Make the Most of SEO Competitive Research : Evaluating the Competition

Why bother about your competitors? Well, a stupid question, I know. You can’t possibly think that you can enter a new niche and get on top without looking into what has been done before you. When done properly, competitor analysis will answer your most important strategic planning questions:

• Is it worth trying to enter this niche? Will I be able to overdo my competitors? How fast? Will long and hard victory be worth the effort? What’s my expected ROI?
• What should I do to succeed in this niche? What shouldn’t I?
• Who are my perspective readers/customers? What are they used to? What do they like?
• Well, and many more, but I will stop here for now not to miss the point.

Step 1. Evaluating your overall competition.

You can either do it ‘at home’ using Google search and Excel or try paid tools returning complete competitor’s report. I usually perform all possible ways of analysis because I (1) cannot fully rely on reports compiled by someone else (be it an automatic tool or another person); (2) do not feel I have the full understanding of a niche unless I spend long hours on searching Google and compiling data into tables (yep, preferably multiple ones, and then combining tables into one table; but that’s just me, you can safely get along with a single solid report).

The idea is simple: you throw all your keywords into a spreadsheet and add the following information:

1. Google daily/monthly estimated reach (I was using data provided by Aaron’s keyword research tool);
2. Overall number of results in Google (broad match);
3. The site ranked #1 for each term;
4. Number of results for [intitle:keyword];
5. Number of results for [inanchor:keyword];
6. Number of results for both [intitle:”keyword” and inanchor:”keyword”] (hat tip to Ciaran) - this is your exact competition, i.e. those who use SEO (optimized titles and incoming links anchor text).

To save time you can get this information via SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool (it will also provide you with lots of other useful information: average PageRank of the top 10 sites, how many root URLs can be found in top 10 results, etc). Naturally, the best combination is when #1 is high, #2 is low (not necessarily) and #4, #5 and #6 are the lowest possible - the cases framed in green:

Step 2. Finding your direct competitors

After you compiled your targeted keyword list, you can sort by ‘#1 in G‘ column and see the sites that is most often ranked high in Google for your chosen keywords:

Be sure to explore your most successful competitor’s on-site optimization: titles, H1 and H2 tags, internal site architecture, etc. I have singled out two approaches that help me to perform this kind of analysis:

1. Don’t be too skeptical. Unfortunately most often experienced SEOs analyzing onpage optimization think they can do much better. This thought can bring you to wrongful conclusions.
2. Learn from their mistakes. (I know, this somehow interferes with the first one, so the most important is balancing between the two.) We all know how to do it right. So analyzing what a competitor did well doesn’t help a lot. The art of seeing mistakes and at the same time being able to keep from underestimating (see #1) always brings to the right solution in the end.

And now a few tools that can also prove helpful:

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool (free) is useful for comparing Google advertisers’ competition data and your own findings and also for differentiating commercial terms from non-commercial ones. Keywords enjoying high advertisers‘ competition are most likely targeting potential customers (while more informative [and hence less competitive] phrases usually attract people who are collecting information rather than are really willing to buy). A good way to overcome high competition while sticking to more commercial phrases is to turn (moderately) commercial phrases into long tail (e.g. per our table: ‘Tennessee fsbo‘ into ‘townsend Tennessee fsbo‘).

2. Compete.com (paid with a few trial searches) also provides some helpful type of analysis that can help you to evaluate your competition:

• “Keyword Share” shows the percentage of total referrals a site receives from a particular keyword compared to its other referrals (= this keyword referrals/other keywords referrals).
• “Keyword Engagement” shows the average time visitors tend to spend on the site after being referred by this keyword.
• “Keyword Effectiveness” all people referred by this term/total time spent on the site.

While these metrics represented by Compete.com look really promising and useful, I mostly use them for self-education and out of curiosity - just because I am more used to ‘old school’ method of looking into my referrals and learn people’s actual behavior in practice. However this can still be very useful for learning the competitors’ referrals and visitors’ [probable] behavior.

Next time I will look into most effective ways of analyzing competitor’s link building strategies. So stay tuned!

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/make-the-most-of-seo-competitive-research-evaluating-the-competiton/6386/

How stale and dated is your website?

We have all had that money maker website that ranks really well but are desperately afraid to touch anything on it, incase whatever it is about the site that Google’s secret sauce is so in love with gets destroyed in the process. But unfortunately, Google doesn’t necessarily like it either when a site hasn’t been updated in years, despite those killer rankings.

Not only that, humans don’t really like it when they can tell a site hasn’t been updated in ages either, and they couldn’t really care less whether Google loves it or not. And after all, sure, Google can drive the traffic, but if the mass majority of your visitors leave out of disdain when they see you 1999 web design, is it really worth keeping it looking as it did when you first launched it with your Frontpage 97 design skills? Which brings me to the question…

So when was the last time you really updated your website? And then the next obvious thing…

What makes your website look stale, outdated and old?

Copyright date

Does your copyright date still say 2005? Or worse, 1999? Copyright date is a common way that people check how current a site is. And no, people are usually smarter than to be tricked by those javascript “today’s date” scripts that were so popular a few years ago. So make sure your site’s copyright notice is updated, and if you want to show that your site has been around since 1999, change it to 1999-2008 instead.

Font choice

Some fonts are, well, so 1999. If you have Comic Sans MS anywhere on your site, change it immediately (here is a link for the three people that have no idea what font this is). In fact, if the temptation is to great (and for many do-it-yourself webmasters, it seems to be the font of choice) go and remove it from your computer completely. Your conversion rate will thank you for it.

Background images

True, some sites definitely suit having a background image, especially if it is a tasteful Web 2.0-ish design that isn’t too distracting. Note the part about the tasteful design because not all webmasters get that part, especially when they have some photo they want to show off and have it sized to the entire browser window. But the only reason you should have a photo background image on your site is if it is directly related to what the site is about. For instance, a beach resort might have a background image showing the beach, which could be acceptable, so long as the text is still legible. Best practices would be to have a plain background beneath the text so people can actually read what you are trying to tell them, but too many people try and put the text right over top of the photo and inevitably, some of the text will be very difficult to see. And the biggest piece of advice when it comes to webpage backgrounds… if it is clouds, or anything space related, ditch it immediately.

Cache date

Look and see how many people are viewing your site via Google cache and you’ll probably be shocked. But if Google’s last cache date of your home page is six months ago, you’ve got some work to do.

Centered text

Yep, way back when the [center] tag was new, people went nuts with it and everything on the site, including all written text such as articles, was centered. Well, the [center] tag is not new anymore, and very few things should be centered except titles/headlines and subheaders.

Animated “under construction” signs

I also thought these went out about a year after animated gifs first became all the rage, but I still not only see them on older sites, but also on newer site that should know better. If a page is under construction, you are better to not add the page to be accessible to the public in the first place, or at least put a small amount of text on the page so it is passable as a legitimate page and not telling the world that you just haven’t had time to do it yet.

Sparkly anything

Sparkly animated gifs had almost died a quiet death when the MySpace crowd brought them back with a vengeance. There is no reason why any legitimate website should have sparkly images if it is targeting anyone over the age of 13, unless there is a damn good reason for it… and I am still waiting for anyone to supply me with a damn good reason!

Link exchange pages

If you still have link exchange pages on your site – usually aptly titled Link Exchange Page 1, Link Exchange Page 2, and so on, and of course with the pages being called something obvious like links1.html. If you are going to have link exchange pages, be a little less obvious about it. Smart webmasters stopped calling them link exchange pages years ago. Sorry, no examples to protect the guilty!

Homepage refers to outdated events

The last summer games were quite the event, but if your homepage is still showcasing them, you should really update the homepage or change it to a retrospective slant, so people aren’t wondering why you are featuring something that happened a couple of years ago as “new”.

Design

While design can be subjective to a certain extent, it can date a site especially if it is done without columns or a CSS file in sight.

Color scheme

Do you remember the old school html tags when colors used to be specified by name instead of HEX #, and the most popular colors were cyan, blue and purple, usually on a black background? Well, if your site still has them, you seriously need to consider a new color scheme for your site. Nothing can date a site faster than having a black background with cyan text… unless you happen to have a site catering to gamers, and then it seems to be the norm.

Last updated June 17, 2004

If you haven’t updated in the last six months – or worse, years – remove the last updated date from your homepage. The only time you should really use this is if it I the first time you have updated in years, or if you have a massive repeat visitor base that you want to alert to what has recently been updated.

Of course, there are always those odd ball exceptions. This site hasn’t changed much about its design in ten years, right down to using the same neon confetti background image.

When you have a website that has killer rankings, webmasters can be somewhat apprehensive about updated what is on the page incase Google’s secret sauce isn’t so happy about those changes. But you also need to ensure that your visitors don’t come to your site and immediately do an about face because the site looks, well, old. If you have one of these websites, changing the above things can ensure your site doesn’t look outdated, even if you update the content and homepage very infrequently.

Still not convinced? Change bits and pieces at a time over a period of weeks (or even months!) so you can evaluate exactly what Google is thinking of your much needed changes. This will also give you the opportunity to backtrack if suddenly things start to tank and you think your updating had something to do with it. And I can’t stress enough… make sure you keep backups of everything before you make the changes, and keep them for each change you make. This will make it easy to undo your changes to figure out what went wrong.
So if you have any of those oldie but goodie websites, take some time to make sure you aren’t committing one of the above faux pas which immediately dates your website, even when the content – while not recently written – is still valuable and updated.

Source: http://www.jenniferslegg.com/2008/02/15/how-stale-and-dated-is-your-website/

The Great Nofollow Link Debate of '08

Three years ago Google introduced the rel="nofollow" tag to the Web. A benign title to anyone who has never run a blog and experienced the headache, "Preventing comment spam" promised future bloggers comment spam would be greatly devalued by this simple tag. The reason being, this little bugger would effectively kill the SEO value of any link "protected by it."

The new nofollow tag quickly became known as a "link condom," and experts at conferences across the world started hailing it for its simple yet powerful purpose. One of the people involved in the comment spam fighting problem within Google was an unknown engineer named Matt Cutts, now Google's famous, unofficial chief Web spam fighter. (Ironically, Google thinks "spamfighter" should be one word, yet when you search the Matt Cutts-related results still outrank spamfighter.com -- ah the power of the SEO (define) community is strong).

Matt's "next little ditty" came out in September 2005 on his personal blog post that sentenced link sellers to eternal damnation. He laid out a compelling argument that buying links solely for PageRank value was polluting the Web. Publishers started using nofollow tags to show Google selling links wouldn't be based on the SEO value of the publisher's site to the buyer's site.

The Nofollow Evolution

While the paid links debate raged on, the nofollow attribute was quietly becoming used for more than just blocking outbound links. Before we go there, let's check in during early 2007 when Sebastian "X" asked if we really need this attribute after all. Sebastian succinctly highlighted the apparent shortcomings of the tag, and expressed the frustration felt by many this tag was worthless when it came to stopping blog spam. Beyond that, there was confusion as to its real purpose, he said.

Not surprisingly, the "link condom" attribute -- much like the occasional cheap or damaged contraceptive device -- doesn't always work. Some feel Google still follows links and, in some cases, might not even strip the "juice" out based on the trust of the landing domain, still assigning value based on the anchor text.

Tests I've tried have been statistically inconclusive so far. I've noticed nofollow links at Wikipedia are scraped, dropping the attribute but keeping the link. (No names in order to protect the innocent.)

Spammers were still spamming, links were still being sold, and at least one war in the Middle East was still going on. Sebastian hinted at a better use for the tag -- specifically to instruct spiders (define) not to crawl printer friendly version of pages. Turns out a new revolution led SEOs to turn their nofollow focus inward.

The Nofollow Revolution

Eric Lander started an interesting debate about nofollow use triggering search engine algorithms (define) to detect spammy sites. This theory has almost no legs to stand on. SEOs, though, certainly haven't forgotten about this little tag.

SEOs have been secretive about their use of nofollow. (I may in fact be hunted down for this post.) SEOs know nofollow lessens "PageRank dilution" that occurs between internal pages of a site. The idea, in a nutshell: if search engine ranking algorithms devalue administrative pages (privacy policy, TOS, contact us), no SEO value should be delivered from external links.

Often a home page gathers many inbound links. Focusing the links on the most important secondary and deeper site pages benefits internal pages with a relatively low number of inbound links.

Some people find this practice effective. I've tested it and I'm not completely sold yet. One commenter on Lander's post (who happens to work with me) took apparent offense at the idea the nofollow could not be used to help "craft the flow of Internal PageRank."

Bottom line: The rel="nofollow" attribute is here to stay, and a few more years of testing and a few dozen search engine algorithms updates from now, it will likely have far different value than it holds today. An interesting tag started on a simple enough mission to rid the world of spammers has evolved into a tool to be used wisely and tested consistently. Please join us for discussion on this topic in the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Frank Watson Fires Back

Frank Watson: The initial intention of the nofollow tag was good -- but the option was that bloggers could use the tag as they saw fit. The problem now is that Google is forcing people to use the tag.

As Michael Gray pointed out, "Google is not the government." Google isn't even the Internet police. Yet the fact that Google is the source of the largest part of Web traffic forces people to follow their edicts.

Google may cause greater government intervention on the Web. Given Google's dominant share of Web searches and traffic, governments around the world may view this as a form of monopoly and start regulating Google, as they review the purchase of DoubleClick.

Will there be an antitrust case eventually brought by someone who lost his source of income by a change Google makes to their algorithm? Let's wait and see.


Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628452

Six Steps to Conversion Health

Are you planning a site re-design? Is your landing page not converting well enough? Hopefully you've got the basics covered, and your landing page has a search function, contact information and a strong marketing message. But what else can you do to improve your conversion rate?

Once a visitor lands on your website, the clock starts ticking and you have only a few seconds to convince them to stay there, let alone make a purchase. At first glance, a user should know that they are in the right place and that their transactions will be secure. Sound daunting? With only a few easy changes, you can convert more visitors. Consider these six points as you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your current site and plan your re-design.

1. Custom Landing Pages - Add a Personal Touch:

Does your landing page have a navigation bar or feature multiple product lines and promotions? If so, you are committing conversion suicide. You must convince the visitor that the landing page is just for them. Avoid using home pages or all-inclusive multipurpose landing pages. Create specific landing pages for every ad and paid search term. When you land a visitor on your home page, they may stay longer and check out more of your pages, but chances are they won't make a purchase. Instead, consider taking your visitors to a custom landing page. They'll stay on your site a shorter amount of time, but they'll convert about three times more often. And whatever you do, do not include a navigation bar on your landing pages - it's completely unrelated to your sale and can dramatically lower your conversion rate.

Custom landing pages are so important for pay-per-click advertising because you are creating consistency from keyword to ad to landing page. Many campaigns fall short of their goals due to an overly general landing page which does not meet the customer's expectations of relevancy. Just make sure you include some branding elements that will help consumers understand who you are and what you offer.

2. Images - Size Matters:

Product image size is actually one of the most important conversion factors on your landing page. The bigger and more detailed a product image is, the more inclined the consumer is to make a purchase. Make sure the picture is clear and full-color to contribute to the professional appearance of your landing page. In addition to product images, pictures of people can also increase conversion rates.

3. Confidence Messaging - Counter the Fear Factor:

Retailers must gain trust from shoppers. A large percentage of consumers won't buy online because they're absolutely terrified of giving out their credit card information. They've heard stories on the news about identity theft and with increasing spyware and phishing threats, consumers are rightfully concerned. Smart marketers counter customer fears by placing third-party endorsements such as "VeriSign secured" or "BizRate.com customer certified" on their landing pages to give visitors confidence to buy.

5. Registration Forms - Don't Scare Them Away:

More information is not always better. When you scrunch too much copy onto one landing page, you make your visitor's eyes hurt and they are more likely to leave. Keep your font size over 10 point type and try just one column of copy. Few visitors will scroll down, so your marketing message should be short and sweet and above the fold. Your goal is to not confuse your visitors, so place your conversion activity in a clear and prominent location. Overall, the design should be clear, uncluttered and easy to read. Don't try to jazz things up with flashing buttons, overly bright colors or artsy fonts.

6. Newsletter Subscriptions - Keep Them Coming Back for More:

Not only are visitors worried about their privacy, they're also a little "work averse". So keep your registration forms short. Limit your page to six or seven fields and don't require too much personal information like Phone numbers. Include e-mail privacy information so the visitor knows that you won't share their information with other marketers.

It's also important to have the reg form on the landing page above the fold so the user doesn't have to click to convert (remember, they may be concerned that a program will download if they click).

Another tip is to not require registration for free downloads like white papers. Instead, on the thank-you page, offer a sign-up for further updates and offers.

Test it.

Conversions don't always happen right away. Keep your visitors coming back by having an easy e-mail newsletter sign-up on your landing page. You're also more likely to keep your customers converting when you build a relationship with them by sending various offers, news and discounts directly to their in-box.

Source: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77127&hl=en

What is Good Content? A Working Definition and Some General Principles

This is quite an interesting question because many blogging experts have talked about the importance of great content and how it trumps other factors when it comes to growing one’s website.

I’m pretty sure you’ve all heard the adage ‘Content is King’ repeated so very often.

Good content is a necessary foundation for most successful blogs. High quality content makes it easier for someone to recommend it to friends or other potential readers. Content makes blog marketing a whole lot easier because it naturally supports the push or pull process involved in promoting a website.

Every successful blogger recommends the same thing: Create great content and learn how to market it. The whole crux of the matter lies with the notion of good content: What exactly is it? And if it’s so important, how do you create ‘good content’?

Let’s examine this idea of content quality in this article. For all its lauded benefits, I’ve not yet seen a working definition for it. Can we crack the content code and determine some general rules or guidelines for its development?

After some thought, I’ve made a list of three general principles on content quality, alongside a definition of what I consider to be good content.

Principle #1: Content Quality is Subjective

I’ve talked about content development in a previous article but I’ll say this again: Content quality is subjective because it is inevitably tied to the knowledge or experience of both the content creator and reader.

When someone feels that an article is excellent, it is not so much because of the content quality itself but rather, his/her own knowledge levels and receptivity to ideas. For someone more experienced, the same article might seem amateurish.

This subjectivity of content consumption is one of the main reasons why I think that content dissemination and distribution channels are sometimes more important than the actual content quality. The more visitors you can get to view your articles, the more they will begin to resonate with the right people and spread on their own.

Recognize that there are many uncontrollable variable factors at play here. Every person that reads your blog has his/her own built-in filters. Some are looking for a very specific solution while others want general overviews for beginners. Their overall receptivity is also influenced by what they already know about the topic.

Don’t feel bad when nobody comments on or links to an article you thought was quite excellent. Nor should you be disappointed when others criticize your content because their opinions only offer a selective assessment on the value of your work.

Principle #2: Content Quality is Comparatively Determined

Apart from content relativity, the value of an article is also comparatively determined. Your article will inevitably be juxtaposed with others on the same topic. The strength of another article will make yours less attractive as a citation source, unless you offer something distinctly different and unique.

Similarly, the weakness of other articles will make your content a more attractive and valuable resource. There is also a contextual determinism when it comes to advice given by experts. The strategies they recommend are often hypothetical or observations based on specific blogs in specific niches/situations.

These techniques and advice can sometimes be unsuitable for your blog niche, unless you learn how to implement them in a way which takes into account your audience expectations and the flow of information within your industry.

For some niches like entertainment/celebrity gossip, there is far more benefit in providing news reportage through short blog posts, than there is writing baits to attract social media audiences. This is because social media traffic is quite easily dwarfed by the massive number of search engine visitors.

Principle #3: There Are Guidelines to Determine Content Quality

Even though content quality is subjective and comparatively determined, one can still create content that is perceived to be of high quality. One way to do so is to study the popular articles of other bloggers, especially the ones in the same niche. These articles provide one with a rough measure of possible content popularity.

In my opinion, good content usually has the following characteristics:

1. Thought-provoking. The article should present new ideas or offer a critical and new look at ideas or assumptions commonly held by others.
2. Highly entertaining. An entertaining piece of content can come not only in the form of written text but videos or pictures. Humor is especially powerful when applied on current events or industry happenings.
3. Important News. Breaking news are considered important because changes usually impact most people in the same industry or niche. Be the first to cover and explain news and people will naturally talk about your blog.
4. Comprehensive. If your article is comprehensive enough, it may outshine others on the same topic. Bloggers love referencing articles which are comprehensive because it gives their readers a good starting point.
5. Well Researched. Well researched articles with multiple links to related discussion on this topic are especially valuable because it allows you to insert yourself within an ongoing conversation in the blogosphere. Extensive research also denotes value because this signifies an investment of time.
6. Unique. The less you repeat what other bloggers say, the more you’ll stand out. If your article examines a topic that’s rarely breached, it is likely that you’ll be regarded as an authority within the field as more people write about it.

Creating a Goal-Oriented Definition of ‘Good Content’

Content is consumed by users in many ways and it is difficult to measure how they value your articles, apart from the usual citation links, comments or emails. Instead of defining ‘good content’ according to reader feedback, why not define it according to the content creator’s perspective?

When we talk about ‘good content’ consider how it impacts your blog and brand. Here’s a working definition: Good content refers to content which succeeds in achieving the objectives that the content creator has set for it.

For example, if you want to network with others in the same niche, a good piece of content should link out and reference as many bloggers as possible. If you are a linkbaiter purely looking to get some incoming links for a webpage, good content would be content which achieves that purpose of acquiring links.

Successful content is no longer measured by the opinions of yourself or your audience but rather, to what extend did it fulfill end goals.

Content determined by purpose is strategic. It serves an objective and strives to achieve a specific result. Before you write a blog post, you should clearly examine your intentions. What exactly do you want to achieve with this specific article? Each blog post must have a defined purpose. Frame the content to suit that specific goal.

And then after the post is published, promote it in a way which accentuates that goal. For instance, if you’re purely looking for opinions, send it to some friends via StumbleUpon or email and get them to let you know what they think about it.

If you’re out for some heavy social media traffic, push it out to some influencers and request they disseminate it to the appropriate channel. After the marketing process is finished, look at your post and record its results. How many links did you get? How many people commented on it? Did you manage to get it cited by a popular blogger?

These results will give you a rough indication of ‘good content’, i.e. content with a track record of achieving objectives. This goal orientated approach to content development may sound a little mechanical but I think its a fairly straightforward method to assuage the quality of your work.

Source: http://www.doshdosh.com/what-is-good-content/

High Performance SEO Requires Fast Load Times

Many large companies assume that site speed isn't very important to the overall user experience. This is normally a result of the site's operational departments setting goals in terms of what they think is a reasonable range. This range can often be well over two to four seconds.

This may not sound like much, but if you add other network issues on top of this time, it can create a horrible user experience. For example, if you have a visitor from a small country on a poor dial-up connection you could see a load time of several minutes, in an extreme case.

More often, you won't see the several minutes load time -- or even hear about it -- because the user on dial-up won't come back. You'll be lucky if they take the time to tell you the problem they had with your site.

These considerations are taken into account by most major search engines. If you look at short tail or tier head keywords, such as news, cars, real estate, and others, you'll find these generic terms searched for in massive quantities and high frequencies.

If we assume any one of these keywords receives 100,000 searches per day with an average CTR (define) of 75 percent, you would need to return this page at an average of 250 milliseconds to be able to handle the load for optimal speed and efficiency. If you return at a rate over 1000 milliseconds, your speed will be to slow to deliver a reasonable experience.

It would be unwise to assume this form of measurement isn't taken when search engines perform their quality score (define) in relations to your PPC (define) campaigns. It would be unwise for them to list a slow site in the top listings.

You can see what your average site speed is through the Google Webmaster Tools interface. If you're still skeptical about search engines looking at this data, carefully think about why a search engine would store this data.

It would be illogical to store data you're not going to use in your calculations. It's rare to see a slow Web site ranking for a competitive term, no matter how much link popularity and unique content can be found.

Many operations departments find search engine bots to be a nuisance. Instead of making the site fast enough to handle these issues, they'll introduce an application called mod throttle. This application can be loaded in apache and will spit back server error messages, typically within the 500 range, saying the server is unavailable.

While the users will never see this message, don't kid yourself. If you give this message to the search engine, bots or spiders (define) will assume it's the message you're sending to your users. They won't manually check every site to be sure it's responding quickly and accurately.

Here are some other helpful tweaks in order to keep your site fast and clean.

Consider using a caching service like Akamai or install hardware to make sure your pages are stored in memory.

Decrease the size of the images you see on the pages. The more images you have -- and the larger they are -- the slower your site will respond.

Many people still don't have broadband connections. Others use comparatively slow WiFi. Still others access the Internet on their mobile phones. These users will likely experience slower site load time.

Another great Google-inspired trick: Use more white space in your design in order to load less in terms of visual affects. Or, if you're green and in favor of consuming less energy, use more black space, as Blackle does.

In writing code for your site, decrease the white space by eliminating excess spaces. Excess spaces between your coding are simply unneeded tabs and spaces. That reduces the number of bytes off the total size of the page, speeding load time.

There are also companies that specialize in monitoring sites and sending you alerts when the speed changes dramatically. These services are great for making sure you're returning appropriate levels of performance around the world.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628404

The SEO Success Pyramid

John Wooden, the greatest basketball coach ever, never talked to his teams about winning. He talked to them about preparation and about the process of becoming a great team.

Wooden’s philosophy on coaching (and life) is summed up in the “Pyramid of Success,” which beats the tail off all that Self-Help Guru junk you see peddled in books, on blogs, on daytime chat shows, and on late night TV. I was lucky to hear Coach Wooden speak about the Pyramid of Success while I was a student at Pepperdine University; to this day, it’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. (Seriously, if you don’t know what his Pyramid of Success is, visit CoachJohnWooden.com.)

What’s all this have to do with SEO and online marketing? Well, the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey.

I would never compare myself to John Wooden, but I do like teaching others about online marketing. So, with that in mind, and inspired by the great coach, here is the….

SEO Success Pyramid

What’s It All Mean?

Commitment:

Every successful project I’ve ever worked on has involved a client whose team is enthusiastic and engaged. Whether you’re big or small, one uninterested department or person can sabotage everything.

Planning:

Success in any pursuit begins with setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them — detailing the strategies and tactics you’ll use, the people and resources needed, and so forth. Search marketing is no different.

Product/Service:

Although you can fool some people into buying crap for a while, real long-term success involves a product or service that people want or need. There’s no substitute for quality.

Education/Information:

You’re a business owner; you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But you’ll succeed faster if you have access to great information. And as fast as the search marketing industry changes, ongoing access to intelligent information is critical.

Patience:

True, there are exceptions every now and then, but for the vast majority of companies big or small, search marketing is a process that takes time to implement correctly. There are no short cuts, no quick fixes. Success almost always takes many months, if not a year or more.

Design & Usability:

Yes, there are some ugly sites that make lots of money; but there are more that don’t. Your best bet is to have a web site that’s attractive and easy to use. Get out of your customers’ way and let them do what they came to your site to do.

Keyword Research:

If you target the wrong keywords, you’re doomed to fail. You’ve heard that a million times, I hope. More than that, you also need to know what to do with your keywords.

Analytics:

How will you know you’re successful if you have no way of measuring what you’ve done? Measure, analyze, adjust strategies and tactics as needed.

Tools:

Having access to appropriate SEO tools can give you an advantage over the competition. Of course, more important than the tools is knowing how to interpret the data they provide.

Crawlability:

A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl. Be careful with the Flash movies, the complicated DHTML and javascript, the robots.txt file, etc.

Content:

This can take many forms: a blog, articles, videos, a FAQ page, or even user-generated content like product/service reviews. When you get this one right, you’ll have an easier time getting…

Links:

Your great content isn’t going to rank well without links, preferably from relevant, quality sites. I brain-dumped (almost) everything I know about links early last year.

Social/Local Findability:

Let me explain this since I might be inventing a new term. Social Media Marketing and Local Search are musts. The size and scope of your company may dictate which you emphasize more, but neither should be ignored. Local SEO is a must for most small businesses, but social media can work, too. Bigger companies that target an audience more than a location will find social media offers a lot of opportunities. In either case, the goal is findability. You want customers to be able to find you as easily as possible.

Reputation Management:

It’s imperative to know what people are saying about your company. This isn’t just for Big Business, either: An old client of mine runs the only roller skating rink in our area, yet is probably losing business because they have a couple negative reviews on a certain Local Search site. Given the growing influence of user reviews, knowing how to manage your reputation is a must.

Trust:

In my first post of 2007, I said trust is the No. 1 factor, and nothing has changed since then. Trusted domains are powerful domains. When you have trust, from users and search engines, you’re on the way to search marketing success.

As you climb the pyramid, you’ll find buzz/word-of-mouth marketing or maybe community helping you along. To a large degree, these are two sides of the same coin. It’s the people factor, the human element that often separates the winners and losers in search marketing. Get people talking positively about you, whether it be one-to-one conversation among friends or in the larger setting of an online community, and you’ll climb the pyramid that much faster.

Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/the-seo-success-pyramid/971/

Search Behavior Patterns

A search engine on an organization’s website or intranet is often built to support an overly narrow model of user behavior, which goes something like this:

• User types in a search
• Search engine gives back matching results
• User reads the results and picks the best one

Simple. Better still, it asks very little of the user interface—only that it provide some way to submit a search, and some list in response.

However, such simple models overlook the fact that humans are complex, convoluted, capricious, mutable, moody, multifaceted beings with broadly differing backgrounds, competencies, and frames of reference. (1) In practice, this can make the requirements for search interfaces quite a bit more complicated.

The good news is that while users vary widely in the ways they search, their behaviors follow a limited number of identifiable patterns. By examining the factors that cause variability in user behavior and considering personas that illustrate those variations, we can identify common search behavior patterns and the interface affordances that support them.

Factors that affect user behavior

Search behavior is the result of interplay among several independent factors the user brings to the search operation, six of which are described below. Designers have no more control over these than they have over the color of the user’s hair.

1. Domain expertise

User behavior has a lot do to with a user’s familiarity with the subject on which he or she is searching. When searching outside a domain of expertise, people will be less certain where to start, use less precise language, and have more difficulty evaluating search results. By contrast, experts in a field generally know what verbiage will work best, and so generally get better results, from which they’re better able to discern the most useful documents. (2)

2. Search experience

Users who have a better understanding of the breadth of a search engine’s capabilities have more ways to go about finding information. If you know how to use Boolean operators, exact strings, filtering controls, and have proven strategies for exploiting search, then you have a much richer toolset at your disposal. But search experience also isn’t an absolute requirement for success. We have seen that users who are short on technical know-how but rich in domain knowledge can often get by. On the other hand, technophiles can have great difficulty finding information in an unfamiliar body of knowledge.

3. Cognitive style

User behavior is also influenced by the way users assimilate new information. Researchers like Nigel Ford and his colleagues have proposed a number of schemas to describe cognitive style, but for the purposes of search it makes sense to think of it as a spectrum ranging from global to analytical thinking.

• Global thinkers first try to build a broad level of understanding across related topics.
• Analytical thinkers dive right into a single topic and research it thoroughly to resolve a specific problem.

Most people lie somewhere between these extremes, sporadically using either cognitive style but tending more often toward one. (3)

4. Goal type

Search goals will vary from one query to the next, and may be broadly classified into three categories as outlined by Andrei Broder in his article “A Taxonomy of Web Search:”

• Navigational searches are efforts to reach a particular location, such as an intranet’s timesheet application.
• Informational searches seek out any documents relating to a topic, like a description of employee benefits.
• Transactional searches occur when the user primarily wants to accomplish something online, like changing her benefits elections.

5. Mode of seeking

The extent to which users understand what they are trying to find determines their mode of seeking. The level of understanding can range from known items, where people know exactly what they need and how to describe it, to much more exploratory searches, where they have only a loose concept what they want to find. (4) Furthermore, as Marcia Bates pointed out in her oft-cited 1989 paper “The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface,” information needs are often unstable and may evolve as a user learns more about a subject area.

6. Situational idiosyncrasies

To add a final layer of unpredictability, search behavior can vary for the same user with the same task, due to idiosyncrasies in external pressures, working context, temperament, or mood. For example, a user who is nearing a tight deadline is likely to behave very differently than a user who is just leisurely exploring the same topic out of general interest. People can also approach search tasks differently simply if they’ve had a bad day, feel tired, stand to make money, or feel especially engaged in a topic.

Personas

Grounding abstract ideas in concrete personas can help bring all of these factors to life. Personas are descriptions of typical users that illustrate key attributes that are relevant to the design of a website or online system. An understanding of the motives underlying user actions, like those detailed above, provides a great starting point for authoring personas.

For instance, the hypothetical people described below each illustrate different areas of domain knowledge, and represent a spectrum of search experiences and cognitive styles. They will be used to relate the factors above to the common search behavior patterns that follow.

• Andrea is a technical wiz who is completely comfortable with search engines. She is a project manager for a mainframe manufacturing division of her company. Her cognitive style tends to be analytical.
• Dmitry has moderate technical know-how. He works in the benefits administration division of his company’s HR department. He learns new information globally about as often as he does analytically.
• Kazue is generally uncomfortable with technology, but is a recognized expert in her field of instructional design. She tends to be a global thinker who prizes an understanding of the big picture.

Patterns of Behavior

Despite the large number of variables tugging user actions this way and that, they translate into a relatively small number of common patterns of behavior. In my work, I’ve observed six broad patterns, described below with recommendations for accommodating each.

1. Alternating between search and browse

When searching, users will often select a result that is closest to the topic they have in mind even if it isn’t a precise match. They’ll then follow the links on that page to find their target information. A global thinker like Kazue might do this if she were exploring an information goal outside of her domain expertise. Unable to formulate the search phrase precisely right, she would need to trust the results returned by the engine. Finding that they’re promising but not quite right, she may switch to browsing before returning to the results page.

In effect, searching and browsing can function as a single behavior, with many people moving fluidly between both. These users see no distinction between the two, since both work in support of a single information seeking task. This means that improving the quality of a site’s navigation will necessarily also make searches more successful.

Design recommendations:

• Support robust cross-linking on each page, so that when users reach pages that are near matches they can easily get to the best matches.
• Include conventional hierarchical cues like breadcrumb trails and contextual navigation, as well as nonhierarchical, associative links among topically related pages. (4)
• Don’t let pages come to a dead end, without any links to other resources on the site.

If Kazue is able to easily cross-link among related pages, this hybridized searching/browsing behavior will be more effective.

2. Minimizing the results set

Users sometimes measure the success of a query primarily by the number of results it returns. If they feel the number is too large, they add more terms in an effort to bring back a more manageable set. Given her understanding of how search engines determine relevance, you’d expect Andrea to do this if she needed to quickly locate a known item within her domain expertise, like “mainframe manufacturing.”

Design recommendations:

• Allow users to filter the search results by categories, so they can reduce the number of results while making them more topical.
• Include a numeric count of the total number of results returned for the query and the total number for each category.
• Use “and” as the default operator rather than “or,” so the number of results narrows instead of growing as the user adds more terms.
• Don’t confound this behavior by truncating the total results set at a round number like 100 or 500; this makes it difficult for users like Andrea to gauge the quality of her query.

3. Surveying quickly

Some users scan through the results quickly, and if none of the titles strike them as an ideal match, they may proceed several pages deep into the results set. I’ve seen these users go to the fifth or sixth page of results without hesitation, then go back to the initial results to look more carefully or submit another query.

For instance, Dmitry could do this to hedge his strategy if his task isn’t fully defined. Hopeful that something will just pop out at him, he may do a quick scan of the first few pages, then fall back to another strategy if that doesn’t work out.

Design recommendations:

• Ensure that result titles are comprehensible at a glance, including application files like PDFs and Word documents, which often return cryptic file names by default.
• Highlight the terms that match the words originally submitted to help people scan the titles and descriptions more easily.
• Allow users to change the number of results shown per page to avoid navigating through too many paginated results.

These changes will allow Dmitry to evaluate pages more efficiently and successfully.

4. Making immediate judgments

Other users look only at the first few results before deciding whether the query was successful or not. Finding nothing, these users may then resubmit the query or give up on search altogether.

Andrea, the analytical thinker, would be discriminating about a result’s relevance to a narrowly defined informational goal. Confident in her expertise, she would also be quick to conclude that search is flawed if it cannot return a good match in the first few listings. This behavior requires that the best match be returned as close to the top of the list as possible.

Design recommendations:

• Optimize results for the most commonly submitted queries. Working from the search logs, try out each of the top queries and evaluate the quality of the top results returned, then optimize the content of those pages to improve their ranking.
• When pages cannot be further optimized, include a manually generated “Best Bets” sidebar to force those matches to appear at the top. This gives the page a second chance to hit the specific target in Andrea’s mind.

5. Agonizing over the query

Sometimes users have difficulty translating the concept they want to find into a specific search phrase. They will often rewrite the query several times before submitting it, and then focus on revising it further if the results are not as they had expected them to be.

Less experienced users like Kazue are more likely to show this behavior, especially if the task isn’t well defined and lies conceptually outside of her domain. Kazue may also be inclined to phrase the query generally enough to satisfy her global cognitive style, but fret over how general is too general.

Design recommendations:

• Consider providing tools that assist in formulating the query, such as suggestion functions that present searches similar to the one the user is typing.
• Consider including lists of popular searches or automated storage of the user’s previous queries, saved to a profile or cookie.

Anytime that Kazue can select a query from a list rather than originating it from scratch, she will be able to search much more efficiently.

6. Pogosticking

Some users click several results in rapid succession, quickly sampling each before settling on a best candidate to meet their needs. Jared Spool has described this as “pogosticking”—bouncing up and down between choices of uncertain relative value. This is the kind of behavior that Dmitry might resort to if the quick surveying behavior described for him above didn’t yield anything. Assuming that his temperament is fairly tolerant and he isn’t pressed for time, Dmitry may decide that he cannot determine the usefulness of pages without looking at them. These users need support for three primary tasks: assessing result listings, comparing result pages, and tracking work.

Design recommendations:

• Again, provide comprehensible titles and descriptions on the results page, as well as highlighted search terms.
• Pages can be even more effectively compared if highlighting can be extended to the display of the results page itself (as is possible with Yahoo! and Google toolbars).
• Allow users the option to open results in a new browser window to assist comparison. Sites like Ask and Easy Search Live are experimenting with page previews.
• Be sure to include a visited link color on the results page. This is absolutely essential for Dmitry to keep track of the pages he has already tried and rejected as he jumps to each of the matches from the hub listing page.

Conclusion

Search behavior varies with domain expertise and technical knowledge, cognitive style, goal, and mode of seeking. All of these factors will interact in complex ways to influence a user’s actions. Even then, behaviors will vary depending upon whether at that moment the user is under pressure, in a good mood, or any number of other idiosyncrasies.

The point is that the designer cannot select the behavior that a user will follow when conducting a search. This may invite the impression that the design must be overly broad, providing any conceivable function regardless of the likelihood it will be used, because we cannot predict whether it will be needed. Fortunately, users’ actual behaviors do fall into generally describable patterns, each of which has dependencies upon specific affordances of the interface. This is how designers can better cater to what appears to be chaos: make available those capabilities that best support the range of known behavior patterns for your target personas.

Source: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/search-behavior

Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist

When I sit down with new clients and discuss the status of their new or existing site they are often shocked when I am forced to inform them that their site is not search engine friendly. Encountered with a blank but slightly shaken look I then explain that this means their site has a particular problem that is hindering search engine rankings. Often this is represented by an inflexible design, overuse of advanced web technologies, or simply a weak navigation scheme. As a result, if they were to continue with the site as it stands they are unlikely to attain competitive search engine rankings.

The following is checklist designed to help you gauge the search engine friendliness of your website and, if you are in the midst of planning a website this checklist will help you avoid the common pitfalls of unfriendly designs.

Technologies
First consider what technologies your website is using. There are certain technologies that require a little more hand holding than others to ensure search engine compatibility.

1. FRAMES
Lets start with this oldie. Luckily, frames are becoming a way of the past what with the use of DIV layers and the slow onset of incredibly flexible AJAX coding. The long and the short of it is that if you have Frames on your website then you are starting off at a disadvantaged position that cannot be truly search engine friendly no matter what you do. There are, however, some remedial fixes that will tie you over until you can redesign your site; yes I said redesign. The fix that I recommend is to use a noframes tag whereby you place another version of your web page inside of your framed page. This ‘backup’ page is what the search engines will view; here you can place relevant content and navigational elements so that the search engines can at least navigate portions of your site that are (hopefully) not framed.

More info on the no frames tags.

2. FLASH
There was a big brouhaha that Flash had become search engine indexable and you no longer had to worry about its search engine issues. Frankly, I have not seen the fruits of this ‘improvement’ to a respectable degree yet so I still consider it a kiss of death for websites designed solely in Flash. If you have a Flash-only website then I recommend one of these two options; one is to design an html version of your website and make the home page of your website html rather than Flash where you can then allow users to choose between html or Flash. The second option is to redesign the site so that it mixes both html and flash together. For example, this might mean implementing Flash amidst content on an HTML page as you would an image. I realize there are certain limitations to this option but if you can create a slick site in this manner then you will have the best of both worlds; clean search engine friendly content along with an interactive, multimedia feel. Just remember that the majority of relevant text should be in HTML format for the search engines to index.

3. Search Engine ‘Unfriendly' Dynamic URL’s
Unfriendly dynamic URL’s are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind. Here are some examples of some unfriendly URL’s:

Sample 1:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts.php&354=prod333&subproduct

Sample 2:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/
filename.php?id=F98ZF4&productId=39222&section=wicked&brand=582&template=532

These URLs are problematic because a search engine may consider these addresses too complex to spider. Why too complex? Suffice it to say that the more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content too dynamic to read; it changes too often to be valuable to a search engine.

The way around these types of URLs is actually not so difficult; it may only require a small investment of time and money. The ‘time’ will be required when researching which URL fix is right for your system. The money may be required to pay a programmer to implement and test the new URLs. Here are how the URLs might look once they are fixed to be search engine friendly:

Sample 1 Fixed:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts/354/prod333/subproduct/

Sample 2 Fixed:
http://www.surfboardsforyou.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/board532/

These URLs are better because they do not include the extraneous characters that are so telltale on dynamic websites. In addition, the URLs are designed to appear like normal website directories when in fact they are dynamic URLs.

Important: it is vital that you minimize the length of the URLs that you use. Search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories. The samples above show fixed URLs that have about as many subdirectories as I would allow (4).

Design
This section focuses on the overall layout and usability of your designs from the perspective of a search engine robot. Search engine friendly design is occasionally quite complex so I have provided a list of the most common issues to consider.

1. Menus
Are the menus on your website spiderable? If not you may be hiding major areas of your website from search engine spiders and missing out on additional search engine rankings.

The fact is there are very few menus out there that a search engine will have a problem following, but there are definitely some worth avoiding. For instance do not use a JavaScript Jump Menu (example) as the core mode of navigation of your website; search engines cannot index this type of menu. Also be careful of Flash menus, they look slick but they will impede the progress of a search engine spider especially if they are the only means of navigation within your site.

General Menu Rules
The ideal menu would be text based and each text link would include the keywords you are targeting on the destination page. Setting up a menu with this much forethought requires that you determine the layout and content for your site before web design begins. Once you have a clear picture of the content for each page you can then research the keywords that are best to target per webpage. This essential keyword research can be done in house easily enough using systems-like keyword research tools that provide you with a glimpse into how your customers think by showing how many searches there are per month (or year) for a particular term.

Remember, almost every page within your site has a very real opportunity to gain a top ranking; all you need to do is ensure that the design, content and site structure is optimized. Ensuring that the menu is carefully thought out and designed is a crucial step for top rankings.

Finally, if you are at all uncertain whether your menu is search engine friendly then be certain to back it up with a text menu in the footer of your page using the same keyword targeting principles noted above.

Tech Advice: a simple text menu may be less than desirable for you; in this case I recommend DHTML menus. These menus use text but in a manner that is quite appealing and very search engine friendly.

2. Sitemaps
Sitemaps can dramatically help the visibility of your website by allowing search engine spiders easy access to all of the pages in your site. Place a link to the sitemap on every page within your site to ensure easy access no matter where a search engine or user enters your site.

Sitemap Tips
Just having a sitemap will help but how you build your sitemap will also play a role in how well the search engines catalogue it. For example, if you have a twenty-page website it would be ideal to create a sitemap where each page is represented by a title along with a short description. Ultimately, the page may be a bit long but it will have content that the search engines like to index and it will boost the relevance of the linked pages because the titles will accurately represent the content. So in effect, you will now have more than just a sitemap; you will have a table of contents for your site that has the potential of getting a ranking and provides an extra boost to the ranking worthiness of each page.

Google Sitemap
Google Sitemap is an additional design element that you should consider adding. Here is an article Scott Van Achte wrote on how to implement your own Google Sitemap.

3. Layout
How you layout your page can make a significant difference in how well your site ranks and ultimately how search engine friendly it is.

Tips for Layout
Search engine robots read a webpage from the top of the source code (the programming that made your page – see “view source” in your browser) all the way to the bottom. As a result, it is important to ensure that both of the following elements are found as close to the beginning of code as possible:

A) A short sentence introducing the topic using the keyword targets you have chosen for the page.
B) Your text menu and other navigational aids, or if this is not possible it would be even more beneficial to start with a paragraph or two of relevant content followed by the navigation.

By placing this information near to the top of the page, you will promptly present the search engine robot with relevant text that backs up the page title and backlinks. You will also provide an immediate sitemap of sorts for the search engine to spider, which includes keywords relevant to each page.

4. Splash Pages – ACK!
With the odd exception Splash Pages are a kiss of death for a website because the home page (the first page seen when someone visits your domain), your most important page, is often converted into nothing but an excess entry point with little or no relevant content on it. Aside from reducing your chances for ranking, you are also making your visitors take another step to get to content or sales material in your site. Any additional steps you add will lessen the likelihood of a successful sale.

Please Let Me Change Your Mind
If you think you need to use a splash page then you need to talk to someone who will change your mind. No, honestly, give me a call if you want because there is nothing more painful to a SEO or search engine friendly web designer to see a Splash Page in use. If, in the unlikely scenario your splash page is required, there are ways to make it slightly more search engine friendly.

1) Add a highly relevant and well-worded paragraph to the page so that the search engines have something to index that shows them they are in the right place.
2) Either provide a link to your sitemap or implement a text menu in the footer of the page so the search engines can access the internal workings of your website without having to take an extra step.

In Summary
Creating a search engine friendly website requires a basic to advanced understanding of how a searchengine works, depending on the complexity of the planned website. Complexity aside, the notes above provide a good basis for you to evaluate the friendliness of your website and make changes where necessary. If you have questions regarding your website you can email me at raman.analyst@gmail.com and I will do my best to help or I will direct you to someone who can.

Source: http://news.stepforth.com/2006-news/Is-Your-Website-Search-Engine-Friendly.shtml

SEO Step One Of Ten: Keyword Research

The 10 steps covered in this series will be:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competition Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

Step One: Keyword Research & Selection

There are two times in a site's life when keyword research is conducted - when researching a site to rank in the organic results on the search engines and when researching keywords for a PPC campaign. In our article today we're going to focus on the former and save the research involved with PPC campaigns for step seven in this series.

So we've got the topic down to "just" keyword research and selection for organic SEO campaigns - from there the topic once again gets split into a variety of areas. Those that we will cover here are:

• The raw data
• Studying those who've gone before
• Understanding your choices

The Raw Data

The raw data is the raw estimated searches/day that you can expect a phrase to get on the major search engines. There are a number of tools you can use to compile this information. Here are some of the more commonly used:

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
Yahoo!'s keyword suggestion tool. It's fast and it's free but it has some serious drawbacks. The tool often mixes singular, plural and common misspellings into one so it could lead you astray (admittedly it's gotten much better lately but still far from perfect).

Is a bed and breakfast in Banff, BC better to target "banff accommodation" or "banff accommodations". How about the very common misspelling "Banff accomodations"? That said, it's based on easily the largest pool of search data made available in this way which gives it a huge edge in accuracy based on the pool of data it's collecting from.

WordTracker
WordTracker is easily one of the most popular of the paid keyword research tools. It solves the problem with the singular vs plural vs misspellings however the data it accesses is from a few meta engines and is not as comprehensive as one might like.

They offer a free trial and have options to pay for just a day or up to a year so they provide options for people who simply need it for a quick round of research on one site to SEO firms who need it on a daily bases. It sells for $59/mth.

Keyword Discovery
This tool is very similar to WordTracker in the advantages/disadvantages category. Better specification of keywords, lower pool of data to base them on. I personally prefer Keyword Discovery simply for some of the features and the ability to export data for clients to view easily. Of course, that could well be due to my increased experience with it.

They have a free trial as well and it sells for $69/mth.

Aaron Wall's Summary
Noted above are some of the most popular tools and the ones I've used the most. There are some other tools definitely worth taking a peek at. Aaron Wall did a great summary on his site of the major tools, their pros and cons, etc. Definitely worth taking a peek at. Admittedly it's a couple years old so some of the features have changed a bit but most of it is still valid and accurate.

Now What ...

Now that we've looked at the tools, let's take a look at what we're supposed to do with them. As noted, we'll cover how to use these tools when launching or updating a PPC campaign in a future article, however there are still a few areas and considerations that we need to consider here.

So let's get started ...

In case no one told you - size doesn't matter. It's not how big it is, it's who's using it. Let's use as an example a phrase we at Beanstalk targetted and that's the phrases "search engine positioning". At first this was our big phrase which now gets 7,689 estimated searches/mth (a bit higher than it was back then). "search engine positioning services" gets a lowly 2,636 searches/mth. Of course we should be targeting the one with the higher number of searches (or so I thought).

Once we have attained top 3 rankings for both I started looking through my stats and setting up filters for conversion (forms filled out and visits to our contact page). People who entered "search engine positioning" were sure interested in our blog and articles but only those who added the word "services" contacted us. And so the big phrase was abandoned as a target and we began focusing on what I refer to as "buy phrases". So bigger isn't better if the people you want are searching using phrases with a lower search volume.

There's another time when bigger isn't better. Which of those two phrases do you suppose we ranked for first? If you guessed the services phrase then you're right. When you launch a new website (which we had) you're likely up against sites that have been around for a while, have some solid backlinks and a good number of pages. You're not going to want to go up against them for the top phrases out of the gate. Choosing to go with phrases that are lower in search volume and lower in competition will almost always result in higher rankings faster, put some money back in your pocket and ready you to go for the bigger phrases.

It's here that the model we followed works well. When you're selecting your short term and long term targets it's wise to choose phrases with the same root keywords ("search engine positioning" and "search engine positioning services" for example). This basically enables you to work towards your long term goals during link building for your short term targets. And who doesn't like to kill two birds with one stone? Or perhaps you have all the time in the world and you're one of those people who likes nothing more than working on developing incoming links.

Which brings us to ...

Studying Those Who've Gone Before

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Let's just hang onto that thought while we research what those who are successful in your industry are targeting in order to glean some insight into what works.

I've recently discovered (much to my pleasure) a very cool tool that, while a bit pricey for some, simplified MANY of the processes of keyword research, tracking and competitor keyword dissection. A company called AdGooroo has created what I've now discovered to be an awesome keyword tracking tool (I'd call it keyword research but it does a lot more than list off search phrases). The tool allows you to do the generic keyword research that we're all used to with the same limitations as the tools above (i.e. Google doesn't hand out their search keyphrase volumes) but that's just the first step.

They then take a look at your competitors on both the organic and PPC results, figure out what they're ranking for and bidding on and provides some great reports on saturation levels, competition levels, and a lot more. With this in hand you can then begin to analyze how they're ranking (that'll be covered next week in our article on competition analysis).

The folks at AdGooroo also store historical information so you can look back over trends in the past and compare that to what you see now. As noted, a bit pricey for some but worth it for those who can afford to know this level of information on who's doing what and what you should be doing.

I should also note that I'm experienced in their SEM Insight product which costs $399/mth. They also do offer AdGooroo Express which has a lot of the same feature (but missing a lot of the ones I personally feel can give a researcher a HUGE jump on their competitors). The Express version however sells at $89/mth so far more affordable for some. And like all my favorite tools, they provide a free trial. :)

But if you can't afford that level of information you'll want to run ranking reports on all your top competitors (you likely know who these are but if you don't - they're the ones who rank in the top 10 for the most competitive phrases). You can either do this manually or use a reporting tool such as WebPosition Gold (again, has a free trail).

If you find weaker sites ranking for large numbers of phrases, you know who to watch (again, we'll get into this more next week). The only problem with this method is that you can only think of what you can think of. The site might be ranking for phrases you never thought to look into and which, in knowing, might provide some great insight into additional targets and tactics. Of course, you might well be from an industry with very obvious and defined keywords.

Understanding Your Choices

So now you've got choices to make. You've got a list of perhaps hundreds of keywords and you need to shorten that list down. The number of phrase you target will only be limited by your site and the amount of time you have to dedicate to it.

You will likely need to pare down your choices to those that will produce the fastest and highest ROI possible. This will likely be the phrases that provide the lowest competition levels for the highest searched "buy phrases". Once you have attained these rankings you can move on.

The alternative is to go for the gold and target the biggest phrases in your industry. This will take longer (99% of the time) but might be necessary if there are no suitable secondary phrases. In this event you have to ready yourself for a slow rise to the top and a longer period of stagnant traffic with a big return (hopefully) at the end.

Another major choice you'll have to make (especially if you have a large number of potential phrases) is whether to start out with a PPC campaign for the traffic or to test keyword phrases for an organic promotion. While these will be covered in more detail in part 7, if you just can't wait you can find a past article on the subject titled "Using PPC To Maximize Your Search Engine Positioning ROI".

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/2008/01/31/seo-step-one-of-ten-keyword-research