There used to be a time when adding keywords to everything on your site would guarantee you a better ranking in the search results. There were keywords in URL, title, description, heading, side nav, main nav, footer nav and gazillion times in the content. Nowadays adding too many keywords makes you look like a spammer in Google's eyes. Here are four practices that will strengthen your website's value.
1. Forget Meta Keywords
Google gave us meta keywords and we overused them so Google took them away. Now plastering your site with meta keywords will only make your site look like spam to Google.
This is why we can't have nice things. - Google most likely.
2. Add Keywords to Content With Good Taste
Again, the amount of keywords is no longer of importance so don't do it. Instead of keywords focus on identifying some keyphrases to include throughout your content, but remember quality over quantity. Here is a short bullet point list summarizing Cyrus Shephard's post about keyword targeting.
Optimizing Content for Users and Ranking
Decide upon a topic for a page or blog post
Extensively research said topic
Write content that is uniquely valuable to your targeted visitor
Verify that you have written a minimum of 400 words
Split the content into short paragraphs, consisting of 2-4 sentences, or bulleted lists
Add a headline to the opening of each paragraph to describe the upcoming info
Within the body content create anchor text links to a similar page on the site
Add a page title that speaks to your targeted visitor and the topic of the page
Make the page easily shareable on social networks
3. Don't Ignore Your Meta Descriptions
Now we are talking about meta descriptions not meta keywords. Meta descriptions are those short on or two sentence paragraphs showing under your sites link on the search results page. Take time to write relevant descriptions for all important pages on your site. Good tip is to add a call to action, like share, learn, or find out.
Hi! In my first blog post in this course, chapter 1. Marketing and consumerism in the digital era, I wrote my post from the B2B point of view. What would be a better ending than writing this last blog post with the same thought?
So basically B2B SEO strategy is quite the same as in B2C. In both you should "put yourself in the head of your consumer". Understand what the customer thinks and what would she or he want?
In a blog post in Who is Visiting writer Jake Hughes has written about this topic, and I'm going to briefly summarize the main points to you. You can read the whole blog post HERE.
1. Keywords and keyword phrases - The most critical part. It's important that the key words is chosen carefully. It should not be too loose, but not either too focused, like on one or just a few words (repeating). The keywords should be repeated only a couple of times in the main text, preferably mentioned in the headlines.
2. Researching your keywords - Follow up which keywords are used the most. You should constantly develop this area so the ranking of your site remains on top. You should focus on the intentions of the page, picking keywords for each optimized page and analyzing the competition.
3. Applying keywords on your page - As mentioned before, use primary key words in the headings and sub-headings. Don't overuse your keywords as this can have an adverse effect. It's preferred that companies add keywords while building the website. Start with less and add more when learning by the process.
I think the biggest difference in B2C and B2B SEO strategy is the different customers. You really need to know your customers. Companies think completely different than privet consumers. I believe that companies search in a more informative way whilst privet consumers mostly search in an entertaining way. What do you think?
I am really interesting in videos and want to bring the subject to this blog also. After all videos are playing a huge role nowadays are definitely in Future also, maybe even a bigger role. The biggest video channel YouTube is owned by Google, the biggest search engine. That is why YouTube is also a big part of search engine and videos in search engine are gaining more popularity. I want to share with you guys 7 video SEO tips that can help your rankings:
Use video to solve problems and provide new information. I'm always trying to find a video if I need something information or to do something that I can't. The reason for that is I'm lazy to read anything but I know that many others do that also and it is gaining popularity all of the time. For example I had to clean my bathroom's seal and my fiancé said that look the "remonttireiska" video from YouTube and you can easily do it. So I watched it and actually now know how to do it and didn't even broke anything! So what I learned that videos with "learn how to..." and "how to..." titles are really popular actually. If you want to learn something or know how to do something, the easiest way is to watch a video about it. Also the title "how to.." is good in SEO and that is why many videos begins with that title.
Make videos easy to browse and link to individual video playback pages. Make a gallery of your videos which is user friendly and easy to browse. You want to get the videos in proper order that is easy to navigate. Each video should have separate landing page that search engines find it better. Also remember to add helpful tags to videos that they are found easily.
Use interactive video elements to connect to viewers. Use in-video links, quizzes, surveys and forms to drive people to your actual site. For example in how to.. video if the company has an app and the video is how to use the one part of that application include the link to the application to that point that the part is.
Use rich metadata and smart content. Also make sure the you have hidden tags in your HTML code of your video landing page if it's possible.
Use transcriptions for indexing, usability and content. Add video transcriptions to HTML of each page where the video is. For example Volvo trucks add in YouTube have transcriptions and it comes first in YouTube search almost in overtime and have never problem to find that video. Also if you check the statistics you can notice that the video has had many viewer through one whole year. I really think that if a advertise video gets popularity that long it has to bee amazing.
Host your video on your own domain. Have your videos in your website and don't give all the credit to video service providers. Simply you want to have more audience to your page through your video so include them on your site. You can use YouTube and Vimeo but with these services include the link to your site and make the content of your video interesting that they would actually do that.
Measure how keywords affect to the bottom line. See how many viewers comes from searches based on your keywords and what keyword drives more traffic. If some keyword doesn't drive traffic at all you maybe want to change it to something else. With different analytics software you can measure that, good ones are Google analytics and YouTube has it own analytics.
If your interested in SEO in YouTube videos, see the following video about it. It is over a year old and I noticed that YouTube has changed a little bit but the basic structure is still the same:
I really hope that these tips would help all of you to succeed if you are interested in videos and how to gain traffic to your videos.
Choosing the right keywords is crucial in both SEO and SEM. Google Trends is a great tool for this because it allows you to compare the popularity of different search-terms. Based on Google Search, it shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.
Another useful feature in Google Trends is Hot Trends. It displays the 20 fastest rising search-terms, news and contents of the past hour in various countries. The information provided helps in content planning. Here are some screenshots of Google Trends. Unfortunately the texts are in Finnish, but I will explain the content in brief.
These are Hot Trends in Finland this Saturday. I think they are a bit surprising, but then again, it's an F1 weekend so at least the first search-term is quite understandable.
I wanted to check out some details so I opened the statistics of the first search-term. This diagram displays the amount of searches over time.
Here you can see how the search-volume varies geographically.
Here we have related search-terms, both the most popular and the rising ones. Not later than now it's obvious why Finns have searched Abu Dhabi...
Finally, these are lists of the most popular and rising search-terms in Finland from the last 30 days. Interesting and surely useful. Google also has a Keyword Planner but it's a feature of AdWords and as such chargeable. If you don't want to pay for keyword planning, Keyword Tool seems like a great alternative. I tested it and here are the results:
Yes, you read that right. Top 10 bad SEO ideas and not top 10 good SEO ideas. I wanted to look at this subject from a little different view. The world of search engine optimization is complicated so there are many ways you can do it in a bad way. So what are the top 10 list?
1. Thin content:
There are pages on your web site that have very little to no unique text content. Google started actively punishing this type of content with the release of their Panda algorithm in February 2011. In any event, each page on your site needs some real unique, quality content, on them.
2. Creating large numbers of pages to rank on as many terms as possible:
It used to make sense to create pages to each variant of a search term a user might use, as it would help you rank for those terms. This was because of the power of a title tag.
3. Copying SEO practices of others:
Trying to understand why that competitor is ranking high is often not a good use of time, and copying their questionable practices is definitely a bad idea. Google is quite clear on what types of practices they want publishers to follow, and it's best to focus on that approach to SEO.
4. One dimension link building:
May publishers learn the importance of links in SEO. and they start figuring out ways to get poeple to link to their sites. You need to use many approaches to building your reputation and visibility, and then creating content on your site that others will want to link to.
5. Not implementing a mobile-friendly site:
According to Google, more than a half of their searches come from mobile devices today.
6. Focusing on keyword metatags:
Search engines rely almost solely on user visible text on your site in order to determine its raking. Text that is not user visible, such as the keyword metatags, stopped being significant years ago, because the spammers abused them so badly.
7. Purchase links:
The problem is that the it is in the strategic interest of the search engines to defeat this practice, and they are working hard to do so.
8.Swap links:
Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank.
9. Implement duplicate content:
The trouble with duplicate content is that search engines want to rank the same content only once. So if you have multiple URLs on one site with the same content, one of these is just a waste of the search engine's time.
10. Cloaking:
When a search engine detects a site is cloaking, there is an excellent chance that it will lead to the site being banned. Your intent in implementing cloaking does not matter. So don't do it.
Here is an interesting video about how o deal with bad SEO.
I think it was really interesting to find out information about this subject. There has been many lectures in my courses about SEO but nothing about what not to do. I hope you learned more and also enjoyed this subject!
