Additional Prioritization Variables to Consider
Published September 14, 2010 | 
Many times there are other variables to take into consideration when attempting to establish correct prioritization to achieve the best results for SEO, and these additional variables might include:
- The lifetime value of item client is important because if the sale of any given item is made, then the current value of the sale cannot the only consideration, since it is very important that you should also take into consideration the average lifetime value of the “purchaser” of the item being examined.
- It is important to clearly understand the profitability or how profitable is the product or service you provide, and obviously, the more profitable items in most cases are more desirable to promote, but you must be completely familiar with what is most profitable for you.
- You must understand with confidence your ability to scale or fulfill with your inventory control and order processing or if your ability to fulfill is limited. If so, you must determine other products and services with more
potential that might be a better priority in both the near and long term.
- You should have a firm knowledge of your competitive advantage, and most importantly is it a well-defined competitive advantage (in terms of price, quality, delivery time etc.) that can be leveraged to increase the probability of sales?
More often than not, you will find that the keyword terms with comparatively high search volumes and low competition are the best opportunities, and of course don’t forget, relevance must be always be factored into this equation as well.
You should always keep in mind that in addition to closely examining volume vs. competition, it often helps to look at the additional prioritization variables, and they shouldn’t be mistakenly overlooked.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
Published September 9, 2010 | 
On-page optimization is a critical but much too often overlooked aspect of Search Engine Optimization. Let’s first examine the problem with doing only on-page optimization, which is the fact that there is a glass ceiling to it, as Search Engines rank websites according to both their authority and relevance specific to the search terms, in addition to their authority on the Web. Remember, on-page optimization creates relevance, while building inbound links generates authority, thus the glass ceiling.
Now, even though off-page optimization actually offers more in the way of SEO benefits, while in reality on-page optimization is the first step to SEO improvement. 
In closer examination we find that your off-page Search Engine Optimization is about building inbound links from relevant websites. One simple but very important question to answer is, how can Search Engines consider your pages relevant to your specific keywords if you have not even made it clear to them just what your page is about?
On-page optimization is basically about two things including choosing the very best keywords around which to establish each of your pages, and making it as clear as possible to search engines that your page is relevant to those keywords.
With the old way of on-page optimization many people simply took a fairly automatic approach to on-page optimization because it was what worked way back then.
There were literally hundreds of tools congesting the web that allowed you to measure the keyword density of your page, and there were many of them that taught more was better, so as a result, webmasters would crank out keyword-stuffed text that was not interesting in the least, as well as very brutal to read.
Finally, to optimize your page content way back then, you simply stuffed your keywords everywhere including the URL, the page title, the Meta description tag, the on-page H1 heading, and aggressively throughout the page content.
Assessing Keyword Competitiveness
Published September 5, 2010 | 
It’s only natural for people to have a tendency to emphasize traffic over relevance, quantity over substance, and of course you need to always make sure that the search terms you’ve selected for targeting have sufficient traffic, but quite often you don’t want them to have too much either, since more traffic more times than not goes hand in hand with high competition.
Let’s look back to the Abilene law firm for example, which has decided they want to rank for the term ‘lawyer.’ Probably without realizing, the decision puts them up against almost all law firms in the entire English-speaking world, which of course include much larger and much more powerful firms. The last time I checked (two seconds ago), there are 406 million Google results for the search term ‘lawyer,’ and always remember there are only 10 listed on the first page of Google search results.
You must learn to choose your battles wisely when deciding on which keywords to target, and let’s examine just how you might go about doing that.
When it comes to assessing keyword competitiveness, there are several free tools. For example, the SEO Chat Keyword Difficulty Check Tool shows the higher the score the keyword search term gets, the more competitive the term, and the greater the difficulty it is to rank for. Remember that generally speaking, terms with a difficulty score over 60 require much more than just “on-page optimization” if you want the ranking on the first page of search results, and the first page ranking is right where you want to be.
Selection of Primary Keywords
Published September 1, 2010 | 
It is not only important to know that keywords are important to your business, but it is also important to understand what aspects of keywords actually make them important to your business.
There are different variables or characteristics that keywords have to help the determination of whether or not the keywords are worth consideration as part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy, and only if keywords pass the primary selection tests can they be subjected to the prioritization variable tests. Considerations for primary keyword selection are:
• Keyword terms/phrases should have adequate search volumes
• Keyword terms that are chosen should be relevant
• Identified relative competition should be evaluated
If a keyword search term’s volume fails to meet sufficient levels, then it is simply removed from the list, and likewise, if it does not satisfy the relevancy criterion, it should also not be considered.
Finally, you must understand that primary keywords are simply the main keywords from which all variations on the keywords should derive, and your primary keywords should be focused on your particular 
industry and yet, not be too specific, while at the same time, the primary keywords should always be open ended enough so that secondary keyword phrases can be derived from them, and still include the primary keywords within the phrases.
Once identified, you want to make sure the primary keywords appear four or five times in your article in addition to the first paragraph of your article. The more you use primary keywords within limits, the better ranking the article will receive, but be careful, if you are submitting your article to an article directory, be sure to check their guidelines for their keyword use ratio.
Your SEO Foundation is Keywords
Published August 31, 2010 | 
If you haven’t noticed lately, people are changing some of their most fundamental habits over the past couple of years including the way people shop in the age of Search Engines. As people become more accustomed and comfortable with navigating the online eCommerce selections available, they are increasingly using Search Engines to help them find the products or services they are looking for. Of course to do this, they type keywords into Search Engine sites like Google, YouTube or Bing, and the Engines then in turn rank sites related to the keywords used based on relevance and authority.
Whether you are aware of it or not, your website is already set out targeting certain keywords, and Search Engines then extract these keywords from your on-page text, headers, page titles, inbound links and other components and factors. 
Most likely however, you might not in most cases have made a conscious decision to target those specific keywords, and even if you did, the likelihood exist that you might not be monitoring your rankings or have a sense of how good your chances are of ranking well for those keywords.
There are several variables that impact keyword selection. These variables can be divided into groupings including primary selection variables and prioritization variables. 
It is also important to remember and be aware that choosing the right keywords is often the difference between getting found in someone’s search and not getting found. Therefore as a result, keyword research is the foundation of an effective online marketing strategy.