Written for myfreelancedesign.com by John Siebert, a Tampa web design master of the web with over 10 years experience in web marketing.
I have created what I know to be four of the worst SEO factors that can positively hurt your chances. As an example, we will examine the top results for the search term/keyword “personal injury lawyer”. Surprisingly, the cost per click on Google Adwords is over $20 for each click! 550,000 searches in one month. Imagine the monthly Google Adwords bill, Yikes! Rest assured that they did the best SEO practices to get to the top free spots in Google. Enlisting the help of SEO experts, their website(s) steadily rise to the top each, valuable term. I will help you grasp and understanding of how to get your site to rise.
Though, visual effects such like photos are nice, text is where your money is. Have you ever noticed that the top ranking sites actually are full of text? Not just any text, it can be either real informative or engaging text. Page content is recommended as 500-1000 words.
The top 5 listings per Google’s rank, for the highly desired keyword “personal injury lawyer” contain the following respective word counts: 664, 265, 1910, 1477, and 600. See what I am getting to? That’s right, add text. Just for fun, add up your word count and see where you stand in comparison. Also, another tip when creating your content, keywords are most effective in the 150 words closest to the top of the page. The aforementioned top 5 sites conform to this rule.
It’s all about links! Inbound links are the most influential ranking factor, when it comes to Google. Taking into consideration that Google uses what some refer to as a voting system to rank terms, links and content are where the money is. Back to our example term, “personal injury lawyer”, you’ll see that there are roughly 12.5 million web pages with that term in it. So which one should Google put as #1? One of the ways Google decides is by using inbound links as “votes” for your site. If more sites link in with the search term then Google moves the site towards the top.
Those same top 5 sites have a ton of other sites linking in. According to MagesticSEO.com’s tools, the number of links in the top 5 sites are; 47k, 360 mil, 233 mil, 6k, and 4k. That’s fantastic. To achieve such a desirable term you can see they’ve gone above and beyond to insure they have plenty of links to their site. This is where networking comes in handy. Quality links is what you will need.
Google is not dumb; they know how SEO experts try to artificially move their listings by building links. This has made the process a little more painful when building links. On the plus side, Google works extremely hard to weed out poor quality links. Google has devalued many links for their unworthiness. It is important that your links appear on quality websites from real webmasters. Poor quality links are from sites that are computer generated or have no real value and will devalue your own work. Poor quality site can be identified if content doesn’t make much sense or is not to one particular niche/topic. For example, a site about web design is talking about casinos, mortgage rates, and free guitar lessons, catch my drift. If not, here’s another… at the end of this article you will find a recipe for delicious blueberry muffins. Makes no sense right? I wouldn’t come to this type of site, looking for that. By the way, you won’t find that here but boy does that sound good! Real sites can be spotted by Google and moved up in the ranks with great quality content and good backlinks. It’s simple really. You’re human and here learning right? Use what you learn and avoid looking like an autobot website with no real value. If you don’t value your content and links, who else will?
Keyword optimization is crucial. Back to the poor content and poor links, your keywords have to be articulately sprinkled throughout your content. However, Google does have certain areas they like to “see” your keyword used. Keyword placement is not difficult but can seem tricky at first. Placing your keywords in key spots, will help you rank with Google for that keyword. It should be in the title tag, meta description, alt image tag, heading tag, and bold.
You can test your web site with sites such as SEOMoz’s On-Page Report Card or websitegrader.com. Remember those top 5 sites? Yep, you guessed it; they followed this rule by these percentages respectively: 75%, 95%, 95%, 95%, and 95% (as determined by SEOMoz’s tool).
I can not explain how important keyword research is to your business. The first step is to determine the proper terms to target. Focus on targeting 2-3 keywords that meet two qualifications: Search volume (amount of potential visitors) and Keyword effectiveness (amount of visitors that will turn into sales). I know you won’t believe me but, there is such a thing as too much. If you pick long-tailed (not that they don’t work) or too many keywords, it can knock your rank go down. It’s about consistency and common sense. Think about when you search for something. How many people do you know that will look for “Fun things to do outside in Florida during the summer months”, not too many that I know. We would search for “Summer fun in Florida”, “Outdoor fun in Florida”, Florida Outdoor fun”.
Search volume is relatively easy to calculate. There are a number of search volume estimators. I prefer the tool by the source, Google. The Google Keyword Tool easily tells you the amount of searches from last month. If you’re trying to decide whether to target “personal injury lawyer” or “personal injury law firm” you can test using Google’s tool. You will notice “personal injury lawyer” has 673,000 searches where as “personal injury law firm” only gets 135,000 monthly searches. That’s almost 5 times as many searches for the previous term.
The other requirement in keyword research is the keyword effectiveness. This depends on how much you’re willing to put into your SEO campaign in efforts to hit that #1 spot. Ask yourself, how much each lead is worth to your business. For example, as with our sample terms you might want to go with the lesser search volume term because maybe that term fits your target audience better or even simpler, less competition. This is where you take over the web! The search volume becomes less relevant if you’re not converting visitors into sales. If the first term has 10,000 searches per month and the second term has 5,000 searches per month it seems obvious to target term one. But if term two converts into sales three times better than term one then it actually makes more sense to target the term with the lower search volume.
Whether you are doing this yourself or enlisting the help of an SEO Expert(s), keep these key points in mind. If you have existing work up on websites that doesn’t hit some of the points, simply go back and recreate. Google likes makeovers. There is nothing wrong with a face-lift. Most importantly, if you find that you would not enjoy looking or reading at what you have posted, chances are no one else will either. Happy SEOing!
I have created what I know to be four of the worst SEO factors that can positively hurt your chances. As an example, we will examine the top results for the search term/keyword “personal injury lawyer”. Surprisingly, the cost per click on Google Adwords is over $20 for each click! 550,000 searches in one month. Imagine the monthly Google Adwords bill, Yikes! Rest assured that they did the best SEO practices to get to the top free spots in Google. Enlisting the help of SEO experts, their website(s) steadily rise to the top each, valuable term. I will help you grasp and understanding of how to get your site to rise.
#1 Poor Content
Though, visual effects such like photos are nice, text is where your money is. Have you ever noticed that the top ranking sites actually are full of text? Not just any text, it can be either real informative or engaging text. Page content is recommended as 500-1000 words.
The top 5 listings per Google’s rank, for the highly desired keyword “personal injury lawyer” contain the following respective word counts: 664, 265, 1910, 1477, and 600. See what I am getting to? That’s right, add text. Just for fun, add up your word count and see where you stand in comparison. Also, another tip when creating your content, keywords are most effective in the 150 words closest to the top of the page. The aforementioned top 5 sites conform to this rule.
#2 No Inbound Links/Poor Quality Links
It’s all about links! Inbound links are the most influential ranking factor, when it comes to Google. Taking into consideration that Google uses what some refer to as a voting system to rank terms, links and content are where the money is. Back to our example term, “personal injury lawyer”, you’ll see that there are roughly 12.5 million web pages with that term in it. So which one should Google put as #1? One of the ways Google decides is by using inbound links as “votes” for your site. If more sites link in with the search term then Google moves the site towards the top.
Those same top 5 sites have a ton of other sites linking in. According to MagesticSEO.com’s tools, the number of links in the top 5 sites are; 47k, 360 mil, 233 mil, 6k, and 4k. That’s fantastic. To achieve such a desirable term you can see they’ve gone above and beyond to insure they have plenty of links to their site. This is where networking comes in handy. Quality links is what you will need.
Google is not dumb; they know how SEO experts try to artificially move their listings by building links. This has made the process a little more painful when building links. On the plus side, Google works extremely hard to weed out poor quality links. Google has devalued many links for their unworthiness. It is important that your links appear on quality websites from real webmasters. Poor quality links are from sites that are computer generated or have no real value and will devalue your own work. Poor quality site can be identified if content doesn’t make much sense or is not to one particular niche/topic. For example, a site about web design is talking about casinos, mortgage rates, and free guitar lessons, catch my drift. If not, here’s another… at the end of this article you will find a recipe for delicious blueberry muffins. Makes no sense right? I wouldn’t come to this type of site, looking for that. By the way, you won’t find that here but boy does that sound good! Real sites can be spotted by Google and moved up in the ranks with great quality content and good backlinks. It’s simple really. You’re human and here learning right? Use what you learn and avoid looking like an autobot website with no real value. If you don’t value your content and links, who else will?
#3 Poor Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization is crucial. Back to the poor content and poor links, your keywords have to be articulately sprinkled throughout your content. However, Google does have certain areas they like to “see” your keyword used. Keyword placement is not difficult but can seem tricky at first. Placing your keywords in key spots, will help you rank with Google for that keyword. It should be in the title tag, meta description, alt image tag, heading tag, and bold.
You can test your web site with sites such as SEOMoz’s On-Page Report Card or websitegrader.com. Remember those top 5 sites? Yep, you guessed it; they followed this rule by these percentages respectively: 75%, 95%, 95%, 95%, and 95% (as determined by SEOMoz’s tool).
#4 Lack of Keyword Research
I can not explain how important keyword research is to your business. The first step is to determine the proper terms to target. Focus on targeting 2-3 keywords that meet two qualifications: Search volume (amount of potential visitors) and Keyword effectiveness (amount of visitors that will turn into sales). I know you won’t believe me but, there is such a thing as too much. If you pick long-tailed (not that they don’t work) or too many keywords, it can knock your rank go down. It’s about consistency and common sense. Think about when you search for something. How many people do you know that will look for “Fun things to do outside in Florida during the summer months”, not too many that I know. We would search for “Summer fun in Florida”, “Outdoor fun in Florida”, Florida Outdoor fun”.
Search volume is relatively easy to calculate. There are a number of search volume estimators. I prefer the tool by the source, Google. The Google Keyword Tool easily tells you the amount of searches from last month. If you’re trying to decide whether to target “personal injury lawyer” or “personal injury law firm” you can test using Google’s tool. You will notice “personal injury lawyer” has 673,000 searches where as “personal injury law firm” only gets 135,000 monthly searches. That’s almost 5 times as many searches for the previous term.
The other requirement in keyword research is the keyword effectiveness. This depends on how much you’re willing to put into your SEO campaign in efforts to hit that #1 spot. Ask yourself, how much each lead is worth to your business. For example, as with our sample terms you might want to go with the lesser search volume term because maybe that term fits your target audience better or even simpler, less competition. This is where you take over the web! The search volume becomes less relevant if you’re not converting visitors into sales. If the first term has 10,000 searches per month and the second term has 5,000 searches per month it seems obvious to target term one. But if term two converts into sales three times better than term one then it actually makes more sense to target the term with the lower search volume.
Whether you are doing this yourself or enlisting the help of an SEO Expert(s), keep these key points in mind. If you have existing work up on websites that doesn’t hit some of the points, simply go back and recreate. Google likes makeovers. There is nothing wrong with a face-lift. Most importantly, if you find that you would not enjoy looking or reading at what you have posted, chances are no one else will either. Happy SEOing!
This post first appeared on Web Design Blog | Web Designer Blog – Paul Bank, please read the originial post: here
