3 Steps To Effective Keyword Research For Small Business is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Before writing your web copy and building your site you need to drill down into the nuts and bolts of your business and do keyword research. This will identify the phrases that you will target through your web copy and on-page SEO to get your site ranking with the search engines.

Some people fall into the trap of putting keyword research into the “too hard” or “too technical” bin when, in reality, it’s not difficult at all.

Here we show you three easy steps so that you get the results you are after.

1. Identify Your Top Products And Services

The first step couldn’t be easier. What are your main products and services?

If you are a Melbourne-based printer, for example, your main products might be printing services, brochure design, flyer printing etc.

That’s really all there is to the first step – knowing what your business is. Nothing difficult about that is there?

2. Use The Google Free Keyword Tool

Secondly you use the Google Keyword Tool or the Market Samurai tools to find keywords.

With the Google tool you will be met with a text box that you need to enter your keyword phrases into, one by one. For example “printing services”, “flyer printing” etc. Enter the phrase and click SEARCH.

The results will show for that phrase and any related phrases (or by selecting the EXACT button on the left hand panel you can get results just for that exact phrase); you will receive results for global searches, searches local to your location and you will also get an idea of the competition level for those phrases.

You can sort the results by MOST SEARCHES to make it easier – work your way down the list and see if there are any there that you can target.

Ideally you want your phrase to have a lot of monthly searches and low level of competition, as that opens the door for a lot of traffic to be headed your way.

Play around with the tool and identify as many core phrases that help to describe and position your business.

3. Add Geographic Modifiers To The Keyword

You will find that “printing services” has a huge amount of searches and a high level of competition; it will take a lot of work to get ranking for that phrase; it’s usually better to add a geographic modifier to the phrase and concentrate on ranking for the local market first.

For example, “printing services Melbourne” will be less competitive and with some smart SEO you can get ranking for that; you can also go after the suburbs, like “printing service Prahran”, for example – as these phrases will be even easier to rank for.

Once you have got good ranks for these keywords you can then target the “bulkier”, more competitive keywords that get more searches and traffic, but it’s best to try to conquer the local market first.

Anybody who can use a computer can handle these three steps for how to do keyword research – and they are steps that nobody designing a small business website should miss.

For more great tips on starting your new online business, watch the Competition Crusher workshop absolutely FREE right here: www.crusherworkshop.com.

You need the right tools for your keyword research.

The Basics Of On Page SEO – Part Two is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Make your site visitors feel at home.

In part one of this post we looked at the concept of on page SEO: what it is, how it differs from off page SEO and three of the first things you can be focusing on to get your website in good SEO shape.

In the first part we focused on “back end” optimization techniques; here we will focus more on what visitors and search engines “see” when they land on your website and how to go about optimising these pages with further techniques.

1. Your Web Page Copy – Keyword Focus

What you actually do with your keywords in the web copy of the relevant pages of your website is equally as important as your page titles and descriptions.

Each page should be focused on 1 or 2 keywords, no more. For instance you can have a main keyword phrase like “Melbourne SEO Services” and then a variation or two such as “SEO services” and “search engine optimisation services” which you can also include in your copy.

2. Keyword Frequency/Density/ Placement

Use the same keyword phrase at least 2 or 3 times on the page. Your web texts should be at least 300 words long and you might want to include your keyword phrase around 3 times in every 500 words – once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and perhaps once in the middle section.

3. Added Extras

A few other places to focus on web page optimization are the H1 tags (headings) on your website, plus using bolded text, italics and also making sure your image tags include keywords. It’s even better if you get your keywords into the URLs of your pages ( eg. www.yourdomain/keyword.html)

4. Keep It Natural And Readable

What many website owners get wrong is focusing too much on pleasing the “bots” and not enough on pleasing their visitors. It’s humans who open their wallets and buy goods and services from you, so you need to keep all of your content interesting, informative and relevant; weave in your keywords, but keep it readable. The search engine rankings will follow if you are providing relevant and interesting content for your customers as you will normally be well rewarded for natural SEO.

5. Do All This Even If You Have Video

With the huge popularity of online video these days, it’s tempting to cut a few corners; please note that you should still create texts with your keywords, even if you have video as your main focal point. Search engine robots cannot read video, so always add a short text summary of what’s in your video on the page.

Most of the above on page SEO methods are not too time consuming; some may take a little practice to get right but, for a small investment of time, the benefits can be great: most small businesses don’t need to use 100% of the SEO techniques to get to Number 1 on Google because it’s not that competitive – completing 80% will get most businesses there and that’s why we’ve given you some of the main approaches in these two articles.

For further excellent tips and advice for your new online business, head on over for a free viewing of the Competition Crusher workshop here: www.crusherworkshop.com.

The Basics Of On Page SEO – Part One is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Learning the basics is vital in mastering SEO.

The beauty of on page SEO is that you can do it once and it can last for the life of your website. That makes it doubly important for you to get it right first time, so that you can forget about it, let it do its job and concentrate on your off page SEO, which is more time consuming.

Below we take you through what you need to know.

What Is On Page SEO?

On page SEO essentially tells the search engines what’s on your website pages. You are making it easy for the search engine web crawlers to find and index your pages and associate them with the right keywords, so that you have a good chance of being listed high in the search results for those keywords. That brings you traffic and, hopefully, sales.

That’s why it’s important. Now what is the right way to go about it?

Fundamentals

1. Know Your Market

It’s fundamental to the success of your business to know what you want to be ranked at the top of the search results for. Everything starts from there – get into the mind of your ideal customer, who will type in a search term; your on-page SEO efforts are geared towards making your page number 1 in the search results for that and similar terms he/she may enter.

For example we want to be top for “Melbourne SEO services”…type it into Google and you’ll see where we rank! Part of the reason why we’re there is because we’ve spent time getting our on page SEO right.

2. Create Unique Page Titles

Every page on your site should have a separate and well written title. If you go to Google search results for a popular search term you will see blue-coloured links listed, which are the titles of the web pages in question.

With page titles being featured so prominently in search results it’s important that you write them well, including a keyword you are targeting.

Our home title page is “#1 Melbourne SEO Services Company” which includes our company name and keyword.

3. Meta Descriptions And Keywords

These are the descriptive texts listed underneath the blue title page links in search engine results. They should be well-written, keyword rich and no more than 160 characters long.

The description for Melbourne SEO Services is:

“Want your website to be in position #1 on Google? Melbourne SEO Services will show you how with their transparent 4 stage search engine optimisation …”

Again, we have spent time to think about what people wanting SEO services want to read – being at Number 1 on Google is everybody’s SEO dream, so including this in the description increases the likelihood of them clicking on our link.

On page SEO, when done correctly, sells your website even before anyone visits; and then, once it’s up, it can continue to work for you until you change your website. So it’s well worth putting time and effort into. We’ll give you some more tips in Part 2 of this post.

In addition to these SEO tips, there’s a whole host of great information in the Competition Crusher workshop, if you are starting an online business. Simply click here to learn more about it.

Will Your Flash Websites Fail To Rank? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Will Flash bring you down?

I’ve been asked this question numerous times and it may have been because people have misinterpreted something I’ve said in the past – “Flash based websites are a bad idea.” What I was getting at here was, having “exclusive” Flash websites is not a great idea – and here’s why…

When the Google spider is crawling around the web, you want to make it as easy as possible for it to navigate your website. This is done through your linking structure and/or your nav bar. Google needs to be able to follow your links to find your pages, so it can index them.

If you’re using exclusively Flash based menus and your website is Flash heavy, Google can’t read this. There’s nothing for it to grab hold of. You need content on your page. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to discard Flash completely.

Flash can help engage users and when used well it can look great. That is equally important because it can make your website more sticky (help retain visitors longer) and hopefully convert visitors to buyers. So Flash isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It’s important to follow the standard rules of thumb for on page optimization: make sure you choose the appropriate keyword, put it in the title tag, and meta description. Put some content on the page and the text in it; you also want to have crawlable links so the spiders can follow them around.

With all that that said and done, like all things SEO, you can still rank pure Flash websites simply by using enough back links. The fact is, if you’ve got enough back links, you can rank just about anything!

A good rule of thumb though, is to make sure you have that good on page optimization, have the crawlable links and some content on your site.

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Duplicate Content Penalty – Are You In Trouble With Google? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

You won't be sent to the penalty box for duplicate content.

There are really two parts to this question. We need to think about duplicate content on your site and off your site.

When we think about content on your site, a common mistake is having duplicate title tags and meta descriptions and having these site wide. It’s definitely a good idea to make sure that every page has its own unique titles and descriptions. This is very quick and easy to fix and will almost immediately improve your rankings.

Now, I don’t believe Google “penalizes” those who are doing something wrong nearly as much as people might think. Instead, Google works more like a “filter”. If you have duplicated content, Google may filter out those pages, but they’re not going to get removed from the index or anything.

Often e-commerce sites get it wrong because their descriptions are duplicated throughout the site. They may even copy their vendor’s products and descriptions directly.

This leads into part 2 of this question. Is it going to be an issue if other people have the same content? Again, I’m quite sure that you’re not going to get a duplicate content penalty from Google.

Repeated content is part and parcel of the way the internet works. For example, when you’re doing a press release, it’s distributed to hundreds and thousands of outlets and it’s all the same press release.

We’ve run some tests where we’ve distributed a release through PRWeb.com and we’ve seen hundreds and thousands of creations of that one article all linking back to our website with the same content! Surely you couldn’t argue that this is going to hurt our rankings.

In short, I do believe that this whole idea of duplicate content is overplayed. And like most things in SEO, with enough link building, even if it is the same content, you can still get those pages to rank extremely well.

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Do You Really Need To Update Your Home Page? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

There is a perception out there that you need to update your homepage everyday to maintain rankings. Here at Melbourne SEO Services we don’t think that’s true. Read on to find out why.

One of the many sites we maintain is www.meta-formula.com which is an authority website on the Metastock niche, a sub niche of the stock market niche. Because we’ve been busy concentrating on other businesses, we haven’t updated this site for five or six years! At the very most, all we’ve done is some basic link building and perhaps added a few additional pages. That said, the homepage has remained unchanged all that time and yet its ranking position has stayed solid at position number 2, second only to the makers of the software.

So why do people think you need to update your homepage? I think it has developed out of the rise of popularity of blog websites, specifically WordPress blogs – so many of them rank incredibly well. As a result many SEOers have jumped to conclusions and believed that the reason for their good rankings is that the content is regularly updated. Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum and there’s a whole host of other factors at play here.

For example, adding regular content to a website is just a good idea because the more pages you have, the more opportunities there are for internal linking. This starts to build up the website’s page rank and link juice. Along a similar line, another reason blogs rank so well is that there is a lot of excellent internal links.

In short, the reasons blogs rank may be because their owners add regular content, creating new pages, and the fact that there’s a large amount of internal links. It is then not because of any changes to their homepage.

Anyway, these are my thoughts; it’s always a good idea to do your own testing .

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Are Meta Keywords Outdated? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Meta keywords are like lost boys to Google.

Some confusion exists about how much weight the meta keywords have in the ranking algorithm and how much it can affect your rankings. Matt Cutts, a spokesman from Google, has said that they’ve been ignoring them for years, as have a few other search engines.

Yes it’s true. Years ago, people would use the meta keywords to squish in as many keywords as they could and it worked. It used to be an important part of the algorithm but that’s now no longer the case.

So how should you optimize the keywords on your page?

The best practice is to optimize each page for one primary keyword and a couple of variations. Put that keyword in the title tag, meta description, meta keywords and a few times throughout the page. You might even add a link, H1 tag and/or bold it.

But hang on. Didn’t we say no one’s using the meta keywords anymore? The reason we put it in the meta keywords tag is more for our own reference and it definitely won’t hurt.

It’s very easy for us to tell what keywords we’re optimizing a particular page for by using the meta keywords tag. When we’re doing our link building we can easily go to the page and it’s clear what keyword we’re trying to optimize for.

So, in short, it’s not going to hurt and it only takes a moment. That’s why we do it but it’s not really going to help your rankings.

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3 Methods For WordPress On Page SEO is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

WordPress is a brilliant platform that is not just limited to bloggers, but also very useful for those who would like to create a content based theme site with good on page SEO, or even a sales letter. For a fair amount of time, WordPress has been more related to bloggers, however with the release of such themes as Thesis, and other more well known theme creators that have ever started to work with the people behind the platform, such as WooThemes, this platform really is starting to open up to a very large scale audience, and no longer limited as such, to bloggers only.

Over the time that I have been using WordPress and been practicing SEO and social media marketing, there are a few very solid tips that I can offer you on the basics of how to optimize your WordPress web site so that the search engines will fall head over heels for your web site!

Use Text For Your Site Title

Most WordPress themes will allow you to use text for your website title rather than using an image. The bonus of this is that if your website has a very keyword rich domain name and title, you dont want to waste an opportunity to put that awesome title in some H1 tags. As WordPress uses H1 tags in most themes by default for the main site title, this is possibly the easiest on page SEO that you will ever do with WordPress.

Sure, the plain text look can look quite boring, however with WordPress allowing easy customization of CSS in most themes, you can easily style your title. If this is too limiting, there is also the option to learn how hooks work in WordPress (its actually really quite easy, and I cant understand a word of PHP mind you…), which will allow you to completely style the entire header on your own, and create a style that is truly unique to your site, whilst keeping true to using a text title.

Change Your Permalink Structure!

I honestly can not believe how many people do not change their permalink structure. In older versions of WordPress, this used to be a hard task at times, with editing of the htaccess file needed in most cases, however with the latest version of WordPress, this is simply done with the touch of a button. In most cases, you will want your permalink to be category/post title based, however there are many more other options that are available, and can be discovered in the WordPress codex.

The structure that I recommend to all people as being the most effective permalink structure that I have used is /%category%/%postname%/. Not only are the keywords in your title going to be emphasized in your URL, but you also have a chance of ranking for your category keyword as well based on its appearance in the URL.

Utilize Your Footer!

Permitting that the theme that you are using allows for editing of your footer within its usage clause, adding links in your footer to categories can be highly beneficial. A lot of WordPress blogs use Java navigation for the top navigation, which as most of us know is not good for SEO as the search engine spiders have a great deal of difficulty reading links in Java. Keeping in mind that some tail keywords are too long to add to your navigation as well, whilst remaining tidy and user friendly.

The trick here is to create a list of category (keyword) links to their relevant archive pages in your footer. Make sure to emphasize these in bold as well. What this will in turn do, is it will allow the search engine spiders and crawlers to further visit more pages on your WordPress website, and will index them accordingly. If you use pages instead of posts, then these can be used for your level one pages, just be sure to link these pages internally to their child pages.

There are plenty more ways to optimize WordPress for SEO, such as the world famous All In One SEO plugin that I am starting to believe that WordPress should integrate as a new feature, however the above three methods are fairly simple and easy methods that will simply allow the search engine robots and crawlers to better index your website much easier, without having to rely on other extreme off page measures.