Google not only a great search engine, they also help you in many ways with optimising your site.
Google SEO tools, yes they do have ways to help you in obtaining better rankings, in more ways than you might know about.
Google SEO tool No1# -
Google Insights for Search, This really handy tool will let you peak under the bonnet as it were, into what people are searching for and what the demographics are for the search term.
You can see in the image the peaks along the time line each one of those highest peaks in January and the lowest points are August. Up here in sunny Queensland after all the floods going on you may also see a distinct rise in the search for termite control or pest control.
This is the worst time of year for termite problems, and after all the Brisbane floods it makes the situation even worse with more timber laying around for the hungry little termites to live on. Our weather bureau has even seen clouds of termites on their radar screens.
Understanding the demographics of search helps the business owner target their marketing, for instance a pest control company would not be smart to spend big on termite control advertising during August. Gogle insight is just that it gives a great insight to search.
Google SEO tool No2# -
Google Adwords keyword tool - Originally designed for helping you chose words for your PPC campaign this tool is very good for helping in the process of keyword selection for your SEO campaign. Now again if we type 'pest control' into the keyword selector tool we are presented with a list of suggestions. We can see that 'pest control' has the most search volume and advertiser competition volume so we would call this a primary keyword phrase.
Because this is a primary term it will be one of the harder terms to rank for as with high search volume and competitor competition so it could be prudent to put this on the SEO long term goal and look for a less traffic and lower competition phrase. Looking a little further down the list we can see 'house pest control' although the adwords competition has dropped on the phrase how will it go for us in the SEO market? We can see that Google gives us nearly 17 million results for 'pest control' and for 'house pest control' we are presented with around 6.6 million results.
So we can comfortably say 'house pest control' is still quite a high competition phrase and still could be considered a primary phrase maybe a secondary. We can keep looking down the list and find 'pest control spray' still with a healthy search volume less competitive in adwords how does it go in Google search? 2.7 million results now we are well into easier to rank for terms now and this we will look at using on the short term goal list for our SEO campaign.
We can keep using this technique to build our basket of keyword choices, what we are wanting to do is set-up long term SEO goals, medium term goals and short term goals. This technique allows for a steady growth in our SEO campaign, if we just try and optimise for the high traffic high competition 'primary' keyword phrases we are going to be looking at a long road to increased traffic.
Google SEO tool No3# -
Google analytics is our data friend letting us see all kinds of useful information, where people have come from, how long they stayed and where did they go. No SEO campaign is complete without a good source of analytical data and it is in our opinion Google analytics is one of the best.
Simple enough for the new user and detailed enough for the long time web master Google analytics is a must for any business wanting to increase their search engine directory exposure.
Google SEO tool No4#
Google webmaster central, this handy resource is on the must be set-up list this is where you add your XML site map to allow the Google bot an easier more direct way to find your content pages. Furthermore Google web master central is full of interesting data, how many inbound and outbound links our website pages have. Crawl statistics, index statistics and top search queries are among the useful data held here.
Google SEO 101 starter guide
Google help us achieve good results in a varied list of ways recently they have released a 101 of SEO to aid in you building the right content and site the first time. This guide will hold you in good stead for self SEO work, download it in PDF format.
Keyword research is the fundamental foundation of a successful website, get it wrong and you will be left with little traffic flow or traffic not suited to your market. You need a good mix of keywords in all three categories, 'primary' 'secondary' and 'the long tail of search' understanding how to use the research is paramount to success.
It is fine and dandy to want to rank for the most competitive terms but the reality is depending on your market, this could take a considerable amount of time. Furthermore a substantial investment will often be needed to attain the top positions for the most competitive terms.
By using the technique of the three categories you allow an increase in traffic and conversion relating to more sales, this allows you to still work on the high competition phrases. With the added traffic and conversion ranking for the primary terms becomes a more obtainable goal, with profits to fund the campaign.