Archive for May, 2007
There’s no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can’t afford to do that. The keyword research process can be broken down into the following phases:
Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice
Phase 2 – Befriending the keyword research tool
Phase 3 – Finalizing your list
Phase 4 – Plan your Attack
Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat
Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions
Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide array of wonderful clients. And as different and diverse as their sites and the individuals running them may have been, many had one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword research mavens right out of the gate.
Or so they thought.
One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don’t. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it’s difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.
This is due to site owners evaluating their site through too narrow of a lens, causing them to come up with words that read like industry jargon, not viable keywords. Remember, your customer probably doesn’t work in the same industry that you do. If they did, they wouldn’t need you. When describing your site or product, break away from industry speak. Your customers aren’t searching that way and if you center your site on these terms, they’ll never find you.
Another misconception is that generic or “big dollar” terms are the most important for rankings, even if the term you’re going after has nothing to do with your site. Imagine a women’s clothing store trying to rank for the term “google”. Sure, thousands of searchers probably type that word into their search bar daily, but they’re not doing it looking for you. They’re looking for Google. Being ranked number one for a term no one would associate with your site is a waste of time and money (and it may get you in trouble!). Your site may see a lot of traffic, but customers won’t stick around.
Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice
The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, rev up your conversion rate and allow the engines to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension headache.
The trick is to start slowly.
The first step in this process is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. This includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like ’shoes’ or ‘clothes’. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won’t drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.
If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also, don’t be afraid to take a peek at your competitor’s Meta Keyword tag. What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their keyword list to make yours better? It’s okay to get a little sneaky here. All’s fair in love and search engine rankings.
Phase 2 – Befriend the keyword research tool
Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.
In the early days of SEO, measuring the “popularity” of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changed and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.
By inputting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren’t aware of.
There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here’s a few of our personal favorites:
Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture’s Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms you may have forgotten about. Our only complaint with Overture is that they lump singular and plural word forms into one phrase. For example, “boots” and “boot” would appear under one category of “boot”. This can sometimes cause problems.
Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a paid-use tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term. It may also highlight hidden gems that have low competition-rates, but high relevancy.
Trellian Keyword Discovery tool: This is a fee-based tool where users can ascertain the market share value for a given search term, see how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and discover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends (mostly useful for PPC).
Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google’s keyword PPC tool doesn’t provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful.
Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may help you expand your original list. Thesaurus.com: Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten.
If those don’t tickle your fancy, we’d also suggest Bruce Clay’s Check Traffic tool, which estimates the number of queries per day for that search term across the major search engines.
Keep in mind that you’re not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you’re also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings.
Understanding the competition tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term. There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how strong are those sites’ rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to them, how many pages do they have indexed)? Basically, is that word or phrase even worth your time? If it’s not, move on.
While you’re testing your new terms, you may want to do a little housekeeping and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and drop the losers.
Phase 3 – Finalizing your list
Now that you have your initial list of words and have tested their activity, it’s time to narrow down the field and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.
We recommend creating a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above). These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and will be a great aid as you try and narrow down your focus.
The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your web site. These are the terms you want to hold on to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that you don’t have sufficient content to support (unless you’re willing to write some). You can’t optimize for words that you don’t have content for.
Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You’ll need both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your web site does; however, they won’t increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.
For example, say you are a company that specializes in cowboy boots. It may be natural for your site to focus on the broad search terms “boots” and “cowboy boots”. These words are important because they tell the search engines what you do and may increase your visitors, but the traffic you receive will be largely unqualified. Customers will arrive on your site still unsure of what kind of boots you sell. Do you offer traditional cowboy boots, stiletto cowboy boots, toddler cowboy boots, suede cowboy boots or women’s cowboy boots? By only targeting broad terms, customers won’t know what you offer until they land on your site.
Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to the search engines, since the targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases. Sticking with our example, targeted terms for your cowboy boots site may be “men’s cowboy boots”, “blue suede cowboy boots”, “extra-wide women’s cowboy boots”, etc. Broad search terms may bring you the higher levels of traffic, but it’s targeted, buying-oriented terms like these that will maximize conversions.
Phase 4 – Plan your attack
So you made your list of about 10-20 highly focused keywords, now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch!
Chances are, if you did your keyword research right, at least some of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but some of them may not. Start thinking about how many pages you’ll need to create to support these new words, and how and where your keyword phrases will be used.
We typically recommend only going after three or four related keywords per page (five if you can balance them properly). Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming. Your content should never sound forced.
Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
- Title Tag
- Meta Description Tags
- Meta Keywords Tag
- Headings
- Alt text
- Anchor Text/ Navigational Links
You’ve spent a lot of time molding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit.
Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat
Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind you. You’ve created your list, checked it twice, made friends with the keyword research tools and are now off to go plan your attack. You’re done, right?
Unfortunately, no. As your customer’s and your site’s needs change over time, so will your keywords. It’s important to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward.
Good luck!
Ten years may not seem like a long time, but at the pace of change in business, it sometimes feels like a lifetime.
For example: When Outsource Marketing first launched in 1997, outsourcing was not some trendy term for staffing CSRs and software programmers in India. It would be eight years before Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat was published and introduced people to the notion that the global economy had arrived.
Marketing has changed even more dramatically during the past 10 years than any other similar period in the past. Why? Technology and its incredible impact on how we access and process information.
In 1997:
* There were fewer than 500,000 Internet Web sites
* Google, YouTube, MySpace or the iPod didn’t exist
* Cell phones were just phones
Now there are more than 100 million Web sites, 35 million blogs, and cell phones are hand-held computers that can multitask phone calling, text messaging, photography, video downloading, digital music files and an endless variety of games. It was in 2004 O’Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0–a group of second generation Web-based services.
A decade ago, high-tech acronyms such as CRM, PPC, SEO, MP3, DSL and DVR were yet to join the lexicon. Television consisted of sports, movies and shows you watched on a set in the living room and maybe on another in the kitchen or bedroom. Now TV programming–all 580 channels–can now be TiVo’d, recalled on demand or viewed on a laptop, MP3 player or cell phone. Cable providers now offer high-speed broadband, as well as local and long-distance phone services.
New tech, new media, new Marketing
What does all this mean for marketers? A change in the landscape, a whole new set of consumer and customer segments and a wealth of new tools that still must be smartly deployed and effectively targeted.
Marketing in today’s crowded, infoglutted world is more exciting than ever, but it’s challenging in new ways. Here are three key dynamics affecting small and mid-market businesses, and some new media strategies to connect customer with your message.
1. Marketing is now in the hands of the people.
As coined by Peter Kim, from Forrester Research in Reinventing the Marketing Organization, participation is now the fifth “p” joining price, product, placement and promotion.
Whether it’s blogs, consumer produced Super Bowl commercials or e-mail sharing, customers have never been in such control. Embrace that change. Give your customers opportunities to generate testimonials, feedback and suggestions for product improvements. Allocate time to listen to what they say and respond promptly and honestly. Product and service improvements start with feedback from your own customers.
Instead of being talked at, customers now expect being talked to. Wikis, e-mails, live chat, bulletin boards, texting and video sharing are just some of the ways the word gets spread. Start with the right product (that’s never out of date), couple it with good customer service, and you won’t need to be afraid of interactive communication–as much communication as you can handle.
American Idol and similar television reality shows are the epitome of the new customer participation model. Instead of just sitting back and watching shows, viewers are now choosing who they want to see by voting. Be creative and think about how you could develop your own company’s “fan base.” With the technology tools now available, you can deepen your relationships with customers and create the dialogue that leads to loyalty.
2. Online media are mandatory in today’s marketing mix.
The Internet continues to absorb more and more of the advertising dollar, leaving other media with less. Newspaper readership is declining. Network TV ratings have declined steadily over the past 10 years. With Internet search engines, consumers can find what they want, rather than be pushed toward purchases with advertising messages. In fact, 66 percent of high school students report that they get their news and information from Web portals such as Yahoo! and Google. More than one-half of U.S. broadband customers said that a recent purchase was influenced by an online message (36 percent by shopping sites and 15 percent by search sites), exceeding the impact of TV commercials (11 percent) and magazine ads (6 percent), according to a 2007 study by market researcher Media-Screen.
“Even the most intensive users of newspapers and magazines spend less time reading these publications than they do online or watching TV,” a 2007 Jupiter Research study confirmed.
While a Web site is a marketing “must-have” for today’s businesses, additional online presence is also required. E-mail newsletters, blogs, interactive Web elements (videos, podcasts, direct response tools) keep your site fresh and relevant. Targeted e-newsletters are a great way to provide inexpensive yet highly valued information of interest to customers and prospects. New tools now make it easy to personalize the messages and track e-mail opens and click-through rates.
3. Integration is the key to success.
Do all these new media seem like a bit much for any one customer? Possibly. Most people average more than 3,000 commercial message exposures a day, and the volume continues to grow. (Reality check: After you’ve bought your next $12 movie ticket, count the commercials and previews you have to sit through before the film begins). Creating clear, concise messages that are smoothly integrated is absolutely crucial to successful customer communications.
That’s because, despite all the new technologies, this marketing principle hasn’t changed: You must start with a relevant position, supported by consistent communications, to achieve a desired position with your target audience.
It used to be that companies could get away with broadcasting clever commercials that generated awareness, and even sales. Now, thanks to infoglut, your company and product and service positioning must be clearly evident across all media. Every customer contact point–how you answer your phone, your e-mails, your customer service and your advertising–need to project the reason why your company provides a unique, relevant value for your intended audience.
Ten years goes by quickly, doesn’t it? In 1997, Outsource Marketing started as a way to help companies get the best, most efficient marketing. Even as we strive to keep pace with evolving trends, that remains our most fundamental mission.
There is a stark contrast between “organic SEO” and “artificial SEO.” Of course, any decent search engine optimization company will make certain that a site is listed in all the popular directories, such as the Yahoo Directory, the Open Directory Project, and Business.com. A good search engine optimization company will also continually seek any industry specific directories where your site should be listed. But truly using “organic SEO” means evolving your site into something that holds actual value to your prospects. In my opinion, this is much more beneficial in the long run than the artificial methodology of trying to garner incoming links that the site does not truly deserve.
Search engines conduct very expensive and frequent studies on what their users want to see when they enter search queries. Obviously, no company has a more vested interest in serving up the type of results that their users want than the engines themselves. “Organic SEO” firms will take the “piggyback” approach. A search engine optimization company that uses “organic SEO” will try to learn what the results of these studies were by examining the sites that figure prominently in search engine results over long periods of time. In this way, the search engine optimization company is using “organic SEO” to make the website not only better for search engines, but also for the user- presumably, the engine’s internal research has shown that these sites have what their users have consistently desired, study after study. “Artificial SEO” practitioners have no real interest in these studies- they are instead expending a great deal of energy finding the next technical loophole to exploit after their most recent one has failed.
A good website does have the characteristics of an organism and does develop in the manner of a living plant or animal. It builds upon itself. It learns how it should behave for its own benefit. Most importantly, it establishes its territory at the top of the search engine results. And as the organism thrives, artificial machine after machine fades into obsolescence.
Much of the time when we take on a new client, one of our recommendations is that they íncrease the amount of unique, keyword-targeted, text content on their site. We generally recommend having at least 250 words of content per page, a number that continues to grow as the years go by. Ten years ago our minimum was 75 words. However, as competition on the Web becomes greater, the barrier to entry gets higher as well. Search engines are seeking even more expert content as a way to determine the most relevant sites for a particular keyword
Conversely, there is no maximum number of words you can put on any one page so long as you are adding quality content. You’ll notice that some BruceClay.com pages are over 5000 words. However, before you go after a strategy of building lengthy pages, remember that you want to build depth of content in your site. It’s not about saying everything you have to say on one page. While it is possible to rank for a one page site, it is very difficult. It is much easier to establish a site wide theme, supported by depth of content and good internal linking.
Pages should be structured to address customer questíons or product information as they become relevant. This can seem to be a daunting task for many people, but it’s actually quite manageable as long as you start your copywriting project off in the right direction.
Search engines want to be treated like any other visitor to your site, but while they are coming closer to the ability to mimic human judgment, they’re not there yet. Search engines can still have trouble trying to accurately define what a page is about if the content is written in anything but a clear and well-defined style.
To understand what you should be writing, you first need to understand a little bit about the history of the search engines. The first search engines were set up for the people who were using the Internet at the time. Because the population of the early Web was largely researchers, scientists and educators, the focus of search engines was to bring back pages that fit the thesis model. This model persists today in the way Web pages are written: a title, description and some keywords that help define what the focus of the paper or page is.
In order to write effective pages to support your search engine optimization goals there are a few guidelines you should keep in mind. Assuming that you have generated a solid keyword líst (See Lisa Barone’s article, Five Steps to Effective SEO Keyword Research, and have assigned the words to pages, your next step should be to brainstorm the best way to represent the keywords in an informative way.
Brainstorming works best if you throw out all your filters. Don’t critique any of your ideas, just write them down. The idea is to get out everything–great ideas and garbage alike. At this stage, no idea is too stupid. You can narrow it down later.
If you are writing content for your own Web site, your first response might be to feel frustrated. What on earth are you going to write about? Everyone knows everything that you could possibly tell them and you’re not a writer anyway. But that’s just the thing, they don’t and you are.
Let’s pretend that your business is selling cowboy boots. Brainstorm everything you can think of that relates to cowboy boots, even if it’s only somewhat related. Once you have all your ideas down, pick a few of the best. For example, you’ll want to focus a section of your site on the keyword “buy cowboy boots”. Everyone, you think, knows about how to buy boots. It’s just a matter of finding the right fit and style. You don’t need to explain it to your site’s visitors. But it’s one of your keywords so you sit down and simply write all the obvious information.
You are an expert in your area. Of course you know how to chëck the fit of your boots and which styles will work best for which people. It’s obvious to you that your jeans should be tucked inside your boots if you’re working outside and that you should take certain steps to care for your boots. But for most people, that’s not the case. That’s why they’re coming to your site in the first place. Your expertise is a valuable resource for the development of content. Explaining something that is obvious to you is probably the best way to introduce new customers to your products.
When I write my first draft, I like to keep the keywords that I want to incorporate on the page in mind. I’ll tape them to my monitor or put them at the very top of the document. However, I don’t worry about densities or forcing them in. If it doesn’t sound natural to use the keyword, I don’t use it. The first draft is just to get the information out. Use your keywords as a guide for the content.
Once you have a first draft, take a look at the tone of your piece. Are you writing to the right audience? Is your content engaging and informative? Does your content solve a problem or help the customer make a decision? If you’re in a highly technical area where your customer isn’t likely to know enough to ask intelligent questíons, have you educated them enough to feel comfortable?
Revise your draft with these ideas in mind. Knowing your audience means putting in the kinds of words that they will be looking for, the same kinds of words that will help them understand what the best choice of products will be for them.
After your next draft, the best thing to do is ask someone else to read it over for you. The best person for this task is someone who fits the profile of a site visitor. Have them read it to see if it answers their questíons in an easy to understand way. If not, revise the content to meet their understanding.
Once you have a final draft, incorporate your final product into the destination page and use the SEOToolSet’s KDA or any other page rating tool to determine the strength of the document. Tweak it if necessary. Keep in mind what your linking strategies will be and how the content will support the Web site theme as a whole.
The final thing to remember about writing for search engines is that there is no magical formula for writing the perfect copy. It takes work and attention to detail to meet the needs of both the search engines and your human visitors. The best thing to do is start writing and go from there.
In Part 1 of this article , some of the better, freeware keyword, sitemap and ranking tools available to webmasters were listed. Part 2 covers meta tag generators, link popularity apps, link checkers and general SEO tools. Again, all of these tools can be found in the SiteProNews Webmaster Tools Directory along with new additions as we find them.
Let’s start with a look at meta tag generators. Since meta tags lost their SEO relevance several years ago, most of the freeware programs in this category are either no longer supported or haven’t been updated for several years. But, then again, not much has really changed in meta tag usage so the apps listed below should still be useful.
Meta Tag Generators
1. BHead 4.1.1 (1.0 MB) is an advanced meta tag generator that can create your entire HEAD section, including CSS style sheets. Generates the code for all popular meta tags and also has an option for custom tags. Keywords and description can be imported from files. Comes with a basic Style Sheet editor that includes a color picker. Other features include spell chëck, search replace, syntax highlighting, etc. For Windows 9x/NT/ME/2K/.
2. Metty Meta Tag Maker 1.31 (2.5 MB) is a meta tag creator with support for 33 meta tags that ensure search engines properly index your website. Easy to use and requires no knowledge of meta tags. For Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.
3. Search Engine Buddy 1.0 (2.7 MB) analyzes web page meta tags and web page content on or offline to help you create the best possible meta tag combinations and web page content based on the requirements and algorithms of the major search engines. For Windows 9x/2000/NT.
4. MetaWizard 1.2a (617 KB) is a simple, bare bones meta tag generator that guides you through the process of creating basic tags for your web site pages.
Link Checkers
Where oh where did all the good freeware link checkers go? Well, apparently they went offline with the cos. or individuals that developed them or they went the shareware route. Of the three listed below, CheckWeb is probably the best.
1. CheckWeb 1.23 (74 KB) is a small, powerful links analyzer that can scan online/ offline HTML pages and generate a report on link, error and page size information. For Windows 95 and above.
2. Mihov Link Checker 0.5 (250 KB) can chëck multiple links on a web site or a local web page. It reports the state of each link as valid, missing, forbidden or otherwise not accessible. Links can be stored in a text file or extracted automatically from a local or internet page. For Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.
3. SiteLinkChecker 1.0 (480 KB) is an easy-to-use link checker tool that checks websites for broken links. Easily locates broken links and links containing syntactic errors and reports the status of each link. For Windows 2000/XP/2003.
Link Popularity Tools
Another category of programs that has suffered attrition in the last few years. At least half a dozen are no longer available, no longer supported or no longer freeware. The first two are the best of the three listed.
1. Indexa 2.0 (115 KB) is a java website popularity program that reports Google Pagerank, the number of backlinks recorded on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and AlltheWeb and the number of pages indexed. Limitations: Analyses 4 urls and 2 search engines. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000/2003/Unix/Linux/MacOS X.
2. Link Popularity Chëck 3.0.3 (941 KB) checks how many sites link to yours and your competitors in 5 major search engines. For Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95.
3. BackLinks Master 1.5 (1.3 MB) helps you find who is linking to you, whether links are direct and what keywords are in the anchor text. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000.
General SEO Tools
Last, but not least, are tools that don’t fall into any specific category, but that are multi-featured and definitely worth a look.
1. SEO Surf 0.7 (2.6 MB) is a powerful program for SEO enthusiasts. It offers numerous features, including keyword analysis, SEO page analysis, backlink management and search engine analysis. For Windows 98 to XP and I.E. 6.0+.
2. Keyword Crawler 1.1 (424 KB) is a keyword tool that can analyze your website and provide web page reports for the top keywords used, word density, Google pagerank, internal and external backlinks and broken links. In addition, the program can also generate a sitemap file in XML format. For Windows 98/ME/NT4/2Kx/XP.
3. SEO SpyGlass v.2.0.4 (7.8 MB) is a research tool designed to show how your competitors got top search engine rankings. It reveals backlink numbers, the URL, PageRank, Alexa Rank, and IP address of each backlink, website age, link value, backlink origin, keyword density, etc. Detailed reports can be generated but not saved in the freeware version. Requires JRE and email registration. For Windows 98+ and Unix/Linux/MacOS X.
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