Keyword Research is by far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimisation initiative. Keyword Phrase Research is a process of selecting the “optimum� keyword phrases that will bring relevant visitors to your site. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords (i.e. if you are an Irish law firm, do you want to target people who search for “Attorney� or people who search for “Litigation and Dispute Resolution Ireland�?).
The keyword research phase will consist of i) discovering keyphrases, ii) analysing keyphrases, iii) selecting keyphrases and iv) deploying keyphrases.
The discovering keyphrases phase will consist of combining existing keyphrases with ones gleaned from the site logs, competitors websites, and the target audience review and analysing them using tools like WordTracker and Overture to expand the list to include all possibilities.
In the keyword analysis and selection phases the keyword list will be refined based on factors like competition for particular phrases and PageRank to produce a focused list of 15-20 keyphrases.
Focused key phrases not only give your site a better chance to rank, they deliver highly targeted traffic resulting in higher traffic to client conversion ratios.
The keywords should be deployed on the site carefully to maximise their effectiveness (positioning the keywords optimally on the page, making use of H1 tags, etc.) while avoiding over-repetition of keywords on a page (might be interpreted as spam by the search engines). Also, devising individual customized keyphrase strategies for each page on your site will be vital to your project’s success - to this end, ensure you include your keyphrases in your page titles and page descriptions.
You can significantly mitigate the costs of marketing your blog with some careful (ethical) SEO (search engine optimisation) tactics.
Primary among these is to have a blog which is web standards compliant. Search engines love standards compliance - to this end, WordPress is a great blogging tool as it is standards complaint out-of-the-box. Having said that, if you have access to a developer, you can get the developer to design a standards compliant template for most blog apps.
Secondly, generate inward traffic/links. The only way to do this (apart from paid ads etc.) is to generate content on your blog that is compelling enough that people will link to it. Also leaving relevant comments on other’s people’s blogs will bring curious readers of those comments to your site.
And finally, get your blog listed in a directory like dmoz or LookSmart.
All these take time and effort but they will ultimately pay off and are free!
I was asked this question on a mailing list I’m on by a poster there in relation to the current WordPress hosting spam story which is doing the rounds.
This was my response:
I would never support an SEO-spam company.
In this case however, there are a number of caveats. First off, WordPress is not a company - this is more than simply semantics. A lot of the hosting costs etc. involved in keeping WordPress going have been borne by Matt Mullenweg - the principle author of WordPress. Matt made a decision to host articles on the site for commercial ends (to earn some money to offset the costs the success for the software was incurring). The articles were generated by another company and were spam for various high cost Adwords. WordPress’ high PR was being leveraged. There is no doubt that this is a sharp practice and Matt should have known better.
Matt is on holidays at the moment but has promised to respond with an explanation. In the meantime, Google has banned the WordPress site and the articles in question have been removed from the WordPress site.
So, to return to your question -
I, and many WordPress users like me, have never supported WordPress - perhaps if we had donated a couple of Euro to WordPress, Matt wouldn’t have made this mistake. I think Matt has learned from his mistake but we’ll know more about that as he responds during the day.
In the meantime, will I continue to use WordPress (a different question, I realise)? Hell yes. The fact that Matt made this mistake doesn’t take from the quality of the product. If Matt continues these kinds of practices, I will remove the link to WordPress on my site - as that is the only form of support I have given WordPress since I started using it, I’m ashamed to say.
By the way, how many people on this list pay to use (i.e. commercially support) products by Microsoft - a company which has been convicted in the courts of abusing its monopoly to kill off competitors? Not just an unethical practice, but an illegal one.
The second step in a Search Engine Optimisation project is to get some metrics on the state of the site before the Optimisation project proper commences. If you missed the first step in this Search Engine Optimisation project, you can see it here.
To achieve this we will first need to carry out a benchmarking of the site’s current web traffic statistics to enable tracking of your ROI. There are several web stats analysis applications available for this task. The main free ones are Webalizer, AwStats and Analog and I find that using a combination of these tools is better than relying on any one. Mostly at this point we are looking for the amount of traffic to the site - we will be comparing this against the amount of traffic coming to the site as the project progresses.
Secondly, we will want to examine search engine rankings for various likely keywords or keyphrases target clients might use to find the site. Googlerankings, a website which allows you to look up the Google Search Engine Rank Position (SERP) of any site, for any keyword or phrase, is the main tool to use for this stage of the process. In the image below we can see that, not unsurprisingly, Microsoft.com have the no.1 Google SERP for the keyphrase Bill Gates:
To perform this step, however, we will need a list of keywords/phrases to use as our baseline. Some of these will be gleaned from the web traffic statistics in the previous step (what words and expressions have historically been used to find the site) and some will be ones which you want the site to be found by.
And finally, a technical audit of the existing site needs to be carried out. This audit needs to flag any issues that may currently be harming search engine ranking (i.e. Frames, Dynamic uri’s, Flash, image maps for navigation, and/or javascript for navigation). Any of these which are found need to be documented and plans put in place for their replacement with search engine friendly alternatives.
I will be writing up the next step in this project in the next couple of days.
Successful Search Engine Optimisation is all about ensuring that the relevant content is delivered to those who search for it. Therefore, the first step in any Search Engine Optimisation project is to clearly identify the aims of the site - what information are you hoping to impart and who will that be of interest to? If you want to be selective about your clients you might also want to ask who are your preferred target audience and develop your site aims with this in mind.
Discussion on the role of the website and the identification of the target audience are the essential starting point whether you are developing a site from scratch or re-developing an existing site.
To accomplish this you will need to ask yourself the following questions:
- What do you want the website to achieve (higher sales/brand building/information dissemination)?
- What is the profile of potential/preferred visitors to your site?
- What needs can your site address for the target audience?
- What information target audience is likely to be seeking?
- How can you ensure that the target audience find your site(keyword research)?
If you have a sales-related site you might want to add the following:
- Who is likely to be the decision maker with regard to buying your product/employing your services?
- What is your current typical sales cycle?
- What is the role of your website in the sales cycle?
Acquiring this information will help you to identify: i) the key information to prioritise in the website and ii) who is likely to be searching for that information. The website can then be (re)developed based on this analysis, ensuring the focus of the site is set for optimal search engine results.
It is estimated that 90% of all online traffic is achieved through the various search engines. If your Web site doesn’t have a page appearing in the top 10 search engine result positions (SERPs), the chances of someone clicking on your listing, and actually visiting your site, are low. If you’re not in the top 20, the chances that someone will scan through the SERPs and find your page, drops dramatically. Hence, Search Engine Optimisation tries to help organise your page/site so that it will move up the Search Engine Results and thus be found.
Search Engine Optimisation has been controversial in the past with many Search Engine Optimisation companies using unscrupulous methodologies to get sites up the rankings quickly. These methods are now largely discredited and using them can get a site banned from search engines.
The importance of Search Engine Optimisation is further highlighted by the results of the list of SEO studies quoted below:
- A study from IMT Strategies demonstrates that a company’s presence on relevant search engines is the most important medium for maintaining high brand awareness ‘ more important than the printed media, radio or TV commercials (Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, January 2001).
- A study by Direct Marketing Association found that search engine optimisation/positioning was evaluated by webmasters as the single most important activity for generating traffic to the website (66%), followed by e-mail marketing (54%).
- A poll by Iconocast concludes that 81% of UK internet users find websites via search engines (Source: June 2000, Forrester Research Inc., “UK Internet User Monitor”).
- The tenth user survey from “The Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center” (GVU) showed that 84.8% of respondents found information on websites from search engines.
- According to a study published by NPD Group, 92% of online users making a purchase over the net use search engines to find the relevant website.
- A study carried out by IMT Strategies discovered that search engines were the most popular medium (46%) for finding websites. Random surfing and word of mouth shared second place (20% each).
- Search engines are the “busiest” and most used websites on the net - cf. RelevantKnowledge or MediaMetrix studies.
- A study carried out by Jupiter Research in March 2001 gives search engines 9.1 points on a scale from 0 - 10 as the most important online media. The No. 2 spot got 6.3 points.
- According to a study among marketing executives search engine optimisation/positioning was considered the most profitable website marketing activity. Far more effective than, for instance, banners, e-mails and offline marketing (Source: WebCMO).
- A study carried out by the NPD Group showed that more than twice as many of those asked could recognise the names of the companies in the top three placements of the search engines as could recognise the names of companies which used banners.
Over the next few posts in this category I will outline a process which, if followed, should help any page/site improve its search engine ranking.
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