So, What Are Keywords?

In basic form, keywords are terms or phrases, which can be associated with your website and specific content. Without targeting specific keywords, every word on your site essentially becomes a “keyword”, which can be detrimental. The reason for this is that a user may search for a term, and then stumble on your page, only to find it has nothing to do with what they are looking for. At the same time, a user that is searching for the exact niche that your site serves will likely find a competitor’s website as opposed to yours, because they have targeted and placed an emphasis on these specific keywords, and you haven’t.

Here is an example: A “silver jewelry” maker could have a website showcasing their products and services. If they do not target their specific, long-tail keywords, they will have a much harder time getting natural visitors who are interested in their website. Here, the obvious keyword “jewelry” would not be as highly valued as more specific keywords like “silver jewelry”. The keyword “jewelry” can be associated with “crystal jewelry”, “gemstone jewelry”, “pearl jewlery” etc. and these visitors would be useless to a “silver jewelry” store.

What Are ‘Short Tail’ and ‘Long Tail’ Keywords?

Short tail keywords are essentially any keyword or term which is very broad and nondescript. A keyword or term such as ‘Jewelry’, ‘Rings’, ‘Necklaces’ would be considered short tail, as the user that is searching for one of these terms is likely seeking a more exact product or result than simply “jewelry”.

Long tail keywords, on the other hand, are more or less specific descriptive terms or phrases which are more targeted to the specifics of the website itself. An example of a long tail keyword would be ‘women’s gold rings’ or ‘diamond engagement ring’. These keywords are very specific, thus targeting a keyword like “men’s gold watches” on a website that sells gold watches for men would allow the site to be returned in a search for “men’s gold watches”, thus being useful to the user.

Finding and Researching Your Keywords

Now that you know the basics, you need to know how to take advantage of long tail keywords, by researching and selecting the best possible keywords available.

There are dozens of keyword research tools available on the internet, whichever one you choose is entirely up to you. However, our favorite is the keyword suggestion tool provided by Google itself -> Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (who can have a bigger database of keywords than Google itself?). When you use one of these keyword research tools, you are essentially tapping into search term history with multiple search engines, but mainly Google. When you enter short tail keywords into these programs, they scour tens of millions of possible terms and search phrases, and then create a list of recommended keywords to use.

From this point, it is your job to analyze and carefully select each keyword that will be beneficial to you. The simple method in doing this is to compare the ‘search volume’ and the ‘advertiser competition’ for each keyword. You want to find keywords that have a high search volume, and low advertiser competition.

Search volume is, in essence, the average number of searches for that particular keyword. The higher the search volume, the more often the keyword is searched for. Just remember to try and find long tail keywords, as they will be much more beneficial to you that a short tail keyword that has 100 times the amount of searches.

Finally, advertiser competition is determined by how many people are targeting the same keyword with paid search results and advertisements. A keyword result with a large number of advertiser competition is likely to be a very competitive term, thus your chances of effectively using it will might be slim to none. Once again, sticking to a low-medium advertiser competition, as well as a medium-high search volume, is the best method to finding excellent long tail keywords.

The document given by Google to its manual reviewers containing the “quality rater guidelines” is LEAKED.

The reviewer can mark the site as spam, not spam, maybe spam. The full document is 43 pages long and definitely worth reading. Go ahead and download it here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/99359823/quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf

If the above link doesn’t work for you, let me know.

An easy way to see what people are doing is very simple. Just search on Google for terms like: “buy viagra”, “buy cialis” and the likes. See what kinds of sites pop up. Study their backlinks. You can either use yahoo siteexplorer tool or our analyze backlinks tool. Watching these results closely will give you insights of how people are still able to trick Google. You will eventually get your own ideas with time.

The people are using the “authority” of other domains by creating a page/ad on them, and then link spamming it to thousands of other forums, blogs, guestbook (probably using xrumer).

If you don’t have a blog, I would definitely recommend you to start one and do the following:

1. Start a wordpress blog, maybe at www.yourdomain.com/blog/ (blogs are so easy to maintain, even my 8 years old nephew can do that)

2. Install the required wordpress plugins to make your blog search engine friendly.

3. Every week, post at least two relevant and attractive articles on your blog. They should be focused to help your visitors, rather than focused to promote your products. Get daily blog tips here.

4. Submit each of the blog post in social sites like:

• digg
• propeller
• shoutwire
• newsvine
• reddit

Note: If you try and maintain a good network of friends on these social sites, you are bound to have a much bigger success.

5. After a month, submit your blog to 100+ blog and feed directories.

Being consistent in producing good content on your blog and promoting it on social sites, will help you in the following:

1. You will observe more sense of trust/credibility among your visitors.

2. There will be more interaction among you and your audience. You can easily form up an online community too.

3. You will get more and more quality backlinks to your blog as your blog grows. With every blog post, you are giving more opportunities to others to link to you.

4. Regular addition of fresh content will get you repeat visitors and is good for those greedy search engine bots too.

5. Your site gains more authority in its field over time.

6. You can easily syndicate content from the RSS Feeds of your blog to a variety of sources.

7. A blog also proves to increase your contacts in your niche.

Thus, you will observe how the ultimate aim to improve search engine rankings and traffic is achieved by maintaining a blog.

1. Do your website’s pages with ‘non-www’ redirect to ‘www’ or vice-versa?
They should, as search engines consider them as different pages. So, you must consolidate your efforts to a single version.

2. Do your website’s URLs have more than one variable in the URL? (SEs may find trouble indexing your site)
Lately, search engines are getting more and more capable to index URLs with more than one variables in the URL. But, still try not to include more than one variable in the URL.

3. Do most of your pages share more than 50% of the same HTML content? (For example having a BIG menu shared across the site)
If yes, you may find your pages in supplemental index without no reason. Try to avoid that.

4. Does your site contain a valid robots.txt?
It must.

5. Make sure there is no duplicate content generating on your site.
For example: the same content at www.yoursite.com/index.php, www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/index.htm
If yes, redirect all of them to a single page. If you have a wordpress blog, this may help.

6. Make sure your site is xhtml and css validated. This will prevent any crawling issues.

7. Check for broken links on your website. This makes it so damn easy.

8. Make sure to follow the Google’s webmaster guidelines.

9. Never use the same title, meta description/keyword tags on many pages of your website.

10. Keep a check on all outgoing links on your website. Keep only those links which are going to help your visitors. (When you are linking to anything, you got to see from your visitors’ point of view – not from the search engines point of view.)