How to get good search engine rankings

How to get good search engine rankings

Keywords are the words you want to rank well for. "Keywords" is somewhat of a misnomer, since when we say keywords we're actually talking about multi-word phrases.

You may want to put some thought into the keywords you want to target. Yes, I've said ad nauseum that you should just focus on building a good website and not worry about the SEO. That's true, but you can cross that line just a little bit by thinking about what phrases you hope your page will match for when creating that page.

Long tail -- search queries that individually aren't searched that often, but all of which together account for most of your search traffic.

A common misconception is that most of your traffic will come from a handful of 2- to 3-word "money phrases". But on a good information-rich site, you'll get traffic from all many of searches that you never thought of, many of them 4+ words in length.Yesterday the top 5 searches into my site comprised only 14% of my total search traffic. The top tencomprised only 20%. Does this concern me? Not at all. If the only traffic I could depend on were the few money terms I optimized for then I wouldn't get much traffic. I love the fact that I get 

Traffic -- the visitors who come to your website.

tons of traffic for phrases I didn't specifically target. This is known as getting thelong tail. Jakob Nielsen demonstrates this in graphical formby showing how most sites could easily enjoymore traffic simply by adding content.

Even though a good site will get most if its traffic from the long tail, it doesn't hurt to eek out better performance by targeting some specific keyword phrases, and that's what the rest of this page is about. But as you read, bear in mind that the keywords you're targeting are not the be-all and end-all of how you expect visitors to find your site.

 

KEYWORDS IN GENERAL

The best keywords are 2- to 4-word phrases that accurately describe what you offer using everyday language that searchers are likely to type in, and which aren't so competitive that you have no chance of getting on the front page. If your keywords are too general then they'll likely be too competitive, and even if you rank well on them your traffic might not convert well, since searchers are usually looking for something specific. But if your keywords are toospecific then few people willsearch for your terms and you'll get few potential visitors.

Note that since the engines rank pages, not sites, you will target different keywords on different pages. You might go for a more general term on your home page, and more specific terms on your inside pages.

Common mistakes in selection of search terms include targeting:

• Single-word terms
• Terms that are way too broad, and not focused to what you offer
• Terms that are too specialized, which nobody searches for
• Terms which are unpopular
• Highly-competitive terms which you can't hope to rank well for

We'll explore each of these in detail. And note that in the discussion that follows, when we say "optimize", we're simply referring to putting the keywords in the <TITLE> tag and in the body copy of the page.

AVOID SINGLE-WORD TERMS

SEO -- Search Engine Optimizer, a professional skilled in getting websites to rank well. Also stands for search engine optimization. The term SEO is somewhat of a misnomer because improving ranking these days usually takes more than just optimizing the actual text on a page, it also involves getting a lot of high quality, relevant inbound links.

Single-word terms are usually a poor choice for optimizing. That's because they're too broad, and they're too competitive. Most SEO's won't touch single-word terms for this reason. Two- and three-word phrases are not only easier to rank for, they send you much higher quality traffic.When we're searching for something ourselves, most of us know that one-word searches aren't very useful for getting the results we want. Think about it: When was the last time you found what you were looking for by typing a single word into Google? Probably the first time you ever tried a single-word search you got a list of results that weren't what you wanted. You then added another word or two to try to refine your search. After having the experience of not finding what you were looking for with single-word searches a few times you began automatically typing at least two or three words in when doing searches. (Either that, or you're spending your time wading through irrelevant search results for the single-word term you typed in.)
So it's funny that when it comes time to pick search terms for our own site, many of us magically forget that we don't use single-word terms in our own searches. But to have a successful website -- or a successful business for that matter -- it's important to put yourself in your customers' shoes, and think like they do. And most of them won't be using single-word terms. Those few who do will be lost among the others who are searching for that same term but had something else in mind besides what you offer.
Besides the fact that single-word terms are too broad, they're also almost impossible to rank well for, because there are too many competing websites. If you want to rank well for "writer" then you're competing with every site that uses the word "writer" anywhere on the page -- and there are 11.6 million of them. But target "real estate writer" and your competition plummets to only 1.2 million. Go with "freelance real estate writer" and now you're down to 48,700. You get the idea. (Of course, you don't want your search terms to be too specific. We'll cover that in a minute.)

Avoid single-word search terms because they're generally too broad and too competitive.

AVOID TERMS THAT ARE TOO BROAD

Terms can be too broad even if they're two or more words. But we'll use a single word in our example, because it's a pretty good example.Let's say your business is decorating cakes in Portland, Oregon. You decide you want a top 10 ranking for "cakes". Will that be good for your business? No, because the overwhelming majority of your visitors searching for just "cakes" aren't potential customers. They're more likely looking for recipes or nutritional information. Even if they're looking for a cake decorator they're probably not looking for one in Portland. The bottom line is, it's not how well your site ranks for a given term, or even how much traffic you get from your ranking; it's how many potential customers visit your site. A thousand random surfers aren't worth as much as one qualified lead.Ignore the number of raw hits; you want visitors who are actually interested in what you have to offer. The raw number of visitors is meaningless. For you, one visitor searching for "cake decorator portland" would be worth more than 1000 people searching for "cake".
And not only is "cake decorator portland" more valuable to you as a keyword, it's easier to get a good ranking for. That's because there's less competition. The more specialized your keywords are, the less competition you'll have. A search for "accountants" on Google yields over 1.7 million results. Yet a search for "naked accountants in albuquerque" yields only 115. (And no, none of those results are for actual naked accountants in Albuquerque, but you get the point.)
In fact, adding the city name where your business is located to your web pages is one of the quickest ways to bring in more qualified traffic.
Going back to the cake example, and the idea of ranking well for the one-word term "cake" even though most people searching for that aren't potential customers, is there any harm in having visitors who aren't potential customers? Sure there is. You waste users' time if you put a highly specialized site in front of them when they were searching for something general. If you've ever been frustrated by having to wade through irrelevant sites to find what you were looking for, then you can appreciate that it's common courtesy to not put your site in front of users who likely have no interest in it.
Getting visitors you don't want to your site also increases your bandwidth, and possibly your webhosting bill, and might even slow down your site down so much that potential customers are frustrated and click off your site. These are less likely consequences, but they're possible.
It's not how many people go to your site, it's how many actually buy something. It's important to stop focusing on the number of hits you get and start focusing on the qualityof hits. This is hard for many site owners to do, but it's essential nonetheless.
Back when it was easier to improve your site's rank (before the search engines started weeding out all the tricks), many site owners would get their sites to rank well on porn keywords, even if the sites had nothing to do with porn, figuring that searches for porn were very popular. Well, they were right, but all that traffic they got was useless, since the visitors clicked off those sites just as fast as they clicked on. What did the site owners think would be going through the visitors' minds? "Well, I was looking for sex pictures, but now that I'm here, I think I will refinance my mortgage!"
This is so important it bears repeating:Untargeted traffic is useless. The number of visitors you get is meaningless. It's the number of qualified visitors you get that counts.

AVOID TERMS THAT ARE TOO SPECIFIC

As we saw earlier, the more specific the search, the less the competition for the search term. And the less the competition, the easier it is to rank well on that term. Expanding on our example from earlier:

Number of Google Matches	Term
11,600,000	writer
1,200,000	real estate writer
48,000	freelance real estate writer
9,000	freelance real estate writer los angeles

But of course there's a catch: The more specific the search, the fewer people actually search for that term. Which is another way of saying that as competition goes down, so does the popularity of the search term. We can graph this concept like this:
Avoid unscrupulous SEO's who don't consider the popularity of the terms they suggest. Anyone can get a front-page ranking for "cheap freelance real estate writer in hollywood california". But since nobody searches for that, your #1 ranking would be useless.
Terms must be specific, but terms that are TOO specific are useless because nobody searches for them.

AVOID TERMS THAT ARE UNPOPULAR

If you pick unpopular keywords, your effort could be wasted. As an exaggerated example, just because the phrase "quadraphonic bluejay" is only two words long doesn't mean anyone's going to be searching for it. Ranking #1 on terms that nobody is searching for is just as bad as ranking #300 for terms that everybody is searching for. You can't get the traffic if people aren't using your search terms, no matter how well you're ranked.That doesn't mean you should avoid optimizing for lesser-used keywords at all. As long as a rare keyword search brings in somequalified traffic, then it's useful to your business.
Of course, it might not be possible to find popular search terms if what your business offers isn't very popular itself. If your business is refurbishing pogo sticks, you can't expect to find a search term that's both relevant and popular. (Though if refurbishing pogo sticks is your only business, you've got other problems.)
There are many online tools that can tell you how many searches are being performed for specific keywords, as well as suggesting related keywords to optimize for:

• Keyword Discovery. (recommended)The best service, uses data from 180 engines including Google and Yahoo, endorsed by a slew of the biggest names in SEO. $50/mo. or $400/yr.
• WordTracker. Similar to the above, but uses data from fewer search engines, and doesn't include Google. $50/mo. or $244/yr.
• Google Adwords. Adwords is Google's pay-per-click advertising program. In setting up an ad, you type in a list of keywords that should cause your ad to be displayed when a user searches for those keywords. Google then estimates how many clicks per day you can expect your ad to receive. By comparing which keywords Google thinks will generate more clicks, you can see which keywords users are more likely to use for their searches. You don't actually have to make an ad go live, and if you don't then it's free.
• Google Trends. A free tool that lets you compare the traffic that two different search phrases get.
• Overture Keyword Selector. Only Yahoo data, but hey, it's free.

Make certain your search terms are popular, or at least as popular as possible given what your market is.

AVOID HIGHLY COMPETITIVE TERMS

You might have found a term that's both popular and highly relevant to what you actually offer. But if too many other sites are competing for that same term, you might not be able to rank well for it, or you might rank lower than you'd like.Let's look at a practical example. Back when I did SEO-for-hire, one of my clients who makes hand-crafted personalized wedding gifts wanted to rank well for the term "wedding gifts". I advised that "wedding gifts" was ultra competitive and that we should also target "personalized wedding gifts" to have a better shot of getting onto the front page of Google. Well, as it turns out, I was able to get "wedding gifts" onto the front page after all. But "personalized wedding gifts" ranked #2 while plain old "wedding gifts" ranked #10.
So even if you can get on the front page for a certain term, you might be able to rank evenhigher on the front page for a less competitive term. And of course some phrases are so competitive you won't be able to get onto the front page at all. In this case your solution is to find a less competitive term, usually by making it more specialized by adding another word or two to the search term.

SUMMING IT UP

Putting it all together, the trick is to find search terms that are highly relevant to what you offer, popular enough that they'll result in decent traffic to your site, but not so competitive that you can't rank well for them. So how do you find out where all these criteria these intersect? How popular is popular enough, and how competitive is too competitive? If you don't think you can figure those things out on your own, this is exactly the kind of thing a good SEO consultant can help you with. He or she can evaluate your search terms and find those with the best fit for your website.

TIP: MINE YOUR SERVER REPORTS

Server reports are a good source for keyword research. If you have a decent webhost such as Dreamhost, they allow you to access reports showing such things as how many people visited your site, which pages they visited, and what search terms they used to find your site. The most popular reporting software programs are Analog and Awstats. If your host doesn't use one of these, ask if they will install it for you. If they don't offer it, and they won't, and the statistics they offer aren't as detailed and easy to use as Analog's or Awstats, then this is an important enough issue that you should consider switching webhosts.Your server reports will show what search terms people used to find your site. You will probably discover that they used terms that you hadn't thought of, and that you happen to have a fair ranking for those terms, perhaps on page 2 or 3, or maybe near the bottom of page 1. Once you discover these terms, you can optimize your pages for them to get a better ranking for them.
Here's a real-world example. I run a site about Las Vegas. One of the pages was about roller coasters in the area. When I created the site I wasn't careful to write good <TITLE> tags for the pages. In checking my server stats I found that a few people were finding the site through a search on "las vegas roller coasters", though my ranking for that term was mediocre. But knowing I was at least on the radar for that particular search, I put that phrase in the <TITLE>, and soon got a #1 match for "las vegas roller coasters".

TIP: CONSIDER WORD VARIANTS, AND WORD ORDER

Most search engines treat plurals different from singular. A search for "wedding gift" returns different results than "wedding gifts". If you have the resources, optimize for both versions. If you optimize for only one, then in most cases you'll pick the plural version, since that's more popular among users. Likewise, make certain to optimize for variations of compound words. For example, to Google, "web site" is different from "website".Word order matters. A search for "personalized wedding gifts" returns a different set of results than "wedding gifts personalized". Again, if you have the resources, optimize for all variations. If not, pick what you think will be the most common term.

RELATED ARTICLES

• The Definitive Secret to SEO Revealed. Ron Carnell's lengthy opus on choosing good keywords.

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Here's what India searched most on Google in 2015

Here's what India searched most on Google in 2015

INDIATODAY.IN  NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 16, 2015 | UPDATED 21:05 IST

Do you know 2015 was the year when Flipkart overtook IRCTC as the most searched query on Google in India? Yes, sir that happened. At the same time, it was also the year when a certain phone from a domestic brand - YU Yureka - dominated Google search India over one of the most talked about phones of 2015, ala, the Apple iPhone 6S. As the world prepares to bid adieu to 2015, global search engine giant Google is out with its "Year in Search" list giving interesting insights into what people - across the globe - were searching for and to what extent.

If you head over to Google Trends - that shows how often a particular search-term is used - the Mountain View-based company has compiled for you lists broken down into categories - globally as well as country wise breakdown - that tell you what the world was searching for in 2015.

The top 5 most searched terms in India this year were:

--Flipkart
--IRCTC
--State Bank of India
--Amazon
--Snapdeal

Indo-Canadian adult star turned Bollywood actor Sunny Leone was the most searched person of the year. Leone was followed closely by actor Salman Khanand the late former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam. PM Narendra Modi was the 10th most searched person of 2015. A large part of this list is occupied by celebrities, notably, Bollywood actors. 
  
Bahubali and Bajrangi Bhaijaan were the top two most searched Bollywood movies as per Google Trends. At the same time, Indian batsman Virat Kohli was the most searched sports personality in 2015.

Micromax-owned YU's Yureka phone was the top searched smartphone of the year, while Apple's iPhone 6S was a close second. 

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India's 20 most searched keywords in 2015

India's 20 most searched keywords in 2015

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: The words 'love' and çar' were the India's most popular searched keywords in 2015.

As per 'The Goonj India Index 2015: 7 Deadly Indian Sins' report made exclusively available to Zee News, the words 'love' and 'car' piped 'iphone' and other to find its ranking at top among all the searched keywords in the year 2015.

This was followed by cat, dog, baby, iphone and kiss.

At the Goonj India Index 2015, love and car became number one searched words in 2015 with 72.73 GPM while the words mobile phone and girlfriend were at the last in the list with 6.54 GPM.

Others in the list are: cat (56.52 GPM) , dog (48.62 GPM), baby (48.62 GPM), iphone (32.61 GPM), kiss (32.61 GPM), girl (17.89 GPM), job (17.89 GPM), wifi (14.62 GPM), money (14.62 GPM), personal loan (14.62 GPM), house (11.96 GPM), tattoo (9.78 GPM), oneplus (9.78 GPM), credit card (9.78 GPM), learn english (8.52 GPM), xbox (8.00 GPM), mobile phone (6.54 GPM) and girlfriend (6.54 GPM).

To read the full report, click here.

(Zee Digital has partnered exclusively with Goonj Labs to bring you these intriguing insights.)

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Keyword Tool: FREE Alternative to Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Tool: FREE Alternative to Google Keyword Planner

Find Out What Your Audience Is Looking For

KEYWORD TOOL HELPS YOU FIND THE KEYWORDS THAT PEOPLE ARE TYPING INTO GOOGLE SEARCH BOX

KEYWORD TOOL IS THE BEST ALTERNATIVE TO GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER AND OTHER KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS

Here are a few reasons why:

• Free version of Keyword Tool generates up to 750+ long-tail keyword suggestions for every search term
• No errors. Keyword Tool is extremely reliable as it works 99.99% of the time
• You can use Keyword Tool absolutely for free, even without creating an account

Are you a business owner, online marketer or content creator? You would definitely need to grab people's attention in order to make them click on your ads or even read your content. For that, you will have to first understand what your potential customers or readers are actually searching for.

Every search is an expression of people's needs, wants, interests and desires. Imagine how your business would benefit if you could analyse these search terms that are related to your business domain and customise your product to serve the actual needs of your customers.

Keyword Tool will help you discover thousands of the new long-tail keywords related to the topic that you specify by automatically generating Google's auto suggestions. The auto suggestions will be generated based on the Google domain and language that you choose.

The Next Web

Enter a keyword, and the Keyword Tool provides a huge handful of long-tail keyword opportunities, organized alphabetically.

Search Engine Watch

The first place to start is with long-tail research and this can be done with the help of a number of tools. My first choice, however, is always KeywordTool.io.

HOW DOES KEYWORD TOOL WORK?

Keyword Tool is free online keyword research instrument that uses Google Autocomplete to generate hundreds of relevant long-tail keywords.

Google Autocomplete is a feature used in Google Search. Its purpose is to speed up the searches performed by users on Google.

The search terms that are suggested by Google Autocomplete are based on a number of different factors, one of them is how often users were searching for a particular term in the past.

Keyword Tool helps you use Google suggest for keyword research. It extracts Google suggestions and presents it to you in a convenient form.

To generate long-tail keyword suggestions, Keyword Tool prepends and appends the term, that you specify with different letters and numbers. It also allows you to choose a specific Google domain (192 Google domains supported) and language (83 languages available) combination.

Free version of Keyword Tool generates over 750+ keywords in the language of your choice, while Keyword Tool Proprovides on average 2 times more keywords and hand full of other useful features. You can export the keywords and use them for content creation, search engine optimization, PPC or other marketing activities.

Forbes

KeywordTool.io is used by many leading SEO's to find long-tail and related keywords.

Search Engine Land

KeywordTool.io: This long-tail keyword research tool can provide thousands of keyword suggestions from real user queries.

WHY KEYWORD TOOL IS ONE OF THE BEST FREE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS?

There are few places where you can find keywords that people type in Google search box. One of the most popular sources of this information is Google Keyword Planner.

Unfortunately data presented by Google Keyword Planner is meant to be used for paid advertising inside Google AdWords platform. The keywords that you will find there might be too general and not very descriptive.

On another hand, the Google Autocomplete feature that is used by Keyword Tool is meant to facilitate the search process.

It is in Google's best interest to show users the most relevant keywords. Keywords that would help Google to retrieve the most relevant websites and help users find the most relevant content for their search query.

In Google's own words:

Autocomplete predictions are automatically generated by an algorithm without any human involvement based on a number of objective factors, including how often past users have searched for a term.

KEYWORD TOOL HELPS TO FIND KEYWORDS THAT ARE HIDDEN IN GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER

Did you notice that you are unable to use Keyword Planner without an AdWords account?

There is a reason for that. Keyword Planner - is a tool created for advertisers and is not meant for SEO. Yes, it does contain valuable data such as competition, suggested bid, average monthly searches etc.

But, at the same time it will hide lucrative long-tail keywords with thousands of monthly searches that can be used to create content for your website. Some digital marketing professionals think that it is done on purpose and helps Google to increase the competition and cost per click for a limited number of keywords.

Keyword Tool is the best alternative to Google Keyword Planner for SEO as it doesn't hide popular keywords that can be used to create content for your website.

KEYWORD TOOL FOR SEO AND CONTENT CREATION

If you want your website to get traffic from Google or other search engines, you need to make sure that your website contains content created around the right keywords. What this means is that you should be using words that your potential audience is already using while looking for similar products or services online.

The best way to discover these keywords, as it was proven by thousands of thriving online businesses, is to use Google's auto suggested keywords as a base to create content for your website.

By creating content around these popular keywords you are readily giving great value to your website visitors, in return Google will reward your website with higher rankings which entails traffic increase.

KEYWORD TOOL FOR INTERNATIONAL SEO

If you are looking for keywords in languages other than English, you will find Keyword Tool's features really useful. It allows you to select from 192 Google domains and 83 Google language interfaces to generate keyword suggestions. The generated keywords will be relevant to the country that you are creating your content for.

KEYWORD TOOL FOR ADVERTISING

If you are running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns and target your ads based on keywords that users type in Google, you know how important it is to select the right keywords.

The relevant keywords that you target will bring the right audience to your website. Showing your ads to people that type relevant keywords would result in higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR), lower Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and higher conversion rates for your business. As a result, you will spend less money on advertising and generate a better return on investment.

Despite the appeal of BJP star campaigner turned Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we are still searching more for Sunny Leone.

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If you have followed the Internet and social media in India, you would think there is nothing that awes us Indians more than Prime Minister Narendra Modiand his campaigns like Swachh Bharat and Digital India.

However, you don’t need to go beyond a Google search to find the truth: that we Indians have more, amorous, interests to pursue. For the third year in running,Sunny Leone is the most searched person on Google in India and she is also the most searched Indian globally. Modi, who was the second most searched in India last year thanks to his rise to power in the general elections, is placed 10th this time, separated from Leone by a list of mostly Bollywood names. Even someone like Kajal Aggarwal (yes, I can visualise you searching her name on Google as you read this line) is placed above our Prime Minister.

In pics: Sunny Leone pips Narendra Modi as Google Zeitgeist most-searched Indian of 2015

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

Yes, we Indians are taking our fascination for Bollywood and its wonder of stars to a whole new level.

The only saving grace, the sort of detail we would like to stress with headline like “A P J Kalam third most searched person in India this year”, is that the death of our beloved “People’s President” did invoke some interest in the country. Always remember, however, that Salman Khan and his year in court made him the second most searched in India.

In pics: Google Zeitgeist 2015: Salman Khan, Sunny Leone are most searched actors

If there is something that comes close to Bollywood in terms of follower value, and search traffic, it is Cricket. And one interesting trivia here it is: Sachin Tendulkar is still the third most searched sportsperson in India, two years after he retired. He is placed below Virat Kohli (no surprises there) and Lionel Messi (all surprises there) and above M S Dhoni (really!!). It is almost as if India is still seeking (or searching for) God.

Sadly, the most searched topic in India is a farce, given that most of the country still types website names on Google instead of typing it directly on the address bar. So popular sites like Flipkart, IRCTC and SBI dominate this list — but, you can’t help but note that Flipkart is now ahead of IRCTC. In trending searches, the ICC World Cup was on top followed by Bahubali and two movies by Salman Khan.

Globally, former US basketball player Lamar Joseph Odom (yes, the result of another Google search) was the most searched globally. Charlie Hebdo was the second most searched.

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