Maine SEO Blog » Keyword Research

How to Optimize Your Web Presence: Step 2 of 4 on Getting the Most SEO Bang for Your Buck

Nicki — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:24:55 +0000

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!

How to Research Keywords: Step 1 of 4 on Getting the Most SEO Bang for Your Buck

Nicki — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:03:49 +0000

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

Free

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

Inner View: Google’s Keyword Research Tools (from SMX East)

Nicki — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 17:22:35 +0000

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?

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

Commercial filter
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

Why Blogging Won’t Target Long Tail Searches

Nicki — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:26:30 +0000

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

How to Target Hot Keywords and Phrases: 4 Tools to Find Out What Your Audience is Searching For Right Now

Nicki — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:45:51 +0000

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.

Nicki Hicks
What’s hot and what’s not