DIY Internet Marketing/Theory Behind Keyword Research

Theory Behind Keyword Research 

Keyword research allows us to produce products, services & content that web searchers are actively seeking. To establish the value of a keyword you must make hypotheses, test & retest.

The Long Tail of the Keyword Curve:
The popular keywords (eg. 5000 searches a day etc.)only account for 30% of all searches. The remaining "long tail", lessor used/unique keywords, comprise 70% of  all searches.

Keyword Research Steps
1 make a list of 1-3-word, phrases, for your product/service
2  find synonyms for these phrases
3 create classifications for all areas of interest in your industry
4 think of higher level terms, of which your services/products may be subsets of
5  extract key phrases from your own website
6 visit industry association & media sites to see what phrases they use for your 
   topic area
7 list all your brand terms
8 list all of your products
9 think what a potential customer would type into a search engine
10 ask outsiders what they would type in
11 look at your own web analytics to see what terms people are already using
13 review competitor's sites for keywords
14 research non-brand terms that your competitors use
15 check out articles written by your competitors
16 what does media say about your competitors

Do-it-Yourself Internet Marketing/Who are your Top Competitors ?

(I've been away for a while working frantically on my new website and I'm back now, ready to continue sharing the info from "The Art of SEO".)


        Who are your Top Competitors ?

Your top competitors will be found in the top half of page one of the your search engine results for the keywords you type in.
More important is finding out how competent your top competitors are at SEO.

This is done by answering these questions

i) Are all their web pages, including product pages, in the search engines' data base ? Use netconcepts.com/urlcheck or theirdomain.com to find out
A site with only a small percentage of its' data in Google is most likely unfriendly to search spiders.

ii) Does each page have keyword-rich titles(title tags) You can discover a sites page titles in Google or Yahoo by using yourcompetitor.com

iii) Do the product and category pages have high page rank scores

iv) Is anchor text throughout the site, particularly in navigation, keyword-rich?

 v) Are they being penalized for copyright infringes?
     Find out with  copyscape.com

vi) Are they spamming with doorway passages ?


Uncovering Their Secrets

1. Keywords.
Find page title in the blue bar at top of your webrowser.
Look in the "view source" of your browser under "meta name".

2. Who's linking to their popular pages

3. Examine the"cached" version of your rivals pages to see what the search engines see, as compared to what the public sees. This button is next to the search results in Google.

4.To get info on rivals' traffic, use compete.com , quantcast.com, alexa.com, http://trends.google.com/websites?q=(name of site)
Paid ones are comscore.com and  hitwise.com

You've probably noticed that the title of this series is changed to "Internet Marketing". That's because my research tells me that "internet marketing" is  used far more as a search term.

Do-it-Yourself Marketing /Pt 11 HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK pt [ii]

How search engines work [pt ii ]

Semantic Connectivity 

This is an added advanced,advantage to help with:
i- figuring out keyword phrases
ii- figuring out relationships of text on high ranking pages
iii- finding pages with relevant themed links
iv- finding which keywords to include on a page

The source for this information is highly technical,but the principles used 

are basic. Search engines try to recognize connections between words, 

phrases & ideas on the web using the following types of searches.
1. proximity searches eg. terms that may have different order from
   original query
2. fuzzy logic  eg.. misspellings, close enough for jazz
3.boolean searches  eg. Yes,Or,Not
4. weight shifting  eg. the importance of each search term

Search engines are getting better at recognizing the connections between 

words, phrases,& ideas. Therefore this semantic connectivity will eventually 

put greater emphasis on theme of pages,sites & links.
eg. zebra & lion would be connected. because they are both animals.

   
TOP 11 BASIC RANKING FACTORS
1.keyword-rich title page
2. keyword-rich of inbound anchor text
3.global link authority of site
4. age of site
5.popularity of link within site's internal link structure
  - all pages should be on the site's global navigation to increase it's own importance
6. relevance of in bound links
 - all links are good, related ones are best
7.link popularity of  of site, in it's topical community
8. keyword-rich content
- include semantics
9. global link popularity of sites that link in
  - number of inbound links use https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
  - quality of links use www.seomoz.org/linkscape
10. number of ranks per day increases/decreases
11.  user Data ...personalization like geolocation, language preference




AMBIGUOUS QUERIES
When search queries that are too general, search engines offer diverse results.