SEO Hosting Blog

Keyword research is great…but then what?

In previous posts, I have talked about tools that can help you when you are performing keyword research. As most people who have even a basic understanding of the SEO world know, keyword research is absolutely crucial if you plan on figuring out what you should be optimizing your website to rank for in the search engines. At the end of the day, if you don’t know what people are searching for in search engines, you really can’t optimize for any specific keywords or search terms.

Although a lot of people have a solid grasp on the concept of conducting keyword research, things get a little more fuzzy when it comes to taking action on the information that has been collected during the course of the keyword research. I think the reason that most people aren’t as confident about how to actually use their keyword research is that most blog posts don’t focus on the action aspect of this task. However, I would like to change that today, and give you some actionable information that you can use to start taking advantage of all the keyword research that you have performed.

Order Your Keywords Like Your Website: While you probably have a list that is ordered by the search volume of the keywords, you need to take things a step farther. You’ve got a good start, but you need to break the keywords down into groups so that they are easier to use in relation to your website.

While some people do things differently, the most logical approach to this step for me is to group your keywords like your website. For example, your navigation may go something along the lines of home, categories, sub-categories, individual topics, etc. So, go through your list of keywords, and break them down into groups that can be applied to these different areas of your website. You can keep them in order of their popularity, but just be sure that the groups align with your website’s structure.

On-Page: Once your keyword research has been broken down into actionable groups, it’s usually easiest to begin with the basic on-page changes. The main on-page changes that you will most likely want to make are including your target keywords in the title, incorporating them into the meta descriptions for your pages and ensuring that the keywords are actually used without your content (remember, keyword density isn’t something you should be worried about).

In addition to these changes, you will want to look at incorporating your keyword research into your internal linking structure. Whether it’s navigational links or deep links, adding keyword rich anchor text to your internal links can definitely benefit your rankings.

Off-Page: The main use of your keyword research in relation to off-page action will be working on getting links with keyword rich anchor text. Obviously, you want to have a varied profile for the anchor text of your backlinks (having all incoming links with the exact same anchor text can actually hurt your rankings), but knowing which keywords to focus on for some of your links can have a major impact on the rankings of your website.

Although you may have your own opinions about why Google provides these tools, you do have to admit that they offer some top notch tools for webmasters.  In addition to Google Analytics, another offering from Google that has grown significantly in its ability to provide value to webmasters is the Google Webmaster Tools set.

To show you some of what Google Webmaster Tools can do for your website, let’s look at five fairly common questions that a website owner may have, and how Google Webmaster Tools can be used to find out the answer to these questions.

Has your website been compromised by a hacker?

Although no one wants to think about their website being hacked, the fact is that it happens all too often.  This is especially true for bloggers or website owners who are using open source platforms like WordPress (which I personally love, but will admit is suspectible to hacking, especially when not updated right away).

In addition to using Google Alerts to monitor if your website has been hacked, you can also use the “What Googlebot Sees” feature to find out if hackers have been adding spam to your website. See this example from Google Groups about a webmaster discovering adult keywords hidden in his website.

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If you’re the owner of a small business, you might be tempted to implement an SEO strategy by yourself. After all, it can get costly hiring an expert to do your SEO, and there are several things you can do if you take your time to learn SEO properly. Of course, you also open yourself to making many crucial SEO mistakes.

What follows is a list of 5 common SEO mistakes that will undo all of your hard word. Avoid these at all costs.

1. Targeting Broad Keywords- Let’s suppose you operate a small business that sells doors in Houston. As nice as it would be to rank for the phrase “doors,” the truth is you have absolutely no shot at doing that. Trying to do so is a waste of your time. Instead, you should try to rank for phrases like “hurricane proof doors” or “door installation in Houston.” The more specific your keywords, the more targeted your traffic will be.

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Link building can be a time consuming venture for search engine marketers and webmasters. There is no easy way to go about it, link building is hard work. Google as the search engine leader wants backlinks that are meaningful to the content of the page and on topic. Business profiles can provide a safe backlink to your important web pages.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

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We all understand the importance of proper SEO when it comes to search engine rank.  That said, many websites continue to make many serious SEO errors.  Want to know what some of these SEO errors are?  Read on …

Mistake #1 – Not Keeping Up With Search Engine Developments

One major SEO mistake is to simply not keep up with the latest and greatest search engine developments. As you may already know, search engines are continually upgrading their algorithms.  For instance, what worked a couple of years ago may not be so effective today. Thus, it is extremely important to educate yourself about all the latest search engine trends.

Mistake #2 – Not Choosing the Right Keywords

You want to choose keywords that potential prospects will actually search – don’t you?  While you may feel good that your website is ranked number one for some extremely obscure keyword phrase, how relevant is this type of situation?  Since no consumers will actually type in these keyword phrases when they search for something, optimizing a website for these types of obscure keyword phrases does not make sense. (more…)