Keywords the Most Important Item in SEO

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1 This is one of several guides and instructionals that we ll be sending you through the course of our Management Service. Please read these instructionals so that you can better understand what you can do to help make your services more successful Keywords the Most Important Item in SEO Keywords are the most important SEO item for every search engine. Actually they are what search strings are matched against. It is very important that you optimize your site for the right keywords. This seems easy at first, but when you get into more detail, it might be a bit confusing to correctly determine the keywords. But with a little research and thinking, the problem of selecting the right keywords to optimize can be solved. 1. Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For Because the web is so densely populated with sites (there are 459,000,000 search results for the word dog on Google), it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a oneword search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal. If you examine closely the dynamics of search results for popular one-word keywords, you might notice that it is so easy one week to be in the first ten results and by the next one to have fallen out of the first 30 results because the competition for popular one-word keywords is so fierce and other sites have replaced you. Of course, you can include one-word strings in your keywords list but if they are not backed up by more phrase, do not dream of high ratings. For instance, if you have a site about dogs, dog is a mandatory keyword, but if you do not optimize for more words, like dog owners, dog breeds, dog food, or even canine, success is unlikely. The examples given here are by no means the ultimate truth about how to optimize a dog site, but they are good enough to show that you need to think broad when choosing the keywords. Generally, when you start optimization, the first thing you need to consider is the keywords that best describe the content of your site and that are most likely to be used by your customers to find you. Ideally, you know your customers well and can guess correctly what search strings they are likely to use to find you. One issue to consider is synonyms. Very often users will use a different word for the same thing. For instance, in the example with the dog site, canine is a synonym and on Google there are 459 Million search results for the word dog, but only 98 Million search results for the word canine. It is for sure that there will be searchers who will use the synonym canine, and it is less competitive, so it does not hurt to include it now and then on your pages. Another example is cat versus feline. The word cat has over 3.6 Billion search results on Google, but the word feline has less than 68 Million search results, thus

2 making the word feline easier to get high rankings for. But do not rush to optimize for every synonym you can think of search engines themselves have algorithms that include synonyms in the keyword match, especially for languages like English. Instead, think of more keywords that are likely to be used to describe your site. Thinking thematically is especially good because search engines tend to rate a page higher if its theme fits into the keyword string. In our example it is important that your site is concentrated around a particular theme dogs. It might be difficult to think of all the relevant keywords on your own, but that is what tools are for. Here are some tools that you can use to give you suggestions on the right keywords for your site: Google s Keyword Tool: Free Keyword Tool from Word Tracker: Great Keyword Tool from Trellian: When choosing the keywords to optimize, you need to consider not only their relevancy to your site but the expected monthly number of searches for these particular keywords. Very often narrow searches are more valuable because the users that come to your site are those that are really interested in your product. Continuing with the dog example, you might discover that the adopt a dog key phrase brings you more visitors because you have a special section on your site where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a dog. This page is not of interest of current dog owners, but to potential dog owners only. They might not be as many in number, but they are your target audience and the overall effect of attracting this niche can be better than attracting everybody who is interested in dogs in general. So, when you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site. Keyword Density After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Anything above 10% looks like keyword stuffing stay away! Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results. Keywords in Special Places

3 Keyword placement can be just as important as the quantity. If, for example, you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs, this counts more than if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title and the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all things being equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors, but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!. Keywords in URLs and File Names The domain name and the full URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about dogs, you will have dog, dogs, or puppy as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site dogadopt.net than animal-care.org. In the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword. When hunting for keyword rich domain names, don't get greedy. While from a SEO point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL, just imagine how long and difficult to memorize the URL will be for your customer. So you need to strike a balance between the keywords in the URL and site usability, which says that more than 3 words in the URL is way too much. Additionally, even if you manage to think of a couple of good domain names, they might be already taken File names and directory names are also important. Often search engines will give preference to pages that have a keyword in the file name. For instance is not as good as but is certainly better than The advantage of keywords in file names over keywords in URLs is that they are easier to change, if you decide to move to another niche, for example. b. Keywords in Page Titles The page title is another special place because the contents of the <title> tag usually gets displayed in most search engines, (including Google). While it is not mandatory per the HTML specification to write something in the <title> tag (i.e. you can leave it empty and the title bar of the browser will read Untitled Document or similar), for SEO purposes it is extremely important. Your title is what shows up as the first line in the SERP s and is the first and last place for a keyword. You d better write the page title in it.

4 Unlike URLs, with page titles you can get wordy. If we go on with the dog example, the <title> tag of the home page for the can include something like this: <title>adopt a Dog Save a Life and Bring Joy to Your Home</title> <title>everything You Need to Know About Adopting a Dog</title> The maximum length for titles should be between characters, with 70 being the sweet spot. c. Keywords in Headings Normally headings separate paragraphs into related subtopics. From a literary point of view, it may be pointless to have a heading after every other paragraph but from SEO point of view it is advantageous to have as many headings on a page as possible, especially if they have keywords in them. We recommend headers of 2-4 words for the contents of the <H1>, <H2>, <H3>,... <Hn> tags. So, like with URLs, you need to be wise with the length of headings. Another issue you need to consider is how the heading will be displayed. If it is Heading 1 (<H1>), generally this means larger font size. In this case it is recommendable to have less than 7-8 words in the heading, otherwise it might spread on 2 or 3 lines, which you should avoid. Here s a good rule of thumb for numbers of words in headers: H1 1 word, H2-2 words, H3 3 words, H4 4 words, H5 4 words. Definitions: Keyword A word or phrase which implies a certain mindset or demand that targeted prospects are likely to search for. Keyword Density An old measure of search engine relevancy based on how prominent keywords appeared within the content of a page. Keyword density is no longer a valid measure of relevancy over a broad open search index though. Keyword Research The process of discovering relevant keywords and keyword phrases on which to focus your SEO and PPC marketing campaigns.

5 Keyword Stuffing Writing copy that uses excessive amounts of the core keyword.

6 Keyword Research for Long Tail Keywords can be split into two main groups, short tail keywords and long tail keywords, or broad keywords and narrow keywords. This important marketing concept, known as "The Long Tail", is used to describe the hundreds to thousands of narrow keywords and key phrases that a website is found for, yet rarely noticed or exploited by owners of the website. The term long tail is used to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than the hugely competitive broad keywords. A long tail keyword is something like Small Business Web Design while a short tail keyword is something like Web Design. When you compare the two keywords, Web Design has about 30 times as many competitors as Small Business Web Design, but Web Design also gets far more searches each month. A small number of broad terms such as Web Design and Marketing account for a large proportion of searches but an equally large proportion of the searches are made up of millions of more specific search queries such as Small Business Web Design. This search distribution can be understood through the following graph: People tend to focus on the thousands of visitors that come to the site for the most popular terms. Most site managers are very happy to see the numbers increase for those specific terms, and even happier to see those terms consistently ranking well. Conventional thinking applies the rule that the top terms provide 80% of the business, but in evaluating multiple sites, the opposite has proven to be true. In most cases, the top 20% of terms provide a large amount of traffic, but not nearly as much traffic as the total traffic for narrower, long tail terms. Add up all of the narrow (long tail) terms that provide 1-3 visits during the month, and chances are they will add up to more total visitors than the top 20% of terms. AND, most sites find that the majority of their business (sales and

7 leads) COME FROM LONG TAIL KEYWORD SEARCHES. This is the heart of the long tail traffic volume is found in the top terms, but VALUE (sales and leads) is found in the long tail terms. Terms that are most popular, most managed by site owners, are rarely those that provide the most business. In most studies, the success of the site was from the hundreds or thousands of referrals outside of the most popular terms. As an example, Amazon.com makes 57% of sales from keywords outside of the "popular" terms. In the world of the web, where minute details are tracked, business is not won in the dozens of mega-popular terms. Business is made in the "thousands of dozens the groups of terms that may only result in a single visit, but the terms themselves number in the thousands. There are the dozens of market segments that search for specific needs, specific requirements and detailed terms. Search your keyword referrals, but leave out the top terms. What types of terms are bringing your site visitors? Where are your sales being generated? If you are not tracking sales generated by keywords, then it's time to break out the heavy artillery of a good stats program and find out if the Long Tail is working for you. A real life example Each day Naruto Wallpaper gets over 1000 visitors from search engines from roughly 200 unique keywords but the best keyword brings almost 50% of those visitors, following is a list of the top 12 keywords. Notice that the first keyword brings 45%, the second keyword brings 20% and the remaining 198 keywords account for the remaining 35% of the searches.

8 This distribution seems very similar to the graph we displayed earlier, the top few keywords account for a lot of the searches but there is many, many more specific searches which cumulatively total a significant figure. Let s display the keywords in graph form. You can see that the top two keywords bring in lots of traffic and the remaining keywords each bring minute amounts of traffic that cumulatively totals a significant amount, but separately are not significant.

9 Benefiting from the long tail You may be wondering why anybody would want to target hundreds or thousands of keywords which bring only a small number of visitors. Well, the answer is simply that there is less competition so you can get rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than for short tail keywords. Yes, they don t bring a lot of traffic separately but if you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic. Not everybody is capable of ranking highly for highly competitive keywords, but anybody(!) can rank for long tail keywords. Another benefit of long tail keywords is that the visitors convert amazingly well to sales and ad clicks. The visitors searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it Small Business Web Design or Half Price Armani Suits, they know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them. To put this into numbers, in general our website might make $5 per 1000 impressions but from long tail visitors we can earn $100 per 1000 impressions, that s 20 times the revenue if the traffic is equal. Although admittedly the traffic is not equal, the main keywords bring in much more visitors than the long tail keywords, but the long tail keywords bring good revenue. Whether you can achieve high rankings for competitive keywords, long tail keywords could be highly beneficial for you. If you have a website selling Armani Suits but can t generate any search engine traffic, rather than targeting the keyword Armani or Armani Suits try targeting more specific keywords such as Armani Mens Suits. Hopefully you will see an increase in conversions and sales. Definitions: Long Tail Phrase describing how for any category of product being sold there is much more aggregate demand for the non-hits than there is for the hits. Keyword Research Tools Tools which help you discover potential keywords based on past search volumes, search trends, bid prices, and page content from related websites. Keyword Funnel The relationship between various related keywords that users search for. Some searches are particularly well aligned with others due to spelling errors, poor search relevancy, and automated or manual query refinement.

10 Thanks for taking the time to read our guide. Please put these items into practice to help facilitate your online lead generations, sales and site visitors. If you have any questions about what you ve just read, please log into your web builder and business center back end, or call or customer support if you have any questions at (866) If you have any questions about your Advanced Service, please feel free to call or Customer Support for more information. Thanks, Ignite Web Services Advanced Services Team (866)