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Hi Kalena

I feel like I am stuck with my keyword research.

I am researching SEO keywords for an Australian business that specializes in tree removal and tree felling. The keywords I chose for them were “tree removal” and “tree lopper” however when I enter these into Keyword Discovery for Australia I get nothing (although “tree removal” comes up quite a bit for global search).

These keywords best describe the business and although the tree removal operator prefers not to be called a tree lopper he is happy for me to use this term for search engine purposes. Yet when entering these keywords into Google it seems a lot of competitor sites come up. I am confused! Can you help?

Louise

Hello Louise

In my experience, most keyword research tools (such as Keyword Discovery or WordTracker) are highly inconsistent or downright inaccurate when it comes to regional search databases.

What I would do is to use the global database when choosing the best keywords to target and then see how they go in terms of bringing you traffic. You can tweak the keywords as you go based on the response and traffic you get. I would start broad e.g. “tree removal”, “tree felling” and then narrow your market based on the responses you receive e.g. “tree removal [city]“ or “tree felling services”.

Another way to measure your potential regional market is to set up a basic pay per click campaign using Google AdWords, targeting Australia only and targeting the keywords you wish to test. Then monitor the number of impressions that your keywords get. Note I said impressions and not clicks. Set the budget low or design your ads in a way you don’t necessarily attract clicks (so it’s a cheap and dirty experiment).

The number of impressions you get per week will give you a ballpark idea of how many Australian searchers are looking for those particular keywords in Google per week.

I was lurking on Twitter today when I saw Rand Fishkin tweet about a new e-book SEOmoz have launched called The Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

I haven’t had a chance to review it yet, but I’m always on the lookout for new white papers, e-books and instructional guides to help my Search Engine College SEO students become SEO Ninjas, so it caught my eye.

I’ll let you know what I think of the content when I’ve given it a thorough look.

Greetings all

After spending the last few weeks providing SEO coaching to small businesses here in New Zealand, I realized that many of them are relying more and more on WordPress-based web sites for their business.

Now I don’t have a problem with this at all – I’m a huge fan of WordPress and so are search engines. It’s really easy to use the blogging platform to build a decent looking, search engine friendly web site. But where people are coming unstuck is in how to optimize their WordPress site when they were previously used to dealing with raw HTML code.

I have started a little checklist for WordPress users, just to remind them of the key SEO tweaks they can make to their blog pages and posts to ensure they are as visible in search engines as possible. I hope to publish the checklist here and also make it available to Search Engine College students as a downloadable PDF.

Here’s where you guys come in. I know many of you use WP on a daily basis and are also busy optimizing your sites for Google and other search engines. I would LOVE for you to share your best tip on how to optimize WP sites so I can add it to the checklist.

Unless you wish to remain anonymous, all tips used will be acknowledged via name and link in the finished document.

Got your tip ready? Please add it in the comments on this post. Thanks so much!

And now for the most enjoyable session of SMX, at least to date. The legend-ary Site Clinic.

Team Motherwell is up first, consisting of @motherwell and @lucasng who are reviewing http://www.goodness.com.au

Issues found:

- graphical text – all keywords embedded in image

- no H1 tags

- links lead to another site entirely

- there’s no custom 404 error page

- canonicalization issue – need to fix in GG Webmaster Tools. This will consolidate your links.

- need more links – try getting links from Aussie directories

- the online store needs some work done – price should be next to the image of the product. No call to action.

- use breadcrumb navigation to help searchers find the categories / pages they are actually looking for. Also helps people to know where they are in your site.

- weird title tags that need tidying up

Next up is Team Google with @gregable and Jim Sterne. They’ll be reviewing Britax.com.au

- I want to buy a stroller, but can’t find them. Bye!

- On the product detail page, no price and no obvious way to purchase

- Maybe “Where to Buy” link will help. Ah…. no. HELP! (Jim hands over to @gregable)

- Greg will be viewing the site as googlebot.

- Greg is trying to find a specific type of child car seat but can’t.

- Very little information about the product. Really wants a detail page, not lots of the same data on similar pages.

- Home link is on the right hand side of the navigation. Why?

- Uses a grey-on-grey link nav at the bottom of the page which isn’t helping.

- Some non sequitir link titles e.g. *4 Reasons*

- Greg says the site has some nice GG friendly URLs

Team Boser is next, featuring @gregboser and @oilman. They’ll be reviewing http://www.donedirtcheapdvd.com.au.

- Sell box sets of DVDs and similar products

- Todd and Greg spend some time trying to get the display right and during the tense silence, the site owner takes the opportunity to promote his DVD box sets “Avatar, available now for $44.95″. Gets a big laugh from the audience.

- There are too many links on many of the pages.

- There’s no need to keyword stuff every single internal link on your site. Google already knows you sell DVDs, you don’t need to hit them over the head with it, says @gregboser

- Trim down your categories and stop loading up your footer with irrelevant links about DVDs, especially in nearly black font on black background, says @oilman.

- Use your movie reviews for content. If you have to, produce clever mashups of pages that are algorithmically unique, but still made up of content elsewhere on your site, says @gregboser.

- Rotate through your content and create mashups that will give you better links in Google.

Next up is Team SEOmoz with @seomom and @dannydover to review www.appliancesonline.com.au

- Gillian starts by asking who in the room are SEOmoz PRO members and proceeds to give some of us a beer! Cute.

- Danny says the site looks good – clean and sharp.  Nice to see categories and images on the home page. Also the brands are front and center on the HP.

- The text nav at the bottom is a bit dodgy, but the payment options/logos at bottom are fantastic.

- No custom 404 error page – Why not? Boring. Gillian says she wants to see some options and some fun on the custom 404 page.

- Enormous home page – 1.6MB in size but should be 150-200 kb. A faster loading site is a better performing site in both engines and sales. Flash file is the major problem.

- Looking at the page as googlebot shows LOTS of links, but no text content. Give people who don’t have Flash an option, preferably text.

- Used OpenSiteExplorer.com to look at the site (SEOmoz plug)

- 301 issues galore due to switching domains.

- ridiculous number of links from small number of domains = BIG spam signal to Google. Clean it up says @seomom

- keyword analysis shows very good keyword density, esp long tail.

- Danny points out that if you do a search in MS.com and you can’t find any results, the 404 page will eventually redirect to a search in Bing for same query.

- Gillian points out that the Call to Action buttons are too passive. Use “Email Me If…” option with drop downs like “if my product is in stock”, “if refrigerators go on sale” etc.

- Use Buy Now rather than Add to Cart

- Use A/B Split testing to confirm findings.

Greg Grothaus from Google is talking now about Search Engine Penalties.

Yes, Google promotes some web sites and demotes others. We sometimes penalize web sites for spam, but most of the penalties we apply relate to malware and spyware etc. rather than spam.

Greg says they update the ranking algo 500+ times a year and that number is rising.

What is NOT Spam?

- improvements to a site’s architecture

- adding relevant keywrods

- offering high quality info

- normal pr and marketing

- editorial linking to pages

What IS Spam?

Sites Positioned Above Mine

- Actually, it’s anything that violates Google’s quality guidelines. Greg then defined Black vs White hat.

“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines”. “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Spam According to Google:

- Hidden text/ links

- sneaky redirects

- schemes to artificially boost links

- off topic kws or kw stuffing

- duplicate content

- misleading content

Examples to Avoid

1) Cloaking -  IP delivery is acceptable if you’re delivering different information to different users. If you’re delivering different info to Googlebot vs real people, then you’re in trouble. If users FROM Google see same thing as Google, then chances are you’ll be ok.

2) Sneaky Redirects -

3) Mad Lib Spam – doorway pages, keywords stuffing

4) Poor Quality Links -

5) Paid Links – Google is ridiculously good at  spotting paid links.

6) Using Links – people linking to you is ok. Paid advertising links is ok. But make sure the links help uses and are relevant.

Bad links don’t have quite the bad effect on ranking that people think they do.

Google now alerts webmasters via W/M Tools if they are being penalized / banned. Even if you don’t receive that email, if you *think* you might be penalized, feel free to submit a *reinclusion request* via W/M tools. Google staff will take a look and make a decision. DON’T submit your reconsideration request until you’ve fixed the probs you think are causing the penalty.

Preventing Spam on Your Site

- hacked sites

- comment spam

- link injection

These lead to:

- unhappy users

- bad reputation

- lost traffic

- dangerous malware

Preventing spam on your site

- Use a Captcha e.g. kitten Captcha or 3+5=?

- Avoid hacking. Already compromised? Here’s how to tell:

1) Try a query like: site.example.com. au viagra

2) Look at your pages with CSS and Javascript disabled for any hidden content

3) Use Google’s W/M tools to see which queries users use to find your site.

Check your analytics for unusual queries – look at your W/M tools dashboard for top kws. If you’ve been hacked, you might see random queries like *viagra* there.

Preventative Measures

- keep your 3rd party software up to date with patched version

- use secure passwords

- if fixing a compromised site, do a clean sweep, reinstalling everythying from scratch and remove any backdoors

- escape all inputs you accept through web forms to avoid SQL injection and XSS attacks

- Skipfish web application security scanner – new automated tool from Google

- GreenSQL database firewall

Greg said that you should use Rel=canonical where possible, provided you don’t overdo it and have hundreds of pages redirecting to a single URL.

Brent told the story about how his link network was penalized and he had to wait until the issue was discussed in Webmaster World and a Reinclusion Request was submitted before the penalty was listed.

Greg stated that affiliate links shouldn’t be impacting a site too much in terms of penalties.

Somebody asked Greg about the loss of PageRank via 301 redirects, quoting Matt Cutts stating there is some loss of PR. Greg made the point that it may just be that it takes googlebot time to follow the 301s and re-index the site, so you may just be witnessing real time PR lag.