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A Gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar.

And what’s an Avatar? Well, you’ve probably seen James Cameron’s Avatar, the movie, so you probably have an idea already (though you don’t have to be blue and sporty!).  In Hinduism, it refers to the descent of a deity from heaven to earth. But on the web, it simply means a persona. The virtual online personae became popular with Second Life and gaming.

Here’s how a Gravatar works:

1. You choose a small picture or image that you want to use to represent yourself.
2. Go to www.gravatar.com and upload the image and associate it with the email address that you use to blog and comment.
3. Then, whenever you blog or comment on a gravatar supported site, and use this email address as the contact, your own personal gravatar will be displayed!

     Here’s mine

     ( just the logo until I get   photoshopped!)

Being owned by Automattic, the company that own WordPress, Gravatars work seamlessly with WordPress blogs. 

And it’s free!

This is the second part in the Keywords guide to making your own web fairydust and here I’m going to list the places where you can put your keywords to make it easy for the search engine bots to find them.

Again, the first thing is to decide on the keywords – there is no point optimising pages for keywords that people are not actually using to search.

The second thing to remember is to make sense and be relevant. It may seem obvious, but a rush of blood to the head could lead to a rash of keywords on the web page. So, place them so that your content still makes sense for the visitor to read.

1. Domain Name

Having a keyword in your domain name is a great way to get a head start in SEO, although this is not always possible. For example, with www.duanebridal.com you know immediately what the business sector is, and so do the search engines.

2. Title Meta Tag

This is the site information that is displayed in the visitor’s brower. In Internet Explorer it looks like:

Place the keywords for your page here, before the name of the site. Either, the visitor already knows the name of the site or has arrived here by searching on keywords and will want to see these reflected on the page on which he has found himself. And search engines like them. Up to 60 chars is all you should use. Only the first 60 chars is displayed in the Google search results titles.

3. Description Meta Tag

The description tag is often what is displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as a result. This is the result for a search on the term ‘data historian‘:

The first line shows what’s in the Title tag, the lines after usually display the contents of the Description Tag.  Note, that Google is only showing the first 60 chars (including spaces) of the title tag, so even though the term ‘data historian’ is in the website’s title tag, it is not displayed! Keep your Description tag less than 250 chars and reflect your title tag keywords here.

4. Header (h1.. h6) Tags

Special emphasis is placed on words in paragraph headings and also in the content of bullet points and numbered lists. So, pay special attention and use these if appropriate to the sense of your content.

5. Content

Content is King

Your content should reflect the keywords in your Meta Tags.

6. Anchor Text of Inbound Links

Inbound links are invaluable in achieving SEO, but the nature of the links is important too. Also important is the ‘anchor text’, this is the text that is used to actually link to the site. For example:

… the payment gateway www.worldnettps.com provides great service…

is not as valuable as:

…the payment gateway Worldnettps provides great service…

where the link is on the keyword ‘payment gateway’.

7. Blog Post Titles

Here’s another opportunity for keyword placement. Search engines love new content and blog posts offer this. Placing keywords in the Post Titles give the search engines extra information to index. The earlier in the title the better. This one for example, ‘Keywords: make the magic happen’!

8. Blog Categories & Tags

Blog Categories exist for the purpose of organising content and Tags exist to allow site search to return relevant posts. A post may belong to more than one Category and may be tagged with different tags. This post will be categorised in ‘SEO‘ and ‘Digital Marketing’ but will be tagged with ‘search engines‘ and ‘keywords‘. 

9. Page URLs

Having your keywords in your page URLs is also useful in reinforcing what your page is about for the search engines. For example, the following URL contains the keyword ‘book‘ and ‘childrens-books’:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/category/2455/Childrens-Books

10. Alt Tags for Images

Images cannot be read by search engines but you can add Alt tags to show them what the images contain. When the mouse hovers over the image, the content of the Alt tag is shown in a little pop-up box. Using Alt tags also has a usability advantage for those who are sight-impaired and have screen content spoken for them.

11. File Names

If you can use a keyword to appropriately describe a file name, then it is useful to do so as it gives the bots a hint as to what it contains.

12. Keywords Tag

Last but not least, the Keywords Tag. This is the place you might think was the most important. And it’s not. Over-used in the past it is now ignored by Google and may not be used by other search engines, although Yahoo claims that they still use them. So put them in.

There you have it. Go forth and optimise!

Keywords are the words, or terms, that are associated with your business or product or service on the web. They are the words that people would use to search for whatever it is that you are trying to sell or promote online.  First of all, when we say ‘keywords‘, we mean words or groups of words.

Here’ a step by step approach to using Keywords to optimise your site for search engines (SEO). 

1. Identify Keywords

The first task in any online marketing strategy should be to identify your keywords. You  can do this by thinking about what you would put into Google’s search box to try to find what you’re promoting. Make a list of all the words and terms that you think might possibly be used. Make a list of all the products or services that your website promotes and try to think of alternatives ways of saying them. There will probably be other words that people (people not like you) will use to try to find the same thing, so this is just a starting position.

2.  Use tools to generate more keywords

Once you have a list together, use a tool like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to generate more keywords. The tool is free and gives you 2 options:

1) type in your keywords and see the other keywords that it suggests.

2) type in the URL  of your site and it will return a list of keywords based on the content of your site.

The latter is useful when you come to optimise the content of your pages for your chosen keywords.

3. Extract the existing keywords on your site

Try to get an idea of the existing keywords on your site as they may appear to search engines. Google Webmaster Tool offer a facility to see the keywords that it sees. But more useful may be the Term Extractor Tool available on seomoz.org. Again, this tool is free to use.

If one of the keywords returned is ‘homepage‘ then you’ve got some work ahead of you!

4. Choose your keywords

Distill the list of keywords into ones you are going to use and then decide which pages you are going to optimise for each of them. The general rule of thumb is to optimise a page for up to 2 -3 keywords.

5. Optimise your site for your keywords

The next step is to optimise your site for your selected keywords and spread the fairy dust!

Part 2 of this guide (out tomorrow) will show you where, and how, to place your keywords on your site.

Before that though, let’s take a quick look at a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and how the keywords are reflected in the results:

This is a screenshot of a Bing SERP for the search term ‘junior school’ (not the exact term but the 2 words in any order).

You can see that the search term is in bold and the words can be in any order or on their own. For the exact expression ‘junior school’, use ” junior school”.

CBC Junior School is returned in position 1. Note how the term is in the domain name, which means it is also in the title. The words also pop up in the description displayed by the search engine.

Chicklet

A Chicklet,  in the context of the web, has nothing to do with poultry, and is in fact an RSS feed subscription button.

RSS is a means of publishing frequently updated content, like blogs and news, and allows users to subscribe to blogs etc. in a variety ways. It could be by email or by ‘burning’ a feed to a Reader like Google Reader. The document itself is the Feed. A reader is also known as a news aggregator.

Readers will automatically check for updated content on the blog and download any updates it finds. So, it’s a great way to keep up with blogs or news from a variety of sites you’re interested in without having to visit them yourself.

A service like Google’s Feedburner allows you to create a Feed in the following ways:

Google’s Webmaster Tools are a valuable resource in determining how your site appears to Google, and to search engines in general. The tools are quite easy to use and do not require any technical skill. However, you must be verified as the owner of the site before Google will allow access and for this you will need to place some Google verification code (provided by Google) either on your pages or on the public folder of your site. There is no charge for using these tools.

You can sign up and access the tools at www.google.com/webmasters/ .

Once verified, there is a great deal you can do here. Here’s a walk through the main points:

Site Configuration

1. You can submit a Sitemap. A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your site and the URL for them. They are useful when Google is crawling the site in helping it navigate pages on your site. If you know your site has more pages than Google has crawled, then a sitemap may rectify the situation. If all of your products or services are not indexed, then it is much more difficult for the customer to find them!

2. You can specifiy content/pages that you do not want Google to crawl by adding a robots.txt file. This is a text file which can be placed in the root directory of your website and can specify pages (URLs) not to be crawled. Search engines may also be specified. (‘Googlebot’ is the Google crawler).

Tip: Many websites have a ‘Privacy Policy’ page, which is linked to from all pages if it is in the footer. Because of the interlinking on the site, this page may be returned in search results, but is rarely what anyone is searching for. It might be more useful to exclude this page from the search engines, using the robots.txt file, so that the relevant pages are better optimised.

3. Google may have already generated Sitelinks for your website and display them in search results. These are internal links on your site. You have the option of removing these if you feel they are not correct or useful.

4. The geographic target of your site can be specified. For example, if your target audience is in Ireland, you can specify that. You won’t get far trying to sell to UK searchers if Google thinks your business is Irish oriented.

5. You can choose which URL Google will use to display search results from your site ie. the www.domainname.ie version or domainname.ie. This is important in not diluting the page rank of your site as search engines may see 2 sites instead of 1.

Your Site on the Web

1. Google will show you the searches for which it has returned your site, or impressions, and you can see how many searchers have clicked through to your site.  If you do not have many click throughs then it is an indicator that the results returned are not attracting visitors and your website is not performing effectively. Either the results displayed are not what the searcher is looking for, or the title tag does not reflect the page or the description tag is not well-optimised.

However, much greater information on traffic to your site is available using Google Analytics.

2. Links to your site (in-bound links) are shown. Doing a ‘link:www.yourdomain.ie’ search in Google will show some links, but Google does not make all of your in-bound links publicly available. The downside of this is that you will not be able to see all of your competitors links. Seeing where competitors have links from can be useful in trying to increase your own in-bound links. As in-bound links are one of the biggest factors in page rank, it is very useful to see that work on in-bound links is paying off and the links are known to Google.

3. The Keywords that Google finds on your site are shown and rated. If the Keywords do not reflect what you expect then you have some work to do with the content and meta data of your site.

Diagnostics

1. If Google detects any malware on your site, this will be shown. This will deter Google from crawling your site and should be monitored.

2. Crawl errors are shown and should be fixed, these might be broken links or problems with code.

3. Google shows stats on how often it’s crawling your site and how many pages.

4. There may also be some useful HTML suggestions relating to the Title and Description tags or if there is some content which Google is not able to index.