If you haven't taken
Lesson 1 yet, go there now.
We'll wait for you.
Lesson 8: The
key to keywords
Good keywords may aid our focus,
but do the search engines care?
There was a time
when keyword selection was thought to be one of the most important factors in how
search engines ranked your site. Figuring out the
"right" keywords, and using them
in such a way that your
site gets to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) spawned a specialty,
search engine optimization (SEO).
(Note: In popular
usage, the term "keywords" includes "key
phrases," i.e., a keyword can be more than one word. An example is "make
money online.")
The concept of SEO
is that a page can be optimized,
that is, designed in a particular way that ranks it highly in the SERPs, for a
particular set of keywords. Think of how high it needs to rank to get
people's attention. At ten results per page, do you ever go past about page
three looking for a search result? How often do you only look at the first page?
So our goal should
then be top-ten placement, with
top-thirty representing the limit of acceptable results. Let us say our keywords
are "business opportunities." Wait ... OK. I just tried Google and that exact
phrase (in quotes) yielded about 10.8 million results! So we could be in
the top 0.00001% and still not make the top-ten.
So maybe that was a
bad choice of keywords. Let me try "work at home business opportunities." Hmm,
only 126,000 results. But will enough of my
target audience use that exact
set of five words? You see the trade-off. Let's take a look at what we have to
get right to win at this game:
-
Pick the "right"
keywords, those that our prospective
customers will use to find sources of the product we offer. (Then, we
need to demonstrate some competitive advantage over other sources of our
product, but that's a whole different subject).
-
Place the keywords
in the site in the proper way. For example,
keywords in titles, headers, and links,
and nearer the top and bottom of the page "count" more heavily
than in "middling" body text.
-
Use the keywords the
"right" number of times. The number of times a keyword appears divided by the
number of words on the page is referred to as "keyword density" and different experts
suggest different target values for the major search engines.
The current
importance of keywords in SEO is
a matter of debate. We will still take a look at the "tools of the trade" for
two reasons. One, they might be important, or may come back into
favor. Two, the selection of keywords that describe the
"theme" of your site can be very
helpful in shaping the theme, focusing on your target market, and designing how
the pages of your site should relate.
We will look
primarily at Google's treatment of keywords. Google seems to be the "gold standard" of search engines, as you have probably
noticed by now. Yahoo! and MSN Search may be considered to round
out the major search engines category.
Here are some of the
keywords we tried for this
site: business opportunity, work
from home, make money on the internet, work at home, internet marketing,
business plans, make money online, home business ideas, work at home jobs, work
at home opportunities, internet in business, entrepreneur.
Notice that these
are rather broad, and so the
competition for them is probably intense. I could narrow down to some
niche such as "business plans for restaurants," or, "work at home baby boomers."
Let's try "work from home"
on
Wordtracker,
a very popular tool that we recommend. They also publish an excellent
Keyword
Research Guide, available free-of-charge.
Wordtracker
suggests 14 related keywords in the free trial (264 in the paid version). Here
is how they explain it
"Why do I need related
keywords?
Not everybody searches for
'"work from home"'.
You need to take advantage of other keywords that mean the same thing.
A good example is the term
'website promotion'. If you were to simply target this keyword, you would miss
out on all the traffic you could generate by targeting 'internet marketing',
'web marketing' or 'internet advertising'. They're all different ways of looking
at the same thing.
Treat related keywords as
suggestions - a brainstorming tool."
Next,
Wordtracker
asks which of these selections go in the keyword "basket." This is where we
select from the keyword list those words for which we want more information.
What else might we want to know? Let's see what
Wordtracker
provides.
Selecting "work at home" this time,
Wordtracker
produces another table:
Count - This shows the
number of times a particular keyword has appeared in our database. E.g. Our
database currently holds 303,766,345 words. A count of 6123 tells us that this
particular word has appeared 6123 times out of 303,766,345.
So we have picked
the keywords in this theme that are the most popular. To complete the picture,
we need to know about the intensity of the competition, that is, how many other
companies are seeking customers who use these phrases.
The following
table from
Wordtracker
introduces a new variable, KEI:
KEYWORD EFFECTIVENESS
INDEX (KEI)
Sumantra Roy (http://www.1stSearchRanking.com)
a respected Search Engine
Positioning specialist,
has kindly allowed us to incorporate his KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) into
Wordtracker.
The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our
data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords
are most effective for your campaign.
This is where you spot your niches ... The
figure you want to take note of is the 'KEI Analysis'. The higher this figure,
the more popular your keyword is and the less competition it has. This generally
means that you will find it easier to reach the top of this keyword.
Now you need to make sense of the KEI figure. Generally, a
poor keyword to target will have a KEI of between 0 - 10. It's not wise to
target keywords with this KEI as there is too much competition and you will
probably end up on page 34 and no-one will notice you!
Good keywords to target have a KEI of between 10 - 100.
These are good value bets and you have a good to medium chance of reaching the
top. Between 100-400 are your best bets and anything above 400+ is a gift!
For the numbers people among
you, KEI is the square of the popularity of a keyword (p) multiplied
by 1000 and divided by the number of sites (s) which appear in AltaVista for that
keyword.
KEI (s ≠ 0) = p^2 * 1000 / s
With that settled, let's take a break. My sense is that you understand the
concepts, but could use a little more practice before being completely
comfortable with keywords. So, our next session will be a keyword "lab."
On to Lesson 9
>>>
| 
