Friday, June 19, 2009

Long Tail Terms, Part 2




Well, SEO and Long Tail terms really do work. One day after my attempt to get Kymanox ranked for the keyword phrase, "biotech knowledge transfer", Kymanox has jumped to the top of the google list for the search, "biotech knowledge transfer".

Quite amazing, that! I figured with the turnaround in search crawlers and such that we would be waiting quite a few days, maybe a week, to see if we had any success.

I hope this post is helpful for those looking to improve their search engine optimization. Since this is but one of the keywords that Kymanox will focus on, I will be adding more keyword tests in the near future to this blog, and will report the outcomes here as well!

Thursday, June 18, 2009

"Long Tail" Terms



I had an interesting meeting with a company called Hubspot yesterday and they brought up some interesting ideas that I thought I would pass along. The main one that I found most interesting was in order to boost your web presence, you should go after "long tail terms" on google. So what are long tail terms?

Well, if you followed the link above, the Long Tail terms really refer to terms that are less likely to have many links on google. I'll give you an example from our point of view:

For Kymanox, we would really like to be in the top 10 on the google keyword "Knowledge Transfer". Unfortunately, there are 28 million sites listed for this search. To move out onto the longer portion of the "long tail" we need to find related keywords with less searches, but ones that can be easily targeted. Kymanox already ranks very high for "Ideal Knowledge Transfer", since Kymanox' Ideal Knowledge Transfer is our trademarked process. But what if I want to target is something that we don't yet have any exposure on?

"Biotech knowledge transfer" is a good start, as this has 380,000 linked items, which is much less than the 28 million we started out with. Kymanox has no presence for this keyword combination, which is a bit odd because it is something we focus a lot of our efforts on. What I've also noted is that none of the top items specifically uses "biotech knowledge transfer" as the title of the document. I'm going to create a document and place it on the Kymanox website, and try a bit of a test to see how quickly we can be ranked on google for "Biotech Knowledge Transfer".

I'll follow up on this in a couple of weeks, and see if Kymanox has entered the "Biotech Knowledge Transfer" results.

Friday, June 5, 2009

On Search Engine Optimization - Title Tags

I have recently been working on updating our Kymanox websites to be more optimized for search engines. I must get a dozen spam messages per week from people claiming to be Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts. It does seem to be a very confusing topic, and I wanted to elaborate on what I've found to be useful, for the benefit of others reading this blog who might be interested in SEO.




This will be a series of posts about the best practices I have found in optimizing our pages for search engines.

Title, Title, Title
The title tag in an HTML document seems to be one of the most important, if not THE most important part of Search Engine Optimization. Here is an example:

Kymanox has a website called the KymaSTORE, which sells what we call, "Downloads for Ideal Knowledge Transfer". We sell all kinds of useful items for the Biotech, Pharmaceutical, and Medical Device industries, including Template Packages, Classroom Training Courses, Training Packages, Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Packages, Equipment and Services for Equipment like the Kaye Validator 2000, GMP Pens - our cGMP Compliant Indelible Ink Pens, and our KymaPRO Project Collaboration Website Software. I have spent a number of weeks optimizing the pages on our store to help search engines find our wide range of useful products.

I have noticed that the Title of the product makes a huge difference in whether the page ranks at the top of the search engine page, or many pages back, or not at all. Here is a great example:

Our product, Introduction to cGMP Current Good Manufacturing Practices Training Package, is indexed quite nicely when you search for "Current Good Manufacturing Practices Training Package" on Google. However, once you shorten your search to "GMP Training Package" as is often done with the phrase, "Good Manufacturing Practices", you will lose our package from the list.

So as you can see, Title is king in SEO. In the next post I will discuss ways in which I am trying to target multiple phrases and alleviate the problem noted above.