The guide I wrote on Ranking in Google Places received/receives quite a bit of traffic. Obviously, this is a big deal to small businesses; what with Google Pages listings showing among organic search results. I’ve been tracking the types of search terms that come through to the article, and wanted to answer some of […]
You have a plan. You started a business. You even have a website. Now what?
You need a way to show the search engines that you are exactly what people are looking for when they need your products or services.
We show Google that your site is in fact what people are looking for. Our SEO solutions provide your site with higher rankings for search terms that matter, and our PPC management services get quality clicks to your site at the lowest cost possible.
By charging SEO Factor with the task of promoting your site, you increase its potential for ranking and traffic, and thus the potential for increased income. Most small and medium-sized businesses already make use of a Pay-Per-Click option, but aren’t getting the returns they should be.
From search engine optimization to PPC management, we create a custom strategy with your business’ needs and goal in mind. We don’t just drive traffic to your site, we drive converting traffic.
Posted by admin on Sat, 03/29/2008 – 15:55
Keyword Research
Understanding the search terms to pick is a tricky thing indeed. There are plenty of tools that will give us an estimated search number, but we need to understand what it is we want. Actually, we need to understand what it is they want. The searchers. The people who will be going to Google and looking for that new cell phone. Yes. Cell phone.
So I’m Joe searcher, and I need a new cell phone. I go to Google and type “cell phone.” Well poop. All those millions of searches, and I’m too overwhelmed to go through all these results. Besides, all the top results are just big cell service companies (remember I said that).
What I need is a “cell phone with internet.” That’s more like it. Now I’m checking out these different pages with information about cell phones with web browsers. This is a lot of money, I better check out a few sites (Unless I’m compulsive, or you’ve done a good job with your calls to action. We’ll get to that later).
I’ve done my research. I’m ready to buy it. I know that I want the “RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130.”
So, I looked for “cell phone,” and was so overwhlemed and unsatisfied with the results that I searched again. This time I was a little more precise in my search for “cell phone with internet.” I got to do my research, compare a few phones, and decide upon the “RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130.” And that, my new little SEOs, is the essence of the buyer’s process and the idea behind the “long tail of search.”
Long Tail
The idea is, the most competitive terms will have the most searches, but the lower conversions. The more precise the the search term, the lower the amount of searches, but much higher the chance of a purchase. You don’t search for “RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130” unless you know exactly what it is you want. Check out this handy graph:
In a perfect world, we would rank for “cell phone” and rely on the shear number of hits to your site and call it a day. That’s just not how it works here. We need to select search terms that aren’t so broad and competitive that we never see the light of day, but prevent limiting ourselves to search terms that only a few people a month will check for. Even better, we need to find the right blend of both. To get both, we need to talk site structure, so we will save it for a few more pages. For now, just remember that we will be getting a touch of both types of search terms.
Alright already. We know what “types” of search terms we need, Mr. Factor (that’s what I make my fiance call me), but how do we pick them? The same way we build a house my little Factorlets (that’s you); with tools.
« Rand Fishkin is Oprah – 9 October 2007
As your blog grows, so will your comments (hopefully), and in turn, so will your comment spam. There are plenty of great tools out there that help combat this, but before you blindly remove spam, take a look at it.
If you look at some of the comments on my post plugging Shylock, you will see that they were blatant attempts at getting a link. One wanted to have a link to his or her site with search terms that happened to compliment my site. So, instead of just deleting it, I stripped the URL, and kept the comment. Thus giving me a tad bit more content within the post, containing some search terms.
Now, this probably isn’t conducive to some of those blogs that get thousands of spam comments, but I only get about 15 a day. It’s not a large chunk of my time to glance over them.
Similar Posts
October 9, 2006 Often times we get so caught up in marketing our site and making it aesthetically pleasing, we forget one of, if not THE most important part of SEO. Content. The search engines can not see pictures, so the only way to tell them what your site is all about is to provide that information to them via text. But why is it so difficult to put text on our sites? During the creation of a site, we often care more about how it looks than how it functions. Flash, in my opinion, can be used to create some of the most beautiful sites out there. We get so drawn into making nice layouts with neat animations, we completely neglect the fact that we are building a site for the world, not just us. The content on your site should actually be the first thing you think of when optimizing it. You need to convey to the search engines that your site is worthy of ranking, and that you are here to offer something to the masses. I often give this advice to customers, and get a great deal of fearful feedback. I hear a lot of “I don’t even know what to write.” Well, your site is an extension of your business/service/whatever, and as such you are likely to be well versed in that area. But I think people get caught up in the idea that the text is going to be placed on the site, promoting the attention to variables such as what font to use, what color, how it will look, etc. The best advice that I can give in reference to thinking of text, is to close your site, use notepad (not Word. This creates problems when deciding to copy and paste), or a pen and paper (these do exist you know), and just put your thoughts to reality. Just write. Write about your business, yourself, your products, the history of your company, whatever. Just write. Before you know it, you will have well over 800 words of cryptic information all about your industry. As I write this, I am not thinking about my blog or my site, but only what I am trying to convey to you, the reader. Once you have all that information, organize it. Make it mean something, and make sense. Given enough thought, it will not be too difficult to come up with at least 500 words, which is a good amount of text to be placed on a website. Once the content is on the site, you can obviously tweak it here and there to make proper use of your search terms (this will most likely happen anyway. You are writing on or about the same subject as your site, right?). And once that is done, you can then figure out what the layout, spacing, font, and all the other wonderful cosmetics the online world can offer will be.
As with all things online, this is easier written than done. But try this method out and see if it helps. To me, writing is my very weakest point, and this helps a great deal. Content is so very important to search engine optimization, and should be treated as such.
The URI to TrackBack this entry is: http://www.seo-factor.com/Blog/bblog/trackback.php/29/
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, HTML allowed: