I have been read­ing a lot about long tail key­words lately. In truth, maybe the phrase is new but the con­cept is not.

When you think about it, would you search for “car” if you were look­ing for a car? I doubt it. You would prob­a­bly type in car, model, color, fea­tures, etc. That is basi­cally what long tail key­words refer to.

So why use them? The best descrip­tion I read is:

“The core idea of long tail key­words is that there is less com­pe­ti­tion for them, so it’s eas­ier to get good search engine rank­ings. As well, peo­ple who search cer­tain long tail key­words are much more likely to be poten­tial pur­chasers. By opti­miz­ing your web­site and deliv­er­ing con­tent to match these search queries you will be attract­ing vis­i­tors who are search­ing for spe­cific (my note: spe­cific is impor­tant) service/product information.”

So, for exam­ple, if you are a coach, don’t just use coach, or career coach, as your key­words, use some­thing like “coach to help with career goals” or “need a coach to help with career goals”. But — but– take it one step fur­ther, for exam­ple, “coach to help with my career goal as a pub­lished author in children’s books”. Now that is long tail!!

Read more here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/SEO.html

Jan

In pre­vi­ous blog posts I have explained to you that author­ity sites are what you should be striv­ing for if you are inter­ested in top posi­tions on the search engines and a few key things to do to get you there. In a new post, one item I read about today (which I do on my own site) is a FAQ page.

FAQ page con­tent answers real user ques­tions about your prod­ucts or ser­vices. One page may work but you also may want to look at hav­ing mul­ti­ple FAQ pages if it fits your products/services.

In a recent WebProNews post Chris Crum states “Web busi­nesses may ben­e­fit by cre­at­ing FAQ con­tent that is tar­geted at answer­ing real user ques­tions about their prod­ucts.” Read more here:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/03/05/why-faq-pages-could-boost-your-google-rankings

Check out my FAQ pages here for the basic idea of FAQ pages:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/faq.html

Jan

What you/searchers select from search results shape future queries based on your choices. Have you noticed when you search for one thing and then another that you are shown options? These options that may be of inter­est but may be way off the mark of what you are look­ing for? Yes, they are fol­low­ing your pref­er­ences and this will hap­pen with your poten­tial vis­i­tor as well. This, in fact, could actu­ally make it harder for searchers to find what they are look­ing for.

So what can you do to help searchers find you?

The best organic SEO is con­tent (Con­tent Is King!)

Bob Massa put it well:

“I believe any­one can be suc­cess­ful at online mar­ket­ing or even traf­fic gen­er­a­tion and search engine place­ment specif­i­cally, if they just stop look­ing for ways to trick machines and instead look for ways to con­nect with humans”.

The need for qual­ity, engag­ing, and usable con­tent is becom­ing more impor­tant than ever.

I live on the balmy west coast of Canada, which I can tell you is not balmy right now. We have had almost 3 feet of snow in the last few days and more to come. What does this have to do with “look­ing for­ward to 2009″? Well, as I looked at the claus­tro­pho­bic snow pil­ing up I real­ized that in all things it is time to do more with less.

So for 2009:

— take a look at your web­site and see what pages may not be work­ing any longer. Maybe it is time to redi­rect them to a page on your site that you can cover the same topic(s) and not just bulk up your site.

- take a look at your con­tent, espe­cially the index page. When was the last time you changed the con­tent? Is your con­tent outdated?

- take a look at the key­words / key phrases that you are using. Are they rel­e­vant for today’s mar­ket? Are there more keywords/phrases then you need — prob­a­bly more tar­geted words will work better?

- take a look at your link­ing. Are there links that no longer work for your site? Are there links that no longer work period?

- take a look at your visual web design. This may be listed last but cer­tainly not least! When was the last time you updated your web­site (2–4– or more years?) Are vis­i­tors com­ing in and see­ing the same-old-same-old?

Look ahead to 2009. It is a new start and you can do more with less and suc­ceed — YES YOU CAN!!

Jan

I read a great arti­cle at Web Pro News called “Is Bounce Rate a Google Rank­ing Fac­tor?” by Chris Crum. Here are a few points.

Pay atten­tion to Bounce Rates. Maybe the page con­tent is not good or maybe the key­words in the con­tent are not good.

Ana­lyt­ics eval­u­a­tion tips

1. Set up goals

2. Pay atten­tion to the Geo­graphic stats.

3. Pay atten­tion to what vis­i­tors are typ­ing in to find you (they are say­ing here’s what I want to find).

This arti­cle also has a video on per­son­al­ized (sub­jec­tive) search results. This is very inter­est­ing and well worth the few min­utes to watch. Briefly Google search is deter­min­ing what you are look­ing for based on what you pre­vi­ously searched for.

Read more about these here.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/21/is-bounce-rate-a-google-ranking-factor