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0:20 – Do you know what keywords you want to rank for?
0:39 – ‘Buying’ Keywords. For static pages.
1:50 – ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ keywords. For Blogs & News sections.
3:47 – How do you know if the on-page optimization report you asked for is complete & trustworthy? (Case study)
4:38 – Meta tags – are they THAT important?
5:50 – Privacy Policy is compulsory
6:26 – What do you know about 404 pages?
7:38 – Do you know how many 404 pages does your website have?
8:11 – What’s the lesson of the day? 2 things you need to keep in mind.
Hi, Fiona Soutter here from Super Savvy Business with this week’s SEO & Traffic news update.
A couple of things have come up during the week with some of my mastermind clients and I thought that they are quite important topics and that I should discuss them on our weekly video.
So here we go:
0:20 – Do you know what keywords you want to rank for?
The very first thing I want to talk about is the importance of doing your research when it comes to keywords – especially if you are at the beginning of setting your business up. The mistake that many business people make is first of all that they don’t do any research. Well, you really need to know what sort of words are going to drive traffic to your website.
0:39 – ‘Buying’ Keywords. For static pages.
There are two different kinds of words that you need to be looking for:
There are the words that you are going to optimize your pages for your static pages, i.e. your Home page, your About page, perhaps the page about your services. These are probably the sorts of keywords that have a high search volume and they are probably going to be a little bit more competitive than some of the others.
One thing you should ensure though, especially if you are sending traffic to a static page where you are selling something is that these keywords are ‘buying’ keywords.
How do you know what a ‘buying’ keyword is?
There are a couple of little things that you can do:
- First of all, go into Google and put the keyword into the Search bar and press ‘Enter’. You’ll see a whole pile of search results come through. But what you want to be looking for is whether or not there are any Google AdWords. Are people actually paying to advertise for that keyword?
- If you see ads along the top and you see them down the side, that’s a really good indicator that those keywords are what we call ‘buying keywords’; in other words, people who use those keyword phrases when they go online are ready to take their credit cards out and spend money.
1:50 – ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ keywords. For Blogs & News sections.
Once you found those buying keywords for your main static pages (and I do recommend that you don’t ever have more than one keyword per page, by the way; I often see a lot of people trying to optimize their web pages for more than one keyword – that is a BIG no-no, you really shouldn’t do that), but what you’ll find when you are doing your keyword research is you’ll find that a lot of phrases which are quite long in length – perhaps 3 to 5 words – and they have a much lower search volume – let’s say maybe 50 searches a month or a couple of hundred searches a month.
Those keywords are really important in regards to using for your blogs and your news. Don’t ignore them. This is what I like to call ‘the low-hanging fruit’; these are the keywords that a lot of bigger businesses can’t be bothered going after because they have got such a low search volume.
But let’s imagine that once or twice a week you put content on your site that is optimized for these ‘low-hanging fruit’ / long-tail keyword phrases and then you started to get a couple of visits per week on each of these particular pages. Now, if you put several pages a week, this is all going to add up over the space of a year or the space of two years.
These ‘low-hanging fruits’ can actually, in combination, bring you a large volume of traffic and they can often be a lot easier to rank for. So don’t ignore that low-hanging fruits. They don’t necessarily have to be buying keywords. It’s great if you can find them , but they don’t have to be the buying keywords because you can bring people to your site that are looking for information and then, whilst they are there, they might see that you have your products and services on sale that are related to your market or your niche.
Now, I can spend a lot of time going into depth in regards to this topic, but this is something that I don’t really have time for on this video, but we do cover this in quite a lot of detail through the Savvy Mastermind program and this is what I’m working on with my private clients.
3:47 – How do you know if the on-page optimization report you asked for is complete & trustworthy? (Case study)
Now, next thing that came up this week was that one of my clients had a report done on one of their websites
by a third party on the state of their on-page optimization. She passed it through to me because she wanted to know what I thought of it.
There were some really good points made by this external organization, but it was quite scary really, because my client paid a fair bit of money for this particular report and although they made some valid points, they had missed out an awful lot of things.
And these were important things too; they weren’t little things.
Some of the things they picked up on were important, but they hadn’t actually given the full explanation or really given them enough depth on those topics. So, let’s give an example on some of the things that were brought up in this particular report:
4:38 – Meta tags – are they THAT important?
One of the things was that it was important to optimize the meta tags on your website. This is an important factor, a lot less than it used to be but it’s still important to get your keywords into your meta tags. when I talk about meta tags I’m talking about your page title, your page description, and to a much lesser degree, the meta tag for your keywords. Now, this organization had said that they needed to put more effort into the keyword meta tags (and they had listed maybe a dozen words).
BIG no-no as far as I’m concerned.
The search engines such as Google don’t actually put a lot of emphasis on the keyword meta tag. So you can put stuff in there or not, but as I mentioned earlier, it’s important to never really optimize for more than one keyword on a page. But what they had failed to say was the importance of having a page title and a description for each page and they need to be unique – it’s very, very important.
It’s also important to ensure that that page title is not more than 70 characters and that the page description is not more than 160 characters. I’m saying ‘characters’, not ‘words’, so don’t get confused there.
5:50 – Privacy Policy is compulsory
Another thing that they have failed to pick up on was the fact that this website did not have a Privacy Policy. In Google Penguin update last year this was a really important factor. This is what Google wants us to have. They want us to have certain elements on our sites such as:
1. A sitemap – we need two different sitemaps: one is called an XML sitemap, which is for the search engines and then we need a link in our footer which is a human readable sitemap.
2. Then, of course, having a Privacy Policy, which is especially important if you are collecting the details of people through your website.
6:26 – What do you know about 404 pages?
3. Another thing that was not picked up on in this report was the importance of ensuring you have a user friendly 404 page.
A 404 page (taking that out of the techno-geek sort of terminology) is a page that people land on when the page doesn’t exist on your site. It can occur because maybe a link was broken and sends to a page that’s no longer there or maybe they have typed something into the web browser and they have made a mistake; they are actually sent on a page that does not exist on your site.
What Google wants us to do is to ensure that the page is user-friendly. What does that mean?
What that means is that you explain to people what has happened, like
‘Whoops! You’ve come to a page that doesn’t seem to exist! Perhaps you might like to go to the Home page?’
…and then you give them a link back to the Home page.
You might even suggest some of your top pages or top blog posts: ‘Perhaps you might like to view ….’ and then you can have some other links to some other pages.
Think about what would be the next best step for somebody to take if they were to land on your site on a page that doesn’t exist. Where would you want to send them? Have that information on your 404 page.
7:38 – Do you know how many 404 pages does your website have?
The other thing that was not picked up with this report is that this client’s website had 22 pages on their website where they had a 404 error. It’s really important that you clear these up and if you’re not sure how to know if you’ve even got them, go to Google Webmaster Tools, make sure your site is connected to it and check to see if there are any 404 errors.
Having 404 errors can actually affect your website’s ranking and your page rank. So it’s really important that you do fix them if Google is picking up that you have them.
8:11 – What’s the lesson of the day? 2 things you need to keep in mind.
So what’s the lesson to be learned here by my client or by you if you are listening and you are thinking ‘Well, how do I know if I go out and get one of these reports if it really is giving me the information I need to know?’.
A couple of things:
- First of all, you might like to get a second opinion. If the reports come back and they are basically saying the same thing, then you can rest assured that you are pretty much on the money. If they come back completely different then that would be a good sign that you need to find out which company is reputable.
- The other thing is to do a little bit of investigation. See if you can get someone to give you a referral, someone that you know has had a good experience with a third party organization: a web developer or an online marketing company. Of course, through Super Savvy we have Super Savvy Websites and Super Savvy SEO and we can certainly help you with any of these sorts of reports or helping you to get your website optimized.
So that’s something that you feel you need to start looking into or you want some advice, please be sure to contact us; we have a team of experts that are ready and are willing to give you a hand in any way that you need.
That brings us to the end of our Word of the Week from Super Savvy Business. My name is Fiona Soutter and we’ll see you next week!