SEO Magic Me

Helping you discover and master the world of SEO

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Interesting searches: Backpack

Research is a big part of my career as an SEO and that being so I’ve come across some very weird and wonderful things online. In this post I want to help you understand online searches better and help you think on different level. Starting out most of my SEO campaigns I do keyword research in Google’s keyword tool or the AdWords keyword planner (same thing). However one must learn to think not like a robot but like a human when doing keyword research. There are many reasons someone might be searching for something.

Let’s take the word backpack as an example. I was searching for eCommerce opportunities, did some brainstorming on niches I could research and ended up looking at backpacks. This specific keyword is a very broad search and gets over 100 000 searches per month.

A part of my research always includes checking what Google suggestions have to offer. Doing keyword / niche research this way helps you discover keywords that don’t normally end up in the Google keyword tool. To my amazement I found a very similar backpack search for backpack.tf which obviously didn’t have anything to do with normal backpack you carry on your back or did it?

I went back to the keyword tool and see the results I found:

Backpack.tf is a website that people search for between 40 000 – 100 000 times per month. Thanks to a backpack.tf beginner’s guide I found on Tumblr (Backpacktfguide.tumblr.com) I realized it was some kind of gaming portal.

The lesson to be learned here is that doing keyword research one always has to look at the keyword from different angels. Who’s to say something searching for backpack isn’t actually searching for the gaming website backpack.tf and vice versa. When targeting keywords, target more specific keywords so that you’ll be sure of the user’s intent. For instance if I were to create an eCommerce store for backpack it would be better to target something like “school backpacks” but for the gaming site I could create something similar to backpacktfgamesite.com.

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What are XML site maps and how to get your website indexed quickly

If you’re new to SEO you probably won’t understand or even know that XML site maps exist, but believe me these files are essential to your success online. The internet exists of millions, probably even billions, of websites and in order for your website to be displayed by a search engine it needs to be indexed. The most popular search engines out there are first and foremost Google with Bing following slightly behind, Yahoo, Yandex (Russian) and the some other lessor known ones.

I’m no expert programmer so I don’t understand every little part of Google’s algorithm and XML site maps. However I do know that an XML site map is essentially a list of all the URL’s in your website. Google started implementing site maps as early as 2005 and today once logged into your Google Webmaster Tools section you can add your sitemap link so that Google’s bots will crawl your website easier and help it get indexed in the search engine quicker. Bing also has a webmaster tool section where you can add you site map. Most WordPress SEO plugins create an XML site map for your website automatically so I’m not going to go into detail about that.

Simply adding your sitemap to your webmaster tools section won’t guarantee that your website gets indexed in mere seconds. I imagine that Google puts some kind of crawl schedule on these bots so they don’t always immediately visit your website after adding a sitemap. Fortunately there are some other ways to index your website faster.

The two methods I use is submitting my URL directly to Google or launching the website with some rich media and having Google’s bots crawl your website.

Submitting your URL to Google

Simply put visit this link, submit your website, wait a few minutes and chances are you’re website will be indexed in Google.

Google XML Sitemap for Videos

For this technique to work you need to build your website on WordPress and install the plugin called Google XML Sitemap for Videos. For each page you want indexed I advise you to add a small bit of text and embed a video. Embedding the video is crucial as this plugin creates a video site map and then pings Google to come and visit your website. Your website then gets crawled and indexed almost instantly.

I usually use the second technique first and if it doesn’t work I know there is something really wrong with the website. The first technique works great for helping websites that aren’t WordPress hosted to get indexed.

Find more SEO tips for beginners and veterans at SEO Magic Me or find out which tools you need as an SEO at our 5 SEO Tools experts can’t do without post.

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How to start your SEO career

Learning about SEO can be confusing, tricky and very exciting – yes two different worlds. If done correctly you can master SEO in a few months’ time but it will take some getting used to and testing. The best thing you can do is start following an SEO blog and simply start reading. Without a doubt, learning SEO is a tedious process and you won’t become its master overnight – believe me. However one great tip I can give you: instead of going after big searches, and highly competitive keywords start small, get some money going (how little it ever may be) and keep on growing from there. That’s probably the biggest mistake I made in my SEO career, not being content with starting small and dreaming to big.

I’m not saying dreaming big is a bad thing, you just have to realize in order to play in the big leagues you have to be a bit of an expert and have the ability to adjust to almost any situation. Ranking a website takes time, especially if you’re trying to rank high competition keyword, but starting small and going after the lowest of the low means you’ll rank faster and have less competition from other SEO’s.

So next time you find a wonder keyword with thousands of searches, don’t lie to yourself and say you’ll be able to rank for this keyword easily, plan ahead and be realistic in your expectations…

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5 SEO tools experts can’t do without

I might be moving a bit fast in terms of the SEO posts I create and the level you’ll have to be to understand these posts, yet any information that is useful is better that no information – right? I’ve got a list of about 5 SEO tools I recommend any serious SEO to have in their arsenal. I won’t be adding affiliate links to any of these tools because most of these tools don’t have affiliate programs and most of all that’s not what this blog is about. Here you go:

SEMrush

A tool that is used for all different kinds of SEO sorcery and more precisely to research competitors, their rankings, advertising expenditure, track keyword rankings and more. Read the full review of SEMrush VS MOZ at this website https://medium.com/@Jay_Smith/semrush-vs-moz-cf10b51e11a9

 MOZ

There’s a little thing called domain and page authority which is kind of a big deal when it comes to SEO. MOZ’s tools help you determine both these metrics, in fact they created them – go figure. They also help you determine a MOZ trust rank and spam score but we don’t look at that as much.

 Majestic SEO

When you’re into analyzing backings, finding expired domains and all that kind of fun activities you’ll need to use Majestic. This is probably the first tool I got started with and although it’s widely argued that the results they provide can easily be manipulated it’s still a great tool to have and very useful when checking competitors, domains or even your own website.

 Ahrefs

Similar to Majestic, Ahrefs is the bigger brother to the backlink analyzer tool family scraping way more results and providing a little more information. They don’t display trust and citation flow like Majestic so you’ll need a bit more skill and experience to make the right decisions – a great addition indeed.

 Long Tail Pro

Every SEO project starts at some point of keyword research and what’s better than being able to do that and find out the competition of these keywords. Not to the wise you’ll have to take the results with a pinch of salt and still use your own judgement but it does help you save a lot of time and money.

 Here’s a great free SEO tool resource: http://smallseotools.com

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How about some SEO?

SEO: Search engine optimization – the one part of internet marketing that can guarantee success and ultimately money if you can master it. And believe me it’s a big if as the internet is full of snake oil salesman promising the world and delivering next to nothing. I intend to not promise you anything when it comes to SEO, instead provide you with information you can use and use to your own extent however you choose.

Yes, I am an SEO myself and I might have ulterior motives for creating this blog, but believe me it’s not to trick, rather to help you and maybe even improve my own skills.

A short video about SEO for those less knowledgeable from the big kahuna’s themselves (Google):