Why Strict Keyword Densities Are No Longer Necessary
To truly understand how SEO works today you need to have an understanding of the history of SEO as a marketing strategy. Search engine optimization did not develop in a vacuum and it won’t evolve into what it will be tomorrow without the developments that are occurring today. There is a continuum and it can be traced.
To begin with, SEO did not really get its name until after Google came on the scene. Before Google, Internet marketers were optimizing their websites but they didn’t really call it that. However, that “optimization” was very primitive compared to how it’s done today.
Meta Tags, Backlinks And The Rise Of Google
At one time, pre-Google, all you had to do was add a bunch of keywords to your meta tag list and you’d rank well for those keywords. It didn’t even matter if those keywords appeared in your page content or not. You’d still rank. Hardly seems fair, does it? That’s why Google rose to such prominence as quickly as it did. The company introduced a whole new paradigm.
When Google came along, no one was interested in analyzing back links. Today, that seems intuitive, but at one time no thought it was important except for two guys with the software to make it happen.
Those two guys started Google, whose search ranking algorithm was based largely on the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page. Soon, Internet marketers started dropping their meta tag strategy in lieu of a backlink strategy. Back links became the new currency.
From Backlinks To Semantic Natural Language
Over the years, Google has tweaked its ranking factors to include more than just an analysis of the number of inbound links to your site’s pages. Quality of links, relevancy of links and link diversity are important too. And there are more than 100 other factors Google considers as well. And then there are Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and many other search engines. Each one has their own ranking criteria.
One consideration that the major search engines look for today is natural language, or semantic language, syntax. While keywords are still important, successful web page do not need X number of one keyword phrase per Y number of words on the page, what marketers call “keyword density”. Instead, it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the right places on your page and in proximity to other important elements on the page. And to write naturally for your site visitors just as you would if keywords were not important.
In essence, the search engines are looking for the best content for every keyword phrase they rank pages for. If you stuff your pages with keywords just for a ranking then you are doing yourself and your site visitors a disservice. It’s basically shooting yourself in the foot. Trust me, that hurts.
Where Does Your PPC Keyword List Come From?
New pay per click advertisers often wonder where they should get their keyword list. The obvious answer is from your initial keyword research – the same place you get the keyword list for your organic search campaigns. But that’s a little too pat. And the answer is not so cut and dry. There are other ways to get your keyword list.
- Borrow from the competition – Have you analyzed your competition’s PPC and organic search campaigns? If not then hop to it. It’s a great resource for your own keyowrd list.
- Your own referrer logs – Study your referrer logs from time to time to see what key phrases people are using to find your site. You can often find phrases that you haven’t targeted. If some of those phrases turn out to be popular phrases then you’ll have a few gems in the rough.
- Google Zeitgeist – This little known product from Google will show you what search queries have trended each day.
- Google Trends – Another product from Google. It allows you to look at trends over time, which can tell a story all its own.
- Twitter Trends – Twitter Trends tells you what is popular right now. This is real time data and if you hit your new keyword trends just right you might find a gold mine.
There is really is no right or wrong way to find new keywords for your pay per click campaigns, but if you think creatively then you can likely find your own.
What Keywords Are Your Competitors Targeting?
There are two reasons why you might want to know what keywords the competition is targeting:
- So you can target the same keywords
- So you can identify keywords they are missing and capitalize on them
The competition is certainly targeting keywords. But are they targeting the right ones? Are they targeting the keywords that you should be targeting?
Keywords are not all created equal. Some of your competitors may actually be targeting the wrong keywords. Your goal should be to identify the right keywords and to go after those aggressively. That means studying the keywords that the competition is (and isn’t) using and studying the keywords that searchers are searching for. The right tools can make that process much easier for you. And your competitive intelligence initiatives will go a long way toward making you successful.
Competitive Intelligence Is As Good As Your Tools
When it comes to gathering competitive intelligence, the information you can obtain legally and ethically is only as good as the tools you use. One good tool for gathering information on your competition’s organic SEO campaigns and PPC campaigns is KeywordSpy.
KeywordSpy allows you to search for information in several ways – Domain, Keyword, Destination URL, and Ad Copies. You’ll probably use the Keyword search most often, but the others do come in handy.
When you search for a keyword at KeywordSpy you get a boat load of information on several competitors. You get keyword statistics on PPC competitors, including CPC and search volume. There is even a nice pretty graph to show you the history of your competition in PPC.
You also get an overview of related keywords, which is nice because it also shows you the CPC and search volume for each of those keywords. Then you get samples of PPC ads from your competition.
Another great benefit is an overview of your top competitors, comparing organic SEO information and PPC information on each one. You get a nice list of the keywords for each of those competitors and how many keywords they are using for PPC and SEO.
I would definitely recommend KeywordSpy for conducting competitive intelligence before embarking on any PPC or SEO campaign.
Are Keywords Important With PPC?
If you are new to pay per click marketing, you might be wondering how important are keywords. In a word, they are very important. You can’t manage an effective PPC campaign without focusing on the right keywords for your campaign.
But how are keywords important?
Keywords in PPC are important in three ways:
- They ensure that your ad is shown for the right keyword queries in the search engines. Targeting. Plain and simple.
- Keywords are important for matching your ads with your landing pages. Your prospects will want to know that what they have queried is also what you are offering.
- Keywords are important for bidding and budgeting correctly. You’ll get to bid on your keywords, placing a value on each one. Consider this value carefully.
Don’t ignore the importance of keywords in PPC marketing. They are just as important as keywords for SEO.
How Many Keywords Can You Manage With PPC?
Google is getting stricter with its quality score. Recently, the search engine announced that you will hurt your quality score if you try to target too many keywords with one ad. The search engine wants you to target a specific web page with each keyword. The result for many webmasters could be a new PPC campaign for every keyword they want to target.
But that’s not to say that you’ll have to target a different keyword for every PPC campaign under every circumstances. In most cases, a tight keyword group within a PPC campaign will boost your quality score and give you maximum performance,l but you have to manage the campaign in the right way.
Your targeted web pages should be managed around a tight keyword group consisting of keywords that are related. We’re talking about a small keyword group – about 5 or 6 keywords. If you try to manage a single PPC campaign around hundreds of keywords that are broadly related then you will hurt your quality score and your ad rankings and click-throughs will suffer.
Content, Links, Meta Tags – Which SEO Factor Is Most Important?
Content, links, meta tags, keywords … it’s all a sea of confusion, right? Which SEO factor is most important?
Links are important. They build link popularity. Relevance, page authority, anchor text, link age, they’re all important, right? Yes, they are all important. But links are the not the most important thing for SEO. Without at least one inbound link to your website, it won’t get crawled and the search engines won’t index it. But for search engine ranking purposes, links are not the most important SEO factor.
How about meta tags? No. In fact, Google doesn’t even consider meta tags for ranking purposes. Yahoo! and Bing still consider meta tags, but they aren’t the most important ranking criteria.
Is it keyword density? SEOs still talk about keyword density. In fact, keywords get a lot of airplay all around. Keywords in title tags, keywords in alt tags, keywords in anchor text. Yes, they’re all important. Even keyword density, to some degree, is important. But not the most important thing.
Content.
Quality, original content is the most important SEO factor online. There’s a reason “content is king” is the Internet’s chant. It’s not a campaign slogan. It’s reality. Content is the most important SEO factor. Over links. Above keyword density. And higher than meta tags.
Make your content shine and dress it up with great links, meta tags, and keyword considerations. But make your content the king.
How Niche Search Engine Marketing Pays The Bills
Search engine marketing is the process of using search engines to drive traffic to your web pages, primarily through search and paid search platforms. Crafty Internet marketers do this by focusing on niche-related keywords in their marketing efforts. How does that work exactly?
For starters, you’ve got to build value into your marketing campaign in your keyword research. This should be your first step in the process. Look for the best and most profitable keywords for your niche and focus your marketing efforts on those. After you’ve identified the best keywords, put them into a list and build your web pages to focus on those keywords with each page focused on a primary and a secondary keyword. Then build links using your keywords as anchor text.
Try a PPC campaign as a test campaign on one or two of your keywords and attempt to drive traffic to a keyword-based landing page. As you do this, note your CTR. If you are getting a high CTR on any keywords then focus on those keywords for building more web pages and for increasing the search engine presence of others you’ve already built.
Search engine marketing is not hard, but it is tedious. You can build value into any niche if you know the basics.
What Makes Good Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is a process that seems to be getting more and more sophisticated as time goes on. Used to be, a webmaster could toss in a few keywords on the web page, add some meta tags, and all was well. Today, there are more than a couple of hundred ranking factors to consider. And what gets one website high rankings may be completely different for another website. Generally speaking, it’s better to focus on principles than specific techniques.
However, there are some best practices that are, across the board, very effective. Savvy search engine optimizers know that putting your keyword in your title is very effective. They also know that inbound links can make a mediocre site a great one. And your URL is important in many ways as well.
But there are certain factors that today may not be important while being extremely important next year or five years from now. A good search engine optimization specialist should be able to look down the road and predict, with some fair amount of accuracy, where search is headed – and begin to optimize web pages for the future of search as well as for today. You don’t need a crystal ball, just a good handle on the playing field. Can your SEO boast of that?
Keyword Analysis As Competitive Intelligence
One of the most important aspects of competitive intelligence is keyword analysis. One of the simplest parts of competitive intelligence, it is also one of the most involved. There is more to keyword analysis than simply checking which keywords are the most popular searches in the search engines and which are the most sought after in terms of competitive business. Those are important, yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
One very important piece of the keyword analysis puzzle is the keyword meta tag. It’s relatively easy to scour the competition’s website and extract their keyword meta tags. The danger is that your competition may not have optimized their meta tags well and you’ll just be getting garbage, but if your competition has done a good job at producing optimized web pages, including the meta tags, then you can get their full list of keywords just by visiting their websites.
When using meta tags, you have to visit each page of your competition’s website individually. That’s because they will likely have optimized every page for one, two, or three keywords. The meta tags, if done properly, will show up to 10 important keywords for each page (5 is better) and each page will be optimized for different keywords. So you can see that there should be some overlap from page to page.
At any rate, while the keywords meta tag is not the only place to go for competitive keyword analysis, it is one place you don’t want to overlook.
Social Media Optimization Tip: Headlines Make All The Difference
Optimizing for social media traffic is a bit different than optimizing for search engines. But there are similarities. When you optimize your landing page for search engines, keywords are extremely important. After all, people will find your site by those keywords. But with social media, while keywords are important, they aren’t the most important thing. Social media users look for something different.
First and foremost, they want a unique experience. Keywords are good for ensuring those social media pages achieve better rankings in the search engines, but what happens if someone finds your content in Digg or StumbleUpon and arrives there from a search engine? You still want them to go to your website and that will take a different approach than merely sprinkling your content with keywords.
Your headline is very important. It should attract attention. More than that, it must get the click. Social media users have two things to go on in deciding whether or not to read your content: The headline and the description, or summary. The headline, more than anything, will determine whether or not they read your content.
What should a headline do? Three things:
- Arouse curiosity
- Tell the reader what to expect from the content
- Use your primary keyword
Understand that Nos. 1 and 2 and more important than No. 3 when it comes to social media optimization. Yes, you want your keyword there for the search engines, but human readers care about the content. It must answer their most pressing questions or make them believe that your content will answer those questions. Get them to click. That’s the goal. And if you achieve that then you’ve done your job.
Test Your Pay Per Click Strategy Before Full Implementation
For most companies, a well-crafted and managed pay per click campaign can build real significant results into their online marketing plans. This is an area of online business that requires some critical thought. You don’t want to just jump in with both feet and a big budget and nonchalantly start tossing money away. There is a strategy to consider.
When you first start your pay-per-click campaign, do so lightly. Run a test. Initially, you want to test your keywords and landing pages. No sense in throwing thousands of dollars into a marketing campaign for a website that isn’t ready to close sales. So run a moderate test to see what kind of results you can get before you go all out with your marketing campaign.
When you run your initial test, you are looking for three things:
- Is your landing page optimized well enough to receive traffic and close sales?
- Are your keywords the right keywords for reaching your target market?
- Is your ad content written well enough to attract click throughs?
If you can answer yes to those three questions then you are ready to start your pay per click campaign. If your answer to any of these questions after you run your test is “no” then you need to tweak and retest.
The Most Overlooked SEO Secret Known To Man
Many times, clients ask us if they have to pay for ranking for keywords that they weren’t targeting. The answer is no.
Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.
Every website will inevitably rank for certain keywords and phrases that weren’t being targeted. It’s a part of the natural order of the Web. Some of those keywords will actually prove to be beneficial for you.
It’s nearly impossible to predict what people will search for. Google has said that a 20%-25% of its search queries are brand new searches that have never been seen before. That effectively means that you’ll see a certain number of queries in your server log delivering traffic to your site in unexpected ways. That’s the power of the long tail.
If you can target long tail searches over a long course then you can penny and nickel your way into top search rankings one long tail search at a time. Eventually, if you win enough of the long tail phrases, you’ll start to rank for the general search phrases in your niche as well. And you’ll see loads of traffic coming to your site just because you were persistent enough to pursue the long-tail strategy.
Four Easy and Free Ways to Build Links
Linking is the key to any natural search-oriented campaign. While Pay Per Click increases the visibility of your website through strategic keyword building, natural search is a combination of on page and off page optimization. The main difference between the two, as to how you achieve a desired visibility status, is the importance of your site. A site of lesser importance, as determined by Google’s complex algorithm, can obtain the first position in searches utilizing a PPC campaign. While it is possible for the same site to appear within the top 3 for natural searches, it is less likely, and therefore natural search depends more on page rank for a site’s position. The similarity between the two is the keyword relevance to the search.
While it would be nice for your website to appear number one for every search, this is not practical. Via a PPC campaign, this mis-targeted traffic would cost you thousands, maybe more, as the majority of clicks would not take the user to a site relevant to that for which they searched. It would make no sense for a law firm website to show up in the top spot for a “heavy equipment training” search query. The purpose of search engines is to return relevant results, not just high ranking sites. The rank is factored in only to represent the importance and usability of the site itself, generally determined by relevant links. Here are four steps for building relevant links to your site, for free:
Social Media Optimization - this may not be the most efficient approach, as far as time is concerned, but the use of Social Media can prove very effective for the initial campaign. Simply, it puts your website on the map. The main quality to look for in a Social Media Site is the ability to add direct links with custom anchor text. This is possible through your profile, various groups, or occasionally, through message systems which allow users to contact each other, via their profile pages. It should be note, however, that many SM profile sites utilize no follow links, which will not benefit keyword relevance of links. Much like relevant pages on a website linking to each other, if only for ease-of-use, consider the network of pages linked to each other on a site such as MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog. It is important to exercise self control with such links, as irrelevant links may be read as spam or abuse of the site. Be sure to read the terms of use for such sites, as violation of such terms can result in the deletion of your account.
Forums – actively participating in forum discussions can increase the online visibility of your company greatly. Choosing a username on said forum that represents your company’s name or primary keyword will increase the relevance of posts, and posting within categories related to your business, its name or its purpose, will increase its importance. Much like social media sites, many forums will have no follow links, so use caution. The best way to utilize a forum is to set up your own. This gives you full control over comments, link properties, posts, and categories. Additionally, relevant traffic generally increases on forums as it allows others to participate in discussions and talk about their own interests in relation to your site.
Free Article and PR Sites – articles and press releases are a great way to build relevant links to your site, and its sub domains, as well as increasing your online availability through referred traffic. Additionally, you have full control over the surrounding text, and many free article sites allow you to include multiple links within the content. An article site might also feature a well-written, highly viewed article on the front page, and if nothing else, feature the submission in a category section related to your article or press release, which will have a URL containing very relevant text.
Blogging – much like article sites, setting up a blog is another good way to build links with more relevance and rank behind them. The only difference is, you can also optimize the blog itself, utilizing your social media profiles, and the articles/pr you’ve written. You may also include links to your blog from your site and forum posts. Cross linking relevant content on your blog and your site, as well as all other areas of the web you maintain, can be quite the task, but well worth the effort and time. Additionally, blogging allows for minimal effort in organizing, coding and optimizing content. Since posts are automatically sorted by date, category and tags, this is an easy way to quickly add content with little hassle; plus, adding images makes your blog more vivid, wont clutter the screen as much, and when ALT tags are properly used, will return links to your blog via image searches. Also, if said images are hosted on your site’s domain, this will add to the relevance of the blog to your site and the use of such images within your blog. You may be hosted on a Blog Site if you wish, but it is generally preferable to be self-hosted, as it implies that your site is more important.
These are only the basics of free link building, and as effective as these may be, there is only so much you can achieve with this method – it really depends on your niche. If you are fighting over less common, less desired, or more unique keywords, these tactics may be enough to put your site on the charts, even at the top spot in searches for those keywords. However, more competitive keywords require more variation, dedication, time, and resources.
When it comes down, most businesses don’t have the time or man-power within the company to embark on a campaign of such magnitude. Consider an experienced, well established, Internet Marketing Firm like Reciprocal Consulting to aid you in this endeavor.