Search engines factor “search intent” into their algorithms in an effort to feed back the best possible results to their users’ search queries.
It’s absolutely crucial to understand this concept when deciding which keywords to target for which sites, especially if you’re trying to manage the expectations of a client who’s hired you to optimise their site for generic keywords in the natural search results.
Let me explain what I mean by “search intent”, in a nutshell, its what search engine users intended to find when they typed in a certain search query in to the search box.
For instance, if a user typed the keyword ”laptops” into the search engine, what would that user be looking for; a website for a specific brand of laptop to buy? or a website comparing and reviewing various brands of laptops? If I would venture a guess I would say the latter and I’d also bet that the algo engineers over at Google would concur.
Now lets take this concept of “search intent” for a test drive and see what results Google feeds back when you type in the keyword “laptops” into its search box…
as expected, none of the top ten results were for a specific laptop brand, instead, they were all aggregators and/or information sites about various laptops or laptops in general.
So there you go, next time your e-commerce client asks you to rank for a generic keyword like “laptops”, explain to her the concept of “search intent” and its influence on the natural search results.
Then when she understands it, pitch to her a content based project such as a blog about laptops!
Do you use article syndication as part of your link building strategy? Matt Cutts from Google supports this form of search engine marketing as a legitimate technique to boost your ranking efforts as long as search engines know that your website is the original source of the content. View the full interview here.
In order to get the most out of your article syndication strategy, follow the following general guidelines:
Make sure that your article adds value to the internet and to user experience.
Make sure your article has genuine original content and not content rewritten from another article or worse yet rehashed from various articles!
If you’re using statistics in your article, make sure that the source of the statistics is included in the article, and more importantly, ensure that the source is authoritative and legitimate!
Make sure that your article is wrtten naturally (ie not stuffed with keyword repetitions that make it look spammy). Search engines are investing/have invested in semanticc technology that allows their robots to read articles much like a human would.
Make sure that your article doesn’t have excessive links that also make it look spammy.
Make sure that the article is published on your site first and that its indexed by he search engines before you syndicate (distribute) it.
And finally…include a resource box at the bottom of the article to tell search engines that your site is the original source of this article.
If you follow the above guidelines you’ll make sure that you reap the full benefits of article syndication and the link popularity benefits that come with it.
Ever wondered what search engines see as the best perfoming pages on your website? This post shows you how to find out what google sees as the most important pages on your site.
Why is it important to find the most valuable pages on your site? Very simply put, to help you optimise your internal “link juice“.
For the most important pages on your site, type into Google
www site:yoursite.com
For the most important pages on a subfolder on your site, type into Google
www site:yoursite.com/your-subfolder
Other ways to find important pages on the internet:
To find the most valuable domains with a particular extension:
The Google Adwords traffic estimation tool gives you an estimation of traffic to a particular keyword(s) or allows you to plug in a URL for a particular site to crawl and bring back suggestions.
The figures from Adwords are displayed in graphs and not actual numbers, but it gives you a good place to start you keyword research as it generates lots of suggestions. Keep in mind though that this tool is based on PPC traffic, not natural.
Keyword Discovery is by far my favourite tool out there. It allows you to plug in a keyword and outputs suggestions including estimated daily searches. Its data is compiled from 180 search engines.
If you had some money to invest I would recommend investing in the commercial version of this tool.
Word Tracker also allows gives you suggestions based on a seed keyword including daily estimates. Its figures are based on statistics from Meta Crawlers (such as dogpile.com and metacrawler.com) which account for 0.63% of all global searches). Word Tracker is a good tool, but if you had a choice between Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery I would go with Keyword Discovery (see above)
The Wikipedia shows up for more and more generic (1 word) keyword phrases than any other site out there. This tool, that estimates daily page views from the Wikipedia, allows you to get an idea of keyword potential (you need to account for 15-20% internal search traffic from within the Wiki)
This tool from Submit Express combines the results from both Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker in one interface, very handy and saves lots of valuable time!
