Road Crew

Ok, Today being a non comic posting day, I deceided to work on some SEO (that’s Search Engine Optmisation, ya know) as  I got an email from a friend of mine who was asking about it. So I rattled off an email to her in my usual rambling way. Then I thought, why not make a blog post about it and help everyone out. Cos, as you know, I am that Nice of a guy! Practically the second coming…

First Off, I am not claiming to be a Google guru or master of the SEO Jedi Arts. I’m going to go through the stages and ideas that I know about and hopefully get it somewhat right along the way. If you know better, please, feel free to correct me.

Let’s Begin,

Join Google.

Set up a gmail account if you don’t already have one. This is where all the magic happens. Google wants to be the best search engine so it more or less tells you exactly what you need to do to get your site noticed. Their Webmaster Tools are essential for getting good information about your site. Now, some of google’s workings are still esoteric and secret so, we can only really guess what we have to do, but with webmaster tools we’re ahead of the field.

So when you enter your site address, google will spit back a host of info about how it sees your site. I am not sure if it does this straight away or if it has to spent 24 hours crawling through your site, either way you’ll get the info soon enough.

It’ll give you a list of keywords that it thinks are important to the topic of your site and then how relevant it believes each keyword is to you. Ok, so if you look at your keywords, you should be getting stuff that has relevance to your site. So in our case we should see comics, comic, webcomic, online comic.

Now, I notice that I’m not getting words exactly like these. My main traffic from Google comes from the Keywords: WIFEY, COMIC SEX, COMIC BABE, and Obvioulsy ROAD CREW. If you put COMIC BREASTS into Google Image search the first imnage should be road crew. Although this mightn’t be a world wide thing as Google reverts to Google.ie for me.

Now, this is both a good and a bad thing. At the very least, Google will target some traffic to me because of these keywords, but how popular are these keywords? To find that out we can use Google ADSENSE. Let’s point our browsers here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This is an extremely handy and FREE little tool that allows us to check keywords and how popular they are.

So lets look up my keywords. WIFEY gets about 823,000 searchs per month worldwide. So I guess that’s not too bad to have as a keyword then. COMIC BREASTS doesn’t fare as well. Google doesn’t have enough information, which means that it’s probably not searched for that often. So this Keyword isn’t going to do much for me. COMIC SEX gets 246,000 searches a month, which surprises me as you would expect it to be higher than WIFEY, but that just goes to show you never can tell.

Ok, enough with my keywords. What are GOOD KEYWORDS for someone doing a webcomic should have? Let’s put in webcomics and see how many searches it gets: 60,500! Wow, that’s pretty small. Only 60,500 searches a month, no wonder most of us don’t get that much traffic from google, not many are searching for webcomics. Right, how about COMICS: a staggering 11,100,00! This would suggest to me that we should delete all references to our comics as webcomics and simply call them comics. If 11 Million people search for comics a month and only 60 thousand for webcomics, I feel this might gain us some results!

But before we jump to any conclusions, lets see what oother relevant keywords are up to:

CARTOONS: 7,480,000  ONLINE COMICS: 110,000  COMICS ONLINE: 135,000 Comics Books: 5,000,000

It’s interesting to note that 25,ooo more people searched for COMICS ONLINE than ONLINE COMICS, and that CARTOONS out search them all.

Ok so that’s one way of getting Keywords. Another way is to take a successful site and see what KEYWORDS is driving traffic to them. On the KEYWORD TOOLS page you can check WEBSITE CONTENT rather than DESCRIPTIVE WORD OR PHRASE. This means we can stick in a website url and get some good information back. Let’s try SCOTT KURTZ’s www.PVPONLINE.com, he’s pretty popular ain’t he?

Interesting. We can now see that a lot of his Google search engine traffic comes from the following Keywords: t shirt printing, custom t shirt, t shirts,  payday loan, and joss whedon. Not even a mention of comics, webcomics or whatever. T-shirts seem to be the Thing for PVP, which is fine as Kurtz does great T-shirts!

Ok so now let’s try www.PENNY-ARCADE.com. This information is less usefull to us as it’s very specific to Penny Arcade. the keywords:  penny arcade, on the rain slick precipice of darkness, etc aren’t going to be relevant to say ROAD CREW.

lAST ONE:  BRAD GUIGAR’s www.EVIL-COMIC.com KEYWORDS: ONLINE COMIC BOOK, COMIC BOOK, MARVEL COMICS, ONLINE COMIC, etc. This is more helpful to us as we can see that Brad is getting some traffic from the keywords we can use.

Ok so now we have some good, highly searched KEYWORDS: COMICS, CARTOONS, and COMIC BOOKS and we know that popular webcomic sites are getting traffic with these. But, I hear you scream, what can we do with this knowledge?

Well, it’s not as simple as just sticking these keywords into post and page/site descriptions. Google doesn’t want people sticking random words into post and pages just to get their search traffic up. So what they want is the keywords plus words that are relevant to these keywords in a post.

Example: If I just randomly said JOHN F KENNEDY, Google wouldn’t really care about this because the rest of my site isn’t related. But adding the terms, assaination, shooting, death etc.  Goggle gets more interested because it sees a pattern.

How do we get the relevant extra words? Back to google adsense keyword tool. So we have our three big keywords that we want to use COMICS, CARTOONS, and COMIC BOOKS. Let’s put in COMICS and see what it gives us. For it to pick up on the keyword comics, you must also have words like funny comics, comic strips, comic, cartoon comics, comic books, comic books online, comic strip.

So stick that list into your page/site descriptions, blog posts etc and make them bold. Do the same steps for keywords that are closer to the topic of your comic, like for me ROAD CREW, MUSIC, BANDS, SOUND ENGINEERS etc. Don’t put in keywords that are relevant to your site as Google will know and punish you. If your comic doesn’t have sex, don’t put comic sex in your keywords. Don’t use Marvel comics, if you don’t talk about marvel comics. You get the idea.

I hope this helps. Next time we’ll talk about SEO plugins for WORDPRESS.

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