Stellar Web Works » SEO

10 Search Engine Optimisation Tips: Keywords

Aidan — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:56:09 +0000

Here are ten useful tips for website owners specifically related to usage of keywords to improve performance in search results.

Think of what someone looking for your type of product/service might type into a search query.
Write down a list of keywords/terms.
Think of common variations and modifiers for those terms and add them to your list.
Examine your website to see if those keywords already appear or find ways of adding extra text to incorporate the most important keywords.
Top priority is to make it human readable – you don’t want to turn people away by having your site not easy to read or seeming spammy.
The words in your titles and headings are given most importance by the search engines so your most important keywords should be here. The title is meta data and does not appear on the page itself but appears at the top of your browser window and also in search results. Headings do appear on your page and there are a number of different levels of headings – H1, H2, H3, etc. H1 is the top level heading and is given the most importance. Ideally you should just have one H1 heading on your page.
Keep the title and the main heading similar, but it is a good idea to vary them a little from each other in order to incorporate different variations of your important keywords.
Don’t stuff your titles and headings with keywords – this looks spammy and can dilute the effect of your keywords.
Some tools that can help you find important variations on your keywords: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, SEOBook Keyword Tool, Quintura, Google Search Based Keyword Tool, Google.com (click wonder wheel and/or related searches).
You can add a new article, page or blog post to your website on a topic centred around some keyword or term that you want to get found for. But don’t make it look spammy or manipulative – write primarily for the real people visiting your website and make sure it sits naturally into your website structure.

Bing allows you to target different regional search results on different pages of your website

Aidan — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 10:38:18 +0000

Finally, after a long wait of about 3 weeks, Bing indexed the page I created for my regional search experiment. And, as I anticipated, the page shows up in the regional search results for Ireland (with ‘Only from Ireland’ selected). This despite the fact that it’s a New Zealand top level domain and the server is physically located in New Zealand. So this confirms that all one needs to do in order to target a specific region is to set the lang attribute in the tag.

Another Bing regional search update and a new experiment

Aidan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:47:31 +0000

Following up on my recent series of posts regarding my findings about Bing regional search results, this website is finally indexed in the regional search results for New Zealand and performing quite well in the search results for target keywords – e.g. it is listed fourth for the term “web design nelson” (and the first 2 results are still bogus):

So what did I do to get things back on track? Well the thing that did it was to change the lang attribute in the html tag to “en-nz”:

This, when set, appears to be the main criteria that Bing uses to determine which region the site should be indexed in. So it looks like it overrides server location and country code top level domain. My lang attribute had previously been set to “en-us” which got picked up from the default settings in Wordpress, the platform that my site is built with. After I made the change it took 1-2 weeks before things got sorted in Bing. The interesting thing is that Bing indexed a few of the internal pages before indexing the home page and other more important pages. So we had the strange situation where some of the pages of my site were showing up in the regional search results but the home page wasn’t.

Does this open up the possibility of being able to target different regions with different pages on a website? It appears that way but I’ll have to do another experiment to find out. So here’s the experiment: I’ve set up a page entitled Web Design Ireland and I’ve set the lang attribute to “en-ie” in order to see if I can get indexed in the regional search results for Ireland.

I’ll follow up soon to let you know what happens, it will be interesting to see. If you use RSS, you can follow my RSS feed from http://sww.co.nz/feed.

Bing Update

Aidan — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:47:04 +0000

Following on from my previous post, I’ve posted my findings regarding Bing’s regional failings on the Bing webmaster forum, which happens to be full of similar reports. I got a response back from Brett Yount, Program Manager, Bing Webmaster Center, which seems to acknowledge that Bing has some problems when it comes to regional indexing:

Aidan,

I’ve brought this up with our indexing team to see if we can find a solution. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back.

~B

Yahoo & Microsoft Partner Up To Take On Google With Bing

Aidan — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:12:07 +0000

Yahoo and Microsoft announced a 10 year partnership on 29th July where Yahoo Search will be powered by Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. The agreement is currently in front of regulators and could take two years finalise. The move looks to be one solid step towards a merger after the failed attempt in 2008.

Google is still the King of search and this deal is not expected to de-throne it, but by combining their market share the Microsoft/Yahoo combo will make a more compelling platform for advertiser’s dollars.

Since it’s unveiling in May, Bing has been fairly well received. Personally however, I have no plans to switch. After trying it out a few times, it left me unimpressed with the quality of the search results. Take for example a search for “Nelson web design” (a term I check occasionally to see how sww.co.nz is ranking in local searches). Here are the top 10 search results that Bing returns right now (NZ only search):

No. 1 is a valid result, but nos 2 & 3, both from the same domain, are not at all relevant results. In fact they are just temporary development pages on the nelson.co.nz domain of our partner, Digital Promotions, and the real Digital Promotions website appears much further down at position 10. The nelson.co.nz domain crops up again in position 6, another irrelevant result, indicating an overly heavy emphasis on domain name over content. I count only 6 relevant results in the all-important top 10. Not a very smart result for an allegedly ’smart’ search engine (or ‘decision engine’ as Microsoft prefers to call it).

Here’s what Google returns for the same search:

Hey, that’s more like it – Stellar Web Works listed at a respectable 5th position (and even finds it’s way to no. 1 in the map results!). This time all ten results are relevant.

So, after this little test my faith in Bing is definitely a bit shaky. But with the recent Yahoo deal it looks like it is going to become part of the our web developer world and something we are going to have to work with from a SEO perspective. And if it gains traction, a bit of competition for the Google monster might not be a bad thing!