Keyword Research Tools

If you are new to Search Engine Marketing and Optimization you might just want to go and get yourself a cup of coffee and take a deep breath. Learning about how to deal with your keywords is necessary!

" Over 80% of all online transactions begin with a keyword search. To compete, you need to target all the relevant keywords." Keyword Discovery

Many of us use keyword research tools in order strengthen our pay per click (PPC) campaigns and improve the website's on-site SEO power. Finding the tool that works for you can effectiviely make your number of visitors grow exponentially.

I have used Keyword Discovery simple because I think that this tool is more European oriented, as it supports many different languages, and it is not so Google oriented, which is important in many countries in Europe with a more powerful YAHOO! and MSN presence. But I have not really done any structured benchmarking between the two most used keyword tools - Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker.

John Alexander from Search Engine Workshop just wrote a great post in which he compares the two keyword research tools mentioned above - Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery - How do they compare?

A third very widely used tool that in addition is free of charge is Keyword Suggestion Tool. "This is a handy little tool which will show you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords. Then, once you know the keywords you want to target, you can use the free keyword position tracking tool to monitor your placement progress." Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Final Point - My experience tells me that you must combine the more theoretical approach, which according to me is the usage of a keyword research tool, with the real-life data that you get access to via for example YAHOO! Search Marketing (YSM) and Google Adwords. A PPC campaign not only gives you exact data on what your potential customers search for, but also how your webpage convert on every single keyword that you place a bid on.

Start Building Quality Links for Your Web Site

Here is a great 2 min article on how you should work with link building

Mother of all Link Building Strategies

This article takes you through what quality content is and how you can leverage on your unique quality content in your link building work.

The Author:
Roger Montti lives in San Francisco & specializes in site reviews and site audits, as well as link development.

Google’s Universal Search & Your Business

Universal Search is the ultimate search across all the content sources on the web; blog results, images, video results, local/map results, news results, books, patents, finance, code and catalogues. Including all "content elements" in the organic search result will effect the placement of your products & services in the Google search engine. For deeper understanding read Danny Sullivan's explanation - Google 2.0: Google Universal Search.

By continuously comparing and ranking all web information in real time Google can provide a single, integrated set of search results that, in the ideal world, is exactly what you are searching for. For example if you search for "Hillary Clinton Iraq policy" you do not only want to get results related to traditional search result but also most popular blog post, most viewed video on YouTube and so on. Here is the Google Press Release on "Universal Search".

Some tips on how your business can leverage on Universal Search

#1 important thing to keep in mind when enriching your sources of content is that all your additional content must ADD CUSTOMER VALUE! The best start is to place yourself in the mind of the customer. When you enrich the content that you provide you improve your customers' experiences with your web site & your services.

Here's an example: If you are selling mobile phones over the Internet, e.g. Katshing or UK Phone Shop, you should start thinking about how to broaden your services and include other media channels than the web.
Examples on how a retailer for mobile phones can prepare for the Universal Search Trend:

1. Create a video tutorial when you release new mobile phones

2. Start a blog-session on Blogger that covers the differences between this new model and previous

3. Give a 3-d presentation of that new super nice mobile phone model - sell it visually

Google’s Matt Cutts – Duplication of Content

Quick VIDEO-note on the risk of duplicating content (6 min 47 sec)

In short and veeeery simplified - if you copy content and post it on your web site or media channel you are duplicating content. Google, YAHOO! etc does not appreciate duplication of content and are likely to punish you....

Here is a great interview from Matt Cutts. He joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000 and is currently the head of Google's Webspam team.

Matt is great fun to listen to

Matt Cutts commenting duplication of content

Semantic Indexing – Rank Up Your Site

Enrich the content of your webpage through Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is a method used in order to position a word's distribution across the whole of the web. Web pages with many words in common are close to each other (semantically close) and pages with a few words in common to be semantically distant. The LSI-relationship between web pages is analyzed as the different SEs' spiders crawl the web. Spiders use LSI as one of the quality checks. Thanks to semantic indexing the spiders can evaluate your web site's relevance for certain keywords & compare your site's content with the content of thousands of other sites' content.

Keywords that the Spiders crunch on

So the spiders that crawl the web therefore spend part of their time evaluating this LSI-factor, i.e. the relationship between the words on a site. Simplified - the co-occurrence between two words, e.g. "Norway" and "Oslo" is the measurement of the two words LSI-factor. When you add LSI as a measurement of the web sites quality it gives the SEs considerable more power to cut through the BS, spam, and promotional links, copy, etc. As the average query word length expands from 3 to 4 to perhaps 5 words or beyond, SEs can continue to provide relevant results, even if the particular "keyword phrase" is not found on a site. Semantic indexing "constructs" a relationships between words based on number of times these two words are found together, so if you write "Oslo" on Google, the SE know that "Oslo" is related to "Norway" and perhaps consider a site that combines "Oslo" and "Norway" as more relevant than a site that purely focus on "Oslo".

The Google, YAHOO!, Ask (and you have it..) spiders that crawl the web, become more and more intelligent, a must in order to extract relevant info when scanning the billions of web pages out there. The more relevant content they extract the more precise result they can provide. If we receive a precise result from the queries that we perform we'll come back for more. Why spiders work hard to provide it's users with the most relevant results. Relevant results makes the users come back for more and search engine (SE) can earn more money on marketing.

When I write content for a web page I initiate the process by searching on the keyword that is important to me on Google, YAHOO! etc. I go through the pages that the SE provide me with and perhaps use some analysis tools, e.g. DomainTools. By doing this I understand the basic structure on these sites, inbound links, domain age, keywords etc. I then extract the important keywords and run a query on Quintura. This LSI-tool gives you a good indication of what co-occurring words a SE spider expect to find on your site as you optimize for a certain keyword phrase.

I punch in Norway and the words that occur most often on web sites that have Norway written in the content appears to be; country, travel guide, vacations, map and many more words.

Main Point: If you want to work your way up the organic search results for a particular keyword, pay attention to what co-occurring words the SEs' spiders expect to find.

Importance of inbound Links

The web is a place with billions of sites & you need to stick out. A very important benchmark on how popular your website really is, are the number of inbound links, i.e. number of other websites linking to your website.

The most popular candidate wins the election
Your need other sites to ”vote” for your site. This “voting” procedure, is performed via link building, which is an ongoing / evolving process. You want / need other sites to link to your site. The more inbound links, the more votes, and thus increased visibility in the search engines result / visitors.

The quality of those inbound links are also important and a separate issue to address. You can easily improve the quality of the inbound links by a simple “baptising” procedure, almost like tagging...

By “baptising” your inbound links you inform the potential customer what to expect when clicking on your link. The simplest form of name tagging a link is
<a href="http://blog.optimalprint.com/">Start-up Entrepreneur Guide</a>
The name we have given this link is “Start-up Entrepreneur Guide"

Dive into the link building work by reading Jim Boykin's link building blog

Increasec monthly cost for Premium Membership on SEOmoz

Oops seems like SEOmoz.org (great site for search engine optimallization) just raised the monthly cost from $ 39 to $ 49 ...  strange don't know if it affects existing members but still worth it. 

How to get your site into Google

Search Engines crawling / indexing non HTML-content

An interview published on Guardian with Dan Crow, the director of crawl systems at Google.

Why is understanding of how Google crawl your web site important?
If you understand what content that is "crawlable" and not, on your website, you stand a better chance of achiving visability on the web for your products and services.

On the same topic comes a blog written by Jill Wahlen, summarizing a Dan Crow presentation on how to get Your site into the Google system - increased visability in the organic (non-paid) search result.

Increase visitors to your web site – Write relevant web page titles

I hardly knew what Search Engine Optimization was in January 2007. Of course I was one of those using Google and YAHOO! every single day, clicking on all those links that came up as a result of the keywords. I even understood that If our link would pop-up on the search result (preferably on the first page and in the #1 position) we would be . Guess (or hope) that a lot of you can relate to that situation.

After half a year of work with SEO we have constructed a website in 4 languages in 6 countries. From launch March 2007 the number of visitors to Optimalprint increases by 50-100% a month - estimating around 40.000 unique visitors in August. The total SEO cost for Optimalprint so far is roughly $ 1.500, (excluding all the coffee cost and night hours) mostly costs related to directory listing, keyword tools, books and some other stuff.

So what's a good beginning for your SEO work??
I believe that the best start when optimizing your web site for search engines is to write a relevant TITLE on all your web pages. A title is the text on the very very top of your computer screen.

An example: Optimalprint Birthday Invitations - Check the Title: Photo Birthday Invitations | Birthday Invitation | Birthday Party | Optimalprint

The title on a web page is super important, like a title on a book. A title should tell the potential reader what he/she can expect, same as with the title on your web page. In addition the search engine spiders (our librarians on the Internet), that index all sites on the web, appreciate the titles you give your pages since it helps them to navigate though the billion of web sites "out there". Facilitating for the spiders is good for SEO and great for your business.

It is quite amazing, but good for you and us, that so few web sites have figured this one out. Relevant titles for end users that strongly link to web page content is like Viagra for your site. However, since spiders place so great emphasis on the title it better be relevant. Pushing traffic to a site is not your greatest challenge it is getting that visitor to come back for more.

So if a title is so important what should you do in order to get things right? Well, I do not know exactly but I can tell you what we have done.

1. Understand your web page / content / services / products - this is where it starts. Great titles that include potent keywords, will come back to haunt you. It results in high bounce rate, bad reputation and in the long run visitor anorexia.
2. When you know the value that your services bring to the customer visit a keyword "engine" (Keyword Discovery, Digital Point (Free) or Wordtracker) that can provide a list of keyword that describes almost exactly what type of services that you provide on this particular page. Example: Business Card is a high traffic generating keyword phrase but "Cheap Full Colour Business Card Templates" tells both the visitor and the search engine spider almost exactly what to expect. So narrow down your services offered on the page and link the content to a descriptive, relevant and high traffic generating title. A good title puts the most relevant keywords in the front, contains no more than 7-10 words (80 characters) & leverages on keyword phrases not only single keywords.
3. A title on a web page should influence the URL and headings. So take the title on the page and let the most relevant description of the services / products that you offer on this page be included in the URL. Take control over the URL and let the links talk to the spiders and consumers.

Ok drop me a mail - good & bad - thanks!

Search Engine Optimaization (SEO) tools for a Start-Up

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) websites that I frequently visit and consider very valuable for all companies that want to grow rapidly on the web.

So here comes a number of SEO related websites that have helped Optimalprint to become one of the most visible and fast growing website for online printing in the Nordic region. SEO work is no rocket science, only a lot of hard work. No programing experience is required to start working with SEO, only the ability to read english and put in many hours of hard work. Good SEO-work will give you rapid payback.

Most Important SEO Lesson - If I can only give you one recommendation related to effective search engine optimization that would be to create valuable content for your customers and thereafter optimize your site. There is little value in pushing customers to your site but not providing "sticky" content. Remember customer feedback, blogs and statistics related to page views and conversion rate will greatly influence your long term positioning on the search engines. Thus, short term "effective" SEO work that generates low degree of customer satisfaction will not provide long term value to your company.

SEOmoz is an excellent site on Search Engine Marketing. This company has a really cool concept that I have never experienced before, at least not so clearly stated! "Basics About our Services. Our current contract minimum is $10,000 per month". This is clear customer communication I really enjoy reading the blogs on this site and recommend that you become a premium member for $ 39 / month.

SEO Book by Aaron Wall writes excellent summaries on hot SEO topics. In addition Mr Wall provides you with all the SEO - tools that you need in order to get your company and it's services visible on the internet. I have primarily used the SEO keyword selection tool. Type in any word (keyword) that you think will drive traffic to your site. You will get a good indication on the number of searches for that word. Furthermore you get the search volume separated between Google, YAHOO! & MSN. At the bottom of the page you have a great link summary to blogs, trends, competitions and much more.

Submit Express gives you instant understanding of how your competitors have structured their site and also how your own site is crawled and understood by the search engines spiders. Check out the free tools such as Meta Tags Analyzer and the Link popularity check. Linkage to and from your website ( just for you that are quite new to SEO-world) is critical for you sites visibility. But remember it is not the number of links that only counts is is also very important to get good quality links. For quality links check the link directory recommendation provided by SEOmoz.

SEO Company providing a collection of great links and forums. Very good start site for browsing within all areas of the SEO community. Take your time to go through the recommended links, it will save you time and money. There are a number of free SEO-tools available on the Internet. This site have spent considerable amount of time mapping the SEO world, leverage on it.

Wordtracker is one of the most frequently used Keyword Tool around the world. Quick explanation about keywords and why it is important. Keywords are the words, or more correctly "keyword phrases", that all people around the world and in the different countries use when they search the web. Consequently if you want you products or services to be visible on the web you must understand how your potential customers think, i.e. what words or phrases do they use when they search and find the services that your company and competitors offer. The better you become at understanding and analyzing this the more visitors you will get to your website. Wordtracker helps you to analyze the keywords or keywords phrases. My experience as a European oriented company is that Wordtracker is very North America oriented. However they have launched a keyword database for UK. Since Optimalprint's launch in the UK the importance and usage of Wordtracker has grown significantly.

Digitalpoint is a great free keyword tool that provides queries from both Wordtracker and Overture. It is a great tool that separates results between Wordtracker and Overture results.

Keyword Discovery is a tool that you need to pay for but it is good value for money. The nice thing about Keyword Discovery is that you can do trend analyzes, i.e. when during the year is it important to work with the keywords and when should you start to prepare for SEO on the keyword phrases. In addition, just like in Wordtracker, you get access to project folders and competitor analyses. All results can be easily saved in different keyword folders. Another great thing is to use the Industry analyses. In short this gives you a possibility to select a specific industry - lets take printing - and receive the 1.000 keyword phrases that have generated the most traffic to websites providing services within printing.

Spider Simulator that will map any website in the world in terms of how the spider read a website. A "Spider" is a term that is often used for the machines that Google, YAHOO!, MSN etc send out to visit websites all over the world. The purpose of the visits are amongst other reasons to map and understand the information that your site provide to the visitors. Depending on a number of parameters the spiders basically decides the quality of your website and thereby significantly influence the position that your website will be given on the different search engines. Thus, it is important to structure your website in a manner that gives all the visiting spiders an easy access but most importantly give them the right input and information.

Quintura - is a fun tool that works like this: you write any word you can think of and Quintura gives you an answer that explains what surrounding words that a search engine spider are used to find on a website. The importance of the surrounding words are visualized on Quintura by enlarging the most important or common surrounding words. A quick example - if you write "Printing" you receive an answer that displays roughly 20 words such as Business Cards, Brochures, Services and Industry. Why is Quintura an important tool for you? Well, there is a phrase that you will encounter when you start working with SEO called "Latent Semantical Indexing" (LSI). In short, LSI means that the spiders are used to find the words that Quintura display on the pages that the search engines present to their users, in our example "Printing". Finally, to the right of the LSI window you can see all the top ranking sites for that specific keyword phrase on Google.

Optimalprint has been live since February / March but has already on local domains such as www.optimalprint.se, www.optimalprint.no and www.optimalprint.com grown very rapidly. You can check all sites and how they grow in terms of number of visitors and the page views that these visitors generate via www.alexa.com and
then go to Traffic Ranking. Alexa can help you evaluate competitors and potential online marketing channels. My experience is that you should use the results as an indication on how the website is developing, don't focus so much on the exact data.

Just drop me a mail if you have comments on this blog