A common client question is how do I find good keywords? It is no good focussing on a phrase that no one actually searches on!

But first what are keywords?

Keywords are answers to your customers questions.

Google Ranks pages and not websites

Spy on your Competitors

Research 

KeywordEye

This tool defaults to Google UK since it’s developed by a UK team, so if you’re using it in the AU, you’ll have to change it to Google AU. 

KeywordSpy

Keyword Spy allows you to quite literally “spy” on keywords. Great for competitor research.

SEMRush

This tool is also a paid tool with a free option.

How can I tell where make page comes now?

Before embarking on keyword research, it is a good idea to determine where your landing page is currently situated in google. This way you can see how any changes you make will improve page position.

I am not implying that you are a dummy - but sometimes in our haste to focus on our real jobs - we can forget some basics. 

1. Focus on what your website and each page is all about

Seems obvious doesn't it - but sometimes we can forget the KISS principle and just forget the key message. 

Picture in your mind a website for a bakery. We might have a page that takes about the history of our bakery, a page of easy to follow recipes, a page of awarding winning cakes and an order form to buy some. We might also have a series of pages that focus on our specialties - our sourdough, our chocolate cake and our chocolate chip cookies. 

So we shouldn't spend too much time talking about our new ovens - no one cares about that!

2. The page’s filename and path — the URL — is very important.

Get keywords in there. Don’t waste this space. You might have something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/award-winning-chocolate-cake-recipes. 

It doesn't matter if it seems long to you - be reasonable, but the Googlebots can still read all of it.

If you have named your page http://www.yourdomain.com/ourawards - people looking for award winning chocolate cake recipes might have a hard time finding you.

The page’s <TITLE></TITLE> tags are also very important. 

You should make sure you include your keywords, like this: <TITLE>Award Winning Chocolate Cake Recipes - Step by Step Guide</TITLE>.

You need a different one for each page - they must be unique.

3. The description tag is important, though not always for search-results placement; 

The description tag is where you can control the snippet of page text that appears in Google search results. This can often be the key reason someone clicks on your site and not someone elses. So stay on message.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The Bakery - your go to destination for award winning chocolate cake recipes, help and ideas. Follow our easy to follow videos">

4. Keywords - but not as you know it

Despite what you may have heard, the KEYWORDS meta tag holds little value; search engines either ignore it or give it very little weight.  You should think of keywords more in context of being the "key words" that are in your page content and form the basis of your clients search criteria.

Put your keywords in Heading Styles

This tells Google to pay attention to this text - it is important, it also tells your viewers to pay attention to!

Wherever possible, use text links.

Search engines read the anchor text in the links to find out what the page the link points to is about. If you need lots of links in your site, use good keywords in those links. We like to use this alot in our footer area for the websites we build.

Repeat your keywords . . . but not too much. 

If you want a page to rank well for chocolate cake, then it also needs to appear a few times throughout the body text. Be careful not to overdo it - it needs to make sense.

Draw attention to keywords in your body text. Make them bold; put them in bulleted lists, or make them italic.

Here’s the ideal optimized page:(and they are all in a bulleted list!)

• You used the keywords in the filename
• . . . and in the <TITLE></TITLE> tags
• . . . and in the DESCRIPTION meta tag
• . . . and in the page’s first <H1> tag
• . . . and perhaps in some subheadings
• . . . and multiple times throughout the body of the page
• You have the keywords in links, elsewhere in your site, pointing to the page.
• You have the keywords in links, on other websites, pointing to the page.

Did you know that correct use of images can help your website rank further up the food chain?

Yes - those little Googlebots 'read' everything on your page - including all the information about your images.

Below are 4 simple steps to make sure your images are working best from a search engine optimization perspective.

1. Use the ALT TEXT TAG.

The ALT TEXT TAG is a field that allows you to label your image and allows the Googlebots to 'see' what your image is. 

If for example you are a baker and have a website with a recipe for Chocolate Cake, you might drop a picture of a Chocolate Cake on your page. 

The ALT Text TAG ( found by using your right mouse button on the image inside your CMS in Adobe Business Catalyst) is where you type in Award Winning Chocolate Cake for example.

2. Optimise your image for the web

Don't forget to resize your image.

This means to use image editing software to control both the physical size of your image and the file size of your image. 

Images that are slow to download will have a negative impact on your site in terms of how Google will rank the page.

3. Give your image a good file name

Make sure you save your image with a description that matches the image. 

My example above of the chocolate cake would work best with an image called award-winning-chocolate-cake.jpg and not DSC00056.jpg which indicates it has come straight from your digital camera!

4. Drop a caption on the page

We are drawn by our very nature to look at images before reading text. So whilst you have people immediately drawn to your image - give them something meaningful to read below/above or beside it as well.

Whilst I have no stats on this, a well chosen and captioned image on a page, could help reduce bounces. 

SEO - it can be a piece of cake

When a new site goes live, one of the very first things people wonder is when will I be on page 1! How can I make sure people find me?

Often clients are waiting for the Googlebots to index their site, so that people can find them online.

A Googlebot is the search software that Google sends out to trawl the internet and bring back data of new information. This is called crawling.

Indexing is what happens when the Googlebot comes back to Google with the data. This allows Google to determine when and how your site will show up in search results. During this process the Googlebot analyses the words on the page, the page titles, internal links, ALT tags and headings. There is alot of data it takes in.

We do 3 simple things to make sure your site gets indexed quickly

1. Submit a sitemap to Google.

The Adobe Business Catalyst platform creates this for you (its called sitemap.xml) and sends this automatically to Google everyday with all your changes.

It's a great way to get Google to take notice of your new site.

We always hook this up for our clients on Go Live and then it is a set and forget process  - easy!

2. Verify your site with Google via Google Webmaster Tools

This process will also kick off the Googlebot's to trawl your site.

All our client sites are listed with Google in this manner - it gives us additional insights into your site as well to help with further SEO work and to help us and you identify areas for future keyword improvement.

3. Submit your Blog via Feedburner

A recent feature we are providing to our clients is to submit their Blog via Feedburner ( a free Google tool ).

This will again notify Google of all new blog posts - helping to boost your relevancy for search results. 

Want to know who is on your website? What they're looking at? If your online marketing is working?

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Features include;

Live Dashboard - This is your control panel for your real time website statistics. The Live Dashboard is where we provide you with the real time website analytics and tracking of your Online Visitors. Find out what country they are from, how they found you and what page they are looking at and much more all in one page. We will also show you how many visitors are on your site, how many page views you have had, recent traffic sources and search keywords and a location map. 

Recent Visitors - What if someone visits your site and you arent monitoring in real time? Will you miss this visitors actions on your website? No way! Recent visitors allows you to view your visitor's information and exactly what they did whilst on your site. Every click and action ( Downloads, Clicking on External Links ) will be logged here and you can choose to go back in time using our unlimited daterange selector.

Referrals - Referrals come from other sites that are not search engines, it's great to know where your traffic is coming from and this is where our real time referral tracking feature kicks in and provides you with this data. They could be blogs, directories or any links that you have to your site. It doesn't really matter where traffic comes from, you Rocket! Live to improve and build high quality referrers.

Keyword Analytics, Recent Searches - See what search terms are being used on the search engines to find your site. This invaluable tool shows you exactly what your site visitors have been searching for. Traffic from search engines is the lifeblood of most websites and blogs. This tool allows you to view the keywords used to reach your site, ranked by their popularity. This can help you identify keywords that are working, and those that aren't, so that you can optimise them accordingly. 

Export Reports - Our analytics tools are able to export a full range of reports. Any report can be set to use your pre-defined date/time settings, this means that you can have weekly, monthly or even annual reports. These are professional reports in CSV or PDF format.

Social Network Tracking - We also provide a full suite of reporting tools for Facebook, Twitter and Mentions. You can attach your own or a company Facebook or Twitter account to be monitored. Traffic stats, likes, retweets will also be shown.

Top Keywords - Would you like to know what key words or key phrases are driving traffic to your site? Any serious webmaster must also know. See exactly what keywords are working for you and those that are not performing so well. The real time keyword tracking feature is ideal for those interested in making money online via affiliate sales, those performing SEO work and webmasters in general.

Entry/Exit Page Reporting - For those involved in marketing the entry or landing page is crucial. You need to make sure that if you are spending money on online advertising that it is effective, a poor landing page will mean that your customers have to search your site again to find what they are looking for. Exit Page reporting is the most important feature out of all the real time website tracking features. It is crucial for any webmaster to know what the last page viewed was before a visitor left. The exit page can tell you that there is an issue with your site. The real time exit page tracking feature will display every page that your visitors are exiting your site from.

Email Reporting - For those who do not have the time to monitor your site in real time, you can select to have your reports emailed to a specified address daily, weekly, monthly or not at all. The email report contains the following: Number of online visitors, Number of visitors, number of hits, number of page views, search engines used, top key-phrases, top referral sites, average time a visitor spends on your site, top pages and much more.

Browsers & Operating Systems Used - Understand what browsers and operating systems are used to view your site so your it can be designed to best meet your viewers.

Chat live to your Visitors - Some online service providers charge $10-$30 a month to have an online support chat feature on your site. We include this free as part of our package! The online chat feature allows your site visitors to interact directly with you when you are signed into your website. A great sales feature, as you can proactively 'greet' your viewer to answer customer questions when you see who is online via your dashboard!

Go back in time! - Compare against time. Rocket! Live offers two levels of analysis - simple summary statistics for all your pageloads, unique, returning, first-time visitors, bounce rate and highly detailed analysis of your latest pageloads. we offer unlimited log size, so you can use Archive feature (Date range selector) to view older data.

Detailed Visitor Information - 'Zoom in' on individual visitors for a detailed report on where they're from, their system settings, and most importantly, what link reffered them to your site and their navigation path through your site. Click the magnifying glass beside each to zoom in on and expose detailed reports to view details of everything on your stats and view visitors relating to them. 

Live Map - Watch the world map automatically refresh to show your current online visitors location using our accurate city-wide geolocation service on earth map. You can even drag and zoom to breakdown viewers by location.

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• Avoid Keyword stuffing.

Yes - you do need to have a high key word density for your designated search phrases, but if you can't read this out loud to yourself and it makes sense - remove the words. Your text must read well and the best way to test this - is to read it out loud to yourself or someone else.

• Have a catchy page name that means nothing to search engines

Don't try and be too clever about what you are offering, avoid jargon and tech terms in your key areas of Page Name, Page Title, words in heading tags etc. Remember your key words are what your customers use - not what you use.

• Make sure your text appeals to a person and not a robot

Yes google bots are trawling your site - but they are not buying from you, make sure you keep the human elements to your text.

• Waffle

Punchy text, bullet points and numbers. Get to the point

• Don't have links from unrelated and untrustworthy websites.

If you have no relationship with a business, no connection, no related products or more importantly nothing that will benefit your customers - DO NOT HAVE THAT LINK. The days of phoney reciprocal link building are over. This can damage your site long term, plus you only ever received benefit from a website that tracks higher than yours anyway - so think long and hard about linking to other sites and them to you!

One of our first conversations with any new client is to clear up some common misconceptions regarding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and keywords.

When Google ranks your site, it looks for a specific list of items to know whether to list your site on page 1 for your search criteria or page not number 1 for the same search criteria.

Many years ago Google paid attention to KEYWORDS meta data in your site code to help determine where your site would appear in search results.

People would stuff their meta data code area with anything and everything that maybe could be about their site. This was repeated on every single page of their site. An example is below for a potential sports store.

< meta name="Keywords" content="football, soccer, baskbetball, sports balls, cricket balls, tennis balls, bowling balls, round balls, orange balls, black balls, balls for sport, sporting balls, sporting teams, school sport, club sport">

This hangover from quite some time ago, still lives with clients and is a misconception we are on a mission to clear up!

Google no longer looks for KEYWORDS in the metadata area (the CODE) to determine your page rank or to be more correct your relevancy for the search criteria you have entered.

Don't believe me?

I thought you might need some convincing, why not listen from the experts themselves..

So are KEYWORDS dead? No!

Keywords are still important but in the following important context.

• Your should have them in your page title tag
• You should have them in your page name
• You should wrap them in H1 tags
• They need to be specific to the actual page your are looking at - i.e. - you may have only one or 2 key phrases
• You should refer to them in within the page content in an appropriate manner - i.e. you can and should repeat them, but it needs to make sense to you when you read it out loud

Want to know more?

Why not review some of our other blog posts on this topic, look out of our next SEO basics training or get in contact with us so that the we can show you how you can control this with your own Adobe Business Catalyst CMS.