Archive for the 'Keyword Research' category

Content Mapping – Attaching Keyword Groups to a Site Structure

May 21 2010 Published by under Keyword Research, Site Structure

Today we’re going to connect our keyword groups with one of the site structures that we discussed previously.

There are hundreds of site structures that you can use to optimize your website for the search engines, but today I’m going to show you my favorite.

With this structure, we’ll used the concept of stacked pyramids and adjust the linking between the tiers for maximum effect on our keywords.

Start by arranging your keyword groups by theme.  With my keyword set I have 3 main themes that focus around “Optimization”, “Marketing”, and “SEO”

I start by taking the most competitive group from each theme and placing it under the home page to create our tier 1 pages.

Group 1 is around the them of Optimization, 2 – Marketing, 3 – SEO

Tier 1 of Site Structure

My home page will like to each of these groups using text that gives reputation to the page by including the main keyword or keywords as the actual hyperlink.

NOTE:  This site structure is for search engine spiders only.  There will be other links on the homepage that use a “nofollow” tag in the link for visitor navigation.

Notice that our Group 1-3 pages do NOT link back to the homepage.  Linking back to the home page will cause your PageRank to pool at the homepage.  If you have one set of HIGHLY competitive terms that you are trying to rank for, then place those on the homepage and return links from each page in your site structure back to the homepage.

Moving on, I’ll now take the less competitive terms from each theme and place them under the main grouping from that theme.

Tier 2

Now with this tier we will want to point links back to the most competitive group in each them to pool our PageRank on our tier 1 pages.

What we have here are 3 separate pyramid shapes under the home page.  The pyramids do NOT connect to each other preserving reputation and page rank in each individual theme.

If you remember back to our keyword groupings, I discussed creating a second group that switched the modifier terms with your main keywords.  What I do now, is take our structure and double it and then link the sub-group tier 1 pages to the main-group tier 2 pages and vice versa.  It ends up looking like this.

Final Structure

You can see that the tier 1 pages still do not link to each other, and likewise with the tier 2 pages.  We’ve just cross linked our tier 1 and 2 sub-group pages to each other.

Group 1 links to: G5, G5.5, G6, G6.5
Group 1.5 links to the same tier 2 pages.

Over the weekend I’ll work on implementing this site structure on my actual website so you’ll have a living example to look at shortly.

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Keyword Research – Organizing Landing Pages

May 19 2010 Published by under Keyword Research, Site Structure

I’m assuming by now that you’ve completed the competition analysis from your keyword list generated by following the instructions in my previous posts on keyword research.

Now we need to organize this research into small groups of 3-5 keywords.  Each group will eventually become a webpage inside our website.

I usually start by making a new tab on my spreadsheet where I’ll begin to cut and paste keywords.  This allows me to keep my original data for later reference.

We’ll use this list of keywords as a working example:

[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont small business seo]
[vermont seo strategy]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine marketing service]
[vermont search engine submission service]
[vermont targeted website traffic]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

We want to start by looking for terms that share words.  In this case, “search engine optimization” seems to be common to the first few terms, so let’s break those out first:

Group 1

[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

Group 2

[small business seo]
[seo strategy]
[search engine marketing service]
[search engine submission service]
[targeted website traffic]

As you can see I took every term with “search engine optimization” and put it into Group 1 while leaving the remaining terms in Group 2.

Now we need to take a look at our competition.  Are our keywords highly competitive?  If so, we need to have a narrow focus on our groupings to target those terms.  If we are less competitive, we can pull the modifiers from the term and proceed forward.

In my example, the search terms are not highly competitive.  So I’ll continue by taking any words following “vermont search engine optimization” and tag them as modifiers for the group.

Group 1

Modifiers: firm, specialist, marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]

Now we’re left with one search term in our grouping.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Now I can go back and pick the most competitive modifiers and bring them back into the group.

Group 1

Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]

From here I like to write a potential title tag for my grouping.  Since Google only displays 65 characters of your title tag, it’s good to keep your title length to 65 characters.  If you don’t you’ll end up with annoying “…” following your title in the search results.

Title: Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist

Perfect, we come in at 59 characters.  I’ll explain later the art of writing title tags, but for now let’s move on with grouping our keywords into landing pages.  Keep not of your modifiers, you’ll want to be sure to include them in the content of your web pages as you build them.

Now, we have a group with 3 main keywords and 3 modifiers.  What if we make another group that switches the modifiers and the main keywords?

Have you ever seen those fancy indented listings on Google?  Those happen when a website has not one, but two pages on the SERP.  Regardless of rank for the second page, Google will slide it up under the highest ranked page on your site for that term.

This gives us an opportunity to not only focus in on our modifier terms, but possibly end up with enough ranking to have each page act as an indented listing for the other.

Group 1 – Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist

Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]

Group 1.5 - Vermont Search Engine Optimization Consulting | Marketing Expert

Modifiers: firm, specialist

[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

Continue through this exercise arranging your keywords into groups of 3-5 terms with accompanying modifiers and titles.

Tomorrow we’ll take our group of pages and arrange them into a working site structure and channel our PageRank appropriately.

[search engine optimization firm]
[search engine optimization specialist]
[search engine optimization marketing]
[small business seo]
[seo strategy]
[search engine optimization consulting]
[search engine marketing service]
[search engine submission service]
[targeted website traffic]
[search engines optimization]
[search engine optimization expert]
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Keyword Competition – Low Hanging Fruits

May 14 2010 Published by under Keyword Research

Let’s start by pulling up our keyword spreadsheet we started last week.

Currently you should have a giant list of keywords with corresponding search volumes, a column with a relevance score, columns with weighted search volumes, a column for backlinks and title information to the #1 and #5 listing on Google.

Here’s what mine looks like:

Now what we need to do is decide how much effort we are willing to put into ranking for the keywords we’ve selected.  What we want to do is “Dress for Success.”  Starting with less competitive keywords will allow us to see some results early on and motivate us to start tackling some of the harder search terms.

As I discussed yesterday, one of the key factors in ranking for a search term is inbound links (aka backlinks).  As we can see from my keyword list, there are some pretty significant numbers here!

The leading site for “SEO Strategy” has 4,809,581 links!  If I managed to get a new link to my site somewhere on the web every 5 minutes, I would spend the next 24,047,905 minutes trying to get that many backlinks. That’s a little over 45 years of continuous brute force linking effort.  No thanks!

Now, don’t lose heart… we’ll implement some strategies in the future that allows us to put our link building efforts in over drive.  But, this keyword is going to be a killer to try and overcome.

Since my business will be based in Vermont, I’m going to go ahead and add Vermont to the beginning of my search terms and re-analyze the competition.  I’m not giving up on the more competitive search terms, I’m just going to save them for later and start with something a little more manageable from the start.

In general, I like to start my SEO campaign with search terms that have leading sites with less than 800 backlinks or less than 2,000 backlinks and don’t have the search term in the title.

The reason I don’t mind chasing down slightly larger sites with the keywords not in the page title is very simple.  It’s likely that those websites aren’t even paying attention to showing up for that search term.  Since one of the fundamental steps in doing SEO is putting your keywords in the title of your page, it’s unlikely that they’ve actually done any SEO to rank for those keywords.

This is low hanging fruit.

Keep working through this process until you have 20-25 keywords that you feel are in your “comfort zone” starting out.

Stay tuned!  Tomorrow I’ll give you a basic overview of site structures and how they apply to SEO.

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Keyword Research – Analysing Competition

May 12 2010 Published by under Keyword Research

Today’s step in developing our keyword strategy is actually going to be the most brute force work that we have to do for this phase of starting an internet business.  Before I go any further, I’d like to mention that there are some wonderful tools out there that can do this step for you.

The one I have the most experience with is Keyword Elite.  While it has a tendency to cause the search engines to block your computer from doing a search temporarily, it can and does end up saving a lot of time in the long run.

Keyword Elite (and the other tools) aren’t cheap either.  They can run anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand dollars.  So, let me show you how to do it the old fashion way.

First, start by sorting your list of keyword from yesterday by the “Weighted Local Search Volume.”  We want to start analyzing the most searched keywords first.  Simply… more searches equals more visitors for a number one ranking.

This is where finding the competition is key.  Putting a ton of effort into a keyword you won’t even get on the first page of the search engines for will NOT yield a lot of traffic to your website.  You want to target keywords that you have a reasonable chance of getting ranked for first and work on the harder ones later.

Keyword Competition 1There are some site structure techniques we’ll use in a few weeks that will help us rank for the harder keywords while still allowing us to focus on our less competitive keywords first.

Start by taking the first search term in your list and doing a search on it in Google.  This will give us a search engine result page (SERP) with the websites that are currently ranking for that search term.

I’ll be using “Search Engine Optimization Firm” for my example.

I want you to copy the URL for the first page listing.

Now jump over to Yahoo! and search for “link:<paste the URL>” IE) link:www.fathomseo.com/

This will drop you into the Yahoo! site explorer.  From there simply click “Inlinks” and then select “Except from this Domain” from the drop down menu.

You’ll now have a fairly accurate count for the number of backlinks that this website has.  Record this number in a new column on your spreadsheet.

My search term’s number one listing on Google had 5,887 links in Yahoo!

Start another column called “In Title 1.”  For this column I want you to put the number 1 if the title of that search result had the searched keyword in it.  In my search term the title was “SEO Firm – Search Engine Marketing | Fathom SEO.”  So I would enter the number 0 in my column.

Repeat this process for the number 5 listing on your Google SERP as well, starting a new column for the number of backlinks and “In Title.”

Now, repeat the whole process for your first 20 keywords.  Painstaking, I know… but totally worth it.

I’ll also do some more explaining on why the information we are gathering is important.  For many of you that have been around the internet for some years, you may already know the key factors to getting a webpage to show up on the SERPs.  For those of you that are new, we’ll do an SEO 101 tomorrow and then analyise our results in a few days.

As always, feel free to post questions and comments.

SEO Firm – Search Engine Marketing | Fathom SEO
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Keyword Research – Relevance is Key

May 11 2010 Published by under Keyword Research

Today’s mission is going to be relatively simple. (Pun intended)

The mission is to organize the keywords we download by relevant search volume.  Every search on the internet is backed by some sort of intent from the searcher.  Our goal is to rate each search term in our list on how closely the searcher’s intent matches our idea or product.

Example:  I’m starting a website that will be geared toward “Vermont Internet Marketing and SEO.”

Search Engine Consultant – someone searching for “Search Engine Consultant” is very likely looking for… well a search engine consultant.  That matches very closely to what my website will be offering.  Score: 100% Relevant

Download SEO Tool – Who would be searching for this?  Someone who is planning on doing their own SEO?  Someone who already does SEO looking for some programs to assist them?  That isn’t what I’ll be offering, so this gets a score of 30% since there is still some chance it’s a small business owner looking for help.

Get the general idea?  If not, write a comment and I’ll explain more.

We’re going to start by opening our downloaded list of keywords we got from yesterday’s post and do a bit of organization.  So, open up that list of keywords and let’s get started.

When you first open up the file, you’ll notice that there are tons of columns.  For now, I want you to delete all but the Keyword, Global Monthly Searches, and Local Monthly Search columns.  No save this file under a different name so that you can still go back to your original file later if we need it.

Now, let’s add a column called “Relevance.”  Make this Column D.

Go through your list of each keyword and give it a relevance score of 0% to 100% based on how well you think the searcher’s intent matches your product or idea.  Keep in mind you are looking for CUSTOMERS not information junkies.  Let that guide your decision as you work though the list of keywords.

Don’t spend hours on each keyword.  This whole sheet should take you 15-20 minutes.

Finally, add another column called “Weighted.”

In this column we’re going to take the Global Monthly Searches and multiply it by our Relevance.  This will give us the amount of traffic searching that keyword each month that we believe is actually looking for our service or product.

Now sort your sheet by the Weighted column and you have an ordered list of keywords by relevance.

Tomorrow we’ll start looking at competition.  Stay tuned!

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Keyword Research – Finding Search Terms You Can Rank For

May 10 2010 Published by under Keyword Research

Keyword Research is actually the second step to starting an online business.

Step one is coming up with an idea, service, product, dream… something worth building a website for.  What I’ll start showing you today is my method for researching that idea or product to see if there is a viable online market for the idea, and if the market has space for a new competitor.

Let’s start with the first market I’m hoping to break into:  Vermont Search Engine Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Keyword Research ToolMy starting point is always a search term dump or brainstorm.  I basically make a list of all the things that someone looking for “Vermont Search Engine Marketing” could possibly type into Google or Yahoo!.  Now, for this example I’m being very specific to Vermont.  I’m not looking to go after “Search Engine Marketing.”  I’m looking to stay local and work with business in my own area.  Or at least, that’s my idea right now.

Quick Brainstorm:

vt seo, vermont internet marketing, vt search engine rankings, vt small business seo, vt search optimization

Ok, that’s a short list but I think you get the idea.

Now we need to use some tools to help us find out what other terms are related to these that people might be searching for already.  Luckily, Google has some free tools available for us.  Head over to adwords.google.com and sign-up for a free Adwords account.  Once you get to the home screen click on the “Opportunities” tab and then “Keyword Tool.”

From there, simply enter your search terms into the search box and click search.

Google now returns a bunch of searches that are similar to your original list.  I just ended up with close to 500.

Keyword Tool Exact Match

IMPORTANT STEP:  On the left of the screen toward the bottom you’ll see a little box that says “Match Types”  Be sure that ONLY Exact Match is selected.  This will give you more accurate search volume numbers moving forward.

Now this is where we need to apply some good old human interaction again.  Many of the results returned may not have anything to do with your idea or product.  One of the words Google just returned for me was “vt motel” which really has nothing to do with SEO.

At this point we need to go through the list and check all the keywords that actually apply to our product or idea.  In my case I’ve also returned results like: seo positioning, seo article, why seo.

These could all be good keywords for me, but I’m really going to focus on Vermont.  So, I’m going to save them for now and return later to put the word “Vermont” in any of the search terms that look too competitive to rank for without targeting on the local level.

Trick! — Click the Check box at the top of the list to select the entire group.  Then remove the check for any boxes for keywords you don’t want.

Ok, I know this seems like it’s going to take forever.  I just completed checking my list of 500 in about 10 minutes.  You can do it.  It’s worth the effort.

Once you’ve completed checking all the relevant results, download the selected keywords to your computer.

I need to tell you that there are some very powerful tools out there that do a lot of keyword research and analysis for you.  However, they aren’t free.  My personal favorite is Keyword Elite.

That’s it for today.  Tomorrow we’ll begin going through our list of keywords and organizing them into an initial priority list.

Please feel free to post questions or comments.  Cheers!

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