Category Archives for keywords
November 11, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
If you haven’t already noticed, Google Keyword Planner has severely limited access to its keyword data to marketers. Unless you have a consistent active Adwords campaign, when logging into Keyword Planner today, you’ll see wide ranges for average monthly search volume instead of an actual number.
A range like 100-1K is useless for most keyword research. If you are like most SEOs or marketers your exploration of your keyword space starts with Google Keyword Planner. So what is the alternative?
August 5, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Do you remember when you learned how to do on page SEO optimization by updating meta tags? For me, it felt like I got the keys to the kingdom. By placing keywords into the meta tags on your page you had a tool that would magically rank your page at the top of the Google search results where it belonged. Right?
Well not so fast, in today’s SEO, optimizing your meta tags may not have the impact you think.
April 22, 2016 / Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
I was inspired to put together this infographic when I read Trond Lyngbø’s Search Engine Land’s article:
Keyword research: a key element of SEO & content marketing.
As the introduction says: “Many business owner see SEO and content marketing as separate, but columnist Trond Lyngbø argues that solid keyword research can and should be used to inform content marketing strategy.” – SearchEngineLand
I couldn’t agree more. Augmented by customer and market research, keyword research becomes a potent tool in your hands, giving you valuable insight into just not content marketing and SEO as Lyngbø asserts but also into multiple aspects of online marketing, including social and paid traffic.
To really do a thorough job with your keyword research, you should be including less traditional keyword research tools such #tagboard. My list of 22 Keyword Research Tools has plenty of interesting tools for you to choose from.
March 24, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Even in an era of the semantic web, keyword research is still important. But it’s not just about the specific keywords. We need research to understand our market and competitive landscape, we need research to help brainstorm the topic of our new blog post. The 22 keyword research tools I cover below will not only help determine keywords for your on page SEO, but help you assess your competition and may even help you validate a new idea. Most of the tools listed below are free, but I’ve included a few that are not.
April 30, 2010 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
Part 2 of What are Meta Tags?
We now know what are meta tags (previous post) and that they are really only two that we care about (well most of us, there are some additional ones that should be in a webmasters tool kit). So how do search engines use meta tags?
Keywords meta tag:
It used to be that you could put the keywords you wanted to rank for into the keyword meta tag, and the more the better right? Then you could sit back and consider yourself done with your SEO efforts. This has not been true for a while. Google completely ignores this tag and has for years, and while yahoo and bing probably look at the tag, it is not clear that they give it much weight in determining how to rank your site. Regardless, do not put 30+ keywords into this tag, this is known as keyword stuffing and will only harm your page. Keep it to 10 at most. If you do use adsense or other context driven ads on your site, there is evidence that they use the tag to determine what ads to show.
Description meta tag:
Technically this meta tag doesn’t help your web page rank any better, but it is still important. Why? Because if this tag is set, google will often show it as the snippet underneath the title in the SERPs (search engine results pages) rather than grabbing some random chunk of text off your page. I’ve seen some funny snippets over the years, usually from sites that have no text, so you get a snippet that says “you need flash version xxx to view this site”. Is that going to entice you to click? You can think of your description meta tag as the “welcome” mat to your site. Put together a catchy description (no more than 160 characters as that is all that will show) that will invite your reader to click through to find out more.
