For well over a year I have managed my companies blog and have succeeded in ranking high for valuable keywords. Depending on your content, one keyword may be more valuable to you than others. In less than 6 months, I managed to greatly increase my companies blog visibility while also generating some awesome Click Through Rates. Search Engine Optimization is not as complicated as others deem it to be. The people that do not understand SEO are the people who say it is confusing and time consuming. In fact, the opposite is true. With a few minutes a day, you can greatly augment your SEO with basic knowledge. This blog posting will focus on the basics to get you started and show you a few insights into analyzing your SEO data using Google Webmaster Tools.
First of all, what is your content all about?
Most bloggers tend to stick to niche topics, which is great, since you’ll tend to have a more concentrated keyword bank. When Google scans your page to judge its rank, it searches through your content for the keyword term that comes up the most. But that doesn’t mean you can fill your page with one keyword repeated over and over! Google’s crawler bots are much smarter than you think. My suggestion is to begin by analyzing the content you already have. I did a quick visual Keyword Density Checker using Webconf’s free SEO tools. Keep in mind that I recently started this blog and don’t have much time to update it.
From the picture above, you’ll notice that some words are bolder and bigger than others. Those are the words most often mentioned in your blog. My most used keywords are Marketing, Social, Media, QR Codes, Afrin, and sadly Cocaine due to my awesome post on the similarities between Afrin and Cocaine, but anyway back to the SEO. It appears I am on track with the intent of my original goal to create a blog revolved around marketing and social media. I’m also branding myself very well too, notice “memrandom” in the keyword bank, even though it’s missing the Zero. I rarely mention that term!
One you see what your content is all about, it’s time to begin working on evolving those keywords. What do I mean by evolving? Take my “marketing” keyword for example. I should begin focusing on tangent terms, such as Direct Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Affiliate Marketing, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and so on. Why? Well, it is good to rank high for one keyword, but when you rank high for keywords that often link closely together, you cover much more ground, thus exposing your content even more to search engines. If you need help on finding tangent keywords, you can use Google’s Keyword Tool or Google Wonderwheel Advanced Search for a quick and dirty method. Below you’ll find my Keyword Tool results for the term “Marketing” It’s your choice if you’d like to tackle keywords with high or low competition. If your daring and are choosing the most competitive keywords, brace your self, because you will see your keyword rank drop and rise dramatically in Google Webmasters!
Now that your expanding your content to revolve around your tangent terms, you’ll need to begin tagging your content. It’s easy to do on WordPress, so kudos for you if your on WordPress! For other sites it may involve light HTML work, but it is nothing that you cant learn in a few minutes of practice. Tagging works great for your SEO. Think of it as a summary of your content for search engine bots. Work on developing great and useful content.
Track your results
To begin tracking your SEO stats, you’ll have to register your blog or website with Google’s Webmaster Tools. It’s super simple for WordPress blogs and you can pretty much run a search on how to do it, quickly and easily. If you own a domain outside of wordpress, all you have to do is upload a meta tag to your site that Google provides you with. Once that is done, make sure to verify your site with Google and your good to go. It may take a while before you begin seeing any results on Top Queries. One way to speed this up is to provide Webmasters with a Sitemap. You can create a Sitemap for free using any Sitemap creator or by submitting a URL of your RSS feed to Webmasters. I’ve had a friend send me a quick screen shot of his Top Queries. I’ve hidden the keywords for his privacy, but I’ll explain how to analyze this content. Below is a screen shot of top queries for a certain website, it’s Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Avg Position, and its estimated change for every column.
Definitions for understanding SEO data is provided, don’t worry!
Impressions: Number of times your search term popped up on Google.
Clicks: Number of clicks generated by the keyword, e.g., People click on “Marketing” which leads to your website/blog
CTR: Clicks that lead to further exploration of your content. For example, once someone has landed in your website, he/she continues to dig through your content
Average Position: Your rank on Google search for that specific keyword
Now that we can somewhat understand the data, its time to put it to good use. One keyword here stands out a lot, notably because it is the only one with a CTR. 150 Impressions with a CTR rate of 22% is really good and it shows, since the website really sticks to its niche topic, but they have yet to expand on its keywords. Considering that it is a highly competitive topic, an average position of 4.1 is great. What else can we analyze from this chart? The content you need to work on or tighten up. You can also use this to see what keywords from your site are targeting search queries. If it is relevant to your content, you may want to begin adding more content for that keyword. If for any reason the keyword is irrelevant, consider a thorough check of your site/blog. You may have to clean up up a bit, or search for Malware. Most of the time, it comes from harmless comments on blogs, or anywhere others can post comments, opinions, feedback, and anything else that allows viewers to edit your page.
Everyone always asks me for help on increasing CTR. If you can link solid keywords from one page of your site/blog to another page of relevance page on your site/blog, you’ll begin to see an increase in CTR. This means that you really need to think about quality over quantity! Create eye catching phrases, pictures, or utilizing current buzz topics to your advantage. The more relevant, useful, and intriguing to your visitor the better your CTR will become!
Mem0random 