breaking through the rain
sunlight’s grace moves through the trees
birds dance on the wind
Sunlight through the rain
Blog
Early Spring
springtime is nearing
flowers eating the sunshine
blown by the cool breeze
Moz Chapter 3 KEYWORD RESEARCH
Another post based on this past quarter’s research on SEO via Moz
There are many key tools for determining a good keyword strategy. The first, and most important one, is the act of questioning. Starting with core questions is critical to developing the right focus on for the other research tools. Who are our customers? What are their goals? What do they want? How do they search? Once you have answers for these, you can explore several other tools like:
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- Google Keywords Planner
- Google Trends
- Moz Keyword Explorer
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Google’s tools are perhaps the most important, as the vast majority of US based search is done via Google. Google Keywords gives you the ability to explore which keywords are relevant, which have high competition, and which have low competition. The “finding new keywords” tool looks particularly powerful. Google Trends is another tool that is worthy of adding to your toolbox. With it you can see what the world is searching for, both at the broadest levels as well as refined to the local or even hyper-local. Besides being able to search for specific keywords, you can also looking at macro trends across the internet. Moz, one of the leaders in digital marketing has their own Keyword Research tool. In many respects, it’s more powerful than Google’s. Especially for the Pro version. But even the free version has great details on their research dashboard, including keyword suggestions and SERP analysis.
With this type of work, you can determine the value of any keyword and build strategies around them.
Cherry Blossoms
all the beauty of springtime
encapsulated
I try to walk every day. During those walks, I seek out signs of the seasons, of change, of life’s patterns. Lately, I’ve searched for signs of spring. Crocuses, daffodils, lilies, and now cherry blossoms.
First day of spring
this first day of spring
amidst the rain and cool wind
under the firs’ grace
Temperamental Weather
walking in the rain
which soon becomes a strong wind
and then it’s sunshine
Along the Water
along the water
under the sun, between trains
beside calm waters
I just finished up winter quarter, so I was able to spend the day as I wished. Today’s the projected last day of sun for a while, so I opted for a waterside walk today. Edmonds is one of my favorite places, so off I went.
Signs of Spring
stand under the sun
and the regalness of trees
caressing the sky
Signs of spring grow. Blossoms forming on trees, daffodils upright, crocuses tall. Soon the cherry trees will regale us with their yearly show. One all to brief, thus we must take the time to watch.
Spring Approaches
underneath the sun
my soul lifted by it’s grace
as spring approaches
Took this photo on a recent walk. It’s been quite lovely the past few days here in Seattle. Though we still have a few days until spring officially begins, it’s presence is felt. And I’ve seen other signs of spring: trees, especially cherry trees, are starting to blossom. Winter’s grip, around here at least, seems to have weakened, perhaps even released. We can hope, at least.
How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, And Ranking
Winter quarter is finished! I just turned in my final project (JavaScript) and my brain is oozing onto the floor. Anyway, this quarter I took Intro To JavaScript, Systems Analysis and one I’m calling a catchall, “Joomla and Introduction To SEO”. Interestingly, this last class featured Amazon Web Services (AWS) heavily, and I’ll write about that, too. So, today I’ll explore more of my thoughts on SEO.
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Crawling and Indexing:
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Crawling sites is when a robot, for instance Googlebot, explores a webpage. One of the key problems with crawling and crawlers is simply whether they can find your page. There are some ways to push Google in this regard. One valuable way: you can tell Google how you want the page crawled via the Search Console. A related problem: keeping crawlers from indexing pages you don’t want indexed. Things like special landing pages, promo-code pages, pages for A-B testings and so forth. The tool for this is the robots.txt file which directs the bots on how you want the files analyzed. Web developers also need to consider the crawl budget, which is the average number of pages the Googlebot will before moving onto another site. It is also important to utilize a clean information architecture and sitemaps.
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Indexes are where search engines store and process the information found while crawling the internet. Just because a site can be crawled does not mean it will be indexed, or indexed the way you want. Robots can be instructed on this within the meta tags.
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Matching Queries to Content
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The goal of the search engine: provide the most relevant results to user queries. Their algorithm uses several things to determine that relevance. One of the main ways is backlinks. These links from other sites assert authority on the subject matter. PageRank is part of the Google core algorithm that analyzes link qualities. More natural backlinks are the most valuable. Other elements that Google considers: page clicks, time on the page, the bounce rate (percentage of user visits where they only viewed one page), and pogo-sticking (where the user goes right back to the Search Engine Results Page after visiting the target site. Additionally, for localized content, Google uses these elements to rank results: relevance, distance, and prominence. Things like Google Reviews and Citations are the biggest influencers of prominence.
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