E3 Internet Marketing

Incorporate Video Transcripts Into Your SEO Strategy

E3 — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:04:35 +0000

The internet used to be a place for text and graphics. If you think back to the days of Angelfire (we’re all getting old, aren’t we), you’ll recall that websites were almost 100% text. But as the internet has evolved, people have turned to their browsers and smartphones to consume video. People watch videos on how to do things, to understand the world around them, and of course, to watch animals do cute things. Video has become so important to internet consumption that search engines typically rank videos at the top of their query results. But it’s not only important to have the video on your website or YouTube. Video transcripts can help you reach people who have difficulties hearing, and they give your viewers something tangible they can save and refer to later. But transcription can also have a positive effect on your SEO, as well.

Search Engines Can’t Crawl Video

Search engines crawl text. They don’t know what your video is about, unless you tell them in plain English. So video transcripts allow Google, Bing, and Yahoo to crawl every word that is spoken in your videos. If a video only has a title and a caption, that’s ok, but it doesn’t really tell the search engines what content can be found in the picture and audio. Video transcripts allow you to incorporate keywords into your video marketing, helping to improve your presence and ranking for those important terms.

This can be especially important for competitive keywords. If you notice that you are having trouble breaking through for specific terms, and you also notice that nobody has produced a video surrounding those terms, you’ve got a win-win situation on your hands. A video that is properly optimized with descriptive titles and captions and transcript can help move you to the very top.

New Outlet for Tough Niches

Video transcripts can also be vital for those businesses who have trouble generating interesting or useful content in their niche. Some subjects just don’t lend themselves to regular blog posts or lots of separate pages on a website. But informative or entertaining videos can help you generate new content, new visitors and better rankings.

Improve Engagement with Video Transcripts

Video Transcripts can also improve user engagement. Some users will download a transcript and follow along with the video. This encourages them to watch the entire video. This is important to you as a business, because the longer someone watches, the more likely they are to convert to a customer. But it’s also important for SEO because search engines, specifically Google, look favorably upon videos that have longer view times.

Use Your Transcript to Create Related Content

Once you’ve transcribed a video, you can take that text and repurpose it in a variety of ways. If you’re discussing a case study or technical topic, you can use that text to create an infographic to help your visitors more easily consume the data you’re sharing. You can also take the text and turn that transcription into a related blog post or guest blog post on someone else’s website. Longer videos may be a springboard for white papers or eBooks, as well. Once you’ve got video transcripts in-hand, your opportunities to repurpose that content are virtually limitless.

Five Reasons Nobody is Watching Your Video Content

E3 — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:02:15 +0000

The moment when internet marketing experts declared video content marketing to be a solid tactic for gaining traffic and rankings, the floodgates opened. Suddenly everyone began slapping videos up all over their websites. Unfortunately, most of these videos did nothing to help traffic or rankings, because nobody was watching them. Creating video for video’s sake is no way to generate clicks to your content.

One: Your Video is Not Interesting

When you’re filming a video for your site, take a second and think about it in terms of home videos. There is nothing worse than being cornered by a friend or coworker who insists you watch their “hilarious” video of Uncle Frank falling into the pool on his birthday. And they make you sit through three minutes of boring party activity featuring people you don’t know, so by the time you get to the actual fall, you just don’t care.

The same principle applies with your business video content. You want to get to the point quickly, and make that point interesting and useful. Have a plan for your video and a well written script. If you are struggling to come up with ideas of what may be interesting to your audience, focus on a problem your clients have or questions your customers ask all the time. Hook the viewer as quickly as possible. If you don’t catch them in the beginning, they’ll click away. Keep your videos short, interesting, and leave the viewer wanting more.

Two: Your Video is Poor Quality

In a world where our phones can produce HD-quality video, it’s a turn-off to come across content that looks as though it was shot on a camcorder from 1994. There is no excuse for low-quality video unless, of course, you’re shooting Uncle Frank falling into the pool.

Your clients and potential clients will expect a high level of video and audio quality when they see that you’ve produced a video. It’s important to invest in quality equipment, use lighting properly, and edit the video before uploading. Don’t just grab your iPhone and slap something together. The more time and effort you put into shooting your video, the better the results will be.

Three – Nobody Can Find Your Video

So you’ve made your video. It’s interesting and compelling. The quality of the picture and audio is movie-studio grade. You put it on your website.

But nobody’s watching it.

Unless you are Buzzfeed or LOLCats, people probably don’t know to visit your website for videos. It is critical to upload your content to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and other websites to increase the number of eyes that will see it.

A crucial component of video marketing is, well, marketing. You’re going to have to put some work into getting viewers, and a lot of the basic principles of internet marketing apply to video marketing. Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world? That’s right. The only search engine people visit more is Google, which directs users to YouTube nine out of ten times. So it’s not enough just to upload your content. You have to optimize the text you provide to YouTube so that your video will show up in search results. You need a descriptive title, an informative description, targeted keyword tags and useful thumbnails. Optimizing your text increases the chances that people will be able to find your video and will watch it.

Four – You Don’t Know Your Audience

When creating video content, it is critical that you truly understand and know your audience. Take mothers, for example. How many products and services are marketed to mothers every minute of every day? Think about the commercials and video content directed at this audience that you’ve personally seen. Often times, companies will use a “mom” to talk directly to the mothers who are watching the video. Mom commercials are rarely funny or interesting.

But in 2012, Fiat UK created a video directed at mothers that takes a different approach. It hits on everything that is serious and also hilarious about motherhood, and wraps it up into a catchy song that will get stuck in your head whether you’ve given birth or not. It’s obvious that Fiat understands what it means to be a mother.

Five – Load Time

We live in a world where we’ve all come to expect instant gratification. Our attention spans are short, and if a video doesn’t load in ten seconds or less, we hit the back button. In fact, many researchers say five seconds is even too long a wait for some consumers.

When you upload your videos, make sure you pay attention to the buffer and load times and that you test your video on computers, tablets, and smart phones. Just because your video loads fine on a laptop doesn’t mean it will run as efficiently on a smartphone. If it works great on an Andriod it may not load so well on an Apple device. You can’t control the data speed of all internet providers, but if you take the time to set everything up correctly, you’re less likely to lose viewers.

If You Need Help With Video Content, Ask

If you’ve decided to try video content marketing, it can help to seek out the help of a professional. Putting the extra time, effort and money into working with a professional video marketing company can help to ensure that you’ll generate interesting and well-produced videos that speak directly to your target audience.

Planning Website Architecture for SEO Success

E3 — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:40:04 +0000

A successful website architecture can mean the difference between your visitors becoming a sales lead or just bouncing away to a competitor’s website. A more formal name for website architecture is “information architecture”, which is the goal of building a website with your audience’s needs in mind and making information intuitively discoverable. A successful website architecture gets the right information to the right person as quickly and as simply as possible. Since websites have different types of visitors, each with different goals, needs, and nuances, it can be difficult to know how to get started planning your website’s structure. This article covers some website architecture best practices and methods that will help you plan the most effective strategy.

There are two types of people; designers and developers. Designers come up with all kinds of wacky ideas to make the website look unique and pretty, but they usually have no idea how to organize information and content. This makes the path that visitors take, from website entry to conversion goal, difficult and confusing to navigate. Developers on the other hand, usually have great site navigation, but lack the creative talent necessary to make a user-friendly interface. The happy medium is, well, in the middle, of these two methodologies.

Website Architecture Basics

Never forget the goal of your website; to sell an idea. Whether you are literally selling physical products, or you are trying to build an online following, the goal is the same – to sell a particular audience on a particular idea. But one common trap site owners tend to fall into is that they fall in love with their website, this is a big mistake. You must look at your site objectively, and be willing to make design and organizational changes that could be radically different from what you would ”think” is the best website architecture. What is best for you, may not be what is best for your target market or audience.

Start out with answering the question, “What is it that you do?” according to the formula provided below:

TO (target market, target audience) PROVIDES (services, products) BY (unique methods, advantages) FOR (results).

An example should help illustrate:

E3 is a Pittsburgh based (TO) internet marketing company that PROVIDES web design, online video, and SEO services BY offering over 10 years of industry experience FOR building your brand’s online market share.

This elevator pitch, more or less, will be your About Us page. There are many possible variations, feel free to mix the elements of the formula around, but you should try to include all four of them. All in all, someone should be able to understand, appreciate, and tell someone else after hearing your About Us elevator pitch only once.

Segmenting Your Site’s Structure

Now that you have your About Us page together, come up with a list of ALL the different types of people who may come to your website. Take a piece of paper. On the left hand side, write down every group that will come to your site. A few examples:

Potential customers
Returning customers
Press or media representatives
Suppliers
Potential allies
Competitors

On the right hand side of the piece of paper, come up with a unique “success point” for each group. In other words, what is it that you want each group to do once they get to your website? Some ideas:

Lead a potential customer to a contact form
Send a returning customer to a support forum
Guide the press to a photo gallery or video page

Then decide on the path each visitor would take to reach their unique success point. What links in the menu, sidebar, footer, and “inside the body content” will these different visitors be clicking on to get them to the page that contains their success point? Think of this “navigational path” and plan it out on a piece of paper. Take note of which pages seem to overlap. Do you really need a “Help” page and a “FAQs” page? Or both a “Request a Quote” and a “Contact Us” page? Probably not.

A good practice is to keep the number of pages (remember, pages are different from posts) on your website down to about 10 – 15 max. This will keep your content concise, reduce the risk of your visitors getting lost, and increase the chances that you will actually maintain, monitor, optimize, and improve your pages over time, which is absolutely critical for long-term success. Every month or so, check with your Google Analytics account to see how your pages are performing. If they are not doing so well, make a few adjustments, and let it run for a month. Then come back and edit the pages to optimize their performance for the different segments of your target audience.

Beginners Guide to Google Webmaster Tools

E3 — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 14:15:59 +0000

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that helps you do lots of things, such as checking for malware on your site, moving your site to a different domain, and even identifying what keywords are bringing you search traffic. If you are a web designer or web developer and have lots of sites to monitor, Google Webmaster Tools can manage several sites through a single account. This article will show you how to add a site into Google Webmaster Tools and then will provide an overview of the services available.Search for “Google Webmaster Tools” and click the link. You will be asked to login with your Google account (usually the same as your Gmail or YouTube account). If you’d like to keep the management of this particular site seperate from your usual Google account, go ahead and create a new one.

Once logged in, you will see a Google Webmaster Tools welcoming page.

If you already are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools (and have added sites to the service), you will be taken directly to your pre-existing Dashboard. For the first timers:

Watch introduction video
Type in URL of your website. Click “Add A Site.”

Verify Ownership in Google Webmaster Tools

Once you’ve added your site, you will need to verify that you actually own it. To do this, Google gives you two options. Their “recommended” option:

And “alternate methods”:

Go ahead and pick which method is best for you. For WordPress users, there is an even simpler way to verify owernship with Google Webmaster Tools.

From your WordPress Dashboard – Install the plugin “WordPress SEO by Yoast”
In Google Webmaster Tools – Copy the meta tag value from the “HTML Tag” option under Alternate Methods
Paste the meta tag value in the Settings area of the “WordPress SEO by Yoast” plugin

There ya go! Click Verify in Google Webmaster Tools. It will take you the Dashboard.

Overview of Google Webmaster Tools

Now since you have just added your site to Google Webmaster Tools, there won’t be much data available for you. Additionally, the service is robust and a complete guide would take pages and pages of instruction. However, let us briefly introduce the various areas of the Dashboard and what they do:

Configuration – This is where you can set whether your URL appears as “e3demo.com” or “www.e3demo.com”. You can also configure geographical targeting, identify Sitelinks, and manage the move of a website from one domain URL to another.
Health – From this area you scan for and monitor malware, double check that Google is properly indexing your website, and see if there are any crawl errors or broken links anywhere on your site.
Traffic – Here you can see what search terms people are using to find your site and what other sites are linking to yours.
Optimization – This area provides tools and suggestions for improving the SEO of your site, including submitting a sitemap, removing URLs, and analyzing keywords.
Labs – Don’t worry too much about this, but here you could check site performance (aka site loading speed), live preview your site, and access other interesting statistics.

The above information will help you get started with Google Webmaster Tools. While a complete guide to using this service is the topic for another post, please explore the available tools that will help maximize the return on your website investment.

How to Properly Choose a Website or Blog Topic

E3 — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:51:06 +0000

Learning how to choose a website or blog topic is the first step in a successful search engine optimization plan. The topic you choose will have a dramatic effect on the results you can expect from your website or blog as well as how quickly you can acheive success. Ranking higher for competitive topics is extremely difficult and will require more resources than less competitive topics.

Topics with High SEO Competition

Examples of highly competitive topics include mortgages, debt relief, and prescription medications. Websites on these topics can make a lot of money if they manage to attract visitors. Even a single visitor to a mortgage website can produce a large profit for the site owner if the visitor applies and is approved for a mortgage. Thus, it is an extremely competitive SEO arena.

Choosing your Topic

You probably do not have the SEO resources or time necessary to rank high for ultra competitive search terms. However, there are ways around the competition. Consider focusing your website or blog topic on ever more specific search terms and keywords. As you get more specific, the competition decreases, and your chance of success increases!

Finding a Profitable Topic

The following is an example of how to research the level of SEO competition for a potential topic. Let’s say you are interested in starting a website or blog about “mortgages”. Here is how to discover potential keyword niches you might be able to carve out as your topic to avoid the ultra competitive keyword “mortgages”.

Go to Google.com
Search for a popular, competitive topic, such as “mortgages.”
Notice 138,000,000 results
Search for “pennsylvania mortgages”
Notice 29,500,000 results
Search for “pennsylvania jumbo mortgages”
Notice 5,460,000 results

As you make the search term more specific, the number of results related to the search decreases. Thus, the amount of websites and blogs your topic is competing with decreases. This step by step process of searching for ever more specific and focused search terms can be applied to any competitive topic, not just mortgages. If you keep this research process in mind when choosing a topic for your website or blog, you’ll see faster SEO success in the future.

Resources for SEO Beginners

E3 — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:59:37 +0000

Getting started in SEO can be daunting. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is both a science, backed by empirical, metric driven data, as well as an art form. It takes skill to develop engaging content that others want to share, and at the same time, understand the vast knowledge base of technical SEO best practices. This article introduces a number of resources for SEO beginners that will help the novice learn the fundamentals of search marketing and start to “speak the language” of this growing field.

There are a few basic concepts an SEO beginner should be familiar with, including:

robots.txt
sitemap
nofollow
301 redirect
canonicalization

If you do not know what these are (or if you’d like a refresher course), the following resources are some of the best on the web:

Beginner SEO Resources:

Beginners Guide to SEO by SEOmoz – Originally founded as an SEO services company, SEOmoz now focuses on providing SEO tools and guidance. This article is a crash course in site optimization and really helps teach the basic terminologies and concepts.
Google Webmaster Help on YouTube - Official Youtube channel for the Google Webmaster Tool. Google itself addresses questions on how best to optimize and administer your website. Hundreds of videos for your viewing pleasure.

SEO Community News and Discussion:

Bookmark these sites and check out on a regular basis.

News & Blogs

Community Forums

These resources for SEO beginners will help get you started. SEO is a dynamic field and staying current on industry news, trends, and best practices, is critical for improving your site rank and overall online profitability.

Why WordPress is Better than an HTML Website

E3 — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:15:52 +0000

Tens of millions now use WordPress as a website and well, it’s time you moved out of the basement and upgraded your website. WordPress has been around for over ten years now and is running some of the biggest sites out there. Sites like Hulu, Fisher Price, Pepsi, and Best Buy all use WordPress as a website – just to name a few. Read more to learn why WordPress is better and how it can take your web presence to the next level.

	It’s a CMS (Content Management System) NOT just a blog. Say what?! Yes, it is a common misconception that WordPress is just a “blog”. But when we use WordPress as a website it comes with an easy to use admin area for you. Just log in to your Dashboard and start managing the content on your site yourself, like a pro! No need to contact your web designer to do something simple, like add a page or post a picture. From any computer, on any browser, anywhere…
	Revenue Generating Flexibility Everyone wants to earn an income with their website, and with WordPress as a website it’s versatile for virtually all monetization strategies. Whether you’re setting up an online payment system for a store or you’re a blog using Pay Per Click advertising to earn a living, we can set it up in no time. Check out our blog post, How to Earn Money Blogging with WordPress for more info.
	OK, I’m excited. What can you do with WordPress? Using WordPress as a website is perfect for: Personal, brand, or company blogs Shopping Cart sites Job hunting and online resumes Portfolios Event calendars Members-only sites Video showcases And much, much more. Let us know your vision, we can code it.
	Wait, SEO? I like that, I think… Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of setting up your site with search engine friendliness in mind. We guide you through the whole process, from choosing the keywords to target, to optimizing each page of your site for higher rankings, SEO is an absolute must have. We use the very latest software and plugins to make your SEO campaign the most competitive out there in your keyword market. Plus, with WordPress as a website, you’ll literally eat and breath SEO packed content.
	Wait, wait, what the heck is a Plugin?! WordPress plugins are much like Apple’s Apps. It gives WordPress designers the freedom to add all kinds of functionality to your site. Want a Jobs Board for your career page? Or a contact form? How about a pay per download area? Using WordPress as a website comes with plugins we can use to customize how your visitors interact. Not only are we familiar with hundreds of the top of the line plugins out there, but we can also custom program your own functionality if you need to.
	Social Media Sharing With WordPress, we can have your blog posts publish AUTOMATICALLY to your outposts like Facebook and Twitter. Build an audience and pull together a following from your peripheral accounts all over the web. Drive them to your home base and convert those visitors into sales or followers. More visitors, more traffic, more links…means higher search engine rankings!
	Connect with your visitors in a whole new way. WordPress allows visitors to leave comments at the bottom of posts and pages. Ask your customers to leave a quick testimonial, or have your fans drop you a line after your newest video release. Comments allow you to engage and connect with your audience and your customers in ways no website platform has before.

Online Video Marketing and Its SEO Advantages

E3 — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:04:06 +0000

Online video marketing is the new battleground for search marketers. According to Google Industry Trends by the year 2014 online video will make up 91% of all internet traffic. Gone are the days where adding alt-tags to your website images earned you a few extra spots on Google. To rank high today, sites need to have lots of rich media content pieces that are properly optimized for SEO. And what are a search engines favorite rich media content? Yup, online video! But just how exactly does online video marketing improve your site’s SEO?

What is Online Video Marketing?

Why is it that some companies succeed with online video marketing and others don’t? How much of corporate online video is just talking heads, fading in and out? Everyone pretty much knows that video is good for their site, but why?

Proper online videos possess these characteristics:

Engaging and useful content
Relatively high production value
Technical optimizations for keywords

How Online Video Marketing Attracts Traffic

As with all SEO, the goal is to build content that is the most relevant for the target keyword as possible. Google prefers sites with online video because:

More Keywords

Additional opportunities to embed keywords into underlying code means increased relevance according to search engine spiders.

Wider Reach

Connect with people on social media outlets like YouTube and Vimeo to target new markets with your Outposts.

Interlinks

Connecting links between videos on social media sources with your Homebase website improves search engine rank.

Stickiness

Visitors stay on pages with video for much longer meaning Google thinks the visitors are finding what they are looking for. This is known as “stickiness”. A site that has a high “stickiness” ratio is ranked higher by Google because it’s assumed that the content is more relevant compared to competing sites.

Brand Equity

Video connects with your audience in a whole new way. With interesting and engaging video content, you can make your audience true brand advocates.

Audience Education

People learn better when watching video compared to just reading text. Take this opportunity to instill marketing messages and your value proposition with a well orchestrated online video.

Advanced SEO is Online Video Marketing

Taken together, online video drastically boosts the SEO performance and search rankings of your site. While more advanced than other internet marketing strategies, online video is an enterprise level performance enhancer for any competitive online niche.

How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO

E3 — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:48:41 +0000

The most important part of building or optimizing a website is the selection of the right keywords for SEO. If you do not identify and target the right keywords, everything else you do will be in vain. Target the right keywords and your website will be a success. The right people will search for and find the information relevant to them. Target the wrong keywords and you’ll miss out on the critical website traffic you need to stay competitive.

Importance of Keywords

Without choosing the right keywords, the theme of your website will not be focused. As a result, your website will not rank high on search engines. Take some time to identify the keywords that describe your business, offering, or audience.

If you incorporate the right keywords throughout your website you ensure your content stays on track. This will greatly increase your chances of gaining high positions on Google for search phrases that will generate traffic to your website.

To get started, ask yourself, “What would someone type into Google if they were looking for what I offer?”

Now let’s refine this a bit…

Never Use Single-Word Keywords

A common misconception among beginners is that they identify and target only a single word as their “keyword”. This is entirely wrong, and if you make this mistake, you will be disappointed with your search engine rankings. To get top placements for a single-word keyword (other than your business name) is virtually impossible. Let’s flesh out this concept a little bit more.

Say you are a Real Estate attorney who has just published a Do-It-Yourself Real Estate Law Guide for Tenants. You would like to build a website to sell this book online so you come up with a few options for the keywords you’d like to target, including:

Book
Real Estate Book
Real Estate Law Book
Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book for Tenants

The difference between these four options is obvious. They become increasingly more descriptive and relevant to the people you are selling to. Targeting the keyword “Book” would be impossible to rank high for. Why? Because it is so vague that the competition is staggering. Literally – you would be competing with every other book for sale on the internet. As you move down the list, you become increasingly more specific. As that happens, the number of people you are competing with goes down and your chances to rank high go up.

Optimizing for multiple-word keywords has many benefits compared with using single-word keywords, including:

Less competition for your search phrase
More relevant visitor traffic
Better chances of ranking high

Even though the single-word keyword “Book” might get millions more searches each month compared to the keyword “Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book for Tenants”, that difference in traffic is irrelevant. Nearly everyone searching the term “Book” is not looking for your specific offering, so it doesn’t matter anyways. In contrast, virtually ALL the people searching with the keyword “Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book for Tenants” are looking for your exact offering. There is no benefit to simply grabbing tons of traffic. The traffic must be relevant to be useful.

ProTip: It is important to note that many professionals in the SEO field use the term “keyword phrase” synonymously with the term “multiple-word keyword”.

Creating a Keyword Portfolio

Think of a number of different keywords to make up your keyword portfolio. First, you want to come up with the “head keyword”, which will be the keyword that is the most competitive and hardest to rank high for. It is the primary, main keyword that describes the theme of your website. The head keyword is between 2-4 words in length. In the example above, a couple of options for the Head Keyword could be:

Real Estate Law Guide
Real Estate Law Book
Tenant Law Book
Tenant Law Guide
Real Estate Legal Book

Write these options down and file them away for now. Next, you want to come up with a dozen or so “long tail keywords”. A long tail keyword is one that is more than 3-4 keywords in length and relevant to a highly specific search phrase. A few examples could be:

Legal advice for tenants in PA
Book on legal responsibilities for tenants
Landlord tenant disputes guide book
Guide to Real Estate Law for Tenants
Do It Yourself Book on Real Estate Law

The main benefit of using long tail keywords in your keyword strategy is that they are much easier to rank initially high for. If you have a new website then starting with some long tail keywords is the best place to begin. You won’t get large amounts of traffic, but the traffic you do get will be highly relevant and more likely to convert.

Research to Find the Right Keywords

So by now you have a couple of ideas for your head keyword and a number of possible long tail keywords in mind. To decide which ones you will use, go to the Google Keyword Tool. It is a free keyword research tool that is a part of the Google AdWords service.

Put in a number of your keyword possibilities into the “Word or Phrase” area. Make sure to click “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” and click Search. In the image below, we follow the example by placing “real estate law book”, “tenant law book”, etc. into the search field.

The Google Keyword Tool will then display a report of the keywords, including:

Competition
Global Monthly Searches
Local Monthly Searches
Ideas for new keywords

As you can see, the keyword “real estate law book” has high competition and high traffic. You’ll probably want to make this your head keyword. The other possibilities, “tenant law book”, “tenant law guide”, and “real estate legal book”, do not have enough traffic to justify reporting (signified by the “-” in the data grid). This is not to say that no one searches for this, and in fact, people surely do, they are just not popular enough keywords for data to be tracked by Google. You will probably want to target these keywords as well in sub areas of your site such as internal pages or blog posts.

Repeat this keyword research process for all of your long tail keyword possibilities as well. Find ones that have low competition and high traffic. Since long tail keywords are so specific, they may go unreported. Even so, you will want to go ahead and use at least some of them anyways (in the title of a blog post for instance) simply because of the extremely high relevance they embody. For example, “Do It Yourself Real Estate Law Book” might be a good title for an internal page of your website because it is just too relevant and targeted to pass up.

Choosing the right keywords involves research, brain storming, and some gut instinct. Take some time to think this through as it’s the most important part of your internet marketing campaign.

What Are SEO Stop Words?

E3 — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:47:34 +0000

As you choose which keywords to target, it is important to understand what SEO Stop words are and why you should avoid using them in certain places on your website. It is important to know what they are and when it is appropriate to use them, since SEO Stop words dilute the weight of your more important keywords when indexed by search engines.

List of SEO Stop Words

The following is a list of frequently used SEO Stop words:

For a complete list of all SEO Stop words, check out the Online SEO Guide: Google Stop Words.

Why Are SEO Stop Words Bad?

SEO Stop words dilute the weight attributed to your other keywords by the search engine algorithm. The search engines ignore SEO Stop words as they are deemed irrelevant and unnecessary. For example, you could have two options for the title of a blog post, such as:

I Take a Tour of the Best Restaurants In Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh’s Best Restaurants Tour

You’ll notice that the first option has ten (10) total keywords, five (5) of which are SEO Stop words. The second option uses none.

This means that the important keywords in the first option (Tour, Best, Restaurants, Pittsburgh) are given only half the weight they would have if there were no SEO Stop words. The second option carries twice as much keyword “juice” as the first option.

Where it is OK to Use SEO Stop Words

This does not mean that you can’t use SEO Stop words anywhere on your website. It is perfectly OK to use the SEO Stop words within the textual body content of your website. After all, the body text of your website would not make much sense without important words such as “Me”, “The”, “And”, etc.

Where You Should Not Use SEO Stop Words

You may use SEO Stop words in the body text of your website, but you should make a concerted effort to refrain from using them in your:

Meta titles
Meta keywords
Links
Anchor Text
Header tags

There might be times where, for aesthetic reasons, you may wish to use SEO Stop words in these areas of your website. However, for the most part, try your best to avoid them. You’ll see real results in your search engine rankings if you keep these tips in mind.