Software Promotion + SEO

The answer is – as much as you need to get a good spread of keywords and phrases. It is unlikely you will get good coverage of alternatives in 2 or 300 words. Since there is no penalty for having more text on a page – unless the page gets to be 45Kb in size or more – take the opportunity to write more text and include so-called long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are less competitive since they are searched for less but if you have 2 competitive keywords compared to 10 long-tails, you might end up getting just as many long-tails hits in searches. You certainly won’t lose anything.

One way to start working out a good set of keywords is to look at sites in a similar market. A good set of keyword analysis tools can be found on www.googlerankings.com. The tools on this site can be used to see what 1, 2 and 3 word phrases appear on a web page. Try to make sure the text on your site includes the same phrases where appropriate.

Tips for thinking up new keywords are:

1. Always include alternative ways of saying the same thing, e.g. an animal mask/ face mask and kids/ children.

2. Try to include the words in different orders, e.g. a man’s hat/ a hat for a man, Kids arts & crafts software/ Arts and crafts software for children.

3. Another way of packing in possible keywords is to include a column on left or right with a list, e.g. dog mask, cat mask, horse mask, party mask, make your own mask …

Never lose an opportunity to include an alternative way of saying something. Two ideal places to do this are:

1. alt text on images

2. title text on a hyperlink.

HTML tags are also an important way of highlighting keywords to Googlebot. The top tags are <title>, <h1> and <h2>.

The page title <title> is an excellent place to include up to 3 keyword/ phrases. Separate the keywords by – or |. The page title is often considered the most important SEO element. Make sure your most important keywords are at the start of the title.

The <h1> tag is the most important header tag (and should be near the top of the page) but <h2> is important too. Structure the page so that you can use a h2 title. If you can’t restructure a page in order to place a h2 tag, make a paragraph of your most important text into a h2 tag and use CSS to style it like a <p> tag.

Make some of your keywords bold or strong to emphasise them – Googlebot picks up this as well as a human reader.

Also, always make sure your important keywords are near the top of the page. Ideally, your first paragraph of text after your h1 tag should be nicely worded with your main keywords.

I’ll include more tips on keywords and linking strategies in a later post.

by ML

Many people have heard of Google Pagerank – the number that Google assigns to each page on the web. In one sense the rank assigned to a page controls how high up the page appears in search results. The reality is more complicated and Google takes into account a number of factors when positioning pages in search results. In fact, Google themselves say that content is now more important than Pagerank.

Take two pages, page A and page B, each with a Pagerank of 3. When a user searches for a specific phrase, let’s say “dog biscuits”, why will one page appear in the results above the other if they both have the same rank?

One answer is that if page A contains the text “dog biscuits” and the other page doesn’t contain the phrase, page A will appear higher in SERPs. Page B might not appear at all.

What if page A is trying to sell pet food and mentions “dog biscuits” twice and page B is a story about how much someone’s dog that loves biscuits and also mentions “dog biscuits” twice? Which page will be higher then? Maybe both pages will be trying to sell pet food and both pages will mention “dog biscuits”. Who wins out in this case? The winner will be the page with the better on-site and off-site optimisation.

Off-site optimisation largely comes down to getting relevant links to a web page.

Google takes into account the text associated with links to a web page. For example, the HTML for a link will look like  <a href=”…”>some text</a>. If page A has more links to it where “some text” is “dog biscuits”, Google will take that to mean the page is all about dog biscuits and place the page higher in SERPs. Page A is likely to come higher in the results in this case, even if page B contains the “dog biscuits” phrase but has fewer relevant links.

Often this voting by external links will override the Pagerank of either page – the one with the outbound or inbound link. A number of links from pages with low Pagerank but the right link text will count for more than just a few links from pages with average rank with irrelevant link text.

There are a number of on-site optimisation (or on-page optimisation) factors affecting positioning in SERPs. These include the domain name and web page URLs. The most important on-page factor is probably the page title, e.g. does the page title mention “dog biscuits”? Is “dog biscuits” near the start of the title? However, you should never ignore the need for backlinks with relevant link text to reinforce the topical content, i.e. keywords, of a page.

by ML

How many keywords or phrases can you fit in a domain name? The likelihood is just one, e.g. ms-access-security.

When optimising a new website or page, the general advice is to begin with 3 (or possibly 2) phrases to optimise. Usually you will only be able to fit one phrase into the domain name itself, the remaining phrases will need to be contained within the text on the page.

When knitting your chosen phrases into a web page, don’t indulge in keyword stuffing, i.e. packing too many instances of the keyword into each paragraph of text. The idea is that the text on the page reads naturally. If it is obvious to a human reader that the text is describing a specific topic, e.g. making microsoft access database secure, it will also be obvious to Google and Yahoo.

Sometimes you hear that you should aim for a particular keyword density on a page, such as 5%, in order to get the best possible result from search engines. This advice is now considered invalid – just write in a way that the topic is obvious to a human.

When you’ve bought your domain and written your well-phrased homepage, what is the next step?

Well, if you take no steps, you probably still won’t do wonderfully well in SERPS. You’re in the position of shouting to the world that your page is all about topic X but without backlinks to reinforce your keywords, the search engines will think that no-one agrees with you.

So, the next step must be to get backlinks from other sites – and from other pages within your own site – with the link text matching your keywords. You then have the ingredients for a winning formula – your pages think they say something about a specific topic and the rest of the internet agrees.

There are lots of other factors that may affect how well you do in search results, e.g. how many backlinks you have, how old your domain is and how well optimised your competitors are.

There is always the possibility of course that you perform very well for certain keywords but that few or no people search for them. If you find out that this is the case after you have chosen a domain name, it’s too late to change. For this reason, relying on the domain name as the foundation of search engine success can be a risky tactic.

by ML