Google SEO: Keyword Research, Link Building, Marketing

We'll continue our summary of the SEO Site Review 2010. In this part, you will learn tips covering keyword research, link building and marketing as provided by the panel of experts in the SEO site review session panel headed.

Keyword Research

Tip #14: "Think about what users will type when searching for your services and make sure that your content contains those keywords."

Keyword research does not only mean looking for the best keywords to target from an SEO point of view. In fact, Google recommends that you research potential keywords that your client will actually type into the search engine. The company offers a free tool, https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, which every webmaster can use to research keywords.

If you need more details on how to use this new/updated keyword tool from Google, you can read a tutorial on using the Google Keyword tool.

Do your keyword research every time you write new content for your website, whether it is a blog post, product-related copy or something else.

Tip #15: "Do not put too much information in a blog. Instead, for better results, limit the blog topics to a well-defined niche."

It is suggested that you have a close association/relationship between the keywords that can be found in your website or blog contents. This association of keywords should be defined as belonging to a specific niche. Log in to your Google Webmaster tools account, and then click your website in the Dashboard. Look under "Your site on the web" and click "Keywords."

What you will see is the list of keywords found by Googlebot in your website. According to Google, this set of keywords "reflect the subject matter of your website."

For example:

The list above obviously shows that the website is highly relevant to PHP web development. This is the specific niche to which this website belongs. A domain like this can be easy to rank in Google by establishing "authority," because the topic is well-defined in a specific niche.

Tip#16: "It is not all about getting to be number one for a particular difficult and hard phrase, where most competitors are competing to take advantage of high search volume. Instead, get some traffic from other great sources such as Facebook, Google map listings, Twitter, etc."

Google is not the only common source of targeted traffic. With the popularity of social networking sites, you can get targeted traffic as well from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Map listings etc. This is much easier and more fun to do than spending a lot of resources to get a difficult (sometimes impossible) keyword to the number one position in Google.

You can check the next link for more tips on social networking and SEO.

Tip #17: "You need to analyze your server logs or even Google Webmaster Tools report and determine for what phrases your website appears in Google. Instead of developing and concentrating on a single difficult keyword, you might as well diversify your strategy to put more content in your website for better long tail results."

This technique has been proven to work. Take, for example, a lot of article websites like eHow, Associated Content and even SEO Chat. These websites do not depend on a single competitive keyword to earn income or drive conversions on their site. Instead, lots of quality content drives massive amounts of traffic because of the long tail effect.

If you are interested in maximizing your site's long tail traffic, you can read this tutorial.

Tip #18: "One aspect that defines a high quality website is that it gets substantial traffic from long tail queries. This type of website will rank better in Google."

A good example is Wikipedia.org. The editors working there are not concerned they did not rank Position 1 for "encyclopedia", because they know they are getting and estimated of 15 times more traffic as compared to encyclopedia.com.

Google loves to rank quality websites, and once you are trusted and a domain with authority; Google continues to send you more and more traffic as you continue to add quality content for your readers in a continuous basis.

Tip #19: " The easiest links that you can get to your own site are your own links- Matt Cutts."

It was explained in this tutorial that canonical issues resulting from an inconsistent linking strategy (such that you have pages in your website that link to default.aspx and "/", instead of having everything point to "/"), will lead to dividing your link juice, and that can affect rankings. In this case you need to implement 301 redirects or apply the link rel canonical tag.

Tip #20 : "One of the best websites to get links from are those websites that belong to a highly targeted/specific niche."

This just means that relevance ratings favor domain relevance as opposed to page relevance. The reason is simple: trusted websites that belong to a specific niche (not just a website that offers content about everything) are symbols of "authority." Their "specialization" or "expertise" in that specific niche can surely add points to your website if you are getting links from them, as opposed to links coming from multi-niche websites (such as article directories).

Tip #21: "Make sure you are careful with your external links. Do they relate highly to your website content? Do that help your website users?"

You need to pay attention to your website's external links (who you link out to). You can read this tutorial for tips about improving further your external links using Xenu Sleuth.

Tip #22 : "Think twice before allowing web developers or SEOs to link to your website. It might look suspicious to Google; some SEOs or web developers might include some spammy anchor text that could affect your website's integrity."

This is a sensitive matter. A lot of SEOs and web developers request that their clients include a link to their own website. It might be good for promotion, but think twice. If it appears that they violated some rules in the Google search quality guidelines, then your website rankings will be affected.

Tip #23: "To keep more search engine value and link juice on your website, limit the number of external links to only those that your users really need. Do not use them frequently as part of your normal website navigation menu. Instead of including too many external links, develop a good internal linking strategy.

Matt Cutts provides a good explanation for this: if inbound links to your website add value, then why should you place a lot of external links pointing to other domains? Instead of having those inbound links to help rank your site better (because of the reputation and value your website has earned), all of that value will be gone and credited to others.

This is not to say external links are bad. There are some websites, however, that use external links extensively as part of their navigation menu to show pages which are found in another domains.

Tip #24: "Instead of developing and launching several blogs or websites, why not concentrate all the effort and work into a single website?"

The point is the "completeness" aspect of the website. Say you have 30 websites. Will you have the time to make sure all of them are 100 percent polished and complete in terms of content, SEO, etc?

If you cannot manage this many websites to the point where they all appear complete, it might be a good strategy to just concentrate all of your work on a single website and market it as a single entity.

In this way, you can save a lot of marketing costs by promoting only a single domain instead of managing too many domains which might NOT be as complete and marketable as they should be.

Tip #25 : "Think about branding. How you can differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition? Think about branding your website so that it will stand out from the crowd, or if you are buying a domain, think of something brandable."

Branding is important. It helps to provide your own identity on the Internet. This is very valuable; some big companies are willing to protect their brand by applying for trademark protection.

If you are the owner of a well-recognized brand in a specific niche, the marketing implementation will not be as hard as it would be for an unknown brand.

Tip #26 : "If you are managing or marketing a website, make sure your website offers some compelling value to your visitors. What do you have that is so cool and great that people want to link to your site?"

It is easy to answer why Google has lots of traffic and links; their search engine offers compelling value that helps a lot of visitors. What does your site offer?

Tip #27 : "Think of things that people want to come back your website."

In your marketing plan, make sure you formulate ways to offer services that makes people want to come back to your site. Consider the following questions, answered for some wildly popular websites:

a. "Why are you using Google everyday?" Because I search for information each day using their search engine.

b. "Why do you need to visit Yahoo everyday?" I need to check my mail daily.

You can likewise ask the same questions for your website and come up with answers in the services you offer that will make your visitors want to come back regularly.

Tip #28 : "For business websites, it is extremely important to put the address on the page. This should be the physical address, including zip codes. Include the city, state and even country."

Google recommends that you place the complete physical address on your website. This is not only beneficial for geo-targeting, but in fact very useful for your visitors. Make sure you include more than just the town name, as that town name could be found in other states or even in other countries. You can easily market a website if your business address is well-defined and stated completely in your website.

GOOGLE OPTIMIZATION BY NTST

Link Google AdSense to Analytics to Increase AdSense Revenue

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If you have not linked your Google AdSense account to your Google Analytics account, you are missing a lot of opportunities to increase your own Google AdSense revenue. This article will show you how to do this and stop leaving money on the table.

This feature was actually released one year ago and published in the Google AdSense blog.

This tutorial will illustrate how to get the maximum use out of the information provided by integrating your AdSense account into your existing Google Analytics (GA) account. The objective is to use the information gathered to formulate an effective Google AdSense marketing strategy that could increase earnings.

Basic Requirements

You need to satisfy the following requirements below to link your AdSense and Analytics accounts:

1. You are a registered Google AdSense publisher. In this case, you are publishing Google ads in your website content.
   
   
2. You have an existing Google Analytics account for all of the websites with Google ads on them.
   
   
3. Your blog/website has enough posts and potential traffic to be considered worth optimizing (see details below). This requirement is, however, optional.

Note that this information can be highly beneficial for those AdSense publishers that are already publishing lots of content on their blogs/websites, and that are starting to earn some Google ad revenue.

This integration can provide lots of data which cannot be seen or easily managed by a normal/independent Google Analytics and Google AdSense report. If your website is still new, the information may not be as meaningful, because your website still needs to do a lot of marketing work to publish content and attract traffic.

Linking both accounts (AdSense and Analytics) can be highly useful for optimizing both your traffic and Google AdSense income. This technique is particularly useful for a medium-sized, fairly established blog. Based on experience, optimizing for Google AdSense and traffic (obtained from analytics reports) will take the following stages (revenue and traffic estimates are for reference guides only):

If your website or blog is new, you will need to work on the first three stages before linking Google Analytics and AdSense can be highly beneficial.

For example, in the screen shot above, you need to have at least 40 high quality posts/unique URLs before you can integrate both your AdSense and Analytics account together. The target of 40 posts may vary depending on your style and commitment. In my experience, I consider this many posts to be a sign of a fairly established blog. Again, you can linked both accounts at any time, even if your blog is new, but your data and results may not be as meaningful if you have a fairly established blog.

To start integrating your Google AdSense account with your Analytics account, you need to follow the steps mentioned in the following tutorials (select either one, but the video tutorial is recommended): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT_e8qeZiCw and http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=92625

By linking, you can view Google AdSense stats with details directly in your Google Analytics report. The detailed report includes what pages/blog posts are getting the highest share of AdSense earnings, user behavior/preferences affecting revenue, and other important information that will be discussed later on.

When you follow the tutorials from the links provided above, you need to ensure that:

1. If you have several websites/blogs for which you need to integrate Google AdSense in your Analytics report, choose the biggest website/blog as the primary domain. You then need to embed codes on those other domains.

2. Note that integration requires you to embed the code that can be placed in the head section of your website, as shown below (bolded are the AdSense-Analytics integration code to be embedded):

You can get the embed code in the application for integration by following Youtube tutorial linked to earlier.

3. All of the pages in your website should have the embed code installed so that you can receive AdSense-related stats in your Analytics report. If you have static pages (i.e. not template-based), you need to manually paste the code into all of those pages with AdSense. If you use WordPress, you can place the code in the header.php template, as shown in the sample code provided above (at the ... section). The code will automatically be generated on all of the blog's pages. Similar procedures apply to other platforms, like Blogger.

4. It will take at least 24 hours (after the code has been embedded) for your Google Analytics report to start showing AdSense-related information.

You will be using the AdSense data available in your Google Analytics report to answer one of the most common questions pertaining to Google AdSense management:

What specific content is contributing the highest AdSense revenue?

You want to know the answer to this question for two reasons. First, if you know this specific URL, then you will be careful with its existing rankings in Google or wherever it gets traffic. This means you will make this URL as stable as possible (for example, not doing any redirects, major content revision, title tag revision, or even deleting this URL) because you'll know that it can seriously affect rankings and traffic, thus affecting your site's AdSense revenue.

Second, you will be careful about creating highly similar content to this URL, because if you do, it might create a canonical/duplicate content issue that can affect existing rankings and traffic contributing to AdSense.

So, once you've linked your Google Analytics and AdSense accounts, how to you find out the answer to this question?

• Log in to your GA (Google Analytics) account.
  
  
• In the dashboard, click "View report" for the website for which you'd like to see the data.
  
• Click "Content" on the sidebar navigation.
  
• Under "Content," click "AdSense."
  
• Finally, under "AdSense," click "Top AdSense Content."

The pages are sorted in terms of AdSense revenue.

You need to protect this URL from any unwanted alteration that can affect traffic and rankings. This includes accidental blocking of the URL in robots.txt.

You can answer other questions as well. For example:

Is there an ad placement problem affecting revenues?

This is a more tricky problem that can be answered by the linked accounts data in GA. The quickest way to answer it is to get the AdSense CTR data directly. For example, 2%, 3%, 0.5%, etc (which is available in an AdSense report anyway).

However, this information only tells you the percentage and not the details. For example, you might need know whether or not this percentage is really bad. Some sites might have a CTR of 0.75% but be earning consistently well. Remember, it's not only the CTR that matters in terms of ad placement, but how it relates also to the impressions.

So how do you know if your blog impressions are working well in terms of AdSense revenue? See the following fictitious AdSense report below (in your account, go to Top AdSense Content - Export - CSV for Excel):

Based on the sample screen shot report, you might say that 0.95% AdSense CTR is bad (without knowing the blog post top content impressions), but the total AdSense impressions generating the total revenue is 200+ 168 + 90 (shaded in yellow green)= 458, which is:

% AdSense Impressions generating revenue = Total Adsense impressions with revenue / Total Impressions

%Adsense Impressions generating revenue = 458/525 = 87.24%

This means that out of 525 blog impressions, 87.24% are contributing to AdSense revenue, which is not bad.

The click-through rate percentage and earnings vary according to your niche, targeted visitors and even your website design. So you can say that there is an ad placement problem if one of the following two conditions is true:

1. Less than half the total impressions are actually generating revenue. In this case, even your top posts may not be earning at all; at the very least, the majority of your blog posts aren't earning anything.

In this case, you might need to check and experiment more with ad placement, and refer to some useful tips.

2. Some pages in your website or blog (which are actually receiving a high amount of impressions) do not have AdSense banners or link units at all, resulting in a low percentage of AdSense impressions generating revenue. In this case, place AdSense link units or AdSense banners on those pages.

You might as well do that analysis yourself by exporting Top AdSense content data to Excel and following the sample computations above.

A number of other questions can be answered. These include the following:

1. What are my top AdSense referrers? You can get the data in Content - Adsense - Top Adsense referrers.

2. Which types of visitors clicked Google Ads the most? Get the data in Visitors - New vs Returning - click the AdSense revenue tab in the report.

Here's a useful tip to keep in mind: every native report of Google Analytics will now contain an AdSense Revenue tab, so when you go to different sections of your Google Analytics report you can also get related AdSense data from the "AdSense revenue" tab. See the screen shot below:

Any useful information you gathered will be used to formulate strategic actions to further increase AdSense revenue. This kind of information cannot be obtained without linking your AdSense and Analytics account together.