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The United States is a huge market. You could probably solely sell your goods or services or even center your website’s topic strictly around something in the US.

Most of us though know, that there is an entire market of people out there that we are not even touching and thus could be losing some very viable search traffic from, in non-English speaking markets.

This is great you say because you have been wanting to put your product in France or Mexico or wherever but simply don’t know how to go about researching the market to do so.

Yahoo’s Overture search tool is now in French, Spanish, German and Japanese.

You now have the ability to market in any of these languages. But what if you don’t know the language?
The very first thing I would do is head on over to Elance or Rent-a-Coder and find someone who speaks the language you are wanting to target natively.

Let them know the keywords you are looking to target for your particular market and let them do the research. Not only can they help you research your keywords, but being as they are from the country you are marketing to, they will have a better command of the language and which words to use effectively.

All the best,
Kristine

Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI (did your “boooooorrrrrinnng” light come on?)

I’m only going to touch on this briefly here. There will be a much larger article about LSI on our website at http://www.be-a-wahm.com.

LSI is really beginning to come to the forefront of website optimization. It’s not an unknown term but it is not widely known. Without causing your eyes to glaze over, it’s simply a way the search engines read your page and understand what your webpage is about.

A good example is “bark” Is your site about the “bark” of a dog or the “bark” of a tree?

Search engines have their own ways of discerning this and we’ll get into it further on our website but suffice it to say that there are certain ways you can write your webpage so as not to confuse the search engines as to what your website is about.

All right, if you’re interested in learning more, check out our web page about it.

An by the way, just in case you are interested, these words are also called homographs.

Quit Writing for the Search Engines

So many people make the mistake of listening to the “guru of the day” when it comes to keyword optimization and your website.

How many times have you visited a website, let’s say, about “Moms” only to see the following:

If you are a Mom then you know how hard it is to be a Mom. Moms have a lot of work to do especially if you are a say at home Mom. A Mom’s work is never done. From hearing your kids say “Mom!” to hearing your husband jokingly say “Hey Mom how about…”. Mom’s, especially stay at home Mom’s are the hardest working people out there. If you’re a Mom you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

C’mon people! Does this really read like people talk? If you visited a website would you find this interesting?

It’s annoying at best. Yet so many people find their particular keyword for their particular page and do just that. They try and find ways to incorporate their keyword into the text as much as possible and it ends up sounding just horrible. They are not writing for their audience, they are writing for the search engines.

This is not the way to gain popularity.

The key to getting high search engine rankings is to simply write for your audience as naturally as possible. However, there are a few other tricks you can use within your writing to be sure that the search engines know exactly what your page is about while still sticking with your overall keyword for the page.

Let’s take the term “Mom” again for simplicity’s sake.

If we head on over to Wordtracker (if you don’t have a subscription, get one! Your competition is using it I guarantee it! And if you don’t have the money now, then at least sign up for the free trial.)

If I enter the word “Mom” into Wordtracker it gives me the following results: (I’m only listing the top 10 here).

• mom
• family
• children
• pregnancy
• parenting
• kids
• mother
• parent
• Mom
• school

As you can see, there are a LOT of other, related keywords relating to “Mom”. Taking this information, we would then rewrite the above absurdity into something that makes a lot more sense and makes your visitors (and hence, the search engines) happy:

If you are a Mom then you know how hard it is running a family. As a mother you have a lot of work to do especially if you are a say at home parent. You never get tired of hearing your children holler for you as they run in the door after school and being there for your kids is what parenting is all about. During pregnancy you never knew how rewarding being a mother could be.

Now we have shortened it up a bit and it still sounds just a little choppy but doesn’t that read so much better than all the “Mom’s” references in the first example?

To be successful in your business you have to keep your visitors in mind. Knowing what terms they are searching for and using them within your content is the absolute best way to get high-quality visitors and equally high search engine rankings.

All the best,
Kristine

You haven’t gone over to Wordtracker yet? What are you waiting for? Your competition to get there first? Jeez!

Websites vs. Webpages

A lot of people are confused about the difference between Websites and Webpages when it comes to search engines.

Your website is your overall theme and encompasses all of your webpages. It is your webpages that show up in the search engines not just your website.

For example, if you have a website about Ice Cream and you have 40 or so pages on your website each named “vanilla”, “chocolate”, “mint”, “chocolate chip cookie dough”, “peppermint”, and so on, each of these individual pages will be visited by the search engines and indexed or put into their database.

People have a misconception that it is their website and their website only that gets found in the search engines. What you need to understand is that since each individual page on your site is indexed, each of these pages needs to be keyword optimized.

It is these individual pages that your site visitors will find and thus your website.

I hope this has helped to clear up some confusion as to the difference – albeit slight – between the two.

All the best,
Kristine

Keywords & Keyphrases

Today we’re going to clear up a little confusion.

There is a difference between keywords and keyphrases although it is not much. You often hear them interchangeably but if you are an incredibly detailed person, you probably want to know exactly what the difference is.

A keyword is a single word used to describe your page. For example, if you are creating a site about fish, and one of your pages is about Goldfish, then “goldfish” would be the keyword for that page.

A keyphrase is nothing more than two or more words used to describe your page. For example, on your fish site you may have a page about fishtanks for goldfish. Therefore, your keyphrase would be “goldfish fishtanks”.

There is an absolutely proper way to find out what keywords and keyphrases are actually being used by real, live people. The best way to do this is to use Wordtracker. I’ll even give you a little freebie here…

If I go to Wordtracker and enter in the term “goldfish” it brings back the following keywords and phrases that people have searched for in the past 90 days. What follows is actually only a sampling of what came back – there were actually hundreds of keywords and keyphrases for goldfish:

“goldfish” – 1427 people searched for this term in the past 90 days

“Goldfish” – 142 “” (notice the only difference is a capital “G”)

“goldfish plant” – 117

“goldfish care” – 86

“Types of Goldfish” – 78

“goldfish diseases” – 75

“Care of a Goldfish Plant” – 71

“fancy goldfish” – 56

“pregnant goldfish” – 55
As you can see, you now have 9 keywords and phrases that people are really searching for and that you can now use as keywords for your web site.

Without knowing what people are actually searching for, you have little chance of making it to the top pages of any search engine. Your competition uses Wordtracker…I guarantee it.

There is a reason that certain pages are at the top of search engine results and knowing what people are looking for and actually giving them that information is absolutely crucial to your site’s success.

All the best,
Kristine