Who to discovery Keyword for a website?
When a
user visits a search engine, they type words into the search box to
find what they are looking for. The search terms they type are called
keywords and the combinations of keywords are keyphrases.
If
you imagine that building an optimized site is like cooking a meal, then
keywords are the essential ingredients. Would you attempt to cook a
complex new dish without first referring to a recipe? Would you start
before you had all the ingredients available and properly prepared? In
our analogy, keywords are your ingredients and the rest of the seven
step approach is your recipe.
Ideally,
you should undertake keyword research well before you choose a domain
name, structure your site, and build your content. However, this is not
always possible, as most webmasters only turn to SEO after they’ve built
their site.
Even
if you have a site already, it is vital to invest significant time and
energy on keyword research before starting your SEO campaign. Although
this may astonish you, I would recommend that 20% of all your SEO effort
is focused on this activity alone. If you make poor keyword selections,
you are likely to waste energy elsewhere in your SEO campaign, pursuing
avenues unlikely to yield traffic in sufficient quantity, quality, or
both. To return to our analogy, if you select poor ingredients, no
matter how good the recipe may be the meal itself will be a
disappointment – and no one will want to eat it.
Don’t
forget that one source for information about keywords is your own web
logs. This helps you avoid undoing what you’re already ranking well for.
Google Analytics’ keyword stats can also be particularly useful input
to the early stages of an SEO campaign. I learnt this lesson from a
client who ran a local catering business. She told me that many of her
customers had found her via Google, but she couldn’t understand what
they were searching on as she could never find her site in the top 50,
let alone the top 10. By investigating her Google Analytics stats, we
discovered that she was ranking well for “thanksgiving catering” due to
some client testimonials and pictures on her site. This explained why so
many of her clients were ex-pat Americans and how they were finding
your business;
What
are the Common mistakes in keyword selection?
Most
people approach SEO with a preconception – or prejudice – about what
their best keywords are. They are normally either wholly or partly
wrong. This is good for you because you are armed with this article.
There
are five key mistakes to avoid when selecting keywords:
1.
Many of my customers first approach me with the sole objective of
ranking number one on Google for the name of their business. Please
don’t misunderstand me; I am not saying that this isn’t important. If
someone you met at a party or in the street could remember your business
name and wanted to use Google to find your site, you should certainly
ensure that you appear in the top five. However, your business name is
very easy to optimize for and only likely ever to yield traffic from
people you have already met or who have heard of your business through a
word-of-mouth referral. The real power of a search engine is its
ability to deliver quality leads from people who have never heard
of your business before. As such, ranking number one for your business
name, while it’s an important foundation, is really only of secondary
importance in the race to achieve good rankings on the web.
2.
Many site owners (particularly in the business-to-business sector) make
the mistake of wanting to rank well for very esoteric and supply-side
terminology. For example, one client of mine was very happy to be in the
top 10 on Google for “Real estates,” because that was the supply-side
terminology for his main business (importing wholesale trees and
shrubs). However, fewer than 10 people a month worldwide search using
that phrase. My client would have been much better off optimizing for
“online plot booking,” which attracts a much more significant volume of
searches. In short, his excellent search engine position was useless to
him, as it never resulted in any traffic.
3
Many webmasters only want to rank well for single words (rather than
chains of words). You may be surprised to hear that (based on research
by OneStat.com) 33% of all searches on search engines are for two-word
combinations, 26% for three words, and 21% for four or more words. Just
20% of people search on single words. Why does that surprise you,
though? Isn’t that what you do when you’re searching? Even if you start
with one word, the results you get are generally not specific
Enough (so you try adding further words to refine
your search). It is therefore vital that keyword analysis is firmly
based on objective facts about what people actually search on rather
than your own subjective guess about what they use.
4
People tend to copy their competitors when choosing the words to use,
without researching in detail what people actually search for and how
many competing sites already carry these terms. Good
SEO is all about finding phrases that pay that are
relatively popular with searchers but relatively underused by your
competitors.
5
Many webmasters overuse certain keywords on their site (so-called
keyword stuffing) and underuse related keywords. Human readers find such
pages irritating and Google’s spam filters look for these unnatural
patterns and penalize them! Instead, it is much better to make liberal
use of synonyms and other words related to your main terms. This process
(often involving a thesaurus) is what information professionals call
ontological analysis.
The
best way to avoid these and other common mistakes is to follow the
following maxims:
Ø Think like your customer and use their language, not
yours.
Ø Put aside your preconceptions of what you wanted to
rank for.
Ø Put aside subjectivity and focus on the facts.
Ø Consider
popularity, competitiveness, and ontology.
In
short, you need to make a scientific study of the keywords and
keyphrases your customers and competitors actually use, and balance this
against what your competitors are doing. I use a three-step approach to
keyword analysis (known affectionately as D–A–D): discovery,
attractiveness, and deployment.
Keyword
discovery, the first step, is the process of finding all the keywords
and keyphrases that are most relevant to your website and business
proposition.
The
D–A–D (discovery,
attractiveness, and deployment.) analysis
tool:
Throughout
the steps of the D–A–D model, I will refer to a spreadsheet based tool
that always accompanies my keyword analysis. Create a new spreadsheet or
table to record your work, with six columns (from left to right):
A.
Keywords
B. Monthly searches
C. Raw competition
D. Directly competing
E. KEI
F. KOI
The
discovery shortcut: Learning from competitors:
The
place to begin your discovery is again by looking at your competitors’
sites. Try putting into Google search terms related to your business,
its products and services. For each of the top five results on each
search term, select the “View source” or “View page source” option from
your browser menu. Make a note of the keywords placed in the
<TITLE>
<META NAME=“Description”>, and <META
NAME=“Keywords”> tags.
</ TITLE>
Alternatively,
if looking through HTML code (hypertext markup language, the
programming language used to create web pages) leaves you cold, visit
one of the keyword analysis tools listed on the forum that accompanies
this book (www.seo-expertservices.co.uk ). One good example is the Abakus Top word Keyword
Check Tool: www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html.
Here you can enter the URLs of your competitors and
read off the keywords that they use.
List
all of the keywords and keyphrases you find on your competitors’ sites,
one after another, in Column A of your spreadsheet. Don’t read me wrong
here. This kind of metadata (data about data, in this case a
categorization of common terms), particularly in isolation, is not the
route to high search engine rankings (as you will see later). However,
sites in the top five on Google have generally undertaken SEO campaigns
and have already developed a good idea of what the more popular keywords
are for their (and your) niche. As such, their metadata is likely to
reflect quality keyword analysis, repeated throughout the site in other
ways. This effectively represents a shortcut that gets your campaign off
to a flying start.
Search
engines provide the modern information scientist with a hugely rich
data set of search terms commonly used by people to retrieve the web
pages they are looking for. I have coined some terms to help describe
these that I use in my business.
CUSPs
– commonly used search phrases – are phrases that people tend to use
when searching for something and, more importantly, narrowing down the
search results returned. There are normally two parts to a CUSP, a “stem
phrase” and a “qualifying phrase.”
For
example, a stem for Truss might be “business cards” and a qualifier
“full color.” Additional qualifiers might be “cheap,” “luxury,” “does it
yourself,” and a whole host of other terms.
Sometimes
qualifiers are strung together, in terms such as “cheap Caribbean
cruises.” And often people will use different synonyms or otherwise
semantically similar words to describe the same qualifying phrase.
For
example, “discounted” and “inexpensive” are synonyms of “cheap.”
However, searchers have learnt that phrases like “last minute” and
“special offer” might return similar results. As such, searchers are
just as likely to search for “last minute cruises” or “special offer
cruises” as “cheap cruises.” I use the acronym SEP (semantically
equivalent phrase) to describe both simple synonyms and more intuitive
variants, and Google is capable of recognizing both. When undertaking
keyword research, I tend to group CUSPs into SEPs and then group SEPs
under the stem to which they relate.
For
example:
Stem: software development, website development.
• SEP: low cost website
development
CUSPs: website development,
Discounted
Website development, Special
Offer website development
• SEP: Luxury website development
CUSPs: Premium website
development, Quality website development.
For
speed, I often simply list the search phrases under a stem one after
another, separated by commas.
Identifying related keywords:
Related
keyphrases and keywords have a similar meaning or inference to your
main keyphrases and keywords. There is reliable empirical evidence that
Google and other search engines make increasing use of semantics in
assessing the quality of a page for ranking purposes. A low-quality web
page, designed by spammers for search engine, rather than human,
consumption, will typically be crammed full of the same search phrase,
repeated over and over again. It won’t contain the related words.
A
high-quality page (naturally written) will, by contrast, typically be
full of words semantically related to the main search term used. As
search engines move ever further toward employing semantic intelligence
in their ranking systems, using related keywords will become ever more
important to avoid scoring low in the rankings.
Perhaps
more importantly, you should remember that the phrases you might use to
search for something will not be the same phrases that someone else
would naturally use, so some research is required. There is an excellent
tool on the web for locating related keywords, the GoRank Ontology
Finder (Related Keywords Lookup Tool). This tool runs a “related word”
enquiry against the Google index. See www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/ . Visit the forum (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk ) for more excellent tools like these.
Try
using an ontology tool (and an ordinary thesaurus) to identify some
related terms. Your optimization campaign should ideally use a mixture
of these words in both on-page and off-page activities.
Often
the words you find through an ontological check will actually be used
more frequently by searchers than the ones you had originally selected.
For
example:
Truss
wants to explore related words for his important qualifying words “cheap”
and “quality.” He uses both the GoRank Ontology Finder and
Microsoft Word’s Thesaurus function and finds the following:
Ø Cheap: buy, cheap, discount, low cost, low priced,
last minute, cheapest, bargain, cheaper, inexpensive, economical,
affordable, cut-price, budget, reduced, inexpensive, on sale
Ø Quality: luxury, superior, class, value, five star,
luxurious, high, highest He adds suitable combinations of his main
keywords and these qualifying words to the keywords list on his
spreadsheet.
Long-tail
analysis:
Long-tail
keyphrases are typically related to your main strategic keywords and
generally include three, four, or more words. For example, “web hosting
linux,” “cheap web hosting,” and “web hosting control panel” might be
typical long-tail phrases for a web-design business. Such phrases are
known as long tail because the frequency with which they are searched on
reduces as the length of the phrase increases (in a long tail that
tends toward zero searches).
In
the next face, on keyword attractiveness, I will show you how to assess
the degree of popularity and competitiveness attached to each keyword
and keyphrase. However, before we get there I can give you a sneak
preview: Generally, the longer a phrase is, the more attractive it is,
in relative terms. Here is a typical long-tail graph:
Long-tail
analysis seeks to identify, for your most common keyword categories (or
“stems”), the phrases that pay where demand is relatively high but
competition relatively weak; what I call relatively underexploited
keyphrases.
I
will return to phrases that pay in the next section. However, at this
point all you need to understand is that it is a good idea to have
several keyword chains (that link two, three, or even four keywords
together) in your optimization ingredients.
Returning
to the Abakus Keyword Tool (or using your SEO software), it is now time
to analyze your competitors’ sites more deeply. This time you are
looking for the most commonly repeated two-, three-, and four-word
keyphrases in the page text. Add these to your spreadsheet, again in
Column A. Repeat the task for different sites and for different pages
within the same site. You are aiming for a list of approximately 100
keywords and keyphrases at this stage.
Truss
investigates his competitors’ sites again (only this time going down
much further in the rankings and trying many different searches). He
settles on a group of multi-word phrases that appear
most often on competing sites, of which the
following are just a few examples:
Ø Two-word phrases: business
cards, letterhead printing, compliment slips, printed labels, address
labels, print design.
Ø Three-word phrases: quality
business cards, business card printing, business card design, laminated
business cards, letterhead stationery printing, online printing
letterheads, avery address labels, printed address labels, sticky
address labels, design brochures leaflets, full color printing, business
brochures flyers, business printing services, online business printing,
business brochure printing
Ø Four-word
phrases:
online business card printing, business card printing services, business
card printing service, business form printing services, cheap business
card printing, business card printing company, custom business card
printing, business card design printing, business card discount
printing, business card printing Idaho, business card printing Boise.
Truss
was interested to note that “business cards” appeared more often than
“business card.” He has learnt another key lesson: Always pluralize your
keywords where you can. You will achieve higher traffic this way,
because of the way search engines handle queries and users perform
searches. As I have said, learn from your competitors where you can!
For a
typical small (10-page) site, you should now have approximately 35–40
one-word and two-word phrases and perhaps as many as 60–75 three-word
and four-or-more-word combinations.
Which
Keyword very is attractiveness?
You
may be wondering at this point how you are going to optimize your site
for more than 100 keyphrases. Well, stop worrying! We are now going to
narrow down the target list substantially in the second D–A–D(
discovery–attractiveness–deployment.) step, keyword attractiveness.
Keyword
attractiveness is all about balancing the demand for your chosen
keywords against the number of competing sites supplying relevant
results. Attractive keyphrases are those that are relatively
underexploited – these are the phrases that pay.
Imagine
that SEO is like target practice, where you only have a certain amount
of ammunition. There are several different targets you can shoot at, all
at varying distances away from your gun sites. You are seeking
bullseyes. Would you shoot at only one target, putting hole after hole
through the bullseye? No! Would you aim at the targets furthest away
from you and see round after round expended fruitlessly? No! This
analogy is in fact very apposite, as SEO is a very similar challenge.
You
may think that you have an unlimited number of bullets. After all, you
could create as many pages as there are variants in search terms and
build as many links as the web will support. However, in practice you
are limited by your own time, the tolerance of your customers, and the
Google spam filters. Your time is probably better spent running your
business than sitting at your computer doing SEO into the small hours
(that’s what people like me are for). Your customers are also unlikely
to be impressed by hundreds of similar pages. Finally, Google does look
actively for – and deflate the ranking of – sites with an excessive
number of inbound links (links from other sites) relative to their
traffic, or for time periods where the links to a site have grown much
more quickly than one would naturally expect.
So
choose your targets carefully. Make sure you take the easier bullseyes
on offer (where the target is close by). Similarly, spread your effort
across a wide range of targets. Finally, do not give up on the faraway
targets, but be mindful of how much ammunition you are using on them.
Keyword attractiveness is the toolset you use to decide where to fire –
and how often.
How
to check the Keyword popularity ?
The
first component of keyword attractiveness is popularity. What are the
keywords most customers will use today to find your site? You may think
you know already (and possibly you do), but then again you may be
surprised.
One
of the most wonderful things about search engines is that they make
available (for public research purposes) “insider data” about what
people search for on their sites. They do this in a variety of ways,
generally through application program interfaces (APIs), which allow
developers to point their web-based or desktop software directly at the
underlying search engine index.
Imagine
that: basically the highest-quality market research data that has ever
been made available continually refreshed in real time and based on
massive sample sizes. Wouldn’t you be mad not to take advantage of this
data? Of course, and I am going to show you how.
To
access the industry data yourself, you basically have two choices.
Either you purchase SEO software that directly interacts with industry
data sources; or you make use of the (now relatively limited) free
keyword-analysis tools online.
On
the forum (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk ), I got some information from here to the
comprehensive and up-to-date list of all the most important SEO tools
and software, including those appropriate for keyword-popularity
research. Via the forum, you can obtain a special discounted price on
the software I most frequently use.
However,
for the purposes of this section, I will work with the current best
free resource: www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ . The Digital Point tool allows you to check for
recent combinations of search words (and their derivatives) on the
search engines, returning search frequencies for each. The data you will
be accessing is for the most recently completed calendar month.
Bear
this in mind if your business is seasonal in nature. For example, if you
sell Halloween costumes, you are likely to get an inflated view of
search rates if you undertake this analysis in March and thus work on
the February data!
Visit
the tool and try entering some of the two-, three-, and fourword
combinations on your keyword list. Make a note of the resulting
frequencies. You will notice that you can drill down from phrases into
their subcategories (by clicking on a phrase in the results).
You
should really multiply the Digital Point search numbers returned by
approximately 2.5 (which extrapolates its numbers to a rough estimate of
worldwide searches). You can then add these numbers to your spreadsheet
(in Column B) to give you the top keywords and phrases for your
business, based on popularity alone.
What
is the Keyword competitiveness?
To
know the popularity of keywords is really less than half the battle,
however. It is vital to know what you are up against: If you are
entering a very competitive marketplace (where there are millions of
sites using exactly your keywords), it will be a long and hard slog to
get up there with the very best. Don’t pick the targets that are miles
away from your gun sites!
Keyword
competitiveness is extracted from the number of results returned from a
Google search on the search terms concerned. For example, a search on
online java class returns, at the time of writing, around 245 million
results.
Return
to your spreadsheet and look at Column C, raw competition. Perform a
search on Google for each of your listed keyphrases in turn and enter
the number of results into your spreadsheet. Once you’ve done this, a
numerical sort of Column C gives you, in ranking order, the most
competitive raw search terms related to your business, products, and
services.
Directly
competing sites (Column D) are those that have the exact keyword phrase
you are analyzing in the anchor text (the text the user clicks) of
links to their site from other websites (rather than simply having the
words in that phrase on their pages). Directly competing sites are your
serious competition: They are likely already to have invested time and
energy into search engine optimization campaigns. They are also likely
to continue doing so in the future.
To
work out D for any search phrase, I use the Trusstechnosofts: Google
operator. For example, a search on “Trusstechnosofts: online java class”
returns 365,000 results and “Trusstechnosofts: online .net class
printing” returns just 13,300. Truss is beginning to smile at last –
suddenly the odds don’t look quite so daunting.
Perform
an allinanchor: search on Google for each term in turn and enter the
number of results into your spreadsheet in Column D. A numerical sort of
the column gives you, in ranking order, a better idea of the truly
competitive search terms related to your business, products, and
services. By now, your spreadsheet should look something like this early
draft of Truss:
Keywords |
Monthly searches |
Raw competition |
Directly competing |
KEI |
KOI |
Online class | 214,349 | 245,000,000 | 365,000 | ||
Online java class | 19,524 | 42,100,000 | 36,600 | ||
Online java, .net class |
1,265 | 516,000,000 | 13,300 |
Note:
KEI (keyword
effectiveness index).
KOI (Keyword opportunity index)
To
speed up your extraction of Google search results numbers, you may wish
to make use of another neat tool, the Google Smackdown analyzer at www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp , which allows you to compare the overall frequency
of two competing keyword sets across the whole of Google’s results.
Keyword
opportunity index (KOI)
|
|
