What is an SEO Page?

What is an SEO Page?

An SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Page is a cost-effective and beneficial alternative to other internet campaigns, David Warmuz explains what an SEO Page is and how to get the most out of your page in this interview.

Interview with David Warmuz

David Warmuz is the President of Trellian. Trellian are the makers of http://www.Above.com - Domain Parking Manager, http://www.KeywordDiscovery.com - Keyword Research Tool and SEO Toolkit. Trellian is a global leader dedicated to delivering innovative internet solutions and web-based technology services.

Do you suggest Google Adwords or SEO Pages for an advertising campaign?

David Warmuz: Google Adwords is an advertising forum where companies can go and buy traffic from Google. The way Google charges the advertisers is per clicks, so every time someone does a search and they click on an ad, the advertiser is charged for that traffic. The advantage with an SEO page is, you're not paying for traffic from the search engines, you're still getting the same traffic from Google's initial page listings.

It's an all out bid for keywords and rankings when it comes to promoting your website through Google Adwords. A company needs to be willing to pay more to see their page rise to the top of the rankings, but it's less work on the advertiser's part. With an SEO page advertising is 'free' but it takes time, hard work and a lot of optimising your page, to get results.


How do SEO pages compare to Google Adwords?

David Warmuz: The best way to explain that is probably explaining how Google Adwords work. What you do is, you have a specific product or service that you want to promote on Google, and Google have a range of people who search, so what they're doing is typing a keyword in and a list of results comes up in the pages. What advertisers can do is they can specify a keyword that they want specific ads to appear on, on the Google results pages.

The way Google does this is they have a system where people can bid for the keyword, so if you have Company A that wants traffic for the same keyword, they may say I want to pay ten cents or 50 cents for that particular traffic, but Company B may come along and decide that they're willing to pay a dollar per visitor for the same keyword. It becomes like an auction system, so the company that pays the most is then placed in the top of the results.


How SEO are pages a financially better alternative to Google Adwords?

David Warmuz: The way Google charges is per clicks, so every time somebody does a search and they click on the ad, the advertiser is charged for that traffic. So that's basically paper-click advertising and the advertiser is buying traffic on a per keyword basis.

The difference between an SEO pages is, you're not paying for traffic from the search engines, you're still getting the same traffic from Google, and the difference is this is the traffic from the organic listings. If you look at how the Google search results page is structured, the organic listings are on the left-hand side and then on the right-hand side you have little boxes, which are the Google Adwords ads. When you're optimising a page for the same keyword you end up in the top results, so when somebody does a search if you happen to get in the top ten rankings you're then in the results of the pages, and if somebody clicks on that page, Google don't charge for that ad, so that's basically free traffic. The problem with this is, it's free traffic but you need to work hard to optimise to get into the top results, so there is a cost in that aswell.


What is the main advantage of an SEO page in magazines?

David Warmuz: In relation to sites like Girl.com.au and Femail.com.au, they have an inherent ranking button, where you seem to find that Google, Yahoo and some of the other search engines, they provide a ranking boost for pages that are indexed on those sites. The main reason is because the sites are quite popular, so they get a fair amount of traffic, so Google and the other search engines perceive those sites to be like an authority on that particular content. For sites getting a lot more traffic, Google already tracks that and they give it a ranking boost, so having an SEO page or any type of a content page on a very popular site gives you a ranking boost just on the traffic that the site gets.


How do you populate the SEO pages?

David Warmuz: That's not an exact science, every search engine differs how they prefer it. The way we do it is, we use a specific formula that has been a proven technique for us. We identify for every given page two main keywords; we classify them as a root term so it has to be a very targeted, very broad search term. From those two keywords we drill deeper into a sub-set, so we try and find the next ten others that are as closely matching the initial two, and that we started with the actual content, the metatags. For metatags there's a title tag, a keyword tag, and a description tag, so we need to make sure that when we optimise the content, the title tag has the two primary terms included.

The description tag includes at least four of the primary terms and the derivatives. The keyword tag doesn't seem to be used too much these days by most of the search engines like Google. Yahoo still tends to rely on it so we populate it with 12 keywords, and then with the content, the first 1000 characters is the most important, so we need to make sure that the 12 keywords are incorporated throughout the body copy, and they're repeated quite a few different times so that the keyword density of those keywords are sufficiently higher. When Google and Yahoo and other search engines index the pages they can see what keywords the page is about.

If you only include a keyword you want to rank for once on the page, Google might see that it has only be used once on that page and think that it's not really about that particular keyword, which will lower the emphasis of its ranking that its going to give for that term. Whereas a keyword that has been used more often is going to be treated differently.


What software do you use to do that?

David Warmuz: The optimisation part is mainly done by hand but the most important part is the keyword research aspect. Keyword research is the be all and end all when it comes to doing optimisation. You need to first find the right keywords to optimise for and identify what people are searching for. There's a couple of tools we use, we have an in-house solution called http://www.Keyword Discovery.com, that provides a range of search term data, which is collected from all the major search engines, so what people are searching for and when, how frequently, common misspellings, different variations, plurals. http://www.Keyword Discovery.com gives you a really clear insight into the search landscape, what people are searching for, how often and when.


Explain the keywords used in the SEO pages, in regards to misspelt keywords

David Warmuz: When you're trying to optimise a page for a specific product or service, you first go through and identify your target keywords, what are the main ones and you also need to identify stop words, keywords you should try to remove from your content. There are some phrases that if they're worded differently or the ordering of the words are changed, it actually gives you the different meaning and if that keyword gets a ranking, then the other version that you're really after, it actually devalues the rankings of other keywords. So there is a range of things you need to consider when you're doing keyword research.


Explain the value of search engine rankings.

David Warmuz: Search engines for most sites drive the most traffic to any given site. I believe it's anywhere above 50 percent of the traffic going to any site is from search engines if not more, some sites it's more like 90 percent of the traffic is derived from search engines. Having rankings on search engines is quite important and crucial when it comes to successful website business. The type of rankings and the ordering of the rankings are even more so important. There have been numerous studies on the actual percentage of clicks based on the positioning of your actual results page. If you're the top ten ranks or top one or top two the percentage is reduced substantially the lower down the list you go. The number of percentage of clicks on a given results page has a couple of different factors, so what percentage or the actual click through ratio.

Some pages, if they've been optimised well with the title and description tags, they can have a very large click through ratio on the search results. Having the right content being displayed when people are searching for the same keyword makes a big difference. You can have sites that have a zero percent click through even if they have a number one ranking, purely because the title and description isn't relevant to what people are searching for.

But, when it comes to overall traffic a number one ranking would get around 80 percent of the clicks, a number two ranking would get around the five to ten percent and rankings three and below get the rest, so it's quite important to have the top ranking if you can.


Do you have any top tips to get the most out of SEO pages?

David Warmuz: The most important part is definitely the keyword research, getting the right keywords first. You need to use tools like http://www.Keyword Discovery.com, you can also use your Google, your Adwords inbuilt tools, you can pretty much identify the right terms first. Once you've done that you then need to structure your campaigning place, so it's actually when you're optimising pages and you get your two keywords per age, your root terms, and you then map out what you're going to do in terms of pages. If you're going to try and target 50 keywords, well how many pages will you actually need to optimise?

Next you need to look at link building. Link building is quite important when it comes to Google; they value sites that have back-links. A back-link is another site linking to your site via the keyword that you're trying to rank for. So to help you in your quest for getting top rankings you also need to get websites that link to you via the keywords that you are trying to rank for. So link building is an exercise where you need to contact other sites and request them to link to you .That's one of the services and one of the things you really need to do, so that's a major tip for that as well.


Is it harder to create successful SEO pages now there are more webpages?

David Warmuz: Of course it is. The more pages and more content there are, the harder it is to achieve. But, as long as you persevere and you work on it, and it's not a one time type of a job, it's an ongoing role, so you're always continually optimising, you're always adding more content, because if you don't others do, and they'll start taking over your rankings.


For more information please see:
www.keyworddiscovery.com
www.above.com
www.trellian.com

Interview by Karli Smith.