SEO, Google & Keywords

[Sarah24]

Hi

After reading a few of the articels on this site about SEO I have a few questions:
After 4-6weeks when a site should be heavily indexed on Google, what happens if the content is changed or updated? Does this whole process start again?
Also, with Google - I realise that links are important but does Google also look at your 'keywords'? If not how does google know what keywords are related to your site?
Internal links - how do you know if yours are good or for that matter how do you make internal links as good as possible?
Finally (!) - do you need to put 'keywords' on other pages of your site or just the first page?

If someone could point me to a relevant article or help me out - thanks!

Sarah

[pete]

Hi Sarah,

Well Brian is the resident expert here and you'll get the best advice from him.
But I'll have a go. (Be gentle with me, Brian).

Google regularily does the rounds so any changes will be picked up the next time the bot pays a visit. However depending on what changes were made and if links to your site are maintaned your pages may move up or down in the index or disappear altogether. So lay on the tea and biscuits (new back links and quality content, amongst others) for the googlebot. Optimizing is an ongoing process.

As far as I am aware Google still uses keywords but doesn't give them as much weight as other factors.

With internal links and any back links from other sites I think the anchor text is of most importance. Using relevent keywords will help when the spiders come round. For example; if when creating a link rather than just putting a link in the form 'Click here' make the text relevant.

Keywords don't have the same level of importance as they used to and I've seen quite a few sites that don't use them at all and still done well in the searches. Yes you can put keywords on the other pages but I think it's best to use ones relevant to that pages content (or vice versa) rather than using site wide keywords (all the same) or littering your page content with keywords to match without any context.

[Brian Turner]

I don't see anything inherently wrong with your answer, pete - no problems there.

This part is especially worth highlighting:

Originally Posted by pete

Google regularily does the rounds so any changes will be picked up the next time the bot pays a visit. However depending on what changes were made and if links to your site are maintaned your pages may move up or down in the index or disappear altogether. So lay on the tea and biscuits (new back links and quality content, amongst others) for the googlebot. Optimizing is an ongoing process.

SEO indeed is ongoing - you can go up and down.

However, I liken SEO to driving - no matter where you're driving to, you're very unlikely to be driving in a straight line - likely you'll find yourself having to turn through a few different directions.

Now, if you focus only on the direction at any single moment, you might never drive anywhere, because you're too fixated on the short-term motion, not the long-term direction - in fact, sometimes you'll find yourself having to go in completely the opposite direction to get to where you need to go.

The point is, though, that your *overall direction* is in the way you need to go.

A good example may be my own business site - just got tanked from No.2 to approx. 250 for an important commercial keyword. The way I look at it, though, is that it's like Google's just set up a one-way system I'm going to have to navigate. So I'll simply try to ensure I steer around it to get back on course.

(Of course, there's an underlying lesson here - never rely on natural search traffic for a single site to be your main income stream!)

Anyway, I'll try to address more of the points raised:

Originally Posted by Sarah24

After 4-6weeks when a site should be heavily indexed on Google, what happens if the content is changed or updated? Does this whole process start again?

Depends on the extent of the changes - Google needs to:

1. Spider the new changes
2. Update the changes to its index

For small changes, where you simply change a heading here, some text there, then the impact is likely to be relatively small for the more important keywords, as they are almost certainly being ranked on more important SEO factors, not least according to the links to a page.

However, if you completely restructure a site, you can lose all original traffic as those pages are dropped from the index, and have to wait for the new pages to have their effect updated in Google.

Originally Posted by Sarah24

Also, with Google - I realise that links are important but does Google also look at your 'keywords'? If not how does google know what keywords are related to your site?

Google uses 2 main ways to determine what keywords apply to your site:

1. What other sites say about you (links)
2. What you say about you (your page titles, headers, text, tags)

Google will look at such factors as these, add them to the mix, and determine how likely you are to rank for any particular keyword query. Obviously, for the more commercially important keywords, you will likely need to develop a strong SEO campaign and allow it to mature.

Originally Posted by Sarah24

Internal links - how do you know if yours are good or for that matter how do you make internal links as good as possible?

Try using keywords in your links where possible - but in doing so, think about your human users. For example, don't set up a links like this:

SEO information can be found here.

Instead, consider setting them up like this:

More here: SEO information

The links help inform *anyone* using those links - spiders or human users - what to expect on the other side of that link. That's helpful. Ultimately, SEO is born from information accessibility, so think about internal links in that way - helping describe the layers of your site.

Originally Posted by Sarah24

Finally (!) - do you need to put 'keywords' on other pages of your site or just the first page?

Every page can get generate traffic - the better targeted it is, the more useful for everyone.

Hopefully that helps for starters?

[Sarah24]

Brian and Pete... THANK YOU!!!!
That was really great and so informative! It's helped an awful lot and given me something to do for a few days lol!
Brian (if I may ask), would you recommend any websites with good info on this sort of stuff as I really do find it very interesting...

Thanks once again

Sarah xx

[Brian Turner]

Well, to be honest, I would really recommend the articles in the SEO section here:

http://www.platinax.co.uk/seo/articles/

You may find Andy Beal's article to be particularly useful:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/seo/articles/11/

Hope that helps.

[Sarah24]

Hi Brian

Thanks a lot - very helpful! I had already looked at some of your articles in that section, but the others are very good too so thanks for bringing them to my attention

Sarah

[Brian Turner]

No problem - and any more questions, feel free to ask.

[brooke]

Personally I find SEO a bit of a mystery. I like it when there is a definate reaction to a particular action. As such, the only really concrete thing I would suggest is to pay particular attention to the title of the page. That really seems to do the trick for me.

However, Google is really difficult to master and I find that I get more Google traffic for unrelated terms than I do for the terms i'm trying to optimise. At first its encouraging but after a while you get sick of having 90% of your traffic being people searching for a particular US president, or your site doing particuly well for a google image search for a supermarket logo you have on your page.

However, one thing I have noticed and thats size matters. The more text you have the more traffic you'll get. Theres a direct correlation. So lots of charst and tables and lots of pages. I dont follow that as a philosophy as its hard to manage, I keep everything I do short, but if you want to get traffic, thats a good starter if your prepared to keep a grip on it.

[pete]

Yeah, content is still King. But depending on the nature of the site sometimes it's just not appropriate.
So if short is true to the nature of the site, then short it should be, although generally the experts tend to recommend a 200 word minimum per page.

[Gary]

Well you learn something new everyday. There's more to this optimization malarkey than meets the eye. Cheers for the advice.