Tutorial Skill Level: Intermediate

Words to know

1.SEO   2.keywords  3.search engine   4.demographic(s)   5.KEI   6.sales copy   7.content   8.conversion

In the first part of this series, “Exploring SEO, (without getting lost)” we briefly touched on the subject of keywords. In this second part, “Keywords, The foundation of your SEO campaign” we will take a closer look at keywords and their functions as well as explaining how to go about choosing the most effective ones for your website in order to have the best chance of making it to that coveted number one SERPs position.

Choosing the best keywords to optimize for is arguably the most important part of planning the design of a website. Thought must go into who will be using the website because different groups use different search terms to find the same thing. The most direct approach would be to talk to your target demographic and ask what they would type into the search engine to find your product or service. You will find that people use vastly different search terms.  Let’s say you own a dog grooming business and you want to optimize your home page. The first thing you must do is find out what search terms pet owners, (your target demographic) use to find the service you provide. This can be accomplished in several ways. Use your imagination and come up with a way to ask your current customers how they would find you on the internet. Polls, quizzes and questionnaires in the waiting room or on the sales receipt, or just asking. This is the real world and these are the people you want to find you so trust what they say. Once you have come up with maybe 10 good search terms, it is time to do some research.  The easiest way to research these keywords is to use one of the keyword tools such as http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com which is, as the name implies, free and very effective. With this tool you can generate hundreds of potential keywords from the ten you already have and even get the KEI, (keyword effectiveness index) of each word. Briefly explained, the higher the KEI, the more popular the keywords are, and the less competition they have, which means they have a better chance of getting to the top of the SERPs. One thing to keep in mind when choosing keywords is that you will be using these words to describe your good or service within the content of your website pages. Words that will be hard to integrate into your written sales copy may not be as good a choice as more “natural sounding words” no matter their KEI. Search engines are surprisingly “smart” and are getting smarter all the time. If your written sales copy or page content does not “flow” or sounds “forced” and littered or “salted” with unnatural keywords you could get tagged as spam and this will negate all of your efforts. A good rule is to write for your human visitors using keywords with strategic purpose, always trying to sound natural. To hear Google tell it you would think page optimization is right on the verge of cheating, but as contradictory as it my sound they also offer advice on how to do it. A search on Google for keyword suggestion tools will deliver many very good and free tools to help you choose but the one way that I have found to be most effective is talking directly to the target demographic and using the words they use. This will bring users who are actively looking for your product and the chances of a conversion is far greater than if the visitor just stumbles on your site by accident.
Once you have the best keywords chosen it is time to begin optimizing your pages. A good practice is to start with your home page and when that has reached the top, move on to other pages of your website. When the search engine spiders crawl your website they begin from top to bottom and from left to right, just like humans. It is for this reason that your keywords must be at the top of your source code. It is a good Idea to use css for page formatting and to keep the navigation below your content. Because we are getting into the next subject of the series, “Keyword placement within your source code” I will pause here until the next installment. Look for it around mid Oct. Definitely before Halloween!……….. Boo!

You know those old western movies where the cowboy rides into the ghost town and the wind is whistling and blowing tumble weeds across the dirt street. The saloon doors swing back and fourth, he looks up to the second story of the hotel and the curtains snap shut, Aha! life! Well thats what my forum looks like except for the curtains. If anyone is reading this, first comment, then join and post in the forum! It needs a jump start. If people see posts they will post but nobody wants to be the only resident of a ghost town. Help me out!

I have been to a good deal of websites devoted to web design and SEO or search engine optimization and I can never get over the ones that advertise “guaranteed #1 placement on Google”! I often wonder how many people fall for this blatant misrepresentation of the facts. You see, it is possible to get to number one on Google, and every other search engine for that matter, as long as you target keywords that no one else is using. I do know of a few website owners who made it to number one and then  jumped for joy until it was made clear to them that everyone should be number one for their own name. The problem is, how many users will search for them by name? Worse yet is the unsuspecting website owner who hires one of these “SEO pros” and pays a lump of money only to find out that their site is ranked number one for a search term that no one would ever use to find a business such as theirs. The “SEO guy” has met his obligation and delivered the promised number one placement and the client is left scratching their head wondering how they could have been taken for a ride so easily. I guess the moral of the story is check the SERPs, (search engine results pages) placement of the SEO firms website and ask what search terms they are optimized for. Also you should determine the search terms that your website is to be optimized for. There are many very good tools that can help to determine the best keywords for you. Make sure that people in the real world would use the keywords you choose to find your business and last but not least, NEVER fall for an “SEO guarantee”!

I wonder what was going on in the first web designers mind to create a web design for free? It is clearly too valuable a skill to be given away for nothing. You know,  I take that back. The website design field has become more and more low budget as more and more of these “free websites” are poured onto the web like slop into a trough. I think at least when one had to pay for a design and development of a website they put a little more thought into what they were doing. The internet was still a place for information exchange and websites were something to be proud of. When a designer created a website for a client there was a certain degree of art involved and the designer considered the design their work. The website owner was vested in the quality of their site. They had something invested so it had value to them. As websites became just a “feature” of your hosting package we lost something. Web hosts realized that one pays for a design only once but the revenue stream was continuous with hosting. The designer was effectively cut out of the loop and his profession was degraded to something considered unnecessary. As a result the internet has suffered considerably. Not only has it become an ugly place visually but intellectually it has suffered as well. Now that anyone can have a website, anyone does. The fact that nothing has to be put into building a website has made websites with nothing put into them. These garbage sites stain the web like the carpet of an untrained dogs house. It is shameful what we have done to a great accomplishment of man. What could have been a tool for the aggregation of the combined total knowledge of mankind is now littered with useless bits and pieces of poorly put together sales brochures and porn. The entire internet is little more than a collection of cheap advertisements and incorrect information interspersed with a tiny amount of quality sources of factual data. I truly believe that we can trace the decline of the internet to the increasing ease with which the completely unqualified and shamefully uninformed can put a “free” website on the web. These “free” websites have “cost” humanity more than the perpetrators of this travesty can ever know. Not only has it very nearly eliminated a thriving profession, it has literally destroyed one of the greatest achievements of mankind. Or maybe it’s just me.

Tutorial Skill Level=intermediate

In order to get the most                      1.SEO     2.SERPs    3.keywords            4.meta tags
out of this article you                          5.inbound link       6.outbound link      7.reciprocal link
should be familiar with                         8.HillSiteDesigns
a few basic website design terms.

No matter what it is that people want to advertise, goods, services, business of all kinds, it seems these days, that websites are the preferred method of getting the message out to the public. The problem with that is getting people to see all these websites. In order to be successful a website must be seen. An internet user can’t see a website if they can’t find it. Being found plus being Seen equals Success!
The most common way a potential customer finds any one website is through search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. The user typically types in a search term or “keyword” and viola! up pops several websites dealing with goods or services related to that “keyword”. This listing is called the “search engine results pages, or SERPs results” and in order for your website to be seen by the searcher, it usually must appear on the first page of results. Because there are anywhere from 10 to 50 websites on the first page, users rarely search past the second page of results. Of course the goal for any website owner is to appear at the top of the results, like top 5 or better and with everyone trying to do so, it is very difficult to obtain a top 5 placement on any search engines’ results page but IN ORDER TO BE SUCCESSFUL, THAT’S WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN.
It takes hard work and great patience but it can be done. The methodology behind getting a website to place well in the SERPs is called, search engine optimization or SEO and there is a whole industry built around this art. Building a successful website is not possible without addressing SEO, or search engine optimization. The majority of website owners have heard of SEO, and many have tried it themselves but just as many have no idea what it is, or what is involved in the process. SEO is continuously changing partly do to the ever growing list of techniques that become available and partly because the search engines like to stir it up every now and then by changing the rules on us just as we learn the old ones.

In defense of the search engines,(not that they need defending) I must add that they are only trying to do their job, which is to give the user the best possible result every time a search query is typed in and although it is debatable, they do a pretty good job of it. Of course Google being the best at it. It is hard to empathize with the search engines unless you consider what they are up against. The “bad webmaster” who is constantly developing ways to circumvent the algorithms that sort through the garbage and, quite successfully deliver quality websites in the search engine results pages, or SERPs and the unskilled webmaster who has a quality website but has no idea how to optimize it for good placement.                          Google has been quite successful in it’s efforts to develop methods of “thinning the herd” of useless websites that offer no real value to the user. I may sound like a broken record but it is important that we always remember when we create a website for the internet is, that the web was not created to sell merchandise. It’s original purpose was, and still is, to allow the world to share information without geographical or temporal limits. The search engines take this very seriously, even if the average user does not. Don’t get me wrong, the search engines want to make a profit just as much as we do but like us, they want to do it by providing the best possible service and that means quality results.
The basics of SEO are composed of certain tasks that when performed correctly can greatly increase the chances of your website appearing at the top of those results the user sees. Each search engine uses a different but similar algorithm taking into consideration many factors including but not limited to, keyword usage, inbound and outbound links, amount and relevence of content and many others. Without going down the line and listing the many many aspects of the search engine algorithms that determine where a website appears in the search results, it is still possible to educate one concerning the most effective and “painless” SEO techniques that a webmaster can practice on a day to day basis in order to improve their websites placement in the SERPs. In the following segments we will attempt to outline the various points you should focus on to bring your website to the top. At first it may seem impossible with the amount of competition out there but in reality that serves in your favor. Typically, any SEO campaign takes weeks or even months before any measureable improvement takes place. This is where our patience will pay off big.
When your more impatient competition gives up, you will have begun to see positive results and if you will just keep plugging away, that top ten position will come. In the following segments of this article, We will take you through the process of web page optimization with the goal of obtaining a top ten search engine search result. The easiest is probably “keyword” research and placement in your pages meta tags. We start with this one because in the development stage of your websites construction is where keywords should be addressed. Look for the next segment of this series sometime after my birthday on the 18th of Sept.       Until next time, “Get to work”!

I have been spending more and more time sitting at my computer typing away. My children come and go. One of them said something the other day…I think. The dog needs to go out…maybe that’s what she said. I went to a football game that my son played last Saturday and all I could think about was promotional ideas for the sites. I want success and I want to give my children everything they need and most of what they want. I want us to be happy. I need balance. I have run across a tool that will help establish, (I say establish because I hope it’s permanent) a degree of balance in my life. The tool is LinkReferral.com and so far, using it has increased my website traffic by about 17%. Now 17% does not sound like a lot but in terms of website visitors it is a very respectable increase for just 20 minutes effort. The site has pros and cons but I have already mentioned the cons in another post. I think over 100 hits in two days is a pretty good pro.

I have just run across the absolute best thing since we crawled out of the soup. Well maybe that is a slight exaggeration but this is really cool. It’s an open source application written in php that runs on your server for live customer support. The name is Crafty Syntax and I love it! I had no trouble with the install and even if I had, there is a feature that calls a support tech to help with the install. It is highly customizable and good looking to boot! I will quote the developers description of this wonderful piece of software because I don’t want to forget anything.

“Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH) is an open source live support solution that helps customer support with live help functionality that can be proactively pushed to visitors to your site or requested by the consumer. Crafty Syntax includes a large range of features to allow multiple operators, multiple departments and multiple languages to be used.
Crafty Syntax Live Help is free and is progammed in PHP with Mysql for the datatabase. Other highlighted features include the ability to create your own questions, auto inviting visitors, referer tracking, page tracking, ability to view what the customer is typing as they type, multiple chat sessions, sound alert, leave a message if offline, push urls, quick responses, Customizable graphics, and multiple operators. runs on your server and is open source GPL.”   What this means in English is this piece of software is designed as a live help feature of your web service site. Some of the features of Crafty Syntax are that it allows you to monitor your traffic in real time as well as sit at your monitor and push URLs to your user. It keeps track also. You can see where your traffic is coming from or what keywords they used to find your page. This is extremely valuable for SEO work.  It helps in sales as well.  Say you are watching a user surf your pages and as soon as they land on a certain page, you display a graphic that promotes a feature or addl. service. The options are limited only by your imagination. I love this software and admire the creator of it. So I will say, even though it is open source and released under the GNU/GPL license it is only fair that if you decide to download and use it that you use the paypal donation buttons so we can keep this guy writing wonderful software like Crafty Syntax.

I am so impressed with this work that I will offer the free download link right here which I NEVER do.
DOWNLOAD

I fully recommend this software but of course I am not responsible for any adverse situations arising from the use of Crafty Syntax.

I belong to a traffic exchange, (I know I know) called Link Referral and Exchange and the way it works is after you register, your website appears with a link and description. You are required to visit 30 websites a day, review 5 of them, pick a favorite, and make a post in their forum. For this your website is rated and ranked somewhere among the list of sites in the category you select when you sign up. The ranking is based on the quality of your reviews, given and received, plus the amount of participation in the forums. If you do your previously mentioned duty every day, your ranking is high enough to place you on the first page of the sites in your category and you receive a decent amount of visits. If your rank falls so do the hits you receive. It is an OK system. The issue I have is, I’m a web designer. I am trying to get people to contract me to build a website for them. When someone joins this type of service they already have a website. Plus it is no secret that the type of visits you get from these systems are not of the greatest quality. I do it mainly out of vanity. Yea, I’ll admit it. I want to read the reviews I get. So I’m getting 5s across the board every day since I joined, (the highest possible). Then some putz gives me a 4, which lowers my average, so I go to his site and it’s a blog. A prefab cms blog. A no talent, no style, no design blog. I go “high order”, (an old explosives term which means… “postal”). This poor review means nothing in the grand scheme of things. It is a stupid little comment from a stupid little person. Why do I want to do evil things to this individual? Of course I reviewed his site. I want to say I was fair and that the review was uninfluenced by the one he gave me…..NOT! To my credit, I did not say anything that was not true. Now I’m having regrets. Although I was honest about this persons website, They may have had as much pride in it as I have in my work. It may have taken them a great deal of time to put it together and considering the wording of their review they probably struggled to get it up and running. I detected no malice in their review of my website just an uninformed opinion. Something we are all entitled to. I may very well have taken something very dear to this person and for no reasons other than pride and vanity completely trashed it. The culmination of countless hours of this persons life, none of which they will ever get back, shattered by a few cruel words that did not need to be said. This poor individual, that I never so much as met, may never attempt another project of this scope again. I know now that no matter how bad the review I get I must realize that they are only doing what they have been asked to do and they are probably being as honest as I am. What gives me the right to react out of anger. Who am I to literally have the creativity stomped out of them like a big ugly bug. I feel so utterly and completely evil. I may have, out of anger, deprived the world of another…. blog…oh &%#@ em. Who needs the no talent piece of $%&@.