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Posts Tagged ‘search engine spiders’

Keyword research tends to be a bit tedious for those who are starting out building their reputations with their website.  There is no exact formula or science that gives away the “secret” to obtain the perfect words or words to use in their site and ultimately is just an element of ‘keep trying.’

Good couple rules to use for searching for those keyword elements are:

1. Use two to four word keyword phrases that people might use to find your website;
2. Search your competitor websites with tools such as a keyword density tool to help identify what they are using.
3. Using the keyword effectiveness index or KEI to help identify how effective your choice in keywords will be is ideal.  The KEI if too high could mean that you are choosing a word that is highly competitive, as well as if you choose one that is too low on KEI then you may not see the effective traffic to make using that particular word useful to you.
4. Avoiding dead words such as “a”, “the”, “but” in your keyword phrases is not advisable and will only break up your phrases into elements that will probably not be as useful as you would like.
5. Utilizing your keywords in not only your content, but your domain name, your links, ‘alt’ tags and in headers, titles and beginning and end of your page will give it strength and credibility with the spiders;

As you can see, it is important to plan a good deal in advance to where your business will come from, the demographic that you need to appeal to as well as your competition in order to start off on the right foot.  Most spiders visit about once a month, and if you plan right and your developer/designer is on their game your keywords, design and presentation of a live site should start  helping your traffic and your ranking with the search engines.  Keyword research and development is important before you start development of your site.

I do get asked often, about the element of SEO for a website, but truthfully, most people don’t understand that it’s not the website that we optimize, but the page. Each page that we handle is optimized carefully for the following elements:

1. One keyword phrase. We always recommend using a phrase that is longer than two words, but no more than four and eliminates dead words such as ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘but’, etc.
2. Alt-Tag usage.  Labeling your images not only with a key word element but for the use of computers equipped to browse the Internet for the visually impaired is crucial.
3. Header matches URL.  It seems that this would make sense, but many sites find that giving a URL that doesn’t match the domain confuses your viewer and it also is frowned upon by the search engines. Make sure they see that they are visiting the right place.
4. Utilize keywords in your links and text links.  Buttons are all good and in this day, CSS provides us with the ability to give buttons a good visual appeal but still offer a text link for the search engine spiders to follow.
5. Make sure that your page is linked to your site map.  This gives the ability to give the spider’s complete access to the rest of your site to your other optimized pages.  Why limit their browsing capability?

Each of these items should be found in a page that is on the right track of a properly optimized page.  Search engines are constantly sending out their spiders and bringing back tons of data for listing you.  Be sure your designer has implemented these once you have decided on your layout and content for the page.  This will get you a leg up with getting your site and pages listed right, right out of the starting gate.