In the previous Session we looked at 2 Steps to Search Engine Optimisation. In this section we will look at Why Search Engines are important.

Download a PDF version of this lesson (242k) Keywords and Key Phrases. This lesson is a sample from the manual.

Think about singular v. plural, abbreviations (e.g. Saint Mary v. St. Mary), common misspellings, associated words, common words, hyphenation, vernacular, cultural differences, nuances, geography (especially important for local business). Ex.

Our objective is to generate highly targeted visitors to our site because:

• Highly targeted visitors to our site are more likely to be attracted to what they see, stay longer and are more likely to “buy”.
• Poorly targeted visitors distort our traffic statistics, visiting inappropriate pages and possibly causing us to make detrimental changes to our site.

Research indicates that searchers use 2 – 4 word phrases in around 74% of all searches. I.e. In July 2006

http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox45-search-phrases.html

Methodology: Research is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day.

If your local community is a target market then check that you have these basic steps covered in your website content:

• Email address using your own domain name. e.g. Trevor @websuburb.com.au looks more professional than some_guy@yourisp.com WebSuburb can also set up generic email addresses for you e.g. sales@websuburb.com.au or support @websuburb.com.au
• Full address including street, suburb, state, country, phone area code, phone number and email address on every page. Tip! Use an image of your email address to avoid spam harvesting of your email address.
• Hours of operation
• Cities or suburbs that you serve in your local area
• About page - the primary objective of this page is to build credibility. Include you ABN, license or trade qualifications, an essay about your business, how long you have been in business, why you are the best choice for potential customers
• Links – a list of relevant and credible links. E.g. an accountant may link to the tax office website. Thus if a potential user searched for tax office and your suburb name then the site may be listed.
• List you website with the following search engines (free options)
  • Google - https://www.google.com/local/add/login
  • SuperPages - https://my.superpages.com/spweb/products/business-listing
  • Axciom - http://bcb.acxiom.com/start.pl
  • infoUSA.com - http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm
  • Dmoz - http://www.dmoz.org/
  • MSN - http://www.localeze.com/manage/
  • CitySearch - https://selfenroll.citysearch.com/
  • Local.com - http://www.local.com/advertise.aspx
  • Yellow pages - http://www.yellowpages.com/sp/advertise/
  • Yahoo - http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/local/business.php
  • dLook - http://dlook.com.au
• Fee based options
  • TrueLocal - http://www.truelocal.com/getlisted.aspx
  • Yahoo - http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/local/business.php

Key word phrases should be placed near to the top of the page because:

• Readers that are searching for key words will be looking for these. If they don’t spot these immediately them they are likely to move on.
• Google only indexes the first 101k of a page. Key words at the end of a page may be ignored by Google.

• Having key words in the title and preferably at the beginning of the title is probably the single most important SEO technique.
• Headings are identified by the HTML tag <H1> through to <H5>.
  • Google attaches additional weight to words in the title and headings.
  • Headings make it easier for users to scan your page and therefore enable them to make more informed choices about your page. I.e. should I stay or should I go?

• META data is descriptive information about the webpage contained is specially designated “META” tags. To see the keywords in any webpage use the following menu option View  Source to open the HTML script in Notepad. Look for the META tags.

Figure: Viewing META tags in the Source of a web page

• The META description is important because this is used by Google in the snippet (see 9.2.3 for snippets and 4.5.1 to update the description in the page)
• META keywords are not used by Google but well by some of the other search engines. We find that it is a good idea to record the specific keyword phrases that are being targeted as META keywords for subsequent evaluation of the page. (To update the META keywords see 4.5.1).
• The numerous other META targets e.g. Author, etc. are not considered important for SEO purposes.

• Bold, italics and underling make it easier for your user to grasp the content of a page and therefore Google attaches additional weight to words that have been highlighted in this fashion.
• By far the more important reason is making it easier and attractive for users.

• Google attaches extra weight to words contained within the link attribute E.g. <A href=www.websuburb.com.au>Free websites for clubs</A>.
• Especially for internal links it is important to get vivid descriptive text containing keywords in the linking text.
• Don’t use “Click here”; this is a search term that is not frequently used by users!

Firstly, do a search on http://images.google.com/.
Google identifies images related to your search by the context in which they have been placed. Image context is derived, inter alia, from the:

• Image name. Separate individual words in the image name with a “-“ sign rather than underscore “_” because Google interprets these differently when indexing.

The word “Narrabeen” is more likely to be indexed in the first instance than the second.

• Alt attribute – the specific purpose of the ALT tag is to describe images. The ALT tag will pop up and give the user a better experience 

Figure: Image ALT attribute showing pop up comment

• Title attribute – works in the same way as the ALT attribute for page elements other than images e.g. tables, forms or links. E.g.
  <A href=”Http://www.websuburb.com.au” title=”How to set up mail”>email and WebMail setup<A> will display like this in the browser. 

 
Figure: Title attribute in link reference showing pop up comment

• A number of free keyword density calculators are available on the internet.
• Bear in mind that since we don’t have the definitive algorithm from Google these calculators are the various authors’ personal interpretation and give different results.
• At WebSuburb we use http://www.googlerankings.com/kdindex.php , mostly because it is easy to use and give results in a clear format.
• You may also like to try these to see if you find them easier to use.
  • http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.htm Detailed and comprehensive result
  • http://www.seochat.com/suo-tools/keyword-density/ This tool allows you to select 1,2 or 3 word phrases
  • Search for “keyword density” on Google

• If you are on page 1,738 then it could be a time consuming and tedious task to click through each page to find your site for the first time. Here’s a shortcut
  • Enter the following Google search: “site: http://www.your/ site.com.au” This will tell you whether Google knows about your site.
    
    
    

    Figure: Search for site included in Google index

  • Enter the following Google search for a specific keyword on your site: “site: http://www.your/ site.com.au keyword” This will tell you whether Google recognises the keyword on your site.

 
Figure: Search for keyword included in Google index

• Google also helps by
  • Publishing common words that it detects on your site
    
    
    
    Figure: Google Page Analysis list of common words
    
  • Publishing the average page number for each keyword referred.

 Figure: Google sitemaps query stats result showing the search results and the click through results for top keywords.

• Get the referring sites stats from your ISP.
  • Find out which search engines are working for your site
    
    
    Figure: ISP referring stats showing source of search engine links.
    
  • Find the keyword phrases that users are clicking through from search engines

 
 Figure: ISP referring stats showing key phrases and keywords.

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