SEO Source

Effective Keyword Research

2006-08-17T07:39:00.000-07:00

How to Effectively Research Keywords

The most important factor in creating a successful SEO campaign is finding killer keywords, and thus keyword research is the most important part of your campaign. Not properly researching keywords to center your SEO campaign around is one of the leading reasons why campaigns fail. Your keyword research should help you find keywords that are not:
1. Too broad. Choosing too broad of a keyword can be a bad thing unless you a major company for that keyword, because the competition is fierce. You don’t want to try to compete a company much larger than yourself because they probably have a larger SEO budget and many more resources. Also, having too broad of a search term might give you traffic, but it might not be relevant traffic. If your company or product is only available in one state or country, how much of the traffic from this keyword will actually be in your area? You might increase the traffic to your site by using real estate, but will the large amount of time for a good rank for a competitive, broad keyword give you an equally significant increase in sales? It is possible to spend a large amount of time on a broad keyword and increase traffic but only increase sales by a small margin, which in turn does not give a good return on investment(ROI).

For Example:
Let’s say you are in the Real Estate business and are considering using “Real Estate” as a keyword for your SEO campaign. When doing your research you might find that people search for real estate more than any other related keyword phrase. This sounds like a good idea to use as a keyword until you find out that there are 5 million real estate companies competing for the same keyword, and they include commonly known agencies like Century 21 and ReMax. The next question: is your company on the same level as Century 21 and ReMax? If it isn’t you might want to research keywords that are a little more specific.

2. Too specific. Choosing a keyword that is too specific is also a bad thing. If your target keyword is too specific then no one will search for it unless they know your company or know your product well.

For Example:
Once again you are in the Real Estate business. You are now considering a keyword phrase like “premier waterfront property in South Haven.” This might very well describe what you are selling, but how many people are searching for this term? If there aren’t many, then you’ll want to try cleaning up the phrase and make it a little less specific.
So now you know what to and what not to use for keywords after you do your research, but how do you do the research? The first thing you are going to want to do is brainstorm. Get a small team of people to work on separate keyword lists. Make sure to keep a pad of paper handy to write down more keyword ideas. Make this list as big as you possibly can, and try to think like a consumer. What would you search for if you were looking for the type of product you sell? Use both specific and broad search terms in this list, because this is what you will research and you want to research every idea you have. Also, remember that the average search query is about three words long. Most of your keywords phrases should be 2-5 words.
Once you have several large lists of keywords you are thinking about targeting, you’ll want to use one of the following tools to find out how often they are searched for.

WordTracker – Probably one of the best keyword research tools.
Overtures Keyword Selector Tool – Free from Overture. Good for getting an estimate for the number of searches are being performed and related keyword searches.

These are not 100% accurate, but they will give you an idea of what terms are searched for more often, and which are searched for less often. Once you find a highly searched for keyword then you will want to find out how competitive the phrase is. WordTracker does this automatically for you and even gives you a KEI index number. The KEI index number is something developed by Sumantra Roy to determine how effective a keyword is. A higher KEI means a more effective keyword. This number is a comparison of how often a phrase is searched for and how many sites are competing for the word.
If you choose to not use WordTracker, you will have to do it the old fashioned way and type your keyword phrase into the search engine and find out how many results there are. My recommendation would be to put your keyword phrase in quotes, so instead of typing in real estate you would type in “real estate.”
It is true that not many searchers use quotes, but the search with quotes will tell us how many real competitors there really are because the results will only return results with the exact phrase on their site. Without quotes shows partial matches, which means a site in the results might not even have that phrase.
It’s a good idea to keep track of keywords that are searched for often, and how many competitors there are. That way when you are done looking at how often keywords are searched for and how many competitors there are you can look at the data and have a good idea of what keywords are too competitive.

Hopefully this gets your feet wet, but there is so much more to Keyword Research. Stay tuned for a second article.

Creating Optimized Content

2006-08-10T07:48:00.000-07:00

An Introduction on How to Write Optimized and User Friendly Content

One of the most important factors in obtaining high rankings in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is your content and how it implements the keywords your SE campaign is targeting. These are the top elements in having a well written landing page are, in no specific order:

Keyword Density
Readability
Keyword Prominence
Length

The first two are equally important. Keyword Prominence and length is less important.

If you have not researched your keywords, stop here and do so. Keyword research needs a great deal of attention. I will be writing again to talk about this subject specifically.

KeyWord Density is the most important when it comes to a raw search engine crawl. Calculating Keyword density works something like this:

Find the total number of iterations of your keyword phrase in your document. Only include the text between the tags, this includes the headings. Let’s say your keyword phrase is, “Real Estate Michigan.” The whole term counts as one, which means the iteration of each individual word is worth ~.3. For example, “Take a look at our Lake Michigan Property,” has ~.3 keywords when searching for the phrase, “Real Estate Michigan.” Also be sure to only count the number of keywords for your specific phrase. You can only calculate Keyword density for one phrase at a time.
Take the number of keywords in your content and divide by the total number of words on your page. So you should do some type of calculation like this:
Ex. 5.3 keywords / 285 words = 5% Keyword Density.

So what is the optimal keyword density? That seems to vary widely. These are the recommendations for Google and the websites I find them at:
Keyword Density: SEO Considerations by Wayne Hubert – 2%
Mike's Marketing Tools – 2%-8%
Pefect Keyword Density by Ahmed El-Naggar – 10%
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/16292.htm - 1%-7%
Google Ranking Factors – 5%-20%

After looking through the organic results, most of the #1 sites on Google hover between 2-3%, and this is what I recommend sticking to.

Readability is just as important for two reasons: you want to make content your user can read easily, and you really don’t want the search engines to pick up the site as spam. So let’s say a site is optimized for “Lakefront Property”:

Lakefront property Lakefront Property Lakefront Property by Super Duper Land Company, etc.

No one wants to read that garbage, and search engines don’t like to crawl it either. They take one look at it and throw it into the spam-keyword-spewing bin which is very far from top SERPs.

So on top of keyword density, particular attention must be put into how far apart keywords are. I wouldn’t put the same keyword in the same sentence, because it would probably sound like spam.

Keyword Prominence is how important the keyword looks on the page. The closer to the top of the page the keyword is the more important the crawler will think it is to your site. So, for example:

Our Michigan Lakefront Property is the most beautiful land…

Will be seen as more prominent, and thus more important than something like

Blah blah blah so come see our Michigan Lakefront Property.

These examples are only a sentence long and are meant to illustrate the position of the keywords as a whole in the content. Try to put as many of your keywords in towards the top of your page as you can, and fewer of the target keywords in the bottom of your content. This way Google will see that you place a lot of importance on your keyword.

Keyword Prominence is also how close your target keywords in your keyword phrase are. If the words “Michigan,” “Lakefront,” and “Property” are right next to each other, they will be given more weight than if they are split up.

Michigan Lakefront Property

Will have more prominence than

Michigan has absolutely beautiful property on the lakefront

The first one will be given more preference than the second. However, using the same phrase over and over again makes for a boring read, so don’t use your entire keyword phrase too often. Split up your phrase and look for ways to put different words in the phrase into your content so that it doesn’t destroy the readability without sacrificing search engine ranking.

Length varies from many sites, and is really what ties up all of these other attributes. The average length for pages is 600, which means with a 2% keyword density you should have 12 iterations of your keyword phrase. This 12 iterations is of the “Michigan lakefront property” only. I would personally only use the entire phrase about 5 times or else you might sound like a spammer to a reader. You should have 12 iterations of every keyword in the phrase, unless there’s overlap between your keyword phrases like “michigan lakefront property” and “michigan waterfront property.” Therefore you would ideally want 12 each of Michigan, lakefront, waterfront, and property.

Another thing you don’t want to do is finish a beautiful write-up because and add 200 more just because it’s only 400 words long. Don’t write bad content, your visitors won’t want to read it. Aim for 600 and if you fall short or go over then try to come up with some more useful content. If you can only succeed in adding fluff, don’t bother.

Please post any comments or suggestions to add to this article. I appreciate it very much and look forward to any questions!