Are You Obsessed With Keyword Density? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Repeating one thing too often just ain't good.

Don’t focus on keyword density because it definitely shouldn’t be a priority. Five or six years ago, people would pick a keyword and aim for 1%, 2% or 3% density. With 2% or 3%, the keyword would be all over the place and didn’t look natural.

As years passed, Google has gotten smarter and keyword stuffing doesn’t quite work the way it used to. In SEO today, the aim of the game is to replicate what happens in nature – that is to say, if it doesn’t look natural, don’t do it!

Of course doing on page optimization is a good place to start. Choose one keyword phrase per page; put it in the title and meta description and on the page two or three times. If you’re writing on topic, this will happen naturally. You don’t need to force the keyword in there.

With all that said and done, you can still rank for a keyword phrase even if you don’t have the on page optimization correct. We’ve proven this many times! As long as you have enough back links to the page you’re trying to rank for with the right anchor text, you’re going to rank anyway.

In short, don’t focus on SEO keyword density; that idea is old fashioned. You better wise up or someone like us will take your #1 ranking

Okay,okay, we’re not that mean, if you follow our stuff, we’ll show you how we do it. Be sure to download our free report – The SEO Manifesto!

Keywords Analysis: Quantity Vs Quality is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying – “It’s the quality that matters, not the quantity.” Well who says that those things have to be mutually exclusive?

When you’re building your website and hoping to rank for a particular keyword, be sure you’re not too focused on just the one word. There are almost always going to be other keywords and phrases you can use for your search engine optimisation that you rank with in addition to your main keyword.

Since I started with an old saying, let’s use another – “Throw it all out there and we’ll see what sticks.” This is one of the tactics we sometimes use here at Melbourne SEO Services. We’ll do on-page optimisation for your website, and then see which of the keywords and phrases stand out from the others. By doing this, we can often find other ways of ranking – which means other ways of making money for you.

Here’s another – “Give even an onion graciously.” Okay, I don’t know what that one means, so let’s move on.

It definitely won’t hurt you to take a look at your website and see if there are other keywords or phrases that can help you rank. For more information on this and other SEO assistance, check out the DVD from our latest workshop.

Top Strategy For Keyword Optimization is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Keyword with an 's' or without an 's'?... that is the question.

A question I’m often asked is whether to optimize for the singular or plural keyword phrase. Following on from that, should we create separate pages for the singular and plural versions of a keyword phrase, or should we create just the one page and target both terms?

For example let’s say you are going after the phrase “trading system”, what’s the best way to also achieve keyword ranking for “trading systems”?

First, go after one of the variations. So take your singular keyword, create a page, optimize for that keyword and get it to position number one. Once you rank number one, then go for the plural version for the same page.

Here’s the thing, Google wants to serve up the most relevant results for the user, so often times they serve up two different pages when searching for either the singular or the plural keyword phrase. It all depends on what Google sees as more relevant.

Sometimes, though, when searching for, say “trading system/s”, they serve up the same results. How does this happen and how can you have it happen on your keywords?

Here’s how we did keyword optimization for our keyword trading systems. First, we optimized for the plural and then, as a secondary term, we chose the singular. That is we started to build inbound links back to that keyword using with the plural version. Once we achieved #1 for that term we started varying anchor text incorporating the singular term.

This is something Google likes because when building links, it’s good to have variations in your anchor text because this is what would happen naturally. That is to say, it’s not natural to have all the links point to your page with the same anchor text.

In this example, our plan was to go after one keyword and then go after the other keyword on the same page. If you’re still having trouble ranking for both terms, you can go after both variations at the same time by creating two separate pages and optimizing each page for each respective variation.

So, there you have it, two different ways you can use to handle keyword optimization for the singular and plural of keyword phrases. Of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg, if you want to find out more on this and related topics, get in touch with the Melbourne SEO team and we’ll do our best to get you off on the right foot.

Dominating Your Primary Keyword The Right Way is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Dominating your “ego’ or “primary keyword” is a huge task depending on what the keyword is that you are focusing your efforts towards, and of course, how competitive that keyword is. You see, another question that I get asked a lot is “How can I rank #1 for my main keyword in Google”. I never answer that question. Instead, I return fire with another question. “What relevant long tail keywords are you trying to rank well for?”.

Human nature says that we want to do the best that we possibly can in the shortest time frame possible, so when someone says to me that there are more long tail keywords in existence than primary keywords, I can understand this notion and how it applies to me and my business, however, to the newbie this is not all that clear and easy to put into perspective. The money is where the broad keywords are, IF you can rank well for that keyword, so naturally when we are trying to rank our website well for our chosen dominant keyword, it is always going to be a hard task unless we learn to take our time and dominate the long tail first.

Let me be as clear as possible about this, as this is an error that I see a lot of webmasters make every single day. In competitive niches where there are plenty of broad dominant keywords, you are always going to have a hard time ranking well unless you have won in the long tail first. Not only is relevancy in the search engines going to be a difficult obstacle, other competing webmasters are going to be able to see you a mile away, and will take preventative measures to protect their websites position in the search engine rankings.

Lets use an example to explain this methodology a bit further. Lets say that I am creating a website based on electric guitars. Ranking for the keyword “electric guitars” would be very tough considering how many people are already competing within that niche. In fact, at the moment, there are over two million people competing for that keyword in Google. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to focus on that keyword, instead, I am going to narrow down a list of longer tail keywords. For instance, Fender Guitars is a subcategory in that main keyword. Lets look at it in Google. There are now 500,000 people competing for that keyword, and is still tough to compete, but winnable if we go further down the long tail. “Fender Telecaster” is a bit deeper into that niche, but with 700,000 people competing, it is going to be hard to compete. Again, lets go deeper. “American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster” has only 16,000 people competing.

So, lets put this into perspective for a moment, to avoid losing you on a tangent here. Google bases its search queries on relevancy. This includes things such as bounce rate, time spend on a domain, and so on and so forth. If you are creating a website that is focused on a broad niche, you need to be broad and focus on as many directly relevant keywords and phrases in order to dominate the number one position. This is unavoidable if you want to win a major keyword. With the above example, I demonstrated that broad keywords are extremely hard to win unless you start working on the longer tail keywords first. In the above example, I would focus first on the guitar brand names rather than the main keyword. If you win smaller keywords such as these first, you will find that over time, your website will become extremely relevant to your main keyword that you would like to dominate, and over time, your chances of becoming an authority site within your niche increases significantly.

So, there we have it. Although, within certain extremely high competition niches, this is not going to be that easy, however, this should serve as a decent guideline for you when planning out your next website concept, and as a solid reminder of the importance of researching your keywords before you start a new project. Remember, any niche is winnable, but rarely winnable by focusing on only your ego keyword.