Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Help

www.theonlinemarketingguy.com by Duane Forrester

Keyword Research

Keyword Research Importance of Keyword Research OK, stop what you’re doing right now. Stop coding, stop playing with web pages, stop searching for images, stop writing content – just stop. Have you actually done some keyword research for your new website? I don’t mean, “Yeah, I’d search for xyz phrase if I was looking for this info.” I mean the real deal. You’ve sifted through hundreds of phrases related to EVERY page of your website? You know all the ACTUAL phrases users have searched on related to your content for say, the last year. You know whether they’ve been searching on the singular or plural versions of phrases. THAT is the kind of keyword research I mean here. The nuts and bolts of your topic and it’s actual popularity on the web. Now that you have a glimpse of the type of data available, lets get into it all in depth. Why Keyword Research is First Simply put, you cannot hit the target if you cannot see it. By doing the keyword research first, before you even build a single page, you’ll know exactly what content to bring to market form the start. Your ideas of what MIGHT be what users would like to see will be replaced by actual knowledge of what they have historically looked for. Since the goal is to build a site that gets good rankings and develops good traffic quickly, doing the keyword research is almost a short-cut to getting started. Your research will help you understand what volumes of searches are performed on the phrases related to your topic. There’s two key points in there: 1 – knowing what users are actually searching on 2 – know the volume of those searches Building a site takes time, getting it ranked well takes time and developing decent traffic takes time. By know exactly what phrases users are searching on you can build content to match this search exactly. By knowing how many searches a phrase generally sees, you can know whether it’s worth your time to actually build the content to go after ranking well for the phrase. Remember, each page should be between 200 – 300 words in length, so the time to make a page is very real. It’s also very important you get the research right. By using the right tools and knowing how to read the data, you’ll know how to find the hidden gems – phrases which are NOT over-populated with optimized pages right now, and yet still get a useful number of searches per day. This concept is known as “The Long Tail” of search – in effect, you’re looking for niche phrases, so very targeted that most folks don’t optimize for them. Collect enough of these phrases in your list of well-ranked pages and collectively, the incremental traffic they deliver can easily outpace more mainstream phrases. We’ll get into “The Long Tail” in more detail in a bit. First up you’ll need to decide how broad or focused you want to look. If you look at one-word phrases, such as “apple”, there will be a large volume of traffic on it – meaning lots of folks search on that phrase daily. This is excellent, provided you can rank well for that phrase. Take a look at who’s already on the first page of results for this phrase – are you likely to knock them out of the first place spots? Realistically – not immediately. So, your biggest weapon is to target phrases that are broader in nature, such as “red delicious apple”. People searching on this phrase actually want information on this exact item. Those searching for “apple” MAY be looking for information on “red delicious apples”, but you have no way of knowing this. Take a long look at the areas you’re going to cover and ask yourself if you can define them even better. If you can, you’re on your way to posting up a winning website. The more targeted each page is towards ONE phrase/keyword, the better it’s chances of successfully being ranked well. Sure, there may be only 4 searches per day on “red delicious apple seeds”, but if you rank well for the phrase, you’ll likely get traffic form those searches, and by providing exactly what the searcher wanted, the value of your website is increased in their eyes. Niche Phrases Now, those niche phrases we mentioned above, those are gold. The true “Long Tail” resides in the phrases you may never have thought up on your own. They are the phrases users cobble together in their own unique way. Phrases you may have no idea you rank well for, yet users find you anyway. When starting a new website, you’ll be without some important data which will only come with time. When starting out, simply target the phrases that your research has led you to – those represent the most popularly searched on phrases for a given topic. When, however, your site is listed in the engines, you can find yourself in the results and you are seeing inbound search traffic in your stats, it’s time to get cozy with a great little tool: www.hittail.com/ I’ve been using this tool since it began running in beta a short time ago. It is simply amazing, in my opinion. I’m sure many folks could replicate it and make it better, etc., etc. My point about it being amazing is simply that this type of tool provides you with real-time information which shows you EXACTLY which phrases users have used to get to you. It shows you which engines they came from, how deep your website was in the rankings there and makes suggestions for you as to which phrases you should move to the “To Do” file and begin creating content for. Users will amaze you with the creative phrases they will come up with when searching for things. Not phrases you’ll ever think of yourself, either – crazy, off-the-wall combos that would simply never occur to you when doing the keyword research up front. This data is very powerful because it allows you to create content pages for those niche phrases, phrases you’ll most likely rank very well for, and develop a whole new base of incremental traffic. There might only be 3 – 5 searches per day on these oddball phrases, but it adds up when you start creating phrases. Another nice benefit is that due to its real-time nature, this provides a snapshot of what users are searching on TODAY. Not what they looked at last month, or over the last year, but 5 minutes ago. This will allow you to spot trends as they emerge. Big Picture Research – Tools and how to use them Starting off, you’ll need some solid tools to do the work for you. Google doesn’t like to share data, so don’t look to them for any info. Yahoo is happy to share results, so long as all you’re after is searches performed on a phrase LAST MONTH. Not so good if you are in a seasonal industry, and not so good when a larger time frame provides a truer picture. If, however, that last 30 day snapshot is right up your alley, you can use the Yahoo Keyword Tool for free – http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ It will show you the results of your search for info with the following restrictions: 1 – its limited to only those searches performed through Yahoo 2 – its limited to showing only the past full month’s worth of data This means is you’ll have to do some basic math on your own. If you know the phrase was searched on 25,000 times in June, then you COULD assume that for the year, it’s searched on roughly 300,000 times. Fine so long as the phrase is NOT seasonal. Following this logic, we could say the phrase is searched on an average of 800 times daily. You’ll want to create a spreadsheet to keep track of the data and do the match for you, but in the end you’ll have a much clearer picture on what’s worth chasing. What’s that? You don’t mind spending a few bucks to get a better tool for keyword research? Excellent idea, because, as we all know, you get what you pay for. I’ll mention two tools that I use for keyword research. Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com/) allows you to perform much the same research as the free keyword tool from Yahoo, but adds the ability to create projects within which to catalogue research. This will allow you to easily track multiple phrase groups for different sections of your site, or track different keyword groups for multiple individual websites. Wordtracker also allows you to export the data – very useful. One downside, though, is that Wordtracker is still hamstrung by the fact it, like the Yahoo tool, can only look back 30 days. Better than nothing, but not as powerful as… Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool (www.keyworddiscovery.com/index.html). In fact, keyword Discovery is pretty much my first-line go-to research tool for new projects now. It costs some money, but is well worth checking out if you’re serious about running your website as a business. The KD system looks at roughly the past 12 months worth of search data from all the major engines. This scope alone affords Keyword Discovery a much better look at what’s popular, long-term, with searchers. KD includes lists to save data, the ability to export data, etc. The ability to access search query volume data through Trellian’s own database, or through individual Yahoo data centers makes it a powerful tool for International users. It also allows enough of a look to understand where seasonal trends lie and will provide a suggestion as to how many times phrases are likely to be searched on daily, based on the historic data. Just remember that good tools cost money, but that doesn’t mean you MUST have them. Successful sites have been started using nothing but free tools and marketing techniques. You can do the same, then as revenue grows, purchase the tools to dig deeper and continue your growth. Now you have some data – but what does it mean? After using any one of the tools, you’ll have a list of phrases with counts next to them. Whether it’s monthly or yearly doesn’t matter, the simple math mentioned above will get you a key number – an average of how many time per day that phrase was searched for. Remember, if you’re using the Yahoo keyword tool, you’ll need to account for the fact that yahoo only has a percentage of the market share on daily searches – so whatever the number shown by Yahoo, multiply that number by something around 60% (because they have 40% of the market, we need to know the other 60%). Simple math would be: Keyword = 34,000 searches per month according to Yahoo More realistically, that phrase sees about 34,000 x 1.6 = 54,400 searches per month, overall This is simply a ballpark as the actual results will vary, but it’ll give you a clearer picture of the reality you’re dealing with. So now you know who’s searching on what. The next step is to narrow down your workload. At this point you may have hundreds of phrases in your spreadsheet. Simply take the top 100 by average number of DAILY searches and drop them onto a new sheet. This will become your working sheet – the one you reference when creating content. Think of this top 100 list of keywords as your list of 100 pages to work on data for – or if the site is already live, the 100 pages to tweak. If you have a live site and see a phrase that does not match any current content, create a new page. Don’t try to revise off-topic content to fit a particular keyword – do the work and build the new page to support the keyword. …and while we’re talking about pages, stick to using one keyword (or phrase) per page. This will allow each page to fully support it’s bid for the one keyword. Want to go after another phrase? Create a new page. What to Avoid This one is easy – avoid phrases that are too broad or overly saturated. Broad phrases are those one-word phrases like “baseball”. Since this word can be used in combination with so many other words when searching on many hundreds of combos, the results that appear are a mixed bag of results. Plus, being so highly searched on, a broad phrase like this will be crowded with the heavy-hitters of your vertical – like MLB.com. Be realistic. You are not going to beat MLB.com for the phrase “baseball” out of the gate. You are much better served drilling down to more targeted phrases to focus on. Things like “baseball batter gloves” or “right hand baseball battering gloves”. This idea goes back to the niche phrases we spoke about. More pages drawing smaller numbers, when combined, often outpace the volume of traffic provided by one page found for a busier phrase – and they offer you protection if/when a page drops in the rankings. Skip the really busy phrases for now and skip phrases that are too broad. Overly saturated phrases have so many folks competing to rank well that you’re bound to lose out to older, more established sites. If you’re not appearing on the first 2 pages of results (top 20), then the value is greatly diminished for you, so avoid fighting the big guns right away – build strength form the grassroots level up. In fact, use this thinking to whittle out those phrases from your Top 100 spreadsheet – the revised list of 100 phrases will be the perfect set to get you started – even if the site isn’t new. Have Faith Finally, when you’ve done the keyword research, found the top 100 phrases and whittled out the overly saturated ones and the broad terms, you’ll have the list that will help you. Whether you’re starting a new website or revising an existing one, this is the list of phrases you need to start the real grunt work of the project. Have faith in your list of phrases and start either building pages to match the keywords or revising current pages to go after selected phrases form the list. If your site is brand new, work on getting these 100 pages live and indexed. Fill in the blanks later and as makes sense for the site you’re building. Your keyword research list is an item you’ll reference time and time again to help keep you on the right path. Update the list every 4 – 6 months or so and you’ll have a strong resource for success.