Advanced Tips to research Hidden Gems and Rising Keywords

For any SEO Campaign, finding keywords and key phrases in your niche is the central point. Traffic may vary by the keywords from thousands to millions visitors for your website. Keyword Research is the first step in order to rank on juicy and most competitive keywords and it has to be said, it is incomplete if you do not know how to research keyword, which tools and tips to be used in entire keyword research process.

I recently talked on How Small Business can grow up with Google Knowledge Graph and other recent updates which suggests that a traditional keyword research is going to shift in semantic based keyword research process in near future. We still use old school methods to research keywords and it’s no wonder that it is still working.

We can enhance this process and take in few more steps in the keyword analysis to make it more progressive. It couldn’t be new for you. The keyword tools used in this article are well known and conversant for you but, the real values hidden behind these keyword identifier tools are truly noteworthy.
Let’s start with a…  

Method to find Hidden Gem Keywords:

(If your website or store is newly launched, please don’t try this method) 

Prior to use this method, your website should be indexed on Google and by now ranked on some top search keywords. The next step is keyword analysis and you can collect some of the new keywords for search engine ranking campaign or onsite targeting keywords list. 

With this method, you can also find more keywords for the content creation or link building campaign to increase your website visibility on the Google or any other search engines.  

Ok, let’s follow these simple 10 steps to find hidden gems keywords,

1. Open www.keywordspy.com (as I said, you might be aware of this tool).
2. Enter your domain (e.g. example.com).
3. Select country (e.g. United States).
4. Access “Organic Keywords (#)” tab.
5. Here, it’s a limited list of keywords you can view (you can upgrade to access more keywords).
6. Choose any keyword and Click on "kw" button.
7. Go for it. These are the list of Hidden Gem Keywords.
8. Copy all keywords into Excel. (You can use export to excel options).
9. Filter all by higher search volumes.
10. That’s it. You got a list of hidden gems keywords (see below image).

Let’s take an example of two keywords highlighted in above image, 

1. "link" – Huge search volumes and it’s  on 17th so, example.com can target this term until it ranks on first page of Google.
2. "link text" – this is already on first page, to get more benefit from the search volumes, you should target this keyword to rank first.

Let’s hope it would be clear for you to know the hidden gems keywords I was talking about.

Finally, you can use these queries in your website content or start link building campaign to optimize your site for these new search terms.

Let’s get into one more tips to find the keywords, which are in trend for any topic/industry.

How to find Rising Search Terms:

We always have confusion over a selection of the primary search query, so that we find more keywords based on it. It’s difficult to determine a keyword that is perfect for the campaign. Using Google AdWords and other keyword tools, we can find more search queries. 

Let’s say we have successfully picked some keywords based on higher search volumes and low competition but, do you think that it is perfect? It may or may not be. It depends on the business or industry you are serving for. Following a trend to the specific business or industry will give you more search queries which are latest in talk. Now, the difficulty is where to find these trend specific search queries?

Google Insight for Search is a perfect solution to find Trend Specific search queries. Based on time, location and the terms you haven entered – you can search Top and Rising keywords on any topic.

Enter a search term, e.g. I have entered, “learn seo” to find keywords which are in trend, specific to a location and a time period.

You can also find countries more interested in learning Search Engine Optimization:

Now, it’s time to what we are waiting for…to see the most Rising and Top keywords related to “learn seo” – these are the trendy keywords you can use for your onsite and offsite seo campaign.

You can use filter to find rising search terms to a specific time ranges and location.

It’s your turn now – let's share your views...

Read More

Is a Contact form in your website converting?

You may have walked through many Contacts us forms, which is a mainstream of most websites. Regardless of you own an ecommerce website selling products, a website offering services etc. This is one of the most priority areas you generally found in top or bottom of any website close to the links of ‘about us’ or other essential page navigation.

The improvement directly to the Conversion Rate starts with its placement on site. It is vital where you place a link or button to contact us form – either from index page or other pages. It should be easily available on the site. Getting tons of traffic to the site is not only a solution, the solution lies on converting that traffic in to more inquiries, sales, downloads, and quotes or whatsoever your goal is. So, the conversion rate optimization should be an ingredient of your SEO strategy or website marketing today.

image credit.

Prior to design the elements or fields for the contact form, I recommend you to do some research and analysis using the records of your existing customers by analyzing the data of what they prefer to fill out most and what they usually ignored or missed. If it is a first time you are crafting a form, then define your goals that what information you are looking from the visitors, less is good!

Here are some steps to follow if you really want to improve the conversion rate of contact forms in your e-commerce site. Already, begin to focus on the most essential information that can attract your visitors. Then put your contact form on a screen, size matters a lot.

• Make sure that your form has a logical structure.
• It is also important to have a sober and functional.
• It is also convenient to reduce the cognitive effort of the user through reducing the number of interactions as it fills the contact form.
• Remember that it is important to inform the user in real time on his mistakes while filling the form (filling successful or not informing the wrong fields). In case he has made mistakes, it is handy to save the correct data that has been typed.
• Do not forget to offer visitor a tool tip for it can easily and correctly fill out the form (suggest examples of responses).
• It'll just take into account two important points: that of caring for your confirmation message, and the test by filling yourself.
• This is most important – the privacy disclosure statement that you ensure that data you collect from will be kept on secured pace and not being shared.
• Recently, I read in a post that reducing bounce rate help improving conversion rate too.

What the other reasons you think can improve a conversion rate? Please share via comments.

Read More

SEO Audit for a Newly Launched Online Store

At the same time, I was tweeting to @SEOGenX; I found an announcement of launching a new online store as you can see in below embed tweet,

We just launched our online store strictlyglutenfree.com check out the products page for all the launch deals
— Strictly Gluten Free (@StrictlyGF) June 5, 2012

I thought I have to check out the store with a hope of finding a good deal. So, I navigated through Strictlyglutenfree.com

Strictlyglutenfree.com is a store selling Gluten free healthy snacks, like Pizza, Pastas, Candy and some more products for diet. The attention-rabbing and eye catchy part was their slogan, “Living Life Healthy!” It has not been said that the site was designed nicely but, I personally like its simplicity, which is best for the kind of products they currently serving for.

Little improvement to this website in all fronts, designing, navigation, conversion, optimization for search engine and social networks and of course local listing can help out this website to be a familiar brand for diet snacks.

This is not a case study; it is shown here as an example of how it has been made as a SEO-friendly website to improve its traffic, ranking and conversion.

As a successful SEO specialist at SEOGenX, I would like to take this opportunity to give some guidance, in order that it helps all the ways to my blog readers and the folks who are in the beginning stage of learning SEO inside the SEOGenX or pursuing training from other resources.

Let’s start with its design first,

• As a potential buyer, I certainly prefer to check out the products first and assuming that I can find it directly on the home page but, after accessing Strictlyglutenfree.com, I can’t find any product. On the other hand, there is no side bar navigation available to view products and no contextual internal pages links on index page to go through the Pizza or Pasta. So, I am suggesting navigation or highlighting some of the products with images directly on home page as you can check  Strictlyglutenfree.com for what I am suggesting.
• Next is its display resolution that is not currently fit to the browser (Google Chrome).
• Required more content on home page with an adjustment to the current position and size of the banners.
• Missing Fevicon.

I need some basic details of the website prior to start auditing next couple of items for on page SEO to figure out the most priority issues and suggestions.

With help of some frequently used SEO tools, I extracted the following details:

• Age of website: 1 Year, 2 Months, 22 days.
• PagerRank: 1
• Alexa: 6,326,622
• Pages indexed by Google: 15
• Pages indexed by Bing/Yahoo: 0
• Google Backlinks: 0
• Yahoo/Bing Backlinks: 0
• Alexa backlinks: 179

As we have improved a site structure quite a lot, it’s time now to optimize some areas for making it easily accessible to major search engines, to do this first check out, Is this site in Google?

Let’s copy ‘info:strictlyglutenfree.com’, paste it into Google.com and yes, it is! Half of battle wins!

Just to look at the following chart to see the organic search queries on which, Strictlyglutenfree.com is top. It’s noticeable that there is no ranking on Google; it’s only ranked on Bing/Yahoo.

Accessibility, Indexation and on page SEO are the next couple of items a website needs to be passed out first.

• Hope this website verified on Google Webmaster Tools. If it has been verified, then it can help webmaster to track crawling and sitemap issues. 404 (page not found), 301 (redirects permanently) are few examples of crawling errors that need to be resolved first.
• The loading time is also an important factor for ranking, so optimize it according to what found in YSlow and Google Page Speed result to get optimum speed.

Let’s insight into the on page areas to make sure the website has no issues and follows the guidelines of Google,

Title Tag
The Title Tag is too short: 42 characters.
Should be 64 characters max.
The Title Tag has the correct number of words: 6.

Meta Description
The Meta Description is too long: 177 characters.
Should be 160 characters max.
The Meta Description has the correct number of words: 27.

Text in Body Tag
The website text is too short: 157 words.
Text length should be more than 400 words.

Links Tags
Less than 10 internal links found.
You should link to more than 10 internal pages.
Less than 5 outbound links found.
You should link to good, relevant pages.

HTML Errors in the Source Code
Not valid: 27 Errors.

Headings  Tags
No h1 Tags found.
No h2 Tags found.
No h3 Tags found.

Images img Tags
106 img Tags found.
100 img Tags without ALT attribute.
106 img Tags without TITLE attribute.

HTML Microdata
No HTML Microdata found.

Meta Keywords
The Meta Keywords has 23 words and Google ignores it :-)
Filesize HTML source code
File size is 19.94 Kilobyte.
Up to 32 KB is great.

Code / Text ratio
Text rate: 4.73 %
Text Rate should be higher than 25 %.
Code size: 19453 Byte, Text size: 965 Byte
336 HTML elements found

Website speed
It took 0.42 seconds to load the website.
The website speed is good when it took less than 2 seconds to load.
Server location: USA / California.

Canonical Tag / hreflang Tag
No Canonical Tag found.

This is an end of primary analysis of design, content, accessibility, and on page SEO. Off page optimization / building links and about optimizing this site for major social media, you can find in our upcoming post.

Leave your comments if something that I have missed to complete an above basic SEO analysis.

Read More

How Small Business can grow with Google Knowledge Graph

Introduction to Google Knowledge Graph…

I like to do travelling and find new places, to meet some new people, playing with new things and so on. So, you think that why am I talking about this. Let’s pick up three words – places, people, and things from above and do a search for your favorite place, people or things on Google.

You may have noticed brief information about what you have searched for place, people or thing, which you can see exactly on a right side of the Google SERP. If you can’t see, it means your search query is not popular or it may not be in the records of Google Knowledge Graph. This new enhancement to Google Search was rolled out by Google on 16th May, 2012 and named as “Knowledge Graph”. 

Search your favorite People, Places and Things…

Knowledge Graph, a name itself says a lot. It helps individuals, students, businesses in many ways. For an individual it’s an instant solution to search information of the place they want to visit, people they want to get more information about their education, family, background, and the things etc.

In addition, Knowledge Graph will also suggest you more places, people or things associated with your search together with Google plus profile.

Small Business SEO and Google Knowledge Graph…

Let’s know more the concept of Knowledge Graph and how it can be used in optimizing website for small business,

Getting potential customer has always been a primary goal for any business. There have been lots of efforts and practices to put on marketing and advertising. SEO is one of the most promising ways to get traffic from search engines directly to your website if it ranked on top.

People’s interaction with search engine produces three kinds of queries, transactional, informational and navigational – find more insight on these queries here, Chapter 2 of Beginner’s Guide to SEO by SEOMoz.

Types of Search Queries (Click image to enlarge):

Google Knowledge Graph is basically a result of an information query. Your website can be seen on an informational query relevant to your business; you can find such queries through Google Adword Keyword Tool or Related search queries directly from Google Web Search and optimize your website.

Increasing in overall search volumes to a specific query (place, people and things) which is also associated with your brands, products, or services will help your website to be seen on that particular query in line with the result of Knowledge Graph.

Next Generation of Search starts with Knowledge Graph …

With this enhancement to search, what exactly is the Google looking for? It seems that this is an experiment put into practiced by Google to see how their LSI (Semantic Search) System will work if it will be entirely implemented to search algorithm in the future. Above is just an assumption made on the basis of recent announcement by Google on Semantic search – a replacement to the existing keyword based search.

The post is not being ended here; we need your feedback on how Knowledge Graph can boost a visibility of a website...

Happy Searching!

Read More

Have you refreshed SEO Strategy of your website?

The key principal of any search engine is to offer relevant, fresh and fast results. On a competitive search query, Google delivers you millions and even billions of search results. These results are not unique and it should not be. It may change according to the freshness and relevancy of search. There are also different segments of Searches in Google like Web, Images, Video, Blog, News, Recipes, Shopping and more. Collectively it’s known as universal search results. Google is constantly updating their algorithm of such segments to provide enhanced results. This post is not about Google Search – it’s all about SEO strategy that needed to be changed or improved according to the updates.

No one knows the exact factors upsetting your site to rank well in Search engine on a specific term. Google has their own guidelines and starter guide for SEO that provides you some basic information about SEO, tips and tools.

 

Building a powerful SEO strategy means to look constantly into the updates that Google has already made and intended to launch some more in near future. Content is still king and it’s first to think about for creating a strategy for SEO. If content is king then Link is queen – building links means to build an authority. The days have gone to apply an old school SEO strategy, which was typically stuffing keywords in title and Meta, submitting your site to tons of directories and distributing an article to article syndication sites, etc. These will definitely loose a trust of your site by Google and I am sure either you or me do not want from Google to penalize our website.

The intention of this post is for you to be familiar with UPDATES that Google has already made and the updates which are coming soon...

The Update is in center point of this post….!

Key updates by Google till date:

• Fresh results
• Authorship
• Page layout algorithm
• Better title in search results
• SPYW - Search plus your World
• Rich Snippets
• Search Preview

Implementing or following all above updates will not just help your website to rank well in Google, but also it will help your existing pages (indexed or ranked on Google) to get higher click through rates. When a potential visitor will come, search something and find your site with rich snippets in Google search results page, with better title and freshness indication into description, I am sure it will surely encourage a visitor to click. Another way that can encourage is a Search Preview (a thumbnail view of the web page). It displays a layout of your page. Having an attractive layout matters a lot and it help engaging a visitor to look at your site for more insight in what you are offerings.

Updates that are in queue…

• Overly Optimized
• Semantic Search

There are two updates; we are all waiting see their effect in SEO, overly optimized and Semantic Search.

Semantic Search…

Google has already cleaned up their SERP using Google Panda by penalizing sites that have duplicate content. It was introduced on Feb 2010. This was the part of their goal of offering better results. Google is continuing in their mission and coming up with these two new historical updates will change SEO that it looks today.

Semantic search means meaningful search. Based on related query, synonyms etc. – Google will provide meaningful results. E.g. Ecommerce is a short term of Electronic Commerce. If you search for “history of ecommerce”, the results will also include “history of electronic commerce”. Until, the concept of Semantic Search introduced, only human understands that these two terms have same meaning. Thanks to Google and we are waiting to see more meaningful results enabled with Semantic Search on some complicated search terms.

Overly optimized…

This is one of the historical update to come in Google Search. It’s not yet confirmed, just announced by Matt Cutts. It is difficult to predict or figure out the areas that Google is going to penalize or consider as over optimization. Duplicate content has been already punished by Google Panda update. So, what’s next? Is it associated with Link? If yes, then the Link Exchanges will be first that Google may target this time.

These two updates definitely change the process of SEO that currently followed by many SEO agencies and individuals.

Let’s hope for the best!

Read More