i5 Blog

Are you looking for good keywords?  So many of our clients think they know what searchers are using to find the client’s products and services and while they may know the high level generic term, they may not have a good idea of how their prospects think when searching.  Or the term they selected is so competitive that the site may never rank for that term. 

For example, if we had an air conditioning business, we know that everyone searches for "air conditioning", yes?  Well maybe years ago, but time changes all.  Service providers are much smarter about keywords than in the past and searcher are much smarter, knowing that a very generic search such as “air conditioning” will likely not yield the results they are seeking.  So, both groups know they need to be smarter about their sites and searchers need to be more precise in their phrasing.  

We use many tools, but the primary tool is Wordtracker (you can get a trial at Wordtracker).  This tool allows us to look at the keyword term “air conditioning” and see the variation used by searchers.  Remember searchers understand they need to be more specific, so they are adding a geographic, brand or function descriptions to their search to better qualify the search, for example:

• Carrier air conditioning
• Home air conditioning
• Houston air conditioning
• Trane air conditioning

We will take these searches deeper to determine if a really unique and less competitive term exists.  But even at this level, we get some good ideas about how to create a title tag from keywords which apply to the client’s business, match the terms searchers are using and to create good content to support the keywords.  Remember, all the search engines are trying to return those pages that have the most relevance to the search to give the searcher a quality experience.  They are not particularly concerned about your business, your products and services – until they get to PPC.  They are focused on the searcher.  

The keyword search above tells us to use Brands (Trane Air Conditioning), Geography (Houston air conditioning) and combinations (home air conditioning) in our tags.  And as every page needs to have a unique title tag to match the content on that page, we now have multiple topics for our website, using terms searchers have used.  What could be better?

Unfortunately, it really does take more work and effort than the short explanation presented above.  But at the very least, do some research to find better keywords for your title tag and the corresponding text on the page.  Do the work and the bots will come and index your page – and maybe, that searcher looking for your services will find your page. 

I will never know as much as the folks at Planet Ocean or John and Robin at Search Engine Workshops.  John & Robin introduced me to SEO some five years ago and while I continue to learn about SEO and feel good about my trade, I am at best – in ski parlance – a black run hack, while the folks mentioned previously are Double Black Diamond, Mogul skiers.  There are many experts, the web is full of them and they all offer advice good, average and bad, and some charge serious money for the advice that is common on the web, but they charge it to the unsuspecting, those who know SEO must be done, but not real sure how to do it.

John Alexander and Robin Nobles do charge for their workshops and to participate in Search Engine Workshops as does Planet Ocean, but both have modest fees for their information and certainly give value for those charges.  I pay a small annual fee to receive monthly reports from Planet Ocean and have always valued the information as informative, relevant and easy to apply.  I encourage anyone who is interested in SEO to check either of both for current and informative information about the ever changing world of Search Engine Optimization.

Thank you all,

We tell everyone we meet to begin a Blog, but we have not been taking our own advice.  Too little time, too much to do is the excuse.  We plan to stop making excuses and begin working on our blogging, adding an ongoing entry on the calendar to add to the Blog and just doing it! 

Finding detail about what to write is not that hard, certainly not that hard in our world.  Many discuss website design, development and Search Engine Optimization and certainly many who are much smarter than we.  But we have a different spin on things, taking other detail and attempting to apply it to everyday situations.  Or at least our perspective on the latest thing, new idea, and new twist.  We will always frame it as we see it.

Tune in regularly to see what's new. Or ask us our view on anything.  Sometimes we will just have to say -- We don't know and investigate. 

Ask your questions, post your comments, let's see what happens. 

On June 30, Google posted detail on the their improved indexing of Adobe Flash files, specifically SWF files of all kinds, according to Rod Adler and Janis Stipins -- Google software Engineers.  They go on to say that all of the text that users can see will be indexed, as well as the URLs in that text. 

They also point out that this applies only to contextual text and that they will not recognize or index text or links within an image.  Nor will they index FLV files, such as many videos on You Tube, as those files do not contain text elements. 

The best part of this is that webmasters need take no special action to ensure their flash files are read.  The engineers created an algorithm that explores the files, just be sure that the content in those files is information you want indexed and if not, embed that detail in an image, making it invisible to Google.

They continue to have limits on their technical ability. For further details, check out the Google Webmaster Central blog.