SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO – Ch5 Review

Keyword Research

Chapter 5 of the Guide is all about keywords, keyword phrases, longtail keywords and how to measure their value.

Relevance

First thing you want to make sure of is that the keyword you are targeting is relevant to your web page content.

Does it answer a need or does it offer a solution for the user that will fall on your page after typing in the query?

Commercial Value

Type it in and look at the search results. Do you see ads on the page? If you do that means someone is paying real money for people to click on that ad.

This demonstrates its commercial value.

Competition

Look at the websites appearing in the results. What is their pagerank, their age, their authority?

This is what you will be competing against if you go after this keyword.

Test with Adwords

If you want to see if your page can convert with that keyword, run a test adwords campaign and drive traffic to you web page to see if people take action.

Longtail Keywords 

Learn to research and value longtail keywords and how they can work for you.

Understand that the longtail represents over 70% of the searches and the most targeted traffic for the term being queried.

Keyword Tools

There are some great keyword tools that you can use.

They are free and come in real handy to find the value and measure the competion.

• Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool
• Google Insights for Search
• Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction
• Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
• Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand

ROI

Learn to figure out the rate of return on your keyword investment.

These are some of the concepts that are discussed in this chapter.

Take a look at the video. It should help you frame the ideas before you actually read the guide.

As always, give the post a “tweet”, a “like”, a “google +1″, a “pin” if the information is helpful. Many thanks for your support.

For those of you who want the transcript. Just read on.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Hey Claude Pelanne of Affiliate Starting Line, welcome. This is going to be

the continuation of the SEOmoz Beginners’ Guide to SEO and it’s about

chapter five. This is a video series and this chapter is about key word

research.

 

So the main point here is to understand that everything that derives search

on the web is driven by key words. And key word research therefore is one

of the most important and valuable and high return activities in the search

marketing field. So anything you are going to do online, especially if

you’re going to build a website and you want to track visitors, is going to

revolve around doing basic key word research about what your pages are

going to be about on the website. And the concept here they try to get

across, is how do you judge the value of a key word?

 

How do you know that the key word that you are picking makes sense for your

page, for your website and how do you determine whether you should use it?

Well, there’s some things here you can do. And the first thing that you do

is ask yourself if the key word is relevant to the content you have on the

page. Will the searcher, when they find that page, be happy with what they

are finding? Will it give them the answers they are looking for? Will this

traffic result in a financial reward, where you’ll get them to take action?

 

Those are the questions you have to ask yourself about the key word. The

other thing you want to ask yourself is, how hard is it to compete for that

keyword? In other words, you want to put that search term in the major

engines and see what the results are. See who pops up on that page, and see

how they rank. See what kind of sites they are. See how long they have been

around. There are lots of competitive variables that you have to

understand, to understand the competition and your chances of ranking.

 

A third thing they tell you is, buy a campaign. Go to Google Adwords or

Bing Adcenter, and put a pay-per-click campaign together with that key

word, so that you can send people, when they click on your ad, to your web

page and then you will see how they react to the information they find.

That’s how you can determine which key words are more effective for you, by

the number of people who compete. Then, using data that you have collected

to determine the exact value, this is a little ROI formula that they show

you, so that you can determine the value of a key word. And they reference

a study that you can read if you wanted to see how that works.

 

The next concept they talk about is the long tailed key word. The long

tailed key word is a multi-unit key word phrase. “Dog” is a key word. “Dog

training” is a key word, two units. “Dog training for German Shepherds” is

a multi-unit key word, a long tailed key word. And in this case, long

tailed key words have a very low search volume on a daily basis or a

monthly basis, but since it’s so specific, the people who type those key

words have a specific motive for it, and you may be able to align your web

page with that motive.

 

So, if you have a dog site about German Shepherds, someone who types in

“dog training for German Shepherds” may be perfectly relevant to what you

have on your website. And this graph here simply tells you that, it shows

you that single unit or double unit or high volume key words, key words

that are searched for between 10,000 and millions of times a month,

represent about 18.5% of the searches.

 

And then key words that get hundreds to maybe 8,000 or 9,000 searches a

month, represent 11.5% of the searches. And then keywords that might

represent one search a month, up to maybe 100 searches a month are long

tailed key words, and they represent 70% of the searches on the web. So,

70% of the searches on the web are long tailed, and they may be very low

volume. But they are very specific and they can be very profitable.

 

So you want to understand that, and try to pick information, if you want to

try to rank for it. It’s easier to rank for the long tail and make sure

that it lines up well. In other words, it says here, ignore the long tail

at your peril. And then what it does in the next section of key word

research, it shows you a bunch of tools that you can use, to do key word

research. And the Google Adwords tool, Insights for search, trends,

Microsoft advertising word tracker and then their own key word research

tool.

 

Now to quickly show you what they are. This is Google Insights for search.

It’s tool here, you type in a key word, you set some parameters, and it’ll

give you geographic data. You can pick your category. I don’t have the time

to do it here. But this is one of the.. Google Trends. This is another tool

that you type in the key word. It will give you all sorts of geographic

data, key word suggestions, everything you want to figure out about a key

word, and you can do the same parameters as Insights.

 

The Google Adwords key word tool. This is extremely important and you can

type in a phrase, you can type in a website, you can type in a category. I

usually type in the phrase, sometimes I type in the URL of a website, and

it will come back with all sorts of key words that people are using,

related to what you just typed in with the monthly search volume. And very

important key word tool. Google Advertising. You can come here to the Bing

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. You can download their tool, and you

can use it in conjunction with Word 2007 and Excel.

 

Word tracker. This is another tool just like the Google Adwords key word

tool. You type in the key word here and it will come back with 100

suggestions and search volume information. And then SEOmoz, has a key word

difficulty tool that you can use, and it will give you it’s own valuation

of how difficult that tool is. SEOmoz has a number of tools you can use.

It’s a subscription service, but it is the one of the best on the web, so

that will tell you about that. So that’s what you’ll see in this section,

suggesting how to use the tools. I have a series of videos that explain how

to use a whole bunch of these tools. You can look for that on my YouTube

channel. For Google Insights, Google Trends, Word tracker etc..

 

Key word difficulty. So that’s the tool we just saw, it’s important to

understand that, and that is really the crux of key word research. There’s

an enormous amount more to learn about key words. This is a very, very

important subject matter. You want to make sure that you do a lot of your

key word research an exact match, for example. It does not say that here,

but just remember that. But the basic concepts here and the tools that they

are suggesting are among the best on the web so you should be aware of them

and learn how to use them. And that’s it. I hope this video has been

helpful. This is Claude Pelanne of Affiliate Starting Line. Stay with it,

stay well and we’ll talk to you soon.