Keyword Selection Strategy

Keyword Selection Strategy

Keyword selection is one of the first steps in implementing a search engine optimization strategy. It goes without saying that if you select and optimize for the wrong keywords, your overall optimization campaign is worthless.

Discuss the article here. You can read the article here .

Sorry ducani - I thought I hit the quote buttom - but must have been edit

Keyword selection is one of the first steps in implementing a search engine optimization strategy. [/quote]

Some very good tips on how to make a web page better, if you are not already using them.

This is a very good discussion to represent how SEO practices must change to meet the times.

Keywording it works! ...there is no doubt in that however, if you are operating your SEO business this way TODAY or you are the do-it-yourselfer, this really isn't effective marketing, promotion, and sales management.

Exceptional SEOs are successful for one reason... they match search engines' move for move to continuously improve.

There is nothing wrong with the article... the information is sound but there are far superiors optimization practices to take a website from scratch and develop sales.

I don't keyword it, I don't rank it, I don't even visitor it (the latter meaning visitors are not the end objective) sales are (unless a information only site)!

You can't make a website or even a webpage successful by merely picking "keywords" or "keyphrases" from some tool that suggests it's a hot one - and rank it. This is under-productive and success can be a fair ways off.

Tools lie - they give you a ballpark to pitch in but frankly -- never instruct you:

1. where the batter is,

2. what pitch to throw, and

3. let's not forget -- you are blind-folded at the time.

This isn't a good approach as:

Out of 100 pitches - how many walks will you have?

Not long ago a client paid me $1000.00 per month to rank him on two phrases - that was nearly a year ago.

All the tools suggested 1000 uses/day/phrase, three weeks later he was #1 on one, #8 on the other.

Four weeks after that #1 and #1, nice marketable title that's 2K visitors per day - sorry max was-- 19 for one term, 27 on the other.

Was he happy?

That's was the easiest 12K/year strategy I ever had but I doubt he would be a client after a year so I re-did the strategy my way.

You can't make a website/webpage very successful overnight - If the text copy of each page sucks - keyword it all you want you are not going to rank it effectively - in a very short period of time.

Google has made this process - extremely quick and quick successes give you the time to appreciate what really does work - but with measureable results already in hand, and the client loves you for it.

My appropriate: (coined by Brett Tabke)

The Spaghetti Effect - get it out there now with what is on the page - and see what sticks. (You can rank in Google in 1 week - admittedly using those keyphases that don't produce much individually - but collectively they all count.

You really can't optimize for a term that produces 1 - 2 uses per day or per month but believe me they all add up, and hands down beats keywording it since they are extremely target and actually produces sales... (which is what the average business owner really wants)

This is what many SEOs miss by looking through Wordtracker, Overture, or any other keyword tools. They miss the opportunity to really show the client -- keywords are less important than the visitor... keywords don't buy -- visitors do.

This is also the difference between SEOing and marketing.

Targeting the wrong term is a cliche since the that right term that an SEO ranks you #1 on which, produces one thousand uses per day is 99.9% of the time is 95% not your clients market...

or the equivalent of 50 solid leads - but it took you 5 months with nothing to show for it in the mean time.

The numbers sure look good on paper, but doesn't really help the client (or yourself).

I optimize in three stages:

Stage #1. add all those article tips to the webpage content.

h1 - h6, bold, change fonts to an external CCS, remove all JavaScript (external file), remove all Meta tags except charset, language, title element, page title same.

add title attribute and lastly validate.

I use a python tool to automate much of this - a hundred page website is complete in a few hours. (Did a 12,000 page site in 6 hours).

...and upload within a week "results" and quite effective

stage #2 - what sticks - success is built on quickness.

The single greatest reason why this is far superior than keyword it -- I have factual realtime evidence that a term I got ranked (a bit) by really doing nothing (and someone clicked on) is far more likely a qualified lead (and ranking higher would produce more), and

by applying a few internal and external links to that specific lead generating term, will get it to #1 quickly and more qaulified leads.

Rank what you can rank on today, progressively work your way up the ladder.

The Spaghetti Effect is all results and no ego.

Note: not one keyword tools actually tells you who is using that term.

example if a term gets 100 uses a day and 100 WPG search for it... you get zero out of it.

Anyway rambled on long enough.

Very interesting perspective, ducani, but I'm having a little trouble understanding what those superior SEO practices are.

It almost looks like they are two main things: 1) content and 2) link pop. You didn't say that, that's my initial conclusion as I'm struggling to understand what you are indentifying as superior SEO practices.

I say content because you indicated you are using a python tool to do a hundred page site in a few hours. Sounds like you do well partly because you have a ton of content.

You say, "by applying a few internal and external links to that specific lead generating term, will get it to #1 quickly and more qaulified leads." That's link pop at work, isn't it? Your point was in part that it was for a specific lead generating term rather than a keyword chosen from a keyword tool.

I have stats that tell me what terms are bringing visitors in from SE but how does one determine which of those terms actually convert to sales? Is that part of your shopping cart or do you use some other software, too?

Sorry if I missed the boat, ducani. I got that you are saying there are superior optimization practices but I'm not feeling very sure I understand what you are saying those superior techniques are. Content and link pop? Is that close?

bigal:-?

Actually that was me - I accidentally edited ducani intro to the article (I thought I depressed quote).

But yes - a 1 page site is extremely difficult to rank, 10 pages easier - you have topic breadth, 100 pages, you have topic depth, 1000 page most certainly it can rank.

In addition, with more pages you have more link (internal) and probably appeal to a larger link partner audience, and most certainly directories.

Thus again - keywording it isn't really the focus of SEO, developing coherent copy, and links is.

I say "leads" because that is precisely what SEO does - provides your website "hot leads" and the more specific these leads are - the greater chance of a sale.

Nearly all cookie-based trackers allow conversion solutions with them - but if you don't paid for it, or you don't use it then sure -- you have not gauge to gauge any strategy.

My previous comment were more suggessive that in a matter of days (not months) you can rank a client - not on those Wordtracker extremely high usage terms, but on terms a single person will use in a month.

So yes content and links - but rather than doing all the development and research first - get something tangible out there for bots to chew on... well you work! ;)

I did an interesting analysis (well interesting for me, hopefully for you too!) on the trial wordtracker results against my own stats and the results were extremely disappointing.

Without going into the analysis in depth, I basically chose the top 10 phrases that people use to find my site, analysed my ranking, and what wordtracker says of each of the phrases.

I could find no meaningful correlation whatsoever between the activity that wordtracker said related to these words and what the reality was with my site.

For instance the top traffic generating phrase (for which I rank #4 in google) came in with a count of 63, while a different phrase (which I have #6 ranking) had a wordtracker count of 132 but generated a fifth of the visitors. My 9th most popular phrase had a count of zero with wordtracker. I only quote the count figure because the 24hrs figure was zero for almost all my phrases.

I have seen this tool recommended in numerous SEO chats etc - am I misunderstanding the results completely? I appreciate that wordtracker does not necessarily equate with google, but I would have thought that comparisons could be made. If not - what is the point, as it the single largest generate of traffic for most sites.

I'm going to see if I can get a representative from WordTracker to come here and provide some light on this.

My name is Andy Mindel from Wordtracker.com and I was asked by rustybrick to help clear up any concerns over the validity of the Wordtracker results.

BCNman, thanks for sharing your findings. Could I ask for some more specific information on your keywords and results. Just the top five or so keywords and the traffic that you are seeing from them.

Thanks

OK that would be good - I want it to work as it could be an invaluable resource.

As I'm on the spot I've taken a fresh look at my stats - it's difficult to recreate the analysis for a different month as we are a seasonal site and so the top keywords change.

One thing that might sway the figures though is that the keyword ranked top by wordtracker, while not outstanding on its own in terms of traffic generation, is the stem for probably 80 or 90% of my traffic.

I don't understand though why it wouldn't generate more traffic in its own right given a reasonable ranking..

No worries, we are actually in the process of implementing seasonal stats for all our keywords. As the counts change so much from moth to month we thought this would be invaluable.

Do you have any non seasonal stats keywords that seem a little suspect that we could run through?

One thing that might sway the figures though is that the keyword ranked top by wordtracker, while not outstanding on its own in terms of traffic generation, is the stem for probably 80 or 90% of my traffic.

I don't understand though why it wouldn't generate more traffic in its own right given a reasonable ranking..

I'm not sure of the question. Are you saying that a keyword that Wordtracker says has a small number of searches is actually bringing in quite alot of traffic on your website?

Could you let me know the keyword and we can analyze it, sometimes it just helps to run through the exact numbers that Wordtracker brings back. Also could you let me know the amount of traffic - is this for all engines or just Google?

Thanks

Andy

This is quite simple actually...

I would estimate that... each day 10 million site owners/webmasters/SEOs manual or automatically do search queries to locate their rankings (or client rankings).

That's a big margin of error to play with.

A term quoted in WordTracker as have 100 uses in 24 hours, possibly 2,000/month could be in whole or in part uninterested SE users to your website.

Their are a lot of rank checkers out there, and many more manual searchers.

This doesn't suggests that tools are useless - just that the source data has a bias -- and you have no idea what that bias is!

Just so you know - I'm not ignoring you having started this off, just snowed under. Will try and get back with the requested details shortly.

No - the phrase in question is 'self catering' and wordtracker gives me a count of 132 for this against a count of 63 for 'self catering holidays'. At the time of my analysis 'self catering' brought in a 5th of the visitors that 'self catering holidays' did, with just a 2 point difference in ranking. (self catering ranked #6, self catering holidays #4). These figures are all google.

Good point. This was why we actually went with the major metacrawlers. When searching through the logs of the major engines we noticed many words that shouldn't have had such a high number of searches. We gained some top positions on them and when there was no traffic we figured that many of these words must have been skewed in some way. This skew being caused by both the position checkers and also bid optimizers. Not only this but many of the search engines have hard coded links into shopping or gambling sites which can play havoc with the results.

With metacrawlers no one actually uses them to check their rankings, so our searches reported should not be inflated by these software tools.