Saturday, September 11, 2010

Keywords, Building Findable Websites

From the keyword research that I do prior to starting an online campaign, I pick a small subset of keywords that are tightly semantically grouped, and that have a decent amount of traffic.

Let’s consider the LSI algorithm. I learned this from these podcast interviews. LSI is a specific mathematical algorithm which absolutely Google does not use. That’s very different from the perspective of saying well, does Google consider semantic relevance of content and semantic relevance of links? Absolutely it does. You can learn SEO step by step If you’ve got a website about a whole lot of unrelated topics and unrelated content, it’s not to say you can’t rank well, but you’re going to rank less well than someone who has a very tightly themed site.

So the LSI argument out there sort of misses the point. They’re saying, do they use this algorithm? The reality is, they do use an algorithm. I’ve seen videos of Google showing semantic scoring algorithms that they’re using. So they definitely are using semantic algorithms in the background.

It boils down to quality. Google wants to serve up the best quality content for any keyword and if it finds a nice, tightly themed site which is all about a particular keyword, then it makes sense that that thing should rank more highly than something else potentially.

I select six to twelve very tightly semantically clustered keywords and load them in as my categories.

The first thing, if my purpose is to test the market, is to validate that there is traffic in that market. The key thing about testing is to risk the minimum amount to get a quick result back. So you don’t want to over invest in a website when you’re starting out. When you’ve tested the market you’re already in, you’ve done some AdWord testing, then you can go hard at it.

But from the testing perspective, you should be still looking to put posts of those category keywords and then, I’ll go into link building in a second, but do some link building and then just wait and measure what happens.

If there’s an action you look at the reaction and if you’re not seeing positive things then you have to start asking the questions why. At least you haven’t over invested into a market from an SEO perspective anyway.

With on page optimization for those keywords if you’re creating posts, apart from the basics of your keyword in the right places: your title tag, meta description keywords and then a little bit throughout the page, even an H1 tag, and a couple of links don’t go astray as well, there is not much more that happens from an on page point of view.

You just need to look at internal linking structure and things like if you’re using a blog to rank, things like tagging and those kind of things are really important and actually looking at site structures to get the best bang for your buck on those sort of things. Really there’s not that much to the on page optimization. It’s the internal link structure which confuses most people.

I think it’s a bit disappointing. Google is on the back foot now with no follow. No follow is still no follow. It’s just that they’ve changed the rules to prevent something called page rank sculpting from happening. So a lot of those techniques that people were using to concentrate page rank on those pages in their website are not as effective as they used to be. It was actually a nice trade off between nice good navigation for people who were visiting your website and the ability to pass page rank and guide you to pages that you really wanted them to see.

The side effect of this decision is probably going to be a lot of people are going to be going back to what happened seven or eight years ago just using a Java script link and those sort of things to try to create a set of links for navigation and a set of links for SEO. This is really sad.

Carefully select tightly semantically grouped keywords, test the market and do some simple on page optimization. Your online campaign will then be off to a very good start.



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