SEO Tips

In general I try to write my posts so anyone can understand what I’m talking about, whether or not they’ve spent 10 years doing SEO. I believe I succeed quite well, but sometimes I don’t.

I recently wrote a post about On Site Optimization and included a brief mention of checking your keyword density.

This might have gone over a few people’s heads, and even if it didn’t, you might not know how to check your keyword density.

Keyword Density basically means the amount of times a word, or word phrase appears on a page. Simple enough.

So how do you check keyword density?

There are a hundred tools out there that will help you out. I’m going to go through a fast but detailed tutorial on how to use just one.

The main keyword density tool that I like to use is SEOQuake Add-on for Firefox. (they also have an add-on for Chrome)
The add-on has a ton of information about SEO in general, but it can be overwhelming and slow your browsing experience down.

First we’ll install seo quake and disable most of the features:
In FireFox go to: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036/
Click the Green button – add to firefox
Install the add on and restart Firefox. During install it will ask if you want instant reports or on demand. change to on demand, you don’t want it looking up every site you visit, it will slow you down too much.
After you restart you will have a small “SQ” in the bottom right of your browser.
Click it once and it will turn gray.

You now turned off all the annoying things with this pluggin that you don’t need right now.

Browse to a site you want to check
I’ll check my on site optimization article:
Right click on an empty are, select SEOQuake, select Keyword Density.

once you select keyword density report it will open in a new tab with all kinds of wonderful information.

You can see my top words for this page are: optimization, search, seo, site, engine, tips

That is right in line with my overall keyword strategy and I’m pretty happy with it. You can also look lower down and see what your 2, 3 and 4 word phrases are.

My top phrases, again right in line with my keyword strategies:
search engine, engine optimization, on site, site optimization, learning center, contact me, seo tips
search engine optimization, on site optimization
marketing tips seo tips, tips seo tips website, seo tips website tips, of search engine optimization

How important is my keyword density?

It’s minor. Keyword density isn’t going to get you to the top of the search engines, but it will give a slight edge when fighting for a particular spot.

You shouldn’t kill yourself trying to get the right recipe of keyword density percentages. Try to write naturally for humans. Then after you finish writing your article check the density and try to improve what you can. I’ve often used keyword density tools to find accidental omissions of words from my keyword research list.

How do I increase my density for my product?
easy – use the words more.

One way to easily and quickly increase your keyword count it to look through your paragraphs for use of pronouns. Replacing pronouns with the proper noun can naturally increase your word counts and not read like it was written in some other language and then translated poorly.

Let me know if you find this article useful and if there is anything you’d like more information on.

In step 1 we discussed keyword research, now we’ll dive into step 2 – Planning and on site optimization

Planning can be as complicated or as simple as you desire, but if you don’t have a plan, chances are you will fail.

The structure of your site and how easy it is for Google, Yahoo and Bing to traverse is extremely important. Luckily if you followed my advice and built your small business web site on WordPress you already have the basics of a well made site. Simply by adding the all in one SEO pack and a few other pluggins you can start with the real work and not waste your time arguing with developers who don’t know jack about SEO.

On-Site optimization is the easiest part of search engine optimization. Do you know why? We’ll I’ll tell you. It is because you have control over it. Really it’s the only part of optimization that is all you. It’s success or failure is your fault. Not Google’s, not Yahoo’s, not Bing’s.

So let’s do an easy check list for your on site optimization. For some more reading you can check out my Google is stupid post.

1. Unique meta title on every page.
2. Unique meta description on every page (this is the text that shows up to search engine users)
3. Good content written for the human (it’s important that you write for human readers and then update to be search engine friendly. Do not write for search engines only)
4. include alt text on images
5. include title tags on links
6. use h1 for important items, h2 for secondary (if you are using wordpress it mostly does this already)
7. use the footer to link back to your home page
8. link to yourself. where applicable link to yourself from other pages, besides just your navigation
9. www or not www. Don’t use both. personally I prefer www because when people type your url or copy and paste it will automatically be a link in their email client or facebook.
10. Stay on topic – one topic per page
11. check your keyword density
12. test your site. (you’d be surprised how many people have 1/2 functioning web sites out there)

If you want more details on anything I’ve written be sure to ask.

I also do training seminars if you’d like to be able to handle search engine optimization in house.

If you can understand a grasp this simple reality your search engine optimization will improve 100 percent. Googlebot, with it’s complex algorithms and 200 points of measurement is nothing but a computer program (or a collection of programs). It can’t think and rationalize. Can’t get angry or happy. It’s just a blind, dumb program that takes input and gives back output.

Now I’m not saying that the people behind Google are stupid, just the googlebot itself.

For your site to be indexed for the proper terms and come up for relevant searches you need to tell Google everything. Don’t just think because everyone knows your brand that Google knows your brand, it doesn’t.

It only knows what you tell it. Computers aren’t evil, computers don’t lie, computers don’t make decisions based on anything other than input.

So, do yourself a favor and give Google what it wants.

• Unique meta Title and description on every page – I’m sorry, but I’m just a bot and I can’t tell that your pages have different content or what the theme of the page is. In my defense you do have 500 lines of bad code, 1,000 lines of off topic text and only 100 lines of real content.
• H1 tags used properly – again, how am I supposed to know which heading is which? I don’t read css or javascript, please give me some info.
• Use alt tags on images – I’m a computer, I can’t see. How am I suppose to know Dsc30011.jpg is a butterfly instead of a horse? Hell, it might even be a moth. You need to tell me! You know what, why not rename it to moth.jpg while you are at it. Help me, I’m stupid.
• Anchor text/title tags on links – Why are you linking to that other page? What does that page have to do with widgets? If you would fill out the title text I might know it’s your search page for widgets instead of ‘click here’. What does click here even mean
• One page for one piece of content – I know I’m a computer and I might be stupid, but these strings of characters don’t look the same to me: www.sitpretty.com sitpretty.com www.sitpretty.com/index.php sitpretty.com/index.php

Now the incredibly smart people behind Google have been able to solve a lot of the problems with its stupid bot, but do you really want extra lines of code trying to guess what your intentions are? Tell the bot everything, don’t leave things to the bots lack of imagination and you’ll be reaping the rewards.

You can search any day of the week on SEO and find a hundred experts telling you the exact opposite of each other. There is a lot of fighting and wrangling amongst SEO experts on many topics.

The reason ‘experts’ can say the exact opposite of each other is because it’s all minutiae that they are fighting about.

The largest pieces of search engine optimization are all well known to everyone in the field. The only thing left to fight about is the minor things. The minutiae makes all the difference in the world when fighting for a search term that receives 300,000 searches a day, but more than likely the terms you want to come up #1 for are not in that class.

So let’s focus on the basics for a few minutes, because the basics can get you to the top of Google.

Build a site that has rich content and people want to link to.
Do on-site optimization that uses your researched keywords.
Get some people to link to you using facebook, twitter, digg, stumbleupon, etc.

So don’t stress about things like page load time, reciprocal linking, the exact percentage of your keyword density, sitemaps, link neighborhood, anchor text, page rank, etc.*

Just build a good site that is on topic and people want to use and your site will come up.

*These things do matter when all added up. Don’t try to cheat and you should be OK. If you are thinking about cheating (buying links, stuffing keywords, hiring a shitty SEO company that spammed you) Please, Please consider giving me a call and discussing your situation first.

The first step to search engine optimization is always, always, always the same – Keyword Research.

I can not tell you how many people don’t do this first. You have a general idea of what people are searching for, but you are wrong. You need to do some research.

Here is what I do:

1. Look at the product I’m selling and try to put myself into the mindset of someone looking for that product or service.

2. Come up with a list of keywords that I think someone might use to find the product or service.

3. Here’s where the research comes in – I then take that list and put it into Google Adwords (Free) or WordTracker (Annual Subscription) – There are hundreds of other keyword tools out there, but these are good for me. SEOMoz can also be a great investment.

4. Use the tools from step 3 to find suggestions, Look for long tail keywords to target. If you are a local business you can often get an advantage over the big players.

5. take those keywords and search them up. This is where you find out who your online competition is. Look at their sites, keyword densities, titles, h1 tags.

6. Now you have a bunch of information to look at and a bunch of keywords to target. Put those keywords on a list and give them to your staff. The more aware they are the more aware your company is.

I’m not saying SEO is simple, but it’s not exactly rocket science.

Best of luck to you!