If you’re spending money to get visitors, look at the phrases you’re using.

Being at the top of the search engines for “Christmas gifts” is not only going to cost a lot of money, it’s also pretty useless if you only sell one or a few things.

“Christmas gift baskets” is more targeted and will help raise your conversion rate.

Other fairly useless phrases I’ve come across people using recently (and I use the word useless to mean that although they generate a lot of traffic, they don’t generate targeted traffic).  Read more...

So you’ve done the optimisation and you’re sure you’ve done the right things to your website to ensure that the search engines know exactly which keyphrases you’re targeting, right?

This little gadget will tell you if you’ve got it right by generating a ‘cloud’ based upon the phrases and words it thinks you are targeting.

The larger the text, the more you are targeting that word or phrase.

Keyword Cloud Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.  Read more...

Most people know that it is important to use their keyphrases in the s of their web pages:

www.yoursite.com/keyphrase.html for example.

But did you know that there is more SEO weight given to a page name with a hyphen in it than one without, or with an underscore?

So:

Internet-marketing-expert.html not internetmarketingexpert.html

Appointment-setting-uk.html not appointment_setting_uk.html

It allows the search engines to see the different words that make up the phrase, and relate them to one another and is just another piece of the SEO jigsaw.

‘Keyword density’ is a phrase that is often bandied about as if it is the Holy Grail of high search engine listings.

Basically it means the percentage of the text on a page that is your keyphrases.

Most experts recommend that you aim for a keyword density of between 2 and 8%.

I’ve tested this quite extensively over the last 13 years and have ranked on the front page of Google for some very competitive phrases with keyword densities ranging from 1% to 18%.  Read more...

If you’re stuck for pages to optimise, it’s better to use the longer versions of your keyphrase than the shorter.

So for example instead of using ‘gift hamper’ use ‘gift hampers’, instead of ‘clean carpets’ use ‘cleaning carpets’ etc.

If someone searches for the shorter version (gift hamper or clean carpets) they have a good chance of finding you.

If, on the other hand, you optimised for the shorter version, then people searching for the longer version would have no chance of finding you at all.