A rather interesting discussion was developing in a LinkedIn group I joined. StyleDiary, a fashion geared group, is basically of course, all about modern trends and blogs gearing towards it. However, a young fashion designer bought on the idea of how searchers tend stop looking past the 3rd page of a Google search. “85% of the website traffic is generated by the search engines alone and 90% of the people do not go beyond the first three search pages,” he explained. His site, he claims, runs purely on keywords and with his limited budget, he found it incredibly hard to create a team solely dedicated to generating keywords that worked for the site.
I went on to add, “This was an interesting comment you made. The idea of keywords is something that is rather foreign to me but over time, I've realize that it is very important to understand this concept. For my own blog, I had to really brainstorm a lot of ideas to make it unique and yet, contain keywords that will bring in readers. I'll definitely check out www.ResultFirst.com and use their information.”
He recommended that all those who were confused in the same manner, should log onto www.ResultsFirst.com as this site would provide them with information that would help them to make their site more unique. This is an alien concept to me despite being a Marketing major. I found myself rather intrigued by what he said because it was interesting to understand how a site works with “keywords.”
The information, the discussion provided, despite only myself and the user who opened the discussion, being the only ones in the discussion, was incredibly useful to a person like myself who is needs to be educated in this area.
1 comment:
Your friend's estimation that people utilize the first 3 SERP's (Search Engine Results Page) I find a bit generous, Roshni; many feel that anything past page 1 is ignored, and that only the first few organic (non-paid, or unadvertised; promoted results are highlighted in a blue background on Google and always appear first - because these are advertisements, they are often also ignored) results are relevant.
The concept of keywords in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is somewhat complex. On a typical Webpage, the XHTML (code in which the page is written) is divided into two sections: the head, and the body. The head is never seen by the user, only the information in the body. The information in the head is used by the processors; included within the head section is something called meta-data. Meta-data is where keywords are described for the "spiders", or "bots", programs used by the search engine to find information about the page. The bots first read the meta-data, then move down into the body to find how many of these stated keywords can be found in the content. On an optimized page, these keywords are used in a logical and descriptive way. Some try to beat the system by a process called "keyword stuffing", where the keywords are repeated often with no relevance to the information in the content; this is done so the bots will read them often and then give high relevance to the page in the SERP's. The problem is that first, this amounts to spam, and secondly, once it is discovered by the reviewers of Google, the page is then punished by reducing the ranking, placing the page results very far down the list, thus decreasing it's chances of ever being found.
Some great resources are Google's Webmaster Central (http://www.google.com/webmasters/) and videos on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=google+webmaster+tools&aq=0)).
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