When first getting into SEO I had the wrong idea of what keywords were, I thought you just took words similar to the topic that you were talking about and wanted to rank high for. It’s actually a bit more involved, below are ten tips for coming up with good KeyWords, thanks to Michelle Chance-Sangthong from Red Hawk Strategies for putting together a great SEO MeetUp and sharing some good SEO practices for creating SEO keywords. Here are some pointers from my experience and the SEO Meetup 5/11/10.

Keyword: is word or group of words that help search engines determine what a page’s content is about. Optimizing for particular keywords will help your page get a better rank in search engines when someone searches a site.

Ten tips for creating successful SEO keywords

1. Define your users goals when viewing the site
   What is your user coming to the site for? Are they looking to find out information? Looking for services? Or looking for a product. These things make a large difference when crafting your keyword list and creating your page content. You may need to create several pages to optimize for several different SEO terms. If your selling MP3 players you may want to have different pages for models, repair, brands, replacement parts and optimize them accordingly.
2. Define your goals when users view the site
   What are you trying to get the user to do? Visit the site, click around, purchase an item submit their e-mail. Defining this will not only help you think of what key terms to use but will also help you ensure you put thought into getting the user to take action or complete a conversion. If you get a good rank but don’t get the result you want, then it’s missing the whole point.
3. Define your target audience
   Think about the type of people are going to come to your site and cater to them. You’re better off catering to a majority than trying to be very general. Is your audience male or female?, how old are they?, what’s the income level?, what’s their ethnic background?, thinking about your audience and catering to them will help you create better keywords and better content.
4. Key word tools
   There are many keyword tools online, some are free some cost money. These tools can help you think of keyword ideas and help see what keywords your competitors or using. If you’re new you can probably start off using a free tool, if you get good you may want to upgrade to tool that costs money.
   Google’s SKTool, Keyword Spy, Word Tracker, Spy Foo, Mozilla
5. Organize your efforts
   With all these keywords and efforts it’s bound to get confusing. Using a program such as Excel or another spread sheet program you can organize your keywords and define patterns to use for creating content. Sporadically creating pages with keywords with no overall strategy is like playing a football game with no game plans.
6. Check your competitors
   If your competitors are ranking well you may want to look and see what they are doing. You wouldn’t want to try to copy them but they may give you some ideas for some terms that you can use for your own. A little research goes a long way.
7. Write for users not just search engines
   Don’t cram your keywords into your copy and make it really obnoxious to read. After all the content is for the user. Getting a good page rank is great but if you’ve comprised your message in the process it may defeat the purpose. Write clear descriptive copy paying attention for the keywords your targeting and call it a day.
8. Keep it simple – One term per page
   Don’t try to rank high for ten terms on one page, your home page doesn’t need to carry your site. Instead use landing pages to optimize for new seo search terms. Focusing on one term per page will help search engines clarify what you’re trying to rank for. This will give you more pages and expand your site as well which also helps with SEO.
9. Different words equal different search terms
   If you’re trying to rank for a certain term, ex: “Jacksonville SEO”, don’t just optimize for that term. SEO Jacksonville, Jax SEO, Search Engine Optimization Jacksonville etc… are also key terms to optimize for. Word order, compound words and plurals can all be taken into consideration. Mix it up.
10. Keyword density
    You need to aim for the write keyword density. Wikipedia “Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1 to 3 percent. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam. A quick search on Google can provide many tools for checking this.

If you’re currently not a fan of my facebook page facebook.com/keytheory, drop by and fan me if you’d like to keep up on new info and findings.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t as fun and hip as Social Media or nearly as sleek and sexy as Graphic Design but it still does play a vital role in on-line traffic and should be addressed in efforts to increase web traffic. Below are the three basic things that I suggest one should focus on with SEO. There are plenty of other factors… more than worth counting but these are keystones in the framework.

Slideshow features some additional information. Help me share my presentation by sharing or embedding. Thanks.

A search engines goal is to provide the best resources pertaining to the searchers search.

Good Practices for Creating Content for SEO:

• Be original / Not Plagiarized
• Write for your targeted consumers
• Format for web w/subheadings & bulleted lists (easier to scan)
• Be informative, useful, helpful
• Be interesting and Engaging
• Check spelling and grammer
• Update content regularly

Inbound Links:

Getting in-bound links from reputable web sites helps give your site more credibility. Some methods include:

• High ranked web sites
• Web site directories
• Social Media sites such as Digg or Delicious
• Creating links to your site in Blog posts
• Trade links with other web sites
• Pay for professional assistance getting links

Important: Use keywords in the links back to your site.

• Bad: To learn more about our product click here. >> Home Page
• Better: Learn more about T Mobile G1 >> G1 Product Page

Proper Web Site Development:

It is crucial that your web site is developed with SEO in mind. Not all web designers have the experience to develop the site for SEO. Possible things to consider:

• XHTML / CSS – (Validated)
• Naming Convention: file names, directories, pictures, files
• Proper Site Architecture
• Proper content formatting
• Flash & Javascript work arounds
• Meta Tags: Titles, descriptions, (key words)
• Proper link development
• Sitemap

Other SEO Considerations:

SEO takes time & continuous effort in order to achieve good results especially for competitive key words.

Social Media is a great way to assist with your SEO efforts but before jumping into SEO and Social Media really should do homework and define a strategy with solid objectives to achieve.

There are many other factors involved in SEO then mentioned in this slide show but these are some core principals.

If you’re new to SEO and aren’t sure how to get started consult a professional and to learn more on what you can do to help out your own efforts.

Another thing to consider is having your site looked at for usability and performance. If your site gets a good rank but doesn’t produce results then you may need to change things on your site to make it more effective.

SEO Resources

http://tools.seobook.com
http://www.seomoz.org/tools
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.google.com/sktool
http://websitegrader.com
http://www.siteopsys.com
http://www.google.com/analytics

If you’re looking to meet with others interested in SEO, try joining a group like Jax SEO Meetup. A MeetUp group in Jacksonville that gets together once a month to talk about SEO techniques and information. You can also check out Jax SEO Works tips on improving your SEO ranking.

Next SEO post I’ll be going over my Top 10 SEO objectives in a new web site development.

In early Feb 2010, I put on an SEO & Social Media presentation at The Art Institute of Jacksonville thanks to Chris Stagl, Academic Department Director Web & Interactive media. I spoke to the students about a few different topics but focused on the importance of SEO / SMO when working through a web design. Through my next several posts I plan to share some of the key notes from the presentation.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization involves using online strategies to improve site visibility and rankings on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

SEO Facts:

Basic SEO Process:

An SEO strategy can be very involved and take quite a bit of time to execute and even longer for results to occur. Anyone can go through the motions but it takes an expert to really hone in on what will be effective for an SEO strategy.

1. Initial Analysis
2. Keyword Research & Analysis
3. Competitor Analysis
4. Sitemap & RSS feed inclusion
5. Search Engine Directory Submission
6. Social Book Marking / Social Media
7. Blogs + Press Release Creation
8. Articles Submission
9. Link Popularity
10. SERP Report / Analytics

Three Basic Principals of Search Engine Optimization:

1. Good Quality Content (formatted for web)
2. Inbound Links
3. Proper Web Site Development

Part II in this 3 part series we’ll look deeper into the basic principals of Search Engine Optimization.

Navigational Searches

Navigation search is when someone knows where they want to to, for example a particular web site. They’ll search for it and will most likely easily find it if they entered in the right search terms.

Example, if someone where searching for me they could type in “Kenny Harper”, they’d find me in the top results but there would be a couple other Kenny Harpers to sort through.

If they were to type “Kenny Harper Jacksonville” my personal site “kennyharperdesign.com” pops up top. And they effectively used the search engine for navigation.

Informational Searches

One could also use a search engine to find information about a particular product, service or topic. If someone wants to find out more about Twitter for instance they could enter “what is twitter for?”, “how to use twitter for business”, “what obsesses people to tweet?” each would provide different results but the point is they’d find information about a topic and not be going to a pre-determined  destination.

Transactional Searches

I believe we’re all familiar with these types of searches. When we know what we want and we’re just looking for a place to get it. People may search for “i-phone”, “smart phone”, “new i-phone touch” and are looking to find a place to buy a particular product. They may be also just looking for information about the product as well.

How to use trends in peoples searches in optimizing a web site.

Keeping these different ways people search in mind when optimizing a site is important. You can add pages and optimize them differently to have a better chance to meet people’s desired result in the SERPs.

Other key things to keep in mind.

I’ll go in to it more in a later post but keep in mind that general terms are going to be very competitive and you shouldn’t base your SEO campaign on terms such as “tv repair” the competition will blow you away. Better to optimize for something more long-tail (specific) ex: “Jacksonville tv repair 32202″. You’d be better off to put your efforts in the more specific search term. You could rank good for that term and get more results overall.

So what is the difference and why should you care?

When I started doing SEO I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do, however I wasn’t sure what was white hat vs black hat. I think most SEOs (search engine optimizers) may have accidentally used some black hat techniques in the beginning of their career thinking they were doing something helpful to the page. The more you learn there is a right way and a wrong way to do just about anything.

White Hat SEO Techniques: Following the guidelines and etiquette established by the search engines. Basically not trying to manipulate or trick the system.

• Create good content
• Update information
• Use keywords in my content
• Address Meta Tags
• Get quality inbound links
• Marketing on the Web
• Blogging
• etc…

Black Hat SEO Techniques: Trying to deceive web crawelers to get better SEO results. You may think you are going to get better results for doing this however this make you can get banned or blacklisted from the Search Engines. Don’t do it. Write for your consumers not for SEO bots.

• Stuffing KeyWords – repeating keywords excessively for trying to manipulate seo results
• Cloaking – Hidden text
• Doorway Page
• Meta-Spamming
• Spam-dexing

If you are trying to get good results, play fair and be patience SEO takes time to do and more time to work. Sometimes days, sometimes months sometimes longer. But patience is the Key.

You’ve got to keep working at it and eventually will make it. Tortoise and the Hare

“SEO – Acronym for “Search Engine Optimization.” This is the process of editing a web site’s content and code in order to improve visibility within one or more search engines.” Sempo

“SEM – Acronym for “Search Engine Marketing.” A form of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).  SEM methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, digital asset optimization, and paid inclusion.” Sempo

Great resources for Search Engine Optimization for Small Business or Personal Knowledge.

SEOmoz
SEOmoz serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help every SEO to be the best they can be.

Sempo.org
SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it.

WebMasterWorld
News and discussion for the web professional and those interested in SEO or SEM.

SearchEngineWatch
A wealth of news, knowledge and information related to the SEO industry.

HighRankings
Tried and True, Professional SEO Consulting since 1995.

Red Hawk Strategies
Tips to grow your business and profits by harnessing the power of the web.

Top Search Engines submission guidelines for web masters and content contributors

You may want to look at each search engine’s submission guidelines. Improper tactics may get your site banned or even blacklisted.

• Google – Submission Guidelines
• Bing – Submission Guidelines
• Yahoo – Submission Guidelines