SEO White Hats » Keyword Research

What is KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)?

seowhitehats — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:29:22 +0000

KEI is definitely a good metric to look at when doing keyword research, here is a quick definition:

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) attempts to characterize the value of a keyword based upon its popularity and the number of competing websites. Higher KEI values are “better” in that they represent more searches per website.

Typically KEI is the the ratio of the square of the searches upon a particular keyword in a day divided by the number of websites that are listed for that keyword. For example, a keyword that has 100 searches a day and for which Google shows 5000 websites would have a KEI of 2. (100 * 100 / 5000)

We have found that it is hard to use KEI, not be cause of the calculation, but because it is hard to get reliable data from online searches. The tools that use KEI, such as Keyword Tracker, Wordze.com, and others, do an absolutely great job at collecting useful data from available sources, but the source isn’t Google (which owns 70% of the marketplace). To illustrate this point, here is a FAQ from Wordze.com

Understanding the search industry data collection methods is very important for search professionals to be able to do their jobs. If you have not already noticed, each keyword research service’s data (search count) is never the same. Services like Google or Yahoo always show much higher numbers for most keywords, but fail to include lower keywords with substantial traffic. In contrast, services like Wordze normally show a lower count, but include more long tail keywords than services like Google or Yahoo keyword services.

The general rule of thumb is to use a paid keyword tool like Wordze along with a free service like Google keywords to guide you in your keyword selection. Google’s search service (Yahoo’s service is now defunct) is built for searching for keywords under Google’s Adwords program. This service includes data from Google’s search results, ad placement on affiliate sites (Adsense search), as well as other 3rd party sites like AOL, YouTube, etc. The problem with this method is Google does not show keywords that have good traffic, but don’t make it into the top percentile of their search data. It also means that their search data is normally over estimated for search engine optimization research. On the other hand, services like Wordze will normally show lower count, but provide long tail terms along with ranking data that Google will never show. This typically has to do with the fact that such services do not have all the data, but a fraction of it.

So, like many other tools and services, we use a product like Wordze.com to help gain insight on a particular question, but rarely does a calculated KEI become more than another input point of data for our consideration as we are putting together strategy. It helps us see outliers, but we often find other Keyword Difficulty Tools (i.e. SEOMoz.org) and a manual review of the Top 10 of Google to be just as useful as KEI.

Why is Keyword Research Critical To SEO?

Why is Keyword Research Critical To SEO?

seowhitehats — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:54:46 +0000

Like a foundation for a building, there is one aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is more important than any other. Without this foundation, you may be wasting all your time and resources. Proper keyword research should be the basis of your optimization.

Keyword research is the practice used by SEO professionals to find actual “search terms” people tend to enter into the search engines when conducting a search for a specific thing. Keyword research is a very vital procedure in SEO. It’s where search engine optimization starts.

Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough. For example, “search engine optimization” gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while “search engine marketing” gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target “search engine marketing”, you may get great rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for “search engine optimization”. There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a lot of time and significant amount of link building regardless of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.

Drawing on the analogy in our search marketing parable, optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it’s a key component of search engine optimization.

Without good keyword research, your search engine optimization efforts will be like firing a gun into the dark. You may hit something, you may not. You may choose keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site at that time. It’s best to know what you need to be targeting.

4 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

4 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

seowhitehats — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:37:06 +0000

Are you getting mediocre results from SEO? To achieve success with SEO, you must target the right key phrases and build links consistently. It is a continuous process – not a one-time effort. With this in mind, let us take a look at the 4 SEO mistakes that you must avoid:

1.) You do not tag your pages with relevant keyword phrases. This is the most common mistake that many webmasters made. I believe you have seen websites that place only their company names in their Title tags. Title tags are words that appear on the top left hand side of your Internet browser. You must place keywords in your Title tag because search engines give a lot of weight to it. The title tag is like the Title of a book. It tells readers what the book is about. Likewise, the title tag tells search engines what your website is about. If you are trying to get higher rankings for a keyword but it is not present in your title tag, it is very hard for search engines to award you with high rankings. Therefore, make sure that your title tag describes the content of your page and place important keywords right at the front of it.

2.) You do not have enough content or your content is outdated. SEO is more than just tagging your pages. You need to have enough content for search engines to read. To rank high on search engine listings, you must place keywords in your content. Moreover, if your website content is outdated, search engines will visit your site less often, and thus view it as less important. This also prevents your site from getting higher rankings in search engine listings.

3.) You optimize the wrong keywords. If you are trying to optimize keywords that are too generic, it is very hard for you to achieve success from your SEO effort. This is because you will get yourself into a more competitive battlefield with other optimizers. So, spend some time to do your research and look for key phrases with lesser competition but relevant to your business. Remember that if you optimize keywords that are not relevant or too generic, even if you achieve high rankings for them, there will be no conversion.

4.) You do not build links consistently. Link building is a process of getting more incoming links to your website. Quality inbound links will help your website to achieve higher rankings for competitive keywords. But link building is a continuous process. If you never do it consistently, you will not achieve good result from SEO. So, always build links consistently by using article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions, and other common strategies that optimizers are using.

Search Engine Stopwords

seowhitehats — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:01:23 +0000

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.

How Many Keywords Can I SEO Per Web Page?

seowhitehats — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:22:37 +0000

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.

4 SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

Search Lessons To Apply In 2009

jbentz — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:02:57 +0000

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 Insights for Search Program

seowhitehats — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:52:58 +0000

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.

RankChecker – Keyword Ranking Tool

seowhitehats — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:52:34 +0000

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.

WordTracker Review – Keyword Research Tool

seowhitehats — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 16:42:08 +0000

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.

Keyword Research Video – SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday

seowhitehats — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:07:46 +0000

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.