SEO Hosting Blog

As a copywriter, I get a lot of my work from SEO companies that need copy for their clients. Typically, they’ll send me an outline of what pages they need and which keywords need to be on each page. It’s then my job to create great sales copy while targeting the keywords per their instructions. Simple enough, right?

Well, most times it is. But sometimes, I’m asked to target keywords that are grammatically incorrect. For example, on one SEO project I’m working on now for a fashion company, there are keywords like “woman apparel” and “women fashion clothes.” In the past, I remember working on a real estate website where there was a keyword along the lines of “new homes real estate Houston.” Try using that naturally in your copy.

I’m a firm believer that SEO should never trump common sense and usability. Yes, it’s important that your copy is optimized and that you target the most profitable keywords, but there has to be a compromise. If a keyword just isn’t natural or it’s incorrect grammatically, you shouldn’t try to force it into your copy.

Think about it from a customer’s perspective. If you were a customer and you came across a website with really awkward content and lots of grammatically incorrect phrases, would you trust them? Would you feel comfortable giving them your business?

I know I wouldn’t. I’d be very suspicious that it was some sort of scam or something.

So what’s the solution?

In some cases, you may be able to add a “stop word” into the keyword to make it correct. For example, let’s say you’re targeting the phrase “new homes Houston.” If you add the word “in” into the keyword, you can make it “new homes in Houston”, a keyword that’s much more natural sounding. A few stop words that can typically be added without throwing off the keyword include “and”, “the”, “of”, and “in”.

The other solution is to not use awkward keywords in your website copy, but to still target them with your linkbuilding efforts. After all, links play a much bigger role in determining search rankings than your on-site copy. So, whenever you can get away with it, use those awkward keywords on offsite links you’re getting. This way, you can still target those keywords without it reflecting poorly on your brand.

What do you do whenever there’s a profitable keyword that’s grammatically incorrect?

My head literally had only hit the pillow for about 30 seconds before I re-realized this thought again. Second place is truly the first loser. And I came to realize that more than ever just a few moments ago. My son lost is cell phone in the snow last week and it stopped working. What I should do is probably punish him and not purchase a new phone, but because I am a common idiot father, I am going to replace his phone with something even better.

So, I logged into my AT&T account and like always, they offer an array of free add-on phones for my family plan. Many of these phones were actually pretty cool. One of the phones that I thought was nice was the Motorola Karma. I can get this phone free. But at any rate, in the process of reviewing these various phones, I decided to jump over to YouTube to see if there were any reviews.

Here’s the part where I re-realized that “second place is the first loser.” When I was doing my searches for these various phones, I felt very strong at clicking the first result. What’s crazy about this situation is that many hours later — once again, head crashed on pillow only 30 seconds — I was able to fully understand the power of ranking #1 for something.

In the case with the YouTube videos, I was clearly able to see the view count of each video on the search result page. In a few cases, the second and third result had more views and in fact seemed even more relevant than the #1 listing. Yet, what did I do? You guessed it… I clicked on the first result and watched that video. Reflecting back on why I did this, I remember saying to myself, “Well… if YouTube thinks this one should be #1, then that’s the video I need to watch to get the best review of this particular phone.”

Was that true? Well, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the fact that I clicked on the #1 result, and so do most people. So ultimately, the key to success is ranking #1. And this helps another point I have made many times before in the past. And that it is better to rank #1 for a keyword that only gets 100 hits per day than to rank on page two for a keyword that gets 10,000. No one looks at page two on Google. Not many people even look at the bottom first ten results.

Ranking #1 is the key. So that being said… when it comes to doing keyword research, or targeting various phrases, etc… remember to choose keywords, titles, and phrases that you feel you have the most chance at ranking number #1. Anything below that are simply losers…

In my previous article about teaching how to research and target keywords, I explained about the importance of targeting keywords that generate qualified traffic. Now that you have an understanding of why it’s important to rank for relevant keywords as opposed to focusing on scoring tons of traffic, let’s take a closer look at two programs offered by Google that can help you drill down and find keywords that you can rank for on your site.

Keep in mind, it’s important for you to have some kind of web publishing system on your site, such as a blog, and someone who is able to write and publish content on it. For more details about this, I suggest reading my article that explains why a blog is important for SEO. That said, the two programs that we’ll take a closer look at are called Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Wonder Wheel. (more…)

Learning how to research and target keywords for search engine marketing is a valuable skill to learn. Ranking for certain keywords and phrases in search engines can deliver more traffic to your site than you can shake a stick at. But also, it isn’t always about the quantity of traffic.

In most cases, it’s about the quality of the traffic. And that is one of the most common things I believe people mistake about SEM and even SEO. In my opinion, I would rather have 100 super qualified visitors to my site per month rather than 10,000 unqualified visitors. That said, of course you can easily rank for many different keywords and phrases; however, if you own a site that sells kitchen appliances in Dallas Texas. Is there really any reason to try to rank for the search term, kitchen appliances in Alaska?

In other words, it’s relatively easy to rank for keywords and phrases that yield a lot of traffic. But, this is useless traffic that only puts a burden on your server and consumes your bandwidth. Not only is this traffic not going to convert, but eventually search engines will catch on to the misuse of keyword targeting and derank the listings and possibly the entire site. (more…)

In the business of search engine marketing, choosing the correct keywords to target is crucial towards the overall success in your online business. The folks who use Pay Per Click services, such as the Google AdWords program, their overall success depends on bidding on the right keywords. For search engine marketers who target organic keywords, the same process is involved; however, instead of bidding for keywords are you rolling the dice on whether you can rank for the keywords you target. Both aspects of search engine marketing have their pro’s and con’s and both equally have their share of stresses.

In my business of search engine marketing, I don’t fool around too much with Pay Per Click. I focus on organic search. The two primary reasons why I focus on organic search versus pay per click is because I am very good at it and secondly I have something to show for my work after it is done. With Pay Per Click, once your campaign money expires so does your listings in the search engines. With organic search, I have an endless amount of free traffic for as long as my keywords continue to be ranked in the search engine.

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