Your Keyword Research Is Critical

July 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I’ve had many enquires on how to do a web page and get it listed on the search engines. Many people get a web designer to do up a nice looking website about their company and expect their website to be listed on the search engine. After some time, they can’t find their website when they search for it, except when they search for their company’s name. What happened? Why can’t I find my website?

This is a common thing that people do when they start internet marketing. After the website is up and they have paid for the website, they don’t get the results they want. Then they keep wondering what went wrong.

The problem lies with the keywords that the person uses. In most cases, web designers will ask the person what does the person want. That person will most probably say that they want to advertise the company or firm, or the person is in this or that business.

So the website is designed with the company’s name or the industry name or the nature of the business as the primary keywords.

Photo by notsogoodphotography

But have you ask yourself whether do people search for your company’s name or industry or nature of the business on the web? Keywords are words that search engines use to index and rank your webpages. An example is, if your website is done up with keyword, Company A Ltd. the seach engine will index your webpages as Company A Ltd. So whenever someone searches for Company A Ltd., your website will be listed. Now, if search engine like Google indexed your webpage as Company A Ltd, it won’t appear if people search for your product lets say “Graphite Fishing Rods For Children”.

This is because you didn’t use “Graphite Fishing Rods For Children” as your keyword. So it is really simple. Use keywords that your customer will search in the search engine to find your product or services.

So how do I research for keywords relevant to my internet business or offline business?

You have to start with marketing 101…that is doing a SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is an analytical method that you use to assess your Strengths, your Weaknesses, your opportunities and Threats. In other words, you need to have a good idea of what you can do and what you can’t do. Then you need to analyse your market whether it is a lucrative market or not. Finally you need to analyse your competitors.

Assessing your strengths and weaknesses is pretty straight forward. Sell what you are really good at doing and don’t do something that you are not so good at. The point here is to be focused on either one product or service first. Don’t try to be like amazon offering thousand and one products and services and lose your focus.

Analyse your online opportunities by doing keyword research. Use Google to search for your product or service that you intend to sell.You should also use keyword search tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool and Free Wordtracker.

Generally, if there are lots of searches made and many pages in the search engine result page (serp), then it may indicate that there is a big market in that particular niche. Try to find keywords that are relevant to your product or service offering that have a balance of not too big or too small niche. To big and you have to fight really hard to get ranked on 1st page of the serp. Too small and you won’t get much traffic.

Read up all your competitor’s webpages and see what are they doing. The general indication is more competitors mean bigger market. See what your competitors are doing and imitate them. Do what all the top ranking competitors are doing but don’t copy their materials. You can get ideas from them but since you are really good at what you are doing, producing your own materials is not difficult.

Brainstorm as many keywords as you can and run each keyword through the SWOT analysis to shortlist your keywords. Remember, getting the right combination of tightly related keywords in a well balanced niche market means getting good targeted traffic with minimum or medium competition. So spend most of your time looking for good keywords. I have met internet marketers who can spend up to a few weeks to search for their keywords.

Photo by Jacob Bøtter

Finding the right keywords solve almost half your problem of getting the right traffic. The design of the webpage is the least of your worries. So emphasize on your keyword research and you will strike your own goldmine.

Once you have your keywords, you can give it to your web designer and tell them you want to have a website designed with your list of keywords. For more tips on search engine optimisation, you can go to my previous articles listed the in SEO Tips category.

Give your web designer the guidelines on what to put and what not to put in your webpages and they’ll design something nice for you which is probably search engine optimised. You can find from my earlier articles under the category SEO Tips on what are the guidelines that you or the web designer can do.

You should also tell your designer how to use your keywords in the meta tags, title page and content. My earlier SEO articles touched on this.

Finally, track and monitor your webpages and see how it is doing. If you have done it correctly, then you should be moving up the ranks in your niche.

Search Engine Optimisation is a whole topic that its best you learn something about it. Armed with good basics, you can tweak and optimise your own webpages to help it move up the serp’s ranking.

Don’t depend on your web designer. They may not know much about search engine optimisation. Remember, ranking on 1st page of your niche give you free targeted traffic to your website. Traffic means potential customers!

You can learn some of the basics first, and its good enough for you to dominate long tail niches and make some money. Once you get a hang of it, you can learn advanced SEO techniques which will give you skills to fight with the big boys and that is where big money lies.

SEO Is Easy If You Know How To Do It

June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment

If you have been to my Facebook, you would have seen that at one time I was helping a friend to SEO his website.

His website was indexed for the wrong reason. It was not indexed for the keywords that his potential clients are looking for. This is a common mistake that people always try to promote their company on the internet.

Are buyers looking for your company or looking for the product or services you are offering? Think about it, as a home business owner or small business owner, how is a potential client in Newcastle, England know what is your company’s name?

We are not coca-cola, IBM or MacDonalds where there is heavy marketing to promote the brand worldwide. We are internet marketers who provide credible solution to people’s problems. Yes you have to brand yourself as an expert in your field before people believe your product or services DO work before they buy it. But will you reach the recognition of Coca-Cola? Be realistic and choose the battle that you can win.

I have spent about 4 full days SEO-ing my friend’s webpage. I took about 2 days to research on keywords and researching the competitors, trying to understand the industry. This is a small niche so the keywords are pretty easy to find.

The next 2 days I was revamping the whole website. The original website has full flash with no content. So I learned from my teacher, Fabian Lim that its a no no.

Using wordpress, I’ve changed some php and html coding to make the wordpress theme look like a fully SEO mini-website. Actually it is still going through cosmetic changes to make it more eye pleasing. However, content wise, it is complete.

After making sure the content is written to our satisfaction, we went on live last week. Admittedly I budgeted about 1 month to get it listed on Google’s search engine result page (SERP) ranking top 10. Last night I checked and it was listed on position 1 and 2 of Google’s serp! It was ranked number 1 and 2 for all the keywords except for 1 set we are ranked 3nd and 4rd. I honestly didn’t expect it to climb the ranking so fast.

What is more exciting is, people are starting to email for quotations!

We were also ambitious to try to rank for the whole Malaysia. As at last night, it was ranked number 17, on the 2nd page.

Since this is a small niche, we don’t need to put in all the advanced SEO techniques. All you need is to do is some basic SEO steps such as changing your page title, meta tags as well as your headers. You must also write original and relevant content which include some of your keywords in the main body and sub-headers. Put your keywords into these places and let your page get indexed by Google. For more information, you can read about my earlier article on SEO tips.

Graphics and flash video do not get you ranked because it has no content. You can use the video but sparingly. Remember, Google is a search engine for giving users relevant content for their searches. So you need to give content relevant to your keywords you are aiming to dominate. People buy because of the information you have, not because they are entertained.

These basic skills are good enough for anyone to dominate their long tail niches and earn money from there. You can learn all these basic skills online at anytime of the day at World Internet Academy. I have shown you that you can learn basic SEO skills and use it in your internet business immediately to get into the 1st page of serp. Being on the 1st page of Google’s result page will give you visibility and draw in more targeted traffic to your website.

Learn some basic SEO skills now and apply it in your internet business to grow your business. Sign up for the online learning portal at World Internet Academy and I can provide you with email support on the courses available.

SEO Tips

June 23, 2008 | 2 Comments

If you have been doing some internet marketing or are just starting out. You will hear about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO being uttered. SEO, without using the same words mean that you are setting up your page that is most Google friendly.

Why do you need to do this? When you make your web pages friendly to Google then they are able to understand what your website is all about and rank it accordingly.

Everyone on the internet will first go to the search engines to search for the info that they want. The search engine result page will then list out all the relevant info requested by the user. If your page is easily understandable by google, then it can make a systematic ranking to list your web page on the search engine result page, also called serp. Being ranked on the 1st page is where you want to be, because that is where the most visibility your website get in an organic search.

Here are some SEO tips on how to optimise your web page:-

1. Do what you are best in

This has not been emphasized enough. When you start internet marketing, make sure you involve yourself in an area that you are an expert. Being an expert in the area, you will have the know how of what people are looking and you have the knowledge in providing the info people are looking for. Of course you also have the experience with problem solving as well.

If you are not an expert then you have to demonstrate you are an expert by building your credibility. So you need to really study it and understand what are you doing. There are many ways to build your credibility. Writing articles and submitting to article directories is one way of doing it. So if you are not an expert, you have an additional preliminary work of gaining knowledge and being involved in the area before you can help others reliably.

2. Plan you webpage layout

Some people design their webpage in any way they like but it may not be search engine friendly. It may look aesthetically nice but bad for SEO. You need to balance the look of the webpage while being fully optimise. You need to ask yourself this question. Do you want a webpage that looks good but doesn’t get good visibility in organics searches or do you want a webpage that is ranked on the 1st page of the serp and bring free traffic.

Remember that the search engine is your friend and being friendly with them will help you improve your ranking. So don’t do things on your webpage that will confuse the search engine.

3. Research your competitors

What you can think of, many before you have tried. So don’t re-invent the wheel. Understand your competitors and see what are they doing that get them to the 1st page on the serp. See what they have done to they web pages and learn from them. You can learn all the good points from your competitors and do what they have done but even more.

This will increase your learning curve and at least you know what you are doing is right. Also, avoid things that your competitors avoid because it is indication that they have bad experience in it or it doesn’t work. The point is you don’t have to waste time re-inventing the wheel.

4. Research your keywords

Researching a proper group of keywords will help you find your customers. If your keywords are too broad or competitive, make sure you have high level or advance skills in SEO. If you don’t then you are fight with the big boys and losing the war. Go for smaller niches and dominate it first. This will help you learn the ropes in a smaller playing field and test your skills. Once you can dominate a small niche, repeat with a bigger market with slightly more competitive keywords or phrase.

Learninig SEO is like learning math, you start with the basics and move progressively to intermediate then advance level. you can start by learning about SEO now and shorten your learning curve.

Once you have your keywords, rank them or group them into primary and secondary keywords. Then change your meta tags, page title and file name to include the keywords. Use your keywords in your content as well but don’t over do it and spam your own content with keywords. Use it naturally as your write.

Each webpage should focus on a few related keywords only. Don’t list all your keywords in a webpage and hope one of them will be picked up by the search engines. They won’t. You’ll only confuse them.

5. Start building links to your webpage

One of the many ways search engine use to rank your webpage is checking your backlinks. Backlinks are links from other pages going to your webpage. So the more the merrier, right? Wrong. Quality links is more important than quantity. What do I mean by quality links?

Quality links are links from authoritative pages and web pages that are related to your niche.

There are many ways of doing this, such as writing an article that is search engine optimised and submit it to high ranking article directories.

You can submit your webpage to authoritative directories. You can also pay for links from web pages that are related to your niche. Leaving your comments in authoritative forums and blog can also help to grow your links.

All the tips above are a topic by itself and will take a few days just to learn the basics of SEO. But it is not difficult. Technically it is very easy if you know how. If you know how to do it, you can get to the first page of the serp between 1 month to 9 months depending on how competitive are your keywords.

Most important thing is that SEO can be learned by everyone and it is not as difficult as what others say. Just that it takes time and repetitive effort to optimise your webpage.