Keyword marketing
Choosing relevant and effective keywords for your website and each Web page is a fundamental step of the whole search engine marketing strategy. Here it is very important to perform advanced keyword analysis and focus on terms with a high number of daily searches and low competition. There are special indexes which can help determine the best keywords for your business and website.
Tuning the pages
This starts with populating the contents of the website with your best keyword and going through HTML elements, optimizing navigation and menus. This topic will provide an overview of all the necessary tasks to implement on your website in order to obtain high search engine rankings.
Optimizing site structure
This area covers topics such as optimization of site architecture, choosing a proper domain and file names and creating a search engine friendly site map. A site map is a very valuable and effective means of guiding both spiders and visitors to your relevant content.
Website submission
The next step explains how to effectively submit your site to search engines, directories as well as the vital principles of a pay-for-performance strategy. The final step here is verifying the success of submission.
Auditing and improving the website
It's a common situation to improve Web pages content and navigation for optimization purposes but forget about the visibility and usability problems these changes may cause. Auditing the website will help to identify these problems, clean up the mess and eliminate any weak points.
Working around specific optimization issues
This part of the course is devoted to optimization advice about Flash sites, graphic-heavy sites, JavaScript and other problem technologies for search engine spiders. Here you'll get a proper picture of search engine demands in order to make specific Web pages search engine compatible.
Picking out Keywords
When someone uses a search engine, they type words into the search box to find what they are looking for. These words are referred to as keywords or key phrases.
Keyword selection is what any optimization mission starts with. The rule of thumb is to start off with keyword research even before you start compiling the content for your pages. However, it is not always possible, and the most common situation is when you've got a website needing optimization and the content is already in place.
As we cannot make a site appear on top when people search for any word (and it isn't worth trying to), we want our site to appear among the first search results for the terms most relevantly reflecting our business
In this Step, you will learn:
1. Basic guidelines for keyword selection
2.The many ways to obtain keyword suggestions
3. Parameters and ways to estimate the potential of every keyword / key phrase.
The algorithm to perform a keyword job is as follows:
1. Figure out the strategic keywords you want to start off with.
2. Conduct preliminary keyword research. Get a list of keyword suggestions for each page.
3. If necessary, select or change the domain name and the names of the pages of your site according to the obtained results.
4. With the data obtained at step 2, perform your advanced keyword research and complete the list of keywords you will use for optimization on each of your pages.
As a result, every page of your site must have 1-3 exact keywords / key phrases associated with it. You may want to print out this scheme and make it your checklist while working with keywords.
Defining your Niche and Audience
To start with our keyword research, we will first figure out which segment of Web surfers we want to find our site, and subsequently, which terms will most likely bring these visitors to us.
Unfortunately, today it's not enough to figure out the keywords that make up the essence of your business. If the industry is competitive (such as, for instance, Web hosting and Web design), there are lots of sites competing to be on the top for these terms. Luckily, Web surfers have become more and more conscious of the need to make their search specific – people who are serious about their search look for "Los-Angeles Web hosting" or "Linux Web hosting" instead of just "Web hosting". Therefore, it gives a bit more variety to optimizers.
Therefore, generic keywords are usually not the best approach. As a rule, it's better to focus on niche keywords related to your product or service.
There are highly specific keywords that people don't search for often but when they do, getting that traffic is very important since these visitors are targeted and will most probably convert into customers. On a regular basis, these are things like actual product names (e.g. Samsung SyncMaster 757 monitor). If someone searches for the specific name of a product, there is a high possibility they are looking to make a purchase. So, those keywords can bring serious profit. If you are running an affiliate site or an online store then this can be very important. For instance, your site deals with selling office and computer desks. You want it to be on the top when people enter into search boxes "office desks" and "computer desks". These are your strategic keywords for the whole site. Each page of your site can have (and should have) its own strategic keywords, depending on the content.
For instance, one page deals with "high-end office desks", the second one with "glass computer desks", etc. It makes a lot of sense to optimize each page separately for different strategic terms. This means targeting each page to a specific search term that relates to the overall theme of your site. In our example of computer desks, we'll target each page to a suitable market that is looking for a certain kind of computer desk. Thus, we'll be competing with fewer websites on the same keywords, and our pages will be optimized for terms people actually use when searching. This will also bring much better results than optimizing your whole site for "computer desks".
The next thing to point out is local targeting. For example, if you're optimizing a Web development site whose owner is located in Sydney, Australia, using keywords such as "Web development Sydney" or "Web development services Australia" will make search engines refer most people from this location to your site because lots of people tend to search services or products locally.
So here are main points you should remember from this lesson:
1. Strategic key phrases should always consist of at least two words (but it's even better to have 3-5 words, as that's the average length of a search phrase).
2. Start with finding the most general terms characterizing your business, then break into more specific ones and optimize each page for the most specific term characterizing this page.
3. Where possible, make your decision in favor of a product name.
4. If possible/applicable, optimize one or several pages for localized terms.
At this step, you can step away from this course for a moment and try to figure out one strategic keyword or key phrase for your own home page and several other pages of your site.
Preparing to Research Keywords and Getting Suggestions
After defining your strategic keywords and key phrases, it's time to start your preliminary keyword research. Ideally, this step should forestall domain name selection, copywriting and content compilation, so that you can create content with the exact keywords for each page already in mind, and then form your domain name and file names based on this initial keyword research. The aim of the preliminary research is to assemble a core base of keywords with the highest potential, so you can use this material when selecting the domain name and creating the file structure for your website. More importantly, this research creates a basket of keywords which form the basis for a latter stage of advanced investigation where you will need to pick out the keywords to actually use in optimization.
As a result of this step, a list of keywords is expected which contain from 5 to 20 keyword suggestions for EACH of your Web pages.
The preliminary research consists of getting keyword suggestions and evaluating each keyword against two basic parameters, Competition and Daily World Searches, thus allowing selection of optimal keywords.
Keyword suggestions can be obtained by using one of the many free and paid tools and web-based services, as well as by extracting them manually from the top-ranked pages. In whichever case, you start with one strategic keyword or key phrase and then get many.
For free tools/services, you can check out www.goodkeywords.com or the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture)keyword suggestion tool (http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/). Among the most popular paid tools we could mention is WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com).
It's also a good idea to see how and on which keywords your competitors position themselves. Go to a search engine, like Google, and type your starting strategic keyword in the search box. It will show up with a list of results. Open the first ten results in your browser, right-click somewhere on the page and select "View HTML (page) source" (this menu item may slightly vary depending on the browser you use)
Now look for the keyword Meta tag (this where you will see every search term they are targeting):
This should be in the first few lines of the page source. If you don't see it then ignore this page, go back to the search results and pull up the source of the second page in the list.
In the Content section of this tag are all the search terms and keywords that this page is targeting. Actually, this may make a good addition to your own list of keyword suggestions.
Daily World Searches. It is virtually impossible to count how many times people search the Web daily for "ice cream" or "stock quotes". Most search engines keep this information secret for commercial reasons. However, some search machines, especially Meta-search engines, offer you the so-called "live searches" statistics, i.e. they tell you how often a word has been searched on the engine during a specific period of time. The most trustworthy suppliers of the "live searches" data are MetaCrawler-MetaSpy (www.metacrawler.com), Lycos (www.lycos.com), and Entireweb (www.entireweb.com). Additionally, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) (http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/), one of the most popular and powerful commercialized search engines, has its own keyword suggestion tool with monthly searches information.
The Keyword Suggestion Tool of Web CEO that we will use processes the information obtained from a total of 37 sources. It then approximates the total number of world searches for the given search phrase made on all search engines of the planet, including Google (although the source data is not obtained from Google directly, of course).
Daily World Searches is a very useful piece of information: the higher this index, the more visitors this keyword will refer to us if we optimize for it. Remember this factor as most important for the keyword research operations.
Competition. Most SEO tutorials will tell you that "Competition", or "Supply", refers to how many sites are given out by the search engine for a certain search term. For instance, if you open Google, type "digital camera", and it finds 129,000,000 results. 129,000,000 will be your "competition" the theory goes, because your site must outplay them all to appear in the first 10 results.
Sean Burns, the author of "Rankings Revealed" (www.webmastersreference.com) has an interesting point of view. He claims you actually have to outperform only 10 sites (the current top-ranked ones) to achieve the desired result. Here are his words:
"Basically, the number of competing pages is something that you should try to ignore. I can tell you how many competing pages there are for any keyword without even doing a search - 10. Your goal is to get in the top 10 for each and every keyword you target so that is the only "supply" figure that you need to focus on."
Nevertheless, Mr. Burns further agrees (along with many) on the point that your actual competition is generally made by all sites which are optimized (intentionally or not) for your strategic key phrase.
Although the numerous sites that appear to be your competition are not necessarily optimized for your keyword, they WILL stand in your way because they are full of relevant content and the search engine considers them important, therefore they've got high rankings. That's why terms with low competition are advised as more preferable.
For the moment, we will consider the "supply" our raw Competition figure, as it will do for our preliminary research. Later, in the course of the advanced investigation, we will refer to many other parameters.
Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). Actually, this isn't as monstrous as it sounds. Developed by SEO expert Sumantra Roy (the author of LinkExplore software, www.linkexplore.com), it crowns the preliminary research by combining the data about Competition and Daily World Searches.
The formula for KEI is KEI = (DS^2/C) = (DS/C * DS), where DS is the number of daily world searches and C is the competition. The KEI ranges from 0 to over 400.
- < 0.001 = Poor keyword
- 0.001-0.010 = Good Keyword
- 0.010-0.100+ = Excellent Keyword
So, the actual aim of our preliminary research is to obtain a list of keyword suggestions based on our initial strategic keywords and then determine the ?KEI? for each of them. The higher the KEI, the more traffic this keyword will theoretically have, since the competition is low and the daily searches number is high. With the KEI, we will select from the best five to twenty suggestions for each of our pages.
So here are main points you should remember from this lesson:
1. The aim of preliminary keyword research is to compile a list of keyword suggestions for every page of your site, based on the one strategic keyword you had in the beginning.
2. Focus on terms with a high number of daily searches and preferably low competition, without damaging the relevance.
3. KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index - will help you determine the best suggestions possible with the help of a keyword suggestion tool.
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