SEO Observation

SEO Tools : Search Engine Spider Simulator

2009-04-24T03:21:00.000-07:00

How it Works

A lot of Content and Links displayed on a webpage may not actually be visible to the Search Engines, eg. Flash based content, content generated through javascript, content displayed as images etc.

This tool Simulates a Search Engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a Search Engine would see it.

It also displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the particular webpage.

SEO Tool: Similar Page Checker

2009-04-24T03:17:00.000-07:00

How it Works

Search Engines are known to act upon websites that contain Duplicate / Similar content.

Your content could be similar to other websites on the Internet, or pages from within your own website could be similar to each other (usually the case with dynamic product catalog pages).

This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages.

The exact percentage of similarity after with a search engine may penalize you is not known, it varies from search engine to search engine, Your aim should be to keep your page similarity as LOW as possible.

Ross The Intern Firefighter

2009-04-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

Burbanc fire fighter's let the character "Ross" (as seen on Leno)on as an intern.
Check out this video of his day on the job as a fire fighter. Here for his Intern job from Torino.

Alexa Rankings

2009-04-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

Wow I am Surprise. Alexa Just Got Crawled our Page.

BTW you don't need to do any thing to get crawled by Alexa.

What is Alexa?

Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information ...

Alexa is a typeface. It was designed for Adobe Systems in 1995. It was designed by John Benson, a famous United States carver of inscriptions, including those at the John F. Kennedy Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. ...

so we Rank 14,771,920
Hahaha thats to far From Top 100,000 of Alexa.

So we need to Improve are Ranking in Alexa.

Good Luck again to Us.

EarthLink Telecommunications Selects Silver Peak Systems for Scalable WAN Acceleration

2009-04-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

SANTA CLARA, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 04/21/09 -- Silver Peak Systems, the leader in scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration, today announced that EarthLink Telecommunications, a leading broadband Internet Service Provider, has selected Silver Peak's NX appliances to optimize WAN performance and reduce bandwidth costs. With Silver Peak's real-time network optimization techniques, EarthLink Telecommunications has improved Internet performance for subscribers while increasing bandwidth capacity on the company's international WAN backbone.

"Satellite is a key technology for bringing the Internet to many countries like Iraq," said Sarmad Ahmed, general manager at EarthLink Telecommunications. "By minimizing latency and packet delivery challenges that can hamper satellite based services, Silver Peak ensures the best possible Internet experience to EarthLink Telecommunication's customers. In addition, Silver Peak has enabled us to double our existing WAN capacity without requiring expensive bandwidth upgrades, which is critical for controlling ongoing operational costs."

Silver Peak leverages a variety of real-time network optimization techniques to maximize application performance across the WAN while minimizing IT operational costs. These techniques include:

-- Network Acceleration to overcome WAN latency

-- Network Integrity to correct packet loss and WAN quality problems

-- Network Memory(TM) to maximize WAN bandwidth utilization

Silver Peak's unique network approach to WAN acceleration delivers unprecedented scalability, including the highest effective throughput of any WAN acceleration device. This makes Silver Peak ideal for large enterprise networks and applications with high sustained data volumes.

Silver Peak optimizes every application that runs over IP, including file, email, web, SQL, Voice over IP (VoIP), streaming video, Citrix, Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), real-time data replication, and remote backup. This provides the best Return on Investment (ROI) for WAN acceleration.

Silver Peak is the only vendor to solve bandwidth, latency, and loss issues in real-time, making shared networks (IP VPN and MPLS) perform like private lines. Enterprises get cost effective bandwidth with high throughput and predictable performance, making Silver Peak strategic to a variety of business initiatives, from server centralization and storage consolidation to real-time collaboration and disaster recovery.

About EarthLink Telecommunications

EarthLink Telecommunications, founded in 2005, deals with Internet connectivity through VSAT terminals, providing solutions for enterprise and SOHOs. EarthLink Telecommunication specializes in streamlining automation, techniques and skills required for day-to-day operation of network and RF facilities. EarthLink customers can be found all throughout Iraq.

About Silver Peak Systems, Inc.

Silver Peak is the leader in scalable Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration. The company's award-winning NX appliances optimize all current and future applications across an entire enterprise, making Silver Peak strategic to a variety of core business initiatives, such as server centralization, real-time collaboration and disaster recovery. For more information on the Silver Peak solution, visit: www.silver-peak.com/infocenter.

David Kellermann, Freddie Mac Acting CFO, Found Dead

2009-04-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

David Kellermann, Freddie Mac’s acting chief financial officer, has been found dead in his home outside of Washington. Kellermann’s wife believes he committed suicide, reports indicate.

David Kellermann Suicide Investigation

David Kellermann, 41, had been with Freddie Mac since 1992. He was promoted from the position controller, in which he managed financial statements and disclosures, to acting CFO following the government’s takeover of the company in September.

David Kellermann’s body was found at 4:48 a.m. in his Reston, Virginia home on Wednesday. According to media reports, there are no signs of any sort of foul play. An official cause of death, however, has not been determined.

Freddie Mac has yet to issue a comment about Kellermann’s death.

Technorati Authority 1

2009-04-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

hahaha this is Cool. we have 1 Authority in Technorati.

So Check out the Sitemap For more SEO Tips And Tricks.

Actually we have only 3 readers now. I dont know what happen to other other readers.

I'm Thinking when will this experiment end.

I Search Google For the keyword SEO but I cant Find Our site. I search From 1-20 page of google with the keyword SEo but I didn't Find our Site.

But I think Its So Early for us to get in the 1s page with the keyword SEO but the Goal is To get there as fast as we can. So We will just w8 for now.

Katmai Sinking:Deadliest Catch

2009-04-22T00:14:00.000-07:00

Katmai Sinking:Deadliest Catch - The Katmai sinking that occurred last October where few crew members were killed was featured on Deadliest Catch on the Discovery channel this evening.Skipper Phil Harris, who survived on the sinking ship now operates his own boat called Cornelia Marie.Harris who is ill said:

“Am I still going to be able to do this? This is my career, man.”

Lawrence Lamond Phillips

2009-04-21T13:48:00.001-07:00

(born May 12, 1975 in Little Rock, Arkansas), is a former running back for the Nebraska Cornhuskers, a former professional American football and Canadian football running back who has had numerous conflicts with law enforcement. Phillips trouble with the law and inability to produce in the NFL have led many critics to label him as a bust[1]. He attended Baldwin Park High School in Baldwin Park, CA.

$5 Dinners on Rachael Ray and New York City

2009-04-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

$5 Dinners on Rachael Ray airs tomorrow, Tuesday, April 21st. Check your local listings at www.rachaelrayshow.com!

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we!

About 6 months ago I heard about this segment with Rachael and Whoopi discussing the “fat tax” and the idea that it is more expensive to eat fresh produce and healthy foods. Of course, when I got wind of this, I had to say SOMETHING! I jumped on Rach’s website and submitted a short note in the ”contact us” that went something like this…

“Just heard about the segment with Whoopi where the high cost of fresh produce and healthy eating were discussed. It is NOT MORE EXPENSIVE TO EAT HEALTHY!!!!!!!!! Here’s what I do…”

Totally forgot that I had submitted this to them. Until about a month ago!

A producer from the show called and said she’d been poking around the site and was interested in doing a story. We talked for a long time, she asked a gazillion questions, the kids whined and cried while I attempted to answer her questions in a most articulate way!

After getting off the phone with the producer there was a little LOT of squealling…cuz I just love Rachael and couldn’t believe I was going to get to MEET HER! After a few more phone calls, squeals and interviews, it was set up that a crew would come to the house one week and I’d fly to NYC another week to appear in the studio!

The crew was LOVELY to work with! They were very patient with me during the interviews. Highlight of the day: the local high school marching band showed up in the grocery store…while we were filming! Huh? And they marched around the store. Yeah. That’s what I said! The band caused a few audio issues while we went throughout the store….but we managed to get what was needed despite the tubas and trombones!

Skip ahead a week and I was off to NYC!!! My mom flew out and met me there. I managed to get a full and complete night’s sleep, by God’s good grace!, and woke up refreshed and ready for the day! My mom and I spent about an hour straightening my hair. We bummed around the hotel, went out to lunch at the Capital Grille and then headed over to the studio.

Getting hair and makeup done!

All dressed and ready to tape the segment! I made a silly face because if I had attempted to smile, I don’t think I would have been able! The anxiety was palpable! No, actually, I completely pretended like I was not there so that I could get through it. Had to make my brain go to another place so I wouldn’t feel nauseous or get tongue tied or just plain fall over!

Notice the deodorant in hand. Steph from A Year of Crockpotting was on the show last year and she tipped me off to the NEED for extra deodorant! Thanks Steph! The mini deodorant was very helpful. As were the little paper towels wrapped around the deodorant. NO SWEAT STAINS allowed on my pretty pink blouse!

The producers walked me over to the set, where I was thrown on stage and met Rachael. I sat down with her at “the kitchen table” for the interview. We had a short little chat while the background piece was rolling. I felt a little shudder of nerves go up my body, I shook that off and it was time for business. Then the camera started rolling. We chatted for a few minutes and that’s was it! The taping was a success! Rachael was so encouraging, flattering and super easy to chat with! It was lovely meeting her, and all the staff and crew on the show!

After the taping, I laid down back at the hotel and felt like I couldn’t move. Pure exhaution! I made a few calls, had a granola bar and then off to dinner and to see Mamma Mia on Broadway! LOVE THAT SHOW! (I had not seen the movie and am so glad to have seen it first on Broadway!)

We then strolled through Times Square and the M&M store after the show.

Hello…Chocolate Heaven!!!

The next day we had brunch with a friend and toured his office.

How about this view of Broadway and 5th…and the Empire State building!

I felt really tall when taking this photo in front of the Flat Iron building!

I did notice as we went around town that NYC streets were quieter than I remembered. I had memories of LOUD horns, lots of honking and cabbies yelling at each other! Not the case anymore…in an effort to reduce noise pollution, there is now a $350 fine for honking just to honk! I think I can say it made my trip a little more peaceful! The noise level was remarkably lower than previous visits!

We did some shopping that day and then it was BACK TO REALITY!

After an hour and a half ride back to the airport (my definition of traffic is stumbling over one of the children on my way to the kitchen in the morning!) I was on my way back home!

I had a FABULOUS time and I’m honored and humbled to have had the experience of being on the show and hanging out in New York City!

UPDATE: Here is a newspaper link with a photo of Rachael and I sitting at the table. If you are in the Dayton, OH area, you can catch me around 8:45 on Fox45 tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. And if you are in the San Antonio, TX area, you can see an interview with me on Good Morning San Antonio on KSAT12.

Paid Ads and Submissions

2009-04-21T07:05:00.003-07:00

We have already mentioned some other alternatives to search engines – forums, specialized sites and search engines, search directories – but if you need to make sure that your site will be noticed, you can always resort to paid ads and submissions. Yes, paid listings are a fast and guaranteed way to appear in search results and most of the major search engines accept payment to put your URL in the Paid Links section for keywords of interest to you but you also must have in mind that users generally do not trust paid links as much as they do with the normal ones – in a sense it looks like you are bribing the search engine to place you where you can't get on your own, so think twice about the pros and cons of paying to get listed.

Specialized Search Engines

2009-04-21T07:05:00.001-07:00

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are not the only search engines on Earth, nor even the only general-purpose ones. There are many other general-purpose and specialized search engines and some of them can be really helpful for reaching your target audience. You just can't imagine for how many niches specialized search engines exist – from law, to radiostations, to educational one! Some of them are actually huge sites that gather Webwide resources on a particular topic but almost all of them have sections for submitting links to external sites of interest. So, after you find the specialized search engines in your niche, go to their site and submit your URL – this could prove more trafficworthy than striving to get to the top of Google.

Submitting Your Site to Search Directories, forums and special sites

2009-04-21T07:04:00.001-07:00

After you have finished optimizing your new site, time comes to submit it to search engines. Generally, with search engines you don't have to do anything special in order to get your site included in their indices – they will come and find you. Well, it cannot be said exactly when they will visit your site for the first time and at what intervals they will visit it later but there is hardly anything that you can to do invite them. Sure, you can go to their Submit a Site pages in submit the URL of your new site but by doing this do not expect that they will hop to you right away. What is more, even if you submit your URL, most search engines reserve the right to judge whether to crawl your site or not. Anyway, here are the URLs for submitting pages in the three major search engines: Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

In addition to search engines, you may also want to have your site included in search directories as well. Although search directories also list sites that are relevant to a given topic, they are different from search engines in several aspects. First, search directories are usually maintained by humans and the sites in them are reviewed for relevancy after they have been submitted. Second, search directories do not use crawlers to get URLs, so you need to go to them and submit your site but once you do this, you can stay there forever and no more efforts on your side are necessary. Some of the most popular search directories are DMOZ and Yahoo! (the directory, not the search engine itself) and here are the URLs of their submissions pages: DMOZ and Yahoo!.

Sometimes posting a link to your site in the right forums or special sites can do miracles in terms of traffic. You need to find the forums and sites that are leaders in the fields of interest to you but generally even a simple search in Google or the other major search engines will retrieve their names. For instance, if you are a hardware freak, type “hardware forums” in the search box and in a second you will have a list of sites that are favorites to other hardware freaks. Then you need to check the sites one by one because some of them might not allow posting links to commercial sites. Posting into forums is more time-consuming than submitting to search engines but it could also be pretty rewarding.

Promoting Your Site to Increase Traffic

2009-04-21T07:03:00.000-07:00

The main purpose of SEO is to make your site visible to search engines, thus leading to higher rankings in search results pages, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. And having more visitors (and above all buyers) is ultimately the goal in sites promotion. For truth's sake, SEO is only one alternative to promote your site and increase traffic – there are many other online and offline ways to do accomplish the goal of getting high traffic and reaching your target audience. We are not going to explore them in this tutorial but just keep in mind that search engines are not the only way to get visitors to your site, although they seem to be a preferable choice and a relatively easy way to do it.

Static Versus Dynamic URLs

2009-04-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

Based on the previous section, you might have gotten the impression that the algorithms of search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell much about the contents of the page.

There are a couple of good reasons why static URLs score better than dynamic URLs. First, dynamic URLs are not always there – i.e. the page is generated on request after the user performs some kind of action (fills a form and submits it or performs a search using the site's search engine). In a sense, such pages are nonexistent for search engines, because they index the Web by crawling it, not by filling in forms.

Second, even if a dynamic page has already been generated by a previous user request and is stored on the server, search engines might just skip it if it has too many question marks and other special symbols in it. Once upon a time search engines did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they do index them but generally slower than they index static pages.

The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools (different for different platforms and servers) that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages. Try the URL Rewriting Tool below, it will convert the cryptic text from the previous example into something more readable, like http://mydomain.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-5.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

2009-04-21T06:55:00.003-07:00

Similar to keyword stuffing, purchasing links in bulk is a practice to be avoided. It gets suspicious if you bartered 1000 links with another site in a day or two. What is more, search engines keep track of link farms (sites that sell links in bulk) and since bought links are a way to manipulate search results, this practice gets punished by search engines. So avoid dealing with link farms because it can cause more harm than do good. Also, outbound links from your site to known Web spammers or “bad guys” are also to be avoided.

As mentioned, link exchange is not a clean deal. Even if it boosts your ranking, it can have many other negative aspects in the long run. First, you do not know if the other party will keep their promise – i.e. they might remove some of the links to you. Second, they might change the context the link appears into. Third, it is really suspicious if you seem to be “married” to another site and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction.

When links are concerned, one aspect to have in mind is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case by case basis. If you have a site that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.

Anchor text

2009-04-21T06:55:00.001-07:00

Anchor text is the most important item in a backlink. While it does matter where a link comes from (i.e. a reputable place or a link farm), what matters more is the actual text the link starts from. Put simply, anchor text is the word(s) that you click on to open the hyperlink – e.g. if we have the best search engine, than “the best search engine” is the anchor text for the hyperlink to google.com. You see that you might have a backlink from a valuable site but if the anchor text is something like “an example of a complete failure”, you will hardly be happy with it.

When you check your backlinks, always check what their anchor text is and if there is a keyword in it. It is a great SEO boost to have a lot of backlinks from quality sites and the anchor text to include our keywords. Check the anchor text of inbound backlinks is with the Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer tool below. Besides the anchor text itself, the text around it is also important.

Inbound and Outbound Links

2009-04-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

Put in layman's terms, there are two types of links that are important for SEO – inbound and outbound links. Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another one, while inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external site to yours, e.g. if a.com links to mydomain.com, the link from a.com is an inbound link for mydomain.com.

Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your site among the Web audience. It is necessary to say that not all backlinks are equal. There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places - preferably from sites with a similar theme. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided. Well, if you are backlinked without your knowledge and consent, maybe you should drop the Webmaster a line, asking him or her to remove the backlink.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don't worry - buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives. For instance, some of the good places where you can get quality backlinks are Web directories like http://dmoz.org or http://dir.yahoo.com.

First, look for suitable sites to backlink to you using the Backlinks Builder below. After you identify potential backlinks, it's time to contact the Web master of the site and to start negotiating terms. Sometimes you can agree to a barter deal – i.e. a link exchange – they will put on their site N links to your site and you will put on your site N links to their site - but have in mind that this is a bad, risky deal and you should always try to avoid it.

Internal links (i.e. links from one page to another page on the same site) are also important but not as much as backlinks. In this connection it is necessary to say, that using images for links might be prettier but it is a SEO killer. Instead of having buttons for links, use simple text links. Since search engines spider the text on a page, they can't see all the designer miracles, like gradient buttons or flash animations, so when possible, either avoid using them, or provide a meaningful textual description in the ALT tag, as described next.

Why Links Are Important

2009-04-21T06:22:00.000-07:00

Probably the word that associates best with Web is “links”. That is what hypertext is all about – you link to pages you like and get linked by pages that like your site. Actually, the Web is woven out of interconnected pages and spiders follow the links, when indexing the Web. If not many sites link to you, then it might take ages for search engines to find your site and even if they find you, it is unlikely that you will have high rankings because the quality and quantity of links is part of the algorithms of search engines for calculating relevancy.

Keywords in Headings

2009-04-21T06:20:00.000-07:00

Normally headings separate paragraphs into related subtopics and from a literary point of view, it may be pointless to have a heading after every other paragraph but from SEO point of view it is extremely good to have as many headings on a page as possible, especially if they have the keywords in them.

There are no technical length limits for the contents of the H1 tag, H2 tag, H3 tag, ... tags but common sense says that too long headings are bad for page readability. So, like with URLs, you need to be wise with the length of headings. Another issue you need to consider is how the heading will be displayed. If it is Heading 1 (H1 tag), generally this means larger font size and in this case it is recommendable to have less than 7-8 words in the heading, otherwise it might spread on 2 or 3 lines, which is not good and if you can avoid it – do it.

Back to Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO

Keywords in Page Titles

2009-04-21T06:19:00.000-07:00

The page title is another special place because the contents of the Title Tags usually gets displayed in most search engines, (including Google). While it is not mandatory per the HTML specification to write something in the Title Tags (i.e. you can leave it empty and the title bar of the browser will read “Untitled Document” or similar), for SEO purposes you may not want to leave the Title Tags empty; instead, you'd better write the the page title in it.

Unlike URLs, with page titles you can get wordy. If we go on with the dog example, the Title Tags of the home page for the http://dog-adopt.net can include something like this: Title Tags Adopt a Dog – Save a Life and Bring Joy to Your Home Title Tags, Title Tags Everything You Need to Know About Adopting a DogTitle Tags or even longer.

Back to Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO

Keywords in URLs and File Names

2009-04-21T06:18:00.000-07:00

The domain name and the whole URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about dogs, you will have “dog”, “dogs”, or “puppy” as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site “dog-adopt.net” than “animal-care.org”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword.

When hunting for keyword rich domain names, don't get greedy. While from a SEO point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL, just imagine how long and difficult to memorize the URL will be. So you need to strike a balance between the keywords in the URL and site usability, which says that more than 3 words in the URL is a way too much.
Probably you will not be able to come on your own with tons of good suggestions. Additionally, even if you manage to think of a couple of good domain names, they might be already taken. In such cases tools like the Tool below can come very handy.

File names and directory names are also important. Often search engines will give preference to pages that have a keyword in the file name. For instance http://mydomain.com/dog-adopt.html is not as good as http://dog-adopt.net/dog-adopt.html but is certainly better than http://mydomain.com/animal-care.html. The advantage of keywords in file names over keywords in URLs is that they are easier to change, if you decide to move to another niche, for example.

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Keywords in Special Places

2009-04-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs – this counts more that if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!.

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Keyword Density

2009-04-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website.

Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

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Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For

2009-04-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

It seems that the time when you could easily top the results for a one-word search string is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so densely populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal. If you examine closely the dynamics of search results for popular one-word keywords, you might notice that it is so easy one week to be in the first ten results and the next one– to have fallen out of the first 30 results because the competition for popular one-word keywords is so fierce and other sites have replaced you.

Of course, you can include one-word strings in your keywords list but if they are not backed up by more expressions, do not dream of high ratings. For instance, if you have a site about dogs, “dog” is a mandatory keyword but if you do not optimize for more words, like “dog owners”, “dog breeds”, “dog food”, or even “canine”, success is unlikely, especially for such a popular keyword. The examples given here are by no means the ultimate truth about how to optimize a dog site but they are good enough to show that you need to think broad when choosing the keywords.

Generally, when you start optimization, the first thing you need to consider is the keywords that describe the content of your site best and that are most likely to be used by users to find you. Ideally, you know your users well and can guess correctly what search strings they are likely to use to search for you. One issue to consider is synonyms. Very often users will use a different word for the same thing. For instance, in the example with the dog site, “canine” is a synonym and it is for sure that there will be users who will use it, so it does not hurt to include it now and then on your pages. But do not rush to optimize for every synonym you can think of – search engines themselves have algorithms that include synonyms in the keyword match, especially for languages like English.

Instead, think of more keywords that are likely to be used to describe your site. Thinking thematically is especially good because search engines tend to rate a page higher if it belongs to a site the theme of which fits into the keyword string. In this aspect it is important that your site is concentrated around a particular theme – i.e. dogs. It might be difficult to think of all the relevant keywords on your own but that is why tools are for. For instance, the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool below can help you to see how search engines determine the theme of your web site and what keywords fit into this theme. You can also try Google's Keyword Tool to get more suggestions about which keywords are hot and which are not.

When choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only their relevancy to your site and the expected monthly number of searches for these particular keywords. Very often narrow searches are more valuable because the users that come to your site are those that are really interested in your product. If we go on with the dog example, you might discover that the “adopt a dog” keyphrase brings you more visitors because you have a special section on your site where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a dog. This page is not of interest of current dog owners but to potential dog owners only, who might be not so many in number but are your target audience and the overall effect of attracting this niche can be better than attracting everybody who is interested in dogs in general. So, when you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.

Back to Keywords – the Most Important Item in SEO