How To Do Keyword Research - The Beginners Guide to SEO. It all begins with words typed into a search box.
Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market's keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole. It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated; with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively seeking.
How to Judge the Value of a Keyword How much is a keyword worth to your website? Even the best estimates of value fall flat against the hands-on process of optimizing and calculating ROI. Understanding the Long Tail of Keyword Demand Keyword Research Resources. The Basics of SEO Friendly Design and Development - The Beginners Guide to SEO. Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content.
A webpage doesn't always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine. In this section, we'll focus on specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in a site's construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site. In order to be listed in the search engines, your most important content should be in HTML text format.
Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. Seeing Like a Search Engine Many websites have significant problems with indexable content, so double-checking is worthwhile. Whoa! That’s a lot of monkeys, and just headline text? Keyword Abuse. Why SEO is Important - The Beginners Guide to SEO. An important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand.
Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, in many ways they still can't see and understand a web page the same way a human does. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users. A Common Argument Against SEO We frequently hear statements like this: “No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed.
But Wait... Imagine you posted online a picture of your family dog. Understanding both the abilities and limitations of search engines allows you to properly build, format and annotate your web content in a way that search spiders can digest. The Limits of Search Engine Technology The major search engines all operate on the same principles, as explained in Chapter 1. 1. Interpreting Non-Text Content 2. 3. How People Use Search Engines - The Beginners Guide to SEO. One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience.
Once you grasp what the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users. We like to say "Build for users, not search engines. " When users have a bad experience at your site, when they can't accomplish a task or find what they were looking for, this often correlates with poor search engine performance. On the other hand, when users are happy with your website, a positive experience is created, both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result. What are users looking for? "Do" Transactional Queries - Action queries such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
How Search Engines Work - The Beginners Guide to SEO. Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they've determined are the most relevant. Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system. Each stop is a unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG, or other file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available—links. Crawling and IndexingCrawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos, and media on the World Wide Web.
Providing Answers Providing answers to user queries, most frequently through lists of relevant pages that they've retrieved and ranked for relevancy. The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together. Links allow the search engines' automated robots, called "crawlers" or "spiders," to reach the many billions of interconnected documents on the web.