How to Boost your SEO with Google Adwords

Many advertisers use Google AdWords as their major PPC network. However, in addition to using AdWords for getting paid traffic to your site, it can also be used for SEO. Here are some ideas how you can use AdWords for SEO.

1 For Keyword Research
The most valuable use of AdWords for SEO is to research keywords. Keywords are the basis of any SEO campaign and even if you are an expert in your niche, you should always research keywords simply because users frequently search for quite unexpected keywords and keyphrases you as an expert will never think of. Needless to say, what matters most for high rankings is which keywords your target audience is searching for, not which keywords you as an expert think are most popular in a particular niche.

In order to find what users are searching for, you need a keyword research tool. It is true that there are many special (free and paid) keyword research tools but Google AdWords Keyword Tool is light years ahead of them all.

It is simple to use AdWords to research keywords. You can either enter the URL of your site or put in some seed keywords, the tool will then automatically generate a whole bunch of suggested keywords. Look at the results and shortlist all the keywords that seem relevent and have a decent global search volume.

You may want to rank well for ALL the generated keywords, but its best to focus all your efforts on a selected few. The idea now is to find keywords that are relatively easy to optimize and yet have a decent search volume. These would be the keywords with the least compitetion in Google. Go to Google.com and enter each of your short listed keywords (one at a time). It is best if you search for the exact phrase, so surround your keyword with double quotes. Note how many web results there are for each of the phrases. Now that you have collected the 'Number of web results' for each keyword, calculate competition ratio by divding it's 'Global search volume' by the 'Number of web results'. The keywords with the higher ratios are the easier ones to optimize.

You can now start a SEO campaign for your keywords however you'll see next, it might be much wiser to start an AdWords campaign instead.

2 To Ensure that the Keywords You Have Picked Convert Well

After you have picked your keywords, you need to verify if these keywords really work for you – i.e. if they convert properly. No matter how precise you've been when picking your keywords, if you don't test them in practice, you can never know for sure if they work well or don't. You can pick lucrative keywords with high global search volume and low levels of competition and still end nowhere.

For instance, for this website - webconfs.com we could try optimizing for the keyword "Search Engine Optimization". It could take a year or so with a LOT of effort to reach the first page on Google for "Search Engine Optimization” and still one can never be sure this will happen.

However, let's pretend that this happens – We manage to top Google for "Search Engine Optimization” after a year of hard SEO work. To our greatest disappointment, even the first place for "Search Engine Optimization” on Google did'nt bring the expected results because the bounce rate for this particular keyword turned out to be very high. Since we do not provide SEO Services a lot of people reaching us via "Search Engine Optimization" may NOT be getting what they're looking for. Instead, lesser popular keywords, such as "SEO Tips” or "SEO Guide” might have lower bounce rates and may actually perform better than "Search Engine Optimization” did for us.

The result is not surprising but the price paid is. If we had launched an AdWords campaign, it would have saved a lot of trouble. We could have spent $20-50 on AdWords for "Search Engine Optimization” and it would have taken us a week or less to figure that the bounce rate for this keyword is very high and it makes no sense to do organic SEO for it. These $20-50 on AdWords would have spared a year of wasted SEO efforts.

3 For Getting a Better CTR with Your Existing Rankings


In addition to keyword research, AdWords is a valuable tool for getting a better CTR (Click Thru Rate) with your existing rankings. You might rank well for a given keyword, get a lot of traffic, and still be unable to monetize this traffic because your CTR is low. The reasons for this might be various but inadequate title and description could be a very possible reason.

AdWords can also help you get better CTR with your existing rankings. For instance, if you run ad AdWords campaign and you are satisfied with the conversion/performance, you might want to keep changing your ad title and description until you feel you have reached the maximum CTR for your keywords.

Sure, it might take you a couple of tries till you find the winning combination of a title and a description and you might even lower your CTR in the process but once you find this magical combination of a title and description, just copy them as the title and description for your page in order to maximize your organic search CTR as well.

4 For Geographic Targeting
One more good use of AdWords for SEO is geotargeting. If you bid on traffic from many geographic locations, you can use Google Analytics to compare how different locations convert. It is quite natural to have significant discrepancies in the conversions for the same keyword among the countries.

When you go to Google Analytics and see which countries are converting best, you can invest more effort in them. For instance, you can create local pages for these countries or target the geo-specific keywords with exceptionally good conversion rates.

AdWords is a really valuable tool not only for advertisers. It started as a tool for advertisers but its use is not restricted to them alone. For many publishers and SEO experts AdWords is the most valuable tool because even a moderate AdWords campaign can give you valuable insights and save you a lot of time and money to optimize for words, which don't work for you.

How to Optimize your Website for Mobile Search

It is not only web designers and developers, who need to adapt to webcomake changes to their strategies and tactics, if they want to capture the lucrative mobile search market. Mobile search is a constantly growing segment of the market, which is good news. However, mobile search has its own rules and they are kind of different from the rules of traditional desktop search. This is why if you don't want to miss mobile searchers, you need to adapt to their requirements. Here are some very important rules to consider when optimizing for mobile search:
1 Mobile Searchers Use Shorter Keyphrases/Keywords

Mobile users search for shorter keyphrases, or even just for keywords. Even mobile devices with QWERTY keyboards are awkward for typing long texts and this is the reason why mobile searchers usually are very brief in their search queries. Very often the search query is limited to only 2 or even 1 words. As a result, if you don't rank well for shorter keyphrases (unfortunately, they are also more competitive), then you will be missing a lot of mobile traffic.

2 Mobile Search Is Mainly Local Search

Mobile users search mostly for local stuff. In addition to shorter search keyphrases, mobile searchers are also locally targeted. It is easy to understand - when a user is standing in the street and is looking for a place to dine, he or she is most likely looking for things in the neighborhood, not in another corner of the world. Searches like “pizza 5th Avenue” are quite popular, which makes local search results even more important to concentrate on.
3 Current Data Rules in Mobile Search

Sports results, news, weather, financial information are among the most popular mobile search categories. The main topics and niches mobile users prefer are kind of limited but again, they revolve around places to eat or shop in the area, sports results, news, weather conditions, market information, and other similar topics where timing and location are key. If your site is in one of these niches, then you really need to optimize it because if your site is not mobile-friendly chances are you are losing visitors. You could even consider having two separate versions of your site – one for desktop searchers and one for mobile searchers.
4 In Mobile Search, Top 10 Is Actually Top 3

Users hate to scroll down long search pages or hit Next, Next, Next. Desktop searchers aren't fond of scrolling endless pages either but in mobile search the limitations are even more severe. A page with 10 search results fits on the screen of a desktop but on a mobile device it might be split into 2 or more screens. Therefore, in mobile search, it is not Top 10, it is more Top 4, or even Top 3 because only the first 3 or 4 positions are on the first page and have a higher chance to attract the user's attention without having to go to the next page.
5 Promote Your Mobile-Friendly Site

Submit your site to major mobile search engines, mobile portals, and directories. It is great if your visitors come from Google and the other major search engines but if you want to get even more traffic, mobile search engines, mobile portals, and directories are even better. For now these mobile resources work great to bring mobile traffic, so don't neglect them. Very often a mobile user doesn't search with Google, but goes to a portal he or she knows. If your site is listed with this portal, the user will come directly to you from there, not from a search engine. The case with directories is similar – i.e. if you are optimizing the site of a pizza restaurant, then you should submit it to all directories where pizza restaurants and restaurants in general for your location are listed.

6 Follow Mobile Standards

Mobile search standards are kind of different and if you want your site to be spiderable, you need to comply with them. Check the guidelines of W3C to see what mobile standards are. Even if your site doesn't comply with mobile standards, it will still be listed in search results but it will be transcoded by the search engine and the result could be pretty shocking to see. Transcoders convert sites to a mobile format but this is not done in a sophisticated manner and the output might be really unbelievable – and everything but mobile-friendly.
7 Don't Forget Meta.txt

Meta.txt is a special file, where you briefly describe the contents of your site and point the user agent to the most appropriate version for it. Search engine spiders directly index the meta.txt file (provided it is located in the root directory), so even if the rest of your site is not accessible, you will still be included in search results. Meta.txt is similar to robots.txt in desktop search but it also has some similarity with metatags because you can put content it it (as you do with the Description and Keywords metatags). The format of the meta.txt file is colon delimited (as is the format of robots.txt). Each field in the file has the following syntax form <fieldname>:<value>. One of the advantages of meta.txt is that it is easily parsed by humans and search engines.
8 No Long Pages for Mobile Searchers

Use shorter texts because mobile users don't have the time to read lengthy pages. We already mentioned that mobile searchers don't like lengthy keyphrases. Well, they like lengthy pages even less! This is why, if you can make a special, shorter mobile version of your site, this would be great. Short pages don't mean that you should skip your keywords, though. Keywords are really vital for mobile search, so don't exclude them but don't keyword stuff, either.
9 Predictive Search Is Popular With Mobile Searchers

Use phrases, which are common in predictive search. Predictive search is also popular with mobile searchers because it saves typing effort. This is why, if your keywords are among the common predictive search results, this seriously increases your chances to be found. It is true that predictive search keywords change from time to time and you can't always follow them but you should at least give it a try.
10 Preview Your Site on Mobile Devices

Always check how your site looks on a mobile device. With the plethora of devices and screen sizes it is not possible to check your site on absolutely every single device you can think of, but if you can check it at least on a couple of the most important ones, this is more than nothing. Even if you manage to get visitors from mobile search engines, if your site is shown distorted on a mobile screen, these visitors will run away. Transcoding is one reason why a site gets distorted, so it is really a good idea to make your site mobile-friendly instead of to rely on search engines to transcode it and make it a design nightmare in the process.

Mobile search is relatively new but it is a safe bet that it will get a huge boost in the near future. If you are uncertain whether your particular site deserves to be optimized for mobile devices or not, use AdWords Keyword Research Tool to track mobile volumes for your particular keywords. If the volumes are high, or if a particular keyword is doing remarkably well in the mobile search segment, invest more time and effort to optimize for it.

SEO Musts for Local Business

The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighborhood. For local businesses getting a global reach is a waste of resources. Instead, you should concentrate on the local community. You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can go local with SEO:
1 Use your location in your keywords.

The first trick is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important keyphrase should be “car insurance London” because this keyphrase contains your business and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in London in particular.
2 Use your location in metatags

Metatags matter for search engines and you shouldn't miss to include your location, together with your other keywords in the metatags of the pages of your site. Of course, you must have your location in the keywords you use in the body text because otherwise it is a bit suspicious when your body text doesn't have your location as a keyword but your tags are stuffed with it.
3 Use your location in your body text

Keywords in the body text count a lot and you can't afford to skip them. If your web copy is optimized for “car insurance” only, this won't help you rank well with “car insurance London”, so make sure that your location is part of your keywords.
4 Take advantage of Google Places and Yahoo Local

Google Places and Yahoo Local are great places to submit to because they will include you in their listings for a particular location.
5 Create backlinks with your location as anchor text

It could be a bit tricky to get organic backlinks with your location as anchor text because some keywords with location don't sound very natural – for instance, “car insurance London” isn't grammatically correct and you will hardly get an organic inline link with it but you can use it in the Name field to comment on blogs. If the blog is dofollow, you will still get a backlink with anchor text that helps for SEO.
6 Get included in local search engine

Global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots of traffic but depending on your location, local search engines might be the real golden mine. A local search engine could mean a search engine for the area (though it is not very likely to have regional search engines) or more likely for your country. For instance, Baidu is a great option, if you are selling on the Chinese market.
7 Get listed in local directories

In addition to local search engines, you need to try your luck with local directories, too. You might think that nobody reads directory listings but this isn't exactly so. For instance, Yellow Pages are one of the first places where people look when searching for a local vendor for a particular product.
8 Run locally-targeted ad campaigns

One of the most efficient ways to drive targeted, local traffic to your site is with the help of locally-targeted ad campaigns. PPC ads and classifieds are the two options that work best – at least for most webmasters.
9 Do occasional checks of your keywords

Occasionally checking the current search volume of your keywords is a good idea because shifts in search volumes are quite typical. Needless to say, if people don't search for “car insurance London” anymore because they have started using other search phrases and you continue to optimize for “car insurance London”, this is a waste of time and money. Also, keep an eye on the keywords your competitors use – this will give you clue which keywords work and which don't.
10 Use social media

Social media can drive more traffic to a site than search engines and for local search this is also true. Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networking sites have a great sales potential because you can promote your business for free and reach exactly the people you need. Local groups on social sites are especially valuable because the participants there are mainly from the region you are interested in.
11 Ask for reviews and testimonials

Client reviews and testimonials are a classical business instrument and these are like letters of recommendation for your business. However, as far as SEO is concerned, they could have another role. There are review sites, where you can publish such reviews and testimonials (or ask your clients to do it) and this will drive business to you. Some of these sites are Yelp and Merchant Circle but it is quite probable that there are regional or national review sites you can also post at.
12 Create separate pages for your different locations

When you have business in several locations, this makes the task a bit more difficult because you can't possibly optimize for all of them – you can't have a keyphrase such as “car insurance London, Berlin, Paris, New York”. In this case the solution is to create separate pages for your different locations. If your locations span the globe, you can also create different sites on different, country-specific domains (i.e. uk.co for GB, .de for Germany, etc.) but this is only reasonable to do, if your business is truly multinational. Otherwise, just a separate page for each of your locations will do.

These simple tips how to optimize your site for local searches are a must, if you rely on the local market. Maybe you are already doing some of them and you know what works for you and what doesn't. Anyway, if you haven't tried them all, try them now and see if this will have a positive impact on your rankings (and your business) or not.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

It is always a good idea to be updated on the factors that search engines use to determine search results and rank websites. SEOMoz released a very detailed document titled “Search Engine Ranking Factors V2”, which outlines the views of 34 SEO experts regarding how Google’s algorithm works. Below you will find the Top 5 positive and negative factors on the study:

Top 5 Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site
5. Age of Site

Top 5 Negative Factors

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content on the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam sites
4. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Page

Search Engine Optimization SEO Checklist

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Checklist Google SEO Checklist Googe Ranking Factors

SEO Factor
Brief SEO Checklsit Information

Keyword in Domain Name/URL

MainKeyword(s) should always appear in the URL and if possible in thedomain name.

Keyword in Title

Main keyword should be as close to the beginning as possible. Don't stuff your title though! Don't use special characters.

Keyword in Meta Description Tag

Use1 to 2 reasonable sentences in your meta description and use yourkeywords at least once.

Keywords Meta Tag

Main keyword should be as close to the beginning as possible. Don'tuse more than about 10 keywords. Don't repeat any single word more thantwice!

Keyword Density in the body

There is no recommended or perfect keyword density, but don't use more than 15% to 20% per main keyword.

Keywords in header tags

Most important isH1, then follow H2, and H3. The others are proably not that important.

Keyword proximity

The closer the keywords are, the better they might rank.

Order of key phrases

Try to order your keywords so that they form key phrases that might be queried for more often in search engines.

Keyword frequency

The most important main keyword should be repeated more than the others. However, don't spam the keyword in nonsensical points.

Keyword prominence

The earlier the main keyword appears on the page, the higher its relevance.

Keyword in ALT and TITLE tags

Describe the image and if possible with one of the main keywords, however, never spam the ALT tag, this is a common SEO mistake!

Keyword Anchor Text

Try to have keywords in your inbound anchor texts, that are links that direct to subpages of your site.

Keyword Stemming

Stem your keywords. Use singular, plural, past forms, etc.

Keyword Semantics

Make use of synonyms and don't spam your site with one and the same keyword.

No excessive deep linking

Check that all your pages can be reached with no more than 3 or 4 clicks!

Page to Page Linking

Try to link to appropriate subpages from a related subpage.

Domain Name Extension

.EDUand .ORG seem to be very important. For any .COM domain it is a littlemore difficult to prove trustworthiness and relevance due to the hugeamount of spamming sites.

File Sizes

Never exceed more than 100kb per page. Try to keep below 40kb per page.

Hyphenate file names

Do never use more than 4 words in the file name, as this indicates spam.

Fresh and new contents

Google loves new and regularly updated contents, so do your visitors!

Total length of URL

Keepit at a minimum. That does not mean that you should not use mor than 60characters.