Keywords and content and seo advice please
-
Hi i am building a site at the moment which i am working on. please ignore the state of the site as we are just playing with designs at the moment but please do take notice of the top part.
The site is a travel magazine but i am a bit concerned. The keywords that we will be looking at to drive travel will be as follows, cheap flights gatwick, holiday magazine and travel magazine.
Now i do not want the site to look untidy with loads of content describing the site but at the same time i want google to know what the site is and for people to pick the site up with the search terms that we are aiming for.
the site is www.cheapflightsgatwick.com
Can anyone please show me some examples of how i should structure the site to attract the keywords and give me some advice. It seems hard when you are designing a magazine site where the content changes all the time to try and attract the search engines with your keywords.
any advice would be great
-
Ryan has a great idea. Think about who will link to your site. Will people want to link to a "cheap flights" website or would they prefer to link to a magazine?
-
Diane
Are you of the belief that 'keyword density' is important for SEO ie inclusion and repeating your chosen keywords in your text paragraphs. If, so think again, that's no longer a ranking factor. You don't need to do 'messy writing' or loads of keywords over the homepage. I would also agree with Ryan regarding your url. You need to get this right from the start. (I should know with an eyewear site called 'pretavoir')
As regards keywords, have you used the basic google keyword tool? Do this first before choosing a domain/url. You need to know your figures before you start. The 'KW Tool' can be invaluable.https://adwords.google.co.uk/o/Targeting/Explorer?ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS&__u=9115528870&__c=3941445370&__u=9115528870&__c=3941445370&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#search.none
-
thank you that is a great idea. cheers for that.
-
Your keyword choices are: cheap flights gatwick, holiday magazine and travel magazine.
I have not put a lot of thought into this but another URL you may consider is gatwickmagazine.com. It contains one keyword from each of your phrases, is only two words and doesn't seem spammy at all.
-
thanks for all the great advice. the magazine is aimed at people using gatwick airport and when the site is designed, it will concentrate on cheap flight offers and cheap holiday offers from gatwick. and then the rest of the site will be about holiday issues and travel news.
-
There is a lot of good advice shared. I'll take a moment and focus on your URL choice.
In short, I hate it. If all your site offered was cheap flights to and from Gatwick, then it works. If you want to be thought of as a site that covers "holiday magazine" and "travel magazine" then I would suggest finding a URL that might suggest you offer such information or at least not causes users to think you don't offer that information.
You can make any URL work. It's possible to rank #1 for a pizza restaurant with the name "cheapflightsgatwick.com". But why paint yourself into a corner for a site that's not even built yet? That URL sounds like the doorway page to a site that offers air travel services, not the main URL.
I am learning Joomla right now and I just checked....joomlatravel.com is available right now! I am not suggesting that to be your new site name, but I would choose it for a name long before the one you selected.
-
Maybe you should try shooting for "online travel magazine". Also there should be categories. These categories may just be the right place to promote your main keywords instead of trying to do it all on the home page.
My home page does NOT get as much volume as my other pages collectively get.
-
I think one of your biggest issues is that those three keywords aren't targeted at the same audience. Someone searching for "cheap flights gatwick" is obviously looking for different information than someone searching for "holiday magazine" or "travel magazine."
Instead of targeting all those keywords on your homepage, it would make sense to target each keyword to a different page on your site. You can put each keyword prominently in the title tag of the page you're trying to rank. And the content on each page should specifically relate to that keyword phrase. That's what site visitors want too -- which is the most important thing of all.
For example, you should organize your articles and posts related to "travel" advice, tips, research, etc into a page targeted to "travel magazine" (you could probably even set that up as a blog category)
The fact that you have a magazine site should be to your advantage since search engines love fresh content. As long as the content you provide is high-quality and relevant (i.e. not shallow and worthless) that should help you a lot.
But, also, it's important to remember that on-page content alone is not going to get you to rank for any of those keywords. You need a sound link building strategy, as well. Targeting a keyword phrase to a specific page helps immensely with link building for many reasons, including the fact that your anchor text should relate to the page content.
-
the magazine is online, so it would be lots of travel articles and holiday news as well as news about cheap offers. by worry is, i have studied the keywords that i want and the only way i know of attracting the search engines for those words is by writing an introduction with the keywords in but it looks very messy doing it that way and i do not want to have loads of keywords placed all over the front page for no reason
-
I completely agree ESPECIALLY in this field regarding "Write for humans not search engines". But don't forget to put the keywords in the content.
-
This is what I would do:
- STUDY why these sites rank for the keyword "Travel Magazine". And I mean study as if you were in college. Use the WebApp to its full extent.
http://www.travelandleisure.com/
http://www.budgettravel.com/magazine/
http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/traveler-magazine/- Design is important. Those 3 sites wanted to give me a magazine for free. Can you give something away for free, something I can get in the mail? And I'm not talking about a "free" download. If a company wants to rank for "Travel Magazines", I think it should be a real "Travel Magazine" site.
-
Diane
First stop should be http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo which is a great starters guide. There are also lots of good books eg http://www.amazon.co.uk/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO-Secrets/dp/0470554185 or http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-SEO-Theory-Practice-OReilly/dp/0596518862/ref=pd_sim_b_2
These books are not such daunting reads and should follow on from the Seomoz starters guide.
I too am a newbie to SEO but can give you the following pointers;
-
Build a clean SEO friendly site with SEO friendly urls
-
Optimise well written relevant title tags
-
Write h1 tags for each page
-
Write good clickable meta descriptions for each page
-
Most importantly attract links. Write good interesting content that other sites will want to link to. Write for humans not search engines. Without links you will not be found...
Good Luck (and remember pretavoir when you're writing about sunglasses)
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Doudle URLs without Canonical link and a change in keyword.: What are the effects on SEO?
I built my new website and i have two major worries. 1. My home page has two URLs. The one with a high PA though indexed by Google, is not submitted in the sitemap. I tried to place a canonical tag but the hosting service said it was impossible for me to place the canonical link. My concern is if the indexed page will be successfully optimized for SEO without it being submitted in the sitemap and what happens to the other URL for the same page which is also indexed and submitted in the sitemap? 2.I started my link building campaign for one of my pages. I acquired some good PA already for a particular keyword but later on discovered it will be very difficult for me to rank for the major keyword. I have decided to change the keyword. Will the acquired PA influence the SEO for the new keyword? I wish to know if i should dissolve the links to the page for the former keyword or should i maintain them and move forward with building links for the new keyword as well.
Technical SEO | | trevordocs0 -
Duplicate content
I have one client with two domains, identical products to appear on both domains. How should I handle this?
Technical SEO | | Hazel_Key0 -
SEO Redirect
If we have several hundred domain names currently using a park page, would we be better served having them redirect to our corporate homepage for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | mkessler0 -
480,000 Redirects - Is this hurting my SEO? PLEASE HELP!
Hello everyone, I have over 480,000 internal rewrites in my Magento site. The reason I have so many is because I have over 1,500 products on my site and I update inventory every day via Bulk Import Extension. For the first few months I didn't realize that the URL was changing by a single digit every time I imported the .xml with new inventory counts. This of course created thousands and thousands of 404s. I figured out how to avoid the digit change and then I started redirecting the 404s via a Bulk Rewrite Extension. I managed to rewrite over over 50,000 404s but new ones still pop up every day and there is no end to them in sight. My traffic is terrible. Only about 40 organics daily. It's been like that for months. I can't get it off the ground and I think it's because of this excessive rewrite and 404 issue. My question is, does having so many internal rewrites and 404s hurt my SEO efforts? Would it be better just to start from scratch with a new site, new domain, new everything? Please help me. I'm going crazy with this. Thank you. Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1010 -
Content and url duplication?
One of the campaign tools flags one of my clients sites as having lots of duplicates. This is true in the sense the content is sort of boiler plate but with the different countries wording changed. The is same with the urls but they are different in the sense a couple of words have changed in the url`s. So its not the case of a cms or server issue as this seomoz advises. It doesnt need 301`s! Thing is in the niche, freight, transport operators, shipping, I can see many other sites doing the same thing and those sites have lots of similar pages ranking very well. In fact one site has over 300 keywords ranked on page 1-2, but it is a large site with an 12yo domain, which clearly helps. Of course having every page content unique is important, however, i suppose it is better than copy n paste from other sites. So its unique in that sense. Im hoping to convince the site owner to change the content over time for every country. A long process. My biggest problem for understanding duplication issues is that every tabloid or broadsheet media website would be canned from google as quite often they scrape Reuters or re-publish standard press releases on their sites as newsworthy content. So i have great doubt that there is a penalty for it. You only have to look and you can see media sites duplication everywhere, everyday, but they get ranked. I just think that google dont rank the worst cases of spammy duplication. They still index though I notice. So considering the business niche has very much the same content layout replicated content, which rank well, is this duplicate flag such a great worry? Many businesses sell the same service to many locations and its virtually impossible to re write the services in a dozen or so different ways.
Technical SEO | | xtopher660 -
Can anyone recommend an SEO friendly Joomla extension to use for SEO on an existing website?
Can anyone recommend an SEO friendly Joomla extension to use for SEO on an existing website? I have downloaded sh404sef but I don't want to change my URL's and make them longer than they are at the moment. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Basic SEO HTML
Hello Everyone, One place I am weak is coding for SEO. I need to get better. One question I do have is can anyone explain why it's important to place css and java script files in an external file? How do you do this and how do you know if it's already being done? If it has not been done on a site is it hard to go back and do? I understand this is important from a site load time issue Thanks, Bill P.S. Can anyone recommend a resource where I can learn proper html coding for SEO? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Duplicate content
This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0