Reviewing thousands of websites in order to assess their internet visibility led me to one incontestable conclusion: many website developers build easy-to-navigate, professional-looking websites but do not understand the importance of keywords. The keywords on some websites had more to do with the content managed software and the developer than the website itself. I’ve seen websites with no keywords, the wrong keywords, and finally one website with keywords that had more to do with the content-managed software and the developer than the actual website.
The metadata on many of these sites is completely out of sync with the page content, as are the keywords (if any) associated with the products and services.
I have met with thousands of small and medium-sized businesses who understand the importance of a website but lack the budget to develop one. So, why should it be a surprise to anyone that the only purpose many of these websites serve is to act as an online company brochure for existing customers and specific prospects who, through direct sales efforts, have become aware of the website’s existence. Prospective customers who use the internet to find a supplier of the goods and services they are looking to purchase will never view these websites.
The business owner, as well as the web developer, must understand the importance of keywords for any website to be successful. Among the hundreds of millions of websites published on the Internet, keywords are the method prospective customers use to locate websites.
You need your website copy to be informative and to give the visitor a compelling reason to stay on your site longer, visit other pages, and ultimately make a purchase. Identifying the keywords your typical customer uses when searching for your products or services is imperative for website developers. Those keywords should be incorporated into the website’s metadata, page title, description, and keywords, as well as its page content. A keyword density of between five and ten percent is ideal. Any higher, and the search engines will deduct points from your ranking, and any lower, and the search engines will not consider the website relevant.
Search engines use spiders to crawl all known websites on the internet and update their search engines’ databases with the metadata found in each website, which is then compared with the content of the webpage to form a page ranking based partly on keyword relevance. Page-one ranking requires that the website be ranked as one of the top ten most relevant websites on the internet. A complete explanation of PageRank can be found in Chapter Six, “Understanding Google’s Market Dominance and How Their Ranking Works.” However, this simple explanation will tell you what you can change quickly and inexpensively.
Enter your website’s home page URL, and click on the “submit” button to find out if your website contains metadata or if its relevance to webpage content. You can use this website to get a detailed evaluation of your webpage and how the search engine spider evaluates your content in seconds. http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/
The simple report will highlight the metadata for title, description, and content, and will rank the metadata on a scale of one to 100 based on how relevant it is to the content on the page. In each category, a hundred percent relevance is possible, but anything less than eighty percent should be taken seriously.
The same test should be run on several of your website’s pages, and the ranking should be above 80% for each page. If the same metadata has been used on all of the webpages, then you need to make changes quickly if you want these pages to be searchable in their own right. Remember, occupying at least two posts of the top ten pages on page one of all the search engines will double your chances of generating business from your website.
If you want to find out how your website is currently ranked, then go to the following free online website, enter your home page URL, and see how well your website ranks against other websites for the same keywords. Please do not enter any competitor websites or your e-mail address unless you want this company to contact you about performing an SEO function on your website. In addition to confirming many of my points in the book, the report will also allow you to measure the effects of any changes you make to your website in the future. http://websitegrader.com/
PageRank is influenced by how many times the keywords appear as plain text, bold text, or heading tags in the metadata or webpage content. H-tags and bold text are interpreted by spiders as headlines related to the content on the webpage, and they are used to assess page relevancy. By confirming the webpage is what it purports to be using metadata keywords, its title, description, H-tags, and bold text, along with internal links and links from other highly regarded websites, it is then ranked against other webpages that use the same keywords.
Since the search engine spiders return to your website based on the invitation found within the robots metadata, the frequency of changes to the website, or a combination of both, continually measuring the performance of the website against other competitors is essential to retaining a page-one ranking.
The creation of inbound and outbound links incorporating the same keywords is When linking to other websites or internal pages, it is imperative to create inbound and outbound links that include the same keywords. Relevant content is measured similarly on inbound and outbound links. Therefore, be sure the URL of each page of your website contains the keyword when constructing the naming conventions. On the Mark Marketing has incorporated the keyword phrase “internet strategies” into the URL of the page at http://www.onthemark.com.au/internet_strategies.htm.
With the rise of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs, this equation has become increasingly complex. If you have visited http://websitegrader.com/ and taken the simple online test described earlier in this chapter, you will have noticed how important this is. An individual ranking for Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and RSS contributes to the ranking of a webpage, while websites such as YouTube provide links back to your homepage. It is vital to incorporate keywords into these links along with all of the other factors.
Pages with high rankings appear on the first page of Google because Google needs to provide its users with websites with content that is relevant to the keyword searched. In summary, if your site is not on Google’s first page, it is unlikely to be found, so if you doubt this, think about how you use Google. In my opinion, if it is not on page one, I won’t bother looking at it.
As we’ve discussed previously, the first page of Google is divided into two sections: AdWords and SEO. For the specific keyword that was searched, the ten websites in the SEO generic section are ranked as the ten most relevant websites on the internet.
A research tool that reveals every keyword searched on Google for the past twelve months, broken down by your local area and internationally, showing you the cost per click for that keyword would be a great place to start when developing or redeveloping a website.
Research Tools
Create a Google AdWords account at https://www.google.com/accounts if you don’t already have one. Setup of the account does not require you to run an AdWords campaign or pay Google for the privilege of doing so.
Having established your account and logged in, click on the “reporting and tools” tab, and then click “keyword tool” in the dropdown box, as shown in Diagram 3.
Please type a keyword or phrase that best describes one of your products or services in the “word or phrase (one per line)” window. You may enter more than one keyword or phrase for the same product or service on the following line. Do not mix products and services.
In the second window, please do not enter your website details; instead, leave it blank.
In addition to presenting a list of keywords, Google will also show how many times each keyword was searched last month and over the past year.
As shown in Diagram 4, click on the “download” tab and then “all.” You will see a dropdown list of the different file formats available. The selection options default to “CSV for Excel.” Assuming you use Excel, click the “download” button, and the system will download a comprehensive Excel spreadsheet containing all of the details for the keyword or phrases displayed on screen.
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| Diagram 4 |
Once you have this data in an Excel spreadsheet, click the sort button and sort the entire spreadsheet from highest to lowest by the local monthly searches column.
You now have access to all keywords and phrases searched for in your region, ranked by the frequency with which they are searched.
Use this function each time you want to describe another product or service your company offers, combining each Excel result into a worksheet “sheet” tab in the spreadsheet. Rename each of the tabs with the keywords or phrases once you have completed the process for all of them.
It is important to note that some of the keywords or phrases in this spreadsheet will not be relevant to you; it’s simply Google’s way of encouraging you to use more keywords in your AdWords campaign to increase PPC revenue. Delete keywords that aren’t relevant.
You have information about the keywords your customers use to search for your products and services. The results provide you with invaluable insight into how your customers search online. Using these keywords effectively on your website is critical to the development and PageRank of your website.
Google Insights
It demonstrates how keyword usage has changed over time as determined by Google’s Keyword Tool. The process also shows the location in the world where the most popular keywords have been used as well as the rise and evolution of the keywords you targeted. An analysis of seasonal and trend information will improve keyword selection, resulting in higher rankings.
You must navigate to the Reporting and Tools tab and select the option at the bottom of the drop-down selection, More Tools, in order to access Google Insights on the website. When you select More Tools, you will be taken to a new page and on the bottom left hand side of the list you will find Google Insights.
http://www.google.com/insights/search will take you directly to the Google Insights page.
It is relatively simple to use Google Insights. Here are a few examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search in a variety of ways. Insights for Search can help either advertising agencies, small businesses, multinational corporations, or academic researchers gauge interest in relevant search terms.
The insights can also help you identify the most effective messages for your target audience. When marketing a new car model, an automobile manufacturer might be unsure whether to emphasize fuel efficiency, safety, or engine performance. As shown in Diagram 5, consumer perceptions of car safety have increased in the past decade, followed by engine performance and last but not least by fuel efficiency.
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| Diagram 5 |
Diagram 6 illustrates a notable shift in the importance of keywords when the time filter is changed from 2004 to the present day, to the last 12-months.
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| Diagram 6 |
Diagram 7 shows a pattern of interest over all the states of Australia for Fuel Efficiency.
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Diagram 8 shows a pattern of interest over all the states of Australia for Car Safety.
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| Diagram 8 |
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| Diagram 9 |
Diagram 10 shows a drop down selection box showing further refinement of search terms used for under car safety. Knowing specifically what people are searching for when they use Google to find a product/service gives you a better chance of having them navigate to your website and converting this visit to sales.
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You can download a comprehensive spreadsheet containing all of the details associated with your search terms using the “download CSV” link, which can be found at the top of the webpage.
We will use this information to assist in achieving a page-one ranking within fourteen days after saving the Excel spreadsheet.
Create landing pages and webpages for PPC AdWords campaigns that deliver the information that website visitors are searching for. For PPC, SEM, SEO, or any combination of these offerings, this information will be invaluable and will contribute to a page-one ranking and a significant increase in traffic to your website.
Even though the techniques outlined in this book will get you a top ranking, you may still want to explore your options for SEM, SEO, and PPC to get an idea of the cost and timeline associated with these options. These programs come at a cost and have a timeline associated with them. Following is a table detailing the lowest investment required to implement these options in Australia.
This book outlines a method for obtaining a page-one ranking within two weeks without spending a dime on PPC, SEM, or SEO. It will be impossible for your competitors to counter the internet strategies you use, and they will be forced to use one or more of these programs.grams. You can be confident they will be on page one of Google for $700 a month and will remain there for another $700 each month. The cost of staying on page one of Google AdWords will also rise as competitors who run AdWords campaigns outbid each other.
Your competitors will have to spend at least $5,000 for an SEO program to increase their ranking on page one, and it will take them between three and six months. They should also know that they will have to pay ten percent of the fee every month in order to maintain this position. As part of an interim strategy, they may also need to run a PPC campaign while the SEO program makes progress.
Rankings achieved through an SEO process can be affected by changes made by Google at any time. Since multiple companies compete for the same SEO ranking, anyone who starts an SEO process must maintain the process continually in order to keep their ranking.
In conclusion, the internet strategy outlined in this book secures and maintains your SEO ranking because it leverages the same principles Google uses to deliver content-rich websites to its users, and these principles will never change. You can block your competitors in your market from adopting the internet strategy if you are the first in your market to adopt it.
These comments may help you determine who you should contact if you do not currently have a website and want to develop one.
To find out what the industry considers the website development process to be, I searched Google for “website development process.”. However, I was surprised to find that only two of the top ten website developers mentioned the use of keywords, and in both cases, the mention was very casual.
Despite slight differences in opinions, all ten websites included analysis, specifications, design and development, content development, code development, testing, promotion, and then maintenance and updating.
It is through this traditional method of website development that many first-class design concepts are developed that are both easy to navigate and highly informative for visitors. As well as producing poorly ranked websites, they also produce websites that are impossible to find via search engines other than by their URL.
Only one website mentioned SEO (search engine optimization) and recommended that it be done after the website had been developed. Despite the fact that this approach would require significant changes to all the work done at the beginning of the project, I can not understand why these so-called specialists recommend doing this work at the end of the development process.
Designing websites needs to be reevaluated in this industry. Rather than building websites based on traditional methods, start building them based on keyword research that confirms what search engine users are actually using to find products and services.
Using keyword research can help to create URL page names, titles, descriptions, and the keyword groups that are associated with each page. Using the keywords for each web page as a starting point, develop the content and graphics for the page.
Instead of starting at the end and having to rework what you started with before you reach the end, I propose starting at the end and working towards the beginning.