Google Analytics is free and powerful web analytics tool that gives webmasters all sorts of statistics about their website. Over the years Google analytics has really evolved with amazing new features and become a strong product for any small-medium business or even an enterprise.

Recently during a session with one of my client (who runs an online t-shirts store), I went over some of the analytics feature that he wasn’t using. In fact he was totally clueless that many of those even existed. Even though these features have existed inside Google Analytics for quite some time now, but an average webmasters never bothers to check beyond their total number of hits on a day, traffic sources and so on.

So I decided to do a quick post highlighting some of the ‘less-used’ features of Google Analytics and why you should start using them.

1. Google Analytics Alerts (Intelligence): Google Analytics intelligence comes with a set of default alerts that will show you interesting trends in your analytics data, 24/7. When something happens out of ordinary, it is important that you get access to that information fast and focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless pile of data. The Automatic Alerts stores historical data as well so you can go back in time and look at some of the automatic alerts which has been triggered by Google Analytics. This can really help you discover insights that might otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, if your site’s bounce rate suddenly increases or say Search Traffic suddenly decreases, Google Analytics should be able to catch that and alert you to dig down further. Google Analytics also gives you the flexibility of adding custom alerts with your own variables & rules. Watch the following video to learn more:

2. Comparing Stats with your Past Data: Everyone loves the calendar feature that lets you see all your stats for a specific time frame (e.g. 22nd July 2010 – 29th July 2010). But sometimes raw figures doesn’t really make much sense if you don’t have anything to compare those with. Fortunately Google Analytics gives a easy way for anyone to compare their stats with a past timeline. The best part is it also calculates the difference in numbers for you and give you a quick overview of the comparison. To access this feature, simply check “Compare to past” in the calendar and it will let you select the time period of your past stats.

3. Customize your Google Analytics Dashboard: By default the Google Analytics Dashboard shows some basic widgets like Site usage, visitor overview, goal overview, content overview, traffic sources overview etc. But lets say if you are running an eCommerce website, you may also want to look at some other widgets on your dashboard like – Adwords overview, Top Landing Pages, Search Keywords etc. So if you like to see any particular widget on the dashboard, simply go to that specific page and press “Add to Dashboard” button on top. Now if you go back to your Dashboard you will see that widget at the bottom of the page. You are also free to drag-and-move all the dashboard widgets in any order you like. If you don’t find a particular widget useful and think that its taking up your dashboard space, simply press the cross (‘x’) on the corner to remove it from your default dashboard view.

4. Segment your Traffic using Advanced Segmentation: Analyzing your data in aggregate is not very useful, as it doesn’t give you the right insights of the many individual factors that builds up the overall stats. Google analytics comes with a very powerful segmentation tool that you can use to identify which segments of your traffic are performing and which are not. This leads to more analysis on the under performing segments and eventually an increased overall site performance. There are a bunch of default segments available, that makes it very easy for you to segment out your paid and organic search data or just perform some analysis on the visits with conversion and so on. Once you are comfortable with the basics, you can also make up your own custom segments and save them for later user. Watch the video below that briefly goes through the GA Advanced Segmentation feature.

5. Setting up Goals: Every website has some business objectives that it wants to achieve. For an eCommerce store it may be the number of raw sales, for a consulting business it may be the number of leads thats comes from the site’s contact page. Google analytics makes it very easy to define and track the business goals of your website. This comes very handy to justify the amount of money/resources that you are spending in order to achieve some of your business goals. For instance, you may have heard that twitter/facebook brings in a lot of traffic to a website and lets say so you have started spending 8 hours day on those sites trying to promote your products. Maybe you have gotten a couple of hundred visitors but without proper tracking it would be very hard for you to know whether it was worth all the effort? Because any typical analytics stats would only tell you that you have received “X” number of visits from Facebook or Twitter. But what it doesn’t tell you is, how many of those visitors has also made a purchase fro your store or has performed a positive action that helped your business in any way. With Google Analytics Goals tracking, you will be able to know exactly that. If you are spending money on PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising), Goals are a must have. You can learn more about setting up Goals in Google Analyics here.

Bonus:

Make it a habit to check your Analytics Data: Many website owners set up Google Analytics on Day 1 and never log back in to check what is actually happening. Having Google Analytics on your website doesn’t help you if you are not making good use of the data and insight it provides. So it is very important that you make it a habit to look at your stats regularly based on which you can further tweak your web strategy and (hopefully) improve your site’s overall performance. You can make Google analytics send you a daily/weekly/monthly report via email, so that you get access to all the stats right from your inbox.

So what is your favorite Google Analytics feature? Share in comments!

I’m sure most of you are already using twitter as a communication medium to communicate with your friends, family, your colleagues, your online pals and it doesn’t stop there. You are also using twitter to keep track of your industry, the key people involved in the industry and companies that are important to you etc.

Nowadays every company seems to have a twitter profile with a real operator (human being) behind the scene who is communicating with customers, taking complaints, resolving existing issues and doing everything to save their online reputation. Companies are monitoring the twitter cloud for occurrences of certain keywords – company name, product name etc. and before you know it, you get a tweet from them – showing you that they exist & they care!

How thoughtful! Isn’t it? Well, that’s just the ‘social’ side of it. When a customer is talking about your company, you should be there! But is being there just enough? Let’s take a look at some of the corporate twitter accounts like dell, comcast, jetblue etc. (Courtesy of Search Engine Journal).

Below are some of the similarities I have found. If you run a business and you have a business twitter profile, than I’m sure you fall under one or more of the points below:

• You simply broadcast whatever new happens with your company. It’s like a TV advertisement– You tweet, tweet and hope that your customer sees it.
• You try to be interactive with your prospective customers. Whenever people talks about something that you
  sell or do – you jump right into the conversation and try to pitch your product/service.
• You use Twitter as one of the dedicated Customer Support channel for your business. So when your customer is having a bad experience and they have shared it via twitter, you try to comfort the customer and help to resolve the issue.
• You use twitter as a Reputation Monitoring tool. When someone talks about a bad experience with your company/product or service. You try to jump right in, showing that you care and show him a light of hope.
• You just heard of twitter and you have opened up a profile with your company name to save it from those stupid name squatters. You are yet to think of a proper strategy to run your twitter account.
• You are using twitter as you normally would, but you are just using your Business name and logo in the profile.

Now whichever point you business falls under, it’s really not my focus today. I’m not here to argue on which ‘strategy’ works and which doesn’t. In fact I’m not even going to touch on the ‘social’ factor that twitter possesses. Twitter is an excellent social tool on the web and this is just a fact so there is no point in talking about it over and over again, because it has already shown its significance in that area.

Can Twitter be a Medium of an Information Retrieval System?

Twitter is yet to be tested as a strong medium of an Information Retrieval System. SMS (Short Message Service) has been very popular & successful in delivering On-Demand information to customers. So for instance, if you want the latest headlines of the news, want to track your order, or want to know the exchange rate of a currency – What you usually do is simply send an SMS to a specific number (provided by the mobile operator) and you get the details instantaneously on your mobile inbox. The service is not necessarily offered by the mobile operator, in most cases it’s created & maintained by the 3rd party providers. They simply lease a pretty number (e.g. 1111, 2000, 3232 etc.) from the operator and share the profit with them as per their agreement.

Now SMS is becoming history, people are sending less ‘text’ messages and relaying more on twitter. So I am very surprised why no one is looking at the possibility that twitter can actually replace SMS in terms of On-Demand Information Retrieval & Marketing.

Here are some scenarios:

Amazon & Dell can start allowing users to track their orders via Twitter – It can be fairly simple. Customers will simply follow a specific twitter account for tracking purpose (i.e. @AmazonTrack, @DellTrack) and they can send a DM to the account with a keyword followed by their tracking number/order number etc. So something like:

DM @DellTrack Track 1033910

Then within seconds DellTrack will query a database containing the order number and DM back the customer with the details:

Order Status: 1033910 – Dispatched 19:09 – 02/01/09 (Details: http://dell.com/tracking/twitter/?o=1033910/)

Some third party service is already doing this for Postal Mail/Parcel Tracking for Fedex, UPS, USPS, and DHL etc. But why aren’t those companies doing these themselves?

Airlines can give away Flight information via Twitter – I found a few airlines on twitter – (e.g. SouthEast, American Airlines, Delta etc.) But most of them are just sticking to the social aspect of twitter. But from a customer point of view I think it would be really useful if a person could just send a tweet and know what time his flight is or from which gate its boarding etc.

So all you need is to follow their twitter account and send a “DM” which will automatically make the ‘bot’ to query the Database and send you a direct message with the details requested.

Service Industry can use Twitter for Customer Support – Whether you are a mobile operator, an ISP or a Web Hosting company, you can provide your customer with an extra channel of support via twitter.

For example, customer can be allowed to assign one twitter account with the service that they are subscribed to with your company. Let’s assume for now that it’s a hosting industry. And for those quick support queries (e.g. My Site is down, How Can I do XyZ), a customer can simply send a DM to the Support’s Twitter account (Without having to make that call or write an email). The system will automatically generate a ticket for that support request and let the user know the ticket number via DM.

Since this will be integrated with the host’s support system, so all those ‘tweets’ will actually be received by the support team via Email. They will simply respond to the email and its cut-down version will be automatically DMed to the user with a link to the full response.

Schools / Colleges can give away their Results via Twitter – A student can DM @StanfordResults with their ID & DOB and get the result of the current term.

Love Sports? Get the latest updates via Twitter – A sports freak can get the latest score of his favorite sport by simply sending a tweet.

Make a Doctor’s Appointment with Twitter – No need to make that call, just tweet and you automatically know whether your doctor is available on your chosen time-slot and then you can register yourself for an appointment – everything just using your twitter account.

Pay for your coffee via Twitter – It would be cool if you could send a DM “Pay @Starbucks48 $9.99” to @PaypalTwitter and automatically @Starbucks48’s TwitterPaypal account will be credited with that amount. This can also work for ordering pizza!

Random Ideas of some Twitter Based Information Retrieval Apps

World Time – You send a tweet to @worldtime – “time London” and the world time bot automatically returns a message to you with the current date/time in London.

Exchange Rate / Conversion – Similar to the one above – “193 USD =? AUD”.

Stock Updates – There are many people who needs to keep a sharp eye on the stock market. So if this app is developed users can just write @StockUpdate GOOG and get the latest Google stock price via twitter. They can sign-up for a auto-notification service where every hour or every day, the system can send a DM to you with the latest stock price of your preferred businesses.

Tweet Poll – I love polls and I have seen a lot of people who take polls via twitter. But I can’t imagine the trouble the host needs to go through by manually counting the ‘votes’. Why not have real tweet polls that can be automated? So you sign up with this service and create a poll, your poll question can be a True-false type (e.g. “yes/no”) type of a MCQ type (e.g. “1,2,3,4”). Users will be asked to simply tweet the poll id and the answer to the service provider, say – @Polldady. (e.g. @polldaddy QS93384 3).

The possibilities are endless. Anything that exists for Mobile devices (via SMS) can actually be upgraded and made for twitter. Since more users are going for mobile internet, and getting wifi access almost anywhere – sooner or later SMS will become a history and Twitter will be the next alternative for SMS.

What Needs to be done from here onwards?

Someone needs to build a platform that will be able to ‘host’ some of these things mentioned above in a simple manner. Since Evan Williams (CEO, Twitter) is yet to find a proper business model, I believe this is something that they should look into. Rather than charging people money for their service, they should build a platform that businesses can subscribe to facilitate these services. Because it will be impossible to do something in a large scale with their current API limit. They are in the best position to host these services on the cloud. They can even formally open up a team, to develop the ‘systems’ and integrate it with the company’s existing system so that a smooth operation can take place.

For small businesses (those who doesn’t require much customization), Twitter can have sort of an ‘Easy Wizard’ that can allow the businesses to make a basic application on the fly and pay for it as they go.

Have any ideas? Share them in comments!

Follow me (@saadkamal) on Twitter!

7 Tips to Save Money on your PPC Campaign

1. Stop using Broad Match – A lot of folks doesn’t know or probably doesn’t bother to use the different keyword match types that are available in Adwords. By default if you type in a keyword in your adwords campaign it is set as a “broad match”. The problem with a broad match is that your ad is often displayed in other different variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists. Even though Google says that the broad match always uses relevant keywords, but we (‘advertisers’) know that its not often best for your business. For example, if Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com wants to bid on the keyword “Shoe Money” on a broad match, Google will probably find a lot of shoe related queries as relevant. (Which certainly isn’t the case here).

   So if you have done some work on your keyword research and you are confident with a couple of 2-3 words and long tail keywords, use the “Phrase” or [Exact Match] instead of a Broad Match.

2. Use Negative Keywords Effectively – I have seen a lot of PPC campaigns that doesn’t implement this sweet Keyword matching feature – Negative Keywords. Suppose you run a web hosting business and you are bidding on the keyword “web hosting” on broad or phrase match. So now suppose If someone performs a search for “free web hosting”, its basically going to trigger your ad. But do you sell web hosting for Free? No! Then do you want to pay for that extra click and have those unwanted impressions which is probably lowering your CTR (Click-Through-Rate)?You can use Negative Keyword match feature to filter out keywords for which you don’t want your ads to show. So words like “free”, “cheap” are common Negative keywords. But its not limited to that. Its absolutely essential to have negative keywords if you have a lot of broad/phrase match keywords in your campaign.

   If you are confused about your negative keywords, Go to Adwords Keyword Tool enter your keyword and choose the “Negative” in the drop-down under Match Type. This will show you a whole bunch of negative keywords that may suit your primary keyword.

3. Smart Bidding – If you have played with some auction sites like Ebay you probably know this secret already. A smart way of bidding for anything is to do the unnatural. Don’t bid like any other Joe, always try to bid in odds (I personally prefers to bid in 1s, 3s and 7s). Now the question is why? Well the main reason is doing odd things gives you an advantage over others who are always playing by their ‘predictabe’ rules. Thus it sort of gives you a higher chance of winning the bid war.

   So instead of bidding $0.10, I’d bid $0.13, and for $0.15 I’d prefer to bid $0.17. So for someone who is bidding in 5s (like 5, 10, 15, 20…), would need to place 4 bids to outbid my ($0.17). Moreover lets say if the highest bidder was $0.10, you can outbid him by only 1 cent ($0.11) rather than paying $0.15!

4. Create Separate Ad Group, Ads and Landing Pages – If your PPC account looks like my friend’s (1 Campaign, 1 Adgroup, 1 Ad, 1 Landing Page, 20 Keywords) then you are doing the whole thing wrong. Try to group similar keywords in Individual ad groups and create Individual Ads for those and point them to their designated Landing pages. This will not only improve your CTR but also improve your conversion.

   Lets say you are running a web hosting business, and you offer different types of hosting (e.g. Shared, Reseller, Dedicated etc). So for best result, you may want to split your whole keyword list into 3 logical segments related to the 3 different types of hosting you offer. And then use those keywords to create 3 different adgroups & Specific ads for the specific services. Point all those ads to your relevant landing pages (e.g. www.host.com/shared-hosting.html). This will definitely help you to get a better quality score as your ads & landing pages will become more relevant to the term the user is searching for. It is likely to increase your CTR & and will eventually lead to higher sales. So at the end of the day because of your good quality score you will be paying less and getting highly targeted audience to the highly targeted offer pages – All this just for a little bit of initial hard work from your side.

5. Geographic Target - If you are just a bakery at queens, why would you want to pay for clicks that are outside your business zone? Use the GEO target facility to target your audience well, this will substantially help you to lower your ad impression, higher CTR, higher quality score and a better ROI.
6. Time your Ads, Show your Ads When They Matter – If you are a local Pizza Store, would you want to show your ads when people at 3 AM search for Pizzas? (Assuming you don’t. have a 24 Hour Delivery). It would be ridicules and a big waste of money if you actually pay for clicks after your business hours where none of the searchers can actually order your pizza during that period of time.

   So What would you do? Use Ad Scheduling to time your ads to match your requirements. Ad scheduling lets you control the days and times your AdWords campaigns appear. So if you are running “Special offers” for Fridays, you can use Ad Scheduling to only show ads (a specific one) on Fridays. Try to think of a time when your ad would actually matter to your customer. By default, your ads will run for 24 hours in a day by trial and error you might be able to find out that running ads on a specific time of the day gives you more conversion! (e.g. People would search for “morning headache” usually in the morning after getting up from bed..)

7. Don’t bid on Content Network – I know some might disagree with me here but this is purely based on my own experience & what works best for me and my clients. I feel that even though bidding at content network is often cheaper, but in terms of conversion the performance of content network is very poor. Again, I’d say that this may be different for your case as some niches do really well in content networks. But if you are really starting out fresh with PPC & adwords, I’d urge you to remove content network from your campaign. This setting is set in the campaign level, so once you turn this off all the other ad groups that are in that particular campaign will be affected.

   What if you want the content network, but you dont want to harm your quality score by having too many impression and low CTR? Easy solution is to create a completely separate campaign only for content network and test the results! Note: You should ALWAYS modify your content network bid as its much lower than the search network bids.

Wait…You just got lucky, Here is a bonus tip for you.

Track Your Results: Google offers a Search Query Performance report that can basically show you the exact term that a user typed into Google that triggered your ad, the match type between your keyword, and the search query alongside all of the standard AdWords reporting metrics like click through rate, conversion rate, cost per conversion, etc.

Google has also done AdWords Integration in their Google Analytics — its an awesome tool that provides in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign’s performance.

So what other simple strategies you use in your campaign? Share in Comments!

Update: Here are some more bonus tips from the readers:

• Test Everything - Test everything. Split test, multivariate test, PAMVAR test… Test until the cows come home, and then test some more. (Shared by: Pete Wailes)

  Pay-Per-Click is not like flying on a plane (Once you get up, you can’t just get out unless the plane lands). In PPC everything is very flexible. So test your campaigns over and over again and tweak it according to the results that you are getting.

]]> http://www.saadkamal.com/google/7-tips-to-save-money-on-pay-per-click-campaign/feed/ 40 http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/how-to-build-authority-links-including-edu-gov-mil/ http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/how-to-build-authority-links-including-edu-gov-mil/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:29:17 +0000 Saad http://www.saadkamal.com/?p=662 After I wrote a comprehensive Link Building Tutorial, I got few emails from my readers and I noticed a common trend in their questions. Majority of them wanted to know How to Build authority Links without buying them?

So I thought rather than replying to each of them individually, I’d just put it up a short answer here in my blog so that everyone else gets value out of the information that I’m about to share.

If you have been in this industry for some time, some of these techniques may not be anything new for you but then again I welcome you to go along with me as I talk about Authoritative Link building.

What are Authority Links?

As the name implies it basically refers to links that have high authority. Some time back a link coming from a High Page Rank site was considered Authoritative. Now that is still not 100% discounted as PageRank still is a good indication of how search engines like Google look and value a website. But obviously when I’m saying PageRank I’m not saying the small green bar that you see in your Google Toolbar. Toolbar PR is very different than what your actual PR is. Toolbar PR is just a small representation of your actual PageRank value.

Years passed and search became more complex. The demands of the users increased substantially and so did the spamming in the search results. So Google came up with another ranking system called TrustRank (Actually the research paper was released by Yahoo first I’m not sure how Google got hold of the patent). Anyway so TrustRank is basically built upon the concept of PageRank but it takes the concept further by taking a set of Absolute Quality Sites and then following their link patterns to find out other quality sites. [Read the Initial Research Paper (PDF) of TrustRank].

So basically educational institution & universities, government sites, military websites, News sites are of high authority. So if Google looks at their Outbound links then they are likely to find another set of quality websites and then can go another step down and look at the outbound links of the second set of quality sites and that will reveal a 3rd set of quality sites and this will continue on until the search engine dies. So the assumption with this concept is – Good sites will always link to good sites. And when there is an exception and a Manual reviewer at Google finds out – they penalizes that “Good site”.

Anyway back to the original topic, Authority Links are those links that helped create the 2nd, 3rd level of quality sites. So if you can get such links, your website will supposedly be treated well by the engines (Its like the President telling his Chief of Staff to give you a Job).

How Do I Find Authority Links?

Ok for those who just jumped to this section without reading the first section – I totally understand. You want to jump right to the nuggets without grasping anything unnecessary. Well I’ll just go right to the point -

• Spy On your Competitors: Yes, that obvious! If your competitor is doing really good in the search engine, its possible that he has a powerful link profile. So you can easily spy on him by diving into his incoming links and as you do so, give particular attention to the links that you think are authoritative. Tools that I recommend you to use – Yahoo Site Explorer, BackLinkWatch.Once you find some quality sites that are linking to them, go to those respective pages and try to figure out why they are linking to them. If that seems like a natural link you might imitate the strategy that your competitor used to get the link. In most of the times quality sites links to other sites just as a citation or as “related resources”. So if you have any resource that you think can fit that article/research well, you can send an email and ask the webmaster to consider adding your resource in the list. If your resource is top notch its very likely that they will add it to make their resource page more rich.
• Find out which .edu/.gov/.mil are linking to your competitor: I am often surprised to see how many people doesn’t know about this simple Yahoo Site Search command –

  linkdomain:www.google.com site:edu

  If you go to Yahoo Search and type the following, you will get all the EDU sites that are linking to google.com. So simply put your competitors URL in place of Google and you can change edu to gov, mil and other extensions that you like. Example: See how many EDU backlinks twitter has.

  Find out why those sites are linking to your competitor and then you will automatically know how to get links from them. E.g. Imagine that a university professor is doing research about semantic web and he referenced my blog post where I wrote about some advanced semantic web algorithm. Now if you are my competitor you can probably try to produce a 3 times better piece on semantic web and pitch that processor to include your work in his article. In many cases he will, if your writing is good and relevant to his area of research.

• Get Links from .Edu/.Gov/.Mil blogs on your Niche: There is another simple search command in Google, that can help you to find .edu, .gov, .mil blogs on your niche. Go to google and type the following:

  Keyword+inurl:blog site:.edu

  Just replace “keyword” with your own keyword. So for example If I’m looking for edu blogs that talk about SEO, i can search for SEO+inurl:blog site:.edu. And it gives me a nice list of blogs that has talked about SEO and has linked to many SEO resources. So If I have something that is absolute quality, I may be able to pitch the author of the blogs to link to my resources as they are relevant to what they are writing about. But you need to be creative with the “keyword” when using that query in Google, because sometimes it may return irrelevant junk results.

Obviously there are plenty of other ways to find authoritative sites, but I guess the ones i mentioned here are probably the most easiest ways.

Read Some Other Resources Related to Authoritative Link building

The 4 Different Types of Authority Links – Wiep.net

The Wisdom & Folly of Directory Link Building – SEOmoz.org

TrustRank Algorithm – SEObook.com

Getting Links From Known, Quality Linkers – Search Engine Land

The Quest for Authority Links – Search Engine Guide

Beyond Link Building Tools – Search Engine Land

How to Get Links – Wikipedia – David Naylor

Some Link Spying Tools You May Like

Hub Finder: Simply Enter Two domains and you will find out which website (hub) Is linking to both of them.

SEOBook Link Tools – a variety of different types of Link tools

SEOMoz LinkScape – Gets you access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains. [Its not Free]

]]> http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/how-to-build-authority-links-including-edu-gov-mil/feed/ 41 http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/link-building-a-complete-walkthrough/ http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/link-building-a-complete-walkthrough/#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:20:44 +0000 Saad http://www.saadkamal.com/?p=412

External Links (Links coming from other sites) was (*and still probably is) one of the major contributor of any Search Engine Optimization effort. Obviously links alone can’t help you to rank well in the Search Engines, but they do play a “major” role to push your ranking up to the top.

What is Link Building?

Link Building is basically the process of getting quality Web sites to link to your Web site, in order to improve search engine rankings.

Why is Link Building Important?

Link building is absolutely essential for your SEO campaigns because currently majority of the search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo etc.) uses link popularity as a metric to judge the quality of your website. An incoming link from a 3rd Party site works like a “vote” or “recommendation” towards your site. So say if 500 people are linking to you from their websites, you can look at it as — 500 people has recommended your site.

Are All Links Treated Equally?

This is a very common question among the Webmasters. Well, The answer is “No”. Each website has their own “reputation profile” that enables them recommend other websites. Now when a high profile website links to you, their link value is much higher compared to a low profile website who is probably new in the market and doesn’t have any reputation to spare for you. A perfect example of this would be, Suppose if CNN links to your website, that particular link would be more trusted and will be more valued by the search engines due to the fact that CNN is a authoritative website and their news/stories are trusted by everyone. So if CNN links to you it gives an indication to the Search Engine that your website is also of high quality and value.

Which Sites are Worth Getting a Link From?

CNN is not the only authoritative site on the Internet, the above was just an example. There are thousands of other quality sites that have high authority. Now you may ask – “How do I determine the quality of the site”. Well below are some of the easy metrics that you can use to determine a site’s quality:

• Age of the Website: The older it is, the better. Old sites are likely to be more Trusted by the Engines.
• Page Rank: Even though I pay very little attention to this myself, But it is some what a good metric to determine the quality of the site. The only Page Rank that is visible to public is the Google Toolbar PR. Its a number between 0 to 10 where 10 denotes the highest quality and 0 denotes the lowest. The Toolbar Page Rank is updated every 3-4 months and its just a partial representation of the Actual Page Rank (an proprietary algorithm of Google to determine a site’s quality & rank them accordingly).
• No. of Pages Indexed : This is another metric that I like to use to determine whether the site has a good search engine presence. If a site has thousands of pages indexed in Google, its an indication that the site has been in business for a long time and it some what trusted by Google. To find out how many pages are indexed, simply go to Google Search and type the following command – site:www.domain.com. This should show you all the pages of domain.com indexed in Google.
• No. of Incoming Links : Since “authority” & “trust” flows from one domain to another via links, its important to see who is linking to the domain that you are testing for authority. There are many tools out there that can help you to check the link profile of any domain. e.g. Yahoo Site Explorer, Backlink Watch etc. The easiest way would be to type link:http://www.domainname.com in Google or Yahoo and it will show you a list of websites that are linking to that domain. Do note that Google often shows a lot less links compared to Yahoo. So if the site has a lot of good quality incoming links, then its likely that a link from that site will give your website a lot value.
• Traffic: Traffic is often a good determinant of a quality website. To check how much traffic a site gets, you can use tools such as: Google Trends for Websites, Compete, Quancast, Alexa and so on. Remember, these tools are not 100% accurate and may not display the traffic information of all domains. (Websites below a certain traffic threshold is not being monitored by these services.)
• Others: There are many automated applications out there that can help you to determine a site’s quality/authority on the web. E.g- SEOmoz Trifecta Tool.

How Do I Get These Links?

There are basically two types of link building, the first type is Organic (a.k.a Natural Linkbuilding) & the other type is “Artificial Linkbuilding”.

Organic Link Building

Organic Link building basically refers to the natural link building where you generate tons of Free Links naturally over time because of the value your site provides to the community. Below are some tips for you to do well in the Organic Link Building –

• Write Quality Content – If you don’t write quality content, you can’t expect people to link to you. This is the most important step in your organic link building process. Next time you think of creating a content for your website, try to imagine how your content can benefit the users and whether its something that people would want to ‘link to’ from their own websites/blogs. When I write “content” i don’t mean only text content, It can be anything – videos, pictures, applications etc.
• Start a Blog – I have seen many small-medium businesses to have a website that is purely static and commercial in nature and they go to different SEO consultancy firms hoping that they can just pay and get 10,000 links in a day or two. Unfortunately thats not how the web works (…not anymore..). Google along with other search engines have strict ruling about paid links which has made it harder to artificially manipulate the searching rankings just by ‘buying links’. Now If you have a e-commerce store and you may be wondering why the heck would someone link to my website naturally? — Well, I certainly agree they won’t! But what if you have a blog attached to your store where you can review the most popular product of each of your category every day and also stick some of the testimonials of your previous customers? Do you think that would give some value to the community? Of course it would! Product reviews are probably among the most searched things on the Internet. No matter what you are selling (e.g. Web hosting, Hair Dryer, Camera) and where you are selling from (e.g. Online / Offline), product reviews play an important part in the customer’s decision making process. There are thousands of brands that are selling the same product with identical features and your online store probably sells dozen of those brands. Now if you can help your customers to choose which one would be the best for their own requirements then definitely it would give them some value. By no time, you will see that you will be ranking on the search engines naturally for some of the Long tail keywords (e.g. Nokia N95 Phone Review, Nokia N95 Battery life) and at the same time you will also attract a lot of natural links from other bloggers & websites who finds your content useful.
• Take Advantage of Social Bookmarking & other social Networks – This is another important step of natural link building that is often overlooked. Social Bookmarking is often called one of the greatest sources of “traffic”. But do you know that its also a solid source of attracting links? If your story gets popular or gets a substantial amount of votes in any of the big social bookmarking sites such as – Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx – Your content will automatically get a lot of attention and many of them will actually ‘write about’ it on their own website and give your site a link. Now because your story reached so many hands in the first place, it created an opportunity for itself to be read by other webmasters on your similar niche. But if you were only writing at your blog and not taking advantage of the social bookmarking sites, it would probably be never seen by them on the first place. So try to increase the reach of your content as much as possible, when you write a post – shout it at Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Frindfeed and at the same time circulate it via the popular social bookmarking sites. If you have followed step 1 (which was – Writing Quality Content), your article will be taken well by the social media and you can hope to generate some good links for your site.
• Write about Industry News – This is partially covered under blogging, but I have added it as a separate point to emphasize on it’s importance. Some bloggers think that its practically useless to write about the latest news because there are many other news sites/blogs out there who are covering it already. But what everyone tend to forget is, You can’t be sure whether your readers have actually gone to all those news sites before coming to yours. There has been cases where a reader might land in your site first and see a interesting news that he haven’t heard elsewhere (Even though it was probably out in 200 other websites). So once he goes to his own blog and writes about that, its very likely that he is going to link to your story. Why? — Well its like a blogger’s code of ethics, if I hear a story from “Source A” first and then from 20 other sources, generally I’d link to “Source A” as that is how I got the news first.
• Freebies – Freebies can often get you a lot of links. For instance – Free Video Tutorials, E-books, Templates etc. can attract hundreds if not thousands of links if they are of good quality. If you are good at programming, you can develop small web applications or widgets that you can give away for free in your website. For example, one of my client who was in the diet industry made a BMI calculator (A calculator to calculate your Body Mass Index). He promoted it via different health forums and within weeks he generated over 400+ unique backlinks from other diet related websites and blogs. Many people also give away free themes, plugins that attracts a lot of natural links. Remember, when you do something useful for the community You wont have to ask for a link because in most cases they will naturally link to you. If you are good at designing, you can design wallpapers, Generic Logos, Cartoons etc. to attract links. Just make sure that your mindset is to Help the community with your own unique abilities and in no time you will be rewarded with a lot of links!

Artificial Link Building

The name might sound a bit dodgy, but I have my reasons for calling the following kind of link building artificial. Basically in my own dictionary, artificial linking refers to links that can be manipulated. So Link requests, directory submission, article submission, paid links etc. all falls under this category.

• Link Requests / Exchange – This is probably the most common form of artificial link building practice that is ongoing. I hate to say, but personally I find this method really annoying as I probably receive over half a dozen of junk emails every day asking me to link to their site. Now what is wrong with asking for a link? Well, of course there is nothing wrong until you spam the crap out of me! Does this method works? Yes, To some extent (as long as I don’t click the “delete” button over your face). What kind of link requests webmasters often ignore:
  • The ones that starts with “Dear Webmaster…”
  • When you mention “PR” in your Email
  • The sender has no idea of what Link building actually is. The email is impersonal and spammy
  • You are asking for a link to your Viagra/Insurance/Health related website where my website is about Gardening!
  • Your website has a horrible design and usability, and 100s of keywords are stuffed all over the place
  • Your website has no valuable information but only contains affiliate links & banners
  • Your website is new and is not even indexed by any of the search engines
  • Your website has more outbound links than the number of quality content

  But I personally Ignore “All” link request/exchange offers. And here is why:

  • Unless your website can provide me a lot of traffic, It’s of no help for me
  • I don’t really care about who is linking to me, but I am very cautious about who I link to (because thats the thing that really matters when it comes to Link exchange). If your website is spammy in nature or practices black-hat, my own site might be penalized because I’m recommending a “junk” to Google saying “its good”.
  • I believe natural one-way links are much more valued.
  • Most of the link requests that I have received are all not ‘related’ to my sites and I personally haven’t found a single site that is asking for a link to be of any quality.

  What Kind of Link Request / Exchange Works:

  • If you have a blog, you can ask another blogger to put you under his blogroll. For personal blogs it works really well, for blogs on a particular niche, you will have a better chance of inclusion if you send requests to only blogs that are on your niche.
  • Since link exchange is something that is “Mutual” and for benefit of both parties. Next time you fire that “Link to Me” email, Ask yourself – If you were the owner of that website, would you link to your site? Do you think your site’s quality is equivalent to his website? If you are asking for a link or blogroll inclusion from a high profile website, you are likely to be ignored because its likely that webmaster just doesn’t see any benefit of linking to you because probably your site doesn’t give any additional value to his readers
  • If you have any online product/tools that is beneficial for a certain industry, you can ask other bloggers on your niche to review that on their blog. (You can also do the same to return the favor). This is a very solid way of getting both links and traffic.
  • If you are truely passionate about a particular niche/subject and you have created resources pages (something like Wikipedia) that covers every detail of that subject, You can speak to some of the bloggers who are currently writing about that subject to give you “feedback” on your content. And once they see that your resources are very comprehensive and good quality its likely that they will link to you.
• Directory Submission – If you have ever been to any Webmaster Forum, you have probably seen tons of people asking/providing directory submission services. What is Directory Submission anyway? Well, It basically refers to submitting your site to Web Directories (something like yellow pages for web). Now let me ask you this — Even since Yahoo & Google has came out with their search engine, do you ever go to any directories to Find websites? Most likely you don’t! Because ever since the search has emerged, people hardly need to go anywhere else to find a website.I’ll admit that I do browse directories (Yahoo Directory in particular), but that’s just me. There are actually some cool things you can do with Yahoo Directory that I’ll probably cover in another blog post. But for now all you should know is at some point (probably 3-4 years back), web directories did ‘matter’ because of traffic & links. But nowadays there are just too many low-quality directories out there that gives you little or no benefit. So stop wasting your time and submit only to those directories that are of any quality. Some notable ones are: Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, Business.com, BOTW etc.
• Article Submission – Submitting articles to different article directories can also get you some links. Most of the article directories will allow you to include a Author Bio, where you can include a link back to your website. Some article directories will also drive traffic to your site. However personally I find including content to my own site more useful than writing elsewhere. If your site is new, you should add more quality content to your website first and then maybe you can write some additional content for the article directories. Some good article directories are: Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Article Dashboard, iSnare etc.
• Guest Blogging – You can write blog posts for other blogs on your niche as a Guest blogger. Not all the blogs will accept post from guest bloggers, but you can always try your luck by contacting them. Just like article directories, you can include your author biography at the end of the article which often allows you to get a link back to your site. If the readers like your post, they are likely to follow the link to your blog. So this is both good for traffic & link juice.
• Press Release – Distributing Press releases is often a good way to create an initial buzz. Writing effective press releases can get you a lot of links and also coverage in a wider media. But if you don’t have any professional experience with writing press releases, its better if you hire a professional to do that. There are lot of places where you can submit your press releases, some of them are: PR Web Direct. PR.com etc.
• Widgets / Footer / Plugins – Create a useful widget, plugin or a wordpress theme that others can use on their sites. And perhaps you can have a link on those back to your home page. But there has been a case where a site was heavily penalized by Google for overdoing this. Read what Matt Cutts (Head of Google Web Spam Team) has to say on widget bait.
• Give Away Award Badges – You will often notice that a lot of websites out there do a tremendous amount of work by making a top 10, top 20, top 100, top 250 list of blogs/tools/services of a particular niche. Occasionally they also give away awards to these websites and the proud winner can display the award as a “badge” on his own website. So say if you are a Web Design Company and have made a list of top 100 Web Design blogs, and given them a badge to display this award with pride, you can surely get about 80% of them to put it on their website. Thus you will be getting a lot of relevant & quality links back to your company’s website. Some of them may also ‘blog’ about it and thus you can also receive some targeted traffic back to your site.
• Start an Affiliate Program – If you start a lucrative affiliate program and manage to get a lot of affiliates under your wing, you can automatically get a lot of links because of the fact that all your affiliates will be linking to your website to promote your products/services. So if you have 1000 affiliates under you and considering 80% of them stay active, you will be getting about 800 links easily from this.
• Buying Links / Paid Links – The reason I have put this at the end is because this is something that I don’t recommend. Some may argue with me and say that buying links may ‘still’ work (and of course it does as long as you can stay under the radar), but the search engines are becoming smarter everyday and I believe its best to play things naturally. There are lot of sites out their who will openly or discreetly sell you links. If you have already decided to go alone in this path, below are some tips and some alternative ways of ‘buying links’ that aren’t too ‘shady’:
  • Instead of buying links directly from the site, think of a way to sponsor the site and in exchange you may take a link back. For example if you have a business of Plush toys and you are trying to get a link from a High profile toy blog/forum, instead of buying a link, you can consider holding a contest where you can give away prizes every month to their readers. Obviously since you are sponsoring the contest, the website holding the contest will likely to put your logo/banner on their site that will also link to your store directly. This way you can get both link juice and also some targeted traffic & leads.
  • Avoid buying likes from Footer, Link pages etc. If they put your site along with 10-100s of other low-quality, unrelated websites then probably its best for you to Pull off your link from there.
  • You may ask the top-notch bloggers of your niche to write an article on a detailed comparison of your product with your competitors. You can probably pay the blogger a review/research fee for this task.
  • Donate money to the open source initiatives. There are many open source projects out there that requires funding to run, and for a small donation like $20 – $100, they will list your name/company name in their website and often give you a juicy link. W3C previously had a page of PR 9, where people could get them listed for a $1000 donation. Now I believe that have changed their policy and made those links “no-follow”. But there are still a lot of open source software/services out there that accepts donation in exchange for a link.

I have pretty much tried to cover all aspects of Link Building. I thank you for taking the time to go through this long article. If there is anything that I have missed, please reply in comments and I’ll update the post.

Also check out some other great resources / articles related to Link building that I have found useful:

• 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website : SEOBook.com
• Five Link Building Strategies That Work – CopyBlogger
• 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies – Search Engine Watch
• Advanced Link Building Strategies – SEOmoz
• A Big Roundup Of Link Building Tool – Search Engine Land
• Link Building Basics – Search Engine Roundtable
• Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques – Search Engine Roundtable
• Link Building for Blogs – Top Rank Blog
• Link Building Best Practices Q&A – Eric Ward
• Link Building & Determining Link Quality – Search Engine Journal
• Old VS New Link Building Strategies – SEO Smarty
• Quality Link Building : Social Links, Reciprocal Links and .edu & .gov Links – Search Engine Journal
• 15 Link Building Tips for New Websites – Dosh Dosh
• The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love – Problogger

Do you have any link building resource/article that you would like to include in this list? Send me an email at – me[at]saadkamal.com or simply give me a buzz at twitter – www.twitter.com/saadkamal.

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]]> http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/link-building-a-complete-walkthrough/feed/ 92 http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/keyword-research-walkthorugh/ http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/keyword-research-walkthorugh/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:39:44 +0000 Saad http://www.saadkamal.com/?p=239 Firstly, If you are new to the world of SEO & Search Marketing, I’d strongly advice you to read my Newbie Guide to SEO. It has all the basic elements that you may need to get your blog/website to rank in the search engines.

In that article I briefly touched on “finding a niche” and “…using keywords in Title” and someone emailed me last week to ask – “How to Find the Right Keyword(s) for a Blog?“. Well I basically gave her a brief answer already, but as promised I’m covering the whole “Keyword Research” topic in more detail here in the blog. If the post gets too lengthy please bear with me – I promise that by the end of the article you will become a Master of the Basics of Keyword Research & Optimization.

Before I continue, I advice you all to Subscribe to this blog (Free) by using the Email Subscription or RSS Subscription (..Located on the top right hand corner of this page…). The reason I want you to subscribe is, I’ll be covering some great topics here and I don’t really want you to miss anything!

What is Keyword Research?

In regards to Organic/Natural/Paid Search, Keyword research basically means researching for words that are supposedly going to be used by your customers/readers/visitors to find your website/blog/business/product.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Well, If you can know what your customer is looking for, its easy for you to sell them the right product. If a person is looking for a Dish washer but ends up in an online tire store, he is less likely to make a purchase.

So if you are selling tires online you need to know what ‘keywords’ or ‘search terms’ searchers use to search for your product online. For example are they searching for ‘tires’ or ‘wheels’?

- Car Tires <> Automobile Tiers ?
- Snow Tire <> Winter Tire ?
- Bridgestone Tire <> Firestone Tire ?

How would you know? How can you differentiate between all these keywords? How can you tell which one is more “important” or better (in terms of search volume).



Well all these questions can be answered when you will do a proper Keyword Research. Now since my target audience is Bloggers & Small Business owners, I’d like to give an example of how Keyword Research can actually help a blog to become successful. Lets say you have a technology blog and you write about all sorts of technology news, tutorials, how-tos, tips & hacks. You only get about 100 visitors a day and most of them are from your own community of friends. You don’t get any significant amount of traffic from search engines because most of the things that you write about are either “too general or common” (there are thousands, if not millions of pages on the same topic), or you just don’t know what people are interested in the technology arena. You only write about things that ‘you feel’ is important, but not necessarily the whole blogosphere thinks the same.

So after you did some basic keyword research, you noticed that people in your area of expertise/interest are searching for the following – (The amount of searches shown are from Google Alone! The figure will be even bigger if you consider the other engines on the market)

facebook group – 18,000+ searches/mo
Vista Theme for Xp – 33,100+ searches/mo
best free antivirus – 22,200+ searches/mo
backup iphone – 22,000+ searches/mo

And all these search phrases has “minimal” amount of competition in Paid + Organic search. (I’ll write about how to determine competition later in the article).

Now with the above data you created few ‘top-notch’ blog posts (I just made up some example titles)-

Target Keyword: “Facebook Group”

- How to Join a Facebook Group?
- How to Create a Facebook Group?
- How to Make a Facebook Group Popular?

Target Keyword: “Vista Theme for Xp”

- Top 20 Windows Vista Theme For Xp
- Beautiful Windows Vista Theme for Windows XP
- Collection of Windows Vista Theme for XP

Target Keyword: “Best Free Antivirus”

- Best Free Antivirus for Windows Vista
- Best Free Antivirus for Windows Xp
- The world’s Best Free Antivirus Review

Target Keyword: “backup iphone”

- How to Backup My Iphone?
- How to Backup your Iphone using Itunes?
- How to Backup Iphone Data?
- Iphone Backup Tutorial
- Free Iphone Backup Software

After writing the posts, you promoted them among your community and also via the social media and soon after they got indexed by google and some other major search engines, you got some decent ranking for some of those terms. As a result you to get an additional 10-20 thousand visitors / per month from the search engines. So from only an average of 100 visitors per day, you straight away jumped to 600 visitors per day! Now just think what you can accomplish, if you are always doing keyword research when thinking about writing your next blog post.

How to do Keyword Research?

Now that I have convinced you (I hope~) that keyword research is very important, let me go straight to the steps that you need to perform in order to do some basic keyword research.

Step 1: Brainstorm for Keyword Ideas & Topics

As easy and lame it may sound, the best keyword ideas can actually come from your own brain. Because you are a human being and you would certainly know it better how another human thinks. Try to put yourself in the shoes of a searcher and “THINK”, what type of queries he may use to search for ‘things’ that are under your hood. Give attention to things that you yourself search for. If it takes you little bit of ‘extra’ time than usual to find what you are looking for then – Wala! You got yourself a keyword that is probably not very saturated. Some other ways of generating keyword ideas may include:

- Looking at other blogs on your niche and tracking what they are writing about. An easy way to do this would be to search for “your-niche” + blog in google and see who are ranking in the top 30. E.g. If you write about gardening, you can search for gardening blog in google. Some other nice keywords to find gardening related blogs would be to search for: gardening blog directory, blogs about gardening etc. You can also search for “gardening” in the major blog directories like: BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, BOTW, Yahoo Directory

A search for “gardening blog” returns over 631,000+ results



- Go to the popular Blog Search Engine & Networks like – Google Blog Search & Technorati and find out what is HOT in the blogosphere.




- Look at the respective categories in some of the big social media and bookmarking sites to find out what is popular and what is liked by the readers. Some big social media & bookmarking sites includes: Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Propeller etc.




- Go to the relevant category of some of the popular news providers and see what the media is talking about. For example if you are have a Technology Blog, you can check out the following: e.g. Google News, Yahoo News, BBC News, MSN Tech, CNN Tech, CNET, NY Times Technology, BusinessWeek, Wired, Forbes etc.




- Go to the relevant category of some of the popular RSS aggregator portals that shows you posts of all the popular blogs in one single page. Most of the time I use: PopUrls & Alltop.



- Look at the trends of a given topic/keyword in a trend engine like – Google Insights. Input your term, choose a time frame of last 90 days and click on search and it will show you how popular the keyword is and most important it will also give you some related keywords at the bottom left and some raising searches at the bottom right. For instance a search for “Vista Themes” shows me a nice list of some other related keywords that have good amount of searches:



- Use a Keyword Research Tool like: Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker or SEObook Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter a general keyword and the system will automatically suggest you a lot of additional keyword along with the number of searches it receives every month. For instances, I searched for “mountain bike” in Google’s keyword tool and this is what I get:



Step 2: Record Your Findings

So after going through all the various sources mentioned above, you must have gotten a hand full of keywords that you want you to optimize your site for. But before even going into that, you should save everything that you found in a spreadsheet.The advantages of using a spreadsheet for keyword research is just too many, but for now all you need to know that its easier to export yours keywords from a spreadsheet to external applications for further analysis and because of their structured tabular nature, its very easy to read keyword data from a spreadsheet rather than any other typical application. Microsoft Excel is a popular choice of desktop spreadsheet application. But my personal favourite is Google Docs and Spreadsheets. You can also use Zoho Sheet which is very identical to MS Excel.

I have created a simple keyword research spreadsheet that you can look into and follow accordingly. Don’t worry about those additional columns (Searches, Competition), I’ll explain them later in the article.

Step 3: Refine your Keyword List

Now that you have a list of keywords on your niche, you can further analyze them and bring out the cream. So the main objective of this step is to figure out which keywords are most relevant for your blog and which are likely to bring you traffic/conversion and which keywords would be easier to rank for. So this part will involve competitor analysis, checking for pay-per-click ads etc.

- Check for competition of each of your keyword in Google. If a term is very competitive, it would be useless to optimize your new site/blog for that keyword because its likely to be very hard to rank well for the term. So how do you check competition? Its very simple, Just go to google.com and type in your keyword in “quotes” and look at the number of results it returns. Even though there is no magic number, but from my experience (and only from my experience) — IF the number of results returned is less than 75,000+, its a keyword that you can easily target with a brand new website/blog. But of course If you already have a reputable site with moderately high PageRank and good backlinks, you can even target a keyword that has over 500,000+ competition. So lets check for the competition of a dummy keyword – Mountain Bike Gear.



According the Google, the keyword – Mountain Bike Gear has about 25,000+ competition thus it would be a relatively easy keyword to rank for. Now how do we determine whether its a profitable keyword? Simply check the number of ads running on the right hand side of Google search when you search for “mountain bike gear”. It seems like a lot of advertisers are actually paying money to show up their advertisement for this keyword so very likely its a profitable one. But to get more accurate information, cross reference this with the result you get from Google’s Keyword Tool. If the keyword shows a lot of searches then definitely its a keyword that is worth ranking for.

- Complete your keyword research spreadsheet that you created in Step 2. Fill in the necessary columns like – searches, competition (organic) & competition (paid). You can always scrap out the keywords that are either too competitive or has very less amount of searches. All keep this list up-to-date and check your rankings for these terms on a regular basis.

Step 4: Keyword Optimization

So now that you have a list of solid keywords that you can easily rank for, you need to complete this final step which is – Keyword optimization. Now how can you optimize your website/blog with the keywords that you just discovered?

- Firstly, you need to determine your approach. If you are doing this keyword research just to figure out what to write for your “next blog post” then apply the following:

• Make sure your Post Title contains the keyword or Phrase. The shorter the title the better
• Try to mention the keyword at least once within the opening of your article (first paragraph)
• Don’t stuff your article with the keyword(s) – instead use synonyms and other keyword variations (e.g. PS3 / Play Station 3/ Sony PS3 / Sony Play Station 3 – All refers to the same thing)
• If you add a relevant picture, make sure the picture “title” and “alt” tags have your keyword.
• Add unique Meta Description for your Posts. Include a short keyword rich opening of your article within 160 char or less.

- If the sole purpose of this Keyword Research was to find a niche for your new online business or blog then do all of the above and in addition do the following:

• Make sure your site’s title has your main keywords. Don’t stuff too many keywords!
• Write a unique keyword rich meta description for your site
• Add a lot of relevant categories on your site that can target each of your main keywords individually. Make sure all the category pages has it’s keyword title properly written
• Start adding unique and useful content that are keyword optimized in all those respective categories

You have Now Mastered the Basics of Keyword Research & Optimization!

Yes finally, we have come to an end. I know this post has been really very long and I actually wanted to break the whole post in smaller parts. But I realized for any newcomer to the SEO world, it would be better if I put up everything in one place for easy referencing.

This is by no means a complete keyword research guide, but I believe this tutorial teaches you all the basics that you need to learn to start Keyword Research & Optimization. There are lots of advanced stuffs that I plan to release later this month.

If you have any questions, dobuts or feedback, I’d appreciate if you shoot them in comments. If you want more help in keyword research & optimization, you can always email me at – me[at]saadkamal.com.

Good Luck with your Keyword Research!

]]> http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/keyword-research-walkthorugh/feed/ 28 http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/how-to-rank-your-blog-high-in-search-engines/ http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/how-to-rank-your-blog-high-in-search-engines/#comments Sun, 05 Oct 2008 08:10:51 +0000 Saad http://www.saadkamal.com/?p=158 Every blogger dreams of getting a lot of targeted traffic from search engines. Because first of all – organic search traffic is absolutely FREE and secondly it gives the blogger a wider reach of audience. For instance, I’m from Malaysia but I believe a lot of you who are reading this are from different parts of the world. So a blogger doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to his own locality but with the help of Search engines his blog can reach out to the whole world.



So Today I have decided to share some of the simple tips that anyone can implement in order to “Optimize” their blog and get good ranking in the search engines. Please note that this tutorial is not only limited to ‘blogs’ but any website that exists on the web. However the article has been written for bloggers in mind so some of the things may be a bit different for other types of sites.

Step 1: Know Your Self – Select a Niche – Set a Goal

The first step is to know yourself and your blog, so that you know exactly what you are writing about. Many bloggers just blog about their daily ramblings (like a personal diary). So if you are a blogger who only keeps your journal for your daily ramblings you are probably witting about – what you had for lunch, how much did your kitty ~poo~ today (jking) etc….

Is there anything wrong with that? Well absolutely not! Its your blog and you can write about anything you want. However the problem raises (especially among the asian bloggers) when it comes to “earning money from blog” or “getting international traffic”.

Unless you have a selected a “niche” (or many niches) that you are comfortable talking about, its very hard to attract traffic just by writing about ‘random’ stuffs.

For example – if you are a female blogger and you are particularly interested in fashion, your posts can be targeted for the fashion world. Your daily ramblings that you put up in your blog will then be more “fashion” related. E.g. new cloths you bought, picture of the latest shoe you saw in the mall etc. Similarly, if you are a car freak, your blog posts can be slightly partial about cars, racing, modifications, sound system and so on. A blogger can choose as many niches he/she wants like- politics, food, cooking, fashion, pets, lifestyle, dining, travel, technology etc.

So you should ask yourself, what are the topics that you are more comfortable to talk about? Whats Interests you? Once you have gotten that answer, slowly sail your blog to that direction.

No, You don’t need a new blog or a domain to do that. You can start writing ‘on your niche’ in your existing blog. And I’m not staying that because you choose fashion, you can’t write about “politics”. Remember, Its your blog so you are the Boss. You can write about absolutely anything you want. However if your writing has a particular focus, it would be easier for your readers to categorize your blog as a part of your respective niche. Even fashion and politics can be blended together if you are creative! (Think about it…)

So once you have selected your comfort zone, set a target for yourself. For example, how are you going to measure your success? It can be in terms of No. of visitors, No of RSS subscribers, Earnings from Blog etc.

Step 2: Optimize the Title of Your Blog Home Page

This is probably the most important “on-page optimization” factor that is the most easy to do. The title of your blog is what everyone sees on the top of their browser when they visit your blog. For search engines its the most important determining factor of what your blog is all about. So for instance, If your name is “John Doe” and you want everyone to find your blog when they search for your name in Google, you MUST put your name “John Doe” in your blog’s Title Tag. So You can perhaps format your title tag like – “John Doe’s Blog” or “John Doe – Recipe Blog” etc.

Bad Title Examples:

“My Daily Ramblings”
“My Blog”
“My Blah Blah”

Why are the above bad Titles? Because no one is actually going to search for “My Blog” in google. You should put something in your title that you think people will search for. Try to get some of the important keywords in your title, such as – your name, your blog’s name, keywords from your niche etc. So If my niche is digital cameras & photography, My title can be:

“John Doe: Digital Camera Review Blog”
“John Doe Digital Camera Blog”
“Digital Photography blog by John Doe”

……and other combinations that makes sense.

Step 3: Meta Tags Optimization

Even though not all meta tags are not as important as before, Meta Description tags are still very useful and a determining factor for increasing your chance of ranking in the search engines. So sometimes Title tags can’t do it alone, if you also optimize your Meta Descriptions tag, you have a higher chance of succeeeding.

A blog’s Meta description should contain a brief description of your blog focusing on the areas and niches that you often write about. This small piece of text can be considered as a selling snippet, if a reader finds it appealing he is likely to click and go inside your blog to find out more information. But if your Meta Description is too generic and isn’t written too well then there is a good chance that your blog will simply be ignored even though its probably ranking well in the search engine. Check out an example of a good meta description:



Now Why do I call the above a Good Example? Because:

• The meta description is descriptive enough for a reader to know what to expect from the blog.
• It contains important keywords – For instance, the name of the photographer is specified (e.g. Laura Novak), The type of photography is also described (e.g. Wedding & Portrait) and her locality is also specified (e.g. Wilmington, Delaware).
• The meta description automatically appeals to someone who is looking for a wedding photographer in Wilmington. So If the searcher sees this result in the search engine.

Of course this description can be improved and further tweaked, but I guess you already got the general idea of having a good meta description.

Important things to include in your Meta Description:

• Include your Selling Point– Tell your readers what they want to hear through your site’s Meta Description, and you will definitely get some advantage over others in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). For instance – if you blog about digital camera and photography then including a phrase like “Digital Camera Review & Advanced Photography tips” may result in more clicks and visitors because your description will exactly match the flavor of search performed by the user.
• Keywords – Including some of your keywords (E.g. Wedding Photography, Photography Tips, Camera Review) will give you some advantage in Google’s relevancy algorithm.

Step 4: Structuring Your Content

Another important thing is to structure your content so that its becomes more readable. Important text should go in top and less important text should go in the bottom. Usage of Bold, Italic, Heading (h1 tags) is a must. If you properly structure your content, it will be more readable for your readers and it will also help the search engines to determine what is more important. For example, when you write a new post, always choose the Post title carefully. Whatever you choose as the title becomes the Header of the particular page and it appears in “big letters”.

So if your post heading reads “I am Bored…” and inside the post only the first two line is about ‘why you are bored’ and after that the whole post is about How to cook cheese macaroni…Its just not going to work! Ask yourself, How do you usually read a newspaper? Do you start reading from the left and read every single word? No – we usually “skim” a newspaper and we look at the heading and if the heading interests us, we read the news beneath the heading.

Blog kind of works in the same way, if you have a poor heading you can’t expect people to read the whole entry. Similarly a Search engine will not consider your Post very related to “cheese macaroni” unless your heading has the words inside. So a Post title “How to Cook Cheese Macaroni” is better compared to “I am Bored….”.

Things to Remember:

• Always use short Post Titles. Think of something that people may use to search for that particular post and use it as your title.
• Always Use Header Tags (h1, h2, h3) effectively. If you have a big article, break it down into different sections and give each section a sub-heading.
• Use Bold, Italic where necessary. Its often good to highlight important words so that they are easily noticeable to your readers as well as to the search engines

Step 5: Image Optimization

No matter what type of blog you are running, You must use a lot of images! Human eyes love images and its often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Its actually true! If your blog has a lot of images, it would be a lot easier for you to engage your users. Moreover You can get additional traffic from Image search engines like (Google Images). When You are putting an image in your blog, you must optimize it for the search engines so that the search engine knows what the image says… (Search engines are dumb and so they can’t see inside images…yet).

Some Important Image Optimization Elements:

• Alt text : ALT text or Alternate Text is the text to describe your image when your mouse moves over an image on your web page. The text should be meaningful but short. You can use your relevant keywords as ALT text. If your browser can’t display the image for some reason, the alt text is used in place of that particular image.
• File name : always use meaningful file name for your images, use names like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “DSC24045.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to the ALT text.
  Image Title : always use the title tag in images which will show the title as tool tip when a user moves his mouse over the image. Example of an image with title tag: [img src=”http://imagelocation.jpg” alt=”Image description” title=”Title of the Image”]
• Image Linking : Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “view an Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view” as the anchor text.

Step 6: Keep your blog Up-to-Date

Search engines loves fresh, new content, so always feed them! Not only your blog will grow automatically if you always add something to it; search engines tend to come and spider your website more often if they always find something new. So you will have a higher chance of ranking high in the search engine if you keep on adding fresh, quality and unique content.

If you follow the 6 steps that I mentioned above, you blog will already be considered as one of the Search Engine Aware blogs. You will definitely see some improvements in your ranking as well as traffic.

Those of you who are using Blogger, Xanga, WordPress, Typepad and other blogging platforms and doesn’t know how to change “title” or meta description, I’ll definitely try to put up separate instruction guide for all of you. But there are hundreds of good resources already available on the internet, and you can simply do a Google search to find them =)

This guide is no way complete and its very basic as I have particularly wrote it for Newbie bloggers (especially those who have absolutely no idea about SEO). So if you run into any problem you are free to put your questions in the comments or you can always email me at – me[at]saadkamal.com.

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