Tag Archives: Google

SEO case study month 0 – Keyword choice and on page SEO

A month ago we started our SEO case study for amber teething necklace and amber beads suppliers Flower Child. In this update post I will outline the basic strategy in terms of keyword choice and on page SEO.

Keyword choice

There are a lot of keyword tools out there, I find the Google Keyword tool sufficient in most cases. My simplified strategy with choosing keyword is:

  1. Choose a keyword that is likely to bring customers (note traffic doesn’t necessarily mean customers)
  2. Choose one that we have some chance of ranking for.

Basically we look at Analytics data to see what terms have brought them traffic in the past, look for terms that would likely be searched for by a potential customer, look at where we are currently ranking and then go to the Google Keyword tool and work out how many searches the keyword is getting. The screenshot below shows the results after I put in some keywords. Click on the image to see the whole picture.

web design - keyword tool

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Small business search engine domination

Ebook I am excited to announce the launch of our new SEO service and to support the launch I have written a 19 page ebook filled with SEO advice for small business owners.Originally I intended to provide the ebook to clients who signed up to the service however I felt this kind of information is too hard to find for the average small business so I have decided to make it available to all. Read More…
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On page SEO

If you have read my post The only way to win at SEO, you will see that I don’t regard on page SEO as a particularly sophisticated SEO strategy. Not to say it’s not important, it’s extremely important but it’s generally no longer going to be enough to get you onto the front page for a high traffic keyword.

In this post I will go through the basics of what we do for on-page optimisation. Note I haven’t included general coding techniques in here but it’s worth mentioning that Google likes well coded web pages and doesn’t particularly love old school coding like loads of tables and Flash.

First off – Google Analytics

The first step here is to look at what keywords are bringing you traffic at the moment. Google Analytics is what we use for this so hopefully it’s installed but if it’s not, install it now and use your current stats package to look at the keyword data (AWStats is often installed on hosting accounts by default).

The last thing we want to do is have our on page SEO changes reduce traffic that is coming from Google already so if there are keywords that are currently bringing you traffic then you have to make sure you don’t undo any onsite work that has been done for these. Read More…

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Understanding Google (video)

If you ever plan on getting traffic through Google then it’s crucial that as a starting point you understand how Google works.

In this video I run through:

  1. The difference between natural listings (SEO) vs paid listings or adwords (SEM)
  2. The importance of keywords
  3. The only way to win at SEO (and my 5 levels of SEO sophistication)
  4. 8 Myths about ranking in Google

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8 Myths about Google (and SEO)

I’m currently working on a presentation on ‘Understanding Google’ and as part of it I’ve covered 8 myths about Google so I thought it made sense to go into some more detail in a blog post.

Some of these things were true a few years ago but as Google has become more sophisticated they are no longer true.

Some of them have never been true and will never be true.

Putting keywords in your meta tags will improve ranking

Back when search engines were first invented, putting keywords in your meta tags (tags that are visible to search engines but not immediately visible to humans) was one way of increasing your position in the search engine. Obviously this sort of thing  is way to easy to abuse and Google worked this out pretty early on.
These days meta tags have no influence over your ranking in Google (note the meta description tag should still be used as it’s words will often be used for the site description in Google’s results but it won’t be used to determine rank).

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