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SEO 101 – Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms

Posted on 24th February 2010 by admin in SEO

attempts, bag, bloggers, clean slate, Core, Don, Keyword, keyword research, l oreal, list, New York, Page, perspective, phrases, process, quetions, relevant terms, research, search engine, site, term, time

by Stoney deGeyter

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Research Takes Time

The process of researching your keywords isn’t something that should be rushed. Each phase of the research process needs to be performed deliberately, ensuring that you take the time to find all relevant terms and discard the irrelevant. Any attempts to rush through the keyword research process will likely lead you down the wrong paths at best and at worst cause you to have to rethink your entire keyword targeting strategy.

Unfortunately the research process isn’t always linear. You can often be working on several phases of the research process at a time depending on what your focus is on at a given moment. There is a lot of overlap and moving backward and forward through the processes but care needs to be taken that you don’t skip over or leave any of the phases out.

Brainstorming Keywords

You can start the keyword research process anywhere, but I like to start with a clean slate. What keywords do you start the research process with? Do some brainstorming.

Brainstorming allows you to get a list of keywords from an unbiased perspective. The brainstorming process doesn’t mean just sitting around and thinking up phrases, though can be a part of it. Good brainstorming starts with asking questions that can then lead to answers. More times than not, those answers will also be your keywords.

First, think of what questions are relevant for you. Don’t try to answer them, you have time for that later, but compile your list of quetions that will help you find the keywords you are looking for.

Once you have a good list of questions do whatever research is needed to find the answers. Those answers give you a base of keywords you can then take to the online research tools to look for related phrases. These related phrases produce a wide-range of variations in how your topic is searched. Some relevant, others not so much.

Find Core Terms First

Undoubtedly in the brainstorming and research process you’ll amass a list of hundreds of phrases. You want to keep the process as simplified as possible so we’ll start by eliminating everything that is not a core term.

A core term is a keyword phrase boiled down to the essentials. It’s specific enough to produce a relevant result but broad enough to cover a wide range of much more targeted phrases. Generally a good core term is two, maybe three words. On rare occasions a core term can be a single word, but only when there is no room for alternate interpretations.

Only use qualifiers on a core term when it is necessary to ensure that the searcher will be led to a relevant page. For example the word “bag” could mean anything from a garbage bag to a sleeping bag to a travel bag. This is a core term that needs a qualifier in order to be relevant to the searcher. If it’s not relevant it’s not a core term.

Each page of your website should have a single core term associated with it. You may find several pages on your site that are a good fit for a single term. That’s fine during this research process but later you’ll want to make sure you select only the most appropriate page for any single core term. The others will have to find their own core terms.

Don’t stop your core term research until you are certain there are no more possible variations that produce measurable traffic. Using the keyword suggestion tools available in most keyword research programs, find all relevant variations on each of your core terms. For example a “travel bag” can also be a “back pack”, “luggage” (a rare case of a one-word core term) and a “duffel bag.” Each of these can be searched to find even more possible core term variants.

In almost every industry I have worked with I have been able to find different ways searchers think of the same product that the site owner hadn’t. Sometimes these variations don’t get searched much while other times they are more popular than the terms that the site owner said were the most important. Knowing these options in advance can make a dramatic difference in the direction you go with your optimization campaign.

Core Term Site Mapping

After you have put together an exhaustive list of core terms and before you start performing deeper research into finding specific phrases, you want to map out where your core terms will be integrated into your site. For some industries it’s as easy as looking at the content and assigning core terms to pages. For others, where there are a lot of core term variations that mean the exact same thing, it can be more difficult.

Assigning core terms to pages must be done very carefully. You need to ensure that the content of each page is either a 100% natural fit or the content can easily be adapted to fit that core term. A good example is “cost segregation” versus “cost segmentation”. Both essentially mean the same thing but both are frequently searched (though one more than the other.) The content of a page about “cost segregation” can easily be adapted for “cost segmentation” without altering the meaning or focus of the page.

If you can’t make a keyword fit without significantly altering the message of a page, then you find another core term, or another page for the core term.

I recommend prioritizing your core terms before assigning pages to them. Figure out which terms get more search volume, are most relevant, bring in targeted audience and which produce the best sales. These are all important factors of determining which core terms are more important than others.

By prioritizing your core terms you can research and optimize those that are most important first before moving on to lower priority terms. The optimization of your high priority terms can take some time so leaving the secondary terms for later is good optimization strategy.

Before you move into the next phase of the keyword research process you have enough information to start optimizing your website. With the core terms and the map of where each core term will be implemented, you can begin to perform a very broad and quick optimization of the website. Going a page at a time, optimize title tags, meta description tags, headings and even a bit of content.

I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on each page as you can go do a more indepth optimization later, once you have more keywords to work with.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

SEO 101 – Part 8: Everything You Need to Know About Keywords

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Posted on 14th February 2010 by admin in SEO

accurate results, bloggers, blue prints, Cycle, downside, Google, great tools, information, insight, interest, Keyword, keyword combination, keyword research tools, l oreal, low hanging fruit, major search engines, marketing efforts, New York, optimization, phrase, process, research, ROI, search, search phrase, searcher, segment, word phrases, word queries, wordtracker

by Stoney deGeyter

Keywords are the blue-prints from which all your marketing efforts are built upon. Keyword research tools provide valuable insight into what words people are searching on the major search engines. But research tools are just the first step in a thorough and well-planned keyword research process. Great tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker or even Google’s tools don’t tell you the intent of each search, however that information can be deduced with a bit of analysis and keyword organization.

But before we get into that, let’s look at how people search so we can better understand how to segment and organize your keywords into an effective optimization campaign.

How People Search

Over the years searching trends have changed. Once upon a time the majority of searchers used one word queries. Eventually they started realizing they they get better, more accurate, results when you give the search engine a bit more information about what you are looking for.

The more accurate the search phrase you use in your search is, the more accurate the results will be that are returned. Studies have shown that four and five-word phrases often have a higher ROI than one and two word phrases because the searcher is more likely to get results that meet their needs.

The downside of longer phrases is this increases the keyword combination potentials so the number of searches for any one phrase reduces dramatically. This makes optimization more difficult. Instead of optimizing for one general phrase you have to optimize for five very specific phrases. This is the long-tail of keywords, also known as the low hanging fruit. These longer phrases have far less competition and are much easier to get ranked, but also produce lower traffic volumes.

Long-tail phrases should not constitute the primary focus of your optimization efforts. Nor should you focus primarily on short-tail phrases either. A good keyword optimization strategy goes after both simultaneously.

keyword Buying Cycle

Every user has different needs and ultimately different goals they wish to achieve when they begin a search process. Many searches are quick with a sole purpose of learning something such as “how many days does it take the Starship Enterprise to travel from Earth to Vulcan at Warp 7?” A few searches may give you a satisfactory answer and then the ~~sci-fi geek~~ Trekker can go back to watching her ST:TNG marathon.

Other searches have another simple goal: to buy a product that best suites your wants and needs. While that goal maybe simple the process to reach it isn’t. Most searchers–no matter what the goal–will ultimately use at least parts of the following research cycle.

Every search starts with an interest. The interest generally uses broad keywords with one or maybe two words. As the user moves through the other stages–gather, research, exclude and purchase, they make their queries more and more specific. Every change in query, brings the searcher closer and closer to their goal, each giving them more information along the way.

Most searchers go through this process unintentionally, but as they start in the lower stages they learn more about what they want and how to search more accurately. How does a searcher know they want a 1080p blu-ray player (for his Star Trek Blu-rays) until they learn that 1080i isn’t quite as good?

Most businesses want to be ranked for the interest level searches because that’s where the most traffic is. This can often be a mistake because searchers will often use those sites as a springboard to get to the other sites that meet their more specific queries. There is still valid reasons to be ranked on these broader searches as that can help brand your site and bring people back as they know more of what they want, but the conversions come from the more specific terms.

What You Learn

Once you understand how the searcher progresses through the buying cycle you can then learn something from the keywords that were used to search. The information you glean can be crucial in determining how to develop the content and direction of your website.

Target Audience: The more you know about who your target audience is the better position you will be in to meet their needs. The keywords used by business professionals will often be different from keywords used by students and hobbyists. Both will be using keywords that appear to be relevant but depending on what you offer, not all of them truly have the same intent or delivered to the same page.

Areas of Interest: Keywords can tell you what is important to your target audience. Are they looking to satisfy a quick query about warp speed travel or are they looking for the quantum mechanical details of how warp propulsion works? Both of these queries take you to Star Trek sites but the latter would certainly turn the non hard-core Trekker away muttering, “stupid sci-fi geeks” under their breath.

Needs to be met: Finally, your keywords can tell you what needs the searcher is looking to have met. Some hobbyists are looking for a strategy for tackling their next project and a business leader may be looking for a community of like-minded individual.

Unlike the chart above, keyword research isn’t always a linear process. There is a lot of overlap and much that you do in the process requires going back and repeating once you have new data on hand. Keeping your keyword research fluid helps you maintain accuracy and adapt as changes are made in visitor search patterns.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

The Mass Guest Bloggging Strategy: Can You Do It?

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Posted on 10th February 2010 by admin in blogging

audience, blog, bloggers, blogs, earnings, fuzz, leo, many things, mass scale, niche, period of time, promotional strategy, short period, subscribers, synergy, traffic, zen

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post saying that I needed to hustle more, and one of the goals I set to myself was to reach 50,000 subscribers by July 21.

Many readers posted a comment or emailed me asking how I planned to achieve that goal. Well, I have many things in mind, and I’ll talk about them individually. Today I want to talk about the first strategy I’ll use: mass guest blogging.

You already know what guest blogging is, and why it is an effective promotional strategy. It basically allows you to reach a new audience, to network with fellow bloggers, and to receive some traffic along the way. But what about mass guest blogging? It is the same thing, but implemented on a mass scale.

For example, you could write and publish 20 guest posts on blogs inside your niche, all within a 30-day period. Alternatively, you could aim to get one guest post published a week, for 6 months in a row.

I like the mass guest blogging strategy because it creates synergy. That is, the results you will get with the 20 guest posts packed in a single month will be larger than the results you would get if you were to publish these same posts scattered through a longer period, say one or two years.

Why is that? Because when people see your name (or the name of your blog) everywhere on a short period of time, they start wondering what the fuzz is about, and they get curious or motivated to visit your site and possibly to subscribe to it.

Leo Babauta used this strategy when he was promoting Zen Habits in the early days. I remember I would see a guest post from him on popular blogs every other day, and that is how I discovered his blog and became a fan of his work (and probably how many other people did, too).

My goal is to write and get one guest post published every week, for the next 6 months. The one for this week is up on Problogger, and it is titled 9 Tricks I Used To Triple My AdSense Earnings In 30 Days. I’ll also try to double the efforts on some weeks, publishing two guest posts instead of one.

It will be a lot of work, but I am sure the results will be worth it. On top of that now I made the whole thing public, so I have some extra motivation to walk my talk.

But what about you? After all you read this blog to improve your own, right? That is why I wanted to invite you to this challenge. Can you write one guest post per week and get it published on blog relevant to your topic? I am sure you can, so get on with it. Make a list of 10, 20 or 30 blogs where you want to guest post, brainstorm some content ideas and start writing the posts straight away.

Within six months I’ll write another post with the results of the challenge, and I’ll be looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Good luck!

Original Post: The Mass Guest Bloggging Strategy: Can You Do It?

SEO 101 – Part 7: Everything You Need to Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking

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Posted on 10th February 2010 by admin in SEO

architectural problems, best bet, bloggers, domain name, dynamic content, endless loops, l oreal, optimized content, possibilities, productid, search engine rankings, search engines, url parameters, URLs, variation

by Stoney deGeyter

Common Architectural Problems

In order to move your site up in the search engine rankings you have to get your optimized content to the search engines in the most streamlined way possible. There are some common problems that often stand in the way of that. These problems may not keep the search engines from finding and indexing and even ranking your content, however they can greatly effect the performance of that content in terms of how well it ranks in the search results.

Too many URL parameters

The web is littered with long complicated URLs such as this:

site.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10051&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100615137&N=10000003+90401+528374

Aside from changing the actual domain name, the URL above is a real one. Look at it closely, everything after “ProductDisplay?” are the various parameters that tell the browser what content to pull up.

Each “=” in the URL represent a different parameter. Each parameter represents a slight variation of the content. Every variation represents a potentially different page that can be indexed by the search engines.

The search engines want to index valuable content, but URLs such as this can often send engines away. They don’t want to be caught into endless loops of variation. While the search engines certainly have no problem indexing dynamic content, once you get more than three parameters your risking losing the search engines all together. The engines tend to shy away from sites with duplicate content or endless loops created by many parameter possibilities. Your best bet is to keep the parameters down to a minimum.

Inaccessible content

Great content is often inaccessible to the search engines either because it’s hidden behind search options or buried deep within the site. Setting up a proper navigation and clickable link search structure is essential for any site, but even more important for large sites with hundreds of pages or products.

Some pages have to be buried, there just isn’t any other way to go about it. But they don’t have to be so deep that they can’t be found without a GPS tracking device. It’s all a matter of laying out your site’s architecture so all pages have a proper place and that the most beneficial content is the easiest to find.

Session IDs

Session IDs create duplicate content by the hundreds, if not thousands. Every visitor to a site is given a session IDs which is appended to the end of each URL visited. Multiply your visitors by thousands and you now have thousands of new URLs all pointing to the same content.

There are some workarounds when using session IDs for tracking, however there are better solutions altogether that you should look into.

Code Bloat

Avoid building navigation links using Flash or JavaScript. Depending on how these are implemented they can often be problematic to the search engines. Pages which are only linked to via these methods can often be outside of the search engines spidering reach and therefore not included in the index.

Directory Structure

There are three basic directory structures you can have, flat, deep or somewhere in between.

A flat directory structure puts all of your site pages on the same directory level. Each page is essentially one click away from the home page and no page is given any type of prominence.

A deep directory structure is the near opposite. Only a few pages are accessible from the home page, then a few more are accessible from those, a few more from those and so on. This puts some pages many clicks away from the home page unnecessarily.

You want to be somewhere in between. You want a directory structure that makes sense. Pages should be grouped together in broad level categories and only sub-categorized as makes sense from the navigation standpoint. You can go a bit deeper with your URLs but again you don’t want half a dozen directories when a few will do just fine.

Internal Linking

You want to do a good share of internal linking within your site. Not just the navigation, mind you but link from within your content areas and product pages. Good internal linking helps your visitors navigate from page to page and find other areas and products that interest them. This improves visitor satisfaction, leads to more sales and helps improve search engine rankings.

Use whatever opportunities you have to give your visitors opportunities to find these other sections of the site. If you talk about a product or service, link to it. If you have a related bit of information or another similar or companion product, link to it. Using keywords in these links gives the search engines more keyword juice for determining how pages should be ranked.

Site Maps

Site maps provide a great way to allow both your visitors and the search engines to find their way to your content with as few clicks as possible. Your site map should always be no more than one click away, no matter what page the visitor is on. This way, if they get lost in the site or have trouble finding what they want, a quick click to the site map gets them a list of every page or piece of content you offer.

Generally you want your site map to be fewer than 100 links. Larger sites may need a site map that links to other site maps in order to keep all your products and pages accessible as easily as possible. The site map should be the only page on your site that links to every page, unless your site is under 20 or so pages.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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SEO 101 – Part 8: Everything You Need to Know About Keywords

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