A Step-by-Step Guide to SEO Keyword Research Using FREE Tools

Choosing keywords can easily become an overwhelming and costly part of your content creation and SEO strategies. And that’s why in this post, I’ll lay out a step-by-step strategy you can use to find the best keywords for your website or blog…using only FREE tools.

A Step-by-Step Guide to SEO Keyword Research Using FREE Tools

Each marketer will have his or her own unique process for finding keywords, so if there are other tools or strategies you want to incorporate into this process, please do! This guide is just one way to find popular and relevant keywords; not the only way.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume we’re looking for a keyword to target on the home page of a fictitious bakery. However this process can easily be replicated when looking for keyword ideas for blog posts, product pages or virtually any other type of content. The basic step-by-step guide to SEO Key process will look like this:

1.   Brainstorm

2.   Choose the most relevant keywords

3.   Investigate traffic volume and level of competition

4.   Find synonyms and variations to supplement your content

Step 1: Brainstorm potential keywords.

The first stage – brainstorming – is one of the most important, but is also one many marketers gloss over. Rather than jumping into the keyword research process with one or two keywords or phrases in mind, take some time to compile an exhaustive list of topics or themes related to your business or products. For instance, if I was a professional baker, I may list keywords like ‘baker San Diego’, ‘bakery California’ or ‘best cakes San Diego’. At this point there is no right or wrong; simply get down as many possible keywords as you can think of that are related to your business. Some strategies you can use to brainstorm possible keywords include:

• Industry journals or magazines
• Your own marketing materials
• Asking your sales team or other staff for suggestions
• Checking out which keywords your competitors are using on their sites

Ubersuggest is a great free tool to use at the beginning of your brainstorming process. Simply type in a keyword or topic, and receive hundreds of related keyword suggestions. If you find a term you’d like to investigate further, simply click on it to receive more suggestions that use that term as a base.

Using the example above, let’s say my bakery specialized in wedding cakes. I type in ‘wedding cake’, and then notice that ‘wedding cakes san diego’ is included in my list. I click on that link to drill down and find even more specific terms I can use:

Remember: At this point you’re only brainstorming. This list won’t give you any indication of how popular a term is, or how difficult it will be to rank for. At this stage, you’re just looking for terms that will be broadly relevant to your business, products or content.

Step 2: Select the Most Relevant Keywords.

Now it’s time to choose the most relevant keywords from your list. Ask yourself: If I was a customer looking for my product (or content), which terms would I be mostly likely to search for? And which ones would be most likely to drive sales? (hint: more specific, ‘long tail’ keywords will often result in higher conversions). After considering all the keywords on my list, I’ve decided to do further research into the following, highly-relevant terms:

• Wedding cake San Diego
• Best wedding cakes San Diego
• Bakery San Diego
• Cakes San Diego

Step 3: Use Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner to Check on Volume and Competition.

Now that I’ve determined that ‘wedding cake San Diego’ is the term I’d like to focus on, it’s time to figure out whether that term is:

a)    Worth targeting (i.e. it gets enough monthly searches), and

b)   Possible to rank for (i.e. there aren’t a ton of other sites trying to rank for it).

Go to the Google Keyword Planner and sign in or create an account (you must have an AdWords account to access this tool, but signing up is free). For our purposes, choose ‘Search for new keyword and ad group ideas’ once you’re logged in.

 On the next page, enter in the keyword or phrase you’re thinking of targeting. In our case, we’re going to try ‘wedding cake San Diego’.

Next, be sure to select the ‘Keyword ideas’ tab, NOT the ‘Ad group ideas’ tab. The Keyword ideas tab will give you two pieces of critical info about your keyword or phrase: the average monthly search volume, and the level of competition.

After plugging in ‘wedding cake San Diego’, I see that while it doesn’t have much competition (“Low”), it only receives around 110 monthly searches. While this may be a good term to include on my site, I likely won’t want to commit to targeting such a low-volume keyword on my home page.

Moving down my list of relevant keywords, I run searches for ‘best wedding cake San Diego’, ‘bakery San Diego’, and ‘cakes San Diego’. This process reveals that the most popular and least competitive of my relevant keywords is ‘bakery San Diego’.

Step 4: Find Keyword Variations and Related Terms to Incorporate Into Your Content.

As Google’s algorithms become more sophisticated, sites that do a thorough job of covering all angles of a topic tend to rank best. This means that each piece of content you produce should include not just one or two main keywords, but many different variations, synonyms and long-tail phrases related to your topic.

One way to brainstorm these related terms is using Google’s Related Search function. Here’s how to do it: Type your chosen keyword into Google Search, and then scroll to the bottom of the page. You should see a section titled ‘Searches related to…..’. These are other words or phrases Google deems relevant to your chosen keywords.

For instance, when I run a Google search for ‘bakery San Diego’, I get related searches like ‘bakery San Diego hillcrest’, ‘bakery San Diego convoy’ and ‘bakery San Diego downtown’. While these phrases likely don’t have enough search volume to justify targeting them as my main keywords, they are phrases I can incorporate into my content to capture related long tail searches.

 And there you have it! A Step-by-Step Guide to SEO Keyword Research Using FREE Tools! Using this process, we’ve been able to find one main keyword for our homepage (bakery San Diego), which we know has a decent number of searches and low competition. We’ve also been able to find some related search terms that will help us rank when it comes to long tail search.

Keep in mind that no process or tool is perfect: for instance, the Google Keyword Tool is notorious for underestimating the search volume of a particular term, and only provides results based on exact match type. However, the tool still provides a good, basic foundation for narrowing down your keyword choices. Thats A Step-by-Step Guide to SEO Keyword Research Using FREE Tools

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Should I Add Google AdSense Ads on My New Blog?

Should I Add Google AdSense Ads 

on My New Blog?

Are you one of those budding bloggers who is not monetizing his blog and is skeptical of doing so? If so, I have also walked in your shoes. In the early days of my blogging career, I did not take advantage of AdSense or any other ad platform. Perhaps the reason many of us stay away from monetizing our blogs is that we are protective of our image, and we fear being judged by our readers.

I was talking with one of my budding blogger (BB) friends, and he told me that he has an approved AdSense account, but he is not putting AdSense on his blog.

Our conversation went on for a while and came away with a suspicion that many other bloggers share my friend’s feelings about advertising on a new blog.

My question remains, why wait to monetize your blog? Making money from your blog doesn’t make you a less passionate blogger or a greedy blogger. It is simply taking advantage of an opportunity to earn money from one of your passions, and to develop your dreams. Ask yourself if that is a disgraceful thing.

If you have a blog that can be monetized, start monetizing it now. Chances are good that you may not make more than $10-$100/month, but at least you are earning some money doing something you enjoy.

When an advertisement that is related to your content and your niche runs on your blog, whether on the sidebar, or on the header, or elsewhere, you are helping your readers by providing a place for him to obtain a product he may be interested in purchasing.

For example, I write extensively about blogging, web hosting and making money online. I share my personal views and experiences. Many readers are here because they like to read about my experiences with different products that I use, and it is very possible that they would like to try these products or related products. They are reading my posts, after all, because they have an interest in the niche that I write about. So this is why I keep web hosting and WordPress theme banners on the sidebars and headers of my posts.

There is no right or wrong time to begin monetizing your blog if you have an interest in doing so.  And as long as you do so in such a way that you will not be hampering the readability of your blog, there is no reason why you should not start monetizing as soon as you feel your blog is ready.  Bear in mind that it is best to place only one or two ads on a page. While it may seem counter-intuitive, fewer ads = better CTR = more money in the long run.

So if you have an AdSense account and a blog, start trying some ads on your blog. Start with one or two ad units, and stay focused on the quality of your blog, delivering good information to your readers, and producing a quality blog overall.  You never know – you may end up making a living from your blog!

What’s your opinion on the monetization of blogs?  Feel free to share your thoughts with us using the comments section below.

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How To Add Keywords in Blogger Posts

How To Add Keywords in Blogger Posts For Optimization?

If you have original and SEO friendly content in your blog, then no doubt you can surely get high ranking in search results.

Writing SEO friendly blog posts is not much tough as beginners think. How To Add Keywords in Blogger and We just need to focus on some places where we can add keywords in our blog posts to make them optimized for search engines.

Don’t forget, optimizing blog posts for search engines is not mean to compromise with content quality. We have to add keywords in a proper way so that it looks natural for our readers and for search engines too.

I’ll outline 6 best locations to add keywords in blogger blog posts. Hope you would like to know them.

Optimize Blog Posts By Adding Keywords Smartly

Before I cover today’s topic, you must need to know that adding too much keywords in blog posts is not good for our blog health. We should keep its density about 2% or less for better optimization of our blog posts.

The locations I’m going to tell you to add keywords are the safest and best locations of our blog area. If you want to get your blog posts rank high in search results, then don’t miss to target below locations:

• Starting and Ending Para of Content

Whenever you write new post for your blog, always remember to add your main keyword in first and last paragraph of your content’s. Both the locations are best for this purpose and search engines also look for keywords in these two places to decide the ranking of our blog posts.

We can add more targeted words in the form of phrases between the content to make it more SEO friendly.

Note: Don’t use same words again and again. Better to use multiple and relevant words. Using multiple related word not only protect our content from keyword stuffing penalty but also help it to appear high with multiple search terms. Hence more targeted traffic to our blog.

• Image Name, Alt Tag and Title Tag

We all know that images plays best role in explanation of the topic. But using images we can also optimize our blog posts even better.

We just need to optimize our images before inserting them into our posts. The better we optimize the images, the better our posts will optimize for search engines. Read below mentioned post to know best 6 ways to optimize images.

6 Tips To Optimize Images For SEO

If we talk about adding targeted words in blog posts using images, then let me tell you that image’s name, title tag and alt tag are the best and prominent places.

• Title Of Our Posts

Our post titles are the top most places to add our targeted keywords. You may listen that we should use catchy post titles to attract more readers. But with catchy post titles we should also remember to add our keywords there.

Meaningful post titles grab more audience. Not only from social sharing sites, but from search engines too.

So, always try to use meaningful and catchy post titles to boost your posts traffic.

• Permalink of Posts

Permalink is the URL of our blog posts. It’s a killer location to add really targeted keywords.

By default, permalinks create on the basis of our post’s titles. But we can use our custom permalinks to add our keywords.

To add custom permalinks go to your Post Editor > click on Permalink from the right side menu and choose Custom Permalink. Add your main keywords there and press Done button.

optimize blog posts

Note: Always try to use only targeted keywords in permalinks. Other non important words should be ignored.

• Post Labels

Post labels not only used to categorize our blog posts. If used smartly then we can take their benefits to optimize our blog posts too.

Stop using non keyword rich names for your labels. Named them correctly and put your really targeted words there.

If you had forgetten to insert your keywords in label’s name, then don’t worry. We can rename them too.

• Post Comments

Many bloggers are unaware with this trick that we can use our blog comments too to add some keywords in our blog posts.

Yes, you heard it right. There are lot of benefits of blog comments and if we use them effectively then no doubt we can get higher ranking in search results.

Whenever you reply your reader’s comment on your blog, try to add some keyword phrases in your reply in a natural way that looks obvious while reading.

Final Words!

This is my strategy to add keywords in blogger blog posts. And truly said these methods really help me to gain higher rankings in search results. I had shared all the working ways to optimize blog posts.

Now I would like to ask you a question: How To Add Keywords in Blogger and How you add your keywords in your posts for SEO?

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5 Tips Sederhana untuk Peringkat Pertama di Google Search Engine

5 Tips Sederhana untuk rangking di Google Search Engine

Mesin pencari seperti Google sebagai kotak pencarian halaman nomer 1 untuk peringkat pencarian website dan blog berdasarkan perhitungan rahasia dan misterius. 

Beberapa ahli seo telah menggunakan cara yang tidak baik untuk mencoba dan mengelabui Google dalam mendapatkan peringkat tinggi dalam hasil pencarian. Hal ini telah dilakukan melalui taktik seperti "Black Hat SEO" yang digunakan untuk mencoba dan menipu Google. Google tidak suka seo seperti ini dan terus memantau algoritma pencarian untuk menghilangkan praktek-praktek ini.

Tujuan Google adalah untuk memastikan bahwa selalu memberikan hasil pencarian yang sebenarnya, menarik dan juga tepat waktu.  Jika mereka tidak melakukan yang seharusnya maka orang akan berhenti menggunakan Google dan kemudian pendapatan iklan akan berhanti juga. 

Situs sosial seperti Facebook yang secara tidak langsung menyediakan alternatif untuk Google (rumor terus beredar bahwa Facebook sedang membangun mesin pencari sosial sendiri). Jika Google tidak terus memberikan kemudian seluruh WEB keberadaannya sedang menuju kepunahan.

Dalam 2 tahun terakhir Google telah meningkatkan pentingnya kegunaan seperti mengukur kecepatan website dan situs yang memproduksi konten yang unik, maka sasarannya konten dan peringkat mereka.

Google Mencintai Konten Unik

Apa yang Google inginkan adalah besanya komten yang unik . Kita telah melihat betapa pentingnya pembuatan konten dan kurasi sebagai alat pemasaran selama beberapa tahun terakhir. Orang menggunakan web untuk mencari informasi, itu sebabnya Google adalah meletakkan nilai tinggi pada konten yang unik. 

Membuat konten untuk dibagikan seperti video, posting blog dan ebooks juga memiliki sisi manfaat besar. Manfaatnya adalah bahwa orang akan link ke website atau blog dan karenanya Google memberikan sesuatu yang besar dalam perhitungan mesin pencari, sering back-link yang diciptakan untuk blog dan situs web dari situs-situs lain.

Ini adalah di mana taktik "optimasi offsite" sangat penting dan kehadirannya dirasakan dan harus dimasukkan dalam strategi SEO Anda. Ini adalah tahap akhir untuk mendapatkan Google menyukai Web Anda.

Off-page Optimization

Ahli SEO umumnya sepakat bahwa off-page teknik membangun link berkontribusi sekitar 80% dari efektivitas dalam setiap kampanye SEO. Off-page optimasi atau membangun link, adalah kegiatan yang paling penting untuk membantu dalam mendapatkan website diperingkat terbaik di mesin pencari. Dan kekuatan penggerak utama dalam hal ini, adalah backlink.

Pentingnya "backlinks"

Sebuah link, atau back-link, adalah link yang Anda gunakan untuk dibawa ke halaman lain. Backlink sangat penting karena pada dasarnya mereka seperti "orang" yang memberitahu Anda dalam search engine tentang halaman web lain dan memanfaatkan halaman Anda untuk informasinya. Semakin banyak website yang telah Anda hubungkan untuk halaman Web Anda, semakin tinggi peringkat Anda. Contoh link dari situs website utama, seperti australia.gov.au Pemerintah Australia, amazon.com atau facebook.com, akan bernilai jauh lebih dari sebuah situs web yang kurang dikenal .

Jadi di sini adalah 5 tips sederhana untuk membangun link :

Tip 1: 

Analisis pesaing

Dengan asumsi Anda tidak akan mendapatkan banyak link dari situs-situs besar. Mulailah kampanye membangun link dengan analisis pesaing. Pada dasarnya, Anda ingin mengulang apa yang pesaing terbaik Anda lakukan, sebagai salah satu prinsip membangun link kunci untuk mencocokkan dan melampaui pesaing Anda. Artinya, jika Anda dapat pergi melalui dan cocok dengan semua link yang mereka miliki, atau setidaknya sebagian dari mereka menemukan beberapa cara lain untuk mendapatkan link tambahan yang mereka tidak miliki, Anda akan dapat dengan mudah melampaui mereka di mesin pencarian seperti google.

Tip 2: 

Konten, konten dan konten

Seperti biasa, cara terbaik untuk mendorong orang untuk link ke website Anda adalah dengan konsisten menyediakan konten baru, menarik dan berguna. Membuat menarik, relevan dan konten yang berguna ; seperti menulis tentang produk Anda, industri, informasi pasar saat ini berorientasi dengan kata kunci konten yang bermanfaat mungkin akan mempengaruhi website Anda lebih dari salah satu faktor lain yang dibahas di sini. Setelah update Google, kualitas konten yang diposting secara teratur adalah metode yang direkomendasikan untuk mendapatkan lebih banyak lalu lintas ke situs Web Anda. Idealnya Anda harus posting minimal 2 artikel per minggu dan Google akan mendukung website dengan bahan yang sering diperbarui yang berisi konten unik dan relevan. Dan jika website Anda menawarkan konten yang baik, situs-situs lain secara alami akan ingin link ke Anda juga.

Ketika Anda posting artikel, jangan lupa untuk menerapkan prinsip-prinsip yang sama Judul tag dan Meta Deskripsi untuk artikel Anda, dan jangan lupa untuk memasukkan kata kunci yang Anda inginkan atau frase.

Tip 3: 

Blogging Guest

Ide lain untuk kampanye membangun link sukses termasuk tamu blogging. Ide umum di belakang blog tamu adalah untuk mendapatkan link ke website Anda diposting pada website yang sudah mapan / blog mapan. Link ini cenderung membawa lebih berat di Google karena mereka lebih sulit . Beberapa situs akan memiliki persyaratan yang sangat ketat untuk jenis artikel mereka , sehingga link dari situs-situs tersebut memiliki nilai lebih. Metode lain yang populer dan sangat sukses adalah untuk menghubungi blogger atau webmaster dalam niche Anda dan hanya meminta mereka untuk link. Atau, meminta untuk menjadi blogger tamu untuk tujuan mendapatkan kesempatan untuk link blog tamu Anda dan postingan kembali ke situs Anda. Membangun hubungan dengan penulis, dosen, penggemar, pakar topik atau siapapun yang dalam sebuah website di niche blog Anda, apakah itu melalui jaringan atau pesan sosial media, adalah cara yang bagus untuk membangun jaringan orang-orang yang mungkin bersedia untuk referensi website Anda dalam konten mereka.

Tip 4: 

Gabung web situs 2.0

Bergabung dengan sebuah situs web 2.0 merupakan metode yang baik untuk mengembangkan mesin pencari ramah link. Jika Anda tidak akrab dengan nama, web 2.0 adalah istilah yang digunakan untuk menggambarkan website yang memiliki komponen jaringan sosial mereka. Situs seperti Squidoo, StumbleUpon, menghasilkan sebagian besar konten mereka dari pengguna situs sendiri. Di mana Anda sendiri dapat menambahkan artikel yang mencakup hingga 9 backlink gratis per artikel untuk situs web Anda. Jangan menduplikasi dari artikel yang ada di website Anda dan menggunakannya untuk Squidoo atau HubPages.

Cara terbaik untuk membangun link dan menciptakan manfaat SEO yang kuat melalui Squidoo.com adalah dengan membuat konten unik yang berfokus pada kata kunci. Selalu mencoba untuk menggabungkan multimedia, seperti video atau gambar untuk mendapatkan lebih banyak kepercayaan dan otoritas cepat. Hanya membutuhkan waktu beberapa artikel sampai Anda akan dapat menambahkan pada sejumlah backlink di artikel Anda ke situs utama Anda. Saya juga sangat suka widget RSS feed Squidoo ini, karena hal ini memberikan backlink bagus ditambah konteks untuk link, yang besar untuk mesin pencari.

Tip 5: 

Vendor, Mitra testimonial

Selalu memberikan testimonial online untuk pembaca, mitra bisnis atau orang lain. Anda dapat memberikan testimonial untuk mereka, karena merupakan cara yang bagus untuk mendapatkan backlink gratis dari situs-situs yang sah. Jangan lupa untuk memasukkan kata kunci strategis Anda ke testimonial Anda dan hyperlink kembali ke halaman web yang sesuai dari website Anda. Dan akhirnya, sumber jaringan Anda sendiri untuk membangun lebih banyak link. kontak bisnis, pembaca, distributor, anggota keluarga, teman, bahkan sekolah anak-anak Anda, semua memiliki potensi untuk memberikan Anda kesempatan backlink. Jika Anda telah baik kepada mereka dan mereka menyukai Anda, meminta backlink gratis di situs web mereka. Tentu saja, semakin tinggi peringkat halaman atau situs web yang baik. Jika Anda dapat mengatur untuk mendapatkan link yang kuat dan berharga dari situs-situs seperti edu.com, yang akan sangat bermanfaat untuk SEO Anda . Tips Sederhana untuk Peringkat Tinggi di Google Search Engine

Ada lebih banyak taktik yang terlibat dalam SEO untuk membantu Anda bersaing dan melampaui pesaing Anda dalam hasil peringkat mesin pencari. Taktik tersebut adalah strategi awal dasar yang membantu membangun fondasi yang kuat dan titik awal untuk usaha SEO Anda, dan akan segera membantu Anda menggerakan lalu lintas situs Web Anda dan hasil pencarian peringkat mesin ke tingkat berikutnya.

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Dapatkah saya menggunakan iklan AdSense dan afiliasi pada halaman yang sama?

Dapatkah saya menggunakan iklan AdSense dan afiliasi pada halaman yang sama? 

Apakah ini akan menjadi pelanggaran kebijakan AdSense?

Saya Contohkan Affiliasi Amazon

Ini adalah pertanyaan yang paling umum oleh blogger pemula yang baru mulai Mendapatkan website mereka dengan iklan Amazon dan memiliki AdSense berjalan di blog mereka.

AdSense adalah jaringan iklan kontekstual dan mereka tidak mengizinkan menjalankan jaringan iklan lain yang meniru iklan seperti AdSense.

Dapatkah Anda memiliki Adsense dan Amazon Afiliate pada halaman yang sama:

Mari saya mengambil contoh dari iklan afiliasi Amazon, karena mereka adalah salah satu program afiliasi populer. Anda bisa menggantinya dengan sesuatu seperti Chitika, afiliasi hosting atau program afiliasi lainnya yang dapat Anda pikirkan.

Jawabannya adalah "Ya" Anda dapat menempatkan iklan Afiliasi bersama dengan iklan AdSense pada halaman yang sama, dan ini tidak melanggar kebijakan AdSense. 

Berikut adalah screenshot dari bantuan AdSense halaman resmi, yang jelas mengatakan: ". Kami memungkinkan afiliasi atau terbatas-teks link"

Adsense dengan iklan Afiliasi

Untuk menambahkan lebih dari itu, di sini adalah apa yang perlu Anda ketahui untuk menggunakan jaringan iklan lain dengan AdSense. Dengan kata sederhana, iklan Afiliasi juga dianggap sebagai jaringan iklan yang berbeda di sini:

AdSense Iklan dengan jaringan iklan lainnya

Jangan senang dulu untuk dapat memulai menambahkan iklan banner afiliasi dan iklan link di blog Anda, berikut adalah 5 hal penting yang harus Anda ketahui.

• Jika jumlah iklan atau afiliasi spanduk / link adalah lebih dari konten asli, ini akan menempatkan akun AdSense Anda dalam bahaya. 
• Membatasi jumlah iklan di blog Anda, dan fokus pada nilai tambah dan kualitas website Anda. 
• Saya sarankan Anda untuk menjaga batas optimum Iklan di blog Anda.
• Dan tempatkan iklan dalam cara yang tidak menghambat pengalaman pengguna di situs web Anda.
• Iklan afiliasi Anda tidak harus link ke konten yang tidak diperbolehkan dalam kebijakan AdSense. 

Sementara menggunakan link afiliasi di blog Anda, pastikan mereka nofollow. Ini tidak ada hubungannya dengan AdSense, tetapi menggunakan tag Nofollow adalah praktik yang baik dari sudut pandang SEO. Anda dapat menggunakan panduan ini untuk mempelajari cara menambahkan tag nofollow atau lebih baik menggunakan Plugin Gocodes WordPress.

Kesimpulan:

Untuk itu, Anda dapat menggunakan iklan Afiliasi dengan Google AdSense di blog Anda. Sebelum Anda mencoba ke dalam dunia pemasaran afiliasi, saya sarankan Anda untuk belajar trik perdagangan dan kemudian menerapkan iklan. Sebuah ide yang baik adalah untuk mengganti salah satu unit iklan yang berkinerja rendah dengan iklan afiliasi langsung produk yang berkaitan dengan artikel Anda. 

Setelah Anda mulai mendapatkan kesuksesan dalam bentuk penjualan afiliasi, Anda dapat mengganti blok iklan lebih AdSense dengan iklan afiliasi. Jika Anda memilih produk yang tepat untuk promosi, Anda dapat dengan mudah memperoleh minimal 2 x lipat dari AdSense.

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Page Title Tag Done Wrong

Page Title Tag Done Wrong

Why the Page Title Tag is Important

When the Web was created, it was created around the idea of pages and links being the fundamental units of data. The page title tag is one of the most important attributes on the page. It is the first thing that search engines show site visitors about your site, and it is the text of the link that site visitors click on when they visit your site from search engines. Most search engines place much more weight on the page title tag text than any other on page element.

For some non-competitive terms a good page title alone can land a page a top search results.

First of all, we will cover bad ways to write page title tag text:

1.      “Get ur drugz here!!!!! paxil, prozac, Zoloft buy now, Internet pharmacy, Viagra, pills on wholesales, antidepressants, weight loss, Phentermine…”

2.      Untitled document (comes from not putting in a title tag at all)

3.      Site > category > sub-category > item

4.      “Welcome to Fred’s store” (from page title tag)

5.      “Welcome to Fred’s store” (title of the entire site and from the page title tag)

The goal of the page title is to give search engines and readers a brief description of what that page is exactly about.

Problems with the Examples

1.      It is true that the page can be about any specific topic (even prescription drugs or casino stuff or pornography), but the title should not be a loose array of selected somewhat similar terms. You could pick any topic and focus on it, but not on a topic range. If you focus too widely with the page title you dilute the value placed on each word, and, in the rare event the page does rank, you may be sending visitors to a page that is not relevant to their needs, and thus does not convert. A large part of effective SEO is ensuring that visitors land on the most relevant page possible.

2.      Many pages on the web do not even have a title tag. Unless one was trying to list well for untitled document, not having a title tag makes it hard to generate any traffic. In the Yahoo! Search index, there are over twenty million pages sporting the “untitled document” title. They would get much more traffic if they titled their documents.

3.      Many content management systems are terrible for SEO purposes. The words at the front of the page title are the most important. If the first few words of every page are not very descriptive, it does not give engines much to determine the difference between pages. Many spam site generators start page titles with the same words in every page title. Make sure your page titles are unique to each page, with the most descriptive words at or near the start of the page title.

4.      First of all, people probably have no idea what Fred’s store is. Is Fred’s store a hardware store? A discount shoe store? A Viagra store? You just don’t know. Neither do search engines.

Placing salutations or unnecessary document references in the title kills the keyword weighting of the title. I always say “Welcome to…low rankings.” Just for fun, I did a search on Yahoo! to show how many sites had the following in their page title:

1.      “welcome to…” (close to 30 million)

2.      “home page” (over 15 million)

3.      “wecome” & “welcom” (thousands of entries each)

5.      Notice there is no difference between example #4 and example #5. A title should be a page title or document title. The title should not be the site title. If, for branding purposes, you feel you should place the site title in the title tag of every page, it is advisable that you place it at the end of the title—that is, unless you are so big that people are likely to search for your name already (Nike, Pepsi, Coke…). The page itself is a fundamental unit of data, not the website!

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What is robots.txt

Robots Exclusion Standard

When primitive robots were first created, some of them would crash servers by requesting too many pages too quickly. A robots exclusion standard was crafted to allow you to tell any robot (or all of them) that you do not want some of your pages indexed or that you do not want your links followed. You can do this via a meta tag on the page copy

or create a robots.txt file that gets placed in the root of your website. The goal of either of these methods is to tell the robots where NOT to go. The official robots exclusion protocol document is located at the following URL.

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

You do not need to use a robots.txt file. By default, search engines will index your site. If you do create a robots.txt file, it goes in the root level of your domain using robots.txt as the file name.

This allows all robots to index everything:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

This disallows all robots to your site:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

You also can disallow a folder or a single file in the robots txt file. This disallows a folder:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /projects/

This disallows a file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cheese/please.html

If you make a robots.txt user-agent command for a specific search engine (e.g. User-agent:Googlebot) the associated search engine will ignore the more general rules located in the section for all search engines (User-agent: *).

One problem many dynamic sites have is sending search engines multiple URLs with nearly identical content. If you have products in different sizes and colors, or other small differences, it is likely that you could generate lots of near-duplicate content, which will prevent search engines from fully indexing your sites.

If you place your variables at the start of your URLs, then you can easily block all of the sorting options using only a few disallow lines. For example, the following would block search engines from indexing any URLs that start with ‘cart.php?size’ or ‘cart.php?color’.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cart.php?size

Disallow: /cart.php?color

Notice how there is no trailing slash at the end of the above disallow lines. That means the engines will not index anything that starts with that in the URL. If there were a trailing slash, search engines would only block a specific folder.

If the sort options were at the end of the URL, you would either need to create an exceptionally long robots.txt file or place the robots noindex meta tags inside the sort pages. You also can specify any specific user agent, such as Googlebot, instead of using the asterisk wild card. Many bad bots will ignore your robots txt files and/or harvest the blocked information, so you do not want to use robots.txt to block individuals from finding confidential information.

Googlebot also supports wildcards in the robots.txt. The following would stop Googlebot from reading any URL that includes the string ‘sort=’ no matter where that string occurs in the URL:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /*sort=

In 2006 Yahoo! also added robots.txt wildcard support. Their example pages is useful for helping you understand how to structure your robots.txt file http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000372.html

You have to be careful when changing your robots.txt file, because the following code

Disallow: /*page

also blocks a file like this from being indexed in Google beauty-pageants.php

Google’s Webmaster Toolset shows you what pages they have tried crawling that you have already blocked via robots.txt, and they have a robots.txt testing tool which will show you if a specific URL would end up getting blocked by your robots.txt file.

In 2007 Google released an unavailable_after meta tag, which tells Google to not crawl a URL after a specific date. I do not recommend using this. Instead, if one of your old URLs ranks where you would like a new one to rank I recommend 301 redirecting it to the URL you want to rank.

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