Keyword Research « OVMwebbuilder Take Your Business Online

September 23, 2009

Keyword Research

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: keyword, keyword reserach, optimisation, search engine optimization, SEO — admin @ 9:39 pm

What Are Keywords – Why Are They So Important ?

Keywords are simply the terms that a potential customer enters into Google Bing or other search engines to find web pages that may meet their requirements.

That is why they are important – because if your customer cannot find your website they will not visit it – and keywords are the KEY that brings them to your website.

If I am looking to buy a new watch online I might enter ‘watch’ or, if I am looking for a bargain I might type in ‘low cost watch’. These search terms are called keywords and someone who is trying to sell watches online or who is trying to attract me to their shop should be trying to get ranked number 1 on Google or Bing for these keyword search terms.

How Do You Get To Number 1 Position on Google or Bing for One or More Keywords

Depending upon which way you look at it, getting to the number one position on Google or Bing can be either very difficult, quite difficult, extremely difficult or damn near impossible.

Let’s look at the easiest way first because that is the way we all want to go isn’t it ?

In general, the longer and more specific the keyword you optimize your website or a particular page on your website for the easier it is to get to the number 1 position on Google. For example, if I was to optimize my website for the keyword ‘OVMwebbuilder builds great websites’ then the chances are that no one else’s website is going to be optimized for that keyword because it is peculiar to my business. So I should be able to get the number one position.

Well, that is great to be number one on Google BUT if no one ever searches for the keyword term ‘OVMwebbuilder builds great websites’ then I am never going to get any traffic to my website via this search.

My number one position means diddly squat if it delivers no traffic to my website (NOTE – watch out for scammers selling you the fact that they can get your website to the number one position on Google – this is the trick they use).

Why Not Optimize Your Website for a Generic Keyword ?

So, let’s go the other way and say that if we optimize our website for the keyword ‘web developer’ then there will be many people searching the Internet using that keyword.

In fact, that is true, however, the keyword ‘web developer’ is so generic that many other web developers will have optimized their websites for this keyword.

For a small business this means that I will be coming head to head with much larger competitors with much bigger marketing budgets, probably far older websites and usually a large number of backlinks, many of them quality backlinks.

The number one position for my business for the generic keyword ‘web developer’ would therefore be extremely difficult to secure.

So we cannot go for the most generic keyword because it will be too competitive and if we make our keyword very specific then we run the risk of not getting any traffic searching for that keyword.

So what is the best keyword strategy for small business owners ?

The Best Keyword Strategy for Small Business Owners

For a small business keyword research is essential - if you are not prepared to do your own keyword research or have it done for you by a professional then do not waste your time and money putting up a website because it will be next to useless.

Our goal is to identify perhaps 6 keywords for a new website that provide us with a reasonable amount of potential traffic, however, are not monopolized by the stronger of our competitors such that we can get onto the front page of Google if we optimize our web pages for these keywords.

The art of selecting these keywords is a specialist task. It requires knowledge and access to the right tools.

At OVMwebbuilder we have the skills and the tools to select the right keywords and we will provide you with the raw data that we use in our decision making process so you can understand the process and use this knowledge to add your own new keywords to your website as you grow your business and add new content to your site.

Contact OVMwebbuilder for more information about the importance of keywords and how you can get the best ones for your website.

Technorati Tags: keyword, keyword reserach, optimisation, search engine optimization, SEO

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May 7, 2009

Wordpress – the best platform for your website

Filed under: Wordpress Development and Consulting, homepage-featured — Tags: CMS, content management, search engine optimisation, SEO, wordpress — admin @ 2:20 pm

Wordpress is a next generation Internet promotion and content management system (CMS) that empowers you to better control how you promote your business online and your return on investment.

Those that are in the know about Internet Marketing (the gurus) commonly recommend Wordpress as the platform of choice as, when used correctly, it is very ‘Google friendly’ helping to attract a steady stream of traffic to your website.

Wordpress CMS blogging platform best base for your website

WordPress started in 2003 and then since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it as you read this which is more than most commercial platforms.

So isn’t blogging for nerds with way too much time on their hands or for people to post pictures on the Internet of their cat or to tell you what happened during their holidays ?

Well, no doubt, nerds do blog and you can find thousands of cute pet pics as well as personal diaries, however, the power and unique advantages of Wordpress have also been harnessed by small, medium and large business and even huge corporates to quickly, accurately and inexpensively communicate their message to clients, prospects, employees and the general public.

Corporate Wordpress users include CNN, The New York Times, Yahoo, Southwest Airlines, CNet, Flickr, Harvard, NASA, Xerox, The US Post Office Ford, Dell, Intel, Nike…… the list is endless and growing.

So what are some of the benefits to your business that accrue from using Wordpress:-

Search Engine Optimisation – How to Get More Business

Search Engines e.g. Google, Yahoo, NineMSN etc have to be considered when building a commercial website. It’s no use having the best looking website in the world if it comes in on the tenth page of a search by a potential site visitor through Google. The chances are your site will rarely be seen and will result in little additional business.

Search Engines like to see relevant content that is updated regularly. Wordpress provides you with a platform that allows you to quickly set up your site’s content, manage the content and <em>update the content in real time yourself WITHOUT having to rely on your web developer</em>.

WordPress also incorporates functionality which makes it search engine friendly. Sending pings to other sites, creating search engine friendly URLs, managing content in categories and archives, the ability to tag posts and the use of relevant page titles, headers, bold and empasized text.

Whilst Wordpress doesn’t solve all your SEO challenges it certainly deals with many of them efficiently.

Update Your Website Yourself – Quicker and More Cost Effective Support

We all understand that our priorities may not always match with those of our service suppliers. Your business may need an important piece of information or a promotion posted on your site today, however, your web developer may only be able to modify your site within the next 48 hours at best.

Wordpress allows you and your staff to change content on your site in real time via the use of a simple text editor. Images and other media can also be uploaded to your site via a simple interface to enhance your message.

Whilst you cannot change everything on your site through Wordpress it is unlikely that you want to do more than update existing information or to add new content on a regular basis.

Wordpress empowers you to manage your own website whilst saving you considerable time and potential cost by doing it yourself.
Standards Compliant – Your Best Product Warranty

WordPress follows web standards. It utilises modern concepts such as Cascading Style Sheets to allow you to quickly update the look and feel of your site from year to year without having to go to the expense of costly re-writes.

And because Wordpress is standards based your site can be quickly migrated to different hosts or web development service providers should the need arise.

The Future of Wordpress

As stated at the top of this article, Wordpress is an open source community project. There are hundreds of developers lending their time to enhance the Wordpress platform and thousands of developers contributing new themes.

The product will continue to be enhanced and new features and functionality are continually made available to the community either for a small contribution to the developer or, in many cases, for no cost at all.

And, yes, this site is a Wordpress site and this article was of course created in Wordpress…..

Technorati Tags: CMS, content management, search engine optimisation, SEO, wordpress

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Building Backlinks for fun and profit

Filed under: Backlink Building, homepage-featured — Tags: authority backlinks, backlink, search engine optimisation, SEO — admin @ 10:51 am

What is a backlink and why is it so important to how you promote your business online ?

A backlink is a link to any of your web pages from another website.

In general, the more backlinks you have to a page on your website, the higher it is rated by Google and the better chance that page has of gaining a higher place in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages).

In practice though it doesn’t quite work that way any longer.

Why Do Search Engines Place Importance on Backlinks to Your Website ?

As Google has over 60% of the search market we will use them as the example to make the explanation simpler.

Google is a business (a very big and profitable business) that is focused on serving it’s customers – that is, you i.e. the people who use Google to search the Internet !

Google wants to keep and improve its market share so it wants to provide you, the Google customer, with the best results for a search that you make using the Google search engine.

Backlinks are conections to your website from other websites

So Google has a method of ranking each webpage on the Internet for the keyword (see our article on keywords for an explanation of what they are) you are searching for. This patented methodology takes into account the age of the website, its relevance to the keyword you are searching and the number and quality (also known as authority) of backlinks to the webpage.

In short, Google ranks web pages based on the relevance of the content on the page, the quality of that content, the age of the website and the number and authority of the backlinks to that particular page.

A backlink is like a ‘vote’ for your website or, more accurately, a page on your website from another website. In theory the more votes you get the better.

All votes are not created equal however. Google recognises some websites as authority sites and therefore places a greater weight on their vote. Authority backlinks include those from government websites, education websites, popular highly regarded websites such as online emagazine sites and others.

A listing in DMOZ (The Open Directory Project is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors – source Wikipedia) is also helpful to your site’s ranking.

Also a paid listing in Yahoo’s directory (about US$300 per annum) will gain you ‘points’ towards a higher ranking for your website.

How Do I Go About Getting Backlinks for My Website ?

A few years ago it used to be a simple process of getting as many backlinks as you could by whatever methodology was available.

Profitable businesses existed just to get backlinks for others. Backlink farms would help websites with no relevance to each other to link to each other to get new backlinks.

Obviously that flies in the face of what Google is trying to achieve – remember, a better search experience for its customers.

So Google worked out methodologies to find out whether the backlinks to a website were from other sites that had any relevance to the website. If not, they no longer have any value.

Based upon Google’s continued improvement in battling those that manipulate search to promote their own websites and those of their clients no matter what the level of relevance to a search (commonly those that employ what are known in the industry as black hat tactics) it is best at present to use white hat tactics to build backlinks.

Writing articles about your industry or your product or service and posting them on online magazine websites such as ezine articles will help.

Obviously getting your website listed by DMOZ and paying for an annual listing in the Yahoo directory will also help.

Try asking other businesses in your industry or industry associations to link to you and you might link to them reciprocally.

If the content on your website is of a high quality you will find that you will generate links as other websites link to your website as an authority in your industry.

Upload videos to Youtube (and / or its competitors) and link back from Youtube to your website.

If you do not have the time or feel you do not have the technical expertise to build backlinks yourself for your website OVMwebbuilder we can help you with your site’s keyword strategy, search engine optimisation (SEO) and create backlinks (and higher authority backlinks) for you.

Just drop us a line explaining your situation, your website address and what you are trying to achieve via your website.

This is an essential service you cannot do without !!!

The image in this article was used with permission via a Creative Commons license from

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timtom/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Technorati Tags: authority backlinks, backlink, search engine optimisation, SEO

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