SEO UPDATES

When you did the keyword research for your website, you probably found a lot of simple words you’re now incorporating into your website. These general terms are things that many people search for, and are not necessarily going to help your business or website to be number one in the search engine for, other than bragging rights.

What you need to find are the long tail keywords. Keywords that are searched for far less, but searched for by people interested in something specific enough you can be pretty sure they’ll buy if you are offering something that remedies the problem.

Are you wondering how to search for long tail keywords? There are a couple ways. The first way is to use a site like NicheBot to find the terms that people are searching for. Good long tail keywords can be three or even four words long. These keyword phrases are things people actually type into the search engine. Think about how you search on Google. Do you just type in one word or do you type in a full phrase? Some people even type in questions, complete with question marks on the end!

The second great way to find long tail keywords is ask people. Start with your friends and family – tell them your niche and then ask them what they would type into Google to search for your product, service, or site. The more people you ask, the closer you will get to understanding how other people (that aren’t as close to your subject as you are) look for what you have. No jargon, no buzzwords, just the real searches. You can use this information to add important keywords to your website.

Many people enjoy using flash on webpages. They feel that moving images and movie-like quality make a website seem more flashy, more professional, and cooler. The problem is that when you use flash Google has no idea what that super-cool movie says.

What does this mean for your SEO? Any keywords you use in your flash graphic or header are worthless – it’s like giving part of your website away for nothing in return. If you’re trying to target keywords for organic search, every keyword counts. Google doesn’t know if that section of your website is relevant or high quality. It just sees it as space, because search engine spiders cannot crawl that area.

Even if you think that flash is amazing and high quality, do a survey of your demographic. The odds are they would feel less overwhelmed finding information if there wasn’t a bunch of moving pictures distracting them from your menu or content.

Making sure your website is simple to navigate and easy to read is a far better alternative for both your website visitor as well as the search engine ranking of your website.

Everything you do for your website should be geared toward your visitor and the search engine. When in doubt, definitely default to the needs of your visitor, because even if Google sends oodles of traffic to your website, it won’t matter if your website usability is nil due to a bunch of flash graphics all over your site.

Keeping it simple can not only save your pocketbook, because flash is not inexpensive to contract, it can also help your conversion rates once you do get visitors to your website.

Pay Per Click consultants and agencies are holding their collective breath…

Yahoo! Is going to use Google for paid search…to see how it’s going to go. According to Marketwatch.com - Microsoft and it’s increasingly aggressive acquisition deal is freaking out at Yahoo! using Google paid search. The head of legal is saying that will bring 90% of all paid search to Google, a possible antitrust problem.

But the ads Yahoo is planning on using will only total 3% of all paid search, and they’re only doing it temporarily.

This is fantastic for those of us doing PPC, because Yahoo needs to find a better way to run the backend of their PPC campaigns.

The Yahoo backend is clunky and confusing, while Google’s MyClientCenter is sleek and easy to use. Yahoo could take many lessons from Google and I hope they do during this possible try-before-you-buy time. If Yahoo could incorporate some of the Google strategies of backend usage as well as not making it darn near impossible to work with Yahoo if you haven’t already spent $1,000 with them would make my life as a PPC consultant so much easier.

Yahoo has the right idea. If your system is broken, look at someone else’s (preferably someone that has paid search in the bag, like Google does) and use the knowledge to improve your own systems.

Or just merge with Google PPC so those of us running campaigns don’t have to spend three times as much time to run the same campaign we do over at Google. It’s just silly.

So you’ve got your page titles, image title tags, and keywords all picked out.

Your copy is amazing and you have everything in order.

What does your navigation structure look like? Do you have pages labeled “About” “Home” and “Services”? Have you researched the keywords you want to use for your page links? If not, you should be doing your Search Engine Optimization due diligence and research the best keywords for your page links.

For regular websites:

• Make sure your page titles are keywords - Instead of “Home” call that link “Name of Company” so the linkback points to the right page with the company name instead of that page just being labeled as “home” by the search engine spiders.
• For the “About” or “About Us” page - Make it a little more interesting and help the search engines love you. If you were an accountant or financial advisor, call the link “About the Accountant” or “About (your first name)” something a little more specific than “About” will help the search engine know what’s behind the link.
• The “Services” page is more neglected than most pages - You could either split your services into categories and label them accordingly (so the page behind the link matches, thus giving it more weight in the search engine.) Or, you could do something as simple as saying “Financial Services” instead of just “Services.” Again, a little can go a long way, as long as you do something beyond doing the bare minimum.

Images are becoming more and more important when it comes to Google.

When you insert an image into a blog post or a website, you need to be making sure you’re adding the title tag attribute to the picture. The title tag tells Google what the picture is, and pictures hold more weight when Google spiders crawl your site.

If your website says flowers for sale, it could easily be a scraping site just pulling feeds to make some quick cash. But if you take the time to put pictures of flowers on your site, Google thinks that means you are probably more legitimate because you put pictures of flowers for sale on your site.

Make sure you use keywords in your title tags whenever possible. If you have a picture of a flower on a gardening site, don’t just put “flower” or “rose” as your title tag. Put something like “we have the best roses at the best prices.” You could specify red roses or yellow roses if you have different pictures on your site.

Using the title tags can really help boost your SEO presence online, and will also help Google bring you targeted traffic by making sure that when people search for what you have, they find your site, your pictures…and your flowers.

Alt tags, while not quite as important as title tags, should not be forgotten. The alt tag on a photo is what the little box will say that pops up when you hover over the photo. This can be as simple as “You can buy these!” or you could just duplicate what your title tag says. Having those little boxes pop up with words in them entertains your potential customers while letting them know what they are looking at.