siloing, or it’s latest name, PageRank Sculpting. The truth of the matter is, it’s all the same thing. The idea behind it is that, instead of allowing all your site links and outbound links to be dofollow, you cut off the unnecessary ones by using a nofollow tag.

Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, and Bruce Clay have all had a say about the practice, and in general the SEO community had entered a into a hype over it. But it seems that the success has been as marginal as those three voices had explained while the community jumped the gun.

It’s understandable why people dove head first into it. The idea of saving your link juice from other sites or even your About Us page seems like it would make a big difference if you cut out enough fat. With little to none spilling over an Google not crawling those links or pages, there would be more juice where you need it. You could even redirect your links from a high PageRank page to another you want to boost up, nofollowing the rest, and the idea should really make a difference.

But unlike the difference you receive from incoming links, this method provides marginal results. On an established website, this can be a project that is worth the time it takes to do correctly. With people like Nathan Buggia from Microsoft and Matt Cutts from Google speaking up about it’s benefit, if you have the time to build a sculpting plan out, why not?

The practice is in no way penalized either. You could easily achieve the same effect by setting the page to not be crawled by the robots.txt file, or even setting the entire page to nofollow through the use of meta tag data.

It would be very interesting to get a survey going and see the results of how PageRank Sculpting helps a website. If you’re interested, please answer the following questions below in our comments section.

• Do you currently utilize this method?
• Have you seen an increase in rank or traffic due to using it?
• Has the rank or traffic advanced at a higher level than that of other pages on your website?
• Have any of the websites that use to be dofollow links from your blog removed your link or altered yours?

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In your attempt to rank for competitive keywords for your site, you’ve surely considered purchasing high quality links to send you some traffic and link juice. But did you ever think about buying sites instead of just links?

A website within your niche is a competitor. But if you own the website, it’s a resource. You’ve now got the potential of additional site which could generate revenue on its own, you can easily restrict it’s outbound links from other competing sites and just point it towards your main site, plus it can occupy another spot in the SERP that your competitors will no longer have.

But sometimes managing another site can be more effort than you’re interested in. So while you can simply leave the site and just redirect all the links over to you, you could always redirect the domain name and links to your site as well, passing the value along with it. The first method is by far the most favorable of the choices, providing you already indexed content and anchor text that can help your site almost instantly.

Even websites that are relevant to your content, but not identitical will be beneficial in this method, allowing you to rank for even more keywords. The power that setting all other links on a high pr page to nofollow are remarkable in how fast your site would receive credit for the new link juice. But before you take the plunge, remember to verify all the important aspects that the specific site has to offer, such as PR, domain age, alexa index, and so on.

And if you’re just considering this method as a way to make money, you could always buy out a site and charge those listed as links from the site a fee for the link they’ve already had!

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The first step to building a website or blog is to, of course, do keyword research. You want to establish your primary keywords and their long tail variations as well. This will allow you to determine the type of competition you’ll be going up against when striving to hit the #1 spot on the SERPs, and for many, this is all they focus on.

Recently, light has been shed on a practice that Google has been taking part of, known as latent semantic indexing. Few webmasters and SEOs actually know about this type of indexing and even less actively use it.

So what exactly is latent semantic indexing, and what makes it so important?

Have you ever thought about how Google differentiates between two words with exactly the same meaning? When your site is indexed by the Googlebot, not only does it pick up on your keywords, but it picks up on the context as well. This allows it to understand that your website about Microsoft Windows shouldn’t show up in the SERPs for Home Windows.

When you enter a search into Google, you’ll notice that your keywords searched are in bold in the title and description. Now take your specific keyword and try the following:

~”keyword” -”keyword”

The Tilda key tells Google to search for synonyms of that word. The minus key tells Google to the keyword from the search. The results you’ll get will be full of appropriate information for your keyword, without using your keyword in the search.

Instead of spending all your time on your specific keywords, make sure to search for synonyms for them. Use this process for the keyword list you’ve already built, and take note of the terms that Google chooses to highlight. Next time you add content to your site, start using a few of those here and there and watch as your ranking for your main keyword begins to improve.

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When marketing decisions are made for a website, more often then not, the decision made relies solely on either PPC or SEO. While these strategies are both very strong independently, using them together an be quite powerful and decrease the amount of time and money spent to get closer to your goal.

The biggest proponent of SEO is keywords. So why would you forgo utilizing the fastest possible keyword determining method when establishing your site? Of course you need to make sure that your site is full of your desired keywords, but by the time you start ranking for them effectively, they may not be the keywords that could bring you in the most traffic. By using a PPC campaign, you select your keywords and track which ones bring in the most traffic through advertisement. The ones that work are the ones you should then focus your SEO goals on and slowly transition out of your PPC campaign.

Don’t simply think of PPC as a solution for sites that can’t be SEO’d. First off, if you’re working with a site that you simply can’t SEO, redesign it or add a blog to it. You’re not going to support your site through just PPC either. But the power of a PPC campaign to send immediate traffic and determine the right keywords for your site is well worth the investment. You may even decide to keep your PPC campaign going if you can establish a proper ROI that justifies the use of the method.

The best tool that you can possibly use is Adwords for PPC. Google clearly dominates the search engine market, so to get the best results you’ll want to use them. Their keyword tool has a free function for anyone to use but those with an Adwords campaign are capable of using a much more powerful tool to find out what the best way to approach advertising a site would be. Don’t be stubborn and decide that you want to rank for keyword X, because sometimes, that can be just too competitive or perhaps not as well searched as you had originally thought it to be.

SEO is not a fast process, it takes time. PPC is a fast process, but it takes money. Combined together, you can save yourself time and money plus better your site before you invest to much effort in an avenue that’s just not worth it.

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To the average person, SEO is like Voodoo. You have no idea how it works, it doesn’t always work, but you know a friend who knows a friend who got results from hiring an SEO firm/freelancer.

While this means that these people will clearly need your help to properly build and maintain an SEO based website, the reality of it is that they may drop you at any point if they can’t grasp exactly what you’re doing and how it benefits them. Put yourself in their shoes, unless they are the owner of that specific company, they’re going to need to answer to someone else as to exactly what is going on results wise in exchange for that (hopefully large) sum of money they’re paying you. Giving your client not only a detailed review of what you’ve done and are doing for them but also a reference point to where they can read and/or you can show them exactly why it’s important and the benefits attached to it will allow them to translate the message to whoever they may need to in a more broken down and palatable way.

Many people worry that this breeds the idea that your client would then in turn attempt this on their own, not true. The majority of beginner SEO individuals spend hours upon hours reading up online and becoming overwhelmed without actually producing the desired results. By providing them with just the necessary information, you guarantee that they’ll be able to translate what you’ve explained to them and even grasp it themselves, but that they’ll need a lot more info before they can make the jump to self sufficient, and besides, that’s a lot of work for them to take on for probably less pay. By making them sound smarter, you secure your job.

Make sure you take advantage of the information you’re providing them. Post it on your site and give it to all your clients. Reference it in any updates you may send them. Chances are, if its got info in it about SEO and it peaks their interest, they have a friend who they’ll pass it to who may just be your next client. While the site could definitely pick up some search engine traffic from these pages as well, the referral aspect will be the most powerful part.

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Links! Links! Links!

It’s all you ever hear anyone say when they talk about off-site SEO/SEM. Many people have been successful with basing their entire plan on getting just text links, but the truth is you can benefit so much more from those links being in a review of your company, product, or general website. Especially if the review is written by a consumer.

You’re link becomes that much stronger when in an article with more of your keywords and more relevancy to your site. Considering a review is a direct look at your site, you really can’t get much better of a link than that.

Let’s examine this from a few different angles:

• Credibility Of Review Location

Pro: The website that reviewed you is reputable enough and credible enough that you’ve just solidified another result in the first page SERPs that points right over to you.

Con: Unfortunately some sites just pump out reviews to fill up content and don’t even spend time with the product. Many of these sites are filled with ads and can leave a bad taste in peoples mouths, making them avoid anything listed on that site in their future searches.

• Quality Of The Review

Pro: Good reviews help sell people. The more enthusiastic the person is who reviews your site, the more likely someone else is going to make a visit over. Reviews don’t have to be epically long or contain anything special, they just have to be genuine to the person who reads it and actually focuses on the key points the people want to read about.

Cons: One of the top sites in your niche just wrote a review about your site. Perfectly written, clear points, everything. Issue is, it wasn’t in your favor. No you’ve got a negative review out ranking your main site on your keywords and everyone’s going to click there first.

If you run into any of these negatives, you can easily take care of the situation by getting involved yourself. Nearly all sites that post a review also have a comment field, so take advantage of that area to answer any issues or differences of opinions you might have with the person writing the review. Just remember not to get too mouthy or you’ll hurt yourself even more than that review did.

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The term "Hotlinking" may not be a familiar one to all of you, but you definitely know it’s meaning. Hotlinking is when someone uses a picture from your site directly off of your site, stealing bandwidth but at the same time redirecting spiders to the source image or users to the site of that picture when it is clicked on to view the image. Many people consider hotlinking to be in very poor taste as it can get you in a lot of trouble and often result in the link being removed and your site having a big gaping hole where your stolen picture was.

Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal referenced a conversation with Aaron Pratt, a member of the Google Groups Webmaster Help, in which Pratt said “anything linked to including images shows that people out there might like what you have, google then has to determine is the linking is real or make believe. :)”

The only real benefit that Baker was able to prove through all this information is that your image will gain more weight in the Google Image Searches if it is properly tagged. You won’t be getting any link juice or real due credit in any trackable form unless the image is actually clickable bringing you to its full sized form hosted on your site. As people who utilize hotlinking aren’t really in it to benefit anyone, they can easily strip away your beneficial information from the image code itself.

How do you stop this? Put a watermark on all of the pictures on your site. Make it so the visitors to the linked site realize where the image comes from, reducing the likelyhood that they’ll return to that site if they see all of your images elsewhere, and increasing the chance that they’ll visit your site organically.

Don’t invest too much time into hunting down hotlinking, as your time is better spent advertising your site then hunting down those that hurt it.

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One of the biggest issues when it comes to working as an SEO is time. Time is a four letter word that the average person never has enough of and that any SEO worth their salt will underestimate. Whatever the job you’ve accepted or are working on it, multiply the time you claim it’s going to take by 1.5, and if you’re lucky that’s where you’ll end up. Any SEO who tells you they do it in less time then they quote or even on time outsources a majority of their work.

While outsourcing may work for some, it doesn’t work for everyone. So for those of you out there looking to keep your income in your pocket while preventing your friends and family from abandoning you, here’s a list of 3 tips that will help you squeeze some extra time out of your day, specifically your morning.

1. Use iGoogle For, Well, Everything:
   By now you’ve probably amassed a significant amount of RSS feeds for SEO blogs that you look through daily. Instead of popping each open, take advantage of iGoogle’s widget feature and load up all your feeds on there. iGoogle is full of great widgets that can really help you out, like the Google Webmaster Tools and a focused news monitor to keep an eye on the niche your site is in. Also, make sure to set up your Gmail account as a widget too to make the entire process even easier. Now when you load up your web browser before your morning cup of coffee is ready, you’ll be able to get up to speed before you’ve added the sugar.
2. Monitor Your Threads With FireFox Forum Additive:
   You read or posted on those forum threads for a reason, so why not organize them and save yourself time. Instead of simply bookmarking them all and cluttering up your most likely disorganized folders, Forum Additive allows you to monitor whichever threads you choose for as long as you like, popping up notifications in your status bar. You can download Forum Additive here.
3. Listen To Your Podcasts In The Shower Or Car:
   With the incredible amount of SEO podcasts out there, chances are you’ve got at least a few you want to listen to each week. Instead of turning them on and ignoring the podcast and your work while you’re at your computer, try turning them on in a place where you can’t get any work done: the shower or the car. Much more efficient. Remember to actually download you podcasts to your system and upload it to your mp3 player before you hop in either.

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