Help 2 SEO

Are you new to SEO or just want some SEO help then the Econsultancy SEO Guide is place to look.

The SEO Best Practice guide at over 200 pages is packed full of SEO tips and help. The guide takes you through a proven SEO process and for each step in the process gives you all the details you need. This is not generic stuff but real proven useful information that a lot of Search Engine Optimization or Internet marketing agencies are keeping secret from you.

Rather than spend $300-$500 on an website audit I would recommend joining Econsultancy where you will then get this best practice guide along with many other useful reports, guides and templates.

Website domain names once registered are something you will have to live with so make sure you select very carefully.

Before you start you need your list of keyword phrases generated during your keywords analysis (follow link to refresh your understanding). Before you do any searches you need to decide on what domain name suffix, e.g. .com, .co.uk, .net, .eu etc, to go for. If you are creating a website which will have a very important brand you need to think about protecting this brand by buying all or most of the top level ones. This will stop a competitor putting a website on the same name but with a different suffix.  For most smaller businesses you don’t need to buy them all up but just selecting your local country and a .com would be OK. So for example a UK company should really go for .com and .co.uk.

When a person makes a search on a search engine the results returned will be relevant to the searcher. For example, If you are a UK business and want to target the UK most of your searchers will be using google.co.uk which gives a preference to sites ending in .co.uk or those hosted in the UK. thus, we would recommend buying both .com and .co.uk and hosting in the UK.

Once you have an idea of your chosen suffixes and your list of keyword phrases then you can go to a domain name company and use the name selection tools.  Most of these tools will show availability of the term across all suffixes and give you suggestions if the selection is not available. This process of website domain name selection can be tedious and time consuming but don’t take short cuts or you will pay later with more expensive search engine optimization costs.

Keywords analysis and keywords research is the most critical thing you will do when planning to start a new website. To search engine optimize a website that had good keywords analysis before a line of code was written is significantly easier than a website that was changed to meet keyword phrases.

So what is a keyword phrase? – When anyone wants to find something on a search engine they type a number of words into the search box and hit search. These words are known as keyword phrases. The search engine will then look through its index of web pages trying to find the most relevant sites.

Lots of SEO companies will tell you that on-site optimization is essential and this is true but any optimization will only be as good as the keyword phrases you have researched and chosen.

Thus, keyword analysis must be carefully executed. The analysis needs to be performed in phases, and for each of the phrases researched we need to collect the following information for each keyword:

• Search volume – the number of searches made for this term
• Competition – the number of other sites that are competing for the phrase
• Competitors – the top 5 websites listing in results pages for the phrase

A useful FREE keyword analysis tool is Traffic Travis that gives lots of help around this research.

The three phases of keyword research are:

1. Identify Generic Keywords Phrases. The first step is to investigate the generic terms around your line of business. These are typically the terms people use when browsing for information on a topic and will not necessarily bring buyers into your website. For example, Coast Accommodation or Beach Accommodation.
2. Identify Niche Keywords. From the generic list we need to now find a niche in the market. Typically generic terms will have high number of requests and high competition. By going through each generic term and looking for niches that have a lower number of searches but with less competition will allow us to get a better ranking faster. An example niche could be Florida Beach Accommodation or Greek Islands Accommodation.
3. Identify Long Tail. Now we have a number of niches selected we can find the specific keywords that will bring in visitors that want to buy our service or product. If you think about it people may well be looking for cheap hotels or to compare hotels. Thus, taking your niche list play around with the following methods:
   - Adjective – add price or product qualifiers, e.g. cheap…
   - Product Type – add a product type, e.g. villa, hostel, B&B
   - Locations – e.g. Crete, Corfu, Jamaica
   - Vendor or Brands – e.g. Hilton, Holiday Inn, Marriott
   - Call to action – add words like: buy, solve, help, ways to

This will now give you your list of keyword phrases that your website needs to be targeted at. If you don’t have a website already you can now select your website domain names based on the niche selected. The advantage about doing keyword research first is that your domain name can include the keywords of your selected niche.

Once your have purchased your domain name you need to start with your website design and hosting. The first step is to host the website in your target region picking a supplier with a good track record of supporting its customers. Once your hosting plan is set-up you can now get a design company or create the website yourself. Our article on website design and hosting gives a lot more pointers to help you out here.

You should now have a website that has a domain name related to your keywords, has content or articles targeted at your keyword phrases. If you have done this correctly the website should start appearing in the search engine results but you will need to do some specific on-site optimization and off-site optimization to help your positioning in result lists.  Another option whilst your organic results are improving is to start a Pay Per Click campaign which can bring well targeted visitors into your website on day one.

If you search for tools to help with performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you will get 1000′s of results and it becomes difficult to pick because they all promise the world but do different things. This review covers a tool called Traffic Travis and this is a all round SEO tool that comes in a FREE and paid for version. For someone starting out in SEO or whom looks after a single website the FREE version will probably be all you need.

==> For more information and to download FREE Traffic Travis click here!

Traffic Travis Features

The goal of any website is to focus on a niche and Traffic Travis is here to provide you with not only keywords, but to give you a complete overview of your niche and your competitors. So, while some of the other tools focus entirely on keyword analysis, Traffic Travis will also go into greater detail for Pay Per Click ( PPC) data and your competition’s website structure. What you get out of the box:

* Keyword Research – Takes a single search term and automatically discovers 20-2,000 related keywords by looking across all the major search engines. The result set of keywords can be saved to a file for later use.

* SEO Research – You have some selected keywords but want to know if your site is optimized for this list? Give your list of keywords along with a domain name and see where it lists within Search Engine Results (SERPS) for each keyword phrase. You can then use the Page Analysis to dive deep into your pages and see a detailed SEO report. These reports include lists of links, page ranking, traffic ranks and typical on-page optimization factors.

* PPC Data – If you are considering pay per click as will as organic search engine listings Traffic Travis will take your keywords and provide a breakdown of the number of ads for that phrase, the top sites for any given keyword, and a list of the most popular keywords. You can quickly see which phrases actually stand any chance of making you money.

* Analysis – This aspect allows you to see the top web sites for a keyword phrase along with Page Ranks, domain age, number of back links, directory listings, title tags, and all the other SEO data you’ll need. This also gives a 1-5 start rating sumarising how dificult it will be to achieve a good ranking against the keyword phrase. The lower the STARS the more time, effort and money it will take. It is often better to focus on more easier keywords that have less searches per month than less hard keywords that have many more searches per month.

* SEO mini course – This is a small mini course provided by email to help you use the tool. This will also assist people new to the concepts of SEO.

The difference between “Free” and “Professional” versions

A main differentiators with Traffic Travis is the availability of a “Free” version of the software which is OK for a single site webmaster/marketeer.

The key differences between the free and paid versions are:

• Number of projects: The free version is restricted to 5 projects.
• Data limits: The free version has lower data limits on some tools.
• Print and save reports: The free version doesn’t support this feature.

Traffic Travis Review Summary

This Traffic Travis review hopefully explains what the software has to offer. The main point to take away is that Traffic Travis can provide all of the tools you need to choose your keywords, check out your competitors, test your sites and ensure your PPC campaign has a good ROI. The one limiting factor is that it is only available on Windows so for all those MAC users you will need to use Parallels or Bootcamp and Linux users a windows VM player.

As it has a FREE version just give it a try and I am sure you will not be able to stop using it ==> For more information and to download FREE Traffic Travis click here!

A few simple pointers to help you dominate your market.

• Understand your customers’ search behaviour. Walk in your website visitors shoes and understand the interaction they have with your site. Most customers are researching or looking for a problem to solve. If you understand what problem they’re trying to solve in terms of the keywords and phrases they will type, you can provide them with a  solution to it on your landing page.

• Decide how you will track conversions. How do you know how successful your campaign is? This can be when you make a sale or possibly a lead and you’ll have to assign some kind of monetary value to that lead so you can determine how much advertising to spend in order to get it.

• The email list. The email list is your best sales tool, it is cheaper to sell to an interested party. Autoresponders are simply a way to keep in touch with your customers through newsletters via email lists.

• Do the keyword research
  - Brainstorm and test with associates
  - “spy” on your competitions’ using tools
  - use other tools to expand the core list
  - don’t focus on generic terms but go for a niche

• Group keywords by the conversation type
  - what is the potential customer looking for?
  - If you’re an estate agent, you’re prospects will be having different conversations if they’re looking to buy as opposed to someone looking to sell their house.

• Build landing pages on your site for each conversation type.  You’d want the two different potential customers above to go to two different pages within your site.  You want to highlight the different value propositions you’re bringing to the table, i.e. each page solves a single problem.

• Set up your own blog. Let everyone know your an expert in your field and use it to communicate and let people know someone exists behind the website.

• Set up your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign using the keywords, groupings and landing pages.

• Monitor and test your PPC campaign EVERY DAY
  - Split test ads every day
  - Adjust bids every day
  - Get rid of non-performing keywords every day

• As soon as a great “money term” is found, start the search engine optimization process for that term
  - Market 2-3 articles per week (or even more)
  - Make blog postings on your blog and others’
  - Answer posts on forums and yahoo answers

• Review and repeat this process every 3 months!