Posts tagged seo

So what are customers looking for ebay design really searching for?

OK, I had to answer my own question!

Using the SEO Book again (I think I might have to add these guys to my blogroll) the closest keywords/phrases that would fit a company selling ebay design are:

make money on ebay – 22,614 apm
ebay business – 27,090 apm

*apm = average search volume per month

and in order to run a successful Google Adwords campaign a lot of ebay related negative keywords ( keywords that might contain ebay but are so not what you do and will waste your precious moolah man!) Most searched to do with ebay are from ebay users and not the ebay sellers you would want to push ebay design too? So how would an advertising campaign start? To maximise the return on investment you would need targeted traffic, and not 7 million ebay users who don’t care two hoots about ebay design!

The keywords ebay design, ebay store design, ebay template design and ebay listing design need to be within your campaign as your competitors also use these keywords and you do have to make sure you are not left behind, but how do you make sure you are hitting the right people?

Answers on a postcard please!

Mindset of Link Building

Just reading an article about the link building mindset.
It lists 13 valuable points about the mindset to start a link building campaign:
1. Know your marketplace
2. Obsess about your customers
3. Understand the language that your customers use – this was a big one for when i decided to use cybergoth as a keyword for Hairfreax, and also added my site to any sites that came up with that keyword!
4. Be wary of automation – on a small scale these are ok, but go for a personal letter/email/phone call to key websites.
5. Be generous with your outbound links – link back you meanies!
6. Watch out for great content, no matter where it comes from – its all about the content baby
7. Get your message out
8. Incorporate writing into your daily routine
9. Obsess about quality – massive quantity might suggest to search engines you are a spam site.
11. Monitor your results – you can do this quiet easily with Google analytics
12. Anticipate – be prepared for the unexpected
13. Be relentless and determined

The most important point for me is point three:

3. Understand the language that your customers use

Keywords are just ‘the words people use when they search’. It goes without saying that using keywords is fundamental to successful link building: there is nothing better than getting keyword rich links coming back to your site.

Keyword rich links are easy when you’re buying directory listings or text link ads, or indeed when you have relationships with other sites and can ask them to link to you using your chosen keyword phrases.

But there are other ways to get keyword rich backlinks. When people link, they often use the name of a product, a publication or the title of an article or blog post, as the linking text. So use keywords wherever you can in names and titles – it’s a great way to influence the words people use when they link.

Most customers are not pioneers within your industry so they might not really know the service or product they want and what to search for. I find this a lot when searching for code snippets, half the time I know the effect I need but not what to call it!
I knew that as the cybergoth sub genre was synonymous with fantastical hair extensions, this keyword was appropriate to build links with for my Hairfreax Hair Extensions site. I sometimes wonder if the keyword ebay design which so many companies bid for has a high search volume.

Lets let SEO Book tell us by using The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool!

-203 searches on average per month for ebay design!

According to my Adwords account, low search engine volume and high advertiser competition! I wonder how many companies are hitting the wrong keywords because they do not know their customer? Have they ever bothered to find out? Can they find out? A lot of research needs to be done on this one I think! So what are customers looking for ebay design really searching for?

Google Keyword Tool

Want to find your keywords for your own experiment? Try the external keyword tool by google

SEO Keyword Ranking Experiment Results

- 7th June 2007 Experiment Started 10th May

Yahoo:

cybergoth: 10th

cyber goth: 38th

Msn

Cybergoth: 2nd

Cyber Goth: 5th

Google.com

Cybergoth: 6th – Up 30 places to the front page!

Cyber Goth 100th – First time site is actually included

Google.co.uk

Cybergoth: 6th

Cyber Goth 34th up 11 places

As you can see the results are proving positive. Most section of the Hairfreax site being brought up in these listings have the keyword in the HTML title of the page and mentioned at least once in the text on the page. So within a month I have achieved suitable ranking for the keyword cybergoth, and my ranking for the more difficult keyword ‘cyber goth’ is improving as now the inclusions are not references to the site they are actual listings. Google as always is the beast to tame, but I think now I can leave it to time and a schedule of regular updates to the blog and gallery which have been the highest performers in the keyword ranking.

You should always have a gallery or blog on the main domain  as it will optimise your website that sells your product. Movers and shakers in the world of SEO keep reminding us that google is going to put less emphasis on blog links, but its not about the page rank, its about your customers finding you in this mess we all love and hate at the same time.

Long live the hyper web! Updates to this experiment will be less frequent now on the cybergoth keyword, but I will keep track if time is more of a factor in the more popular keyword ‘cyber goth’

Keyword Experiement Results 21/5/07

Well:

Google UK – Cyber goth – Listing 45

Cybergoth – Listing 6

Google (US) – Cyber Goth – Listing 88 (eBay Blog)

Cybergoth Listing 36

Now I introduced a Gallery about 2 weeks ago and this has cybergoth in the HTML title. The HTML titles seem to be winning the race. Are HTML titles more effective that keywords or tags? Currently it seems so.

Go to Top