The Maine SEO Blog

This is part two in a four part series on the 4 Steps to Getting the Most SEO Bang for your Buck.

So you just finished getting all of your best keywords and phrases. Now what do you do with them? Optimize for them.

Website

Your website is obviously going to be one of the most important places for your keywords. A few key things to remember:

• Optimize page-by-page. Your homepage is going to include a lot of your bigger keywords and act as an umbrella page. Deeper pages are going to get more and more specific.
• Keyword usage is dependent on the length of whatever space we’re talking about. If you only have 200 words on a page, don’t use a given keyword more than 2 times. If you have closer to 500 words, you can use the keyword 3 or maybe 4 times.
• It’s about balance. Optimizing for keywords should never trump writing for your audience. Make sure your copy still makes sense for your users.

Where to put your keywords on the website:

• Title tag – Front load your most important keywords, and don’t use a keyword more than twice here. Include your company name last and your location, if you have a brick-and-mortar location.
• Domain/URL – If you have an established domain/URL, don’t change it! But if you’re just building your site, keep your keywords in mind.
• Navigation – We all need About and Contact pages, and while they aren’t necessarily keyword rich, they’re necessary. For other page names, make sure you don’t stuff your keywords.
• Meta-description – Not only good for a marketing message, but also a great spot for keywords.
• Header – Be careful here: describe the page without stuffing your keywords. And remember: you can have more than one header tag on a page!
• Links – Google (and your users, for that matter) don’t understand what happens when you “click here” or “learn more”. Make sure you link keyword rich phrases to other pages on your website.
• Copy – Of course! Include your keywords – and very importantly, variations of them – in the copy.

Blog

Your blog provides a huge opportunity to target niche sets of keywords. By default, your Content Management System (CMS) may offer different setups, but typically all blogs will offer the following:

• Each new blogpost is a new web page. Therefore, you have one more opportunity to rank well at the search engines.
• The title of your post is also the title tag of the page (unless it’s overridden by a plugin), so make it keyword rich.
• You can further optimize by applying categories and tags to your posts.
• Blogposts are great link bait; for as we all know: the more (relevant) incoming links, the better.

Social Media

Use the keyword analysis you did to uncover terms to use on your social profiles, too!

On Facebook, branded keywords will certainly help people find you; but make sure you also use keywords within posts. Searches on Facebook could cause your fan page to come up in the results!

Twitter yields a larger opportunity: with tools like Twitter search, Twellow, NearbyTweets, and more, you have the opportunity to be found by people using your

On LinkedIn, use your keywords in your profile, especially in your profile heading. Participate in Groups and the Answers section that also use those keywords.

Articles

Don’t forget to use your keywords in any articles or guest posts you write. Many of the same rules will apply from the website/blog, but also remember that you can apply categories when submitting your articles. Also, don’t forget to include a keyword rich link back to your website!

Next time we’ll talk about measuring your success.

Photo credit: cliff1066™

Nicki Hicks
Optimization, FTW!

This is part one in a four part series on the 4 Steps to Getting the Most SEO Bang for your Buck.

How do you know what your audience is searching for? Do you just guess? Take a stab in the dark?

No longer, my friend.

Brainstorm

Start by brainstorming a list of keywords. Here’s a great guide to help you create that list from a ton of different angles.

Once you’ve got your list, it’s time to do research and figure out what people are actually searching for. Research may mean you’ll be surprised that your audience isn’t searching for the keywords you guessed, but a similar term instead. That’s what we’ll find out with keyword research tools.

Keyword Research Tools

There are a ton of keyword research tools out there, some paid and some free. Here’s a smattering of both:

Paid

• Wordtracker
• Keyword Discovery
• Raven SEO Tools

Free

• Wordtracker (the free version)
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Google Insights
• Wordtracker Keyword Questions

The goal in using any of these tools is to find those diamonds in the rough: keywords with low competition and high search volume.

In this example, I used the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and searched for “internet marketing”.

How to Decipher Keyword Research Tools

Some really quick background if you’ve never used this tool before:

• Keyword – keyword or phrase that users have searched for on Google, pretty self-explanatory
• Competition – based on Google’s algorithm to identify the number of other websites (in this case) bidding on the keyword. (From a relative sense, the numbers will be about the same for an organic search.)
• Global monthly searches – the average number of searches for the term, worldwide
• Local monthly searches – the average number of searches for the term, nationally
• Local search trends – how the searches for the term change over the past year, nationally

From these results, I can see that:

• “Internet marketing” has a ton of searches and mid-range competition, so I’ll want to use that term. Depending on the page, however, it might be a little too vague.
• Terms like “internet marketing marketing”, “internet marketing firms(s)”, “internet marketing companies”, “internet marketing on line”, and “online internet marketing” are probably not going to make sense for the page I’m creating; so I’m going to disregard those.
• “Internet marketing tool” gets a ton of searches, but it also has extremely high competition. If this is applicable to the page I’m optimizing for, I would certainly use it, but also supplement with less competitive terms.
• “Internet marketing [for] businesses”, “business internet marketing”, and “business to business internet marketing” all have high search volume and mid-range competition, so I’ll definitely want to incorporate those terms.
• “Internet marketing strategies” also has a high search volume/mid-range competition. It may be too abstract for the page I’m optimizing for, but it would be perfect for a blogpost!

Create your list

From there, I typically separate my terms:

• Terms that don’t apply/don’t make sense (these get deleted altogether)
• Terms with high search volume/high competition – these might be able to be used in conjunction with less competitive terms
• Terms with high search volume/low competition - these are our diamonds in the rough!
• Terms with medium search volume/medium competition – we’ll also want to hold on to these
• Terms with low search volume/high competition – these are rare, but more than likely aren’t worth the effort
• Terms with low search volume/low competition – these may be better suited for blogposts or supplementing highly competitive terms
• Terms best suited for blogpost/article ideas (how to’s, questions, lists, etc.)

Now that you have a list of keywords to optimize for, it’s time to optimize your pages. We’ll cover that next time…

Photo credit: shutterhacks

Nicki Hicks
Keyword Researcher

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Google stats

• Billion users, billions of searches
• August 2008 – over 7 million search for Britney Spears, over 1,000 misspelling of Britney’s name, top 10 misspellings of those misspellings add up to over 900,000 additional searches

Longtail search

• 55% of queries have more than 3 words
• 70% of queries have no exact keyword match
• 20% of queries in a given day have not been seen in the previous 90 days

What to use?

• Wonder Wheel
• Search-based Keyword Tool
• Insights
• Traffic estimator
• AdWords Keyword Tool

Final thoughts

• Problem: You need features from all products, and need to use them all.
• Keyword Tool has 2 million + users and gets 300 million + ideas a month
• Recently, the tool was updated and relaunched, including using Google.com – specific numbers.

Q&A

Why’d you get rid of the old tool?

The only infrastructure was going away. The new tool primes Google to be able to add a lot more functionality.

Geotargeting: Will that be available for the new keyword tool?

Getting stats for a city/state level is in the works.

Global monthly/Local monthly

Global: last 12 months and global search volume

Local: only what you have your settings on (e.g. English United States) Local is actually National.

What is the minimum keyword volume a keyword has to have to show up in the keyword tool?

No volume threshold. Pricing threshold. Any query has an opportunity to show up in the keyword tool.

Google has various filters to show only things that are commercial.

How much is filtered out for privacy?

No stats; but from a search advertising perspective, you’re getting a good coverage of all search terms.

Logged in vs. non-logged in

When you’re logged in to KWT, you could get up to 1,000 queries.

When you’re not logged in to KWT, you only get up to 100 queries.

Google Suggest

Keyword Tool uses Google Suggest, on top of a lot of other metrics.

Commercially used keywords

The KWT uses commercially used keyword. A trigger is when a keyword is used in an ad.

Search-based keyword tool

Thresholds on search-based keyword tool are very similar.

Search-based keyword tool is being phased out because the technology has been incorporated in KWT.

Who wants a tool that shows all the raw data of Google search terms?
EVERYONE. (Look for something like this in the next year.)

Do you pull in realtime data?

Volume numbers given are for the past 12 months.

Similar words have similar volume numbers.

Volume is rounded.

Traffic Estimator

You can get the estimated traffic for terms inputted, and can filter exact/broad the same way as KWT

Filters on KWT

1. Commercial filter
2. Privacy filter

Ad impressions vs. search volume

Keywords are shown for AdWords keywords that have been purchased. The search volume is for all searches.

Why am I seeing different numbers when I’m not logged in vs. when I am?

That bug should be fixed – it was because of switching over from the old interface.

How is punctuation treated?

Gather separate results for punctuation vs. non-punctuation

Baris Gultekin, Group Product Manager, Google

In the other day’s webinar from SEOmoz, a point Rand Fishkin made really stuck out. During the section on Real Time Search, Rand mentioned: “Your blog doesn’t really target long tail searches”. The reason this point stuck out is because I’ve always talked about how blogposts are a great way to leverage the long tail.

With over 200 posts under its belt, this blog has built up a fair amount of trust over the past two years. However, 200 posts aren’t much when it comes to long tail searchers – targeting more or less 250 odd long tail keywords isn’t going to bring in much traffic.

Rand mentioned UGC (user-generated content) websites like Wikipedia…

…that boast over 40 million unique pages and targeted articles. Talk about targeting long tail searchers.

How can you target the long tail?

Just because you have less than 1 million posts doesn’t mean you should throw your hands up and give up on your blog. You can still target those long tail searchers – slowly but surely, and here are a few ways:

• Use tools like WordTracker Keyword Questions to get long tail questions the community has actually asked.
• Don’t neglect Google Analytics. Be sure to check the keyword section – especially near the bottom (with 1 or 2 searches) to see what long tail terms your visitors are already using. You can also leverage search terms in order to optimize better for what people can’t find.
• Use questions your customers ask you in real life; chances are, they’re asking them online too.
• A little experimentation. The sad truth is, long tail keyword research is nearly impossible, and sometimes it’s about taking the keywords you’ve already discovered as powerful and putting a different spin on them.

Nicki Hicks
Long-tailer

What people search for changes all the time. It changes because of everything from news and events to seasons, and even to the time of day. When you think about it, it’s intimidating to think about how you could possibly keep up with all of the change!

A blog is certainly the easiest and most efficient way to keep up with search trends – by creating keyword rich content that targets popular keywords of the moment. Creating articles, videos, and even images are also great ways to leverage hot keywords. But…where do you find these elusive keywords? Here are a few tools that can help.

Twitter Search

Twitter Search has a section at the bottom of the page for trending topics. You’ll most certainly get up-to-date (or to the minute) information about what the Twitterverse is talking about.

Google Trends

Likewise, Google provides a comprehensive list of what the nation is searching for on the homepage of Google Trends. (Search for topics in your industry to see a graph of trends over time related to that query.)

Google Insights

Google Insights provides “breakout” terms. Simply search for an industry keyword, then scroll through the trend graph, searches by region, and you’ll see a list of “top” and “rising” searches.

WordTracker Keyword Questions

By far one of my favorite tools for blogging inspiration, WordTracker Keyword Questions will give you a list of actual questions people have asked about your query – and how many times that question has been asked in the past year.

I’m sure there are a ton of other tools out there for keeping up with trending topics; but do you really need more than 4?

Nicki Hicks
What’s hot and what’s not

One of the first rules for keyword research is use more than one tool. Lucky for us, Google’s got a whole suite of tools – and better yet – they’re completely free!

1. Keyword Synonyms

I quite honestly don’t use the Google Synonym Tool as often as I probably should, but it will give you some great ideas when you start your keyword research.

2. Google Insights and 3. Google Trends

Google Insights will give you a good idea of what is popular right now (including similar “hot” keywords and phrases); while Google Trends gives a better indicator of how a keyword performs over time (Google has data as far back as 2004).

4. Google Analytics

You didn’t realize your Analytics could give you insight to what people are searching for?! Sure! Look no further than the keyword section. The bottom of the list will more than likely be rich with long tail searches. Maybe you could do a better job optimizing for those keywords, or maybe they’ll give you ideas for even more keyword research.

Another great place to look for keyword inspiration in Analytics is within your site search keywords. What were people looking for that they couldn’t find on their own? You might find some opportunity there.

5. Search-based Keyword Tool

Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool is based on AdWords bidding prices and competition, but you can get a great idea of search volume using it. It’s important to remember that this tool uses keywords in conjunction with existing websites. (So, if you don’t have a website yet, pop in one of your competitors’ sites!)

6. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

To date, Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool has been one of my favorite research tools. Again, based on AdWords competition, you’ll get the added benefit of global and local monthly search volume statistics.

7. (The New) AdWords Keyword Tool

I couldn’t be more excited for this new addition to the keyword research toolbox from Google: the new AdWords Keyword Tool. That much more robust, this tool adds a new column: local search trends. Even in a few short days of using it, I’ve found that, while you have to sort through the irrelevant keywords a bit more, you’ll get a ton of helpful synonyms and related search terms.

8. Google Sets

Ironically, I saw that Kasi Gajtkowski from Hall Web Services just put up a new blogpost about Google Sets – a new keyword research tool from Google. This tool will give you more loosely related (but still relevant) keywords related to the search terms you enter. That way, you’ll really be able to expand your keyword research and get some ideas you’d never thought of!

9. Google Suggest

While it’s not traditionally a keyword research tool, Google Suggest is an out-of-the-box way to get keyword ideas.

With so many free tools to choose from, you’re bound to be a keyword pro in no time. Which is your favorite to use?

Nicki Hicks
Google Tool Savant

When’s the last time you revamped the copy on your website?

The leaves are in the midst of falling, and now might be the perfect time to rework your website a little.

It’s about the title

It’ll be the first place any SEO suggests adding your best keywords, the title is the easiest way to increase your search engine visibility. If you don’t want to (or need to) do a lot of copyediting, this might be the perfect place to start. For some ideas, you might want to head over to Google Insights or Trends for what’s hot right now.

Content

When it comes to the copy on your pages, you know your business far better than anyone else could imagine to. However, the point is to see your company through the eyes of your customers. Optimize for the keywords they’re searching for. Do you come up in a Google search for the right queries? Move through the site like they do. Is it easy to navigate? Think like your customer.

‘Tis the season

You might need a change simply due to the nature of your business. Do you notice your customer flow changes seasonally? If you run a lodging or hotel business, the answer is obvious; but for other companies it might be more subtle. Update your copy accordingly.

Blogging makes it easy

This is where a blog comes in handy. Even if you do have a blog, you should still spice up your copy and titles every so often. But with a hot topic or news, you won’t have to as often. Just blog about it! That post has the ability to rank (just make sure you funnel people from your blog to your website).

Give it a facelift

There’s no need to update every page on your website, but maybe a facelift here and there – starting with the homepage – could really do some good! Search engines love fresh, unique content. Then again, maybe your copy is perfect the way it is. Either way, pay it a visit every once and again and just read it through. Make sure everything is still accurate and up-to-date.

Nicki Hicks
Content is the Spice of Life

Photo Credit

A few months ago, one of the folks I follow on Twitter posted a link to Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions, a great little tool that gives you insight into the world of long tail search. Or, as Wordtracker puts it: “find the questions people are asking in your market”.

It uses questions people have actually searched for and – bonus! – how many times within the past year they’ve been searched for. But don’t let the low number scare you – 1. we are talking about long tail here and 2. this is the number of people who used this exact wording.

Here are the questions about keywords:

And here are some about SEO:

The questions on social media were particularly interesting:

It just goes to show you…it might be worth taking a look at the keywords before you write your next blogpost, article, and especially webpage in order to target the long tail. Interestingly enough, as I was writing this, Jill Whalen posed a question to the Twitterverse about this very topic. Here are some of the responses.

Nicki Hicks
Long Tail Searcher

Dear Confused,

Although you can perform SEO at any point before or after the launch of a Web site, I can think of three good reasons why it’s better to start with SEO:

1. It’s less expensive. A good keyword analysis (an important part of a healthy breakfast an SEO package) will drive your content and your copy; if you do it after the site is built, you’re in effect doing the work twice.
2. It’s market research. A keyword analysis may uncover some opportunities that you hadn’t thought of yet; new topics to cover, even new services to offer.
3. It will help focus your social media strategy. You can take your optimal keywords and start working them into your tweets, your Facebook fan page, your YouTube videos and your LinkedIn profile…all things you can be working on while your Web designer builds out your new site.

There is some parts of SEO that can’t be performed until after the site is launched, specifically a link building campaign. Obviously, other sites, blogs and directories won’t want to link to a coming soon page; they’ll be looking for something of value if they’re going to be linking to you.

Rich Brooks
SEO for Small Businesses

Allow me to preface this by saying: SEO is an art, not a science. So my recipe for title perfection needs to be experimented with – you will have different results with every industry. That said, titles are important. It can be argued they are the most important.

As always, start by figuring out what your customers are searching for. If you don’t optimize for the right words, then you really don’t have a shot at even being a choice on a search results page.

Keeping in mind what the page is about, here’s a hand-to-the-forehead thought: you’ll want to incorporate those keywords in the title. Now you sit down to write that fabulous title tag and wonder how long should it be? SEOs disagree about this, but: there is no correct length to a good title. Google allows for 65 characters to be shown in the SERPs and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a big deal if the title is 65+ characters. My rule of thumb? The same as copy writing: as long as it takes to get the job done.

That said, don’t create such a long title that expands past the width of my browser (in a wide screened Mac, to boot). Along the same lines, please please PLEASE don’t stuff the title full of every synonym for your keywords that you can think of.

Alright, so what have we got now? A bunch of really great keywords. Now, put them together in a way that makes sense – something that accurately describes the page.

This next part is your choice: your company name. The thing is, as long as you have a fairly unique name, you’ll rank well for someone searching for your name. I tend to put it in every title just for good measure.

Finally, I put in the location. Obviously this would only apply for local businesses. The thing to remember is that local search is dependent on more than just the title; but having it here is absolutely helpful.

Last but not least, is the way it looks – and most people quite honestly may not think about it, but would you click on a ReSuLt tHaT LoOkEd lIkE ThIs? My personal preference is to capitalize the first letter of words that make sense – much as you would for a blog post title. Then separate major “sections” (in this case: keywords, company name, and location) with a mixture of colons, semicolons, hyphens, and vertical lines: whichever you prefer.

So, in the end we have something that looks like this:

Really Great Stupendous Clickable Exactly What I’m Looking For Phrase: My Company – Where I Am, USA

Nicki Hicks
Page Title Extraordinaire