Keyword Targeting

The search engines face a tough task; based on a few words in a query, sometimes only one, they must return a list of relevant results, order them by measures of importance, and hope that the searcher finds what he is seeking. As website creators and web content publishers, you can make this process massively simpler for the search engines and, in turn, benefit from the enormous traffic they send by employing the same terms users search for in prominent positions on your pages.

Keyword targeting has long been a critical part of search engine optimization, and although other metrics (such as links) have a great deal of value in the search rankings, keyword usage is still at the core of targeting search traffic.

The first step in the keyword targeting process is uncovering popular terms and phrases that searchers regularly use to find the content, products, or services your site offers. There’s an art and science to this process, but it consistently begins with a list of keywords to target Once you have that list, you’ll need to include these in your pages. In the early days of SEO, the process involved stuffing keywords repetitively into every HTML tag possible. Now,keyword relevance is much more aligned with the usability of a page from a human perspective.

Since links and other factors make up a significant portion of the search engines’ algorithms, they no longer rank pages with 61 instances of “free credit report” above pages that contain only 60. In fact, keyword stuffing, as it is known in the SEO world, can actually get your pages devalued via search engine penalties. The engines don’t like to be manipulated, and they recognize keyword stuffing as a disingenuous tactic.

Keyword usage includes creating titles, headlines, and content designed to appeal to searchers in the results (and entice clicks), as well as building relevance for search engines to improve your rankings. Building a search-friendly site requires that the keywords searchers use to find content are prominently employed.

Now What The Hell Is keyword research!!

OK, now you know a little about seo and you have set up your domain/blog and started added content. But now you are wondering how can i choose the best keywords for my website/blog that would be relative to content and will rank me up in google search. Well this is not as hard as you might think. There are a lot of keyword research tools available on the internet and the great news is that most of them are free. Lets take a brief overview of what keyword research is and how are you going to choose your keywords out of an almost unlimited choice of words.

Keyword research is the core of any SEO campaign, since the keywords you pick during the research will be included in your website copy, into your PPC campaigns and any other website promotion campaigns. In a sense, keyword research is similar to customer research, because you are studying what words your potential clients use when searching for your service or product.

When starting your keyword research, you'll need to pick the main keywords to base your keyword research on. These will be the keywords that you, your customers and your competitors chiefly use when speaking of your service or product. The valid keywords would be synonyms, different in one aspect or another - view them as the directions your website SEO will go. Naturally, you'll need to use quite a variety of sources for your keywords. The most common tools used for keyword research are:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker
• Sitepoint
• Keyword discovery

And many others. So you can choose the one which suits you the best. And remember that it'll give you an idea about how much the keyword is being used and what are the alternatives. You can take the basic idea from here and make keywords that best describe your blog/website. And it is a good practice to use synonyms.

Seo Definition

The search engine industry frequently innovates as do consumer behaviors for discovery and sharing. Those changes require search marketers to take a fresh look at what search engine optimization (SEO) is and why companies should or should not engage in its practice.

Defining search engine optimization is often focused on the mechanics:
“SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.” (Wikipedia).

Even Google offers a definition of what an SEO is along with guidelines:
“Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Review of your site content or structure, Technical advice on website, development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript, Content development, Management of online business development campaigns, Keyword research, SEO training, Expertise in specific markets and geographies.”

Since the key components of how a search engine works include: crawling, indexing and sorting, those are the functional focus areas of most SEO efforts.  Most experienced internet marketing professionals will admit that is a limited view of the value SEO brings.

What about link building and promotion of content? What about search for content that isn’t product or service oriented? What about search within closed networks? What about real-time search? What about niche search: vertical, local, mobile, multi-lingual? What about social search?

Code, site architecture and server issues that affect how search engine bots interact with and index a web site’s content are certainly important as are keyword research and the subsequent use of those keywords in tags, on-page copy, markup and anchor text links between pages.  These areas all fall under the realm of “on-page SEO”.  The Yang to that Yin is “off-page SEO” which is basically link building. For more of this kind of practical SEO advice, read “Basics of Search Engine Optimization“.

Defining SEO can be as simple as, “Optimizing digital content for better performance in search.”  That’s a broad definition and the implications and value from improved search performance can range from increased sales to lowered customer service costs. It really depends on what customers are searching for, whether available company content is optimized and if analytics are in place to benchmark and measure performance.

Consumers are prompted to use search in a variety of scenarios ranging from research to finding products for purchase.  In most cases, SEO consultants (like TopRank :) ) are hired by corporate marketing departments to improve the search visibility of products and services being marketed to customers. Improved search engine placement typically results in an increase in traffic (qualified by the search terms used) and an increase in sales.

Marketing departments fund most Search Engine Optimization efforts whether they are executed in-house, by outside consultants or as is increasingly common, a combination of the two.  Companies that take a holistic view of search and approach the notion of “If it can be searched, it can be optimized” strategically, find themselves with an opportunity to not only improve marketing performance and efficiency via SEO, but do the same for other content areas as well.

Most companies only engage, implement and measure SEO efforts to increase revenue as part of marketing. Those same companies often publish many other types of content ON and OFF the site as well as content that has a ROI, but isn’t part of marketing. Customers are searching for this content and if it’s not well optimized, cannot find it. That spells opportunity.

Companies that implement keyword research and SEO efforts for their web sites holistically, typically realize a very desirable combination of benefits that include an increase in sales as well as a reduction of costs in certain areas. If not a reduction in costs, at least an improvement in efficiency and performance.

For example: Most on site search functions for company web sites rate a C to D minus. Google on the other hand, can do quite well with such content.  After the sale, customers often search for company contact info, product support and customer service related info. “How to fix this or that” or “Where to re-order this or that part.”  Increasing numbers of companies have invested in the aggregation and publishing of this kind of information, but the usability inherent to those systems is often flawed.

Making FAQ and Knowledgebase information available to external crawlers like Googlebot, SLURP and MSNBot as well as the systematic keyword optimization of such content makes it more easily available to customers that are looking. Companies invest in aggregating product and customer service / support information to reduce overall customer service costs (call centers are expensive) and hopefully provide better service to customers in a way that is more convenient for them (i.e. 24/7 online).  Making support content perform better in search can facilitate those performance and cost efficiency goals.

There are other examples I could share involving SEO for job listings, news content and others, but I think you get the model. Assess all content being published online (from text to digital assets) to determine the audience and whether improved search performance can help reach business goals. Those goals might be increased sales, branding/reputation, recruiting better employees while lowering recruiter costs or increasing media coverage while lowering PR agency costs.  The thread that binds this kind of SEO effort is that customers are searching for content being published on and off company web sites (inside social networks for example), but it’s often difficult to find. Making content easier for customers to find can help multiple departments reach business goals.

In the end, whether search optimization efforts are for marketing, public relations, talent acquisition, customer service or consumer research, my preferred definition of SEO is a broad one and commercially focused: “Optimizing digital content for search engines and consumers to improve performance and reach business goals.”

What Is Keyword Research

As you explore the world of internet marketing, you’ll probably come across the phrases “keyword” or “keyword research” more than one time. what are keywords and why should you care about them?

Think about what happens when you go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo. If you’re looking for information on cruise deals for your next vacation, you might enter the word “cruises” into the search bar to find websites related to vacation deals. That word you entered is what’s referred to as a keyword. If you entered a string of words, say “best cruise deals”, you’ve entered a keyphrase into the search engine.

The keyword or keyphrase tells the search engine what kind of results to bring back for you. Search engines scour the internet, recording the information they find on various sites around the web. When you enter the keyphrase “best cruise deals”, the search engines comb their databanks to find sites related to “best cruise deals”.

When you’re building a website, choosing the keywords and phrases to focus on is extremely important. You want to target the keywords people are actively searching for. But as you can imagine, some keywords are more competitive than others. An example of a general keyphrase is “lose weight”. It’s much more competitive than the keyphrase “lose weight with the lemon juice diet”.

If you build a new site around the phrase “lose weight”, you’ll be competing with well established websites and likely find your site buried on page 89 of Google’s search results for the term.

Where your site falls on the search results pages is measured as its ranking. For the general keyphrase “lose weight”, you’ll likely be low in the rankings, so your site won’t receive much traffic or exposure.

On the other hand, if you focus on less competitive keywords, you can expect to rank much higher in the search engine results – you may even be able to land the much-coveted first page ranking.

This is why good keyword research is vital to the success of your online business. Focus on less competitive keywords and you can expect to rank much higher in the search engine results. Focus on lots of less competitive keywords and you’ll get lots of free traffic.

Ideally, you want to find keyphrases that have high search volumes and low competition. The two go hand-in-hand – the phrase “make your own digital camera using a potato” likely has low competition, but it won’t matter if no one ever searches for it. The experts argue back and forth about exactly what type of numbers you should be looking for – “search engine results of less than 500,000″ or “at least 1,000 daily searches” – but it will be up to you to determine which parameters work best for your internet business.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you optimize the individual pages of your site, not just the home page. So you don’t just pick one keyword or keyphrase. You need to select a number of them and set up an actual strategy for ranking high for all of them.

To conduct your keyword research, you can take advantage of a number of free or paid keyword research tools. One of the best free research tools is available through the Google Adwords program, although you can find other good options at SEOBook.com or by searching online. If you’re looking for programs that offer added functionality, look into WordTracker’s subscription service. Any one of these programs will help you identify keywords and keyphrases with high traffic and low competition to build your web pages around.