All major search engines use spider programs (also known as crawlers or robots) to scour the web, collect documents, give each a unique reference, scan their text, and hand them off to an indexing program. Where the scan picks up hyperlinks to other documents, those documents are then fetched in their turn. Google’s spider is called Googlebot and you can see it hitting your site if you look at your web logs. A typical Googlebot entry (in the browser section of your logs) might look like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html)
If you picked up a book on SEO from two or three years ago, there would have probably been a whole chapter on search engine submission. There were also businesses that used to specialize in this activity alone.
One or two of them still vainly pursue this business model, but I am afraid the world has moved on. The modern way to handle Google inclusion is through the use of sitemaps (see later in this step) and a well structured site.
Courting the crawl is all about helping Google to find your site and, most importantly, to index all your pages properly. It may surprise you, but even many well-established big names (with huge sites) have very substantial problems in this area. In fact, the bigger the client the more time I typically need to spend focused on the crawl.
As you will see, good websites are hosted well, set up properly, and, above all, structured sensibly. Whether you are working on a new site or reworking an existing internet presence, I will show you how to be found by Google and have all your pages included fully in the Google search index.
One or two of them still vainly pursue this business model, but I am afraid the world has moved on. The modern way to handle Google inclusion is through the use of sitemaps (see later in this step) and a well structured site.
Courting the crawl is all about helping Google to find your site and, most importantly, to index all your pages properly. It may surprise you, but even many well-established big names (with huge sites) have very substantial problems in this area. In fact, the bigger the client the more time I typically need to spend focused on the crawl.
As you will see, good websites are hosted well, set up properly, and, above all, structured sensibly. Whether you are working on a new site or reworking an existing internet presence, I will show you how to be found by Google and have all your pages included fully in the Google search index.
To complete the keyword deployment phase, look again at your A list. Try to identify 3–5 two-word and 4–6 three-word phrases that have the highest keyword weighting. These phrases will become site-wide phrases; the rest will be deep phrases. Site-wide phrases will be used to optimize your homepage and liberally sprinkled throughout the rest of the site. Deep phrases will typically be confined only to individual sections, categories, or content pages.
Now you are fully ready and properly equipped to embark on your journey of search engine optimization.
Now you are fully ready and properly equipped to embark on your journey of search engine optimization.
You should now split your prioritized raw list of keywords into three groups: A, B, and C. Your A list will include suitable candidates for homepage content and product or service sections and categories. Your B list will contain the individual products and services themselves; and your C list will incorporate other attractive phrases and qualifying categories (which may or may not have individual pages to themselves).
For example, Brad would go for:
A list
1 Business card printing
2 Letterhead printing
B list
1.1 Online business card custom design
1.2 Online business card custom printing
1.3 Online business card ordering
C list
1.1.1 Quality business card designs
Include variations: luxury, value, superior, 5 star, highest
1.1.2 Cheap business card designs
Include variations: discount, low cost, bargain, affordable, etc.
This is just an extract from Brad’s planning, but gives you an idea of how to break down your keyphrases into workable categories and lists that you can more readily deploy later.
You should select, as far as possible, the most attractive phrases (as measured by KOI) in your A list, the next most attractive in your B list, and the least most attractive in your C list. This will normally follow, as most people tend to search more often on broad category matches than individual products.
Use common sense, however, as it is unlikely that KOI alone will give you a sensible list. If in doubt, always promote the phrases with higher search popularity. Remember that a sound business is never built wholly on niches.
For example, Brad would go for:
A list
1 Business card printing
2 Letterhead printing
B list
1.1 Online business card custom design
1.2 Online business card custom printing
1.3 Online business card ordering
C list
1.1.1 Quality business card designs
Include variations: luxury, value, superior, 5 star, highest
1.1.2 Cheap business card designs
Include variations: discount, low cost, bargain, affordable, etc.
This is just an extract from Brad’s planning, but gives you an idea of how to break down your keyphrases into workable categories and lists that you can more readily deploy later.
You should select, as far as possible, the most attractive phrases (as measured by KOI) in your A list, the next most attractive in your B list, and the least most attractive in your C list. This will normally follow, as most people tend to search more often on broad category matches than individual products.
Use common sense, however, as it is unlikely that KOI alone will give you a sensible list. If in doubt, always promote the phrases with higher search popularity. Remember that a sound business is never built wholly on niches.
The second of my additional rules is keyword splicing. The observant among you might have noticed that Brad managed to hit two birds with one stone in the example above. From his original keyword analysis he had:
" Online Business Card Printing – 1,265 daily searches
" Business Card Printing Services – 934 daily searches
By deploying the phrase “online business card printing services” as a five-keyword chain, Brad actually managed to include two proximate three-word keyphrases in one longer, composite phrase. You should look for the same keyword-splicing opportunities in your keyword deployment planning.
" Online Business Card Printing – 1,265 daily searches
" Business Card Printing Services – 934 daily searches
By deploying the phrase “online business card printing services” as a five-keyword chain, Brad actually managed to include two proximate three-word keyphrases in one longer, composite phrase. You should look for the same keyword-splicing opportunities in your keyword deployment planning.
I said there were three rules, didn’t I? Well, actually there are five. The first of my additional rules is keyword splitting. It cannot have escaped your notice above that having business cards and letterheads together on one page inherently dilutes the prominence, proximity, and density of both products.
If Brad had a separate page for each of his two products, then he could reduce the stem for each to just two words, then add related keyphrases to build density. So, using the title tag as an example:
" Page 1: Business Card Printing – Online Business Card Design & Printing Services
" Page 2: Letterhead Printing – Online Letterhead Design & Printing Services
But why stop here? Brad could actually create a section for each product, then have individual pages for each aspect of the service.
So why not:
" Section 1: Business Card Printing
• Page 1.1: Business Card Printing > Online Business Card
Design Services
• Page 1.2: Business Card Printing > Online Business Card
Printing Services
• Page 1.3: Business Card Printing > Luxury Business Cards
Etc,
As you can see, this begins to lead us into site structure and navigational optimization (which there is a section on later, see page 86) but at this point, all you need to understand is that splitting out keyphrase categories into separate pages and sections helps with the three main principles of prominence, proximity, and density.
If Brad had a separate page for each of his two products, then he could reduce the stem for each to just two words, then add related keyphrases to build density. So, using the title tag as an example:
" Page 1: Business Card Printing – Online Business Card Design & Printing Services
" Page 2: Letterhead Printing – Online Letterhead Design & Printing Services
But why stop here? Brad could actually create a section for each product, then have individual pages for each aspect of the service.
So why not:
" Section 1: Business Card Printing
• Page 1.1: Business Card Printing > Online Business Card
Design Services
• Page 1.2: Business Card Printing > Online Business Card
Printing Services
• Page 1.3: Business Card Printing > Luxury Business Cards
Etc,
As you can see, this begins to lead us into site structure and navigational optimization (which there is a section on later, see page 86) but at this point, all you need to understand is that splitting out keyphrase categories into separate pages and sections helps with the three main principles of prominence, proximity, and density.
The final keyword deployment factor used by search engines to determine keyword importance is density. This can be defined as the relative frequency with which a keyword or phrase is found within the page text area being examined (whether this is a title, heading, link anchor text, or page text). “Relative” in this context means relative to all the other words in the text area.
In other words, density is calculated as the number of words in the keyphrase multiplied by the frequency with which they occur together, and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword).
As an example, consider these two alternative headings:
" Business Printing
" Business Printing and more
While both options score equally on prominence and proximity, the first wins on the density criterion. Here keyword density is at 100% (for the phrase “business printing”) compared to just 50% for option 2.
Many webmasters use titles or descriptions that include words or phrases like “and more” or “world’s biggest selection of.” I call these phrases redundant text, in that they have no SEO value and serve only to dilute the effectiveness of your page copy. Get rid of them where you can.
There are thus two ways to improve density: either increase the frequency with which certain phrases are used or reduce the overall number of words in the text area. Again, moderation is key here. Too high a density for the type of content involved can trigger a spam penalty from Google.
In the on-page and off-page sections (pages 97 and 132) I explore keyword density in much greater detail, including the ideal density for each text area to score well in search engines while avoiding spam triggers.
In other words, density is calculated as the number of words in the keyphrase multiplied by the frequency with which they occur together, and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword).
As an example, consider these two alternative headings:
" Business Printing
" Business Printing and more
While both options score equally on prominence and proximity, the first wins on the density criterion. Here keyword density is at 100% (for the phrase “business printing”) compared to just 50% for option 2.
Many webmasters use titles or descriptions that include words or phrases like “and more” or “world’s biggest selection of.” I call these phrases redundant text, in that they have no SEO value and serve only to dilute the effectiveness of your page copy. Get rid of them where you can.
There are thus two ways to improve density: either increase the frequency with which certain phrases are used or reduce the overall number of words in the text area. Again, moderation is key here. Too high a density for the type of content involved can trigger a spam penalty from Google.
In the on-page and off-page sections (pages 97 and 132) I explore keyword density in much greater detail, including the ideal density for each text area to score well in search engines while avoiding spam triggers.
The next factor used by search engines to determine keyword importance (or relevance) is proximity. Keyword proximity refers to how close the keywords that make up your keyphrase are to each other.
As an example, consider these two alternative headings:
" Printing Business Cards & Letterheads
" Business Card Printing & Letterhead Printing
While the first option is perhaps more elegant English, the second will produce better rankings for a page optimized on either “business card printing” or “letterhead printing,” as the relevant words appear next to one another and in the correct order.
In short, you should always endeavor to keep your keywords together as a unit. Where this is not possible (i.e., the text would not read well for a human user), do your best to keep them not too far away from each other. For example, “business card and letterhead printing” is still an improvement on “business card and letterhead stationery and printing services.” The reason proximity works is that search engines are machines that follow ruthless logic. If someone searches on “letterhead printing” then logic dictates that pages full of the text “letterhead printing” – or linked with the anchor text “letterhead printing” – are more likely to be relevant to the searcher than pages that do not exhibit this characteristic.
As an example, consider these two alternative headings:
" Printing Business Cards & Letterheads
" Business Card Printing & Letterhead Printing
While the first option is perhaps more elegant English, the second will produce better rankings for a page optimized on either “business card printing” or “letterhead printing,” as the relevant words appear next to one another and in the correct order.
In short, you should always endeavor to keep your keywords together as a unit. Where this is not possible (i.e., the text would not read well for a human user), do your best to keep them not too far away from each other. For example, “business card and letterhead printing” is still an improvement on “business card and letterhead stationery and printing services.” The reason proximity works is that search engines are machines that follow ruthless logic. If someone searches on “letterhead printing” then logic dictates that pages full of the text “letterhead printing” – or linked with the anchor text “letterhead printing” – are more likely to be relevant to the searcher than pages that do not exhibit this characteristic.
All search engines attempt to determine the most important words on a page, in a tag, or in a link. In the absence of any guidance from your HTML (see below), the first and most important measure used is that of prominence (i.e., the closer a word is to the front of the analyzed text area, the more relevant or important it is).
Prominence implies that a word used at the beginning of a link or piece of text is more important than the rest. The words that follow are scored lower and lower by the algorithm until (in a very long text section) their value tends toward zero or is cut off by a programmatic truncation.
As an example, consider these two alternative page titles:
" Chambers Print LLC – we offer printing services to businesses
" Business Printing Services – from Chambers Print LLC
Now you understand prominence, you will appreciate that, all other things being equal, the second of these alternative titles will produce better search engine rankings (for “business printing” or “printing services”) than the first option can.
Remember that search engines evaluate each important page area or inbound link separately. As such, the title tag, meta-description tag, keyword tag, heading tags, alt text tags, and page text all produce their own prominence pictures that, together, tell the search engine a great deal about your page.
This is one of many reasons not using standard HTML mark-ups is simply a wasted opportunity. For example, if you break up your text with subheadings (all of which use the h1 tag), the search engine will attach a prominence value to the first words of each of these in turn.
As an example, consider these two alternative page titles:
" Chambers Print LLC – we offer printing services to businesses
" Business Printing Services – from Chambers Print LLC
Now you understand prominence, you will appreciate that, all other things being equal, the second of these alternative titles will produce better search engine rankings (for “business printing” or “printing services”) than the first option can.
Remember that search engines evaluate each important page area or inbound link separately. As such, the title tag, meta-description tag, keyword tag, heading tags, alt text tags, and page text all produce their own prominence pictures that, together, tell the search engine a great deal about your page.
This is one of many reasons not using standard HTML mark-ups is simply a wasted opportunity. For example, if you break up your text with subheadings (all of which use the h1 tag), the search engine will attach a prominence value to the first words of each of these in turn.
First, it is important to understand that spiders love text. Every piece of information about a page can be turned into a long list of words. The domain name (the name of your site), the URL (the web address, technically the uniform resource locator), the filename (from which you created the page), and the page title are all text blocks. So too are the page meta tags (elements in the programming that provide information about the page), heading tags, page text, and even the alt tags on images (which describe what the image is, for spiders or the visually impaired). Finally, the links to and away from each page are text blocks. Google goes even further and looks at all the text blocks of all the pages that link to (or are linked from) your page. In short, all the world is a text block to a Googlebot.
So if you read on a forum somewhere that “domain names don’t matter” or “alt tags are overrated,” ignore that. As I have said, SEO is like throwing mud at a wall every bit you throw will stick to some extent and the more mud you throw, the more will stick. You can afford to ignore no text block in your quest for dominance!
Each text block has a beginning, an end, and a pattern in the middle. Google will examine each text block separately and take it into the index for that page. Try experimenting on a search using the intitle:anykeyword and inurl:anykeyword operators (search for itle:antiques or inurl:antiques, for example) and you will see that Google finds a separate place (and weighting) in its index for every text block. In evaluating each block, Google will assume that relevant keywords appear earlier in each text block; tend to appear together; and tend to appear often. Put simply, the spider is looking for prominence, proximity, and density.
So if you read on a forum somewhere that “domain names don’t matter” or “alt tags are overrated,” ignore that. As I have said, SEO is like throwing mud at a wall every bit you throw will stick to some extent and the more mud you throw, the more will stick. You can afford to ignore no text block in your quest for dominance!
Each text block has a beginning, an end, and a pattern in the middle. Google will examine each text block separately and take it into the index for that page. Try experimenting on a search using the intitle:anykeyword and inurl:anykeyword operators (search for itle:antiques or inurl:antiques, for example) and you will see that Google finds a separate place (and weighting) in its index for every text block. In evaluating each block, Google will assume that relevant keywords appear earlier in each text block; tend to appear together; and tend to appear often. Put simply, the spider is looking for prominence, proximity, and density.
Before you begin to use your keywords for real, it is important to narrow down your long list of keyphrases yet further; to use them more efficiently in combination with one another; and to ensure that the end result is not unreadable garbage. In short, you need to understand the basic rules of what I call keyword deployment.
Whether you are building links, choosing domain names. or writing page text, you are trying to include your keywords in all of these in a search-engine-friendly way. While different search engines use slightly different algorithms, they all place importance on prominence, proximity, and density, the three basic rules of keyword deployment.
Follow the simple rules in this section in moderation and you will always get a good result. Overdo any one and you risk getting flagged as spam. The acid test is: Does it still read well for the human user? If it does and obeys the three basic rules, then the search-engine spiders (robot browsers, also known as crawlers, or Googlebots on Google) will love you. If, alternatively, your keyword stuffing would make a user laugh (or cry), then you are running a very real risk of failure.
Whether you are building links, choosing domain names. or writing page text, you are trying to include your keywords in all of these in a search-engine-friendly way. While different search engines use slightly different algorithms, they all place importance on prominence, proximity, and density, the three basic rules of keyword deployment.
Follow the simple rules in this section in moderation and you will always get a good result. Overdo any one and you risk getting flagged as spam. The acid test is: Does it still read well for the human user? If it does and obeys the three basic rules, then the search-engine spiders (robot browsers, also known as crawlers, or Googlebots on Google) will love you. If, alternatively, your keyword stuffing would make a user laugh (or cry), then you are running a very real risk of failure.
It will not have escaped your notice that by now, you may have a very long list indeed of keyphrase candidates for your site. Brad, as I have noted, has over 500 at this point. However, candidates are all they are.
Unless you have a very large, content rich site, it is unlikely that you will need so many phrases. Nor is it likely that you would be able to optimize effectively for so many.
Can I suggest that at this point, you cull a full 50% of your entire list, based on a KOI sort. Then add back in 10–15% of the words with the highest search frequencies. This should give you a more workable database with which to enter the final part of the D–A–D method, keyword deployment.
Unless you have a very large, content rich site, it is unlikely that you will need so many phrases. Nor is it likely that you would be able to optimize effectively for so many.
Can I suggest that at this point, you cull a full 50% of your entire list, based on a KOI sort. Then add back in 10–15% of the words with the highest search frequencies. This should give you a more workable database with which to enter the final part of the D–A–D method, keyword deployment.
The keyword effectiveness index (KEI), first popularized by Sumantra Roy, is a way of combining keyword popularity (P) with raw keyword competitiveness (C) to give a composite score. The usual formula for KEI is popularity squared, divided by the number of competing sites using that keyword. This gives a higher significance to the popularity measure (which is the right way to look at it).
The KEI measure is often used to rank the effectiveness of different keyword combinations. In your spreadsheet, use Column E (entitled KEI) to calculate the keyword effectiveness of each phrase. The formula in each cell should be P^2/C.
I have developed my own attractiveness measure, the keyword opportunity index (KOI), which takes Sumantra’s work a step further and is a more sophisticated measure of the opportunity presented by each keyword. KOI is calculated as KOI = (P^2/D) and thus bases the attractiveness of a keyword or keyphrase solely on directly competing sites.
Enter the formula P^2/D into each Column F cell of your spreadsheet to calculate KOI. A numerical sort on Column F gives you, in ranking order, a composite rating of the attractiveness of each keyword for an SEO campaign on your business, products, and services. It is this KOI number that I refer to most during the on-page and off-page optimization phases to follow.
Brad’s final keyword analysis spreadsheet contains a staggering 570 phrases. However, for the purposes of illustration I will continue to focus just on the business card category of his analysis. Opposite is a short extract from the finished product.
Brad is delighted with the results. He finds, to his surprise, that the market for online business cards is relatively uncompetitive, with fewer than 400,000 competing pages, chasing 214,000 daily searches. His long-tailed demand curve falls steeply but the competition curve is flat, meaning that Brad has lots of opportunities to make money.
Note the phrase “full color business card printing.” Like our earlier “ski chalet child care” illustration, this is a great example of a phrase that pays. With fewer than 800 competing pages, I share Brad’s confidence that he can achieve a #1 ranking on Google for a search term that more than 400 people search for each and every day. Note, also, how much more effective the KOI comparison is than the KEI score. Would Brad have unearthed the “full color business card printing” phrase without using KOI?
At this point, it is worth injecting a note of caution. Digital Point numbers are extrapolated from a relatively small sample of searches. As such, any search frequency of less than 1,000 can be unreliable. It may be worth running your full analysis over a period of three month ends just to be sure than some overenthusiastic searchers have not skewed the results.
The KEI measure is often used to rank the effectiveness of different keyword combinations. In your spreadsheet, use Column E (entitled KEI) to calculate the keyword effectiveness of each phrase. The formula in each cell should be P^2/C.
I have developed my own attractiveness measure, the keyword opportunity index (KOI), which takes Sumantra’s work a step further and is a more sophisticated measure of the opportunity presented by each keyword. KOI is calculated as KOI = (P^2/D) and thus bases the attractiveness of a keyword or keyphrase solely on directly competing sites.
Enter the formula P^2/D into each Column F cell of your spreadsheet to calculate KOI. A numerical sort on Column F gives you, in ranking order, a composite rating of the attractiveness of each keyword for an SEO campaign on your business, products, and services. It is this KOI number that I refer to most during the on-page and off-page optimization phases to follow.
Brad’s final keyword analysis spreadsheet contains a staggering 570 phrases. However, for the purposes of illustration I will continue to focus just on the business card category of his analysis. Opposite is a short extract from the finished product.
Brad is delighted with the results. He finds, to his surprise, that the market for online business cards is relatively uncompetitive, with fewer than 400,000 competing pages, chasing 214,000 daily searches. His long-tailed demand curve falls steeply but the competition curve is flat, meaning that Brad has lots of opportunities to make money.
Note the phrase “full color business card printing.” Like our earlier “ski chalet child care” illustration, this is a great example of a phrase that pays. With fewer than 800 competing pages, I share Brad’s confidence that he can achieve a #1 ranking on Google for a search term that more than 400 people search for each and every day. Note, also, how much more effective the KOI comparison is than the KEI score. Would Brad have unearthed the “full color business card printing” phrase without using KOI?
At this point, it is worth injecting a note of caution. Digital Point numbers are extrapolated from a relatively small sample of searches. As such, any search frequency of less than 1,000 can be unreliable. It may be worth running your full analysis over a period of three month ends just to be sure than some overenthusiastic searchers have not skewed the results.
| Keywords | Monthly searches | Raw competition | Directly competing | KEI | KOI |
| Business cards | 214,349 | 245,000,000 | 365,000 | 187.53 | 125,878.07 |
| Business card printing | 19,524 | 42,100,000 | 36,600 | 9.05 | 10,414,93 |
| Business printing | 6,345 | 127,000,000 | 120,000 | 0.32 | 335,49 |
| Online business card printing | 1,265 | 516,000,000 | 13,300 | 0.00 | 120,32 |
| Business card printing services | 934 | 256,000,000 | 11,800 | 0.00 | 73,73 |
| Business card printing service | 811 | 234,000,000 | 10,400 | 0.00 | 63,24 |
| Color business card printing | 793 | 98,500,000 | 12,300 | 0.01 | 51,13 |
| Full color business card printing | 426 | 2,630,000 | 774 | 0.07 | 234,47 |
| Cheap business card printing | 215 | 35,000,000 | 736 | 0.00 | 62,81 |
| Business card printing company | 179l | 82,000,000 | 10,100 | 0.00 | 3,17 |
To know the popularity of keywords is really less than half the battle, however. It is vital to know what you are up against: If you are entering a very competitive marketplace (where there are millions of sites using exactly your keywords), it will be a long and hard slog to get up there with the very best. Don’t pick the targets that are miles away from your gun sites!
Keyword competitiveness is extracted from the number of results returned from a Google search on the search terms concerned. For example, a search on business cards returns, at the time of writing, around 245 million results.
Return to your spreadsheet and look at Column C, raw competition. Perform a search on Google for each of your listed keyphrases in turn and enter the number of results into your spreadsheet. Once you’ve done this, a numerical sort of Column C gives you, in ranking order, the most competitive raw search terms related to your business, products, and services.
Directly competing sites (Column D) are those that have the exact keyword phrase you are analyzing in the anchor text (the text the user clicks) of links to their site from other websites (rather than simply having the words in that phrase on their pages). Directly competing sites are your serious competition: They are likely already to have invested time and energy into search engine optimization campaigns. They are also likely to continue doing so in the future.
To work out D for any search phrase, I use the allinanchor: Google operator. For example, a search on “allinanchor:business cards” returns 365,000 results and “allinanchor:online business card printing” returns just 13,300. Brad is beginning to smile at last suddenly the odds don’t look quite so daunting.
Perform an allinanchor: search on Google for each term in turn and enter the number of results into your spreadsheet in Column D. A numerical sort of the column gives you, in ranking order, a better idea of the truly competitive search terms related to your business, products, and services. By now, your spreadsheet should look something like this early draft of Brad’s:
To speed up your extraction of Google search results numbers, you may wish to make use of another neat tool, the Google Smackdown analyzer at www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp, which allows you to compare the overall frequency of two competing keyword sets across the whole of Google’s results.
Keyword competitiveness is extracted from the number of results returned from a Google search on the search terms concerned. For example, a search on business cards returns, at the time of writing, around 245 million results.
Return to your spreadsheet and look at Column C, raw competition. Perform a search on Google for each of your listed keyphrases in turn and enter the number of results into your spreadsheet. Once you’ve done this, a numerical sort of Column C gives you, in ranking order, the most competitive raw search terms related to your business, products, and services.
Directly competing sites (Column D) are those that have the exact keyword phrase you are analyzing in the anchor text (the text the user clicks) of links to their site from other websites (rather than simply having the words in that phrase on their pages). Directly competing sites are your serious competition: They are likely already to have invested time and energy into search engine optimization campaigns. They are also likely to continue doing so in the future.
To work out D for any search phrase, I use the allinanchor: Google operator. For example, a search on “allinanchor:business cards” returns 365,000 results and “allinanchor:online business card printing” returns just 13,300. Brad is beginning to smile at last suddenly the odds don’t look quite so daunting.
Perform an allinanchor: search on Google for each term in turn and enter the number of results into your spreadsheet in Column D. A numerical sort of the column gives you, in ranking order, a better idea of the truly competitive search terms related to your business, products, and services. By now, your spreadsheet should look something like this early draft of Brad’s:
| Keywords | Monthly searches | Raw competition | Directly competing | KEI | KOI |
| Business cards | 214,349 | 245,000,000 | 365,000 | ||
| Business card printing | 19,524 | 42,100,000 | 36,600 | ||
| Online business card printing | 1,265 | 516,000,000 | 13,300 |
To speed up your extraction of Google search results numbers, you may wish to make use of another neat tool, the Google Smackdown analyzer at www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp, which allows you to compare the overall frequency of two competing keyword sets across the whole of Google’s results.
The first component of keyword attractiveness is popularity. What are the keywords most customers will use today to find your site? You may think you know already (and possibly you do), but then again you may be surprised.
One of the most wonderful things about search engines is that they make available (for public research purposes) “insider data” about what people search for on their sites. They do this in a variety of ways, generally through application program interfaces (APIs), which allow developers to point their web-based or desktop software directly at the underlying search engine index.
Imagine that: basically the highest-quality market research data that has ever been made available, continually refreshed in real time and based on massive sample sizes. Wouldn’t you be mad not to take advantage of this data? Of course, and I am going to show you how. To access the industry data yourself, you basically have two choices. Either you purchase SEO software that directly interacts with industry data sources; or you make use of the (now relatively limited) free keyword analysis tools online.
On the forum (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk), I maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date list of all the most important SEO tools and software, including those appropriate for keyword popularity research. Via the forum, you can obtain a special discounted price on the software I most frequently use.
However, for the purposes of this section, I will work with the current best free resource: www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/. The Digital Point tool allows you to check for recent combinations of search words (and their derivatives) on the search engines, returning search frequencies for each. The data you will be accessing is for the most recently completed calendar month.
Bear this in mind if your business is seasonal in nature. For example, if you sell Halloween costumes, you are likely to get an inflated view of search rates if you undertake this analysis in November and thus work on the October data! Visit the tool and try entering some of the two-, three-, and four word combinations on your keyword list. Make a note of the resulting frequencies. You will notice that you can drill down from phrases into their subcategories (by clicking on a phrase in the results).
Brad finds that the main subcategory for “business printing” (6,245 results) is “business card printing” (19,254 results). This surprises him more than perhaps it should. More than 50% of all US businesses are now home based, so the SOHO/B2C part of his market is bigger than he could ever have imagined. Consumers, not companies, are what drives big search popularity numbers, and most bedroom entrepreneurs need business cards.
You should really multiply the Digital Point search numbers returned by approximately 2.5 (which extrapolates its numbers to a rough estimate of worldwide searches). You can then add these numbers to your spreadsheet (in Column B) to give you the top keywords and phrases for your business, based on popularity alone.
You will find, as did Brad, that clicking up and down through the Digital Point results will suggest many more keyword combinations that your competitors have not spotted. Brad, for example, found that “color business card printing” and even “full color business card printing” were quite popular, despite not featuring on his competitors’ sites. Add all of these new finds to your keyword list in Column A and aim to get your total up to about 150 different keywords and keyphrases.
One of the most wonderful things about search engines is that they make available (for public research purposes) “insider data” about what people search for on their sites. They do this in a variety of ways, generally through application program interfaces (APIs), which allow developers to point their web-based or desktop software directly at the underlying search engine index.
Imagine that: basically the highest-quality market research data that has ever been made available, continually refreshed in real time and based on massive sample sizes. Wouldn’t you be mad not to take advantage of this data? Of course, and I am going to show you how. To access the industry data yourself, you basically have two choices. Either you purchase SEO software that directly interacts with industry data sources; or you make use of the (now relatively limited) free keyword analysis tools online.
On the forum (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk), I maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date list of all the most important SEO tools and software, including those appropriate for keyword popularity research. Via the forum, you can obtain a special discounted price on the software I most frequently use.
However, for the purposes of this section, I will work with the current best free resource: www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/. The Digital Point tool allows you to check for recent combinations of search words (and their derivatives) on the search engines, returning search frequencies for each. The data you will be accessing is for the most recently completed calendar month.
Bear this in mind if your business is seasonal in nature. For example, if you sell Halloween costumes, you are likely to get an inflated view of search rates if you undertake this analysis in November and thus work on the October data! Visit the tool and try entering some of the two-, three-, and four word combinations on your keyword list. Make a note of the resulting frequencies. You will notice that you can drill down from phrases into their subcategories (by clicking on a phrase in the results).
Brad finds that the main subcategory for “business printing” (6,245 results) is “business card printing” (19,254 results). This surprises him more than perhaps it should. More than 50% of all US businesses are now home based, so the SOHO/B2C part of his market is bigger than he could ever have imagined. Consumers, not companies, are what drives big search popularity numbers, and most bedroom entrepreneurs need business cards.
You should really multiply the Digital Point search numbers returned by approximately 2.5 (which extrapolates its numbers to a rough estimate of worldwide searches). You can then add these numbers to your spreadsheet (in Column B) to give you the top keywords and phrases for your business, based on popularity alone.
You will find, as did Brad, that clicking up and down through the Digital Point results will suggest many more keyword combinations that your competitors have not spotted. Brad, for example, found that “color business card printing” and even “full color business card printing” were quite popular, despite not featuring on his competitors’ sites. Add all of these new finds to your keyword list in Column A and aim to get your total up to about 150 different keywords and keyphrases.
You may be wondering at this point how you are going to optimize your site for more than 100 keyphrases. Well, stop worrying! We are now going to narrow down the target list substantially in the second D–A–D step, keyword attractiveness.
Keyword attractiveness is all about balancing the demand for your chosen keywords against the number of competing sites supplying relevant results. Attractive keyphrases are those that are relatively underexploited – these are the phrases that pay.
Imagine that SEO is like target practice, where you only have a certain amount of ammunition. There are several different targets you can shoot at, all at varying distances away from your gun sites. You are seeking bullseyes. Would you shoot at only one target, putting hole after hole through the bullseye? No! Would you aim at the targets furthest away from you and see round after round expended fruitlessly?
No! This analogy is in fact very apposite, as SEO is a very similar challenge.
You may think that you have an unlimited number of bullets. After all, you could create as many pages as there are variants in search terms and build as many links as the web will support. However, in practice you are limited by your own time, the tolerance of your customers, and the Google spam filters. Your time is probably better spent running your business than sitting at your computer doing SEO into the small hours (that’s what people like me are for). Your customers are also unlikely to be impressed by hundreds of similar pages. Finally, Google does look actively for – and deflate the ranking of – sites with an excessive number of inbound links (links from other sites) relative to their traffic, or for time periods where the links to a site have grown much more quickly than one would naturally expect.
So choose your targets carefully. Make sure you take the easier bullseyes on offer (where the target is close by). Similarly, spread your effort across a wide range of targets. Finally, do not give up on the faraway targets, but be mindful of how much ammunition you are using on them. Keyword attractiveness is the toolset you use to decide where to fire – and how often.
Keyword attractiveness is all about balancing the demand for your chosen keywords against the number of competing sites supplying relevant results. Attractive keyphrases are those that are relatively underexploited – these are the phrases that pay.
Imagine that SEO is like target practice, where you only have a certain amount of ammunition. There are several different targets you can shoot at, all at varying distances away from your gun sites. You are seeking bullseyes. Would you shoot at only one target, putting hole after hole through the bullseye? No! Would you aim at the targets furthest away from you and see round after round expended fruitlessly?
No! This analogy is in fact very apposite, as SEO is a very similar challenge.
You may think that you have an unlimited number of bullets. After all, you could create as many pages as there are variants in search terms and build as many links as the web will support. However, in practice you are limited by your own time, the tolerance of your customers, and the Google spam filters. Your time is probably better spent running your business than sitting at your computer doing SEO into the small hours (that’s what people like me are for). Your customers are also unlikely to be impressed by hundreds of similar pages. Finally, Google does look actively for – and deflate the ranking of – sites with an excessive number of inbound links (links from other sites) relative to their traffic, or for time periods where the links to a site have grown much more quickly than one would naturally expect.
So choose your targets carefully. Make sure you take the easier bullseyes on offer (where the target is close by). Similarly, spread your effort across a wide range of targets. Finally, do not give up on the faraway targets, but be mindful of how much ammunition you are using on them. Keyword attractiveness is the toolset you use to decide where to fire – and how often.
Long-tail keyphrases are typically related to your main strategic keywords and generally include three, four, or more words. For example, “web hosting linux,” “cheap web hosting,” and “web hosting control panel” might be typical long-tail phrases for a web-design business. Such phrases are known as long tail because the frequency with which they are searched on reduces as the length of the phrase increases (in a long tail that tends toward zero searches).
In the next chapter, on keyword attractiveness, I will show you how to assess the degree of popularity and competitiveness attached to each keyword and keyphrase. However, before we get there I can give you a sneak preview: Generally, the longer a phrase is, the more attractive it is, in relative terms. Here is a typical long-tail graph:
Long-tail analysis seeks to identify, for your most common keyword categories (or “stems”), the phrases that pay where demand is relatively high but competition relatively weak; what I call relatively under-exploited keyphrases.
As an example, consider Sam Larder, owner of a luxury, ski-in–ski-out chalet in Verbier, Switzerland. Sam has been spending a fortune on a paid advertising campaign, selecting phrases such as “ski chalet” and “chalet verbier.” Given the popularity of the resort (and the number of competing accommodation providers) he has had to pay more and more to acquire his visitors. However, after reading this book, Sam thoroughly considers his business proposition and looks at the long tail in the light of this.
Nearly all of Sam’s customers have one big thing in common: They bring their children skiing with them. This might have something to do with the fact that Sam’s chalet is right next door to the local crčche. He reconsiders his keyword selection and (from ontological analysis) goes for “ski chalet crčche,” “ski chalet child care,” “ski chalet nursery,” and “ski chalet ski school.” It may not surprise you to learn that Sam more than doubled his customer conversions while almost halving his costs! I will return to phrases that pay in the next section. However, at this point all you need to understand is that it is a good idea to have several keyword chains (that link two, three, or even four keywords together) in your optimization ingredients.
Returning to the Abakus Keyword Tool (or using your SEO software), it is now time to analyze your competitors’ sites more deeply.
This time you are looking for the most commonly repeated two-, three-, and four-word keyphrases in the page text. Add these to your spreadsheet, again in Column A. Repeat the task for different sites and for different pages within the same site. You are aiming for a list of approximately 100 keywords and keyphrases at this stage.
Brad investigates his competitors’ sites again (only this time going down much further in the rankings and trying many different searches). He settles on a group of multi-word phrases that appear most often on competing sites, of which the following are just a few examples:
" Two-word phrases: business cards, letterhead printing, compliment slips, printed labels, address labels, print design " Three-word phrases: quality business cards, business card printing, business card design, laminated business cards, letterhead stationery printing, online printing letterheads, avery address labels, printed address labels, sticky address labels, design brochures leaflets, full color printing, business brochures flyers, business printing services, online business printing, business brochure printing
" Four-word phrases: online business card printing, business card printing services, business card printing service, business form printing services, cheap business card printing, business card printing company, custom business card printing, business card design printing, business card discount printing, business card printing Idaho, business card printing Boise
Brad was interested to note that “business cards” appeared more often than “business card.” He has learnt another key lesson: Always pluralize your keywords where you can. You will achieve higher traffic this way, because of the way search engines handle queries and users perform searches. As I have said, learn from your competitors where you can!
For a typical small (10-page) site, you should now have approximately 35–40 one-word and two-word phrases and perhaps as many as 60–75 three-word and four-or-more-word combinations.
In the next chapter, on keyword attractiveness, I will show you how to assess the degree of popularity and competitiveness attached to each keyword and keyphrase. However, before we get there I can give you a sneak preview: Generally, the longer a phrase is, the more attractive it is, in relative terms. Here is a typical long-tail graph:
Long-tail analysis seeks to identify, for your most common keyword categories (or “stems”), the phrases that pay where demand is relatively high but competition relatively weak; what I call relatively under-exploited keyphrases.
As an example, consider Sam Larder, owner of a luxury, ski-in–ski-out chalet in Verbier, Switzerland. Sam has been spending a fortune on a paid advertising campaign, selecting phrases such as “ski chalet” and “chalet verbier.” Given the popularity of the resort (and the number of competing accommodation providers) he has had to pay more and more to acquire his visitors. However, after reading this book, Sam thoroughly considers his business proposition and looks at the long tail in the light of this.
Nearly all of Sam’s customers have one big thing in common: They bring their children skiing with them. This might have something to do with the fact that Sam’s chalet is right next door to the local crčche. He reconsiders his keyword selection and (from ontological analysis) goes for “ski chalet crčche,” “ski chalet child care,” “ski chalet nursery,” and “ski chalet ski school.” It may not surprise you to learn that Sam more than doubled his customer conversions while almost halving his costs! I will return to phrases that pay in the next section. However, at this point all you need to understand is that it is a good idea to have several keyword chains (that link two, three, or even four keywords together) in your optimization ingredients.
Returning to the Abakus Keyword Tool (or using your SEO software), it is now time to analyze your competitors’ sites more deeply.
This time you are looking for the most commonly repeated two-, three-, and four-word keyphrases in the page text. Add these to your spreadsheet, again in Column A. Repeat the task for different sites and for different pages within the same site. You are aiming for a list of approximately 100 keywords and keyphrases at this stage.
Brad investigates his competitors’ sites again (only this time going down much further in the rankings and trying many different searches). He settles on a group of multi-word phrases that appear most often on competing sites, of which the following are just a few examples:
" Two-word phrases: business cards, letterhead printing, compliment slips, printed labels, address labels, print design " Three-word phrases: quality business cards, business card printing, business card design, laminated business cards, letterhead stationery printing, online printing letterheads, avery address labels, printed address labels, sticky address labels, design brochures leaflets, full color printing, business brochures flyers, business printing services, online business printing, business brochure printing
" Four-word phrases: online business card printing, business card printing services, business card printing service, business form printing services, cheap business card printing, business card printing company, custom business card printing, business card design printing, business card discount printing, business card printing Idaho, business card printing Boise
Brad was interested to note that “business cards” appeared more often than “business card.” He has learnt another key lesson: Always pluralize your keywords where you can. You will achieve higher traffic this way, because of the way search engines handle queries and users perform searches. As I have said, learn from your competitors where you can!
For a typical small (10-page) site, you should now have approximately 35–40 one-word and two-word phrases and perhaps as many as 60–75 three-word and four-or-more-word combinations.
Related keyphrases and keywords have a similar meaning or inference to your main keyphrases and keywords. There is reliable empirical evidence that Google and other search engines make increasing use of semantics in assessing the quality of a page for ranking purposes. A low quality web page, designed by spammers for search engine, rather than human, consumption, will typically be crammed full of the same search phrase, repeated over and over again. It won’t contain the related words.
A high-quality page (naturally written) will, by contrast, typically be full of words semantically related to the main search term used. As search engines move ever further toward employing semantic intelligence in their ranking systems, using related keywords will become ever more important to avoid scoring low in the rankings.
Perhaps more importantly, you should remember that the phrases you might use to search for something will not be the same phrases that someone else would naturally use, so some research is required. There is an excellent tool on the web for locating related keywords, the GoRank Ontology Finder (Related Keywords Lookup Tool). This tool runs a “related word” enquiry against the Google index. See www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/. Visit the forum (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk) for more excellent tools like these. Try using an ontology tool (and an ordinary thesaurus) to identify some related terms. Your optimization campaign should ideally use a mixture of these words in both on-page and off-page activities.
Brad wants to explore related words for his important qualifying words “cheap” and “quality.” He uses both the GoRank Ontology Finder and Microsoft Word’s Thesaurus function and finds the following:
" Cheap: buy, cheap, discount, low cost, low priced, last minute, cheapest, bargain, cheaper, inexpensive, economical, affordable, cut-price, budget, reduced, inexpensive, on sale
" Quality: luxury, superior, class, value, five star, luxurious, high, highest
He adds suitable combinations of his main keywords and these qualifying words to the keywords list on his spreadsheet.
Often the words you find through an ontological check will actually be used more frequently by searchers than the ones you had originally selected.
Consider Doug Chalmers, purveyor of fine antiques in Windsor, UK. Doug specializes in “Victorian furnishings,” so (before reading this book) he was very set on ranking well for that particular keyphrase. However, a full related-word check revealed many alternatives – including old, classic, antique, furniture, vintage, rare, Victorian, antiques, and collectible – with “antique furniture” being the most attractive choice. Without an ontological check, he could have wasted a great deal of time and energy on too narrow a selection.
A high-quality page (naturally written) will, by contrast, typically be full of words semantically related to the main search term used. As search engines move ever further toward employing semantic intelligence in their ranking systems, using related keywords will become ever more important to avoid scoring low in the rankings.
Perhaps more importantly, you should remember that the phrases you might use to search for something will not be the same phrases that someone else would naturally use, so some research is required. There is an excellent tool on the web for locating related keywords, the GoRank Ontology Finder (Related Keywords Lookup Tool). This tool runs a “related word” enquiry against the Google index. See www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/. Visit the forum (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk) for more excellent tools like these. Try using an ontology tool (and an ordinary thesaurus) to identify some related terms. Your optimization campaign should ideally use a mixture of these words in both on-page and off-page activities.
Brad wants to explore related words for his important qualifying words “cheap” and “quality.” He uses both the GoRank Ontology Finder and Microsoft Word’s Thesaurus function and finds the following:
" Cheap: buy, cheap, discount, low cost, low priced, last minute, cheapest, bargain, cheaper, inexpensive, economical, affordable, cut-price, budget, reduced, inexpensive, on sale
" Quality: luxury, superior, class, value, five star, luxurious, high, highest
He adds suitable combinations of his main keywords and these qualifying words to the keywords list on his spreadsheet.
Often the words you find through an ontological check will actually be used more frequently by searchers than the ones you had originally selected.
Consider Doug Chalmers, purveyor of fine antiques in Windsor, UK. Doug specializes in “Victorian furnishings,” so (before reading this book) he was very set on ranking well for that particular keyphrase. However, a full related-word check revealed many alternatives – including old, classic, antique, furniture, vintage, rare, Victorian, antiques, and collectible – with “antique furniture” being the most attractive choice. Without an ontological check, he could have wasted a great deal of time and energy on too narrow a selection.
The place to begin your discovery is again by looking at your competitors’ sites. Try putting into Google search terms related to your business, its products and services. For each of the top five results on each search term, select the “View source” or “View page source” option from your browser menu. Make a note of the keywords placed in the , , and tags.
Alternatively, if looking through HTML code (hypertext markup language, the programming language used to create web pages) leaves you cold, visit one of the keyword analysis tools listed on the forum that accompanies this book (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk). One good example is the Abakus Topword Keyword Check Tool: www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html.
Here you can enter the URLs of your competitors and read off the keywords that they use.
List all of the keywords and keyphrases you find on your competitors’ sites, one after another, in Column A of your spreadsheet. Don’t read me wrong here. This kind of metadata (data about data, in this case a categorization of common terms), particularly in isolation, is not the route to high search engine rankings (as you will see later). However, sites in the top five on Google have generally undertaken SEO campaigns and have already developed a good idea of what the more popular keywords are for their (and your) niche. As such, their metadata is likely to reflect quality keyword analysis, repeated throughout the site in other ways. This effectively represents a shortcut that gets your campaign off to a flying start.
Search engines provide the modern information scientist with a hugely rich data set of search terms commonly used by people to retrieve the web pages they are looking for. I have coined some terms to help describe these that I use in my business.
CUSPs – commonly used search phrases – are phrases that people tend to use when searching for something and, more importantly, narrowing down the search results returned. There are normally two parts to a CUSP, a “stem phrase” and a “qualifying phrase.”
For example, a stem for Brad might be “business cards” and a qualifier “full color.” Additional qualifiers might be “cheap,” “luxury,” “do it yourself,” and a whole host of other terms.
Sometimes qualifiers are strung together, in terms such as “cheap Caribbean cruises.” And often people will use different synonyms or otherwise semantically similar words to describe the same qualifying phrase.
For example, “discounted” and “inexpensive” are synonyms of “cheap.” However, searchers have learnt that phrases like “last minute” and “special offer” might return similar results. As such, searchers are just as likely to search for “last minute cruises” or “special offer cruises” as “cheap cruises.” I use the acronym SEP (semantically equivalent phrase) to describe both simple synonyms and more intuitive variants, and Google is capable of recognizing both. When undertaking keyword research, I tend to group CUSPs into SEPs and then group SEPs under the stem to which they relate. For example:
"Stem: Business Cards
• SEP: Cheap Business Cards
CUSPs: Inexpensive Business Cards, Discounted
Business Cards, Special Offer Business Cards
• SEP: Luxury Business Cards
CUSPs: Premium Business Cards, Quality Business
Cards, Handmade Business Cards
For speed, I often simply list the search phrases under a stem one after another, separated by commas.
Brad searches for “business card printers” – and a small number of other keyphrases – on Google and takes a long look at the top 10 results for each search. He uses the menu option “View source” in Internet Explorer to look at the keywords used in the page metadata. He is surprised to find some consistent themes. For example, almost all of the top-ranked sites offer a way for users to upload their artwork or even to design it online. It seems he has not been the only person with this idea! He also finds a huge variety of keywords used and comes up with the following list (grouped under stems) to summarize his discovery efforts:
" Business cards: business cards, cheap business cards, free business cards, affordable business cards, discount business cards, business card design, full color business cards, folded cards, business card, business card printing, CD business cards, CD Rom business cards, caricature business cards, premium business cards, luxury business cards, caricature contact cards, business card magnets
" Letterheads and compliment slips: letterheads, letterhead, letterpaper, notepaper, personalised stationery, personalized stationery, personalised stationary, personalized stationary, personalised notepaper, personalized notepaper, custom notepaper, customized notepaper, postcard, postcards, compliments slips, personalized compliment slips
" Leaflets and flyers: Leaflet, leaflets, flyers, brochures, brochure, brochure design, flyer design, flyer, presentation folders, newsletters, sales data sheets, folders, promotional material
" Address stamps and labels: address labels, address label, label, stickers, address stickers, return address labels, custom labels, address stamp, caricature address labels
" Printing: business printers, printing, online design, online printing, online print ordering, online printers, online print order, affordable printing, printing company, printing company Idaho, printing company Boise, printing supplies, printers services, cheap printer, cheap printing, online printer, printing online, digital printing, screen printing, offset printing, custom printing, best printing, printing gift certificates, printing coupons, order printing online, low priced printing, short print runs " Other: advertising film, advertising lettering, book printers, greeting cards, invitation cards, wedding cards, tshirt, tshirts, t shirt, t-shirt, stamp, online creation, online graphics, online design, folding paper, book, books, pdf, copyshop, annual report, magnets, folded cards, note cards, press kit
You will note that grouping keywords and keyphrases into categories is a useful exercise, as it begins to lay the foundations for determining your page structure and navigation later on.
Alternatively, if looking through HTML code (hypertext markup language, the programming language used to create web pages) leaves you cold, visit one of the keyword analysis tools listed on the forum that accompanies this book (www.seo-expert-services.co.uk). One good example is the Abakus Topword Keyword Check Tool: www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/tools/topword.html.
Here you can enter the URLs of your competitors and read off the keywords that they use.
List all of the keywords and keyphrases you find on your competitors’ sites, one after another, in Column A of your spreadsheet. Don’t read me wrong here. This kind of metadata (data about data, in this case a categorization of common terms), particularly in isolation, is not the route to high search engine rankings (as you will see later). However, sites in the top five on Google have generally undertaken SEO campaigns and have already developed a good idea of what the more popular keywords are for their (and your) niche. As such, their metadata is likely to reflect quality keyword analysis, repeated throughout the site in other ways. This effectively represents a shortcut that gets your campaign off to a flying start.
Search engines provide the modern information scientist with a hugely rich data set of search terms commonly used by people to retrieve the web pages they are looking for. I have coined some terms to help describe these that I use in my business.
CUSPs – commonly used search phrases – are phrases that people tend to use when searching for something and, more importantly, narrowing down the search results returned. There are normally two parts to a CUSP, a “stem phrase” and a “qualifying phrase.”
For example, a stem for Brad might be “business cards” and a qualifier “full color.” Additional qualifiers might be “cheap,” “luxury,” “do it yourself,” and a whole host of other terms.
Sometimes qualifiers are strung together, in terms such as “cheap Caribbean cruises.” And often people will use different synonyms or otherwise semantically similar words to describe the same qualifying phrase.
For example, “discounted” and “inexpensive” are synonyms of “cheap.” However, searchers have learnt that phrases like “last minute” and “special offer” might return similar results. As such, searchers are just as likely to search for “last minute cruises” or “special offer cruises” as “cheap cruises.” I use the acronym SEP (semantically equivalent phrase) to describe both simple synonyms and more intuitive variants, and Google is capable of recognizing both. When undertaking keyword research, I tend to group CUSPs into SEPs and then group SEPs under the stem to which they relate. For example:
"Stem: Business Cards
• SEP: Cheap Business Cards
CUSPs: Inexpensive Business Cards, Discounted
Business Cards, Special Offer Business Cards
• SEP: Luxury Business Cards
CUSPs: Premium Business Cards, Quality Business
Cards, Handmade Business Cards
For speed, I often simply list the search phrases under a stem one after another, separated by commas.
Brad searches for “business card printers” – and a small number of other keyphrases – on Google and takes a long look at the top 10 results for each search. He uses the menu option “View source” in Internet Explorer to look at the keywords used in the page metadata. He is surprised to find some consistent themes. For example, almost all of the top-ranked sites offer a way for users to upload their artwork or even to design it online. It seems he has not been the only person with this idea! He also finds a huge variety of keywords used and comes up with the following list (grouped under stems) to summarize his discovery efforts:
" Business cards: business cards, cheap business cards, free business cards, affordable business cards, discount business cards, business card design, full color business cards, folded cards, business card, business card printing, CD business cards, CD Rom business cards, caricature business cards, premium business cards, luxury business cards, caricature contact cards, business card magnets
" Letterheads and compliment slips: letterheads, letterhead, letterpaper, notepaper, personalised stationery, personalized stationery, personalised stationary, personalized stationary, personalised notepaper, personalized notepaper, custom notepaper, customized notepaper, postcard, postcards, compliments slips, personalized compliment slips
" Leaflets and flyers: Leaflet, leaflets, flyers, brochures, brochure, brochure design, flyer design, flyer, presentation folders, newsletters, sales data sheets, folders, promotional material
" Address stamps and labels: address labels, address label, label, stickers, address stickers, return address labels, custom labels, address stamp, caricature address labels
" Printing: business printers, printing, online design, online printing, online print ordering, online printers, online print order, affordable printing, printing company, printing company Idaho, printing company Boise, printing supplies, printers services, cheap printer, cheap printing, online printer, printing online, digital printing, screen printing, offset printing, custom printing, best printing, printing gift certificates, printing coupons, order printing online, low priced printing, short print runs " Other: advertising film, advertising lettering, book printers, greeting cards, invitation cards, wedding cards, tshirt, tshirts, t shirt, t-shirt, stamp, online creation, online graphics, online design, folding paper, book, books, pdf, copyshop, annual report, magnets, folded cards, note cards, press kit
You will note that grouping keywords and keyphrases into categories is a useful exercise, as it begins to lay the foundations for determining your page structure and navigation later on.
Throughout the steps of the D–A–D model, I will refer to a spreadsheet-based tool that always accompanies my keyword analysis. Create a new spreadsheet or table to record your work, with six columns (from left to right):
A Keywords
B Monthly searches
B Raw competition
D Directly competing
E KEI
F KOI
All will become clear later in this chapter. In the keyword discovery phase, we are focusing on Column A only and trying to compile as large a list of keywords as possible.
A Keywords
B Monthly searches
B Raw competition
D Directly competing
E KEI
F KOI
All will become clear later in this chapter. In the keyword discovery phase, we are focusing on Column A only and trying to compile as large a list of keywords as possible.