Author: prospeedguy@gmail.com

Learn what search engines do and how they work. Easy step-by-step tutorial with a video for beginners.

If you are a developer, designer, small business owner, marketing professional, website owner, or thinking of creating a personal blog or website for your business, then you need to understand how search engines work.

Having a clear understanding of how search works, can help you create a website that search engines can understand, and this has a number of added benefits.

It’s the first step you need to take before even dealing with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or any other SEM (Search Engine Marketing) tasks.

In this guide, you’ll learn the three main processes (crawling, indexing, and ranking) that search engines follow to find, organize, and present information to users.

What does a Search Engine Do?

Have you ever wondered how many times per day you use Google or any other search engine to search the web?

Is it 5 times, 10 times or even sometimes more? Did you know that Google alone handles more than 2 trillion searches per year?

The numbers are huge. Search engines have become part of our daily life. We use them as a learning tool, a shopping tool, for fun and leisure but also for business.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that we reached a point that we depend on search engines for almost anything we do.

And the reason this is happening is very simple. We know that search engines and in particular, Google has answers to all our questions and queries.

What happens though when you type a query and click search? How do search engines work internally and how do they decide what to show in the search results and in what order?

How Do Search Engines Work

Search engines are complex computer programs.

Before they even allow you to type a query and search the web, they have to do a lot of preparation work so that when you click “Search”, you are presented with a set of precise and quality results that answer your question or query.

What does ‘preparation work’ includes? Three main stages. The first stage is the process of discovering the information, the second stage is organizing the information, and the third stage is ranking.

This is generally known in the Internet World as Crawling, Indexing, and ranking.

Step 1: Crawling

Search engines have a number of computer programs called web crawlers (thus the word Crawling), that are responsible for finding information that is publicly available on the Internet.

To simplify a complicated process, it’s enough for you to know that the job of these software crawlers (also known as search engine spiders), is to scan the Internet and find the servers (also known as webservers) hosting websites.

They create a list of all the web servers to crawl, the number of websites hosted by each server, and then start work.

They visit each website and by using different techniques, they try to find out how many pages they have, whether it is text content, images, videos, or any other format (CSS, HTML, javascript, etc).

When visiting a website, besides taking note of the number of pages they also follow any links (either pointing to pages within the site or to external websites), and thus they discover more and more pages.

They do this continuously and they also keep track of changes made to a website so that they know when new pages are added or deleted, when links are updated, etc.

If you take into account that there are more than 130 trillion individual pages on the Internet today and on average thousands of new pages are published on a daily basis, you can imagine that this is a lot of work.

Why care about the crawling process?

Your first concern when optimizing your website for search engines is to ensure that they can access it correctly otherwise if they cannot ‘read’ your website, you shouldn’t expect much in terms of high rankings or search engine traffic.

As explained above, crawlers have a lot of work to do and you should try and make their job easier.

There are a number of things to do to make sure that crawlers can discover and access your website in the fastest possible way without problems.

1. Use Robots.txt to specify which pages of your website you don’t want crawlers to access. For example, pages like your admin or backend pages and other pages you don’t want to be publicly available on the Internet.
2. Big search engines like Google and Bing, have tools (aka Webmaster tools),  you can use to give them more information about your website (number of pages, structure, etc) so that they don’t have to find it themselves.
3. Use an XML sitemap to list all important pages of your website so that the crawlers can know which pages to monitor for changes and which to ignore.

Step 2: Indexing

Crawling alone is not enough to build a search engine.

Information identified by the crawlers needs to be organized, sorted and stored so that it can be processed by the search engine algorithms before being made available to the end-user.

This process is called Indexing.

Search engines don’t store all the information found on a page in their index but they keep things like: when it was created/updated, title and description of the page, type of content, associated keywords, incoming and outgoing links, and a lot of other parameters that are needed by their algorithms.

Google likes to describe its index as the back of a book (a really big book).

Why care about the indexing process?

It’s very simple, if your website is not in their index, it will not appear for any searches.

This also implies that the more pages you have in the search engine indexes, the more your chances of appearing in the search results when someone types a query.

Notice that I mentioned the word ‘appear in the search results’, which means in any position and not necessarily on the top positions or pages.

In order to appear in the first 5 positions of the SERPs (search engine results pages), you have to optimize your website for search engines using a process called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short.

How to find how many pages of your website are included in the Google index?

There are two ways to do that.

Open Google and use the site operator followed by your domain name. For example site:reliablesoft.net. You will find out how many pages related to the particular domain are included in the Google Index.

The second way is to create a free Google Search Console account and add your website.

Then look at the Coverage report and in particular the VALID AND INDEXED pages.

Step 3: Ranking

Search Engine Ranking Algorithms

The third and final step in the process is for search engines to decide which pages to show in the SERPS and in what order when someone types a query.

This is achieved through the use of search engine ranking algorithms.

In simple terms, these are pieces of software that have a number of rules that analyze what the user is looking for and what information to return.

These rules and decisions are made based on what information is available in their index.

How do search engine algorithms work?

Over the years search engine ranking algorithms have evolved and become really complex.

At the beginning (think 2001) it was as simple as matching the user’s query with the title of the page but this is no longer the case.

Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account more than 255 rules before making a decision and nobody knows for sure what these rules are.

And this includes Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s founders), who created the original algorithm.

Things have changed a lot and now machine learning and computer programs are responsible for making decisions based on a number of parameters that are outside the boundaries of the content found on a web page.

To make it easier to understand, here is a simplified process of how search engine ranking factors work:

Step 1: Analyze User Query

The first step is for search engines to understand what kind of information the user is looking for.

To do that, they analyze the user’s query (search terms) by breaking it down into a number of meaningful keywords.

A keyword is a word that has a specific meaning and purpose.

For example, when you type “How to make a chocolate cake”, search engines know from the words how-to that you are looking for instructions on how to make a chocolate cake and thus the returned results will contain cooking websites with recipes.

If you search for “Buy refurbished ….”, they know from the words buy and refurbished that you are looking to buy something and the returned results will include eCommerce websites and online shops.

Machine learning has helped them associate related keywords together. For example, they know that the meaning of this query “how to change a light bulb” is the same as this “how to replace a light bulb”.

They are also clever enough to interpret spelling mistakes, understand plurals and in general extract the meaning of a query from natural language (either written or verbal in case of Voice search).

Step 2: Finding matching pages

The second step is to look into their index and decide which pages can provide the best answer for a given query.

This is a very important stage in the whole process for both search engines and web owners.

Search engines need to return the best possible results in the fastest possible way so that they keep their users happy and web owners want their websites to be picked up so that they get traffic and visits.

This is also the stage where good SEO techniques can influence the decision made by the algorithms.

To give you an idea of how matching works, these are the most important factors:

Title and content relevancy – how relevant is the title and content of the page with the user query?

Type of content – if the user is asking for images, the returned results will contain images and not text.

Quality of the content – content needs to be thorough, useful and informative, unbiased, and cover both sites of a story.

Quality of the website – The overall quality of a website matters. Google will not show pages from websites that don’t meet their quality standards.

Date of publication – For news-related queries, Google wants to show the latest results so the date of publication is also taken into account.

The popularity of a page – This doesn’t have to do with how much traffic a website has but how other websites perceive the particular page.

A page that has a lot of references (backlinks), from other websites is considered to be more popular than other pages with no links and thus has more chances in getting picked up by the algorithms. This process is also known as Off-Page SEO.

Language of the page – Users are served pages in their language and it’s not always English.

Webpage Speed – Websites that load fast (think 2-3 seconds) have a small advantage compared to websites that are slow to load.

Device Type – Users searching on mobile are served mobile-friendly pages.

Location – Users searching for results in their area i.e. “Italian restaurants in Ohio” will be shown results related to their location.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. As mentioned before, Google uses more than 255 factors in its algorithms to ensure that its users are happy with the results they get.

Why care how search engine ranking algorithms work?

In order to get traffic from search engines, your website needs to appear in the top positions on the first page of the results.

It is statistically proven that the majority of users click one of the top 5 results (both desktop and mobile).

Appearing on the second or third page of the results will not get you any traffic at all.

Traffic is just one of the benefits of SEO, once you get to the top positions for keywords that make sense for your business, the added benefits are much more.

Knowing how search engines work can help you adjust your website and increase your rankings and traffic.

Conclusion

Search engines have become very complex computer programs. Their interface may be simple but the way they work and make decisions is far from simple.

The process starts with crawling and indexing. During this phase, the search engine crawlers gather as much information as possible for all the websites that are publicly available on the Internet.

They discover, process, sort, and store this information in a format that can be used by search engine algorithms to make a decision and return the best possible results back to the user.

The amount of data they have to digest is enormous and the process is completely automated. Human intervention is only done in the process of designing the rules to be used by the various algorithms but even this step is gradually being replaced by computers through the help of artificial intelligence.

As a webmaster, your job is to make their crawling and indexing job easier by creating websites that have a simple and straightforward structure.

Once they can “read” your website without issues, you then need to ensure that you give them the right signals to help their search ranking algorithms, and pick your website when a user types a relevant query (that’s SEO).

Everything you need to know about Search Engine Marketing. Includes examples and additional learning resources.

Search engine marketing is a very effective digital marketing channel. Through search marketing, you can increase the visibility of your website in search engine results using paid and unpaid methods.

SEM is important because search traffic is targeted and thus more valuable than any other form of traffic you can get with other promotion methods.

In this guide, you’ll learn what is search engine marketing, why it’s important, and the different types of SEM.

Search Engine Marketing

• What is Search Engine Marketing
• Importance of Search Marketing
• Search Marketing Types

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing (also known as Search Marketing) is the process of getting traffic from search engines either organically or paid.

Search marketing has two main types: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PSA (Paid Search Advertising).

SEO is the way to get free traffic from search engines by achieving high rankings in the SERPs and Paid search ads are the process of paying for your ads to appear on search engine results pages.

What is the main goal of Search Marketing?

The overall goal of SEM is to increase visibility in search engines by achieving higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) or top positions for ad placements.

Higher ad positions and rankings mean more traffic and this has a number of added advantages.

As we will see later, each SEM component has a number of processes and tools.

Importance of Search Marketing

Before getting into the details on what is SEO and paid search advertising (PSA) and how to use them to get more exposure and traffic from search engines, let’s quickly examine the importance of SEM for the success of a website or online business.

It is a fact that in today’s world the Internet is the source for everything we need to know, learn, ask, buy or do.

Whenever we have a question or looking for something, the first thing we do is to turn to a search engine (in the majority of cases Google) and type in our search query.

When we hit SEARCH, we expect to either get a direct answer to our question or a list of resources (and this list includes both ads and websites), that can satisfy our intent.

Search engines are working hard to improve the quality of their search results by presenting to the searcher those websites (or ads) that will keep their users happy and come back again for more searches.

To do that they have developed complex algorithms that take a number of variables into account before they decide which websites (or ads) to show in the top positions.

Search engine marketing is important because it’s the process to follow to optimize your website or ads so that they appear in the top positions.

Your goal is not just to have a presence in search engines but to show up in one of the top 5 positions for the search terms (keywords), that matter for your business or website.

Statistics show that the majority of users click on one of the top ads or one of the first five organic results.

Search Marketing Types

There are a number of techniques you can follow to improve your presence in search engines (organically) and to achieve higher positions for your ads.

As mentioned above, these are grouped into two main types, SEO and PSA.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing your website for achieving higher rankings in search engines for certain keywords.

SEO principles can also help you create high-quality websites with good content and satisfy the user intent.

Until 10 years ago, SEO was about keyword stuffing, publishing mediocre content, and building links but this is not the case today.

SEO has become more complex and to get it right, you have to take into account a number of parameters.

To make the whole process easier, it is broken down into the following SEO types:

Technical SEO – optimize your website for the crawling and indexing process so that search engines can discover, read and understand your website.

On-Page SEO – optimize all pages of your website one by one and give search engines the right signals to understand what your website and individual pages are all about.

Off-Page SEO – promote your website on the internet, get good quality backlinks and prove to search engine algorithms that your website deserves to be in one of the top spots for the keywords you want.

You may also come across other terms which describe specific aspects of SEO like:

• Content SEO – give both users and search engines the content they want and keep them happy
• Local SEO – optimizes your website so that people can find and visit your brick-and-mortar store
• eCommerce SEO – SEO rules that are applicable to eCommerce websites only.
• Mobile SEO – make it easy for users to find and use your website while on the go and from their mobile or tablet devices.

Why is SEO important?

Higher rankings, more traffic: If your goal with search marketing is to get traffic to your website without having to pay for ads, then SEO is the way to go.

As mentioned above, the websites that appear in the top 3 positions of the organic results get more than 60% of the traffic – This statistic alone explains the importance of SEO.

Search engine traffic is targeted: Open Google and search for anything you want. The websites that appear in the top positions get thousands of visits from Google on a daily basis.

Depending on the keywords you used, they are probably making thousands of dollars in revenue (from advertising or selling their own products or services), because search engine traffic is highly targeted.

Unlike traffic coming from Facebook or other social media networks, organic traffic converts better since the users have a clear intent in mind before typing something into Google and it’s not just for curiosity or leisure.

Besides the traffic, SEO offers a number of other advantages and these can be summarized in the following:

Trust and recognition: Users trust search engines because they know that they have strict rules as to which websites are shown in the search results, and in turn, they trust websites that rank in the top positions.

Trust does not only generate more conversions but also increases recognition and brand awareness and this makes your digital marketing efforts in other channels easier.

SEO can guide you on how to create better websites: SEO is not just about search engines but it’s mainly about users. To have a fully optimized website for search engines, it has to be optimized for users first and this is what SEO is all about.

Paid Search Advertising (PSA)

Besides getting organic traffic from Search engines, the other way to take advantage of the millions of users that use search engines on a daily basis and get targeted traffic to your website is through paid ads.

If you search Google you will notice that above and below the organic results, you are presented with Paid Ads.

This is what we mean by paid search advertising. Instead of trying to achieve high rankings through SEO, you can pay your way to the top.

Of course, as we will see below, that’s not so easy. It gets more complicated when a number of advertisers are competing for one of the top ad positions.

The most commonly used model is the PPC (Pay Per Click), which means that you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and the most widely used PSA system is Google Ads.

Google Ads is owned by Google and it is the platform you need to use to show your ads on Google, Youtube, or the thousands of websites that participate in the Google ad network.

How does PPC Work?

The way it works is simple but it gets more complicated when you are dealing with niches and keywords that have a lot of competition. Here is an overview of the process:

• You create a Free account with Google Ads
• You set up advertising campaigns. Each campaign can contain a number of ad groups, keywords, and ads.
• You specify your target audience i.e. which people can see your ads (you can narrow down your selection by country, time of day, user location, etc).
• You start the campaign and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
• You monitor the results of your campaigns and make the necessary changes.

How much you pay every time someone clicks on your ad depends on a number of factors.

The system will give you in advance an indication of how much you will be charged per click but the actual amount is decided when it actually happens.

Google Ads in an auction-based system. This means that the cost of each click and the position your ad will appear depends on ‘demand and supply’.

Every time a search is made on Google, Google Ads runs an auction for the available ad positions.

Advertisers that are willing to pay more, and have higher quality ads that are most likely to satisfy the user intent, win the top positions.

Example:

To make this easier to understand, let’s say that there are 20 advertisers who sell ‘engagement rings’ and want to have their ads shown on the first page of Google when people search for ‘Buy an Engagement Rings’.

Google shows 3-4 ads above the organic search results and 2-3 ads at the bottom. This means that there are only 7 ad spots on the first page but there are 20 advertisers.

Which ads will show on these 7 available positions?

This is where pay-per-click marketing comes into play. Similar to SEO, the Google Ads system takes into account a number of rules before deciding where each ad is to be shown.

Some of the factors can be controlled by advertisers such as the price they are willing to pay per click, the quality of the ads, etc, some are decided during the auction and some are only known to Google.

What you need to understand is that while Paid advertising is a great way to promote your website on Google, it’s not always as simple as setting up an account and running a campaign.

There is an optimization process in place and if you don’t want to lose your money without any return, it is best to leave this task to professional marketers.

When to use PPC Ads?

When you want fast results – One of the disadvantages of SEO is that takes time to work.

The competition is intense in all niches and it takes time to achieve high rankings for the keywords you want.

So, while working on your SEO and waiting patiently to get higher rankings and organic traffic, you can start a campaign in Adwords and get the traffic this way.

You will pay for the traffic but as long as the ROI is positive, then you have more to gain than lose.

You sell expensive products or services – PPC ads are not for every business. The costs of setting up a campaign and the costs per click are high and unless you sell products at a price that can make you a profit, PPC is not the solution for you.

Your SEO is already working and you want better results – PPC and SEO can work together in harmony. It’s never the one or the other.

If you already have some good results with SEO, you can increase your market share by running ads for the same keywords that generate organic traffic for your business.

You run an online business – when you run an online business without having a physical presence and your only source of customers is the Internet, then you need to make paid search advertising work for you.

SEO is a fantastic way to get customers but if your business depends on it, then it’s better to have PPC ads as a second way out.

Difference between SEO and SEM

As explained above, SEO is one of the major components of SEM (search engine marketing). The other one is PSA (Paid search advertising).

A lot of people tend to confuse SEO and SEM and sometimes when they refer to SEM they actually mean PSA i.e. the paid advertising part and they consider SEO to be a process that it’s outside the boundaries of Search Marketing.

KEY LEARNINGS

No business or website can survive online unless it follows solid search engine marketing practices.

Search engine marketing gives you the framework, tools, and processes to gain more visibility in search engines either by getting higher positions in organic results or better positions for your ads.

The two main types of SEM, SEO, and PPC can work together in harmony and maximize your results.

In the online business world, it’s never one or the other. Both are two powerful tools in your digital marketing arsenal, which you can use to boost your online presence.

If you are new to search marketing then what you need to have clear in your mind is that there are no shortcuts. In order to succeed with either SEO or PPC, you need to put the user experience on top of anything else.

Your first task is to make sure you have a great website that is functional and easy to use, then to work on your content and deliver the best possible result to your users.

Once you have this in place, your next step is to start working on your SEO and gradually work your way to the top of the organic results and if applicable, to start working on your PPC campaigns and maximize your Return on Investment (ROI).

Running successful SEM campaigns is not easy, it requires special skills, a lot of experience, and hard work. Enrolling in a good SEM course is the fastest way to build the necessary skills.

If you don’t possess those skills then it’s best to leave it to professionals. Save your precious time and time and at the same time increase your chances of getting the results you want in the fastest possible way.

Learn what SEO Keywords are and how to use them in your content to improve your search engine rankings.

You probably already know that keywords are important for SEO but what do we actually mean when we talk about SEO keywords? How can you find the right keywords for your website and more importantly, how to use those keywords in your content and maximize your SEO?

These are some of the questions I will answer in this post.

Let’s start with a definition of what SEO keywords are.

What are SEO Keywords?

SEO Keywords are words or phrases (search terms) that people use when searching for information through a search engine.

By adding those keywords to your content, you increase your chances of appearing in the search results for those terms.

SEO Keywords make it easier for search engines to understand what your content is all about and help users find the information they need.

Why are keywords important?

As you might have already guessed, keywords are very important for SEO.

Without using the right SEO keywords in your content, search engines have a hard time understanding the meaning of your content. And this diminishes your chances of getting organic traffic to your website.

The way search engines work is by matching the user search queries with pages available in their index.

During the crawling and indexing phase, search engine crawlers visit a webpage. They extract the information they need and add it to their index. They use this information later during the ‘matching’ process (also referred to as the ranking process).

Part of the information they extract is the keywords a web page is associated with.

If during this process your website is associated with the wrong keywords, then you have no chance of appearing high in the results for the keywords that matter for your website.

Let me give you an example to understand this better.

Let’s say you want to rank for [electric bicycles]. You create a page and showcase your products (product name, images of the products, etc.).

Unless you mention on the page that they are electric, Google will most probably associate your page with bicycles, and this is not what you want.

What you should do instead is to find out which keywords people use as search terms when they look for electric bicycles and make sure that these keywords are part of your content.

Different types of SEO keywords

Keywords are classified in two categories: head keywords and long-tail keywords.

Head keywords (also known as seed keywords) usually consist of one or two words and have a high search volume.

Long-tail keywords consist of more words and have less search volume compared to head keywords but makeup 70% of all searches.

What is important to understand at this point is that head keywords may have more search volume but they are also highly competitive.

This means that thousands of websites are competing for one of the top positions in the SERPS and this makes it almost impossible for new websites (or small businesses) to rank for these terms.

The solution is to focus on long-tail keywords.

They have less search volume but with the right SEO plan, it is possible to rank in the top positions of Google and get targeted organic traffic to your website.

How to choose keywords for SEO

Let’s see how to choose the “right” SEO keywords to use in your content.

This process is known in SEO as keyword research.

Step 1: Decide for which ‘search terms’ you want to be known for

Your first step is to spend some time thinking about the following:

• For which search terms do you want to be known for online
• What words or search phrases people might use in the search engines to find you
• Which words best describe your products or services
• Which words describe your niche better

The outcome of the above exercise should be a list of phrases that we’ll use to turn into a keyword list in the next step.

Step 2: Create a Keyword list

To create a keyword list, you need to take the list created above and associate it with the actual keywords people type in the search box i.e. SEO Keywords.

To do that we need the help of keyword research tools. There are a lot of tools you can use but my recommended tools are the Google Keyword Planner (Free) and Semrush (Paid).

Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner is part of Google Ads and it’s offered by Google for free for Google Ads customers.

Nevertheless, it’s a great keyword research tool and you can use it to find your SEO keywords.

Go to Google Ads and create an account. Follow the steps to create a draft campaign so that the system will allow you to access the Keyword Planner.

Once you are done with the draft campaign, select TOOLS > KEYWORD PLANNER.

Click on FIND NEW KEYWORDS

For the sake of this example, let’s say that you are a dog trainer selling an online course teaching people how to train their dogs.

If you enter the relevant keywords in the keyword planner, you will be presented with a list of keyword ideas matching your selected topics.

Notice that besides the keywords, the tool has a few more columns.

The ‘Average Monthly Searches’ shows you how many searches are performed on Google per month for that term and the ‘Competition’ gives you an idea of how competitive a keyword is.

By ‘competitive’ we mean how many people are bidding to advertise for that keyword on Google Ads.

Remember that the keyword planner is a tool for Google PPC Ads and not for SEO search results.

Select some of the keywords that are highly relevant to your website and products, both ‘head’ and ‘long-tail keywords’, add them to a spreadsheet, and move on to the next step.

Step 3: Find Semantic SEO Keywords

The next step is to find keywords related to your target keywords. These keywords are known as semantic keywords or LSI keywords.

A semantic keyword is a keyword that is strongly related to another keyword.

The reason you want to do this is that Google no longer ranks pages that target individual keywords but it’s more targeted to topics.

So, by finding LSI keywords for your main keywords and including them in your content, you help Google get a better understanding of your content and this translates to higher rankings.

The best way to find LSI keywords is to use the LSI Keyword Generator and Google search.

LSI Keyword Generator

Go to LSI Graph and your head keywords and click search. Take note of the keywords and add them to the second column in your spreadsheet.

Google Search

When you search for a keyword in Google, there are 2 ways to find out what Google considers to be the related keywords for a given search term.

The first one is to look at the “People also ask” section.

And the second one is the “Searches related to…” section.

SEMRUSH

SEMRUSH is my favorite keyword research tool. Among many other useful features, it has two very powerful tools for keyword research.The first is the “Keyword Magic Tool” and the second one is the “Topic Research”.

With SEMRUSH, you don’t have to go through the process of creating an account with the Google Keyword Planner or going to LSIGraph and Google search to find related keywords.

Everything is done within SEMRUSH.

Keyword Magic Tool

The first step is to create an account (there is a 7 Day Free Trial).

Then select KEYWORD MAGIC TOOL under KEYWORD ANALYTICS.

Type in your head keyword and click SEARCH.

SEMRUSH will group related keywords together.

Sort the keywords by volume and KD (Keyword Difficulty). Unlike the Google Keyword Planner, KD refers to how difficult to RANK for a particular keyword in Google.

This is a very useful metric since what you want is to pick the right SEO keywords that have higher search volume and lower KD scores.

Topic Research

Remember what I mentioned above that Google now ranks websites based on Topics and not just keywords?

The Topic Research tool will help you find long-tail keywords related to a topic.

Click TOPIC RESEARCH from the left menu and type in our main head keyword.

What you see on the right (under Interesting Questions), are questions related to your niche. It’s similar to “People also ask” but more comprehensive since it includes questions from various sources.

How can you take advantage of this?

These questions can help you build TOPIC RELEVANCY, which is what you want if your goal is to rank higher on Google.

How can you do this in practice? Optimize your homepage for your head keywords and then create content (through a blog) targeting each of the questions (which in essence it’s the long-tail keywords).

Make sure that within your blogs, you link to your main pages.

How to use SEO Keywords in your Content

Doing good keyword research and having a keyword list, is not enough.

In order to benefit from this process, you need to know how to use those keywords in your content.

This is known as SEO Content, which is a subset of On-Page SEO.

Here are some tips to follow:

Optimize your Homepage for your main keyword

Homepage SEO is very important. Search engines start the crawling process from the homepage and follow up on any links from there.

When it comes to keyword optimization, you should optimize your homepage for your main head keywords (even if their keyword difficulty is very high).

The reason is that you want to make it clear to both crawlers and users, what your website is all about.

Create a separate page for each of your main keywords

Let’s say that your company sells services (like my company), you need to create a page for each of your services, each page to be optimized for the main keyword.

I have a summary page for all my services and individual pages for each of the services we offer. Each page is optimized for a specific keyword.

Create pieces of content to target long-tail keywords

Once you are done with the main keywords, it’s time to utilize the power of blogging and start creating content targeting long-tail keywords.

You can use the results of topic research to decide which keywords to target in your blog posts.

Optimize your content with SEO keywords

When writing the content for both your pages and blog posts, you need to make sure that:

Use keywords in the URL – you include your target keyword in the page URL.

Use keywords in the page title – you include your target keyword in the page title.

Use keywords in the H1 Tag – you include your target keyword (or close variations) in the h1 tag

Use long-tail keywords as subheadings (h2, h3) – you include related keywords in your subheadings

Use LSI keywords in your content – you include LSI keywords within your copy.

SEO Keywords: Final Advice

Picking up the right keywords for your website is important.

When choosing keywords, try to think outside the box and consider all possible search phrases people might use in search engines to find your products.

Add those keywords in a spreadsheet and take advantage of the data provided by the different keyword tools, to expand your keyword list as much as possible.

Group your keywords into two categories. First are the keywords to use on your homepage and main website pages and second the keywords to use in your blog.

Follow the on-page SEO tips outlined above to intelligently include keywords in your copy but always make sure that you pay special attention to the quality of the content.

Publish content related to your target topics to create content relevancy and watch your rankings and traffic increase.

Learn what long-tail keywords are, how to find them and how to use them in your content to increase your rankings.

What if I told you that there’s a way to get targeted organic traffic that’s actually easier than driving a ton of random page views?

We’re all familiar with the race to the top of Google for high-volume keywords, but throughout that race, long tail keywords can get overlooked.

If you ask me, this makes no sense because long tail keywords make up 70% of all searches. You don’t want to miss out on 70% of the potential traffic, do you?

In this guide, I’m going to run through everything you need to know about long tail SEO, including:

• What are long tail keywords?
• Long-tail keywords Examples
• What are the benefits of targeting long tail keywords?
• How to find long tail keywords
• How to use long tail keywords in your content

What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are search queries usually consisting of three or more words that narrow down the focus of the search results and bring up more specific results. Long tail keywords are also often lower difficulty and lower volume.

To understand this better, let’s also define head keywords. A head keyword is usually a high traffic, high difficulty term that constitutes an entire topic.

While they’re searched for often, they’re not always 100% specific to what you’re promoting with your content.

Long Tail Keywords Examples

I know that beginners to SEO may have trouble understanding what exactly long tail keywords are, so let me demonstrate this with a real example.

Let’s take the keyword “SEO”.

This is a very popular keyword and according to SEMRUSH it has more than 110,000 exact keyword searches per month.

It is also a highly competitive keyword with an average CPC of 14.82 USD.

If you search for this term on Google.com you will find in the first positions websites like Wikipedia.org, moz.com, and Google websites, which makes it almost impossible to outrank them with a normal website or blog.

So, if it is impossible to rank for “SEO” what is the next step?

You go one step further by adding tail or tails to the existing keyword so as to narrow down your competition.

If you add the word ‘tips’ your keyword now becomes “SEO tips”, which is less competitive than the head keyword (SEO), but it is still very difficult to target.

The top results are dominated by large and well-known websites.

So, what do you do?

Add another word and it becomes “SEO tips for beginners”.

Certainly, the number of people searching for this keyword per month is less compared to “SEO” and “SEO tips” but the benefits gained from ranking long tail keywords are much more than the traffic difference.

Here is a visual representation of the relationship between head keywords and long tail keywords.

What Are The Benefits of Targeting Long Tail Keywords?

In summary, these are the main benefits of targeting long tail keywords in your content marketing campaigns:

• Long tail keywords match the user’s intent
• Long tail keywords are easier to rank compared to non-long tail keywords
• There are more long tail keywords than head keywords
• Long tail keywords have higher conversion rates
• Long tail keywords help you build website authority and trust
• You will get more traffic than the suggested search volume

Long tail keywords match the user’s intent

To understand the benefits of long tail keywords, you need to understand the concept of intent.

Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher for a moment while you think about the customer journey.

A section of it might look something like this:

1. The prospect becomes aware of their need, and searches head keywords to find out more.
2. The prospect becomes aware of a potential solution and searches a long tail keyword with the intent to buy it.

This is a dumbed-down explanation, but it sums up the idea of intent nicely.

Basically, considering the intent of a keyword is considering the mindset of someone who would search the keyword.

For example, someone looking for ‘SEO’ is probably looking for a broad definition while someone looking for ‘SEO Services’ has the intent to click on your search snippet listing, and buy your services.

Through the long tail specificity of their search, they’re expressing their intent to buy exactly what you’re selling (or at least read exactly what you’re writing).

For this reason, it’s worth targeting long tail keywords because the traffic that they bring in is targeted and will be far more likely to convert.

The searchers are no longer in the ‘discovery’ mindset. They’re ready to move into buying mode, and even though the volume won’t be as high, it’s well worth it.

What’s the intent of someone searching ‘marketing’? Who knows. It’s probably to find out a definition or to read some kind of encyclopedic article, which shows why Wikipedia and the Business Dictionary rank highly.

Narrow it down, however, and target ‘marketing agency London’ (instead of just ‘marketing’) and the intent is much, much clearer. And you’re way more likely to rank for it.

In fact, the major problem with going after head keywords is that you’ll be putting a ton of work into driving the wrong kind of traffic. And, when you drive traffic that doesn’t stay long on your page, you’re telling Google that you don’t deserve to rank, and that’s all your work wasted.

A good rule of thumb is to Google the keyword you’re targeting before you target it, and ask yourself whether your article would be out of place in the results. If it would be, then don’t bother.

Long tail keywords are easier to rank compared to non-long tail keywords

Provided that you are having a high-quality website long tail keywords are easier to rank especially if you choose low competition keywords.

There are more long tail keywords than head keywords

There are nowhere near as many head keywords out there as long tail.

And that means that at some point, you could theoretically run out of big meaty keywords to target, and find yourself thinking “phew! I’ve targeted ‘marketing’, I’ve targeted ‘SEO’, I’ve targeted ‘business’ … What’s next?”.

When you’re going after the long tail, you’re not only giving yourself more chances to put optimized content on your site, you’re creating more pages.

It only makes sense that sites with more pages rank for more keywords and drive more traffic, especially if they’re ranking for juicy long tail keywords.

This is probably best described simply as covering your bases. Targeting both ‘green tea smoothie ideas’ and ‘green tea smoothie recipes’ in two separate posts and getting both of them ranking is a way to make sure you’re scooping up whichever search term variation that gets typed in.

Long tail keywords have higher conversion rates

If you think about it for a second, those users that use long tail keywords to search for something can be considered more targeted because they already made the effort to make their search terms more specific.

If we are talking about ‘buying’ or ‘action’ keywords then those are more likely to convert or perform an action.

Consider the following example:

“Cars” <- General search

“used cars for sale” <- looking for used cars

“used cars for sale in florida” <- looking for used cars in florida

“used ford focus for sale in florida” <-looking for used ford focus cars in florida

Long tail keywords help you build website authority and trust

Having a first-page ranking of any keyword is an indication of website authority and trust.

One of the ways to get your website ready to target more important keywords is to get as many first placements as you can for long tail keywords.

Of course, this is not the only factor that will help you build authority but a number of first-place placements together with a solid SEO strategy can work towards that direction.

You will get more traffic than the suggested search volume

The various keyword research tools give an estimate of the traffic you can get if you secure a top position for a specific keyword.

When it comes to long tail keywords, their estimates are not 100% correct. This is because the volume for long tail keywords is low and so is their sampling so they under-estimate.

I have many examples of long tail keywords that bring in 10 times the traffic shown by the keyword tools so never reject a keyword because the traffic in the tools is low.

How to Find Long Tail Keywords?

“Ok, ok! I’m sold”, I hear you say. “How do I find these high-converting long tail keywords?”.

Well, like it always is with keyword research, it’s a mix between a manual and an automated process.

Manually – Researching suggested terms, reading posts on Quora, Reddit, and forums. Getting together a list of head keywords and commonly mentioned phrases.

Automatically – Using tools like SEMRush to generate a list of semantically relevant terms and different permutations from your head keyword research.

How to manually find long tail keywords

Google search box suggestions

A great way is to start typing keywords in the google search box and see the ideas suggested by Google.

When you find a nice long tail keyword you can check it with the keyword tool of your choice (I use SEMRUSH) and decide if it is worth targeting or not.

Google ‘People Also Ask’ and ‘Related Searches’

Another manual method is to Google the topic you have in mind and check the “People Also Ask Section and the “Related Searches”.

Bing / Yahoo suggest

Bing and Yahoo also make suggestions as you are typing a search term. You can use that as well since in almost all cases the suggestions made are different from Google so it’s worth exploiting.

Reddit

Another goldmine is reddit. I headed over to /r/brewing to find out what people are talking about.

If I was blogging about beer brewing, these people are my target audience. I’ve highlighted some viable keywords:

Quora

Finally, search for keywords in Quora. People are answering questions that you could answer with your ads or content:

Note: Quora is actually a fantastic source of inspiration for blog posts, too. You can usually just grab the questions as a title and use the content in the answer plus your own original research to create winning content.

Competition analysis

There is no niche without competition so it’s not a bad idea to take a look at what your competitors are doing in terms of long tail keyword targeting.

Register to their newsletter and RSS feed and if you like a keyword they have used, check it with SEMRUSH and see if there are any variations or similar keywords you can target.

To avoid any confusion, competition analysis does not mean copying your competitor’s ideas or stealing their work but simply means keeping an eye on what other websites in your niche are doing.

How to find long tail keywords using a tool

Long Tail Keyword Research with SEMRUSH

As well as being a complete platform for managing organic and paid SEO campaigns, SEMrush has a quality keyword research feature.

For finding long tail versions of a particular head keyword you’ve researched, use the Keyword Magic Tool.

Look at these great long tail keywords I found in just a few clicks:

How to Use Long Tail Keywords

Let’s say you’ve found a long tail keyword and want to start creating content to rank for that term. Great! What now?

Well, the first thing to do is to choose one major target. As you’ve seen, by ranking for one keyword you scoop up a lot of long tail variants, too, so it isn’t like it’s the one chance you get to rank for a single term.

Here’s a quick checklist to follow adapted from this post to include only keyword placement:

1. Put the keyword at the start of the headline (and title tag!)
2. Use the only the keyword as the slug (the part of the URL after the domain — com/this-is-the-slug)
3. Make sure your title is in an H1 tag
4. Use the keyword throughout your H2 subheadings
5. Use the keyword in the first 100 words
6. Use a few variations of the keyword throughout the body of the article (you should have plenty from your research)

And, of course, you should always make sure your entire site is optimized to be SEO-friendly.

Long Tail SEO tips and tricks

I have said above that long tail keywords are easier to rank but that does not mean that you just throw text on a page and it will get a top position because it is a low competition long tail keyword.

You need to do a lot more than that if you want to rank higher in Google or any other search engine.

Content still matters

Content not only matters but it’s the most important factor for achieving and maintaining a good ranking in the long term.

Make sure that your content rocks both in quantity and most importantly in quality. Use proven content marketing tips and try to publish content that answers the question in the long tail.

Content SEO

When writing content, you should follow some simple yet effective SEO copywriting rules for making your copy friendlier to search engines and users.

Thinks like post titles, content freshness, and formatting do matter and once you learn the basics they are very easy to follow.

On-page SEO is a must

Don’t forget the rest of the on-page SEO factors that can help you achieve better rankings. Besides the keywords and content, there are other ways to make your website more attractive to search engines.

Promote, Promote, Promote: When you hit the publish button you don’t sit back and relax but you start promoting your content on social media and using other white hat techniques.

Getting Started With Your Long Tail SEO Strategy

What’s the next step you can act on right now?

Well, I’ve given you a reason to do it, as well as the tools and methods you need to get started.

The only thing that’s left is to get going.

Pick a head keyword, find the low-hanging long tail fruit, and get targeting with content or ads that recognize the intent behind the search term.

For new websites or for not-so-big websites there is no other way to get traffic and good rankings than working with long tail keywords. The competition for high-volume keywords is so huge and it is very difficult to win one of the top positions.

The best way to start building a strong website is to provide top-quality content for long-tail keywords consistently so as to start gaining rankings and traffic and then gradually move on to more general terms and establish your presence.

Learn how much money you can realistically make from Google Ads.

How much does Google Adsense pay is a very popular question among bloggers (especially beginners) and I will explain below why. Adsense is for some the medium to achieve a better quality of life by increasing their income and for others it’s a total waste of time.

I am using adsense for almost 10 years now and I am happy to say that I managed to stay in the first group after a lot of effort and hard work. What I can tell you for sure is that Adsense is indeed a great way to make money online. What I cannot give you is a precise figure on how much money you can make with adsense and this is because there are a lot of factors that play a role.

Let’s take it step by step and you will understand better what I mean.

How do you make money with Adsense?

What does it take to make money with Adsense? If you research this on Google you will find a lot of different answers but in reality you need 3 things:

An Adsense complaint website – A website or blog that meets adsense guidelines. Adsense has a number of policies related to website content, copyright laws, ad placement, traffic sources and many more. To make a career as an Adsense publisher and you need to make sure that you will never violate these rules.

A website with a lot of hiqh quality content – Besides being compliant with adsense policies you need to have a lot of content published on your website. Although content can mean a number of things (videos, images, etc) what you need is original and unique TEXT content (blog pots, articles, how-to guides). Of course with the text you can have images and videos but text has to be the main part of the website.

A lot of traffic – To make serious money with Adsense you need a LOT of traffic. In my opinion adsense is not suitable for websites that only receive a few hundreds of visits per day. You can still run adsense if you meet the other 2 guidelines but you should not expect to make a living out of it.

So, if you want to become a ‘professional’ adsense publisher you need a good website, a lot of original content and many people visiting your website on a daily basis. If all these are true then how much money will you make from Adsense?

Hint: Read my 10 Adsense tips for maximizing your revenue.

What factors affect how much you will make from Adsense?

For every click a user makes on an Adsense Ad, Google will pay you a certain amount of money (from a few cents to a few dollars). So the amount of money that you will make from adsense depends on the numbers of clicks your ads will receive.

How big that amount will be depends on the following factors:

Volume of traffic – Obviously the more people visit a website the greater are the chances someone will click on one of the Adsense ads.

Type of traffic – This is equally important as the volume of traffic. When you have an adsense website you don’t just need any kind of traffic but you need targeted traffic i.e. people looking to buy something or solve a problem and they come to your website for help. These people are more likely to click on a related Adsense Ad than people who are visiting your website to read the latest news or hangout in your forums.

Type of Website – This is related to the above as the type of website makes a big difference in the amount of money you can make from Adsense. For example a website that has funny videos will make less from Adsense compared to website that has in-depth articles.

The reason is that people will visit the website and view the different videos and then leave since they are not looking to solve a problem or buy something.

On the other hand, people visiting the in-depth articles website are more likely to click a related ad after they read an article that helps them understand a concept, make a decision or solve a problem.

Ad placements – The type and location of ads is also important. Ads that are in the main content of the page get more pageviews and have a higher CTR (click through rate) than ads that are in the sidebar.

IMPORTANT: While the ad position is very important you should not take risks for a higher CTR. What I mean is that when placing your adsense ads in your website make sure that you read and follow the guidelines for ad placement given by Adsense and also have in mind that Google is punishing websites that have ‘too many ads above the fold’.

In other words, you can have ads above the fold and earn more but at the same time you should avoid exaggerations. One adsense unit in a similar way as shown below is enough.

From experience, one of the best positions to place an adsense ad in content rich websites is at the end of an article or blog post so you get a good CTR and revenue without violating any guidelines.

Competition – The ads shown by the Adsense system are coming from Google Adwords. Advertisers that are using PPC campaigns to promote their products or services, pay Google an amount of money every time someone clicks on their ads. Out of that money Google keeps a percentage (around 40%) and the rest is paid to the publisher.

Now, the amount of money that PPC advertisers are paying for each click depends on a number of factors, one of them being competition. The higher the demand of advertising for a particular keyword, the higher is the CPC and the higher are the earnings for the publisher.

So, if your website topics are based on popular and high competition keywords, it is more likely to make more from Adsense rather than having a website with general content that people like to read but not searching for it in Google.

This is also the reason why niche websites tend to perform better in Adsense (if they have a lot of traffic and content) than websites of general interest.

Final thoughts and advice

To make real money from adsense make sure that:

You don’t violate any of their guidelines ever.

You create a website with lots of original and unique content.

Concentrate on getting organic traffic to the website since it converts better than any other type of traffic (when it comes to adsense).

Your content should be mainly text and must provide a solution to problem or advice (how-to articles).

Position your ads above the fold and in places where people can see them (best places are in the main content).

Use big size ads without overdoing it.

If you follow the above suggestions, sooner or later you will be able to answer the question “how much google adsense pays” and also you will be able to understand whether adsense is the medium to improve your quality of life.

Follow these tips to increase your Google AdSense earnings without taking any risks or violating any guidelines.

AdSense is one of the most popular ways to make money online and perhaps among the easiest ways if you do things correctly.

By doing things correctly I mean following standards and practices that are in accordance with AdSense guidelines but at the same time can contribute in maximizing your revenue and earnings.

So, let’s see below the most important AdSense tips that will help you achieve that.

#1 Don’t violate any AdSense Guidelines

I have mentioned this 3 times so far in the article and we are only in the first AdSense tip but it’s very important that whatever you do to increase your earnings is not against these guidelines. You can read the full guidelines here but in general avoid:

Clicking on your own ads for any reason (even testing them)

• Buying traffic or clicks
• Making the ads not look like ads
• Showing only the ads to the user and no content
• Asking your friends to click on the ads
• Adding the ads on website that have inappropriate content (adult, alcohol, gambling etc)

#2 Use Responsive AdSense Units

We made several tests and all tests show (more details to be published in coming posts) that responsive websites with responsive AdSense units perform better than non-responsive websites.

If you have a responsive website then you can replace your ads with Responsive AdSense Units. This means that depending on the available ad space, AdSense will show the most appropriate ad (both in size and type).

Especially for mobile websites, you will soon realise that the 300×250 on mobile performs much better compared to the standard 320×50.

#3 Place your ads where users can see them

The position of the ads is very important and can make a big difference in clicks and earnings.

It’s always better to have the ads above the fold (that’s the area users see without scrolling) but if this is not possible then try to have the ads in the main content of the page instead of the sidebar.

Caution: Google punishes websites that have too many ads above the fold so if you choose to enter the ads in the main content do it at the end of the article.

#4 Publish Content more often

Depending on the type of website, you may choose to publish content more often.

The idea is that frequent publishing will generate more visits to your website and more visits will naturally generated more AdSense clicks and revenue.

#5 Make your website load faster

It is proven that faster websites lead to more ad clicks so if you optimize your website’s speed this will eventually increase your earnings too.

Avoid using too many graphics and remove any images that don’t add value to the user experience but slow down the site.

#6 Remove other ad networks

If you want to make more from AdSense then you can remove any other ad networks and run AdSense only.

This will not only make your website load faster but also it will give more visibility to the AdSense ads that will lead to more clicks and revenue.

Certainly many ads does not mean more revenue so it’s always better to stick to the 3 ads per page (even if you are not using AdSense).

#7 Find your Adsense Referrers and improve them

When you connect your Google Analytics account with Google Adsense, you can go in Analytics and see which referrers generate your AdSense revenue. You can see that under Behaviour -> AdSense -> AdSense Referrers.

Maybe visits from Facebook or other social media networks generate AdSense revenue when they visit your website so it’s a good idea to work on those and improve your presence so as to get more traffic and revenue.

#8 Use standard ad sizes (both text and image)

When setting up your ads use the sizes recommended by AdSense as being the most popular. These usually are 728×90, 336×280, 300×250 and 300×600. Other sizes may have less demand from advertisers and this will lead to lower earnings.

Also, make sure that your ads are set to show both text and images as this will increase the numbers of advertisers competing for your ad spaces and will lead to better earnings per click.

#9 Use AdSense experiments to test different ad variations

One of the features of AdSense that is not well known to users is AdSense Experiments (found under My Ads in your AdSense account). With experiments you can test different variations for the same ad spot and see which one performs better.

For example you may test different link colours, border or no border etc. This feature is very easy to use and you can tell in a few days which of your ads are better performing.

#10 Don’t make your website look like it Made for AdSense (MFA)

AdSense is supposed to enhance the user experience (and it really does in most cases) by showing relevant ads that may interest the user.

That does not mean that your website should focus on the ads but still your focus should be on the user experience and high quality content.

AdSense is a way to monetize your content and not the reason of your website’s existence.

What else you can do to improve your AdSense earnings?