7 replies to this topic

[nirvana]

Hi,

I'm new to SEO so be patient with me. I have used Jill's nitty gritty tips to optimise some of my sites and use Wordtracker to identify keywords.

My sites are normally companies in Ireland so people searching need to use local directores e.g. google.ie or use Ireland / Irish in the search.

For example when somebody is looking for a holiday home in Ireland I assume they will search on "holiday home Ireland". Wordtracker will give me some results when I use these words but the count rises dramatically when I use holiday home on its own.

Do you think that adding Ireland, Irish etc to the tags and page content is a good idea.

[qwerty]

I think it's a very good idea. The question is not so much how much traffic you want, but what traffic. There's not much point in having a thousand user sessions from people looking for holiday homes in Indonesia.

Moreover, I don't know how much competition you've got for the keyword phrase "holiday homes ireland," but I'll bet it's a lot less than the competition for "holiday homes".

[robwatts]

I think its always a good idea to research your target markets for terms that tools like wordtracker help you formulate, I'd also suggest talking to your friends and family too, have a chat with them about how they use the internet, talk to them about their searching habits, you'll be surprised at some of the approaches they use. My kids use questions like approaches such as "Where is the coolest yuigio cards website" so, with this in mind, if I were building a website about yuigio cards I would consider using such a phrase in my copy.

Once this is done and you are happy with your treasure chest of relevant terms, you can then get to work on the task of writing engaging copy, including your newly found word gems.

Edited by robwatts, 11 September 2003 - 02:16 PM.

[mcanerin]

One thing I did, though it takes a lot of patience and a day or two, is to do searches on my areas, for example, "Calgary" and "Canada" just by themselves without anything else to narrow them down.

Naturally, I ended up with a huge list of things like Calgary Herald and calgary home rentals and so forth, but it gave me a really good idea of what the market was like. It also gave me some great little nuggets I would have never thought of that were very much on point to some of my sites.

If you have a local market, learn it as best as you can, even if it doesn't seem totally relevant at the time - trust me, it's worth it. Plus, it's really, really interesting to see what your fellow citizens are up to! I'd do a search on "Ireland" just by itself and take a look at the results - you'll be surprised!

Welcome to the High Rankings Forum!
Ian

[fred]

Well seem like you are in a very specific business

there is no point in attracting visitors that are not interested in your product

don't worry about losing traffic from using your irish keyword
someone looking to rent a home for the holiday in ireland , might start it's search with holiday home rental but will soon realize that the search needs to be refined.

That is where your irish keywords will bring in the traffic you want.

if you have a local business you should always include your locality in your keywords

[mcanerin]

I'd like to pipe in right now and point something out:

Which of these phrases are optimised for "irish home rentals" ?

"Looking for an Irish Home? Rentals might be an option"
"Irish Home Rentals are our specialty"
"Do you have the luck of the Irish? Home rentals could be for you!"
"You are here: home/country/irish/home/rentals/current"

Answer: ALL of them.

Now, my advanced class. :learn: How many of these phrases are optimised for the much more difficult "home rentals"?

Answer: ALL of them!

Next point, if you do a search for home rentals and then find out it's too broad, what do you do?

Answer: You keep the phrase "home rentals" and then narrow it down - with "irish" in this case.

So, lets say you have a specific market and no one has searched for irish home rentals recently. This is very on point for seasonal items (do a Wordtracker report on Christmas Gifts - if you believe the computer you wouldn't think it was a very popular phrase. But you'd be wrong in a month or so, now wouldn't you?) Likewise, Wordtracker will tell you around Valentines day that the most popular phrases are for Christmas gifts - it's a measurement of the previous 3 months, not what people will be searching for tomorrow or next week.

So how can you figure out what phrases to optimise for if you have a seasonal or less popular niche, which is not well represented by recent historical data?

Answer: Figure out HOW people would search for your product and then optimise for that.

How? Look to the broad category. do a Wordtracker report on home rentals and look at it closely. What do people use to narrow it down? If everyone seems to be adding the country at the end, then that's what you should do- same if it's at the beginning. Maybe they don't use the country at all and tend to use the city, or some other narrowing factor. After all, if you would normally look for rental homes in canada by typing in "home rentals canada", then it's a pretty safe bet that you would also look for home rentals in Ireland by typing in "home rentals ireland", right?

My point is to do your research on the broad catagory first. Figure out how people look at it and search for specifics with it. Then optimise for the specifics - you will get the broad automatically as part of that.

Ian

[nirvana]

Thanks for all the good tips. I'll check out the content and keyword tags etc. and make sure I'm using all the options. I had already used local names and things like "west of Ireland" which browsers seem to use when searching.

Over the summer the site has ranked better in the major engines after I had optimised it for the 1st time. So hopefully next year will be even better.

When the site is aimed at tourists from all over the world it means we have to use keywords like "vacation" (U.S.) instead of "holiday" (U.K.).

Enjoying the forum and the learning process.

Mary

[Scottie]

Welcome to the forum, Mary!