I know exactly what she’s talking about and was glad to hear her answer the questions that way, because “it depends” is often the only way you can answer SEO questions. In fact, it’s so common that “it depends” has been said 357 times on various High Rankings Forum threads!

To show you what I mean, here’s a list of SEO questions that I get asked all the time, along with what the answer depends upon, and then a quick answer based on the various factors that might be involved:

Q. How quickly will Google re-index my pages after I’ve SEO’d them?

It depends on: how popular your site is, how often Google’s spiders typically come around, how deep in the site the changes have been made, and more.

The quick answer: Anywhere from 1 day to 6 weeks.

It depends on: how long you had your previous rankings, how competitive they were, if you’ve done anything to purposely deceive the search engines, how long rankings drop has existed, etc.

The quick answer: Do nothing and give it a few weeks to see if your rankings come back. In most cases, they will.

It depends on: who’s doing it, their knowledge and skill levels, as well as the types of keyword phrases you’re targeting.

The quick answer: SEO done correctly by a knowledgeable and skilled SEO consultant can be highly effective in increasing the targeted traffic to your website. But SEO done by someone who’s just read about it…well…not so much!

It depends on: whether your content management system (CMS) does this as the default and it would be difficult to change, or how much time you have to create separate Titles and headlines.

The quick answer: Typically you’d want your Title tag and your main headline to be different because they serve different purposes. But if it’s a major undertaking to ensure this doesn’t happen, it’s not a deal breaker as far as SEO is concerned, assuming you have some control over what they say.

It depends on: whether your current URLs are getting indexed and found, whether you’re currently in the midst of a redesign, how awful your URLs currently look, how easy it is to implement within your CMS, and whether you can easily 301-redirect the old versions to the new ones.

The quick answer: If you have to change all URLs anyway because of a website redesign and CMS change, then sure, make clean, keyword-rich URLs that look nice in the search results. But if there’s nothing really wrong with your current ones other than you don’t like the way they look or you think you need to add keywords to them, it’s probably not worth the hassle that goes with such a major change to the structure of your website.

It depends on: how many keywords phrases people would type into the search engines to seek out what your company provides and how many pages your site has.

The quick answer: If everything else is in place, you can typically target anywhere from 2-5 keyword phrases on any one page of your website. Multiply that by the number of unique, optimizable pages on your site and you should have a rough estimate of how many potential keyword phrases you could target.

It depends on: whether you want to brand the blog as part of your main website or brand it as a separate entity, and whether you want people to be able to easily remember the URL.

The quick answer: Whether it’s in a sub-directory or subdomain doesn’t make too much difference, although if it’s in a subdomain you may have more chance of it showing up in the search results at the same time that your main domain also shows up, than if it’s in a sub-directory. On the other hand, the average person doesn’t think to type in subdomains if they’re trying to go directly to your site and are more likely to remember something like yourdomain.com/blog than blog.yourdomain.com. For SEO purposes, none of these things really matter, so it’s more of a business/branding decision.

It depends on: how many words it takes to say what you need to say.

The quick answer: There is no specific number of words a page should be for SEO purposes.

Which is King – Quality Content or Keywords?

Yahoo tends to lean towards commerce-related sites more so than informational sites and has a paid-inclusion program that allows even newer websites to appear at the top of search engine results. To rank well with Yahoo, it helps to have very descriptive and keyword-rich content and titles for each page. The same goes for MSN search, which places high value on descriptive content.

However, MSN search currently drives little traffic so any website owner’s goal should be to rank with Google and Yahoo first and foremost. To rank with Google, long-term efforts to improve organic ranking are your best bet while more aggressive SEO tactics fare better with Yahoo and MSN. Google is a bit trickier when it comes to ranking your website based on content. If your website is obviously targeting a particular keyword phrase, such as when that particular keyword phrase is used in internal links, inbound links, the page title, etc., Google may omit your website from search results for that particular keyword.

If you want to successfully rank on Google, you must make the content on your website appear as natural as possible. Avoid overuse of keyword phrases and make your content newsy and informational. Disperse semantically related text throughout the content on your website and be frugal with keywords if you want your website to have a better chance of ranking on Google.

Query Processing – Text vs. Concept

Yahoo places a lot of importance on the text of your website. If you search for a particular keyword phrase, you will notice that the top search engine rankings on Yahoo have the exact same phrase in the title. Even common words of lesser importance such as “how to” will show up in the text of the page titles. Yahoo values even such commonly used phrases, making them important to use in your page titles and text if you want to rank on Yahoo.

On the other hand, Google places little importance on common words and phrases and instead judges a page based on its educational value. In sum, Google values concept over text. If your website has a lot of informational content it is more likely to rank on Google, which judges content based on its meaning rather than merely taking it for its literal value. MSN is also better than Yahoo in this regard but it still pales in comparison to Google.

So there you have it. Query processing and content are just a couple of the important factors top search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN judge when ranking websites. Keep these points in mind when creating content and titles for your website’s pages because your actions will have varying results from search engine to search engine. Decide which search engine you want to focus on ranking for and alter your approach based on that decision.

SEO Articles: How Google, Yahoo and MSN Differ

Keyword research is often known as a “process” rather than just simple research, comprising of selecting the most popular keyword phrase(s) that will help internet users find your website (and therefore the information they are seeking!). Most web designers and administrators spend weeks and months on their web pages, fine-tuning them so that their pages can get a good ranking on major search engines but still find that they are listing near/at the bottom. This happens because of the simple fact that they have not chosen the RIGHT keyword phrases or their keyword research was not adequate/relevant to their audience needs. You should not make the same mistake (as long as you keep reading) if you are unable to reach your target audience and generate business – then what is the point of creating a website? Hence, the focus should be more on identifying the target audience as well as keyword research.

A good marketing strategy is one which focuses on its target audience and that should be your aim too. You need to reach out to them. Your focus can be geographical or demographical, region specific, location specific, age group specific, sex specific or even country specific. The focus can also be industry specific like trade, business, service, or products. It is about going niche!

Keyword Research Process
Now let’s get down to understanding the keyword research process. The process of keyword research involves certain steps, which can be identified as:

1.    Discovering Keywords: The discovering keywords phase will focus mostly on identifying as many optimum performance keywords as possible and at the same time they should be related to your website, business, product, service, and target audience
2.    Analyzing Keywords: In the analysis phase, you will be adding more information to search for keywords like identifying existing competition, certain limitations that are PageRank based and the actual potential for page ranking
3.    Selecting Keywords: Selecting keywords is the most critical phase in the entire process and requires objective measurement based short-listing of all optimum performance keywords. You need to focus on the website, how you want to project it to the customers and on the target audience within any limitations that you have identified or analyzed.
4.    Deploying Keywords: The Deployment phase focuses on how well you use the selected keywords or keyword phrases through HTML code, website copy, as well as tags.

NOTE: Avoid the “keyword density” pitfall! Don’t stuff your web pages with keywords as this will backfire and the SEO campaign will fail completely. Try SEOintelligence Today to increase your rankings and choose the RIGHT keywords the beginning!

Best Practices

Keywords: Visibility, search engine optimization, SEM, meta tags, Alt tags, Google Adwords and other forms and strategies of online advertising depend on just one word – the keyword. There are two types of keyword that you can use: primary keyword and secondary keyword. Now for example: if the primary keyword is adventure travel then secondary keywords can be travel cruises, trekking, hiking, mountaineering, river rafting and many more. It will then come down to how well you are able to use your primary and secondary keywords without making your content sound more like a drag. So you need to avoid keyword spamming. You need to place your primary keyword strategically on your website so that the search engines can find them with ease and treat them as the most important words to appear on your website.

Optimizing website content: The factor that drives page ranking is textual content on your web page. You need to hence ensure that your web site should have sufficient text on each of the web pages in order to facilitate proper indexing by various search engines. You need to keep in mind that the text on your web page will not include images or Flash elements. The body copy of a web page should have the correct and most important keyword phrases.

Links from external websites: Page Rank is often increased based on the number as well as quality of links. This means that if your web page is linked to other good or high page ranking websites then it will have a positive affect on the page ranking of your website as well. You can start by sending linking requests to other top ranking websites. This should also be followed by reciprocal linking.

JavaScript navigation: If you are thinking of using JavaScript navigation then you need to reconsider the decision because search engines have difficulty indexing websites using JavaScript based navigation.

Page titles: You need to create appropriate page titles for each of the web pages on your website. A page title is the first line of copy that is displayed during search listing. To attract visitors, you need to apply the right keywords and compelling copy in page titles.

Dynamic URLs: If you are using a dynamic URL then search engines will face difficulty in indexing your web pages. Try to avoid using dynamic URL’s.

Flash content: As of date, search engines are unable to index flash based web pages. So if you need to use flash then limit it to images only and for text, you can use simple HTML. This will serve all your purposes.

‘Siloing’ is the solution offered towards this kind of link dilution, which is sometimes referred to as unfocused linking (I know I don’t make this up). Siloing can resolve the poor linking problem and help you to achieve a high rank on search engines for specific as well as general keywords/specific keyword phrases – basically you get the best of both worlds. This is done mainly by using a themed vertical page construction or linking. The best way to achieve high ranks for keywords is by incorporating silos right into the website structure.

There are mainly two types of silos and they are:
1. Virtual silos
2. Directory based silos

Both the ‘virtual’ and ‘directory’ based silos are capable of creating a keyword theme using linking, but they achieve this method using very different methodologies. The ‘virtual silos’ are capable of creating content as well as subject relationships by cross-linking them so that a theme can be created. On the other hand, a directory based silo will create a relationship through linking different directories to a group.

If you use the directory silo method then it will build relationships between different pages by grouping similar-content pages under one directory and the directory theme will be then tied to the main directory structure (simple and most common). Most directory structures will need a minimum of five content pages that will support the topic that your directory is trying to address. One thing that you need to remember is that all directory silos will need to be extremely well structured as well as organized.

The only way to ensure that your directory silo has been implemented correctly; you will need to group similar-content into different directories. To understand it better, let us take an example of salami and cheese. You will need to create a separate directory for each of the themes, which are one for salami and one for cheese. You will have subsequent pages in the directory that are content rich in order to support your overall directory theme. Now if there are two types of cheese: feta cheese and Parmigiano reggiano then both the different types of cheese will be categorized under the main cheese page. We can extrapolate this idea with Salami, and build out pages based on type: Genoa, Hard, Soppreseta etc…see it’s easy and I’m getting hungry.

On the other hand, you can create a virtual silo theme through linking. In a virtual silo environment the page names are unimportant because the relationship between the pages might not necessarily be in under the same silo. The silo will always be defined by each of the pages it is linked to. Thus in a virtual silo, you are basically creating a theme that is based on links vis-à-vis a directory structure in directory silo.

Try SEOintelligence and use our Keyword Manager and Categorization features to easily create and manage your own optimized Keyword silos!