Mapping Keywords to Pages
Once you have gone over our keyword strategy guide and figured out which terms you are going to target it's type to associate those keywords with content. This is where you decide which pages you want to rank for when a user searches for the keywords you are targeting. You want to choose the most relevant page on your site that will deliver to the visitor exactly what they are looking for.
You are not going to be able to optimize a single page of your site for a wide variety of terms. Your title and meta description only allow for so many characters before you are cut off. That is why we target only 1-3 keywords per page. You will want to create new content on your site that is fully optimized for each of the major keywords you are going after and that content should deliver exactly what the user expects to find for that particular search.
Now, you don't need to create new pages for every small modifier of your term. As long as the modifier doesn't completely change the meaning (free v. buy), most can be combined for a single page of your site. When you are creating a brand new site, it's more important to focus on the bigger picture and get content created for your more general terms first. After getting the basic structure of your site complete you can work down on the extremely specific content within the broader categories.
As your site matures you are going to want to use your analytics to map out additional keywords. If people are finding your site already using a keyword term, then make sure you are serving them the answers they are looking for. If you aren't, create that content and start directing that traffic to the appropriate page. You won't have to do much work to rank for these terms since you already are, but you will be able to increase your conversion rate off of that traffic.
So where does that leave the homepage? Your homepage is likely going to have the most incoming links and thus the most pagerank of any page on your site. However, your homepage likely will not be very specific for any kind of search term. That means you should take your 1-3 most important, competitive, general keywords and target them to your homepage. As you keep working on your SEO you will be able to rank for more and more terms, but start small and achieve some successful rankings before you move on to additional terms.
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What is a Keyword?
Keywords are the heart and soul of Internet marketing. The first step in promoting a site will be to start to brainstorm what the keywords are going to be that you will focus on. But, if you are just getting started with online promotion you might be asking "What exactly is a keyword?"
Definition
For the main page of your site the keywords will be the terms and phrases that best describe what your business, site, product, or service is about. It is what the users will type into a search engine to find you. They are the terms that you are going to pay to show up for in the results while running your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.
Keywords are more than just a single word. I use the term to cover any phrase or combination of words that are used by the searcher.
Brand Names
Unless you are a major brand, your keywords will not be your company name. People are more interested in the services or solutions that you provide than what you are called. So for example Amazon.com might be big enough now to get enough people to search for them on their name alone, but early on they wanted to rank their home page for the keywords of "online shopping" or "online books."
How Many Keywords Per Site?
A site can have many different keywords. Again using Amazon as an example you will see that each individual page of their site is optimized for separate keywords for that specific page. If you search for an individual product, it almost doesn't matter what kind of product it is anymore, Amazon will show up in the search results. The product pages of their site are targeting the keywords you are searching for related to that product. How many keywords to target for your site depends on how many resources you have.
How Do You Use Keywords?
In the old days people use to "stuff" their keywords into their content in order to try to rank high in the search engines for those terms. This is a big no-no these days as you want your content to read naturally and to give the searcher exactly what they are looking for.
Today, what you want to do is include your keywords in the title and the meta description of the page. Not only does the title tell the search engine spiders what your page is about, but when your page shows up in the search engine results they will bold the keywords in both your title and the description when displaying you along with the other pages. That bolding will draw the attention of the searcher to your page and increase your click through rate.
The other way to use keywords is in getting links to your site. When someone links to your site the words or phrases they highlight when giving the link is called anchor text. That is a strong signal to the search engines telling them the keywords of your page.
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Why a Keyword Strategy is Needed
Today when people are looking for information using the Internet they use search engines. How do people find what they are looking for? By entering keywords. You can benefit from this large source of traffic by having your site optimized around the keywords that tell the story of the problem or solution that your business solves.
Keywords not only drive people to your site, but these are targeted visitors. People who are hungry to learn, have a problem solve, or have one of their needs met. You want to make sure that you are targeting the keywords that you can actually provide the answer to. This ensures you get the best return on your investment. So if you are going to focus your attention on the right keywords then you need a keyword strategy.
General Terms
It is very important when you begin planning your keyword strategy that you think of what visitors you are going to and can serve. I worked with an insurance agent once who didn't know much about Internet marketing except that there was a bunch of money in it and he was missing out. He wanted to rank no. 1 for insurance. Not only is this going to require a TON of resources to even start to think about getting on the first page for, it wasn't going to give him a very good return. What kind of insurance does he sell: health, car, home, or more? Could he serve every state? How about every country?
After asking a few simple questions about his true customer base, we narrowed his focus down to "Iowa" and "Des Moines" focuses keywords on "car" and "house" insurance. He might not have gotten near as much traffic, but he received plenty of targeted leads that earned him more business.
The Holy Grail
A lot of new marketers come online and have one goal in mind: rank No. 1 for their main search term. That's all fine and dandy that you have high aspirations, but don't get too caught up searching for the holy grail of a no. 1 ranking for the term that gets the most traffic. You see, the real key to winning this game is to realizing that it's not only how high you rank, but also how many keywords that you rank for.
It's a simple formula really: higher ranking + more keywords you rank for = more money. Don't lose track of both parts of the equation. Too many people spend the majority of their resources on a few, highly competitive terms instead of shooting up the rankings for a LOT of lower traffic, less competitive terms.
So, maximizing your traffic requires a plan. The more you research before hand to get an idea of the popularity and competitiveness of your keywords the better you are going to be able to put your resources to use.
Forming a keyword strategy isn't a one-and-done affair. You are going to want to keep coming back, going over your plan, checking your rankings, and seeing if new terms are worth going after. Don't worry if this sounds like a daunting task. The more you work at it, the easier it will become and the more money you are going to make with your online business.
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How to Find the Best Keywords for SEO
Once you understand why a keyword strategy is needed it's time to get to work by creating a list of the phrases you are going to target. In the beginning you are going to want to throw out as many ideas as possible. Don't worry about competitiveness of the term for now, instead focus on creating as large a list of possibilities as you can. Here are the best ways to start your discover process.
1. What is Your Product or Service About?
Your major search terms are going to be focused on the main product, solution, or information that you deliver. You should have anywhere from 3-10 different majors keywords that describe your site. These can either be one word ideas or commonly used phrases and will drive most of your homepage anchor text efforts. My site is about "Internet marketing" and "making money online."
Tip: Remember, keep all of your terms relevant for what you are providing. I could probably get a lot of traffic for "make money online with surveys" but I do not have any kind of content on my site to help someone interested in that. Only go after keywords that you can provide the searcher what they are looking for.
2. Categories
How are you going to organize your content? What are the common themes you are going to be talking about with the articles that you write? On my site I break it up into different categories of Internet marketing like keywords, search engine optimization, email marketing, conversion, outsourcing, analytics, and pay-per-click.
3. Brainstorming the Categories
Once you have the categories down it's time to really get down to the core terms that you are going to target. These are the two-to-four word phrases that you want to use to attract targeted traffic. These are the most popular phrases describing your categories. You'll want 10-20 in all and you will organize them into each category.
For example on my main keyword landing page I would go for "keyword strategy" or "keyword guide" as an example. I always start with two or three keywords that I am going to start targeting and focus my efforts on those specific terms until I hit the front page. Then you can move on to trying to get the page to rank for other relevant terms.
4. Will Users Search for the Plural or Singular Version?
Once you start figuring out your list of keywords, check to see if the singular or plural version makes sense. If it does, you might as well try to rank for both of them. For something like "article marketing" some people might search for "articles marketing" but not enough for it to be worth my time.
5. Use Tools
Using your brain and coming up with every single keyword that you possibly can to describe what kind of information you provide or will be providing is the best way to get started. After you have a nice list there are a few tools that you can use to help you discover some related terms. Personally, I recommend the Google Keyword Tool over anything else.
Type in your keywords, select "exact" from the match types category, and see what else comes up. The best part is that it gives you the traffic numbers for both your keyword and the related ones, so you can see just how much traffic you could expect to get from it. Those numbers aren't going to be exact, but it's a good rough estimate.
6. Using Keywords for Content Ideas
By using your own brainstorming and the keyword tool you will be able to group together keywords. When you have three or more variations of basically the same kind of search term, you want to make sure you create a page and start targeting those searchers. Let's take a look at my "keywords" category. By using the tools I can see several different topics I can cover under like strategy, tools, density, and finder. All of those keywords turn into content ideas and pages on my site. Who knows, if you plug those specific keywords into the tool above you can maybe even drill down further.
7. Are You Local?
If you have a small brick and mortar shop then you are more than likely serving your local community, especially if you are service based. Make sure you include local modifiers to all your keywords. City, state, county, suburbs, or any local terms used to describe the geography can help drive you more targeted traffic.
8. Brand Names
Do you sell or review a particular product? Then you will need to target those terms. If I am reviewing someone's SEO tool you can bet that I put the name of their product in my title and try to rank for "(product name) review."
9. Misspellings
Don't worry about typos or common misspellings of the words. Search engines are figuring out what users mean and fixing their mistakes for them.
10. Modifier Tool
If you have a lot of modifiers (words like "free," "buy," or colors) that you can attach to keywords, use our easy keyword generator to come up with long tail terms.
After going through our list you should have plenty of keywords that you are ready to target for your SEO and PPC efforts.
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Keywords & Domain Names
Most likely if you try to buy a domain name for a specific keyword that you are after you will find that it is already taken. One of the biggest reasons these domains are so popular is having keywords in your site's domain name allows you to easily get the desired anchor text that you wanted to rank for. Over the years the search engines have tried to fight the abuse of keyword anchor text by making it less of a factor in the rankings, but in my personal experience it still carries a lot of weight.
Say for example your site is CNN.com. You would get a lot of links to your site with the anchor text of:
- CNN
- cnn
- cnn.com
- CNN News
- Breaking News at CNN
If instead the domain was News.com you would get a lot of links containing the anchor text "news". If "news" was the anchor text that news sites want to rank for (and why wouldn't it be) you would think News.com would have a leg up on CNN.com. Not only would it get more links with the proper anchor text, but Google isn't going to filter those anchor text links because of the keyword being in the domain name. Distinguishing between what domains are focused on keywords and which are brands is difficult to compute and I would think Google would want to error on the side of caution.
Now that isn't going to say that if your keyword is in the domain name you are automatically going to be sent to the top of the search engines. You still need to build a healthy profile of links from authority sites. It appears to me in the last couple of years Google has decreased the importance of keywords in the domain so that lower quality sites do not outrank authority sites. With so many more extensions being available rather than .com and .net, it's easier than ever for marketers to try and game the system and purchase keyword domains with odd extensions, further diluting the effectiveness of having keywords in the domain name.
Do not try to create hundreds of different sites based around similar keywords. For example, do not buy redwidgets.com, bluewidgets.com, and down the line. Instead buy widgets.com and build your navigation around different variations.
Check out this survey data composed by SEOMoz.org to see the importance of keywords in domain and subdomain names.
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Best SEO Keyword Strategy
Internet marketing is a game of managing resources better than your competitors. You are limited in the amount of time you can commit and the money that you can spend. With search engine optimization (SEO), it all starts with keywords. Using a strategy that allows you to select the "right" keywords to target will help you make more money online.
The first question to ask is how many keywords to target for your site? Keep this simple and go after only 1-9 at a time. This will allow you to devote more time to getting a high ranking for specific terms, and once that high ranking is reached you can move on to your next target. If you overreach and try and optimize your site for 50 keywords at once, none of them will get ranked and you will have wasted both time and money without seeing much in return.
When it comes to the number of keywords to target on individual pages the goal is 1-3. You can only fit so many terms into your title tag and having your keywords in the title tag is important for both conversion and getting a high ranking. Matching keywords to the right landing pages is also important for conversion purposes. Plus, that extra content also helps gain you more Pagerank on your site that you can use to give a boost to internal pages you want ranked.
Once you know how many terms you are going to target you have to choose your keywords. The main point here is to make sure you go after the terms that will earn you the most money. If you are just starting out, these are the ones you want to simply get listed on the first page of the results. If you already have some traffic it could mean moving up the listing for terms you are already ranking for.
For existing sites, it is important to use the rankings you already have in order to learn which keywords are most profitable for you, and also which are the highest traffic. Getting a No. 1 ranking will provide a huge boost over 2-5, and getting up into that second tier is big over ranking in the 6-10 spots. Optimization that moves you up a few places to get seen on the first page will provide a nice traffic bump rather than being on page two.
Another advantage that older sites have is that they can learn keywords to target with their site analtyics. Site stats can tell you what keywords visitors are using to find your site and what pages they are landing on. You can then either improve the pages you already have or create new ones more appropriate for those terms.
How difficult will it be to make a dent in the rankings? As part of your research you have to analyze your competitors. Big sites tend to do better because they can point more internal links to certain pages. If a site has a lot of authority it's internal links will also provide it a boost, and of course external links going to a page directly using the anchor text desired provides a lift. Find out where your competitors stand for each of these and you'll be able to paint yourself a picture on what you have to do to rank closer to the top.
That is our keyword strategy from start to finish. If you use the tips provided you will start using your resources more effectively and do a better job of increasing your traffic with your SEO efforts.
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Keeping Track of Your Search Engine Rankings
If you are doing any kind of search engine optimization on your website then I'm sure you have a list of keywords that you are targeting. These will be high traffic terms that you hope will bring loads of people to your site and help make your site profitable. It's a good idea then to track your progress over time, but if you are targeting a lot of keywords it can be a pain to go through each individual one to see what position you are in the rankings. There is a better way, if you have Excel this spreadsheet will help you automatically track your Google positions.
If you are just getting started and rank outside of the top 30 for your keywords, then this spreadsheet isn't going to work for you. It only tracks the first three pages with ten results per page.
Notice that to run the macro you have to hit ctrl-shift-u, but they also have a setting to run the macro automatically. I just put a reminder at the top of the worksheet of the buttons I needed to press, that way I can look at the data without having it run each time I open the file.
I create several worksheets for each one of my sites, breaking down the keywords I was going for in certain categories. That way I could compare related data easier without having to scroll across a single worksheet.
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Easy Keyword Generator
The first step to doing any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is to have a keyword list of the targets you are going to go after. Generating a long list that combines different commonly used phrases can be difficult so that is why I was pretty happy when I found this keyword variation generator for excel.
It is fairly easy to use. All you have to do is come up with a list of prefixs then a list of keywords. The spreadsheet then gives you all of the different combinations for the two.
So let's say you have an e-commerce store that sells dog supplies. Your keyword list might look something like this:
Prefixes: Blue, Red, Holiday, Yellow, Black, White
Keywords: Collars, Leashes, Clothes, Placemats
The spreadsheet would then combine the two, giving you 24 different keyword variations.
This isn't a perfect solution, since some of your keywords might use certain prefixes and others note. In our example if you are selling carriers, treats, or food then having those prefixes might not give you the best combination to go for.
After you have your keyword list, you can then start targeting these combinations with your SEO efforts, or if you do PPC advertising then you have a nice list of keywords to start testing and tracking.
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SEO Keyword Competition Analysis
When deciding what keywords that you should go after it's important to analyze how difficult it will be to get ranked for those terms. Often times, the highly profitable, high traffic terms have lots of competition making it more difficult for you to get a high ranking. If you are just starting out with search engine optimization (SEO), then it's best to go after terms with less competition. How do you know how much work it is going to take to earn your ranking? Here is what I look at when breaking down keyword competition analysis:
1. Find Your Competitors
Go to Google and do a search for the keyword that you are targeting. Now make a list of the exact URLs that are listed on the first page. These are the competitors that you are going to be analyzing.
2. How Big Are the Sites?
Big sites have more authority and can do a better job of going after search terms with internal linking strategies. To determine how big the sites you are competing with are, go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the domains (not the exact URLs, just the homepage like www.jamiefaidley.com) of your competitors. The first page of the results should show you how many pages the site has. You may have to enter or remove the "www." depending on the structure of their site.
3. How Many External Links to the Site?
Now click on "Inlinks" then make sure you select "Show Inlinks: Excetpt from this domain to Entire Site". The number by Inlinks is the number of external links the competitor has to their entire site.
4. How Many External Links to the Page?
Next, enter the exact URL that is showing up in the search engines. If it's the home page it should be the same as the URL you searched for in part two. Under results, click on "Inlinks" then in the dropdown box by "Show Inlinks:" select "Except from this Domain". If the URL you are searching is the home page the make sure the dropdown box is changed to "Only this URL".
5. How Many Internal Links?
You should have the number of links from question three written down, now change the "Show Inlinks:" option to "From All Pages". If you subtract this total by the number of external links you will have the number of internal links pointing to that page.
6. How Many External Domains Linking to the Site?
Head to MajesticSEO.com and enter the domain in their backlinks search box. On the following page you will find "Domains" in their "External Backlinks Stats" section. That is how many different domains link to your competitor.
After doing that for all ten listings on the first page of your targeted keyword's search results you will have a general idea of what you are facing. Can you produce enough content to as many internal links pointing to your planned landing page? Can you get enough external links pointing to your page? Are your link building efforts diversified enough to get as many different domains linking to you? This is what our SEO analysis tells us.
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Keywords Per Page Strategy
When site owners first start trying their hand at search engine optimization (SEO) one of the first questions they ask is "how many keywords should you focus on for each page?" The reason why there is a limit to how many keywords you should target does not have as much to do with it being difficult to get a page ranked for several different keywords, but more about conversion.
The real limit that you have to work with is the title tag. Titles play an important role in the on-page optimization of your site. However, knowing how important links are to SEO and the anchor text of those incoming links even the lack of on-page benefits can be overcome.
The real reason you want to limit the number of keywords you aim for on a single page is conversion. Do you notice how if you search for a keyword in Google it is bolded in the results? That goes for the title tag, the description, and the URL. This helps with clickthrough rates, so by creating a page with the keyword in the title, description, and URL (by naming the page after the keyword) you are going to get a higher clickthrough rate to your site.
Another conversion benefit for creating a lot of pages for different keywords is that each landing page will be tailored to the visitors needs. Let's say you sell golf clubs on your site, and more specifically putters. If someone searches for "Scotty Cameron putters" do you want them to land on your overall golf clubs page, or take them right to your section on Scotty Cameron putters so they get exactly what they want? Trust me, conversions are going to be higher the less you make the user work to find what they want.
The final reason I like to limit the keywords per page is that having more content is important for building up the authority of your site and this is an easy way to do it.