ib tutor,tutorial-RealWebMarketing.net: Advanced Keyword Selection Strategies - Part 1

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RealWebMarketing.net: Advanced Keyword Selection Strategies - Part 1 By: John Eberhard

Selecting the right keywords can be one of the most important aspects of search engine marketing. This is equally important for search engine optimization and for pay per click search engine marketing.

Research shows that a person who enters a 2 or 3 word keyword is quite a bit more likely to buy. So generally stay away from the single word keywords. Go for 2, 3 or 4 word keywords.

Starting Your List

There are many valid ways to study keywords and I’m going to discuss a number of them in this article series. The first step, as I’ve covered in other articles and in my books on Internet marketing, is to create a spreadsheet. In the first column put your keywords. Here are some tips for coming up with keyword ideas:

1. Go to your company web site and see if whoever designed it placed any well though out keywords in the metatags section of the code on the home page. Of course if it was you who designed it, you will be the one who came up with that list. Go to the home page, then select View | Source. Add those to your spreadsheet.

2. Brainstorm for types of phrases someone might type in at a search engine to find your type of product. Add those to your spreadsheet.

3. Select 4-5 competitor web sites, and go to those web sites and see what keywords they have used in their metatags. Add those to your spreadsheet.

Evaluating the Keywords

By now you should have some keywords in your spreadsheet, and you’ll add more as you go through the rest of these steps. But how do you evaluate the data there? Which keywords are better? Which keywords are a must have? Which keywords should be thrown in the trash? Properly evaluating the list of keywords is vital to your success in either SEO or pay per click search engine marketing.

We’ll now discuss some free tools you can use to evaluate the importance or value of the keywords. These include:

1. The monthly number of searches on the Yahoo network, shown by their online tool
2. The number of people using those keywords to find your site over the last few months
3. Your ranking for those keywords on Google
4. The Google Page Rank of the top site on Google for that keyword
5. The type of sites coming up on organic or paid search listings for that keyword

I’ll explain each of these methods in detail. You don’t have to use them all, but some have more or less usefulness in certain situations.

Number of Searches on Yahoo

The very first thing you should do, now that you have spreadsheet started, is to go to the Overture Keyword Selection Tool, which can be found at:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Enter a keyword or key phrase in that online tool, and it will tell you how many people have searched for that keyword on Yahoo over the last month. You can generally figure that the total number of people who searched for that term on the whole Internet in the last month is about three times that amount, since Google has about twice the traffic as Yahoo.

This is by far the most important tool in determining which keywords to use. After all, you want lots of people coming to your web site or sites, and so it’s vital to know the amount of traffic for the various keywords on your list. The higher the monthly searches the better. In general you need a selection or group of keywords that adds up to some decent number of searches per month.

So go through your entire list and enter each phrase into the Overture tool, get the search amounts, and enter them into column two on your spreadsheet.

Overture (now owned by Yahoo) will not only give you the amount of the searches for each keyword, but also will give a list of other related key phrases, and their counts as well. So as you enter your keywords into the tool, note the other phrases on the list that Overture gives you and add any to your spreadsheet that look good. Often I print out these pages, go through the lists and highlight the ones that I want.

The Number of People Using Those Keywords to Find Your Site

The next thing to do is to get your web statistics program and get a list of the keywords that people are using to find your site on search engines. Any decent web stats program will give you this information. Unfortunately the free web statistics programs that most hosting companies give you are terrible. See my article on this for some good programs or online services you can get, some fairly cheap.

So take your web stats program and select a time frame that is fairly long, let’s say for the last six months. Now get a list of the keywords used to find your site. Your program should show a count of the number who found your site using each of the key phrases. Some stats programs will show counts for individual words. Forget that. You want the counts for the complete phrases.

Now go over that list and find those words on your spreadsheet, and enter the number in column three. If a phrase isn’t on your spreadsheet, add it.

This is important because these are the phrases that are already working for you. People are already finding your site using those key phrases. So by working on these keywords you can increase that number. If you have a brand new site this doesn’t apply of course.

Your Ranking for Those Keywords on Google

Next you want to find out your current ranking for those keywords on Google. There is a software program that will find this out for you called Internet Business Promoter. You can download a free demo at:
http://www.triumph.asia/download/index.htm

And the free demo gives you the functionality to check your Google ranking for a list of keywords. You can set it to check for the top 50 positions, top 100 positions, etc. It’s a pretty good software program.

Enter the Google ranking for your site in column four. Check the first 100 positions. If your site is not in the top 100, put “Not in top 100” in column four.

This is important because it will tell you if you’re already ranking for certain keywords, and how high. If you’re already ranking for a keyword, you want to take actions occasionally to reinforce that. If you are ranking but not very high, let’s say at between 30 and 70, then by taking search engine optimization actions you know you can raise that up. Also, let’s say there is a keyword where you’re not in the top 50 or top 100, but it has a lot of monthly searches, you could work on that one so you start ranking for it.

In my next article I’ll discuss the rest of the free tools you can use to evaluate the keywords on your list. Then in Part 3 I’ll discuss what to do once you have selected your keyword list.