Note about keyword research: Frequency and Distribution

When choosing keywords one must keep in mind the frequency that the targeted term is searched for. You shouldn't optimized your site for a keyword or term that gets only 10 or so searches a month. When using the different keyword tracker tools, look for a high traffic keyword or key term to be the primary focus of your optimization. Leave the words or phrases that get around 100 searches a month to be your secondary keyword for that page. The object of keyword research is to find out what people are searching for when they look for products and services like yours, you can't force people to search for anything.

If you have a new product that no one has ever heard of, it is best not to use the product name as your primary keyword until the brand is established. If this is the case, use terms related to the product, or function of the product.

Remember to use individual landing pages with only a few keywords related to each individual page, don't try to work all your keywords into one page. Optimizing a site is exactly that, optimizing the entire site. You are not just trying to get traffic to your home page.

When building links, route different links to the pages they are most related to. If you business is web design and SEO, you should have one or more pages about web design a a few about SEO. Links from web design firms should go to the web design pages, and links from SEO companies should go to your SEO related pages.

Some niches are harder to break into, so do some background research on the sites that are scoring high for your target terms. Find out how many links they have to that page, the age of the domain, and the keyword density. It is not impossible to break into a niche with established sites, but it will take more onsite and offsite SEO to do it, but don't be scared.

Keyword Density, Spamming and Stuffing

When optimizing a website for the search engines you have to weigh your keyword density and how it effects the quality of your content. The most important thing is providing quality content your readers can use and content that gives them a reason to either come back or link to your website or blog. If your keyword density percentage is too high, it could interfere with the delivery and readability of the content. As a general rule, your keyword density should be between 3-5%, that is just enough to say what you have to say without suspiciously over emphasizing, or repeating the same words over and over again.

Having your keyword density too high, say 10-12%, will interfere your message and could be seen as keyword stuffing to the search engines. Keyword Stuffing is simply that, when your keyword density is so high that no reader can get any use out of the content containing the content.

Good SEO copy:
Goatsmilktavern Studios is a New Orleans based SEO company, we have provided Search Engine Optimization for many clients, whilst keeping up to date on the latest search engine changes. gmtS can design your website in a search engine friendly way and optimize it with the latest SEO strategies.

As you can see this copy delivers a clear statement that is not hindered by the terms SEO and search engine optimization.

Pushing the SEO copy (might not get you banned):
SEO Goatsmilktavern Studios is a New Orleans based SEO, Goatsmilktavern SEO has only Done Search Engine Optimization for many SEO Clients, whilst keeping up to date on the latest SEO and search engine changes, This SEO found designing the sites for SEO Clients, that we could control on their SEO needs. For more on SEO, contact Goatsmilktavern Studios a New Orleans SEO.

That example might not get you banned, but can you see how it is harder to read.

Almost or good chance of being banned by the almighty google:
SEO Goatsmilktavern is a New Orleans based SEO, this SEO has only Done Search Engine Optimisation for large SEO our clients, whilst keeping up to date on the latest SEO and search engine changes, This SEO found designing websites for SEO Clients, we could concentrate on their SEO needs. For more on SEO, contact Goatsmilktavern a New Orleans SEO.

Tags : Seo, Search Engine Optimisation,Search Engine Optimization, New Orleans SEO, SEO in New Orleans, not Cheap SEO

Bad SEO Copy and keyword stuffing (will get you banned)

I stole that pic from Dave Naylor's weblog because there is no way in hell I'm gonna type it on my site.

Keyword spamming is using keywords that are not relevant to your website. For instance if you are selling shoelaces, don't put plasma screen TVs in on your website, it is not relevant and will interfere with you selling shoelaces. The coolest example of this can be found at Matt Cutt's blog.

The website in the example is selling the secret to eternal youth and says that being banned by Google is a conspiracy to cover the truth, and has nothing to do with the invisible text field at the bottom left hand side of the screen.

Here is the text field:

As you can see keyword spamming can look quite sill, and yes, you may get away with it for a while, but you will be "covered-up" by the almighty Google eventually.

My point is, say what you need to say and give your visitors good information and the search engine gods will reward you for helping make the internet a better place. I'm not saying don't do keyword research and don't tailor you content to your KEI, just don't make your copy sound like crap.

Using Google Alerts for SEO

The rel=nofollow experiment has been put on hold for the time being, the 4 weekly publications I make have been taking all my time due to a shortage of manpower. I would like to talk about an important part of my strategy for the experiment, Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a service provided by Google to tell readers when links have been indexed by their spiders containing keywords set by the user. If you are interested in "internet marketing", you could set an alert to be notified when Google indexes a page containing "internet marketing". You can set the frequency of these notifications so your inbox doesn't fill up with junk from Google.

I am using the service to tell me when a page is indexed with words like "goatsmilktavern" or "new orleans web design". This takes some time out of the pains of discovering which pages with links to gmtS have been indexed.

There are a lot of tools available to you that can be used for SEO, just get creative. Anything to save time and help you with your analytic reports for your clients is a good tool to keep handy.

murrydan, Goatsmilktavern Studios, a New Orleans based web design and internet marketing company.

nofollow tags?

As part of your job as an SEO specialist it is your job to test the limitations of the search engines. I will be performing a series of "experiments" this weekend with websites and blogs that have nofollow tags to see if Google is following them. I have been reading on blogs like Dave Naylor's and Matt Cutts' about how some link juice trickles through the nofollow tags found on some blogs and websites like Wiki. If the nofollow tags don't work this could lead to a few changes in how people SEO their websites. I have always used blog and forum post to get indexed, but never used them as a link building strategy. I should have a report by the middle of next week.

New Orleans Web Design and SEO

Quicky: About Choosing a Domain Name

There are many theories about choosing a good domain name. Domain name has very little to do with your influence on the search engines, content carries more weight. For example Goatsmilktavern.com is doing just fine in the SERP's for "New Orleans SEO", "New Orleans Search Engine Optimization", and so on. This site is doing well because my content is about SEO, but I don't even show up in the top 100 for "goats milk". According to most SEO theories I should rank quite highly for a search about "places that sell goats milk"

When choosing a domain name you should consider these things and your SEO should do just fine.

• Easy to remember


• Easy to type, Goatsmilktavern is a stretch on this one


• Keep it short, www.new-orleans-web-design-search-engine-optimization-blah-blah-blah.com would be a bad domain name


• Branding, going with your company name is always a good idea to get the name out there


• Domain name should be unambiguous


• The name should reflect something about the business or services provided

Choosing the best domain for your site shouldn't be a struggle, when you envision your new site it should just come to you. Unless you are in a highly competitive niche, you should be able to get away with anything.

Food for Thought.

I came across a post at Dave Naylor's website that got me thinking. It seems the W3C website is not using nofollow tags on their "registered members" page, so is this considered a paid link?

W3C is transferring a lot of link juice to the companies that "register" with them, including Google. According to their new "law", will they penalize these "members" for a paid link?

Read more HERE.

About Keyword Selection "Phase 2- Refining Core Terms"

Now that you have brainstormed and discovered the basic keywords that you will be using, it is time to refine that list into a list of keywords that people are actually searching for and them map them to your pages. During the brainstorming process we didn't think about what people actually search for, now we will discover these magic words as they relate to your site. This phase of the process will require the use of a few online tools, don't worry, we are gonna stick to the free ones.

The Overture Keyword Tool is a great place to start for this step in the process, but Wordtracker is one of the best. You can also use the keyword selection tool at Google Adwords, just sign-up for adwords, and use the tool, you don't have to give them any money.

Keyword Clusters
Now, to use the keyword selection tool, just enter in your keyword one at a time and we are gonna look for the top 10 variations of that individual keyword. Examine the variations of our keyword and note whether or not they are relevant to your web site, if so write them down. These will be your keyword "clusters". You want about 10-15 clusters that you know for certain people are searching for.

Prioritizing Your Keywords
Let's talk about prioritizing these clusters, some of these keyword clusters that you have stumbled upon maybe niches that are impossible to crack without spending thousands of dollars on links. I would go to the big 3 search engines and just scope out the pagerank and amount of links the competition has. If #9 has a pagerank of 9 and 300,000 inbound links, maybe you should take another approach.

Modifiers and Localization
For each cluster, you need to come up with a list of modifiers like "free". Go back to your keyword tool of choice, and add a simple modifier to a keyword, and look at the top 10-20, you will see "free", "tips, "help, and so on. Write these down, we are going to add these modifiers to to our keyword clusters whenever possible.

Localization means adding your city and state, or region to the clusters so your neighbors will be able to find your services in their area.

The next phase we will cover will be "Mapping Keyword Clusters to Pages.

Author: Murry Daniels
Murry Daniels is the owner of Goatsmilktavern Studios, a web design and search engine optimization company located in New Orleans, LA.

Free Reciprocal Link Submission at Goatsmilktavern Studios

Goatsmilktavern Studios has added free reciprocal link submission to their website. The process is simple and painless. Create a link to your website or blog in a matter of seconds, all we ask is that you place a reciprocal link on your website or blog first, then, BAM, you have a link to your website or blog.

This is the easiest SEO on the web. Submit your link to Goatsmilktavern Studios today.

About Keyword Selection "Phase 1- Brainstorming"

Keyword research is the cornerstone of SEO, without good keyword research, your chances of a well optimized website are pretty slim. Keyword research is no longer just for a long list of terms in your keyword tag, but from an optimization standpoint, it will dictate the wording of most of your websites content.

Understanding keyword research and development begins with understanding how your clientele use the search engines. First of all you should brainstorm with a pencil and paper and come up with 5-10 "major" keywords that best describe your website, these should be one or two word phrases, like "web design" or "SEO". These 5-10 keywords will be the backbone of your keyword development strategy.

Core Terms
Now, using the 5-10 "major" keywords you should expand them to 2-4 word phrases, try to get about 10-20 of these. These "core terms" will not cover all of the searches people use to get to your sit, but they will cover about 60% of them. Try to keep some sort of organization with the core terms under the major keywords, when doing keyword research organization is very important. I use diagrams to show the relationship between keywords to make sure they overlap and cover every topic on the site I am optimizing.

Singulars and Plurals
Search engines can't discern between singular and plural versions of a word (yet?), so you need to account for all the people who search for "concert ticket" and those who search for "concert tickets". Keep in mind some singulars and plurals are not as important as others, like "shoe" and "shoes".

Stemming and Misspellings
Stemming and misspellings are a major pain, but let's face it, most of us either don't look when we type, or are bad spellers. I put these two into the same category because they are the "real world" problems you will encounter when optimizing your keyword selection and usage.

Stemming involves words with a suffix, like "web design" and "web designer". Stemming can include all the "-ing, -ed, -er" versions of your keywords. When you write your optimized content for your web site, try to use as many versions of your keywords as possible to cover all the potential searches.

A couple of tips to discovering misspellings are to type the word phonetically, leave out letters, or use letters next to it on the keyboard.

Stop Words
Stop words are common usage words like "a, and, the", there are hundreds of stop words, so just use your head when you look for them. Try not to use stop words in places like title tags and heading tags.

Related Terms
The last step in brainstorming is finding related terms. Related terms are keyword phrases that are closely related to your website, but not exactly what your site is about. Optimizing your related terms will help with your offsite optimization efforts like link popularity and link relevance.

The next phase will deal with finding important keywords you didn't find in the brainstorming process, and refining your list of keywords.

Author: Murry Daniels
Murry Daniels is the owner of Goatsmilktavern Studios, a web design and search engine optimization company located in New Orleans, LA.

Goatsmilktavern SERP results

Check this out! I just checked my rankings in the Google. SERPs, I am doing pretty good. I haven't really done that much offsite SEO to the Goatsmilktavern Website.

I had intentions of really slamming the search engines when I was done writing all of the content for the site, but I am creeping up without any links. I really thought it would be harder than this considering I am competing with other, larger SEO companies. When I start my link campaign I should be on top of every key phrase I am targeting. It appears that "New Orleans web design" will be the hardest nice to bust into simply because of the age of the other sites (mine is only a year old). I would like to concentrate on SEO, but I still love being a web designer.

I made a post on my other blog that is more fitting for this one about how to get indexed in Google in 24 hours. you can find it here. The company I work for is now selling websites and I had to get one indexed fast, and it only took me 1 blog post and about 4 hours of waiting to do it.

I am working on a series of tips to move your site up the search engines, so look for them here soon.

New blog added to gmtS

I have added a new blog to the Goatsmilktavern website. This blog will be for posts dealing with projects by Goatsmilktavern Studios. You can find it at http://neworleanswebdesign.wordpress.com.