Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Chapter 2 Landersweb.com SEO – Keywords, keywords, keywords, the start of any SEO effort

Jun 12, 2009 Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0

Today’s topic is website keyword selection, this is a fundamental and very important step to your website optimization efforts, if you are off on your keywords, then every SEO step afterwards will be adversely affected. As always, I will share what I plan on doing, will sign off for a day or two and then finish the post with results of my research. I will include the websites I found useful along with tips and tricks I found along the way.

The Plan
I plan on using the Google Keyword Tool as a first destination to picking keywords. I have some keywords in mind including “Professional Web Maintenance“ or even the more aggressive “Web Maintenance“. Those may or may not change based on my analysis. There are also some great blogs and Tweets from other SEO professionals that I will refer to as well and will be giving kudos to those whose advice seems knowledgeable and more importantly provides positive results.

The results
As mentioned above, my first task was to check out the Google Keyword Tool. I entered “Web Maintenance”, “Professional Web maintenance”, “Kevin Landers” and “Web 2.0″ into the tool and it listed out a few hundred keywords to choose from.
These keywords caught my eye as strong possibilities. I’m going to start by targeting the keywords in bold, but will be keeping an eye on these daily, look for posts as I learn what keywords are working and why.
maintaining websites
professional web design
professional web maintenance
web 2.0 company
web 2.0 consulting
web 2.0 content
web 2.0 developers
web 2.0 development
web 2.0 marketing
web 2.0 services
web 2.0 technology
web 2.0 templates
web 2.0 tools
web 2.0 websites
web design company
web design maintenance
web maintenance
web maintenance services
web page maintenance
web site maintenance
webpage maintenance
website maintenance
kevin landers

I plan on writing another article on this subject in a few days as I now realize there is much more to keyword selection than I previously thought. I have much research to do to get a better understanding of the following questions I have, I will probably write new posts on each of these questions.

      What makes a good keyword?
      Do I target large traffic keywords or more targeted keywords?
      What SEO tools are best?
      Do I group like keywords together?
      What are keyword add-ons?
      Do I want to consider listing misspellings?
      Who do I trust to give good advice (1000s of free and pay “SEO experts”
      What should I look for in my competition?
      Other than adding to the META tags on my webpages, what else do I do with my keywords?

Basically, I have more questions about keywords than when I started. As mentioned in my initial post http://www.landersweb.com/wordpress/?p=3, I already achieved Google Page One for the search term of “Portland Web Maintenance” so I know that some of what I m doing is working.

My goal is to get to Page One on Google for some more popular searches, resulting in more click throughs of quality leads that are truly interested in my services which is Website Maintenance including (upgrading sites to using 2.0 tools, Search engine optimization, Data Conversions and .NET/PHP/Classic ASP programming).

I already know that I have a lot of work to do in getting more effective keywords, but I am learning as I go and entering in my blog, hopefully that will let others learn from my successes and mistakes (hopefully more of the former).

This is my initial list of keywords, I am adding them to my site as I speak and will be changing them often. Thankfully I built a nifty tool that allows me to edit my keywords and content in real time without moving a webpage. I simply login to my admin tool and edit away, changes to my site are instant, a necessity to stay fresh in a Web 2.0 world. (yes, this is a plug of a cool tool I built that may be of interest to those wanting an easy way to manage their website).

Thanks for giving me a portion of your day, I encourage and strive for reactions, comments, suggestions etc.

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Chapter 1 LandersWeb.com SEO – Google SiteMap

Jun 7, 2009 Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0

This is the first day of my SEO campaign for LandersWeb.com. As mentioned in the last post, I am already Number 1 in Google search of “Web Maintenance Portland” which is nice and shows that META tags work, but how many people actually type that in their Google search? Looking at my Statistics program, not many. So I have set a much loftier goal which is to get on Page One of Google when searcing for “Professional Web Maintenance“. There are over 27 million results on that search, how great would that be and how much traffic would that bring my site? Stay tuned.

Each day I am going to apply an SEO strategy to improve the Google placement of LandersWeb.com, I encourage you to follow along and work with me as we get our sites on Page One.

Using Google Optmization and Analysis tools, classic SEO techniques and leveraging WEB 2.0 tools and websites, I will work to my goal of getting on Page One of Google. Each article will begin by mentioning what I plan on doing and discuss how I am going to go about it.

Day 1 Plan
My first task is to put together a Google Site Map. Looking at my Google WebMaster tools, that appears to be the first logical step in SEO. This post will discuss the creation of a sitemap for LandersWeb.com. I’ll be back in an hour to finish this post.

Day 1 results
Ok, I’m back, that was a fairly easy task, a few comments though. There are several free SiteMap creation tools out there, I can see some value if you have a huge site, but they don’t handle how often your content changes that well so I created my own. Here is an example node in the XML –

<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>

This is for the front page, the important part here is the changefreq node. It is very important that you let Google know how often to expect this page to change. This is my front page, I change it daily using a tool I built where I can login to my Admin Panel, select the page and make changes to it. I’ll be writing an article about this tool I created and if interested email me to discuss and a demo. Changing content is key to Google placement, this tool I built will come in handy in quickly updating content and addding content throughout my site.

Currently my website is a sleek 10 pages but it will be growing as I add Web 2.0 information and articles that will assist my clients at the Google SEO game.

Below is my complete Sitemap and I have just submitted it to Google, they say it will take a few hours to index. It seems a bit backward that I did not go in and optimize my pages for the search term “Professional Web Maintenance” but I wanted to get the sitemap uploaded to Google. I did add that keyword to my front page and a few other pages. Tomorrow I’ll be working on more keyword optimization of my pages.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″ xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd”>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/testimonials_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/MicrosoftDotNet_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/SEO_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/webdesign_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/webdevelopment_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/webhosting_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/Security_Secunia_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/default.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/WordPress</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>

Welcome fellow Google Page One seekers

Jun 6, 2009 Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0

Ending up at my blog, you are probably interested in getting your web site, your companies web site or a clients web site listed higher in the search engines, specifically getting to Page One on Google. We share an interest as I am now seeking to more fully understand what is involved in getting high Google rankings, my goal being to get my web site (www.LandersWeb.com) and those of my clients ranked higher in Google.

This is the first post in a series of several as I start a few SEO campaigns for my web site and those of my clients. I will be writing articles about my experiences using different SEO techniques including

  • Google Optimization Tools (Sitemap, Google Analytics)
  • Web 2.0 tools (Twitter, FaceBook, Blogs, Dynamic Web Pages)
  • Link Building Strategies
  • Keyword Targeting

The First Step – A few months back I trimmed my cluttered website down to a few pages so I could focus on message, content and keywords. I edited the titles, edited the keywords to focus on a certain searches and edited the content to make it more interesting and keyword rich. A few weeks later a search on Google for “Web Maintenance Portland” my website comes up first on Page One of Google. That is a nice small win, but how many people are searching “Web Maintenance Portland“. This is however a good example that setting up a website for certain keywords does in fact work, now it is time to focus on less targeted keywords that will result in signigicantly more traffic.

A good goal for my website is to get listed on Google Page One for “Web Maintenance“, that is a much more realistic search. Plus, my services (web development, design, maintenance and hosting) are services I can provide to companies around the globe not just those in the Portland OR area. The problem is that I will have a lot more competition for Page One, more poeple will be searching that term so there will be more effort (dollars, SEO experts, consultants) spent by my competition in getting that Page One listing.

I have just set a lofty goal for myself, check in to this blog occasionally for posts on what is working, not working and even offer me some advice to me as I compete against all web maintnenace and development companies for Page One of Google.

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