Keyword Competitive Research

Keyword Competitive Research

Keyword research is the core of any SEO campaign and it is vitally important when developing PPC programs. You should choose carefully the keywords that you believe will be most effective, because the keywords selected during the research phase will be included in your web site copy,well as your PPC programs, and many other types of campaigns. For starters, you should select valid keywords from a variety of sources, including the following:

■ Your own knowledge of the product or service that you’re marketing: From your own knowledge, you should be able to choose at least one word that characterizes the product or service. If you’re unable to select that word, spend some time getting to know your products and services better.

■ Your customers: Your customers will be able to tell you what keywords they think of or use when searching for your product or service. Customers can be your best source for valid and relevant keywords, because you’re trying to reach people just like them.

■ Competitors’ web sites. Check your competitors’ web sites for additional keywords that you may not have considered during your initial brainstorming session. Obviously, if your competitors are using these keywords, there will be some competition for them, but better to have the competition than to be left outside the arena while the games are taking place.

Keyword suggestion tools

One tool that you should use when developing your keyword list is a keyword suggestion tool. Keyword suggestion tools are just that: tools that provide a list of suggested keywords based on a base word that you enter into the search tool. Some of the words returned may not have occurred to you when you were brainstorming keywords and soliciting feedback from your customers about the words they would use. In addition, keyword suggestion tools provide some of the information that you’ll need to determine how much competition there is for the keywords and phrases you’re considering using.

In the past, measuring the competition for your search terms was done by performing a search for each keyword or phrase using one search engine at a time. When the SERPs were returned, you could see how many times that keyword or phrase turned up. It was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Today, keyword suggestion tools speed the competitive research process.

Here’s how it works: You first input your proposed keywords into a keyword suggestion tool, which examines a database containing millions of instances of keyword usage. Using these tools, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting daily searches for that term, how many of those searches resulted in an actual visit, and what related search terms were used.  Many keyword suggestion tools are available on the Web. Some of the top tools, which you may already be familiar with, include the following:

■ SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool, shows you how many searches have been conducted over a given month in various search engines for a keyword or phrase related to the search term you enter into the tool. You can find the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php.

■ Wordtracker: Wordtracker enables you to search for terms in the database of terms collected. This program tells you how often a keyword or phrase was searched for. In addition, the list of keywords and phrases returned may include words or phrases that you haven’t considered using. You may also find keywords on this list that have low competition rates but high relevancy.

■ Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool: The Trellian tool is a subscription tool (about $70 per month) that enables users to 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 affected by seasonal trends.

■ Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google’s Keyword Tool provides suggestions for additional

words that you may not have considered. There are no actual numbers, so your decisions about competition will include a high degree of guesswork. What you might find unique about the Google Keyword Tool is its capability to examine your web page or even your entire web site and make suggestions for keywords and phrases that might be useful in marketing your site.

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What are Service pay-per-click programs

Service pay-per-click programs

When users search for a service of any type, such as travel reservations, they are likely to

use search engines related specifically to that type of service. For example, a user searching for the best price for hotel reservations in India, US, might go to TripAdvisor.com.

Advertisers — in this case, hotel chains — can choose to pay for their rank in the search results using a service PPC program.

Service PPC programs are similar to product PPC programs, with the only difference being the type of product or service that is offered. 

Product PPC programs are more focused on e-commerce products, whereas service PPC programs are focused on businesses that have a specific service to offer. Service PPC programs also require an RSS feed, and even some of the same attribute listings as product PPC programs. Some of the service PPC programs you might be familiar with are SideStep.com and TripAdvisor.com. In addition, many product PPC programs have expanded to include services. One such vendor is NexTag.

PPC Is Not Paid Inclusion!

One distinction that is important to understand is the difference between PPC and paid-inclusion (PI) services. Many people believe that PPC and PI services are the same type of marketing, but there can be some subtle differences. For starters, paid-inclusion services are used by some search engines to enable web site owners to pay a one-year subscription fee to ensure that their site is indexed with that search engine at all times. 
This fee doesn’t guarantee any specific rank in search engine results; it only guarantees that the site is indexed by the search engine. Google is one company that uses paid inclusion to populate its search index. Not all the listings in Google are paid listings, however. 

Google combines both normally spidered sites and paid sites. Many other search engines have staunchly avoided using paid-inclusion services — Ask.com and yahoo! are two of the most notable — because most users feel that paid inclusion can skew the search results. In fact, search engines that allow only paid-inclusion listings are not likely to survive very long, because people won’t use them. 

There is a bit of a gray area between paid inclusion and PPC. That area begins at about the point where both services are paid for. Detractors of these types of programs claim that paying for a listing — any listing — is likely to make search returns invalid because it is believed that search engines give higher ranking to paid-inclusion services, just as they do to PPC advertisements.

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Pay-per-Click Categories

Pay-per-Click Categories

Pay-per-click programs are not all created equal. When you think of PPC programs, you probably think of keyword marketing — bidding on a keyword to determine where your site will be placed in search results; and that’s an accurate description of PPC marketing programs as they apply to keywords. 

However, there are two other types of PPC programs — and you may find that targeting a different category of PPC marketing is more effective than simply targeting keyword PPC programs.

Keyword pay-per-click programs

Keyword PPC programs are the most common type of PPC program. They are also the type this book focuses on most often. By now you know that keyword PPC programs are about bidding on keywords associated with your site. The amount that you’re willing to bid determines the placement of your site in search engine results.

In keyword PPC, the keywords used can be any word or phrase that might apply to your site.

However, remember that some of the most common keywords have the highest competition for top spot, so it’s not always advisable to assume that the broadest term is the best one. If you’re in a specialized type of business, a broader term might be more effective; but as a rule of thumb, the more narrowly focused your keywords are, the better the results you are likely to have with them (and PPC costs much less if you’re not using a word that requires a $50-per-click bid).

The major search engines are usually the ones that come to mind when you think of keyword PPC programs, and that’s fairly accurate. Search PPC marketing programs like those offered by vendors such as Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN are some of the most well-known PPC programs.

Product pay-per-click programs

You can think of product pay-per-click programs as online-comparison shopping engines or price-comparison engines. A product PPC program focuses specifically on products, so you bid on placement for your product advertisements.

The requirements for using a product PPC program are a little different from keyword PPC programs, however. With a product PPC, you must provide a feed — think of it as a regularly updated price list for your products — to the search engine. Then, when users search for a product, your links are given prominence, depending on the amount you have bid for placement. 

However, users can freely display those product listings returned by the search engine in the order of price from lowest to highest if that is their preference. This means that your product may get good placement initially, but if it’s not the lowest-priced product in that category, it’s not guaranteed that your placement results will stay in front of potential visitors. Some of these product PPC programs include Shopping.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla

Implementing a product feed for your products isn’t terribly difficult, although, depending on the number of products you have, it can be time-consuming. Most of the different product PPC programs have different requirements for the product attributes that must be included in the product feed. For example, the basic information included for all products is an item title, the direct link for the item, and a brief description of the item.

Some of the additional attributes that you may need to include in your product PPC listings

include the following:

■ Title

■ Description

■ Link

■ Image link

■ Product type

■ UPC

■ Price

■ MPN (manufacturer’s part number)

■ ISBN

■ ID

Some product PPC programs require XML-formatted feeds; however, most will allow text-delimited Excel files (simple CSV files). This means you can create your product lists in 

an Excel spreadsheet and then save that spreadsheet as text delimited by selecting File Save As and ensuring that the file type selected is text delimited.

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How this complicated Pay-per-Click Works

How Pay-per-Click Works

Pay-per-click marketing is an advertising method that enables you to buy search engine placement by bidding on keywords or phrases. 

There are two different types of PPC marketing. 

In the first type, you pay a fee for an actual SERP ranking, and in some cases you also pay a per-click fee, meaning the more you pay, the higher in the returned results your page will rank. 

The second type is more along true advertising lines. This type of PPC marketing involves bidding on keywords or phrases that appear in, or are associated with, text advertisements. Google is probably the most notable provider of this service. 

Google’s AdWords service, shown in Figure, is an excellent example of how PPC advertisements work.

Determining visitor value

The first thing that you need to do when you begin considering PPC strategies is to determine how much each web site visitor is worth to you. It’s important to know this number, because otherwise you could find yourself paying far too much for keyword advertising that doesn’t bring the traffic or conversions that you expect. 

For example, if it costs you $25 to gain a conversion (or sale) but the value of that conversion is only $15, then you’re losing a lot of money PPC advertisements are those that you see at the top and on the sides of search pages.

To determine the value of each web site visitor, you need some historical data about the number  of visitors to your site in a given amount of time (e.g., a month) and the actual sales numbers (or profit) for that same time period. This is where it’s good to have some kind of web metrics program to keep track of your site statistics. If you divide the profit by the number of visitors for the same time frame, the result should tell you (approximately) what each visitor is worth. 

For example, suppose that during December, your site cleared $2,500. (In this admittedly simplified example, we’re ignoring various other factors you would have to figure into an actual profit and loss statement.) Suppose also that during the same month, 15,000 visitors came to your site. Note that this number is for all the visitors to your site, not just the ones who made a purchase. You divide your $2,500 profit by all the visitors, purchasers or not, because this gives you an accurate average value of every visitor to your site. Not every visitor will make a purchase, but you have to go through a number of non-purchasing visitors to get to those who will purchase.

Back to the formula for the value of a visitor: Divide the site profit for December ($2,500) by the number of visitors (15,000) and the value of your visitors is approximately $.17 per visitor. This value is approximate because during any given month (or whatever time frame you choose) the number of visitors and the amount of profit will vary. The way you slice the time can change your average visitor value by a few cents to a few dollars, depending on your site traffic. (Again, the example is based on the value of all visitors, not just conversions, which might be a more valid real-life way of calculating the value of individual visitors; but this example is simply to demonstrate the principle.)

The number you get for visitor value is a sort of break-even point. It means you can spend up to $.17 per visitor on keywords or other promotions without losing money; but if you’re spending more than that without increasing sales and profits, you’re going in the hole. It’s not good business to spend everything you make (or more) to draw visitors to the site, but note the preceding italicized words.

If a $.25 keyword can raise your sales and profits dramatically, then it may be worth buying that word. In this oversimplified example, you need to decide how much you can realistically spend on keywords or other promotions. Maybe you feel a particular keyword is powerful enough that you can spend $.12 per click for it, and raise your sales and visitor value substantially. 

You have to decide what profit margin you want and what promotions are likely to provide it. As you can see, there are a number of variables. Real life is dynamic and eludes static examples. Whatever you decide, you shouldn’t spend everything you make on PPC programs. There are far too many other things that you need to invest in.

Popular keyword phrases can often run much more than $.12 per click. In fact, some of the most popular keywords can run as much as $50 (yes, fifty dollars) per click. To stretch your PPC budget, you can choose less popular terms that are much less expensive but that provide good results for the investment that you do make. Putting pay-per-click to work Now that you have your average visitor value, you can begin to look at the different keywords on which you might bid. Before you do, however, you need to look at a few more things. 

One of the main mistakes made with PPC programs is that users don’t take the time to clarify what it is they hope to gain from using a PPC service. It’s not enough for your PPC program to have a goal of increasing your ROI (return on investment). You need something more quantifiable than just the desire to increase profit. How much would you like to increase your profit? How many visitors will it take to reach the desired increase?

Let’s say that right now each visit to your site is worth $.50, using our simplified example, and your average monthly profit is $5,000. That means that your site receives 10,000 visits per month. Now you need to decide how much you’d like to increase your profit. 

For this example, let’s say that you want to increase it to $7,500. To do that, if each visitor is worth $.50, you would need to increase the number of visits to your site to 15,000 per month. Therefore, the goal for your PPC program should be to increase profit $2,500 by driving an additional 5,000 visits per month. Now you have a concrete, quantifiable measurement by which you can track your PPC campaigns.

Once you know what you want to spend, and what your goals are, you can begin to look at the different types of PPC programs that might work for you. Although keywords are the main PPC element associated with PPC marketing, there are other types of PPC programs to consider as well.

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How PPC Affects SEO

Understanding How PPC Affects SEO

There’s a lot of debate about how an organization should use organic keyword marketing versus PPC marketing. There seem to be two (and possibly three) distinct opinions about what should and shouldn’t be done in regard to these different types of marketing. The first position is that pay- per-click programs can hurt organic keyword programs. 
According to supporters of this position, PPC programs damage organic rankings because the act of paying for a listing automatically reduces the rank of your organic keyword efforts. Those who subscribe to this theory believe that there is no place for PPC programs.

Another position in this argument is that PPC has no effect at all on SEO. It’s a tough concept to swallow, because one would naturally assume that any organization paying for a specific rank in search returns would automatically push organic keyword returns into a lower slot (which supports the first theory). Those who follow this theory believe that there is no need to invest in PPC because you can achieve the same results with organic keywords, though it takes much longer for those results to become apparent.

The most widely held belief, however, is that a combination of PPC and organic keywords is the best approach. This theory would seem to have a lot of validity. According to some researchers, pay-per-click programs tend to be much more effective when an organization also has organic keywords that rank in the same area as the PPC ranks. For example, if you’ve bid on a keyword that’s consistently placed number two or three in search engine returns and you have organic keywords that fall in the next few slots, you’re likely to enjoy better conversion numbers than either organic keywords or PPC programs can deliver on their own.

It’s important to note here that all search engines make a distinction between PPC and organic SEO. PPC doesn’t help your organic rankings. Only those activities such as tagging your web site properly, using keyword placement properly, and including great content on your site will help you on the organic side. PPC is a search marketing strategy.

Before You PPC

Before you even begin to use a PPC program, you should consider some basics. A very important point to keep in mind is that just because you’re paying for placement or advertising space associated with your keywords, you’re not necessarily going to get the best results with all the keywords or phrases that you choose. 

With PPC services, you must test, test, and test some more. Begin small, with a minimum number of keywords, to see how the search engine you’ve selected performs in terms of the amount of traffic it delivers and how well that traffic converts into paying customers.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that enables you to track your return on investment. For example, if your goal is to bring new subscribers to your newsletter, you’ll want to track conversions, perhaps by directing the visitors funneled to your site by your PPC link to a subscription page set up just for them. You can then monitor how many clicks actually result in a goal conversion (in this case, a new subscription). This helps you to quickly track your return on investment and to determine how much you’re paying for each new subscriber.

Before investing in a PPC service, you may want to review a few different services to determine which is the best one for you. When doing your preliminary research, take the time to ask the following questions:

• How many searches are conducted each month through the search engine for which you’re considering a PPC program?
• Does the search engine have major partners or affiliates that could contribute to the volume of traffic you’re likely to receive through the PPC program
• How many searches are generated each month by those partners and affiliates?  What exactly are the terms of service for search partners or affiliates?
• How does the search engine or PPC program prevent fraudulent activity? 
• How difficult is it to file a report about fraudulent activity and how quickly is the issue
• addressed (and by whom)? 
• What recourse do you have if fraudulent activity is discovered?
• Do you have control over where your listing does appear? For example, can you choose not to have your listing appear in search results for other countries where your site is not relevant? Can you choose to have your listing withheld from affiliate searches?

When you’re looking at different PPC programs, look for those that have strict guidelines about how sites appear in listings, how partners and affiliates calculate visits, and how fraud is handled. These are important issues, because in each case you could be stuck paying for clicks that didn’t actually happen. Be sure to monitor any service that you decide to use to ensure that your PPC advertisements are working properly and seem to be targeted well. 

It often takes a lot of testing, monitoring, and redirection to find a PPC program that works well for you. Don’t be discouraged or surprised if you find that you must try several different programs or many different keywords before you find the right combination. Through a system of trial and error and diligent effort, you’ll find that PPC programs can help build your site traffic and goal conversions faster than you could with organic SEO alone.

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Pay-per-click(PPC) and Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

PPC AND SEO

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one of those terms that you hear associated with keywords so often you might think they were the conjoined twins of SEO. They’re not, really. Keywords and PPC do go hand in hand, but it is possible to have keywords without PPC. It’s not always advisable, however.

Hundreds of PPC services are available, but they are not all created equal. Some pay-per-click services work with actual search rankings, whereas others are more about text advertisements. Then there are the category-specific PPC programs, such as those for keywords, products, and services.

The main goal of a pay-per-click program is to drive traffic to your site, but ideally you want more out of PPC results than just visits. What’s most important is traffic that reaches some conversion goal that you’ve set for your web site. To achieve these goal conversions, you may have to experiment

with different techniques, keywords, and even PPC services. Pay-per-click programs have numerous advantages over traditional search engine optimization:

■ No changes to a current site design are required. You don’t have to change any code or add any other elements to your site. All you have to do is bid on and pay for the keywords you’d like to target.

■ PPC implementation is quick and easy. After signing up for a PPC program, it might take only a few minutes to start getting targeted traffic to your web site. With SEO campaigns that are strictly

organic and don’t include pay-per-click, it could take months for you to build the traffic levels that PPC can build in hours (assuming your PPC campaign is well targeted).

■ PPC implementation doesn’t require any specialized knowledge. Your pay-per-click campaigns will be much better targeted, however, if you understand keywords and how they work.

As with any SEO strategy, PPC has its limitations. Bidding for keywords can be fierce, with each

competitor bidding higher and higher to reach and maintain the top search results position. Many organizations even have a dedicated person or team that’s responsible for monitoring the company’s position in search results and amending bids accordingly.

Monitoring your position is crucial to maintaining good placement, however, because you do have to fight for your ranking, and PPC programs can become prohibitively expensive. The competitiveness of the keywords or phrases and the aggressiveness of the competition determine how much you’ll ultimately end up spending to rank well.

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Never Do Keyword Stuffing on your website

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Recall from earlier post that keyword stuffing is the practice of loading your web pages with keywords in an effort to artificially improve your ranking in search engine results. Depending on the page that you’re trying to stuff, this could mean using a specific keyword or key phrase a dozen times or hundreds of times.

Temporarily, this might improve your page ranking; but if it does, the improvement won’t last, because when the search engine crawler examines your site, it will find the multiple keyword uses.

Search engine crawlers use an algorithm to determine whether the keyword density — the number

of times that a keyword or phrase is used on your site — is reasonable. If it’s not, then the crawler will discover very quickly that your site can’t support the number of times you’ve used that keyword or key phrase. The result will be a lower quality score for your site, and the site will be either dropped deeper into search rankings or removed completely from search results (which is what happens in most cases).

There are no search engine guidelines that state, ‘‘It’s appropriate to use keywords on your web site X number of times,’’ because then everyone would use their keywords similarly and they would hold no value in search rankings at all. As it is, many web site owners try to skew search rankings with complicated (and not always ethical) keyword strategies. Therefore, it’s up to you to determine how many times you should include keywords in your tags, titles, text, links, headings, and content, and to hope that whatever you decide is the right solution.

Keyword stuffing, purposely or not, occurs in several ways on web pages. The first is when the content writer or web designer includes a block of text on the web page (usually at the bottom, but it can be anywhere) that is nothing more than a repetition of the chosen keyword, as shown here:

AKC Breeding AKC Breeding AKC Breeding

AKC Breeding AKC Breeding AKC Breeding

AKC Breeding AKC Breeding AKC Breeding

AKC Breeding AKC Breeding AKC Breeding

Sometimes this repetitive block of text is shown in the same font as the other text on the page, but it’s not at all unusual for a block of text like this to be the same color as the page background so that it is invisible to visitors, but perfectly readable by search engine crawlers. When it’s invisible to visitors, it’s called invisible keyword stuffing.

You also run the risk of accidentally falling victim to keyword stuffing on your page. This can happen when you place too many keywords into tags, text, and other elements of your web page. As a general rule, keep the keyword density of your page at 7 to 10 percent of the total words on your web page. For example, if your page has 300 words of text, then no more than 21 to 30 of those words should be keywords. In addition, those 21 to 30 words should be distributed between the text and the back-end meta tags.

As mentioned earlier, 7 to 10 percent keyword density isn’t a rule, but a guideline that you should try to stay close to. Some search engines will allow a little higher keyword density before flagging your site as a spam site, whereas others might allow less than 10 percent. It’s a game that you’ll have to play for a while in order to learn what works and what doesn’t. One way to ensure that you’re not overdoing it with your keywords is to use several different keywords or phrases that are unique to that page. These keywords should come from the keyword groups that you learned about at the beginning of this blog. If a keyword is not essential in helping site visitors understand a product, service, or concept, don’t use it simply as a tactic to increase your rankings. Don’t be tempted. The result of that temptation could be the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve.

Keywords are still one of the least expensive methods of advertising your web site. They are also a moving target, not a simple select-and-forget-it solution. You’ll have to put plenty of ongoing effort and experimentation into learning what works and what doesn’t with your PPC ads and keyword placement. If you keep your efforts consistent and regular, though, you’ll eventually find the right combination — one that not only provides the increased traffic and conversions you’re looking for, but also does it within the confines of your budget.

More About Keyword Optimization

There is much more to learn about keywords and pay-per-click programs. In later posts you’ll learn more about how to conduct keyword research, what pay-per-click programs are, and how to select the right keywords for your web site. Always keep in mind that keywords are just tools to help you improve your search rankings. 

When designing your site, the site should be designed to inform, enlighten, or persuade your site visitor to reach a goal conversion. That’s what SEO is truly all about. Keywords may be a major component of your SEO strategies, but the ultimate goal of SEO is bringing in more visitors who reach more goal conversions. Without those conversions, all the site visitors in the world won’t mean anything more than that people dropped by.

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The Right Keyword Density

What’s the Right Keyword Density?

Keyword density is hard to quantify. It’s a measurement of the number of times that your keywords appear on the page versus the number of words on a page — a ratio, in other words.

For example, if you have a single web page that has 1,000 words of text and your keyword appears on that page 10 times (assuming a single keyword, not a keyword phrase), then your keyword density is 1 percent.

What’s the right keyword density? That’s a question that no one has been able to answer definitively. Some experts say that your keyword density should be around 5 to 7 percent; others suggest that it should be higher or lower. No one seems to agree on exactly where it should be. Because there’s no hard-and-fast rule, or even a good rule of thumb, to dictate keyword density, site owners are flying on their own. What is certain is that using a keyword or a set of keywords or phrases often begins to look like keyword stuffing to a search engine, which will negatively impact the ranking of your site.

Not enough keyword density and your site ranking suffers. Too much keyword density and your site ranking suffers. Fortunately, you can at least find out what keyword density your competitors are using by looking at the source code for their pages.

To view the source code of a page if you’re using Internet Explorer, follow these steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer and navigate to the page for which you would like to view the

source code.

2. Click View in the standard toolbar. The View (or Page) menu appears.

3. Select View Source. A separate window will open displaying the source code from the web

page you’re viewing.

If you’re using the Firefox browser, the menus are slightly different and the source code looks a little different. These are the steps for Firefox:

1. Open Firefox and navigate to the page for which you would like to view the source code.

2. Click View in the standard toolbar. The View menu appears.

The source code looks a little different in Internet Explorer than it does in Firefox, but the

basic information is all there. That said, it’s not very easy to get through this information. All

of the page text is jumbled in with the page encoding. It may take some time to decipher, but

ultimately, this is the best way to find out not only what keywords the competition is using, but also how they’re using them, and how often the keywords appear on their pages.

Taking Advantage of Organic Keywords

We’ve already covered brief information about organic keywords. As you may remember, organic keywords are those that appear naturally on your web site, and they contribute to the search engine ranking of the page. By taking advantage of those organic keywords, you can improve your site rankings without spending additional budget dollars. The problem is that gaining organic ranking alone can take four to six months or longer. 

To help speed the time it takes to achieve good rankings, many organizations (or individuals) use organic keywords in addition to some type of PPC (pay-per-click) or pay-for-inclusion service.

To take advantage of organic keywords, you first need to know what those keywords are. One way to find out is to us a web site application that collects visitor data, such as the one that Google provides, Google Analytics. Some of these services track the keywords that push users to your site. When viewing the reports associated with keywords, you can quickly see how your PPC keywords draw traffic, and what keywords in which you’re not investing still draw traffic.

Another way to discover organic keywords is to consider the words that would be associated

with your web site, product, or business name. For example, a writer might include various keywords about the area in which she specializes, but one keyword she won’t necessarily want to purchase is the word ‘‘writer,’’ which would be naturally occurring on the site.

The word won’t necessarily garner high traffic for you, but when that word is combined with

more specific keywords, perhaps keywords that you acquire through a PPC service, the organic words can help to push traffic to your site. Going back to the writer example, if the writer specializes in writing about AJAX, then the word ‘‘writer’’ might be an organic keyword, and ‘‘AJAX’’ might be a keyword that the writer bids for in a PPC service.

That way, when potential visitors use a search engine to search for ‘‘AJAX writer,’’ the writer’s site has a better chance of being listed higher in the results rankings. Of course, by using more specific terms related to AJAX in addition to writer, the chances are pretty good that the organic keyword combined with the PPC keywords will improve search rankings.

Therefore, when you consider organic keywords, think of words that you might not be willing to spend your budget on but that could help improve your search rankings, either alone or when combined with keywords in which you are willing to invest.

Where organic keywords are concerned, more specific is better. In fact, if you have a series of specific phrases that relate well to your site but to few other sites, those are good phrases to focus your organic efforts on. Those words should not only rank well in terms of Long Tail search, but also bring more qualified visitors to your site and serve as a solid foundation for any future PPC campaigns that you may begin.

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What is your Correct Keywords for the website

PICKING THE CORRECT KEYWORD

Keywords are really the cornerstone of any SEO program. Your keywords play a large part in determining where in search rankings you’ll land, and they also mean the difference between a user finding your page or not. Selecting the right keywords for your site means the difference between being a nobody on the Web and being the first site that users click when they perform a search. Therefore, when you’re picking keywords, you want to be sure that you’ve selected the right ones. How do you know what’s right and what’s not? You’ll be looking at two types of keywords: brand keywords and generic keywords.

Brand keywords are keywords associated with your brand. It seems pretty obvious that these keywords are important; however, many people don’t think they need to pay attention to these keywords because they’re already tied to the site. Not true. If you don’t use the keywords contained in your business name, business description, and specific category of business, you’re missing out. If you don’t own them, who will? And if someone else owns them, how will they use those keywords to direct traffic away from your site?

Generic keywords are all the other keywords that are not directly associated with your company brand. For example, if your web site, Myntra.com, sells clothing, then keywords such as clothing, tank tops, cargo pants, and bathing suits might be generic keywords that you could use on your site.

Before going too much farther in this description of keywords and how to choose the right ones, you should know that keywords fall into two other categories:

keywords you pay a fee to use (called pay-per-click), and naturally occurring keywords that just seem to work for you without the need to pay someone to ensure they appear in search results (called organic keywords). 

When you think about purchasing keywords, these fall into the pay-per-click category. When you stumble upon a keyword that works, that falls into the organic category. As you begin considering the keywords that you’ll use on your site, the best place to start brainstorming is with keywords that apply to your business. Every business has its own set of buzzwords that people think of when they think about that business or the products or services related to the business. Start your brainstorming session with words and phrases that are broad in scope, even if they may not bring great search results. Then narrow your selections to more specific words and phrases, which will bring highly targeted traffic.

Table 5-1 shows how broad keywords compare to specific key phrases

Recall the information on Long Tail search. The keywords that appear in the left column of Table 5-1 are those at the broad head of search. These are some of the most competitive keywords available, and they typically require a paid keyword campaign to even come close to the top ranking. But that doesn’t mean you should discard them from your keyword options. 

The amount of potential traffic that can be generated by these broad keywords is huge if you can rank high enough. Just keep in mind that it will probably take a lot of time and a large budget to land on the first page of results, not to mention in the number one spot. Conversely, the keywords in the right column are Long Tail keywords. They’re more specific and will probably draw smaller amounts of traffic to your site. The traffic that Long Tail keywords draw, however, tends to be qualified traffic, meaning those visitors are more likely to reach a conversion goal you’ve established for your web site.

For example, people searching for ‘‘Tees’’ already know what they’re looking for. If your web site features those knives and information about them, and it’s properly loaded with the right keywords, then you’re more likely to land in the top search results; and when those searchers see you in the top results and click through to your site, they’re more likely to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter or mailing list, or help you reach whatever other goal you might have for that page.

Another advantage to Long Tail keywords is that it’s easier to achieve organic SEO with them. Specific key phrases tend to be in lower demand than broader, more popular terms, so a little work and attention to detail should help you rank well for these terms. Ultimately, it may result in less traffic than a broader term, but the traffic it does drive to your site should be much better targeted, which may work out better for you in the long run.

In short, as you consider the keywords that you want to use in optimizing your web site, think in terms of both broad words and deep phrases. They have different requirements and payoffs, but both will prove useful in your SEO efforts. 

Image source: Google
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Validating Your HTML

Validating Your HTML

HTML code is a pretty straightforward programming language. However, like any language, a document written in HTML can contain a lot of meaningless garbage that doesn’t seem to interfere with the message but leaves the document less than pristine. In fact, if your web site designer leaves a snippet of trash in your HTML code because it didn’t overtly affect the site and the designer didn’t want to take time cleaning it up, it could spell disaster for your SEO. With HTML there’s a lot behind the scenes that site visitors don’t see. There are the tags and elements that must be there for users, of course, and then there are the tags and elements that aren’t ever visible, so whether they are there or not doesn’t seem to matter — but of course it does.

When you recognize that a search engine crawler looks at text, and that HTML is a type of text, then your HTML begins to take on new meaning. If your site contains something that shouldn’t be there, visitors may not see it but search crawlers will, and it could affect the quality score of your site. Because HTML can be manipulated on the back end, a set of guidelines and best practices has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines and best practices were created to help web designers use HTML in the most efficient and effective manner. Unfortunately, the designers don’t always pay attention, and sometimes the HTML of a site can be littered with unneeded elements that affect your search engine rankings. The best thing to do is validate your HTML, or check to ensure that it complies with W3C standards.

You could do that manually, by going through every single line of code in your web site, but that would take a very long time when you consider that some web sites contain millions of

lines of code. Instead, you can use a tool such as the free HTML Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) that the W3C makes available to examine (or validate) your HTML to ensure that it adheres to the W3C guidelines. To use this tool, just enter the URL of your web site, and the validator will run a diagnostic on the site and return the results to you. You can then use that information to ensure that your site is free of the clutter that turns crawlers off. 

After Your Site Is Built

Building the right site to help maximize your SEO efforts is a difficult task; and when you’re finished, the work doesn’t end. As mentioned earlier, SEO is an ongoing strategy, not a technology that you can implement and forget. You need to spend time reviewing your practices, examining results, and making adjustments where necessary. If this ongoing maintenance is ignored, then your SEO efforts up to this point will quickly become time that would have been better spent standing on the street with a sign around your neck advertising your web site. That might be more effective than outdated SEO.

Beware of content thieves

Maintenance of your SEO strategies is also essential to helping you find problems that might be completely unrelated to SEO. For example, SEO strategies can help you locate content thieves. One such strategy is tagging your web site. Some people (including black-hat SEOs) take snippets of content from your site to use on their own. If you tag your content cleverly, you can use some very distinctive tags, which will help you quickly locate content that has been stolen. Another way in which SEO helps you to locate stolen content is through tracking. 

Presumably, if you’re executing SEO strategies, then you’re also monitoring your site metrics with a program such as Google Analytics. Watching the metrics used by one of those analytics programs can help you locate content thieves. For example, if you look at your incoming links on one of these programs, you might find that people are coming to your site from a completely unexpected location. If that’s the case, you can follow the link back to that site to find out why. A site using stolen content is easy to find using this method. 

Many services are available that will help you track your web site content. Tagging works well for finding content thieves, and you can also use domain cloaking to thwart automatic content scrapers. Recall that this is a process by which your web site appears to be located somewhere other than where it actually is. This is accomplished using an HTML frameset that redirects traffic from one URL to another. For example, if your web site address is www.you.somewhere.com, you can use domain cloaking to have your site appear to be www.yourbusiness.com. As you learned earlier, a problem with using domain cloaking is that it can confuse a search engine crawler, because the same content appears to be on two pages, although it’s only one page that redirects. Another problem is that some search engine crawlers can’t read the frameset that’s used to redirect the user, which means your site may end up not being ranked at all. Domain cloaking is a tactic that should be used only in special cases — namely, where content is truly unique and could possibly affect your SEO rankings (or that of someone who might

steal it) in a dramatic way. 

Dealing with updates and site changes

One last problem you may encounter after you’ve initially set up your SEO strategies is the updates and changes that your site will undergo. Web site owners often think that once the SEO is in place, it’s always in place and they don’t have to think about it again. That attitude can lead to a very unpleasant surprise.

When your site changes, especially when there are content updates or changes to the site structure, links can be broken, tags may be changed, and any number of other small details may be overlooked. When this happens, the result can be a reduced ranking for your site. Site crawlers look at everything, from your tags to your links, and based on what they see, your ranking could fluctuate from day to day. If what the crawler sees indicates that your site has changed in a negative way, the site’s ranking will be negatively affected.

As you know, many factors affect the way your site is ranked in a search engine. You’ve seen an overview of a lot of them on this blog, and you’ll see them all again in more depth. Realize that SEO is not a simple undertaking. It is a complex, time-consuming strategy for improving your business. Without attention to all of the details, you could be wasting your time. Plan to invest the time needed to ensure that your search engine optimization efforts aren’t wasted.

Image Source: Google
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