my keyword density popped

“My density has popped me to you.” How true that is. This misspoken statement by George McFly in may have had more meaning than he ever knew. But the question is how much influence does keyword density really have in the search results that are “popped” to you?
I think we can all agree that proper keyword usage on a site plays a key role in how your site ranks for those keywords. But what is the best placement for these keywords? And how much is too much? When does it become keyword stuffing?
We’ll address these and other questions…after the break.
Just kidding, we’ll do it now.
What is the best placement for keywords on your site or article? Well, let me answer that by asking you this: What do you remember most when you read an article? The first and last paragraph, right? At least that’s how it is for me – and for Google, apparently. So when you’re wondering where to place your keywords, of course you want to have them spread throughout the content. But if you can, do something to make the first and last paragraph stand out. The h1, h2 and h3 headers are always dependable for this, as well as internal linking (if possible) or even just using bold type. That way you can use the keyword in several other places, but the places that stand out the most will basically be highlighted for Google.
How much keyword density is too much? That is actually a great question that it seems no one really knows for sure. The word on the street is that it can be as low as 3% and as high as 12%, with Yahoo and MSN being more tolerant of keyword stuffing than Google. I also found sites that were majorly stuffed with keywords (www.halloween.com, which was rightfully mentioned in the SEO Fail Blog for having over 21% keyword density for the keyword “Halloween”), but were not banned by Google. I guess they may still be penalized in their rankings, but that’s very hard to tell from the outside looking in. One thing I couldn’t find though is some good examples of pages getting banned from Google for keyword stuffing. In fact, I actually found one keyword stuffing experiment where keyword stuffing of up to 51% had no perceived effect on the PR of the page or the ranking for the tested keyword. So I thought I’d open that up in the comments section of this post. Got any good examples of keyword stuffing getting a page banned?
Bottom line: despite the vagueness of the limits on keyword density vs. keyword stuffing, I think it’s safe to say it’s always a matter of good practice. As long as your article or page flows naturally and is readable to the human eye, you’ll make friends with your readers as well as Google.
Oh, and just for your information, I have posted the keyword density for a couple of the keywords in this post just below:
Keyword: Keyword Density (1.13%)
Keyword: Keyword Stuffing (1.32%)
Keyword: Keyword (4.73%)

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do keywords came

It seems to come up with almost every child – the somewhat awkward yet vitally important question that every parent knows will one day be voiced. Although we aren’t in the business of educating youngsters about the origins of babies, we are in the business of helping SEO youngsters understand where keywords come from.
Let’s imagine we have just created a website where we want to promote web hosting companies as an affiliate. The site is designed just how we like it, and now we’re ready to begin driving some serious traffic. Although there are many different steps and processes involved in SEO success, the foundation is in the keywords. We need targeted traffic that is relevant to the products, services, or information on our site, so we need to choose keywords wisely.
Understanding this process and how we as “SEO storks” deliver the right keywords is an essential part of the optimization process. SEO for Firefox, a free Firefox add-on from SEOBook, provides the stork services we need. Through this tool we will be connected with the needed resources to truly know where quality keywords come from. Let’s use the example of our hosting site to understand the path of the SEO stork.
Go to the Firefox add-on page, download SEO for Firefox, restart your browser, and activate the add-on. Once the add-on is active, search for “web hosting” in Google, and you’ll see something like this:
Notice the links below the search bar. We will take a look at the most significant of these. As we understand each resource, our SEO stork will advance in his journey of delivering the proper keyword focus. Each resource will provide us with a new perspective, change of opinion, or new idea relating to keywords. In other words, watch and learn from the stork…
KW Research – This link takes you to SEOTools and gives a breakdown of daily search estimates for Google, Yahoo, and MSN on our keyword of choice and very similar keywords. From this tool, I can get estimates on each search engine for my keyword of choice, plus other closely related keywords. I see that “web hosting” is by far the most searched for term. The fact that my site doesn’t directly provide web hosting services might influence me to steer away from that phrase and consider different options listed below. …SEO stork arrives for pickup…

AW Sandbox - This link takes me to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Since we’ve decided to go against “web hosting,” we need new ideas. In order to get a better idea of what to focus on, I will choose 3 or 4 broadly related keyword phrases such as “compare web hosting”, “web hosting reviews”, and “rate web hosting.” These words would be more relevant to my site if I plan on marketing for hosting companies. I enter these phrases and the tool reports on exact and related terms. From this simple report, I can compare traffic on a broad range of keywords. At this point, we can discover that “compare web hosting” and “web hosting reviews” are relevant to our site and receive plenty of traffic. …SEO Stork takes flight…


Traffic Estimator- This tool shows me useful information on costs related to PPC campaigns. Once you’ve settled on a keyword phrase, this tool will give you great estimates on how much you should expect to spend on a PPC campaign surrounding that keyword. In this case, I could expect to spend $140 a day using “compare web hosting” as a primary phrase. …SEO Stork is cruising on course…

Trends – If nothing else, Google Trends helps you decide what to avoid. If we are trying to decide between two phrases, this tool will indicate the trends in search traffic. As shown below, the term “cheap web hosting” is on a decline whereas “business web hosting” seems to be more stable. …SEO Stork avoids a deadly collision with an airplane…

Insights-Here we can focus on quantities of searches relating to geographic locations, and potential alternatives with rising trends. Insights also displays other suggestions of possible keywords. If everything looks good up this point, we are well on our way to landing a great keyword phrase. …SEO stork comes in for landing…

Our flight is near completion. The remaining resources under the Google search bar are Sktool, Sponsored Results, 100, and CSV. Sktool is very similar to the Traffic Estimator, providing information on potential PPC campaign costs. Sponsored Results simply shows the sponsored results of the search. 100 shows the top 100 results rather than the default. CSV creates a comma separated value document with your results. Although all of these tools are helpful for other purposes, they do not provide the insight that the other tools give relating to keyword research.
As the SEO stork lands, let’s consider what we’ve learned. As we use each tool, we gain additional insight and information that helps us target proper keywords. And perhaps the most important thing to glean is we should base our keyword decisions on current search traffic, relevant information, and past statistics rather than guesswork. …SEO stork has safely delivered our keywords.
And that is where keywords come from.

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misspelled keywords good luck!

Ranking well for a popular keyword phrase is getting harder and harder these days. But did you know that about 10 million times a day someone misspells a keyword in their search? Normally to those poor saps I would say, “Hey, good luck with that!” But the truth is, more and more online companies are taking advantage of the misspelled keywords.
For example, if your website is selling office calendars, the average monthly search for “office calendars” is about 40,500. The term “office calenders” is searched about 1,300 times per month. What does this mean for you? Well, even though the misspelled term searches are significantly less (only 3% of the correctly spelled term’s search volume) you will not need to fight as hard to get to the top of this search, thus bringing in some extra traffic from those bad spellors that u may knot hav otherwize bin kounting on.
So what is the best way to optimize for these misspelled keywords? The first trick is to know what your options are for the possible misspellings. A great tool to use for this is the Seobook.com Typo Generator—although, in the 146 possibilities this tool gives for the word “Calendar,” they don’t even mention “Calender.” So, you will want to check out more than one source. Another source is checking the “100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English” from yourdictionary.com or other dictionary sites. Make sure to check the misspelled word’s estimated search traffic to see if it is worth optimizing for.
Next you’ll need to optimize for the misspelled term on your page. There are several ways of accomplishing this, but I believe one of the classiest methods is to simply post an article or blog post on your site that mentions different common misspellings of the desired term. You can’t base your entire SEO strategy on optimizing for misspellings. Google often times helps out poor spelling patrons showing the “Did you mean…” option above the search results.
Well, there you have it—a new arrow in your quiver. Just make sure to take some time to do a little research (Google AdWords keyword tool) before spending energy on the optimization. Often times, it’s hit or miss with these misspellings—so, good luck with that!

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matt cutts domain roundtable

Matt Cutts made an appearance today at the Domain Roundtable conference. Matt started things off with a few introductory comments, then spent most of the time answering questions from the audience and from questions that people sent in ahead of time.
Here are the highlights of what he discussed:
The primary litmus test for whether something is acceptable, ask yourself, “What is the regular user looking for?”
-Does it add value for the customer?
-Will they be happy to find this site?
-Is it relevant?
-Is the content unique?
He talked about how there are lots of great reasons to buy domains, but not as many domainers want to actually design and build out sites around the domains. He gave some examples of parked pages that don’t really add value, gmhs.com, earthday.org.
He mentioned ajaxian as a site that has great content even though their domain isn’t generic/premium. It’s a multi-author blog about all things AJAX.
Someone asked about duplicate content/stolen content. Matt said Google keeps track of when/where they first find content, and they do a pretty good job of rewarding the original source of the content and not the thieves’ version of the content. There was an attorney in the audience who was asking about DMCA requests and Matt referred us to the DMCA process with Google, and admitted that this stuff is outside his area of expertise.
When somebody asked about moving a site to a new domain, he recommended reading the recent post about moving a site on the Google Webmaster blog. He said people often overlook the suggestion to test the redirect with a small part of your site first (subdomain or directory), and it works smoothly and quickly, you will be fine to do the 301 redir on the whole site.
The question came up about whether it matters which TLD (top level domain) you’re using. For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a .net, .us, .info, etc. He said that TLD doesn’t matter–that’s the way Larry and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The algorithm doesn’t care where the page is located, it’s all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the end of answering this question he did admit that they might have started to look at particularly cheap (and spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs–or they might start considering TLD in their algorithm if they’re not already doing so.
Regarding interlinking between sites, he said it’s fine to interlink if the sites are related, but he said not to overdo it. When pressed, he said over 10 sites interlinking might be asking for trouble. He said it would also be ok to break out your network of sites and interlink sites within a certain category. The specific example was a network of local sites, and Matt said you could either have a single portal with links to all the geo-portals, or maybe interlink between all the various plumbing sites.
Matt mentioned that sites don’t automatically get pagerank just for existing. They need backlinks to get pagerank. Also, he said if you have a network of sites and add a bunch more sites, it’s like spreading the same amount of peanut butter across a bigger piece of bread. In that case, each site in the network gets a smaller share of the pagerank distribution.
On expired domains, Matt said Google tries to reset pagerank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links.
He said keywords in the domain carry weight with users, and for this reason, Google also gives some weight to a keyword in the URL and/or domain name.
I don’t have the question in my notes, but something prompted Matt to mention Google Ad Manager, which I wasn’t familiar with (who can keep up with Google’s products?). It’s an ad serving solution that’s free and lets you serve ads on your site. You can serve up adsense ads, but you don’t have to, or you can use Adsense as your backfill for any unsold inventory.
Matt suggested doing a site: search to check if a domain is indexed before buying the domain. He also talked briefly about webmaster tools and how to submit a reinclusion request if needed.
Matt was asked what is the best way to park your domains without ticking off Google. He replied that Google can detect any change in content as it recrawls the site, so it’s fine to park a domain with a simple PPC parked page or whatever, and then when you start building out the site, Googlebot will notice and start indexing the site as quickly as possible. He also made the obligatory recommendation for using nofollow for links on parked pages, “just to be safe,” and then he explained what nofollow does and how it is used.
He suggested reading and abiding by the webmaster quality guidelines.
He was asked about IP delivery and he said that IP delivery is not bad, but it is bad to cloak–serve up different content to Google than what everyone else sees. If you use IP delivery (for geotargeting content for example), you should simply geotarget the content to Googlebot, too.

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4 Tips to exchange links

In exchange links, there are some things that must be considered. Here are 4 tips to exchange links-style sibaho:

1. Apple to Apple or Orange to Orange. That is, the placement of links to match. Index Page (Home) vs. Index Page. Do not Index Page opponent Post Page (page post). That's not fair name, because it will provide a different quality backlink. I several times to ignore the invite friends to exchange links, because after my survey, were collected in a blogroll special post. But I realized, it certainly was not intentional element of the friends ...
2. Give and Take. Who took first pair of links. If you are invited to ultimately do not want, to stay deleted. If you are invited there is no response, confirm again, until the time limit considered, delete it. There are many other blogs kok invited to exchange links:)
3. Look forward, not now. Exchanging links is like investing. Do not dwell only on this blog that had a high Pagerank. It takes great effort and a high failure potential. Why not ask to exchange links with blog newbie but potentially in the future. In addition to easier, it also will train our intuition to see the potential of a blog:))
4. Friendship above all. If you do not want invited to exchange links, do not break the charcoal and then immediately left the blog. Ninety percent of the links that I put in a blogroll is not due to exchange links, but because of friendship from blogwalking activity. So quite confusing just someone once commented on our blog, next thing I knew immediately invited to exchange links.

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list-great-firefox-plugins-seo

I’m a fan of Firefox mainly for the additional functionality you get from using plugins. In fact, it’s always frustrating when I am on someone else’s computer, and I don’t have access to my own set of “tools” that I use on a daily basis. Simply put, if you aren’t using Firefox, you’re missing out on a more effective way to work.
Below is a list of some of my favorite SEO plugins. I have also included a short list of web developer plugins that have some crossover into SEO. I know there are other tools out there, so if you have some additional plugins you like to use, please add them in the comments!
Plugins Specifically for SEO
SEO for Firefox
This one is a standard tool for most of the SEOs that I personally know. This plugin gives you a ton of additional information when you do a search on Google. You can see a site’s PageRank, age, Yahoo links and other data that can help you when analyzing your competitors.
It also gives you access to a handy little tool called SEO XRay. This sub-tool will show you the meta information, H tag use and internal and external links on a page. There are so many ways to use SEO for Firefox, it’s no wonder that it’s a standard tool! Aaron Wall (SEOBook) did a great job with this one!
Get it here: SEO for Firefox
Rank Checker
This is another great tool from Aaron Wall. If all you want to do is a quick ranking update, Rank Checker is the way to go. This tool is usually quick, and you can export your findings to a CSV document if you want to compare them with previous rankings.
As with any rank checking tool, it is not always 100% accurate. However, it is still a great free way to keep up on all of your keywords.
Get it here: Rank Checker
SearchStatus
Do you ever get tired of the Google Toolbar? If you’re like me, the only reason you really use the Google Toolbar is to find out the PageRank of the page. Well, with SearchStatus, you can get PageRank, Alexa Rank, Moz Rank and Compete Rank in your status bar. There are many other things that this tool does, but that’s what I mainly use it for.
Get it here: SearchStatus
SEO Link Analysis
I consider this plugin to be one of the essentials in my toolbox. This tool works when you go to the Yahoo Site Explorer or into your Google Webmaster account looking for back links. Rather than just seeing what sites are linking back, you can see the anchor text and the PageRank of the page linking back. You can also find out if the link is still there or has a no follow attribute.
This tool is great for spying on your competition. Go to the Yahoo Site Explorer and you will very quickly find out what keywords your competition is targeting. This makes it great for site analysis and competitive analysis.
Get it here: SEO Link Analysis
Helpful Web Development Plugins
If you’re going to do SEO, you need to know some of the basics of web development as well. Because of this, I thought it might be helpful to list a few plugins that you can use mainly for web development, but also have a crossover into SEO.
Firebug
I have loved this plugin ever since I first found it. As an SEO, I find that I am constantly helping to fix web development problems as part of the job. This tool will let you go through a site and find the different elements so you can see where the problems are in the HTML or CSS of the page. You can also make changes to a live site to see what would happen if you tweaked certain things.
Get it here: Firebug
HTML Validator
By having your HTML valid, your site is more likely to look the same in the different browsers. This tool will show you where the problems are in your code that could be causing inconsistencies from browser to browser. It also gives you suggestions on how to fix them.
Get it here: HTML Validator
Web Developer
This tool has similar functionality to some of the other tools above and is very handy. I use it frequently to turn off JavaScript so I can see how a site is handling its main navigation. Most web developers that I know of use this plugin.
Get it here: Web Developer
Add to the List!
Now it is your turn. Do you have some favorites that I did not include on this list? If so, please add them in the comments below!

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your-conten-link-thirsty

Lets face it. Link building is drab work. It’s the kind of work most of us like to hand off to the”‘next guy.” Nevertheless, I firmly advocate its role in Search Engine Optimization. Google’s key indicator of the “good,” “better,” and “best” websites depends on number of backlinks, and where those links are coming from.
I assume you, the reader, have already figured this out. An SEO firm without offering link building strategies to its clients might as well pack up. A site with no links is like a telephone pole with no wires—useless. Consequently, instead of asking “if” link building should be done, online marketers are always asking “how” it will be done. What’s the best strategy?
A relative of mine created an informative website, after research, about “Good Security Questions.” That was over two years ago. The site lacked all the bells and whistles that come with newer web 3.0, but it was content-rich, and more importantly, there was a niche market available who needed the information the site provided.
He didn’t know much about Search Engine Optimization. He didn’t think much about keyword research or quality link building. I spoke to him recently about the results he’s had lately. His site now ranks #1 for “security questions.” He also told me some larger corporate websites such as American Express, Delta, Prudential, and ING Direct recently changed their security questions to match the list of questions he had written on his website. People are also beginning to link to his site and use his content at the cost of little to no SEO effort on his part.
His results reveal an old rule that’s been around ever since the first neanderthal man showed his prehistoric friends how to make fire. If you want people to listen to you, say something they want to hear. Thus, before you spend time and money developing an extensive link building strategy, first, provide that your content is “link-thirsty”—make it useful, interesting, timely, or outrageous (see some of Adam’s tips about Buzz Marketing)!
Even better, include “quality content” as the first priority on your link building plan. Indirectly, appropriating your content (appropriate: suitable or fitting for a particular purpose, person, occasion) is, by far, the most successful link building strategy on the planet. If done right, link building will work for you—no more mindless directory submissions. At a bonus, you’ll get traffic from relevant sources–which means higher conversion rates. Here are a few tips to appropriate your content (This stuff isn’t breaking news…just common sense principles of which many companies fail to apply):
• Research and know your topic. This shouldn’t be difficult because you are already a guru of your industry.
• Be informative and as detailed as possible. (Word of caution: Quantity is good as long as you know how to present it in a comfortable, readable manner. Use lists, headings, and varied amounts of italicizing and bolding. Remember, people like to learn, but they don’t like to read)
• Link out to your sources. Google looks for links on your site as extra avenues to gather further information on your topic. Don’t be a dead end on the web.
• Make lists and tables. People like to gather information fast. Tables make it easy to compare items. You could even provide an objective microsite comparing your product with your competitors’ products (this only works if you, honestly, have the best product/service on the market).
• Tell stories and be narrative. This adds flavor to your content. Write with flamboyant, playful, or exciting language. Don’t always be so serious. People want to know there is a human being behind your content and your business.
• Be original. Are you telling something people already know? If it’s already known, take a new twist or add your own opinion. (Don’t copy content from other sites! First, this is plagiarism and second, Google doesn’t like duplicate content).
• Involve Users. Yes, you will need to jump on the Web 3.0 bandwagon. Provide means to comment, write reviews, vote on items, etc.
• Check your spelling and grammar. Nothing is better at killing your credibility than poor writing. Hint: Get a professional editor to check your work.

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