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Posts Tagged ‘keyword’

Do you remember the line full of acronyms used by Robin Williams in the movie, “Good Morning Vietnam”? Every time I see all of the acronyms in the internet marketing world, it reminds me of that line from the movie.

“Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P. shouldn’t we keep the P.C. on the Q.T. ’cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could become a M.I.A. and then we’d all be put out on K.P.”

However, while I could tell stories and make jokes about the growing number of acronyms in the internet marketing world, I’m not here to discuss internet marketing acronyms. What I do want to talk about is a simple strategy that can save you a world of time and money because you will no longer be chasing after an empty piggy bank.

The Strategy

After conducting keyword research and determining the keywords to target for your SEO efforts, run them through a short PPC campaign. Why take your SEO keywords through a PPC campaign before you do any link building or on page optimization? The reason is simple. SEO takes time and effort. You cannot afford to waste time on keywords that will not deliver results. You need to be confident that the keyword phrases you target will bring the results you desire (in terms of leads, profit, etc.) once you make it to the top of the search engines.

The first step after finding the keywords you would like targeted is to build a landing page as quickly as possible. Make sure that you build the page with conversion in mind rather than SEO. However, while building the page for conversion, do not completely ignore SEO. Be sure to have keywords in the page name, title and content, but do not spend extra time optimizing the page. After the page is finished, I recommend starting a PPC campaign targeting the keywords. This can provide valuable information quickly. After running the campaign for a short time (I would recommend at least 500-1000 unique visitors), you will know if the keyword will convert at an acceptable rate. The question you should be asking is “Can you make money on that keyword phrase?”

By using PPC to test your keywords, you will discover whether the keywords are profitable. Think of it this way. If you spend all the time necessary in SEO to rank well for a keyword, get a ton of traffic but no business, then I say “so what?” That is good for bragging rights at the family party where no one else understands internet marketing, but bragging rights do not help pay the mortgage. I would much rather rank #1 for a keyword phrase that brings 20 unique visitors a day and converts at least 1 person into a sale. Wouldn’t you?

I heard something on the radio a few weeks ago that stuck with me and made me think about the basics of SEO. The line went something like this, “You have to have the fundamentals down before trying any of the fancy stuff. ” So before you go out and try to do things like PR sculpting or any of the other advanced techniques you hear about, get the basics down.

SEO can really be broken down into three essential areas: Architecture, Content, and Links. These are the basics of SEO that you need to understand and get right first. Let’s take a look at some key points to understand in each of these main areas.

Architecture – Can Your Site Be Crawled?

One of the first problems that a website has to address is whether or not their site can actually be crawled by the search engine spiders. You can have the best content in the world, but if the search engine spiders can’t get to it you won’t reap the benefits! Here are some things you can do to help your site be more crawl-able:

1. Avoid things like JavaScript or Flash navigation. Both of these kinds of navigation are not crawled very well by search engines at this time. This could change in the future, but for now it’s best to just avoid JavaScript and Flash navigations.
2. Keep your site’s architecture as flat as possible. Don’t have tons of levels in your architecture. Keep pages as close to the root as possible. In other words, mysite.com/folder/product is much better than mysite.com/category/subcategory/other-folder/product.
3. Stay away from parameter strings in URLs. By having parameter strings in URLs you could have multiple versions of the same content and will have to learn how to properly use the canonical element. You can avoid this by not using parameters. Instead, have a static URL for each page whenever possible. For example, mysite.com/productname.html is much better than mysite.com/?prod-id=abc123&cat-id=def456.
4. Use internal linking appropriately. Whenever it makes sense, link to other pages in your site from within the content of the page. Don’t just rely on your navigation to get people (and search engine spiders) to where you want them to go. (More about internal linking.)
5. Sitemaps are your friends. Make sure your site has both an HTML and XML sitemap. (More about sitemaps).

Content – Is It Optimized?

Once you have your website’s architecture set up the right way, the next step is to make sure that your content is well-optimized to help your site rank for your main keyword phrases. Here are a few basic guidelines to follow:

1. Don’t target too many phrases per page. You may have a list of 50 keywords you want to target, but you should only focus on 2-3 main phrases per page. Create other pages around additional phrases as needed.
2. No spammy stuff! Don’t do any keyword stuffing, alt stuffing, meta spamming, or any other spammy techniques. They don’t really work well anymore anyway.
3. Use your keyword phrases in titles, header tags, etc. By using your keyword phrases in your titles and header tags you can give them more emphasis.
4. Use your keywords in your content. Don’t just rely on your titles and header tags. Don’t overdo it; make the text read naturally but make sure you include your keywords and variations of them in the content.

Links – Getting Juice from Other Sites

Setting your site up the right way is one step, but getting traffic to your website takes a lot more than just using keywords on your pages. The other big key to getting a good rank on the search engines is to get other sites linking to you. By getting these links you are showing that your site has credibility and is worth ranking well. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind when you’re building links:

1. Use a variety of techniques. There are a lot of things you can do to build links: directories, articles, social bookmarking, forums … the list goes on and on. Mix up what you’re doing and get a variety of link types coming into your site. (More about link building)
2. Spread your links over a lot of domains. It’s important to get a lot of links, but it’s also important to get a lot of links spread over many domains. If you follow tip #1 this shouldn’t be much of a problem for you.
3. Use keywords in your anchor text. One problem that I’ve seen over and over is that someone will build links to their site using either their name, their business name, or their URL. This is nice if that’s what you want to rank for, but if you want to rank for a keyword phrase you have to use that phrase as the anchor text of your link.
4. Use a variety of anchors. Don’t just use the same keyword phrase over and over again. Mix it up so that you aren’t spamming one phrase too much. This will help your link building look more natural.
5. The work is never done. Don’t think you can just submit to a bunch of directories and your work is over. SEO is an ongoing process.

While these tips don’t cover everything you need to know about the three main areas of search engine optimization, this is enough to get you started. Spend some time looking over your site to make sure that you are doing these basics. Then, if you want, you can try to get a little fancy.

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Conducting keyword research can be a bit of a challenge if you aren’t using the right tools. When you conduct a search for “keyword research tools,” you’ll come across so many choices it can be hard to choose just one. So what are some strong keyword research tools available today? I’ve come across a few that seem to be effective.

Aaah, Google AdWords. This is probably one of the more popular tools out there, and all of you SEO experts are familiar with how it works, or at least should be. So what other tools are useful for keyword research?

Let’s take a look at a few.

Google’s SK tool works really well for generating niche keyword ideas. When you get to the SK tool page, click on the link, “Or see top keywords across all categories.”

Now it will display a list of categories for this search. From there, you can search through a various categories such as health, food, computers, travel & tourism, and more.

Let’s click on Sports & Fitness. Now, if I click on the Boating & Water Recreation, it will pull up a list of ideas and corresponding monthly search volume.

From here, you can find some great ideas for niche marketing. This tool can be useful for finding long-tail keyword ideas as well. To do this, simply do a search for a keyword (such as ski boats) and it will generate a list of long-tail keyword suggestions.

Additional Free tools for keyword research include:

• Wordtracker – Can help you compile associated keywords.  A more robust, paid version is also available.
• Keyword Discovery – Free version of the keyword research tool from Trellian.
• Spacky.com- Generates a monthly search volume for a given keyword.
• Seo Book Keyword Research- As stated on their site, “The Coolest Keyword Research Tool Today!”
• Keyword Spy- A site that allows you to spy on your competition and find their keywords.

Paid Subscription Tools

If you’re looking for added features, some good tools to check out:

• Spyfu.com- This is a great way to spy on the competition. They provide a Keyword Smart Search generates keyword ideas based on what the competition is doing. You can use some of their basic tools by creating an account, but in order to get the most out of it, you have to subscribe for a membership. 
• KeyCompete.com- KeyCompete is a keyword research tool that recognizes the keywords your competitors use in their pay-per-click campaigns and also reveals the competition that is bidding on your keywords.
• Wordze.com- Facilitates finding niche markets and locates market growth.
• Adgooroo.com- Helps you to get more traffic by finding traffic opportunities, PPC monitoring, and more.
• Nichebot.com- According to their ad, it’s “keyword research on steroids.”

The best tool that I am utilizing is Market Samurai. This tool is amazing! Really. I’ve been using it for the past month or so, and it makes keyword research so simple. In addition to keyword research, it provides tools like a rank tracker, finding content, and analyzing the competition. If you don’t want to pay for it right away you can download a free trial version for 12 days.

Have you found other tools useful when conducting keyword research? If so, I would love to hear about them.

Before anyone asks the question, the answer is: “Yes, I finally got out to the theater to see Revenge of the Fallen.” About 10 years ago life was much simpler. I could just pick a night, meet some of my friends and head out to the theater to see a movie. Now I am married and have a couple of kids. Getting out to the theater has become a rare event, but I did manage to make time over the weekend to see it with my brother in-law.

Thanks to a couple of comments from Princess Zelda and Dan Schulz on my previous post about Transformers of SEO, I have had some inspiration to write a sequel. My previous post compared a few optimization strategies to the Autobots. This post will contrast some of the current blackhat SEO strategies to the Decepticons. I think this comparison is appropriate because, in the end, blackhat SEO only “deceives” the person using it by making them think that it will bring top rankings and instant wealth.

Cloaking (Megatron):

Megatron is the leader of the Decepticons and one of the most powerful Transformers. Just like Megatron, cloaking can be a powerful blackhat SEO tactic that could result in high search engine rankings. The negative aspect of this tactic is that once a site has been caught cloaking it is removed from the search index and all the top rankings are instantly taken away. Cloaking is done by making a website appear to be something completely different for site visitors than it does for search engine spiders. There are many ways a web developer can go accomplish it, but whatever method is used, the end result is always the same.

Doorway Pages (Devastator):

Several Decepticons combined together to transform into one large robot called Devastator. When combined together they were a powerful and formidable opponent. Doorway pages can be compared to these Decepticons. One doorway page on its own can be an effective tool for driving traffic to a website, but multiple doorway pages can have a “devastating” effect. Doorway pages are single web pages that are set up and optimized for a couple of search terms with the singular goal of sending people from that page to a main website. Creating several doorway pages targeting multiple search terms can eventually help a webmaster rank well for all their targeted search terms. Doorway pages are just another way of tricking or deceiving the search engines. The goal of search engines is to provide the searcher with the most relevant websites to their search query. They want those websites to be what is displayed in the search results and not a page that directs a visitor to another site. Once doorway pages are discovered, they will be removed from the search index and all the work of creating them will be for nothing.

Keyword Stuffing (Starscream):

Starscream is the sidekick to Megatron but always seems to be more like a thorn in Megatron’s side. He was useful when he assisted the Decepticons in battle but was usually more of a hindrance then a help to Megatron because he was constantly plotting to overthrow him and take over as leader. I think keyword stuffing is much like Starscream. Many webmasters stuff webpage elements like titles tags, alt attributes and headers, full of keywords to either target many different search terms or inflate keyword density. While this strategy may have worked in the past, today it only results in reducing the weight of the elements that have been stuffed. So instead of possibly ranking well for a few targeted search terms, the site will struggle to rank for any search terms at all. Keyword stuffing is a strategy of the past that is dead and gone. Anyone practicing it today can expect their SEO campaign to also be dead and gone.

Don’t be fooled by any of these blackhat strategies, they deceive webmasters into believing they can bring quick rankings and wealth, but in the end it is the ethical SEO techniques that will bring the lasting results.

Sure, your website has traffic, but is it the right traffic? Are the people frequenting your website finding the information they want? Many times, website owners are so concerned with the number of visitors, they lose track of what those visitors are doing, or even if they are the right type of visitors. So ask yourself, “Do I have the right traffic coming to my website?”

To address this question, look at your major keywords. Take a minute and determine whether the information on your website is relevant to your keywords if searched for on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. There are a number of times where I have seen the content of the website irrelevant to the keyword the site owner is targeting.

Second, take a look at your analytics and see what traffic the search engines are sending your way, and what keywords people are using to find your site. In Google Analytics, click on the “Traffic Sources” tab, and then click the “Search Engines” option in the submenu. From here it will give you a list of the different search engines that have sent traffic (both paid and unpaid) to your website. Click on a particular Search Engine, such as Google, and you will see a list of terms that were searched when they found your site.

Your results will look similar to this.

This report shows search patterns and keyword terms. It also provides a better understanding of how people are finding your site, and what keywords are being used. This list shows what Google finds to be relevant to your website as well, allowing insight to how Google views your site.

When reviewing the report, take a close look at the bounce rate of keywords used. This indicates whether visitors are finding their desired information on your website. Consider the example above, the keyword “hsplit download” (third from the top), has an extremely high bounce rate of 96.36%, indicating that the 110 visitors more than likely did not find the information they expected from the website. Compare that to the first term on the list “802.11bg wlan driver,” which has a bounce rate of 31.86%. From this report it is easy to determine that the content/page referring to “hsplit download” needs to be refined, and reworked.

Studying analytics will deliver an understanding of past trends, and help you make decisions on how to revise  content  to provide better results. But if you are starting new, or want a better idea of how to prepare for future traffic, there are other ways to plan for the right traffic. Last month David Scoville wrote an excellent article on getting toknow your target market, and learning from a basic focus group. He offers a simple way to find out how to understand the way your “right traffic” thinks.

When I first dove into SEO and SEM, I was taught a valuable principle when planning for keywords and targeted traffic: People who are doing research on a topic use broad keywords to gather information. Once that information is gathered, people search vary specific and generally use “longer tail” phrases to find and purchase a product.

An example of this principle would be when someone is interested in getting a website hosted; they may look up a general keyword such as “website hosting.” However, when the person makes the shift from researching the product to buying the product, they are more likely to be more specific in their search and my look for “VPS PHP web server.”

What does this mean to you? Well the conversions from a visitor to a buyer are more likely to happen with longer tail keyword searches, meaning you will have more of the “right traffic” coming to your website. Now it is apparent that there is less traffic overall associated with the more specific and sometimes longer tail keywords, but the traffic that is coming to your site is more qualified and has a better potential of converting, and that is far more important than just trying to build high traffic numbers.

Take time to evaluate your current traffic, and see what trends in your analytics can help you improve your visitor’s time on the website. The goal of proper SEO is to not pretend to be the most relevant to the search, but to actually BE THE MOST RELEVANT. Sure you have traffic to the website, and when all is said and done all traffic is good traffic, but only the right traffic will keep the website up and the bills paid.

Your site ranks for your desired keyword phrases in Yahoo and Bing, but is nowhere to be found in Google. Why doesn’t Google like your site? Or maybe your site was ranking well in Google, but has suddenly plummeted.

Whether you are an SEO superstar, or just trying to get your site more exposure, it is important to realize that rankings are not static and will fluctuate. It’s a common mistake to get comfortable once you rank for your various keyword phrases. Once you achieve your ranking goals, remember you won’t stay there forever without hard work, and even then, you will experience ranking fluctuations.

First, don’t worry that your page was penalized unless you have done something deceptive. If you aren’t doing anything “fishy” with the search engines, you won’t have to worry about being penalized.  Most likely, if your page rank suddenly drops, it’s due to a major algorithm shift. Search engines are relentlessly fine-tuning algorithms, and new sites are continuously created. As a result, ranking fluctuations are normal.

Since this is the case, it is absolutely critical to optimize your website for many different related phrases. This will help when some phrases suddenly drop, as there will be others that perform well.  Never get stuck on one or two phrases. It’s awesome to rank well for some of the more coveted phrases. However, if they are that significant to you, you may want to also consider running PPC campaigns targeting your favorite keywords.

I recommend changing your focus from rankings to targeted traffic and conversion rates. Focus on making your site efficient at converting traffic into sales. With a high conversion rate and a well managed back-up PPC campaign, you won’t even notice a blip in your traffic or sales.

In August of last year, Google opened up about some refining of their search algorithms, and mentioned a few technologies they implemented to improve search results. These technologies included Spelling Suggestions, Synonyms, Conceptual Context, and Universal Search. You may or may not have seen these changes with your search results, but all have become a big part of searching with Google, and are beneficial in increasing the user’s Google experience. One in particular stands out from the rest, as a useful SEO possibility: Synonyms.

What are Synonyms
Google has included Keyword Stems in searches for a long time. A good example of stemming is where you use the keyword “running” and Google will provide results with run, runs, or running in their results. Synonyms, on the other hand, are completely different words that have no part of the original word within the search. Here’s a good example: a person might “run” a company or “manage” a company, essentially, “run” and “manage” mean the same thing in this context, even though they are completely different words.

Consider this excerpt from the Google blog post on synonyms.

This is one of the hardest problems we are solving at Google. Though sometimes obvious to humans, it is an unsolved problem in automatic language processing. As a user, I don’t want to think too much about what words I should use in my queries. Often I don’t even know what the right words are. This is where our synonyms system comes into action. Our synonyms system can do sophisticated query modifications, e.g., it knows that the word ‘Dr’ in the query [Dr Zhivago] stands for Doctor whereas in [Rodeo Dr] it means Drive. A user looking for [back bumper repair] gets results about rear bumper repair. For [Ramstein ab], we automatically look for Ramstein Air Base; for the query query [b&b ab] we search for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta, Canada. We have developed this level of query understanding for almost one hundred different languages, which is what I am truly proud of.

How to Find Synonyms
The concept of Google providing results from synonyms is exciting for the SEO-minded individual, and I’ll explain why. But first, let me show how to find synonyms for your keywords. One way is to use a synonym tool, however the most effective way is to use Google directly. When you do a Google search place the “ ~ ” (approximate symbol) in front of your search query and Google will highlight all the keyword synonyms. Example: ~management advice

Below is a screenshot of the following search: ~advice –advice (I am negating the main keyword to highlight only the synonyms known by Google.)

From these results, we see there are several alternative words to work with, other than the word “advice.” “Help”, “Tips”, “Planning”, and “Guide” are all synonyms in Google’s eyes for the word “advice.” However, it is important to note that the search results are not the same if you were to just search for “advice.” Also, if you optimize your site for the keyword “tips” you won’t necessarily show up in the search results for “advice.” So how can this help you? Let me offer a few suggestions on how you can use synonyms to improve your SEO opportunities.

SEO Implications
SEO in its simplest form is broken down into two major parts: relevance and importance. Relevance basically means that your site/article/blog is relevant to the search query of the use. Importance is based on the idea that if more people are linking to your site, it must mean it is more important than a site that doesn’t have links.

In a post written a couple of month ago by my fellow SEOer Joe Bergevin, he talks about proper use of keyword density, or in other words, how many times one should put their keyword in the text of the page. The current rule of thumb is that your keyword density should be anywhere from 3-7%. However, if you know the synonyms of your keywords, you can now implement them within your text and increase the relevance of the website without over stuffing the page with one keyword phrase.

My brain is thinking of other potentially good and effective uses for synonyms in SEO, such as linking strategies; but first I want to hear if any of you have had success in using Google Synonyms in your SEO strategies. If so, please share. I would be interested in knowing what others are doing.

In my last post, How to Create a Huge Keyword List, I suggested to spy on your competition for keyword ideas. Well, today I want to delve a little further into that topic, and give you some techniques and tools for doing just that.

Learning from your competition is one of the best ways to get keyword suggestions. One of the great things about marketing online, is your competition is right in front of you, and can’t hide everything they’re doing. Here are a few ways to get keyword ideas from your competition:

1- Inspect Meta Tags
This technique doesn’t always work because enough sites have learned that meta keywords are not as important as they used to be. If your competition is still using meta keywords, it is a very easy way to get an idea of what keywords they’re targeting.

You can use SEOBook.com’s SEO XRay (part of SEO for Firefox) and easily see this information. Just do a right click and choose “SEO For Firefox”, then SEO XRay. Or you can always just look at the source code and find it there.

2- BacklinkWatch.com
I find this tool is hit and miss, but sometimes you can get some really good information from it. Just go to BacklinkWatch.com and type in the URL you want to check. It can take a while to load everything, but this tool will provide a list of pages that are linking to the site and the anchor text of some of the links. The anchor text is what you should be looking at for ideas.

3- Google AdWords Keyword Tool
You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to get suggestions for keywords based on the URL. Just choose the option “Website content,” type in your competitors URL, and see what suggestions it gives you. This can be a great way to brainstorm other keyword ideas as well.

4- Yahoo! Site Explorer and SEO Link Analysis
This is one of my favorite techniques to see what keywords your competition is using in their anchor links from other sites. First, you’ll need to download and install the Firefox plugin SEO Link Analysis by Joost de Valk. Then, go to Yahoo! and type “site:www.whateversite.com” into the search bar. This will take you to the Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Once the site explorer comes up, click on the button that says “Inlinks.” Once the next page loads, change the first dropdown menu to say “Except from this domain.” Here’s a shot of what the results look like with the SEO Link Analysis plugin working:

This plugin shows you what the PR and anchor of the links are. As you go through the list of links, you’ll be able to see what keyword phrases they are using as anchors from other sites. Chances are you’ll find a lot of your competition’s main keyword phrases this way.

5- Other Tools
There are a bunch of websites that offer to provide your competitors AdWords lists and other information. I don’t really believe them; but I figure you can use some of them for ideas. So, before you go spending a lot of money on a software program that claims to steal your competitor’s keyword list, understand that it’s a marketing ploy. Get some ideas from their free tools, if they have any, then leave them alone and don’t waste your money.

Here are some more credible sites that provide useful information:

• SpyFu.com
• Compete.com
• QuantCast.com

Of course, there are other ways of spying on your competition that I haven’t covered in this post. If you have tools or techniques that you have found helpful, please share them in the comments below!