SEO Tips Australia

There are several good keyword tools out there that you can use to generate ideas for what to target as you build websites and blogs. The most well known is the Adwords keyword tool of course. That gives you lots of good information as well as listing many related keywords and phrases.

But there's one that I've found recently that seems to come up with a very different and often longer list of related keywords. It includes the level of competition for each. This is the Keyword Country free keyword suggestion tool. Those extra suggestions are great raw material to use as inspiration for pages and blog posts as well as articles that you use in your link building efforts.

One place you can get a powerful backlink to your own website is the revenue sharing site Triond. It's like an article directory, but you don't put the links in an author bio-box. You can put them in the body of the article, and they are "dofollow" so they do pass on search engine juice.

Triond has various sub-sites that all have their own unique domains. One of these, Trifter, looks like a good place to submit something if you are seeking geo-specific traffic. It's the place for travel related articles, and there's a section for Australia.

Obviously, submitting something there would be most appropriate if you have a specifically location-oriented website such as an entertainment guide for a city or town. But other kinds of websites would still benefit.

You've just got to find a local angle. So, say you have a website for a surf shop. You could write an article about all the best surf beaches in that city.

The trick is to include information that is good, unique and relevant, and not just make your article a shameless puff piece. That way you're offering the reader something worthwhile, and the backlink you include is appropriate even if it isn't demonstrably useful.

As you crawl up the rankings for different keywords you notice how various spelling versions rank differently. For example, for this main site, I rank pretty highly for "SEO tips". That's because that acronym is in the actual URL, and because I've got a reasonable number of backlinks out there with it in the anchor text.

In recent months I started getting some Google traffic from the phrase "search engine optimisation tips" even though I hadn't targeted that at all. Presumably this was because the search engine is pretty smart and knows what the acronym stands for. But remember there are two ways to spell the word "optimisation" -- one with an "s" and one with a "z". And at that point I hadn't had any visitors arrive via searches for the latter version.

So I've done a bit of backlink building over recent weeks, alternating between the two versions in the anchor text. I'm now on page one for both of them, and getting a couple more hits a day on average. Sure, that's not much, but every little bit helps. And it will build as I keep chipping away.

So, there's definitely something to remember there. If you're targeting a keyword phrase, see if there's an acronym for it. And also look for different ways to spell it. Then build links using all those different versions. You could end up drawing in quite a bit of extra search engine traffic as a result.

It's certainly a great feeling to get onto the first page of Google's search engine results for your chosen keyword or phrase. As long as it has decent search volume, you're sure to get a constant flow of trageted traffic as a result. (And even if you get hardly any, it still proves that you're doing something right!)

But your ultimate goal should always be to rise to the very top of the page -- preferably in the top three positions -- since this is when you really notice the benefits. A study carried out earlier this year showed that when combined these three slots get well over half of all the clicks from people viewing the results. Not surprisingly, there was significant variation between these three places also:

Websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent; and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent. Being number one in Google, according to Optify, is the equivalent of all the traffic going to the sites appearing in the second through fifth positions.

I have noticed this very effect in action just recently. I was sitting in third place for a nice two word phrase that was bringing several hits a day to the main domain of this site. Recently, I moved into second place for it. It's quite remarkable what a boost that change has given me. If I do get into the top spot, well, that will be fantastic!

This site is specifically about SEO. And it's not highly structured. I just keep blogging, building and promoting websites, checking the results of my experiments, then describing the results here occasionally. So it's designed to help people who have a bit of time to browse through the posts and pages, then pick out and perhaps apply what looks suitable to them.

However, many people -- particularly those in business -- are too maxed out for this leisurely approach. They are looking for good, clear informaiton about building a website from scratch, and doing it in the quickest way possible with the best tools available.

These people might be interested in You Make The Website. It's been created by Dean Wormald, who has extensive experience in website production, SEO and other related fields.

For a small fee you get a comprehensive guide about how to start a website from scratch using Wordpress. It's all very clearly laid out. Subjects include how to set up various required accounts, choosing domain names, drawing traffic, and using Google Analytics. Membership includes access to various useful resources.

As any blogger knows, Wordpress is the best blogging platform available. But it's also a great content management system in its own right and has been designed with SEO in mind. It can be used to make a slick and professional website, and so is great for businesses.

The downside is that using Wordpress does require some comparatively involved technical steps. (Actually that's one of the reasons I haven't used it yet. I find it all a bit daunting! I've found that Blogger, Yola and Weebly meet my needs for now.) But the step by step approach in the guide will help dispel any trepidation that people have about using this platform.

In my opinion this is a good option for someone keen to build and promote his or her own professional looking, SEO friendly website quickly and efficiently.

You Make The Website

There are many keywords and phrases that have had huge competition for a long while, so you've got Buckley's chance of ranking highly for them and there's no point in trying. However, if you just add the name of a country after them, as so many people do when Googling, ranking highly becomes a whole lot easier.

Here's an example. Some months back I started building a basic "make money from home" site around a domain I'd bought ages ago -- originally to promote a particular real estate affiliate program. It's "oz-income.net". It's not a great domain name for the subject, but it's not the worst, either.

I did next to no keyword research, and just wrote some pages that I thought were appropriate and relevant to the subject of making a supplementary income from home in this country. I've been pretty busy so they're all quite basic, and I haven't even written meta-descriptions for them yet. I have been building links, though, mostly with articles and lots of blog comments.

Anyway the traffic is trickling in and gradually increasing. And the main domain is already on the bottom of page one (and sometimes the top of page two) for searches for "make money from home Australia".

So, that's definitely something to think about if you have a website or blog in a very competitive niche. Just tailor it more towards Aussies, include the country name in your page titles and it should help quite a bit.

I posted recently about Google's drop down suggestion box. That lists keywords to the searcher based on what others have been typing in. In the same way, the search engine will also suggest actual domain names. (To try it just type in "www." then a letter and you'll see how it works.)

There are obvious benefits if your site is listed there. Searchers will inevitably choose it from time to time and you'll get more hits.

I assume that the criteria for listing is that your actual domain name has been searched for a reasonable number of times. Now, I know that the main domain for this site is not yet included, even though it does okay in Google. (For example I'm in the third position for Aussie searches for "seo tips" and I sometimes get 15 hits a day from that one query alone.)

Yet I have two URLs that do appear in this domain suggestion box. Significantly, those two are the ones that I have done quite a bit of offline promotion for (using flyers mostly). I have done next to none for this site. I suspect it's this offline promotion that was the crucial factor.

Why this conclusion? Because lately, after having done flyer campaigns for these sites, as well as seeing direct "type in" clicks, I've seen quite a few clicks coming from searches for these domains.

Clearly people are getting savvier in their use of the internet. Upon receiving a flyer they often check to see if the advertised site is listed in Google (which will give them a sense of its quality). Google helpfully shows them a preview as well. If they feel the site is worth clicking on then they will do so. Consequently that hit is recorded as resulting from a search for that domain.

It seems that if you rack up enough of these "URL-search" hits, Google will include your domain in the drop down suggestion box. Given that Google is becoming more and more localized in its presentation of results, I suspect that it will give URL suggestions related to the location of the searcher. So, this seems to be another way in which offline advertising can help with local SEO and bring more visitors to your site.

Anyone who's used Google will be familiar with the drop down suggested searches box. It's basically the search engine using its own data to do a bit of thinking for you and suggest the keyword searches that many other people have used.

So, as you type in each word, others magically appear below in the menu. The more words you type yourself, the more chance that you're using a completely one off, original search, and so the suggestions trail off to nothing.

This tool is extremely useful for webmasters and bloggers because they can be sure that if a keyword search appears, a reasonable number of people type that in every month. So, if you include such keyword combinations in your page and blog post titles and write lots of good unique content that's relevant to them you've got a good chance of ranking fairly highly for such searches, and ones like them. Targeted traffic will then follow.

That said, it's not always that simple, because some keyword searches have massive volumes and therefore huge competition. And that information is not included next to the words. Still, if you apply a bit of intuition it's not hard to find some keyword combinations with strong potential.

You can get pretty creative and find your own way of using this drop down suggestion tool. It's great for helping you get geo-targeted Aussie traffic too. One thing that people often do is type a country, state or city name, then their main keyword (or vice versa). Depending on how popular those keywords are, Google will then suggest many related, oft-used searches.

For example, if you run an employment themed website you can type in "Australia+jobs" and you'll get many suggestions. You can sift through them for ideas. And even some of the resultant three word searches listed will throw up still more that you can target.

Of course it's doesn't always follow that those typing in local location names are from Australia. However you can be confident that many of them are. Keep going with this technique - even if you don't do further research into exactly how many people type those particular searches and how many websites and blogs are competing for them - and you're sure to have some success before too long. Remember that a few such traffic trickles can add up to a flood over a year or so.

One thing worth remembering when blogging is that people are always on the lookout for specific information. That's why it's a good idea to write detailed posts with the names of products, companies, businesses and even well known individuals in the titles. It's usually pretty easy to end up on page one for search results for such keywords. And needless to say, if those keywords are specifically related to Australia, then you will draw local visitors.

And being opinionated can also make those posts stand out on the search results pages, making them more likely to be clicked on. I had a very good illustration of this recently.

Being a climate change skeptic I did some Googling on the issue and noticed that a theatrical management company that runs a lot of Perth theatre venues had some pretty full on green policies in place. So I wrote what was quite an abrasive, though humorous post about this on my arts blog. It ranked highly enough in Aussie searches including the company name that a journalist for a local paper who was researching a story on the company saw my post and read it. He thought that the blog itself was unusual and interesting, so ended up doing a story on it alone. It can be found on page 2 of the issue marked 14/5.

I haven't received any direct SEO benefit from this, since the issues seem not to be indexed by Google. However I've definitely had some clicks coming in from people who read the story, since I saw these in my stats. And it has certainly helped raise my profile as a local blogger.

So, remember to be specific with your blog posts, and don't be afraid to be controversial. It can definitely get you noticed by media outlets with a much wider reach.

I occasionally tweet about Perth, and these tweets get retweeted comparatively often. They also get included every now and then in Twitter "newspapers" like this one.

There are clearly a lot of people on Twitter interested in information related to their location. And not just at the city level; they tweet and retweet about their suburbs, too. Take this feed, which is devoted primarily to things happening in (or at least related to) Wanneroo.

This is a goldmine for any business person keen to service a particular geographical area. You can get your products and services well known through Twitter for free. As well as the direct geo-targeted traffic it can attract, remember that lots of tweeps are also bloggers and webmasters, so you're bound to get a few local backlinks as well.

The key is to just to keep cranking out geo-specific tweets, and be sure to use the hash tags with the locations you cite.