The Online Sunshine Plan
Posts Tagged keywords
Laws of Keyword Usage – all keywords are not created equal
Posted by robertworstell in Search Engine Marketing on October 31, 2009
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This error below made me realize I hadn’t compiled the rules/laws/principles of proper and effective keyword usage for SEO:
1. One main keyword (phrase) per page. Now, sufficiently long, you’ll get other combinations of keywords which link to this page, but you are going for one particular long-tail niche (forget one-word keywords, these have been sewn up long ago and are maintained by huge sites with massive link-love coming their way.
Reason? Your page is known (reputation) by its in-bound links. Whatever they say is on the page is really more important that what is on that page – but you want all inbound links to say the same keyword as you optimize the page for. If you work on getting prime search engine real estate (top 5 positions – above the fold), then figure for a keyword “scatterbrained nitwit”, all or most of your inbound links should have the words “scatterbrained nitwit” in their text link. While you can get “scatterbrainednitwit.com” to help out, it’s not essential. (But note: having “scatter-brained-nitwit.com” can get you penalized, as spammers wasted that approach years ago.)
Two or more keyword phrases will confuse search engines and give you lower rankings. Your pages should be like you talk – one subject at a time. Don’t talk or write in non-sequiturs. If you do have to bring up another topic, it’s perfectly OK to link to a separate page on this new topic. Gives you another keyword phrase you can “dominate”.
2. Use your meta-tags for theme words, not keywords. Most of the biggest search engines don’t rely on meta-tags (thank spammers for that one, too…), but Google uses them to check the “theme” of the page, ie. does your content match what you are talking about?
If you put your keyword phrases in your meta-tags, unscrupulous spammers will scan these to find what you are talking about or trying to get search engine real-estate with and work to beat you to the punch. Just what you need – more competition.
The old tools which harvest meta tag information are good now for finding theme words – what that page should be talking about. The reason Google looks for theme words is also to help them figure where to list your page. Most words have several distinct meanings. Searching for “Apple” the computer company shouldn’t give you results on “apple” the fruit. Help them out – use meta tags for repeating theme words on your page.
3. General current use of Keywords:
a. Page title
b. H1-H2 headings (Not necessarily in the headline.)
c. Once in opening paragraph – which should be emphasized with bold (or possibly italic – but only in san-serif fonts, so it remains legible).
d. Generally, no where else on the page, or at max – no greater than 3-5% of that text copy – again, thank the spammers for this rule.
e. The rest of the page is composed of theme words and articles (an, a, the, those, that, etc.) and somewhat meaningless words which hold the sentence together (conjunctions and stuff like and, or, with, as well as of, in, by, etc.) But these common words aren’t theme words and so shouldn’t show up on your meta-tags.
This above is the result of several studies into page optimization, namely through Michael Campbell, Dr. Andy Williams, SEO2020, and some others.
While the rest of this below post seems fairly accurate, the below quote is not. (P.S. I blog this to give you all possible data, but also because their site has no particularly apparent way to add a comment -siwwy wabbits.)
Website Magazine : Keyword Research – A Foundation for Local SEO:
“Focus on one or two keywords or phrases per page – and use them in the title, subheads, meta tags, and copy of the page. Also use keyword variations in the text to enhance the keyword’s relevance.
As an example, let’s say your business is called Las Vegas Floral Boutique. You could use your business’s name as one keyword phrase and ‘Las Vegas flowers’ as another. Since most people will be using ‘Las Vegas flowers’ rather than your business name in their searches, mention Las Vegas Floral Boutique occasionally but focus more on the more generic term and use variations like ‘Las Vegas flower shop’, ‘flower shop Las Vegas’, ‘affordable Vegas flowers”, etc.”
And now you know why that wouldn’t work and what to ignore on the Internet – well, at lest some more…
Some additional posts of interest:
Keywords which don’t tell you anything about the Gorilla in the room
Posted by robertworstell in Marketing Research on October 30, 2009
That’s the problem with a lot of these niches we deal with. When we are simply trying to sell a product, we fail because some of these niches simply don’t have buyers in them. And worse, some people are telling you that the way you find buyers is to see if people are advertising in that area. (Really? How come people are advertising where there isn’t even any traffic? Google says they do – just look on their Adwords tool and see where there is “competition” even when there aren’t enough traffic results to make up a monthly tally…)
Since I got myself all worked up with that (above-linked) post, I then had to see what was actually going on.
So I set up my Keywords Genies: Google Adwords Tool and RankTracker and started to get to work figuring this all out. I started using Google Adwords to see if it would give me bigger and bigger traffic keywords through its synonyms. After I amassed about 12,000 keywords, then I quit to digest them by OpenOffice database.
Now, this is completely the reverse of what my research says to do. I was purposely looking for stuff that couldn’t possibly be a niche – waaayy too big. Of course, one of the first things I found out was that Google and WordTracker don’t agree on what the traffic for something actually is. (Big surprise – all these tools only deal with their own estimates of traffic. Your mileage may vary, as well – only your own analytics knows for sure.)
But what I did find is that there seem to be a huge number of really good one and two-word keywords with decent KEI. Even though they could (and some did) have literally a trillion pages of competition. No, you couldn’t dream of trying to get these on their own. So the niche theory of marketing empire-building still holds.
The review of these niches and their main keywords started showing something else (other than the fact I was really straining RankTracker and WordTracker – you can only check about 240 KW’s at a time before WordTracker shuts you down). That something else was the point that people who search on Google are just that – lookers. Doesn’t mean they are buyers. And you have to check that keyword on eBay or Amazon to see if people are actually able to sell something like that.
Even more striking was the observation that very little “stuff” was turning up with these keywords. Specific camera’s, or toys, or gadgets or books or authors weren’t coming up. But the big-ticket Maslow-pyramid-type phrases were. As niches.
But didn’t I just say you couldn’t sell anything in a niche that didn’t have buyers in it?
Sure. The trick is that the motivations to buy are there, not the stuff you can sell.
This means that people are actually searching for their wants and feelings, not just specific stuff they want to buy – although that happens as well, but not in two words or less (most of the time, anyway).
Your niches show up in four-word or longer phrases.
But something even more interesting showed up – you aren’t selling stuff, you’re offering solutions.
All of these wants and feelings people put in their search engine forms – these are just problems they are having in their lives (more or less). What they are plugging away at searching for are solutions which would improve their lives.
Again, go back to Maslow and Cialdini. When you take these two giants together, you see what people as individuals and as groups/niches are trying to solve in their lives. All these things people buy are somewhere on Maslow’s pyramid. And what you see selling on eBay or Amazon are translations of these items into the tribe-dominated Cialdini 6 (or 7) principle triggers.
Being blonde, young, trim, athletic, rich, famous, etc. – all of these have definite products associated with them. But below all these states are very definite wants and needs – and between those and the products that represent them are the person’s feelings. Which are what all sales are based on – feelings.
My point in this actually goes back to what I’ve spend the bulk of this life on – personal improvement and self-growth. Recently, I’ve been studying marketing to see how selling this type stuff is done. And so, now I know how to sell almost anything – find out what stresses are hitting people’s lines and offer solutions. Stresses are tied into feelings – and they come from a person’s purpose, something seemingly dis-related to marketing.
The reason I’m telling you all this is to keep you up to speed with what I’ve been discovering.
Practically, with proper market research, starting with keywords and then finding what products are selling in that niche – you could conceivably sell sun-tan oil to Eskimo’s if you wanted.
It’s all sitting there in the keywords.
So, go ahead, compile your own list of 12,000 Google Adwords and see what comes up.
May you be just as pleasantly surprised.
Some additional posts of interest:
WordPress site-building sequence
Posted by robertworstell in Search Engine Marketing on October 30, 2009
[Oh, this one is a killer. I'm going to have to do a follow up for this - all full of plug-in's, etc. It will probably only show up in the membership area...]
This post on Marketing Insight is how to build your site. (And those are silo’s above – where chopped, fermented corn is stored before it is fed to fattening cattle.) Dr. Williams (below) is offering one concept about how to build a site. He’s actually converting old hand-coded sites over to a new WordPress platform. And I respect his work.
ezSEO Blog: “The overall idea of this new system is to concentrate on sub-niches, one at a time, and build those sub-sections before moving on to the next one.
THINK OF EACH SUB-SECTION AS A MINI-SITE
Suppose my website was on dieting. This is a huge niche and to try to do the keyword research up front would be a monumental task. A large part of my site would probably be the various diets that people could go on, so I would start off by setting up my Wordpress site with a super category called ‘Diets’.
I would then pick one diet at a time, e.g. the Sonoma diet, and carry out the keyword research only on the Sonoma diet. I’d keep this data in a separate database in KRA Pro.
I could then concentrate on the Sonoma diet, creating a main page for that diet as well as articles on the diet that can link back to the main page.
When you are finished with the Sonoma diet, pick another area you want to work on, e.g. South Beach Diet and repeat.
IT’S LIKE ADDING LOTS OF MINI-SITES TO THE SAME DOMAIN, AND LINKING THEM WITH THE HOMEPAGE AND MENU SYSTEM”
I would take a different approach. And as you know from following this blog I use RankTracker to query WordTracker to get my niches (which is a whole lot cheaper and more powerful).
Now, as I’ve discussed, my approach is to distill my niches and their keywords. This gives me what keywords add up to the targeted main keywords I want to use to create content. I simply line them up by KEI and then work on them in that way. I don’t take a certain one and then create content for all the pages like that. I don’t do all the dog-collar keywords and then do dog-leash keywords. I’d work all of the long-tail niche keywords for dog in order of their KEI. Sure they’ll cross, but what you are trying to take over is “dog” as a main KW – and that is what your blog is named. (Yes, that is a lousy choice as a “niche”, since it isn’t really, but it gives a good example.)
Under dogs, you’d have categories (silos) of dog-collars, dog-leashes, dog-dishes, and so on. As Andy says above, I don’t really hold to silos either. Mainly because people don’t want their content served up that way. And your “back” button is there by default on every page you visit. So bouncing from a too-content-limited page is easier than not.
And WordPress has the option of viewing all your categories on the sidebar. So while they might be interested in dog-collars, they might want to compare with the content you have for cat-collars. Or just Cats. Those are all on your categories – and allow you to nest categories as well.
I recently imported a Blogger blog into WordPress and found that now I had tons of default categories. So that screwed any idea of having category-silos without editing every single page out of hundreds. (And I have more to study up on the use of both categories and tags for posts – both of which cross-link posts, making it easier for viewers, but ridiculous if you are trying to maximize page-rank.)
Another reason I like to post by KEI rather than category is to break up my week. While I still have lots of research to do on the various keywords, it gives you more diversity and options if you are posting for the best traffic/competition first. And when you have all the long-tail keywords established, you can come back to work them all in sequence again (or several times) because you already have the research done.
My writing is what I am inspired on – so I jump from blog to blog, depending on what I’m covering at the time. Lately I’ve been hobby-horsing other books, but this also gave me a post on hate-addiction, as well as putting up a new post from an old draft about expanding your marketing mix beyond email newsletters I had hanging around on that imported Blogger site. So I’m working on several keywords at the same time. Each with different publics. Keeps me from getting bored, but it’s mainly to get those-type thoughts out and written down before I forgot about them and lost the inspiration. (Plus, it makes my Friendfeed life-stream far more interesting, let alone twitter.)
And this method of writing for just a single blog also makes more sense to the search engines, since a person doesn’t just talk about dog-collars for twenty articles over a couple of weeks and then fascinate on dog-leashes. This also breaks up your flow if you are doing posts, so your subscribing public isn’t bored to tears by dog-collars, then bored by dog-leashes. A simple approach would be to write in one category, then do your next post in the next-best KEI category, and so on.
But I’m pretty sure with both tags and categories, any idea of a silo is pretty shot. Silo’s are actually a hold-over from the days when PageRank ruled SEO. And pagerank has been pretty back-watered for some time now.
The general rule is that search engines follow viewers. So Content is King – like nothing else. Build a great site and you’ll get more subscribers and they’ll stick around for more (as well as buy).
The point of doing your articles/posts by KEI then targets your most likely traffic first. Rotating through these keywords until you have several articles for each long-tail-KW – and a good leg-up on taking over the main phrase, this keeps your readers interested and coming back for more.
Some additional posts of interest:
Creative Commons License
This work by Dr. Robert C. Worstell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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