"Words are free. It's how you use them that may cost you." -KushandWizdom
Isn't this so true? Not only in real life but in the IT world as well. Words hold so much power when you think about it. Which ones you use, or don't use can't result in very different outcomes. Researching and determining which SEO keywords are the correct fit for you is paramount. With this knowledge you can predict shifts in demand, respond to the changing market and product content that consumers are already actively seeking. This would fall under the Team Leader responsibility list...Knowing your target audience. Get to know the typical search sequences that your target audience is using. Which demographics are using them? What locations are they coming from? What times of the year are they peaking? Think strategically on what words users will search in correlation with keywords. Anticipate long tail queries to better pinpoint relevant queries. For example, a mobile phone user might query gas stations near downtown Dallas. Another item to make sure the keyword meta section is filled in. If it left blank it will send a "not provided" message to Google and will probably be left out of the SERPs. In addition, Google now is checking for co-occurrence analysis which refers to what words appear most commonly on a page and under what circumstances they appear together. So how do you maximize your keyword research? You google it of course! There are some options to help you identify what words or phrases are needed.
Some other resources include (some of the resources listed in the book are no longer available but these are still active):
It is important to note that word conversion rate vary. In other words what results for one keyword may not apply to other keywords. One keyword may result in an action such as purchasing a product or service while others may result in a deeper or more specific search. Regularly monitor keyword results so that you maximize resource investments. Happy researching!
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"Before you start the SEO process, it is important to identify your target audience, your message, and how your message is relevant." (The Art of SEO, Enge, Spencer, and Sricchiola)
As I mentioned before in my Planning post, you need to know where you are going before you being your SEO journey. Now comes the task of assigning those responsibilities to team members. Ideally, the business is large enough for each team member to not be burdened with more than one responsibility but sometimes in small business one is required to wear multiple hats. A good leader defines the responsibilities of each task so that everyone is on the same page on expected results so let's do that now. Team leader is in charge of the target audience:
PR leader is in charge of:
Technical, content development and creative leader all oversee the implementation and integration of the SEO strategy.
Putting your team members in the correct spot is critical so assign based on strengths to ensure best results. When in doubt, over communicate to ensure progress is being made together as a team. Miscommunication is the fastest way to slow progress or even delete it all together! As one of my best friends always says, "Plan the work, then work the plan". *It is said that an hour of planning can save you ten hours of doing. In order to create web content that will equal SEO success, continuous investment is needed to ensure proper content and the correct foundation happens. When planning is properly executed, the SEO can perform much of the desired traffic for business. Online SEO marketing targets include visibility, website traffic, and high return on investment. There is not a one stop solution on this so every strategy should be custom for your business. Consider what your business is trying to promote, your competitors' strategies, and how to maximize your resources in getting your content worldwide. An effective SEO strategy takes into account: *Purpose: Are you selling products/services, obtaining leads, or gaining memberships? *Targeting customers: Understand your audience and find your niche including how they will search for you, their location, age, and gender. How to direct relevant traffic to your content? What terminology should you use in your meta tags? *Competitors: How can you stand out from your competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? If a firm establishment has been owned by the competitor, perhaps focus on a different area of that market? You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to see what your cost per click (CPC) could be *Branding goals: Be sure to use comprehensive and correct terms so the search engine can find your web presence. *Content development: create high-quality content being sure to incorporate user engagement and great links for social sharing. Content is KING. *Reputation management: How will you maintain your positive reputation online? *SWOT analysis: to help plan and evaluate your online presence All of these factors will determine the success of your online presence and traffic. Don't be afraid to ask tough questions, explore new areas, and remember your objectives. Let's talk about the basics of a search engine and how it brings up results. SERPs (search engine results pages) are the pages that are returned when a query is performed. Each search engine is slightly different in how it presents these results but the logic remains the same. The following are the popular sections you will probably see. Let's talk about them.
*Vertical navigation - SERPs are listed in separate verticals such as images, news, video, or maps; most popular format *Horizontal navigation - same as vertical just presented in horizontal format *Search query box - where the user will enter their query; search engine may also provide "hints" or "suggestions" as to what it thinks you might be looking for in order to produce more accurate results. *Results information - provides a small amount of meta-information such as number of pages that are relevant to that particular query. *PPC (aka paid advertising) - ads placed by companies in order for their products/services to be shown at the top *Natural/organic/algorithmic results - relevance ranked results based on query. *Query refinement suggestions - lets users search with a more specific and relevant query for increased satisfaction *Navigation to more advertising - Only via Yahoo; additional paid search results related to original query Additionally the search engines may also display more than just SERPs. They may provide the information so that the user may not even need to click on any of the SERP links. For example, if you the user is inquiring about the weather in Dallas, Google will display the current weather information as part of top vertical navigation information. Other examples, include popular artists, restaurants, videos, etc. In order to provide top relevant SERPs, search engines must be able to crawl and index a massive amount of data. In the crawling process, robots called crawlers or spiders search engines start with a seed set of sites that are known to be very high in quality, and then visit each of the links on each page of those sites to discover other web pages. The speed at which they process relevant information is staggering to say the least. After the information is collected by crawlers, it is then indexed and prioritized using IR (information retrieval) and document analysis according to importance and citation analysis. Algorithms rank the information according to the content quality and reading level of the content on each page. This process is referred to as algorithmic ranking criteria. Therefore, the words you put on a web page, play an enormous role in how your page will be prioritized in the SERPs. Making sure you have the correct terms listed in the meta tags are vital for crawlers to be able to find your page and display it for users to see. Link analysis is used to analyze SERPs by researching who is linking to a site and what reviews they are giving. In addition, they can assess whom is worthy of being trusted based on the authority of sites linking to them and the contextual data about the site. Although search engines are powerful they do have their limits. Differentiating images, limited OCR, pictorial aspects contained in Flash, audio/video files, and reading any content contained within a program all continue to pose difficulty at this point in time. Disambiguation is also a challenging factor. For example, if a user types in jaguar, the search must try to determine which type of jaguar the user is wanting. Is the user requesting information about the animal jaguar or the vehicle jaguar? Despite all of the challenges search engines face, they still manage to produce accurate SERPs the majority of the time. Just as there are positive ranking factors (as we mentioned earlier) there are negative ranking factors. Some of those include: malware being hosted on the site, cloaking, pages with sale links, content that advertises paid links, and slow page speed. One way to create better SERPs is to correct search operators. -Keyword excludes the keyword from the search results. For example, science -computer shows results for all types of science except computer science. "Key Phrase" shows search results for the exact phrase. For example, "dachshund puppy" will display results specifically on dachshund puppies rather puppies or dachshunds. More advanced search operators include intitle:" ", filetype: " ", and contains: " ", etc. Each search engine has their own search operators so it's best to find one you like and get familiar with those search operators. "Disruptive event...an event that has changed something in a fundamental way." (The Art of SEO, Authors-3rd Edition: Enge, Spencer, & Stricchiola) Just like Covid has recently been a "disruptive event" and completely changed how our world operates, so has the Internet. Our lives have been forever impacted since the evolution of the Internet. Need information on why your dog behaves they do? Perhaps you need a jacket for this weekend's events. Maybe you are interested in furthering your education. All of these are available on the Internet and SEOs make all that possible for you to find each and every one. The days of physically going to the library and using its time consuming and antiquated systems are long gone. The power is at your fingertips. Let's examine search engines a little closer. There are many out there, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc. but Google is currently the dominant stakeholder. "I'll just Google it." has become a common household phrase. A search engine's mission is to provide a relevant, speedy, and current search experience for the user. Users search with intent which means they are looking for something specific. They aren't just haphazardly browsing through some content or stumbling on information by chance. No, there's a purpose behind their query. Some users are making informational queries such as finding the manual for their vacuum cleaner that is clogged up. Others are executing transactional queries such as signing up for a free trial, a social media account, or making a financial transaction to buy those pair of jeans that just got restocked. When these searches are entered, the adaptability of the search engine is really quite phenomenal. It takes your history and tries to anticipate your desired results based on those entries. For example, if I search for hotels, it probably will only give me hotels based on my current location. On the other hand, if I before I type in my hotel search, I type in places to see in New York, the search engine will adapt and include hotels in New York in my results. Search engines aren't only monitoring and adapting your search queries, they are incorporating how you view and utilize those results as well. Have you ever noticed when you look at the results page? Most tend to make an "F" pattern as they scan the page and only see the top PAID results. Although analytics show that the higher spot ads prove to be more effective, they often come with a hefty price tag. Forward progress has brought blended search to the forefront where images, videos, news results, etc are now displayed as a part of the top search results. Search engines are adaptable and powerful. They even seem like they are "always listening" in anticipation to give us the information we "need". Next time you do a search, hopefully you will look at it a little bit different point of view.
I know..I know. You're thinking, "This is her FIRST blog post?" In this day and age, people of all ages are blogging, vlogging, and *logging anything you could think of. As for me, I'm just not a talker/writer. I'm a woman of few words. I don't like a lot of fluff and am always thankful when people get straight to the heart of the matter.
So why am I blogging? It is for an assignment for one of the college classes I am taking. This blog will consist of my journey through this course and will document my insights, my "aha" moments, and probably more often than not, my struggles, as I navigate my way through the curriculum. That's a natural part of coding right? One of my favorite quotes is from Scott Adams - "Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet." |
AuthorHello! My name is Becky Gage and I'm starting a new blog called Becky's Bytes. The goal is of this blog is to take you along the process of what I'm learning about in the book "The Art of SEO, Mastering Search Engine Optimization" by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, and Jessie C. Sricchiola. Archives
November 2022
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