SEO 101 0 - Jesper Åström - Ideas worth keeping to yourself

A Beginners Guide to Keyword Research

I read a tweet today about keyword research. I decided to go nuts. Thus I also got the inspiration for this blog post. See, this is the thing with Search engine optimization, it is actually kind of an art form. Regardless of how many of the rules you know, there are always exceptions and if you don’t know these exceptions you will end up biting the dust.

Every Link comes with a Person(-a)

by Jesper Åström

Blog post about LSI and Co-Citation and how it is related to the way we as people judge each other in society. There are many similarities with judgmental preferences in off line life.

Where to put the keywords

by Jesper Åström

I will now continue my SEO 101 guide with explaining where to put the keywords for a particular page.

Just as you arrange your ordinary word document that is longer than just a page, you construct an index so that all people reading your document will have an easy overview of what they are reading. On a website this index is called the sitemap. (Now some of you think… “Isn’t that the start page??” NO IDIOT… I will deal with the start page later… but keep in mind that you do NOT… I repeat… do NOT put all the links to all your content on your start page)

In the sitemap you should put links to all the pages of your website. As you want your reader, google and all other interested to know where they end up you use the “jam jar method” to lable your links and the pages where the people will end up.

Jam Jar Method
Just as you don’t put “Sweet and sticky” on a jar of strawberry jam (because no one knows what’s in it) you don’t put a slogan or something catchy in a link to a page. You simply say what’s on the page or in the jar. As for the case of the Jam jar you would write “Strawberry Jam”, as for a web page explaining the recepie for strawberry jam, you would give it the name “Recepie – Strawberry Jam” or “Recepie for strawberry jam”.

Many people put catchy phrases in their links, or even worse, put “read more” in their links leading to pages. This method sucks as it doesn’t give the reader any notion on where he or she is going to end up.

On-Page keyword optimization
Once you are on the page there are some elements that search engines as well as people find more important than others.

The title
First of all it is the title of the page. This is what is seen as the link from Google. It is also what is seen in the field on the very top of your browser. The title is defined in the head meta text of the page. The tag you use to define it is <title>Your title</title>.

SEO Link values According to Gollum

by Jesper Åström

There is allways a huge discussion in the search engine optimization community about link values. However, only a few people come out and say that they are actively building links to rank better in the SERPs. Even fewer people say that they buy links.

In an attempt to actually build some understanding on the topic. I contacted the link builder and black hat SEO spammer Gollum. Yes, you’re correct. Gollum who made an outstanding performance in playing himself in the Lord of the Rings. Gollum takes us behind the scenes to describe what the Lord of the Rings is really all about. Namely: The value of different links!!

– Oooooh… preeccciousss… links… preeecious liiinks… I’ll tell you all about them links..

Extending keywords

by Jesper Åström

Extending keywords is a practice where you extend the concept of viewing your keyword as a theme. As it is meant to define your page, you should really try to include whatever words can complete your theme. If your main keyword or theme for the page is car insurance for example, you should think of whatever other words are related to car insurance.

Such words can be found in either Google KeywordTool or by using Google Sets. You can also search for you page keyword and look at what pages end up on top in the search engines. What other words, related to the word you are working with, are included in the top three results. I generally use SEO Quake to find what words have the highest density on top ranking webpages for the keyword I am pushing for.

Keywords

by Jesper Åström

What is a keyword?
It is debatable whether or not a keyword is one word or if it is a theme. What we know is that a keyword defines the content of a page. There is a misconception that you can have several keywords on one page. Each page should be optimized around its own keyword. No other pages on a website should be optimized for the same word.

A keyword…

…defines the page
…is unique
…matches a potential search queery from a user