Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Win The Battle Of Relevancy Online With Custom Content



It's a dog eat dog world out there on the Internet. There is the capacity for an unlimited number of storefronts on the web that you'd never be able to find on main street. The fact is that there is even more competition for business online than there is in the brick-and-mortar world. This is only going to get more intense. It wasn't so long ago that many people were afraid to use credit cards online. Shopping online was a curiosity. Now, it's a given.

The battle of relevancy online is the battle of one site being more useful than another. In the growing virtual marketplace, it isn't nearly enough to just have a number of products and hope for the best. Look at Amazon.com reviews—they are core to what has made that site grow. A glowing Amazon review can do a lot for a product's sales. Web surfers use Amazon reviews as much as they use a review in the local paper, if not more. Reviews have made Amazon a relevant and trusted resource for a department store's worth of products.

Not every site can hope to have the same review structure as Amazon. A number of affiliate sites use Amazon reviews as their own content. Web surfers are getting savvy to this: they can smell an affiliate site. Why not just go to Amazon directly? The battle for relevancy, then, is to become something as trusted and vital as the major sites online. You can't necessarily wait around for people to write reviews, and the process may not even apply to your site, so a site owner needs to provide content of your own.

Another word for relevancy is usefulness. It has been shown that the longer a person sticks around on a site, the more likely he or she will make a purchase. Even if that person doesn't make a purchase the first time to the site, the site will have left an impression. People are looking for information on a product or service as much as they are looking to make an immediate purchase. Web surfers like to be informed shoppers and the web gives them an unlimited amount of places to get this information.

This is where your site comes in. Don't make a web surfer click off your site to find information on a product—give them the information right on site. This means you should have articles available about any and all issues affecting a particular type of product or service. There can be hundreds of potential topics on one type of product, and a site may have dozens upon dozens of products available.

Not only will this type of information keep your site relevant to web surfers, it will be relevant to search engines as well. With content, these make up your target audience: search engine spiders and real people. If you provide relevant content that speaks to both, your site can compete with the giants.

Web Site Optimization



All optimization is not equal. There is such a rush to optimize a website for search engines that people don't realize that some SEO techniques can be self-defeating. Either a lot of work will go into a particular type of optimization that is fruitless or it can be downright harmful for search engine ranking. A high search-engine ranking is the holy grail of search engine optimization, but make sure you put your energy in the right place.

The first two issues involve web design: don't use flash or frames when designing a website. These won't get you banned by search engines;but the site might be ignored entirely. While you can use some flash animation within a site, overuse of flash should be avoided. Search engines like text, not fancy graphics. A flash-heavy site could be passed over. The same goes for a site written with frames;frame-heavy sites confuse search engines so the sites are not properly indexed. The text on a framed site is hidden within the frame, so even if there is ample content within the frame, it will not be read correctly. Verdict: avoid it.

When writing content, make sure the content makes sense. In the early days of the web, people went keyword crazy. They would cram a huge paragraph of keywords throughout a page. This worked for a little while. Now search engines are wise to it and this technique can lead to a site being banned. Website owners try to trick search engines by including the keywords within actual content, but if the keywords are too close together, this could also lead to problems.

Another issue is spamdexing. Never use keywords that don't apply specifically to a site. This can most often be seen with site owners using adult-themed keywords to bring in unrelated searches. This will cause a site to be quickly red-flagged. Using invisible text is a bad idea as well. Invisible text is the same color as the background. It can be read by spiders, but can't be read by human eyes. The problem here is that spiders now recognize this technique and it will be red-flagged.

Generally, content should be useful and informative. You can include specific keywords within content, but if you provide enough content, these keywords will be covered automatically without jeopardizing the site with picky search engine spiders. The use of quality content is two-fold: it's a better way to optimize with search engines and web surfers will spend a longer time on the site reading articles or other content. The trick is to create trust;both with spiders and real people.

The Essentials Of Keyword Planning



Remember the web in the old days? You could cram in a bunch of keywords at the bottom of the page regardless of grammar, and pretty much devoid of any aesthetic sense, and search engines ate it up. It's probably a good thing those days are over because websites have become a lot more professional. That still doesn't mean that people are using keywords to the best of their advantage. In fact, because it is much harder to write keyword-targeted content, many site owners avoid the issue.

This is good news for anyone looking to improve their page ranking. The market is wide open for people who use an effective keyword strategy. The main issues are both quality and quantity. A few pages of keyword-driven content just aren't going to do it anymore. If you're really looking to improve your search engine ranking, and ultimately improve your sales, you have to provide dozens of pages of content.

To do so, you need to first research keyword strategies employed by competing businesses. Type in the most obvious keyword for your industry. What comes out in the top ten? What have those sites done to achieve that ranking? Keyword planning tools will tell you the popularity of certain keywords, but you should do some brainstorming on your own. Try and think every possible permutation of a possible search, including misspellings—even for easy-to-spell words.

Each search engine will provide keyword planning tools, potentially for a fee—you can check the keyword relevancy in Google, Overture, Yahoo, and others. It's not a bad idea to check how keyword popularity compares in different search engines. You should be looking at potentially a hundred or more keywords—though this can vary according to the site. If a site sells a variety of different products, or provides different services, you're going to be able to multiply that keyword list.

Each keyword list should be tailored to a specific demographic. Once you have the keyword list together, it is time to optimize content so that the site provides relevant content surrounding that list of keywords. The most important part of content optimization is the title. What this means is you should title the article with a specific keyword in mind—the HTML link for the article is vital for page rank. This keyword should then be repeated in the article—but not so much that the text becomes unnatural or, worse, unreadable.

If that's the case, you could risk the site being banned by search engines outright. In addition to keyword popularity tools, you should also use keyword density tools for your site's content. If the keyword density is too high, the site could be red-flagged as offering unnatural, inorganic content. All of these issues are core to keyword planning.