SEO - for beginner (Part 2)

In last article, I talked about why I have to SEO my wife's make up page: Hong Kong Make Up Artist.  Explained why Facebook advertisement does not work and Google adv is too expensive to pay.  I mentioned about some basic SEO that we can done as a beginner and now I will show you what I have setup for the first start of her page.

1) Keywords: this is very important.  Keywords that is something related to your page.  For example, my wife's page is about make up artist in Hong Kong, so you want to say everything about it.  In her website, try to write some content about makeup and anything related to it.  Just write naturally, and remember, never ever try to copy content from other website!  Google is just too smart and they will know your content is copied somewhere else or not.  If they found out your material is copied from somewhere else, no worry, there is no penalties, but your site probably won't show up from the Google search because they think that there is duplicated content.  Since they don't want to show duplicated stuffs, they will analyze themselves and pick one that they think the content is original.  Talking about keywords, you should remember to add a meta keywords tag and meta description tag in your website.  For meta keywords (html), put all the related words in here and write something that can describe your site perfectly in one sentence in meta description tag.  

Keywords can be described as short tail keyword and long tail keyword.

Long tail keyword: which is a group of four to seven words or longer.

Short tail keyword: which is one to three words.

So, how they work?  Try to think like this: for example: since my wife's website is about makeup, for short tail keyword, it will be: [hong kong makeup], [makeup], [make up artist], etc.  For long tail keyword, it will be: [the hong kong makeup artist who can provide airbrush service], [bridal makeup artist based in Hong Kong who can speak french], etc.

Try to imagine this, if you type [hong kong makeup] to search, it will definitely come up thousands of  results.  If you type [the hong kong makeup artist who can provide airbrush service] to search, the result will be far more less to the short tail keyword because you are looking into more specific result.  So how to make your site better?  You have to combine two of these keywords.  What you have to do is, think of yourself and see what you stand out from others, then type those words into your content.  The combination of both short tail and long tail keywords can help to put you to a higher ranking.

So, how do you come up these keywords?

You could sit down and talk with your partner (or just yourself if you don't have any).  Brainstorm the keywords that can most representing your website.

Another method is, ask someone who doesn't know you.  Tell them about your story and ask them what keywords they will use.

The other way is ask your clients, they are the best answers that you can get because they are you client!  You want people like them to come to your page so that you can make business.

The last method I use will be Google's Adwords.  To use that tool, search [Google Adwords Keyword Tool].  You have to have google account in order to use this tool.  So on the top menu, click [Tool] and click Keyword Planner.  There are different ways to give you suggestive keywords.  I will show you how I get keywords from the first option.  First click on [Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category].  Then you will see the below screen.  Fill up your info then click Get Ideas:

You will see the result like this:

Here you go.  There is a list that you can try to put it in your website.  Depends on what you want to target.

I think most people is interested in what competition means.  Generally if the keyword has high competition, then it means that the advertiser has to big higher to win the high ad position, hence it will have a higher CPC (cost per click).  If you want to have Google adv on your page you definitely want to build up your page content like above base on the CPC.  Anyway, from this idea list, you would want to write something about the eye makeup and eyeliner because they have the highest searches within the month.

I will continue to talk about this topic on next article.  Stay tuned!

SEO - for beginner (Part 1)

Haven't update this page for ages!

Well, during this period, I have been to a lot of things.  I have changed my jobs two times at least I believe?  The first job was working on Java, Sybase Sql, very common languages as a developer.  But now I m working as a MAINFRAME Developer! Sounds crazy eh!?  MAINFRAME is totally new to me and I have to learn everything from bottom.  Anyway
I will talk about this in another post.  Today I want to talk about SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

So basically, what is SEO? When you have a page up on internet, you want people to go to your page right? Unless you want to keep your page private, you want your page to show up in google search result as highest rank as possible.  SEO - the term means to optimize your page by tuning all the possible factors to make you page have a higher ranking.  This is very important if you have an online business.  By SEO (fine tuning your page), your page is expected to have an increased traffic, increased conversions, exposure to new markets and audiences etc.

Why am I talking about this today?  Well, I have been facing so much difficulties when I am trying to promote my wife's page: Krace Makeup.  I have tried to promote her page in Facebook, but not looking so well.  If you haven't promote your page in Facebook before, I will let you know what is the problem.  So basically, you create a fans page or community or whatever.  After you have invited all your friends to your pages, you want some new audiences to join the page.  The first thing that comes to my mind is: pay my money to Facebook.  It works like this, you give an mount of money and the promotion date range and they will tell you the expected number of people will join your page.  Sounds fair? Well, not really.  It really depends on what is your page about.  If you page talks about sport, I believe many people would like to join the page.  If your going to promote a page like, makeup?  Obviously, it is a little bit harder.  So what Facebook will do to give you that expected number of people to like your page is that (this is my guess only), they hired certain amount of people to like your page in case the expected number of people cannot be reached.  Why am I saying this?  Every time I try to promote my page, I will narrow down the target: country = my country, gender = female etc.  At the end there will be a number of people liked her Facebook page Krace Makeup, but most of them are OBVIOUSLY not my country people! I clicked inside of the person who liked her page and see if there is any mistake that Facebook has made, but I found that those people country is listed as the place of where my country is, but obviously they are not belong to my country, you can tell by check through all their page inside.  So, Facebook advertising doesn't work.  I have to think of another way to promote her page Krace Mak Makeup.

Another way that I have tried is paying Google money (Goolge Adv), but that doesn't work well either and the cost is even higher.  Why is that?  Because each of the click costs pretty high and most of the people just click around the websites by accident and they are not intended to check your website (by most of the cases).  So you are actually paying many unwanted clicks.

So I have no choices but to SEO my wife's page!  I have tried those basic setup but the result doesn't look good.  Right now if we search "hong kong make up artist", her page is only at page 15 rank #3, which is terrible and I don't think anybody will click the result to page 15.  I have to have a better tuning to make the page ranking higher.

To continue on the SEO article, please click on the "SEO" tag and look for my article.

Will keep posted of what I have done to make her page ranking higher.