Stopwords are a common type of words that search engines generally ignore. Some examples of stopwords include “the”, “is”, “who”, “it”, “on”, and “then”. When people search with these words, search engines focus upon using more meaningful keywords to generate more relevant results.

For example, someone might search for “TV repair in the state of New York”. The search engine would (mostly) ignore “in”, “the”, and “of”, providing results that contain the keywords “TV”, “repair”, “state”, “New”, and “York”. An exception is when the searcher encloses a phrase in quotation marks, but most engines still factor in stopwords to a lesser degree.

So why is this important? Because it can help webmasters determine the best names to give web sites and pages. A title with a lot of stopwords in it will be less effective. Also, business or product names with many stopwords in them can be somewhat harder for searchers to find.

It is less important to emphasize these words in web page text or optimize their keyword density. Some keyword density analyzer software excludes common stopwords. Likewise, webmasters shouldn’t bother putting any stopwords in their META keyword tags, and they ought not be used in the “keywords” field on article or web directories.

Additional stopword examples include “it”, “this”, “that”, “when”, and “be”. Most are under five letters long, with a few exceptions. Specific words vary from one search engine to the next. A few search engines will completely exclude any stopword; for instance, EntireWeb and ExactSeek don’t return any results under “Where Is It?”.

Although the effect of such words remains noteworthy, they aren’t as important as they were some years ago. The search mechanisms employed by major engines have evolved to prevent stopword filters from seriously interfering with the quality of results, so it is now possible to locate websites with names mostly or entirely consisting of stopwords.

One way to find out if words are considered stopwords by Google is to use the suspect words in a search query on Google News. Make sure the query includes at least one non-stopword. If there is at least one stopword, a sentence reading “The following words are very common and were not included in your search… ” will be visible below the search box when results appear.

While the problem of stopwords ought to be taken into consideration, webmasters should also keep in mind that major search engines don’t entirely ignore these words when producing results.

SEO Best Practices often refer to the rule of optimizing for “One Keyword Phrase Per Page” and this is very good advice.   This rule first applies to the most important on-page ranking factor – the or even better would be .

This second title is optimized for both ‘Valentines Gifts’ as well as ‘Gifts for Valentines’.   With our available space of 65 characters, this title is also optimized for ‘Best Valentines Gifts’, ‘Valentines Day Gifts’, and the long tail of ‘Best Valentines Day Gifts’.   Some people would argue that this page is now attempting to optimize for more than one keyword phrase.  Our strategy, in this example, is to primarily optimize for ‘Valentines Gifts’ and then to find the best keyword phrases to use for our variations.

This strategy is extended to the content of the page with use of the primary keyword in the H1 of the page as well as 1-2 times in the first 100 words of the content.  If the page contains 500 words, we feel that you should use the primary keyword 2 -3 times and can use the variations up to 6 – 8 times on the page.  Using our ‘valentines gift’ example, you can use the secondary variations each 1 time on the page.  This thematic variety of the keyword not only provides a wider range of keywords for SEO, but minimizes the keyword stuffing effect that many SEO pages seem unable to avoid.

One last note, be sure to use these different variations as you build links to the page, both internally and externally.  Most analytical programs also let you see which keywords generated traffic to a particular page;  you might be surprised how successful this approach can be if you have a popular page and can monitor the results in your analytics program.

The holiday season is over and all of us will spent hours with our favorite countdowns of the year. The search industry gets especially excited when top search term charts come out. After taking time to browse the top searches of 2008 on Ask and Yahoo!, then browsing this year’s edition of the Google Zeitgeist, I have to wonder: why do so many people search for branded websites in search engines?

According to Google, “facebook” (broad matched, of course) is the no. 2 searched term in 2008 behind “obama.” Ask’s rankings have the social network as the no. 5 most searched for term.

I totally understand that people searching online have a wide variety of education and comfort levels with the internet. Fine. That said, why on earth do people need to search “facebook” in Google or Ask to, presumably, find Facebook.com? Everyone says they left a comment on their friend’s  Facebook wall because, well, they left it on Facebook! Try using a direct web address every once and a while.

The tendency to search for web domain names is especially prevalent in Ask, where five branded wLebsites rank in their top 10 searches. I find it really funny that “Google” is the no. 3 top search term in Ask – anyone else? Ask is most likely being used by people who have a lower experience and comfort level with the internet. While I find this information interesting and useful for those who manage PPC accounts, is information like this useful at all to SEOs?

Other things I learned from the top search rankings for Yahoo!, Ask, and the Zeitgeist:

• Fans of professional wrestling own computers and can read (presumably) – WWE no. 2 top search in Yahoo!
• What RuneScape (a World Of Warcraft-style RPG) is – no. 5 search in Yahoo!
• surfthechannel is going to be a large player in 2009 for internet TV – no. 10 in Zeitgeist.
• People use Ask to gather information – Dictionary, Cars, Online degrees, and Credit score were some of the top searches.

Search on Yahoo! is still strongly driven by the entertainment industry, with the only non-entertainment related top 10 term being “Barack Obama.” Although, if you believe the ads from the McCain campaign, Obama is the world’s biggest celebrity. Whatever.

Anyway, in addition to Yahoo’s swing towards entertainment, I believe the news Yahoo! leads with in their  featured box directly drives how people search on their site. Argue amongst yourselves about whether or not she was a “search-worthy” celebrity this year, but did Yahoo! feature every Britney Spears headline – minor or major – she made in 2008? Yep. Thus the search volume.

Any other observations you made after checking out this year’s top searches? I’d love to hear ‘em. Thanks for hearing mine.

Google’s Insight for Search program is closely related to their Google Trends product. With Insights for Search you can compare and contrast search volume patterns across specified regions (like USA or Japan), categories (such as health or sports) and time ranges (last 30 days, for example).

No matter what business you’re in – small business owner, marketing/advertising agency or even a giant corporation – Google Insights for Search can help you determine the interest in different search terms. The reason is that Insight for Search shows you A/B comparison between keywords so that you can choose the best keywords for your needs. It also shows you the top related keywords as well as which keywords are on the rise in your market. Additionally, you can see which cites, states and even countries in which a keyword is popular.

A note of caution, Google Insights for Search works much like Google Trends in that it defaults to the broad matched version of a keyword. This means that a word like credit will show more volume than credit cards, event though credit cards gets more search volume. The reason is that the term credit card counts towards the search volume for the word credit. Also good to know, keywords are weighted so that their top volume day is anchored at 100 and other days represent a relative percentage of that search volume.

All in all, this is another powerful tool in Google’s toolbox that is well worth taking a look at to determine how it can fit into your marketing plan.

We use this keyword ranking tool (Download Rank Checker) at least a couple of times a day to check keyword rankings quickly.  In addition, we use the .CSV export to show the rankings to clients and potential clients.  The rankings are tracked for the Top 200 rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Additional features include the ability to set a preset list that will let you re-check at a later date as well as the history of the keyword preset lists.  Once a preset list is setup, you can schedule the Firefox extension to run at a set time…be sure to set you search interval to between 4-7 seconds so you are being ‘friendly’ to search engines.

This product review of Wordtracker is by Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com
and covers some useful keyword research techniques.

Basically, keyword research should begin with looking at your current web logs or analytics reports since basically these keywords should have some type of ranking. The logic is that you can probably rank for similar keywords.

The key to using a keyword research tool is to start with general themes like ‘chocolate’ and then find other keywords like ‘white chocolate’ and ‘chocolate truffles’. Once you identify some of these, you should visit competition to see how they have ranked.

According to SEOQuake, the more keywords in a search results the better lower quality sites did in the results. This long tail strategy can be good for sites that don’t have the authority to rank for competitive keywords.

Quintera shows keyword phrases that people might be using by relating keywords from the top Google SERP results.  There are lots of keyword tools that can be used for ideas as part of the discovery process.  Be sure to review keywords volumes as part of the input, but don’t rely on the data from any of the tools.

Google’s keyword tool not only provides keyword variations but you can also plug in a url and Google will use the content of the home page to pull relevant keywords.  Compete also provides a traffic / ranking based keyword terms that allows you to ’spy’ on your competition.

Picking the right keywords can lead to traffic quickly if you the right modifers.  Only half of the search queries on Google are unique, so be sure to use modifiers that might include product names, brands, and action items like ‘buy’, ‘price’,'order’, ‘cheap’, etc.  For another example, clothes might have modifiers like ‘loose’ or ‘tight’.  Aaron Wall gives a lot of good ideas regarding the type of keyword modifiers that might be used and these items could potentially be used for on-page body copy.

Rand at SEOMoz does a good walk-through of the Keyword Research Process and how site hierarchy should be more important than just Keyword Demand. This is a common question that we come across as we try to interpret keyword volume research and overlay it into a website.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Implementing Keyword Research from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Once keyword research is complete, it is time to overlay the identified keywords into the meta data and on page body copy (a writing task) and modify the site architecture and link structure (a development task). While not specifically mentioned, this is an excellent time to evaluate Page Rank sculpting and attempting to silo content.

Rand is putting this all under a Keyword Research and Implementation, while we tend divide this overall process into several smaller steps:

• Keyword Research – Brainstorm, research, presentation and sign-off by client.
• Meta Data – Mapping of target keywords to the website pages.
• SEO Content Optimization – On page body copy improvements to support target keyword by page.

While we break this up into some small deliverable items, we do view the overall process as one complete exercise to improve the on-site factors that affect SEO.

“Insight for Search” is a new tool Google has recently introduced in to add to the current Google Trends and AdWords tools. Google claims Insights for Search will help you “see what the world is searching for.”

Basically, the tool should help people better understand what is being searched for on Google as well as to see the details for certain keywords across various geographic regions, verticals and time periods for more insight.

Internet marketers or bloggers that what to determine what kind of content is engaging to more people should consider looking into the tool. One of the most powerful uses it offers is that you can actually narrow your search by categories to figure out which keywords are more popular in certain categories.

Additionally you can simply click the “search” button without entering any words in the search field to find the most popular rising terms for all categories and regions. And, by narrowing your empty search to a specific category you can see the most popular search terms for the category for its history.

This has the potential to be quite a powerful tool for anyone in the online marketing arena because essentially now you know which article topic will be more popular or which keyword is searched for more often in certain areas.

A competition analysis allows you to measure the strengths and weaknesses of your business, current competitors and potential competitors.  The analysis helps a business assess opportunities and threats as well as providing help creating business strategies, including the implementation and monitoring of them.

Although competition analyses are different depending on a variety of things they do share common points. A competition analysis should show you who are the major competitors in a market along with what share of the market they hold. Another point included in an analysis is if any significant changes have been seen in the market shares of the competition over the past few years. You should also identify which competitors tackle the various segments of your market and who is the strongest in each field. Finally, a competition analysis should tell you about your competitors’ strategies in reaching your target market.

You can find this information in a variety of ways. First you can check out your competition personally. Visit the business if it’s a brick and mortar place and see whom they cater to and how they do business. You can also research your competition online. There are tons of free ways to do this research such as following any press your competitors receive. The government also offers free research options.  Another option is to join a trade association in your field. Trade associations tend to have a lot of information about their fields and with the price of membership you can usually have access to it. Finally, there are plenty of paid searches you can do to find out specific data.

Make sure you know your target market before beginning a competition analysis and don’t forget to identify direct and indirect competitors. The solid base of information that comes from a strong competitive analysis can provide insights to your product and positioning, your company’s strengths and weaknesses and help you determine which areas in your market you can succeed the most as well as what places you shouldn’t worry about. And that is one of the best ways to successfully run a business.

When you research keywords to use in your web site or blog, it’s important to find words that people really search for, while avoiding keywords that you cannot realistically compete for. Here are some suggestions on how to research keywords more effectively and efficiently.

1. Create a list of potential keywords and phrases related to the subject of your web site. Try using a thesaurus to obtain more related keywords you might find desirable. The keyword research tools referred to in the next step are also useful for finding related keywords. Some sites effectively obtain traffic by creating content centered around commonly misspelled words.

2. Research how many people are searching for these keywords. You can use Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and various other keyword research tools to easily and effectively obtain this sort of data. Some of these tools are free, others require a subscription fee. If no one is looking for a particular word or phrase on the search engines and you don’t have any reason to believe that will change, it probably isn’t worth producing content on that subject.

3. Use a major search engine to query keywords you are interested in; if all of the first and second page results are supplied by major (high PageRank) web sites, your site will have difficulty surpassing them in this subject (unless the site is already very well known). It is a good sign if there are few results or most listings aren’t specific to the keyword of interest; you may be able to effectively serve this niche.

4. Keep in mind that your goal (probably) isn’t just to increase hits to the web site; you want to effectively attract interested visitors who will click advertisements, purchase products, or otherwise benefit the site. For example, if a laser printer dealer were to go to the effort of attaining high rankings for words like “printer” and “printing”, it would needlessly attract many users who are only interested in other types of printers (also wasting bandwidth).

Unfortunately, no matter how effectively you research keywords, not all of them will produce a lot of traffic. Search query data isn’t always accurate, the things people are interested in vary from time to time, and new competitors may appear. Generally, the best strategy is to target niche keyword phrases which specifically relate to your site’s content and aren’t overly competitive.