Tag Clouds, what the heck are tag clouds you might ask? Well if you look over in the sidebar you will see the tag cloud for this site.
Tag clouds are generally alphabetically ordered lists of tags that make a visual representation of the overall content on a a website. Words or tags that are represented more often on a site are listed with darker and larger text. Since many of my posts are about SEO, the SEO tag is the biggest and darkest.
When writing posts, each post is “tagged” with representative keywords. And the more often a tag is used, the bigger and darker that tag will become in the tag cloud.
This post should be read after the Keyword Research post has been read.
To prioritize your Keyword List, you must calculate the R/S value, that is obtained when Results or number of competing sites is divided by searches per month. The quotients of the R/S values for each keyword phrase are then compared and used to prioritize which words will be optimized for first.
There are tools out there that will determine the competition for your keywords, but the easiest free way I know of is to plug your potential keyword phrases into Google. If you use the “allintitle:” search function, you will get web pages that have the keyword in the title, that is to say the title tag of the site includes the keywords in it.
The title tag is the name of the site that is shown in the little blue bar at the top of the browser, like the title tag at the top of this page which should read “Keyword List Prioritizing-SEO Training – and SEO tips from Pixelhead” followed by your browser name. An example of using the “allintitle” function is “allintitle:cloth bags” and Google shows 52,000 web pages that have the phrase cloth bags in the title as opposed to 490,000 pages that show up for the phrase just typed into the Google search bar.
There are many keyword tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker and Keyword Spy, but for this series, which is being done for the beginner, the Google Keyword tool will be fine.
First, look at your site, and ask yourself – generally speaking what is it about? Looking at Mybarebags.com, I see that cloth bags are being sold here. So “cloth bags” is what I put into the Keyword tool. I might also look around the site and take note of any other keywords that might apply. On some sites, depending upon the site, I might actually go through each page and see what keywords apply to each individual page…if the site owner wants the entire site optimized…
The first thing we do prior to starting an SEO campaign is take a look at the site to be optimized and evaluate a few things. Below is the basic SEO site assessment that I did for Mybarebags.com. I encourage you to do a report like this for the site that you would like to optimize prior to beginning your optimization campaign.
This video introduces a series of posts that will be part of our SEO Training program. If you would like to be part of the series, please sign up to receive updates by either RSS or email.
After signing up for the feed, please send me a message via our contact form indicating that you want to be put on the SEO Training Mailing List.
For this series, I am going to use the site which was featured in the Canvas Shopping Bags post, MyBareBags.com, as the site that I will be doing a 1 month SEO campaign. This will include at least a month of SEO services, free to Mybarebags.com, as I will be posting all the steps involved here.
SEO post featuring Mybarebags.com will include but are not limited too:
A brief site analysis.
Keyword research
Baseline Ranking Report
On-page optimization suggestions for Mybarebags.com
At least one month of Link Building
A Ranking Report at the end of the month.
A Link Building report.
When you sign up to be on the SEO Training mailing list, you will receive not only updates, but you will get materials that I am not publishing here. You will also be able to ask me SEO questions via email during the period of time I am running this SEO Training special.
Need SEO Intern?
Some time ago I had put out a request for interns, and I had numerous people who were interested, but only one was seriously intent upon being involved with the internship. Dunstan Barrett, who is the webmaster over at Free Ipods Ect, will be participating in the program, by doing the SEO steps on one of his sites. Dunstan is an 18 year old entrepreneur from South East England. Thanks Dunstan, I look forward to working with on this project.
Need SEO Training?
What about you, do you need some SEO Training? If you have a site you want to have optimized, why not participate in the program. Are you interested in getting into the SEO business, or in getting an SEO position as a company that has an online presence that is lacking? Sign up.
If you are the former, that is someone who wants to be employed as an SEO or wants to make a living as a Freelance SEO, I suggest that you do as I did with Mybarebags.com, and find a local business or non-profit organization and ask them if they would mind being your SEO case study.
Social media optimization or SMO is a relatively new area of marketing. It involves the use of the social media to market a site, be it a blog or an ecommerce site. Social media is a pretty broad category and can mean community blogs, forums, micro-blogging, and social bookmarking sites like Digg. The video below is by no way a complete guide for Social Media Optimization..I’ll have to work on a series of Social Media Optimization videos for that…
Social Media Optimization Video Review
This post is brought to you by the Jagdirectory, a premium web directory. This link building video is more of a Social Media Optimization video than an SEO video, but I am still going to classify it as an SEO video because if used correctly, social media can get you a ton of one way links. Using social media sites such as community blogs, social book marking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Mixx can send a lot of traffic to your site. Sites that are not blogs can also be optimized for the social media. For an ecommerce site, this could be as simple as putting social media book mark buttons on the page or having a share this statement at the bottom of the page with a button like this . Get your button at Addthis.com. Lots of Stumblers and other social media users like to pass on hot sales, so make it easy for them to pass on your sale info.
Link Bait Example
Your site could do a top ten article in your sites niche, like this top 10 Halloween Insurance Claims article. I don’t see any Social Media buttons on the page, but I know this article received more than a few stumbles. I believe I actually came across it on one of the social media sites, so it is definitely a good example of link bait. If it had utilized some social media buttons, the article might have even gotten more than four reviews and 32 Stumbles.
Second Tier Social Media
Next, use second tier social media sites to bolster the primary social media sites. Second tier social media sites are sites that are more closely related to your particular niche. Check out Steven of Vandelay Website Design’s blog post about using second tier Social media networks to create a “domino affect with traffic”. Here is a post on his other blog that lists over 200 Social Media sites, broken down into particular niches.
Link Building Nuggets
Use Social Media bookmarking buttons.
Develop and use Second Tier Social Media profiles.
This post should serve as an intro to using social media. Each social media site in itself takes a bit of getting use to and developing a network on each one takes a good amount of time. Time that you should find is well spent. How is your Social Media marketing doing?
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