Over the past few weeks several people have asked me questions to find out how they can improve their listings in general and how to get listed in their local Google listings in particular. Lots of the Wix users are local businesses and small business that rely on their website to get noticed online by potential users. So I’ve decided to post a simple step by step rundown of a few tactical steps you can take to get yourself listed in the right places, and use the competition for your own benefit.

Step 1:

Start searching for keywords relevant to your business and location. Try all the combinations you can think of. For example, if you were to search for a pizzeria in New York, you may use several different combinations.

What you’re looking for is a list of competing and closely related businesses. Imagine you were one of your clients, what possible combinations might you be using to find the service or product you’re looking for?

Step 2:

Start making lists of the businesses that are consistently getting top rankings. The more keywords (word combinations) you try, the more listings you will become familiar with. Get to know your virtual surroundings. For the best results I suggest you get a few dozen listings from your research. You can start a spreadsheet to follow the different data you’re about to derive from each of these listings.

Step 3:

Explore each of these local business’s online profile. Don’t click on the name of the listing, visit the reviews by clicking on the reviews link next to the listing. Each page listed here is a page with information about the restaurant, reviews and information that Google found about the place.

Step 4:

Scroll down the page to the “More about this place” section. This is where you’ll find a wealth of links to websites that contain information and mention the restaurant. This is your goldmine, as you can probably find lots of great places to get listed yourself.

Each of the website’s listed here is a website that Google is crawling for information on that restaurant. You can visit many of these websites and list your own Flash website. Make sure that there is a consistency in your listings, that the phone numbers and address are consistent and true. Google places as much emphasis on quality as it does on quantity, so if you’ve listed yourself in a million places, but those websites are irrelevant or the information on them is irrelevant you’d be doing yourself a disservice.

Even if you don’t care about being listed in local directories but you care about promoting your website, this is a good tactic, as it will bump your website up in terms of ranking. Google will see many good website’s pointing at it and it will consider your website more relevant important.

Step 5:

If you’re feeling particularly industrious you can do the same thing for the “reviews” and “user content” sections. Here you’ll find many more links. Do this process thoroughly and you will reap what you sow. Don’t think small. I recommend you try to get between 50-250 listings, even if it takes you a few days, and of course depending on the level of competition in your field and your area.

Many of you often ask me how to get the search engines to crawl your website more often. Well, the simple answer is that you need to get your website noticed. That means, generating as much traffic as possible and having as many good and established sites pointing at yours, drawing the search engine’s attention to your web page.

Well, we’ve been talking about SEO for a while, but it just may be that you’re not familiar with all the terms I’ve been using in this blog and others that may be helpful in understanding general SEO. Here is a compilation of basic SEO terminology:

Analytics: This is a type of software that enables you to track all sorts of information on your website, such as the traffic to your website, the sources, the keywords, the bounce rate and a useful comparison to the past, so you can assess your website’s growth, strengths and weaknesses.

Alt Tags: Short for alternate text. This text is associated with graphic elements and describes images so that search engine crawlers know how to index a specific image.

Anchor Text: Anchor text refers to a word or phrase used as a link. This is used by search engines in the ranking process.

Back Links: A synonym for incoming links. These are links in websites other than your own, pointing at your website.

Bounce Rate: The rate of visitors to your website who choose to leave your website after viewing only one page, and ‘bounce’ away.

Cache: Cache refers to copies of your website stored in the search engine’s database or on the user’s hard drive. This makes it possible for web pages to load faster when you hit the back button for example.

Directory: An online categorization and listing compiled by humans.

Google XML Sitemap: These are xml files that list the URL’s on a specific website.

Internet Promotion: Marketing done on the internet through emails, banners and other web based techniques.

Keyword: This is a word or a phrase (which could include even four words or more) that describes a product or service and is used recurrently.

Link Building: The process of obtaining quality incoming links or back links in an effort to encourage the search engines to trust your website and increase its ranking and importance.

Link Farm: A group of highly interlinked sites with an agenda of inflating the popularity (PR) of the websites. This is considered an illegitimate technique, spamming of the search engine index process.

Meta Tags: These are tags that are not visible to your website’s visitors but provide important information to the search engine crawlers. Some of these meta tags are visible in SERP pages.

Meta Keywords: These are the keywords that appear in the meta tag. In the Wix website builder, this tag is accessed through the settings box at the top of the builder. Customarily you would enter around 7 keywords. These keywords will only be seen by search engines or by viewing the source of your website.

Meta Description: A description, about to 200 characters long that is not visible on the actual website but appears when your website shows up in a SERP.

Meta Title: A short title – up to 70 characters long (when optimizing for Google) that can be viewed at the very top of your web page as well as any time your website shows up in a SERP.

Natural Listings/Organic Search Results: Non-paid listings in search engine result pages.

Optimization: The process of strategizing and tweaking your website so that the content and structure of the website is best suited for search engine crawlers with the objective of getting listed and ranked well by the search engines.

Out bound links: Links directing to external URL’s outside the website.

Page Rank (PR): This is a scale named after Larry Page (one of Google’s co-founders) which estimates the importance of a web page. This is estimated on a scale from 0-10.

Page Views (Impressions): The number of times a visitor views a certain page or a specific ad.

Redirect: A user who attempts to enter a certain URL is automatically taken to another page without clicking on anything. There are different types of redirects. Redirects are generally not good for page rank.

Search Engine Ranking: A measure of the popularity of a specific website based on its placement in the results page for a specific keyword.

SEM: Search engine marketing.

SERP: Search engine results page. A list of the pages that come up when searching for a specific keyword.

Spider: The search engine’s ‘crawler’ or ’spider’ which scans your website pages in order to index it.

This week I’d like to talk to you about a great new feature being introduced to Wix. Many of you have used Wix to create a Flash website for your business or non-profit organization and this could be particularly interesting for you.

So first things first:

• Wix is introducing a new deep linking feature. This will enable you to send links directly to the inner pages of your website. For those of you who are still confused consider what has been happening with your website until now. Anyone who enters your website is automatically redirected to your homepage.  With the new deep linking feature, you can send visitors to a specific page, leading to a better promotion of inner pages. For example, suppose you have a pretty large photography website, and you’ve met a potential client. You have a specific picture you think will be perfect for him. Instead of sending him to your website with a list of explanations on how to reach the exact picture, gambling that this potential client has the patience and determination to actually reach this page, you can send him (or her) directly to the photo or gallery page you want. Good idea right?

At this point, this feature will only work on regular pages (as opposed to mini-pages).

• Getting Inner Pages Crawled. This part of this post is in direct response to recurring queries that have been sent to our support department. Some have noticed that Google will index your inner pages and they will appear as additional results to search queries underneath the homepage result. In some cases, when you change your website’s description you will see that it has been updated in the main result, while these inner pages are still accompanied by the old and outdated description.

This happens in cases where your homepage is crawled and your inner page is not. To see this, visit the cached view of your inner page and compare the date that appears in the header at the top of your page with the one listed for your homepage.

To see the cached view either click the ‘cache’ link which appears alongside your website’s URL in the Google search results, or enter the following search:

Cache:http://www.domainname.com

The solution for this is simple. You must wait until your inner page is crawled and you can hasten this process using the same techniques you used to get your Flash website crawled. You are welcome to browse other posts that appear in this blog for more tips.

One last thing – many of you have been sending different support questions through the comments option. The bad news is that I can’t answer all these support questions through this blog. The good news is that you can easily get an answer through the Wix support. That’s where you can get answers to any technical or even non-technical question you have!

Good Luck!

Your website architecture is important both in terms of its target audience usability and also when taking search engines into consideration.

Focusing on the search engines for this post remember that your site architecture may influence and affect your page rank and traffic, particularly for inner pages. A higher page rank doesn’t necessarily ensure a higher ranking in search results, but it helps. It also tells your users that the information on your page is reliable, having passed the Google test.

So what does ‘flat architecture’ mean? Flat architecture is the alternative to ‘deep’ or ‘nested’ architecture. A deep architecture refers to a long chain of links, leading to inner pages, while a flat architecture refers to a system where practically no link chains exist and each page can be reached in one, two or three links.

Having a flat website makes it possible to access each page on your website quickly. From a search engine’s perspective less clicks translates into higher importance and fewer clicks into diminished importance. This is also based on the logic that the more clicks it takes to reach a page, the fewer the viewers who will reach it. This doesn’t mean you should put all your content on one page. Keep in mind that the logic behind Google’s algorithms is to target improved usability, if all your content is on one page and assuming that you have enough content to fill in several pages, will clog the page and make it harder for users to understand where and what to look at.

Here is a sketch of what was traditionally considered the best practice for an SEO structured website:

Here is a sketch of a modified web architecture, based on the flat structure theory:

This modified web structure is a good idea for websites. If you have hundreds of pages you may find that you’re clogging your homepage with links and damaging the usability of your website, not to mention that Google traditionally does not crawl over 100 links on a specific page.

In terms of transferring the ‘link juice’ and improving the ranking, the more links on a page, the more the potency of the link juice is diminished. Most experts agree that the typical algorithm for link juice is something along the lines: .85 * (1/X), with ‘x’ representing the number of links on the page.  Even so, homepage links are stronger and more valuable than deeper links and the further away a page is (in terms of links) from the homepage, the lower its page rank and importance.

Please remember that this is referring specifically to small websites. Websites with thousands of pages will have to utilize a completely different strategy that will be compatible with their size and subject. If you would like to read further on this subject, you may enjoy Sergey & Larry’s famous original paper on Page Rank .

Good luck with your new Flash website!

If you’ve upgraded your Flash website to premium, you may be using Google analytics to study the trends and behavior of your website. Keeping a close eye on your website’s trends is a good idea as it helps you know what changes you can implement to improve the statistics, or what is already working.

Here are a few of the terms you’ll encounter in your Analytics account:

Bounce rate –

The bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who enter your site and leave after viewing only one page. If you have a blog that may not be so bad, but usually people prefer to keep the bounce rate as low as possible.

How do you keep the bounce rate as low as possible? Well, it depends on many different factors, but make sure your navigation is clear and legible, so visitors to your site understand where each button or link will lead them. Also, take a look at the sources of your traffic. Which keywords are leading them to your site? Perhaps you’ve been indexed in non-relevant keywords and you need to optimize your site to bring better traffic your way.

Unique visitors –

Unique visitors are first time visitors who have never before been to your website. How is this measured? As you visit a website for the first time, a cookie is planted on your computer. Don’t worry, it’s a harmless cookie and you won’t feel it any other way. Next time you visit that website, it will search and find this cookie on your computer and recognize you and register you in the visitor loyalty statistics.

Visitor Loyalty –

Visitor loyalty is measured by the number of repeat visits your website gets.

Page Views (vs. impressions) (vs. hits) -

A page view is registered when a visitor requests to view a ‘page’ type file. This should not be confused with impressions and/or hits.

Each page view may include many hits. Hits count the number of times a person requests to view a file on a certain page. There could be numerous files on each page and hundreds of hits for each page.

An impression refers to the number of times an advertisement is loaded onto a user’s screen. This is only relevant to those of you including banners and advertisements in your website. From the other direction – when you visit a website and see a banner, even if you ignore it – you’ve made an impression. Isn’t that nice for you?

% Exit –

The Exit rate is different for each page. It is the percentage of users who have exited from that page.

If you want to learn more about Analytics in general you can always visit the official Google Analytics blog and if you have more questions about how to connect your wix.com Flash website to Google visit our help center, the Wixipedia article on the subject. Remember, to use embed Google Analytics into your Wix website you need to upgrade, any of the packages will do. Following your website’s statistics is like collecting intelligence reports that allow you to adjust your website and improve its usability. This benefits both you and your visitors.

Have Fun!

We’ve talked about finding the keywords to use in your website but we never really got down into the grit and grind of how best to integrate them.

How you use your keywords is important, particularly now as the new caffeine version of Google is coming out. If you use the keyword out of context, or repetitively in an exaggerated manner, it will not benefit your website in the same way as correct implementation.

Here are a few tips and ideas on how to use your keywords organically to get the best results:

1. Keywords in Your Titles

Even if you have a really catchy poetic title to give your website, you may want to reconsider and use your most important keyword here, or even two if you can. The search engine spiders read article titles and so do users for that matter. The title’s weight in determining indexing is quite large, so take advantage of it.

2. Photos

Adding texts to a picture is called adding ‘alt texts’ and that is how you’ll find it in the source of your website. Search engine crawlers can’t see images, but they can read the texts behind the picture, such as the description and the title so take advantage of these fields to use your keywords once again. In the Wix website builder you can add texts to your pictures as you add them to the galleries or by publishing the picture.

3. Writing a Smokin’ Description

The description is accessed through the settings menu at the top of the builder. The description is very important both for search engines and users. When your website appears in search results your description will accompany the result.  Make sure to include at least two of your most important keywords in your description. If you’ve chosen your keywords wisely, it shouldn’t be too difficult as the subject of your website should be related to the keywords. Take some time to write a super description. It’s worth the effort.

4. Meta Tags

Aside from the description Meta tag which you’re already familiar with there are other ways to get your keywords read in the source. For one thing, consider the names of your website pages. Suppose you’re building a website about flowers and you have galleries filled with pictures of flowers. Now, imagine you’ve divided the galleries by color (ex: red flowers, blue flowers, yellow flowers etc). Naming the page on which the gallery is located ‘Red Flowers’ if the gallery includes red flowers can help the search engine crawler figure out what that page is about. If you’ve added tags to each of the pictures and they include (at least some of them) the keyword ‘red flowers’, you’ve moved a few steps closer to optimizing your website. Headers are another element you should consider. Headers receive greater weight in determining indexing than regular texts and can be easily created in the Wix website builder. To create a header use the ‘title text box’ instead of the regular ‘paragraph’ text boxes. The bigger the title, the higher that header will rank. The largest header will appear as H1 in your website’s source (right click over the website > view source), the second largest will be H2 and so on and so forth.

5. Textual Integration

How should you use your keyword? How many times is enough? The purpose of the search engine crawler is to divine what subject your web page deals with. If you keep that in mind it will be easier to figure out how to use your keywords. If you find yourself writing a text and the same keyword keeps coming up naturally, you shouldn’t feel the need to erase it. If it comes up that often though, you may want to consider using different variations of that keyword as well instead, but that is for your consideration. Depending on how many texts you have on your website, using your keyword 3-5 times is more than enough.

To get some more information on how optimized your website is, you can download seaquake. This freeware will definitely give you more insight on how optimized your texts are and what the Google bot will see as he visits your website. It includes different statistics and details that are very helpful in the optimization process.

Rumors have been a buzzing across the web that Google is about to introduce a new algorithm that will affect anyone who deals with SEO, SEM (search engine marketing) and web design.

This new algorithm is being called Google Caffeine and it will be launched some time after the holidays. So what is it? Matt Cutts calls it “…the new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure.”

Here are the categories in which tweaks and changes have been made. In some categories the changes are more dramatic than others, but in all cases the changes are constructed over Google’s basic line of thought – what’s good for you is good for Google and what’s good for Google is good for your users and business as well.

1. Content is Still King

Good news optimizers, content is still king. More to the point, relevant content is still king. Your website’s content should relate to your main message, to your products or your services. You’ll find irrelevant content to be much less effective. Also, an easily indexed website will get higher ranking than a website the Google bot finds hard to crawl. For this reason you should refrain from using a shotgun approach. Adding original content, or presenting your content in an original way is recommend and is also a good way of promoting your website for search engines. Sites that are indexed well lead to accurate search results. Accurate search results improve the service Google can provide its users and in turn improves business. You can apply the same logical train of thought to your customers and/or target market.

2. Meta Tags

Titles and descriptions continue to be critical elements in the indexing process. It’s in your best interest as well as Google’s to provide accurate descriptions to your web pages. While Google will only display up to about 155 characters in its search result and will only crawl about 200 characters, it’s also important not to leave your description too short. I’ve seen many cases in which the user’s description was so short, Google bots decided to use alternative texts instead. The website builders were then surprised to discover irrelevant texts or texts they hadn’t planned on using as descriptions spearheading their search results.

3. Website Loading Time

While I haven’t mentioned this criteria before it is based on the same principles as the rest of Google indexing doctrine. If your website takes a long time to load, its reasonable enough to assume that this will frustrate a certain percentage of users who will then leave the site by backtracking or by giving up on the search altogether. This affects the site’s usability and therefore also the website’s ranking in Google. So next time you upload pictures with the wix website builder, make sure they aren’t heavy, large sized images that will make it really hard for the page to load.

4. Refreshing Content

The new caffeine algorithm is expected to give greater weight to websites that are being constantly refreshed and updated with new content. This means that websites that have not been touched for a while will lose their ranking. This is a logical progression as it stands to reason that if a website has not been updated for a while, it has either been abandoned or has become outdated and therefore lost relevancy. Once again Google proves, that what is good for Google is good for you.

5. Quality Linking

Anybody who deals with SEO knows there are high quality links and low quality links and everything in the middle. If this is the first time you’re hearing this I recommend that you read a few of the earlier posts in this blog on links. From now on, quality links will not be the only factor. This means that even if you have a link to your website from a great site with a fantastic page rank, unless the content of your site is relevant to the source site and unless the link is organic, or a so called ‘natural link’, it will have less importance in determining your ranking and indexing. The same goes for outgoing links. If you send a link out to a great website with a high page rank, make sure that website is relevant to yours, otherwise you’re simply wasting potent linking juice.

Well that’s it for today folks. I guess all we can do is stay put and wait expectantly for the new caffeine algorithm to kick in so we can all have some fun!

Previously I touched the subject of hyperlinks or links and their role in search engine optimization. Search engine crawlers use natural links to identify the subject, relevance and importance of a page. When an important page (as defined by the page rank) sends a link to your website it improves your page ranking. There are different types of link structures and links may carry different attributes with them, affecting the way the search engine crawler identifies the link source and target.

So for starters, what is a natural link? A natural link refers to a link that was created with the user in mind. Supposing you have a paragraph on elephants in your website but you don’t plan on expanding on the subject much yourself. Instead you insert a link into the paragraph sending the user to a website with loads of information on elephants with anchor text that says ‘elephant’. That would be considered natural. An artificial link on the other hand is a link created solely for the purpose of promoting the source or target website in the search engines. This type of link gives value to the site owner or to a third party. The target page is irrelevant to the source and the average user/surfer who clicks on it will probably hit the back button as soon as he can or disappear forever.

Each link has two ends called anchors and a direction. Each link starts at the ’source’ anchor and ends at the ‘destination’ anchor.

The simplest link is created by opening a tag and using the ‘href‘ attribute which specifies the location of a web resource or document, the URL, the ‘anchor text’  and a closing tag, in the following manner:

<a href= “http://www.wix.com“> Wix </a>

The link above is a simple html link to the wix.com website, using the word Wix as anchor text. The anchor text in a natural link gives the Google bots more information on the subject and topic of your website, as well as the target website. If you have links pointing at your site with an anchor text that says ‘free cameras’, Google’s crawlers will assume that your website, or at least the page linked to deals with free cameras. If the site sending you the link is a strong site, with a high page rank, it will be considered a more reliable source. The more ‘link juice’ your homepage gets, for example, the more this ‘juice’ trickles down to your other pages – as long as they are linked to the homepage.

Internal Linking

Up till now, we’ve only been discussing links from and to external websites, but links inside your website, connecting the pages, are also very important. A good internal linking structure can:

1. Make sure your entire website gets crawled properly, as discussed in previous posts about sitemaps and links.
2. Strengthen the relevancy of a specific page for a specific keyword, by using anchor texts as well as other practices.
3. Increase the page rank of an inner page.

Using inner pages to consolidate keywords is particularly useful when you have a large site and/or you want to get ranked for a large number of keywords. In this case, it is a good idea to create specific pages targeting a specific keyword.  If your inner page is targeting the keyword ’round swimming pools’ you would make sure that all links using ’round swimming pools’ as anchor text will be directed to this specific page.

Increasing the Inner Page PageRank

As I mentioned before, link juice trickles down from the homepage to the pages connected to it. The closer a page is, in clicks, to the homepage, the more link juice it gets and as a result, the pagerank increases.

This doesn’t mean that all your pages should be linked from the homepage. Creating too many links from the homepage will diffuse the weight of each separate link. Create solid pages for the phrases (keywords) you are targeting and link to those specific pages. A good navigational structure could use:

-           A footer text with good, organic anchor text links. Keep the footer clean looking, don’t spam it with hundreds of links. For one thing, this could be flagged by the search engines, another reason is that you are diffusing the value of each individual link, so what’s the point?

-          Text link navigation, which is basically a menu with texts. Make sure to use the keyword you are optimizing. This doesn’t mean that every link to that page has to be crammed with the keyword. Try every other link, or one of three. Keep in mind that the page should not natural and appealing to users (you know, those people for whom you’re building your website).

-          You can also use internal text links, which are links that appear organically within the text of your website. They are given extra weight because it is assumed that their relevancy to the content is superior.

Doing all this doesn’t mean your website will automatically be launched into the first spot of the Google search results, but it will improve your standing in terms of SEO. Moreover, you are identifying specific inner pages with specific content or subjects and increasing their individual importance. This will help your entire site get crawled and promote it in Google and the other search engines making the effort worthwhile.

Good Luck!

Google doesn’t appreciate being fooled, and once it discovers websites using inappropriate optimization techniques it may also punish them by reducing the website’s ranking and even removing the website from its search results altogether. If you’re not sure that what you’re doing is acceptable SEO practice or not, keep in mind the one golden rule: If it’s good for your users, it’s good for Google. Incorporating elements that are for Google’s bot eyes alone usually leads to fishy results. The following is a list of ILLEGITIMATE SEO practices. Here’s what you SHOULD NOT be doing:

Using Redirects to Manipulate Google Page Rank

An illegitimate redirect is a one that occurs automatically when you approach a certain URL. As you click on the link to that site, the page URL (address) will appear for a short while and then automatically redirect you to the main site. This technique is used to increase the number of times the website will appear in search results, as it will appear through different domains.

Google’s crawlers will see a different page than the users, fooling the robot into giving a false page rank.

Not all redirects are considered spam, there are several redirect types that Google accepts and acknowledges, which you can read about in other blog posts here, or through Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

100% Frames

We’ve already discussed iframes here in this blog. Just like the redirect, and the golden principle of SEO, if what your users see is different than what the Google bot sees, it’s a problem. A 100% frame page is a page covered completely by a frame that consists of different content from the rest of the website. End result – Google sees one thing on which it bases its page ranking and the user sees something entirely different.

Just like the redirect, this enables spammers to index the same site over and over again under different domains. While the different domains may have different content and get ranked as a result of that content, the end user will find himself viewing the same main site.

Hiding Texts and Links

If a text is visible to search engines only it is considered spam. So what does Google consider hidden text?

• Any text written in the same color (or close to) as the web page background.
• Any text situated in an area of the page that has been defined as hidden or invisible using CSS.
• Extremely small fonts that are not legible to internet user.
• Any text that is being hidden behind an image.

While you might find this useful, particularly if you don’t want to overload your web design with texts, it may very well backfire at you. It may get you kicked out of the ranking game altogether, not to mention that clicking ctrl-a in the browser may reveal your texts anyway.

Other Illegitimate Practices to Avoid

Spamming the keywords – using the same keyword over and over without any real content involved.

Cloaking – this is a technological ruse. As you enter the website, the website issues a query inspecting your status. If you are discovered as a crawler you will end up seeing a different page than you would have reached as a regular user.

Doorway Pages – these are pages created solely to optimize for a specific word. The chosen keyword is repeated over and over again on this page, suggesting high relevance to search engines. This doorway page will either include a link to the main homepage or it will include an automatic redirect to the homepage. Either way, this doorway is considered unethical SEO practice.

Excessive Linking between Websites – an exaggerated amount of links between two sites. What’s considered exaggerated? Good question. There isn’t a specific number of links and it depends greatly on the balance of the rest of the content. There is higher risk of getting caught when the two sites use the same IP. In general, triangle linking is much better for SEO purposes. This means that if your website is site A, and you sent a link to site B, site B will link to site C and site C will send the link right back to you – site A. Another unethical practice involves a bombardment of links on a single page or website. Link farms are a particularly deplorable practice.

Selling Links for PR

Lately, websites that have integrated a practice where they sell links to other websites (meaning, website x pays website y to include a link to it) have been losing ground fast. This is done in order to increase the page rank and is also considered deceptive.

So, How Will You Be Discovered?

Search engines use three different methods to discover culprit websites. The first is technological. Search engine bots are programmed to uncover some of the more obvious deception techniques. When the crawler runs in to such cases it will raise a ‘red flag’. This will lead to a temporary PRO penalty (in Google). Usually these penalties are only temporary but in certain cases they may become permanent.

Google and the other search engines also encourage users to report unethical website promotion techniques. You can report other websites through a special web page dedicated to this subject. This is Google’s Spam Report page. You need to sign in to use it though.

Forums are another method of discovering SEO scams. Apparently Google employees read webmaster forums and if they run into something suspicious… they do something about it.

In this blog we’ve been discussing search engine optimization from many different angles and one of the primary subjects has always been keywords, and how to use them. But how do you choose the right keywords for your website? Good question.  Here are a few tips.

Choosing your keyword involves several stages:

1. Brainstorm. Visualize your potential customers. What kind of words would your customers use when attempting to find information or services which your site offers. Think of alternative spellings, different word combinations, synonyms, slang…
   A good way to find out what keywords to optimize is by researching the keywords being used by your current customers. If you already have a website this is a good way to go.
2. Take Advantage of Keyword Research Tools. There are several online tools that can help you sift through the thousands of keyword options. These include Google Adwords, Google Trends, Wordtracker and Overture. I will go into further detail on each of the tools, but suffice to say using these tools can give you data on trends and statistics related to keyword selection.
3. Check Out the Competition. Certain keywords are very popular but very competitive. Take a look at the websites currently ranked in the first places to understand the scale necessary to overtake these spots. Your website may be a spiritual haven for example, but using just the word God as a keyword, may not be the wisest decision. God is the second most popular search term on the internet (after sex of course), and when you search for it in Google, there are 397,000,000 results as of today, November 2009.
4. Create a Chart. Analyze the keyword data you’ve collected in a chart and compare traffic, relevance to your website, each keyword’s conversion rate etc. This method is the best way to reach an informed decision. After you’ve selected and implemented the targeted keywords, you can use analytics programs (such as Google Analytics) to review and refine your choice of keywords.

Keyword Research Tools

Adwords – Adwords is dedicated to advertising in Google, but it also has the keyword external tool that is very useful for finding new keyword ideas.  You enter a word or phrase, and it will generate related keywords along with some basic information on them. This is a good place to start your brainstorm session.

Google Trends – Google trends is great because it lets you see which keywords are more popular than others in a simple graph. In both cases you have the option of changing different parameters to suit your specific search needs.

WordTracker – another popular tool for keyword data collection. WordTracker acquires most of its statistics through the meta search engine Dogpile that has approximately 1% of all searches online.  WordTracker provides a lot of detail, and even though this information comes from a relatively smaller piece of the pie, it is relatively reliable.

Overture – Overture was re-branded Yahoo! Search Marketing and provides data collected from searches performed in Yahoo! Yahoo has 22%-28% of searches online. It provides good data and methods for measuring comparative numbers.

Keyword Analysis Parameters

Even after choosing your keywords and implementing them in your website tactfully you should always stay alert to changes in trends and the general data. Here are a few parameters by which you can test the keywords you like best:

• Conversion Rate – this parameter covers the percent of surfers searching for that term who converts. To convert in this case, means to click on an ad, to purchase a product etc)
• Predicted Traffic – a prediction of the amount of surfers who will be searching for this specific keyword each month. This data may change as trends do, so stay updated
• Per Customer Value – this parameter covers the average revenues per customer using the keyword and leads to a comparison of lucrative keywords vs. less profitable ones.

Once you’ve analyzed this data you should be well on your way to optimizing your website for the best keywords possible. Remember, it takes more than a couple of days and the key to SEO is also a lot of patience and persistence.

Don’t try to grab the entire pie at once. Rather, work slowly and carefully through the keywords and build your site gradually. This is also a better method of working with Google, which usually credits older sites before new ones anyway. Target one or two main keywords or phrases per page tops and work your way up in the page ranks. As your website matures, gains more and more links, grows in terms of content and pages and acquires greater legitimacy with the search engines, you’ll find targeting multiple keywords more feasible.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…