Seo Expert Guide - Keyword Analysis (part 3/10)
|
If you imagine that building an optimized site is like cooking a meal, then keywords are the essential ingredients. Would you attempt to cook a complex new dish without first referring to a recipe? Would you start before you had all the ingredients available and properly prepared?
In our analogy, key words are your ingredients and the rest of the guide (after this part) is your recipe. It is vital that you start by investing time in key word research. This may surprise you, but I would recommend you spend at least 25% of your time on this activity alone! That's 25% of all your time, including the time you spend designing your site, building it, optimising and promoting it! Quite an investment, eh? But believe me, if you din't get this part right your meal will not be a very satisfying one and no-one will want to eat it!
(a) What are your 10 key words?
You may think you know straight off. You are likely to be right about most of them but you will almost certainly make three common mistakes. Firstly, you will tend to pick single words (rather than chains of words). Secondly, you will tend to pick the same words used by other people. Thirdly, you will compound this by overusing these key words on your site and underusing related key words. The result will be a poor finished product and sub-optimal ranking or traffic.
So please be patient and walk through the following steps. From part two, you will remember Doug (who sells antique doors, door handles, knockers, door bells or pulls and fitting services).
Like Doug, you should start with a visit to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool (which I recommend in preference to Wordtracker, which is a paid service, and the Google Adwords: Keyword Suggestion Tool, which does not indicate the popularity count of each search phrase). This tool allows you to check for recent word search combinations (and their derivatives) on the Overture search engine, returning search frequencies for each.
Doug enters "antique doors" and is surprized to find that "antique door knob" and "antique door hinge" score higher than "antique door knocker" (his best selling product in the high street store). But far higher still is the category level combination "antique door hardware". He had never guessed searchers could be so savvy.
Next he tries "antique door knocker" and finds a single derivative "antique brass door knocker". He had not thought seriously about making brass a keyword. Now it is pencilled in on his list.
Trying "antique door bell" and playing around, he discovers "antique door chime" is about as popular (reflecting a difference between UK and US english). This is also very enlightening, as he is hoping to sell to the US audience by mail order.
Perhaps you begin to see my point. As you will see later in the guide, I recommend a separate page for each product, service or information topic on your site. Through your Overture search, you should come up with an "A" list of about 10 key words for each page. At least four of them are likely to be site-wide in their applicability and common to each page. The remaining six will be page-specific. Put any left-over words onto a second page entitled "B" list.
In Doug's example, he decides he wants antique, door, brass and hardware on each page in the site. On the door knocker page, he wants (in addition) the key words knocker, iron, decorative, engraved, pineapple and lion.
You too should do the same. If you find this activity overly difficult, can I suggest you revisit your proposition? It is quite possible you have not yet properly thought that through!
(b) Which key words do your competitors use?
Through searching for door knockers on Google and focusing on the top 15 results, Doug brings up their pages. He uses the menu option "view-source" in Internet Explorer to look at the key words used in the page metadata.
He is surpised to find some consistent themes. For example, almost all of the sites he finds whilst searching for "door knockers" also include "door knobs" in their metadata for that page. He also finds that several have used old as one of their kewords, in addition to antique.
Don't read me wrong here. Metadata (particularly in isolation) is not the route to high search engine rankings (as you will see later). However, top 10 sites generally have done well with their optimization more generally (and their metadata is likely to reflect quality keyword analysis, repeated throughout the site in other ways).
Another key tool is the Google Smackdown, permitting you to compare the overall frequency of two competing keyword sets across the whole of Google's results. Doug compares "antique door knob" with "antique door knocker" and finds the former is hugely overrepresented on the web compared to the latter (with over 2,000 results vs. under 200). He knows that knob is not searched on ten times more (from his earlier work) so decides to concentrate on knocker as a word where he has less competition.
However, Doug confirms the effectiveness of all competitor combinations using the Overture tool and revises his list to include some of these new words, relegating "pineapple" and "lion" to his B-list, in favour of "old" and "knobs".
(c) How many related keywords can you identify?
Now for an important third step. Navigate your browser to the GoRank Ontology Finder - Related Keywords Lookup Tool. Like Doug, try entering "antique door knocker" and look at the results. For "antique", the tool suggests related keywords of old, classic, antique, furniture, vintage, rare, victorian, antiques, collectible.
Hmmm. Now he can see why his competitors use old in their list! Doug runs these related words back through the Overture tool and finds that "Victorian door" yields some decent results, so adds Victorian and Edwardian to his B-list (something he had never thought of previously).
Imagine if Doug had started with victorian door knockers as his gane plan. The Ontology finder would have shown him that antique door knockers was a much more sensible combination. He would then have been changing his A-list.
As Search Engines move ever further towards the use of semantic intelligence in their ranking systems, the use of relared keywords will become ever more important. Make sure you future-proof your site through the liberal use of such words in page text content. More on this later in the guide.
(d) Building key word chains
Perhaps it might surprise you to learn that the majority of all searches on Google are for two or three word combinations. Why does it surprise you, though? Isn't that what you yourself do when you are searching? Even if you start with one word, the results you get are generally not specific enough (so you try adding further words to refine your search).
Bearing this in mind, it is vitally important to come up with 3-5 keyword chains for each separate page on your site. When you write your page copy later, you will need to ensure that these keyword chains appear with reasonable density in your overall text.
Like Doug, pay a visit to the ABAKUS Topword Keyword Check Tool. Put in your competitor sites one after another and check out the results (using the default search settings). Study closely the two-word and three-word combinations that come up most frequently for each of your key pages in turn.
Through Doug's exploration (for his door knockers page), he comes up with three favorite two-letter combinations: "door knockers", "antique door" and "antique hardware". For three-letter combinations, he settles on "house antique hardware" and "brass door knocker".
Doug is surprised to note that "door knockers" is more popular than "door knocker". He has learnt another key lesson; always pluralise your key words where you can. You will achieve higher traffic this way (becuase of the way search engines handle queries).
For a typical 10-page site, you should now have approximately 65-70 A-list words (with four of those being site wide) and perhaps as many as 200 B-list words (many of which will be related key words). You will have perhaps as many as 50 key word chains. Congratulations. You now have all the ingredients you need to get cooking. Read on...
Navigate the guide
Previous :SEO Expert Guide - Proposition Development (part 2/10)
Next:SEO Expert Guide - Sitewide Optimization (part 4/10)
About the author:David Viney (david@viney.com) is the author of the Intranet Portal Guide; 31 pages of advice, tools and downloads covering the period before, during and after an Intranet Portal implementation.
Read the guide at http://www.viney.com/DFV/intranet_portal_guide or the Intranet Watch Blog at http://www.viney.com/intranet_watch.
|
|
|
Going To Market: Keywords And Backlinks, Part 1
As I waded into the 'Make Money Online' waters on the Internet, I felt I needed to do some research on what keywords might help me generate traffic for my websites. I am very, very new to this whole Internet marketing arena but at the simplest level it seems that the keys to generating income are:<...(related: Seo)
Search Engine Marketing Simplified
All the great efforts made for making your own site, goes in vain when your site doesn't bring you business. The reasons can be anything right from less traffic, to less page-per-views, or lesser PageRank. Upon serendipity of elaborating all of the above said problems, I would land up in search engine marketing basics.- Less Traffic means fewer hits to your site.- Fewer pages per views mean users checking your site but not getting interested in clicking on other pages. They don't find it interesting to surf through.- Lesser PageRank. PageRank is Google's way of measuring the quality of ...(related: Seo)
Googles Good-writing Filter
I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really rank web pages based primarily on arcane technical criteria such as keyword density, link text, or even PageRank?Apparently not.
Most Common Website Content Success Factors
I took a close look at the top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Here's what I found.The ...(related: Seo)Youve Got The Power, Why Arent You Promoting It?
Like all things, theft is theft, misery loves company, negative people are everywhere, business is sometimes bad, things go up and others go down.If those are all true then knowledge is power right? Wrong, knowledge is only power if applied. So why is it that most of us only apply "commercialized" marketing tactics and fail to utilize the little stuff that counts?For instance, Google allows us to promote 2 url's, www.yoursite.com & http://yoursite.comSo ok. Nothing new...Then why aren't you promoting the power Google gave to you?See there's some of us who know that adding a link to both urls within our sites is a powerful thing. But what most of us don't k...(related: Seo)
Alert Marketing - Get Google Search Results By E-mail
Sometimes our jobs as marketers means we need to look beyond the obvious. Google, for example, offers their Google Alerts service. At first glance, this may seem most useful to companies who want to track certain searches within their industry, or to hobbyists who want to stay on top of changes in their topics of interest.But Internet marketers can also use Google Alerts to help keep track of what's going on around the net, and even to keep tabs on their direct competition for that matter. Google Alerts, which are email notifications, can be created based on the top 10 Google news stories, but more helpful to marketers is the poss...(related: Seo)
Commonly Seo Terms And Jargon Used By Search Engine Gurus
What does all this SEO jargon mean.Have you ever been left scratching your head, wondering what the Search Engine Optimizers SEO's or Gurus are talking about.You are not the only one.There are so many terms used on the Internet that you almost need a degree just to understand what the experts are saying.I thought you might like to be enlightened on some of the more commonly used terms.I have divided my SEO Dictionary into two sections, Search Engine and Web site related termsThe More common Search Engine terms include,Algorithm. This is the formula used by Search Engines that determines how any web page will rank ...(related: Seo)
7 Steps To Prepare You For The Local Search Bonanza
At One Time Local Searches were reserved for services like City Guides and Online Yellow Pages. But the BIG 3 (Yahoo, Google and MSN) have all jumped into the Local Search Market. According to some Estimates Local searches represent 20-25% of all Internet Searches either implicitly or explicitly)1 - Local ContentCreate a web site with a...(related: Seo)
Emerging Methods For Effective Search Engine Ranking
Search Engine traffic has always been and continues to be one of the best ways to drive qualified traffic to a web site - it presents information about goods and services when the interest level is high and it can be acted on immediately. Up till now opt-in e-mail marketing has been an effective complement to search engine ranking campaigns; but the never-ending deluge of Spam is rapidly ruining the effectiveness of opt-in e-mail and helping to add luster to the value and cost-effectiveness of search engine traffic.Unfortunately, the increasing popularity of search engine ranking methodologies is helping to raise the barriers to entry - as more businesses, ad agencies and SEO firms concentrate their efforts on creating highly optimized web sites, the competition for keyword rankings and qualified traffic is increasing significantly....(related: Seo)
More Hits Are Good For My Website - A Myth You Should Avoid
I hear this all the time. "I can get you listed on 100,000 websites for $29.95" and..."I can get you 100,000 hits on your website for the same price". Avoid these like the plague.First off you don't need a 100,000 visitors to your site. What you need is 100,000 CUSTOMERS on your site searching for your product or service. Very simply you're not going to find many people doing this for you. DocMurdock? will do this. Our mission is to find people looking for your product or service and bring them to your website so that you can sell them. While we ...(related: Seo)
The Changing Face Of Search Engine Optimization
With the ever evolving internet market for just about anything you can imagine and Google's index growing to almost 9 billion pages, and counting, there is little dispute amongst search engine optimizers that our job is getting much harder. From linking to articles, and density to ontology, our industry changes as fast as any other. The search engines, especially Google, seem to be on a daily diet of change and their algorithm seems to be growing at the rate of their index.The word 'related' plays a much bigger part in SEO today than it ever has in the past. Instead of targeting an exact keyword phrase, it now makes a lot more sense to keep your site within context and to have related words to your keywords, compared to having density of one keyword phrase. Linking has also turned into a frenzy for relevancy. Unrelated l...(related: Seo)
Ranked #1 At Google For Invisible Entrepreneurs But No Traffic?
I am ranked #1 for that silly phrase at Google. So What?Here's a secret. You can be ranked #1 at Google for thephrase "Waterfall Watches" if you put the phrase on yourpage 4 times and in metatags twice. How do I know that?I did it in 2001 and still rank number one in Google forth...(related: Seo)
Six Reasons Why Your Alexa Rating Is Still Important
1. Additional Exposure For Your Site.At the end of 2003, Alexa.com's results were being closely linked into the listings of its' parent company, Amazon.com. This currently means that when someone reviews your site, it is linked to their amazon profile, which can be accessed when people browsing for books look to see what reviewers like them suggest. In the future, it could mean that amazon.com will integrate your web site in other ways, such as showing a list of websites related to popular topics such as marketing.2. Alexa's relationship with Google.comSee if you can name one major partnership that Google.com or Amazon.com has had where the other party came out worse off in the end.Yahoo? I don't think so. Though their relationship has soured for reasons that aren'...(related: Seo)
Choosing A Good Domain Name Isnt Always So Simple.
So you need a domain name for your brand new internet business. You may even have some cool ideas for a new domain name combination that will really impress your friends. Question is, is your new domain name going to help your business or hurt it?What could be simpler than choosing a domain name right? Wrong. There are a number of things you need to consider and research before you register your favorite domain name.First off, what is a domain name and why would I want one?A domain name makes our lives much easier when surfing the internet. You see, all computers on the internet are actually referenced with what is called IP addresses. On the internet, IP addresses are four sets of numbers that serve like street addresses allowing two computers to talk over ...(related: Seo)
site-map - Copyright © 2006 | You can send your articles and get links. Contact Webmaster | All Rights Reserved.
| Seo