Easter is over, so we’ve got a bit of a break until the next public holiday. Seasonal keywords are always great to target if your product or service is offering holiday specials (how did you go targeting Easter seasonal keywords?)
While it’s not a stat holiday (although some might argue it should be!) Mother’s Day is coming up in May. If you’re having a Mother’s Day sale on your website, start thinking about targeting key phrases now.
Here’s a helpful list of Mother’s Day-related keyword searches which were popular on NZS.com last year:
mothers day
mothers day poems
mothers day gifts
mothers day quotes
mothers day poem
mothers day gift ideas
mothers day ideas
mother’s day poem
mothers day present
Get in quick are you’ve got the best chance of gaining a good search engine rank for your Mother’s Day-specific pages!
Analysing seasonal trends in search and keeping an eye on what’s coming up on your seasonal keyword list can produce solid results for the in-bound traffic to your website. Are you planning an Easter promotion and have a page targeting Easter keywords on your website?
For NZS.com, the largest spike we’ve seen over the last year was in relation to the Olympic Keyword Searches that were being searched on. These searches were across the widest range of user demographics that we’ve seen in some time.
Here’s a helpful list of Easter-related keyword searches which have gained popularity on NZS.com over the last week:
If you have a statistics package attached to you website (like Google Analytics, which is freely available) it’s a good idea to look back at Easter 2008 and see if people found your site by searching for Easter related terms. Re-cycling those terms this year within your website copy may help increase your traffic on them.
You might be surprised at the extra opportunities that present themselves by following other seasonal keywords that your visitors are using through-out the year.
Being a part of the global online community, we’re always keeping tabs on what is new and exciting in search engine optimisation at NZS.com. It seems like every week there’s a new way of doing things, a new keyword analysis resource from you-know-who.
We forget sometimes just how young SEO is, and how quickly optimisation fads and flutter in and out of popular use. It wasn’t too long ago when every at-home website developer was testing out every new SEO technique: from black text on black background keyword-laden pages, to irrelevant meta data keyword schemes focused on the hottest worldwide searches.
We’re a decade on from the emergence of these methods, but funnily enough they are still highly (and badly) used throughout the World Wide Web. What are the best SEO tools today? SEO companies will continually tell you that going back to the basics never goes awry. Unique content, cohesive page titling, targeted and concise keyword data, clean HTML, and of course, relevant inbound linking.
Set yourself a simple SEO formula for your website (and stick with that formula for every new page you create), and you’ll glide into top ranks and high conversions.
If you’ve been looking at SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) keyword suggestions to put the icing on your search engine optimisation cake, you may have come across the idea of incorporating misspelled keywords to capture a slice of the search market.
But is bad keyword spelling really useful or does it just make your website look unprofessional?
The answer to this question depends on your point of view. Just take a look at any keyword tool and you’ll see that intentional misspellings account for a significant proportion of searches online. So, including misspelled keywords can be useful, allowing you to:
Target searches that are commonly misspelled, for instance ‘accomodation’ instead of ‘accommodation’
Get good search engine rankings for profitable popular search terms that have low levels of competition
Capture the market forregional spelling variations, eg. both UK and US spellings of words such as ‘optimisation’ (’optimization’)
Help searchers find what they’re looking for, even if they enter a word incorrectly
But along with these benefits, there are also disadvantages to including misspellings or alternate spellingsin your website copy – the most obvious being that visitors and potential clients will see your website (and therefore your business) as sloppy, careless or… lacking in basic spelling skills. Even worse, you may end up losing your search engine friendly status if you, or your Web designer, try to fool search engines with invisible text or other keyword tricks.
More interesting statistics from the world of online search, this time demonstrating clear online search trends as we approach the holiday season. A highlight of many a New Zealand summer is the Kiwi camping holiday – packing the car and heading to the beach, campsite or holiday park with kids, chilly bins and kayaks in tow.
And New Zealand search statistics are showing the popularity of this summer pastime. Reports from Hitwise show that searches relating to the great outdoors have increased significantly in recent weeks. Most of these high ranking search terms are generic (like ‘camping grounds’), but other popular search terms are geographically specific (for instance ‘paihia camping ground’).
Top ten searches relating to camping holidays in New Zealand, for the week ending 8 December, 2007 were:
kiwi camping
camping grounds
camping
camping equipment
camping gear
camping nz
camping ground
camping sites
new zealand camping holidays
camping new zealand
So, what can we do with search keyword stats like this? Information on how searchers are finding your website can be used (along with data on what searchers are looking for online) to better tailor your website content and keywords. These statistics also show the power of seasonal search trends (online promotions should take into account the time of year) and region-specific searches (you may not be number one in generic camping term searches, but you could rank highly for a geographically specific search).
And if you’re getting ready to relax over the summer holidays, get sorted for your camping holiday with our directory of New Zealand camping grounds and camping equipment stores.
If you’re looking for information about businesses or services on the Internet, you may (like 85% of Internet users) start your search off by using a search engine. Search engines are amazing tools that are designed to retrieve and display information.
Getting the results you want
To get the most relevant results from search engines, you need to be quite specific about the ‘keyword search phrase’ you type into the search box. In this example, you have decided to use NZS.com to help you find out where you can buy piano music at a reasonable price. You are based in Christchurch (the city in New Zealand, not the town in England). The words you might choose to include in your search term would then be: “second hand piano music christchurch”.
By being so specific about your search, the search engine can pull up what it considers to the best and most relevant result to answer your query.
Searching for New Zealand Web sites
If you’re interested in searching for a New Zealand service or company, NZS.com itself is a great place to start, but Google is still the world’s favourite search engine and comes in hundreds of different varieties. Google NZ offers the option to search New Zealand Web pages only, so you can start narrowing your search field that way.
Read more about keyword phrases and using them in your search engine marketing campaigns. More on this in another post! Adios!
NZS.com has dedicated a lot of time to finding New Zealand online content. It’s become evident to us that a lot of Kiwi sites are jolly hard to find. We regularly meet people at events etc that hand us their business card with their Web site on it. You take a look and see the site has no Google PageRank. This is generally because their site has no links to it from anywhere on the Web at all!
It’s a real shame to see this, because often they’ve spent thousands of dollars creating a site that looks pretty swish. It’s just marketing money down the drain, and in the end gives the Web a bad rap. I can imagine them saying at some point “We’ve spent a lot of time and money developing this site, but we get nothing much out of it, the Web is a waste of time.”
To stop your Web site being invisible, make sure you get it linked from high profile directories and content sites. What’s the point of having a site if people can’t find you?! Also, if you’re a bit more serious about it, then commit to an ongoing Web site promotion program – for most Web sites this is the key to getting a good return on your investment.
In my last post, I talked about some of the things search engines like about the websites they rank highly on their results pages. One way I mentioned was to get votes from 3rd party websites. Here’s more on how you can get ‘votes’ for your site.
Getting other website owners to ‘vote’ for your Web site is all about getting them to publish a hypertext link on their website, which points to one of your Web pages. The more links pointing to your website not only means ‘more votes’ but provides more ways for people and search engines to reach your Web site.
Presidential link bait
The best way to get links from other websites pointing to your website is to publish content (link bait) that is so mind-blowingly brilliant that another Web site owner just WANTS to link to it.
Linking leg work
You can also ask website owners to publish a link to your site. Start with friends and associates, then move onto specialist, national and international directories. Spread your wings further by seeking out websites (preferably relevant to your business) that also publish links or ‘resources’.
The online back-scratch
Some website owners will only publish a link to your website if you publish a link to theirs in exchange. This mutual back-scratching is called, unsurprisingly enough, link exchange. NZS.com offer a FREE bold listing for link exchanges – it’s well worth checking out their link exchange offer.
You can read more about some of the best practises for link building and link exchange, in Link Building Made Easy.
By now, Internet junkies and casual Web surfers alike will have heard of a lil’ thing called PageRank.
PageRank is a tool used by Google to rank all pages on the Web. The higher your PageRank, the better. A high rank indicates that the great G views your page as more important than a page with a lower rank. The Google-meister describes PageRank as: “using [the Web's] vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.”
How does it work?
In a nutshell, Google reads all the inbound links to a page. For instance, if page X links to page Y, Google sees this as a vote, by Page X for page Y.
Sounds like an online democracy?
Well, these elections aren’t 100% democratic. Google doesn’t just go by the number of links to a page; it looks at the importance of the page that has cast the vote. Votes cast by pages with a high PageRank have greater weighting than those cast by pages with a lower PageRank. Google also takes into account many other factors: how long the links remain active, the rate at which your site is gaining links, click throughs to your site from Google searches and the stickiness of your site (how well you can retain your visitors).
And the winner is?
After analysing a page’s inbound links, Google assigns the page a rank out of 10. To see the PageRank of your site and others, simply install the PageRank reader on your Google Toolbar.
So what can I do to get a better PageRank?
The good news is that you can do things to improve your PageRank:
Fill your site with useful, informative and interesting content that users will want to share
Exchange links with other quality sites – getting highly ranked sites to link to yours will improve your ranking, so make sure you’re swapping links with well ranked sites. Note: if you link to sites that have been delisted by Google, your site may also be removed from Google’s index
Search engines are basically computer programs that search the Internet for Web sites. With over 85% of people using search engines to start their Internet sessions and about 81% of these people finding NEW Web sites via search engines, you can see why search and search engines mean big business.
You may have heard of ‘little-known’ engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live Search (formerly MSN)? Well, as you may have guessed, Google is the big enchilada of search engines with over 80% of New Zealand searchers using it to find Web sites and images. It’s important then, that Google likes your Web site so you can get in front of people online. Your next question is probably something along the lines of, ‘how does my Web site get loved up by Google?’
What search engines like Google go for
There are lots of factors to consider, but here are a few of the things about Web sites that search engines like Google tend to prefer:
Sites that make their content accessible to spiders or robots (programs that index the Internet)
Sites publishing lots of unique, relevant and interesting content
Sites that offer a lot of textual content and aren’t heavily graphic or Flash laden
Sites with lots of votes from other 3rd party Web sites (incoming links)
View more info about Web site design that’s search engine friendly. Good luck!
If you’ve been looking at SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) keyword suggestions to put the icing on your search engine optimisation cake, you may have come across the idea of incorporating misspelled keywords to capture a slice of the search market.
