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Make your content tasty
This article was originally written by Dave Rodenbaugh over at Business Directory I’ve adapted it and give full credit to Dave for this wonderful article
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is something everyone wants but no one wants to do the work for it to be successful. Why? because its dull. It’s not glamorous, it consists of identifying those keyword phrases someone who needs your product or services but yet doesn’t know your, name your businesses name, or you or your products name, but is searching Google or Bing for someone like you and your direct competitors.
Identifying those phrases can make or break your website. But still it is the least most utilized aspect of most websites that site owners let slide or wont pay for a legitimate company to have done for them and trust me there are a ton of scammers out there promising the moon. SEO is not instantaneous either, it takes time. results can take from a month to 6 months or more to be realized and should be ongoing. Here is a new article on our site about maximizing your keyword phrase searches to better optimize your content to be search engine tasty
Dave’s Original Article
Why No One Can Find Your Site on Google (And-How-to-Fix-It)
No matter what business you’re in, if you have an online presence you’re bound to be concerned about ranking on Google (or any applicable search engine). After all, what’s the point of having a website if nobody can find it?
You may have spent plenty of time on your site doing all the typical SEO improvements – you’ve optimized your images, you’ve checked and double-checked your site’s loading speeds, and you’ve developed an eye-catching design that’s mobile-friendly. But you’re still not on the first pages of Google. Why?
Well, it could be your SEO keywords.
SEO keywords are an essential part of getting found on search engines (though that may be changing in the near future, but we’ll get to that), but business owners and creative developers often spend little to no time coming up with effective keywords; they regularly take the most obvious choice and leave it at that. But missing out on the right keywords can make or break your SEO.
With that in mind, here are a few tips to uncovering effective SEO keywords that get you found on Google much, much faster.
Do your research
Choosing the right keywords is not just about picking random words out of a hat. Finding effective word choices is about understanding your business intimately, and using words that help your customers understand your business, too.
The important thing to remember when you’re choosing keywords is that you’re not really picking one word, you’re putting together a phrase – a string of 2-3 words – about your business that you think someone would type into Google’s search bar. The goal to creating effective keywords is to be specific.
The goal to creating effective keywords is to be specific.
keyword-research Be specific
The best keywords are ones that predict what your customers want. What are they thinking when they search for your site? Are they looking for local businesses? Or are they searching for something niche? If you were trying to find your competitors online, what would you type in to find them?
Think about it terms of having an actual, physical storefront. Imagine a customer approaching your sales team and asking for something. What are they after? If you owned a jewelry store, for example, your customers wouldn’t necessarily come in and ask about “jewelry” – they’re already in a jewelry store – they’d ask about “gold watches” or “women’s bracelets” or even specific brand names, like Rolex.
When it comes to searching for things online, the same rules apply. If you want people to find you, you have to break your services down into essential parts. What is your business all about?
If you run a site with a directory, for example, you could use the keyphrase “business directory”, but that’s a little vague. If your customers type “business directory” into any major search engine, they’ll be hit with thousands of results, and none of them will be your site.
Instead of using broad keywords or phrases that are fairly common, focus on something unique or specific about your business. If your directory features businesses from a certain area of the country or includes businesses from certain industries, go with that. Setting your keyphrase as “Chicago business directory” or “graphic design business directory” will improve your chances of being ranked.
Use natural language keyphrases (topics)
Another option to try when researching keywords is to use common language questions or search terms instead of standard keywords. What does that mean?
Well, for the most part, search engine algorithms use keyword-based terms (like “women’s jewelry”) to find relevant results. The problem is these keyword-based systems ignore common words – such as “a,” “an,” “the,” “is,” etc. – which can actually eliminate relative results.
To counteract this, search engines have been introducing natural language algorithms to help give meaning to search results. Unlike keyword algorithms, natural language algorithms focus on the meaning of the phrase – the natural way humans ask and answers questions – in order to generate results. For example, people might be more likely to type in questions like, “Where is the nearest Greek restaurant” instead of simply typing “Greek restaurants Chicago.”
Google has already begun incorporating the use of natural language into what it calls “topics” – groups of similar keywords and phrases that give context or meaning to the search, which many SEO experts consider to be more important than the individual keywords themselves.
Moz recently conducted an experiment to determine whether individual keywords or topics were more effective at getting rankings. They found that the results were mixed: In some categories, topics were more effective at getting sites found, while in others individual keywords played a stronger role. Basically, while traditional keywords are (and will continue to be) vital to SEO, topics and natural language phrases will probably play a major role in the years to come.
So what does this mean for you? It means that both individual keywords and topics will be important to SEO. Ultimately, you’ll probably have to come up with a list of keywords and natural language phrases to use in your site.
Save time with tools
Of course, this might mean double the work. And you’ll also need to be sure your keywords are meaningful (as in, it’s possible no one in the world is really searching for your chosen terms). The best way to save time in your keyword research and to ensure that your keywords are actually effective is to use keyword research tools.
For simple SEO suggestions or variations on keywords you’ve already chosen, or for helping come up with keywords from scratch, try using a free service like Ubersuggest or another alternative to UberSuggest with no ads Simply type in a keyword (like “jewelry”) and it will show you related terms that people are already searching.
Destroy all Robots!
Ok, not really but it did grab you didn’t it? What I’m actually trying to say is its time to destroy all robo callers…
What is a robo caller?
A robo caller is any call you receive that is initiated by a dialing program or software designed to get you to answer the phone and not be able to talk to a live person UNLESS you are interested in their product or services.
ROBO Calling is illegal
Because of the abusive behavior of telemarketing companies using robo calling practices it was made illegal yet companies regularly employ this method to call you, usually a scam.
I’m on the national DO NOT CALL list!
So am I but because these companies aren’t following any laws in the first place the national do not cal list wont help you. As a matter of course they regularly pull the list of numbers from the FCC to call you because they figure you haven’t been cold called in awhile and are ripe for the picking and the FCC, while it does have a reporting form to report illegal robo callers or telemarketers, trust me it doesn’t help. I’ve been thru their process and nothing came of it except I got more robo calls…
What can we do about it?
Well until recently not much, but now there is a service that will protect you and it is completely FREE! and its won awards from the Federal Trade Commission its called NOMOROBO. It works with your phone whether landline or VOIP but adding their number as a simul ring it detects the call on the first ring and if its a robo call it kills the call. more about NOMOROBO here. Ive set it up with my vonage line and within minutes of setting it up; the annoying robo telemarketers stopped cold. I went from 3 or 4 calls a day to none but all my legititamite calls went right on thru. Including automated school calls, Dr calls legitimate robo calls as well as actual persons calling my business. Did I mention its free? I’ve been using it now for 2 weeks and no spam to my email from them, no ads, no downside at all just no more robo calls!
Self Manged Leased vs Reseller Hosting
We make no bones that we lease our servers thru Hi Velocity which makes us a self managed host not a reseller. We have full access to our machine(s) and can configure them any way we need directly from our hosting consoles. The big difference between a reseller and us is we are one rung up on the “hosting food chain” As self managed leased hosts we can resell our servers to others who wish to provide hosting of their own and dont want the cost of leasing a server directly and with out the headaches of knowing how a servers is supposed to run and or how to set one up or configure it. This is why a self managed or leased hoster like Kinetic Servers is always better than a reseller. We KNOW how to set up servers and configure them so they are hardened against attacks and people who want to commit acts of tom foolery. We take the steps necessary to provide a stable secure environment that resellers dont have access to to ensure for those clients who trust us to maintain our server.
A reseller if issues arise (as they invariably will) has to call up the chain to get action taken, as they are usually very limited as to the access they have. For us, when things happen that are beyond us knowledge-wise we have direct access to some of the smartest server geeks around; the Impressive techs at Hi Velocity who are very quick to respond and lend a hand when in those rare instances we are out of our depth.
When you are in the market for a hosting company and need a company that will keep your site up keep it running smooth and fast make sure you ask them if they own the server or if they are a self managed lease host or a reseller it will make the world of difference in the quality of services and support you receive
Brand New Server!!!
We just picked up a brand new server thru our partners at Hi Velocity (Some of the coolest geeks around) This new machine will serve us and our hosting customers well for the next 3 to 5 years.
Server Specs
- 72GB DDr3 Ram
- 2 Quad core processors running at 2.26Ghz
- 480GB SSD as the main drive so all files and databases are being serverd up FAST
This is a monster of a machine and just part of our ongoing effort to make sure our hosted clients and their site visitors have an extremely fast and satisfying experience. Database or static sites load faster because the wait states for the sql queries to return are in the .06 millisecond range. larger hosting companies are just figuring out what we learned 2 years ago SSD hosting is the ONLY way to host your clients and give them the speed they need when they have a database driven site like 90% or higher of the sites out there. We have been first in all categories for SSD hosting since it was made available first just hosting the Databases on a 60GB addon drve now a full SSD suite with Databases and site files all being delivered up from a Solid State Drive.
SSD Hosting
SSD Hosting or hosting on a solid state drive is the current state of the art for hosting and its important because most websites today are database driven and PHP and Specifically MySql which is used to drive these sites has limitations on how much data it can cache at anyone time so when a server which has thousands of database driven websites starts to have a large number of users visiting those sites the hard drives cant keep up with the demand and the wait state starts to increase dramatically.