Keywords
A
keyword is a word or phrase used to make a search. In the example below donuts
delivered is the keyword and Google suggests more commonly searched keywords,
such as donuts delivered to your door.
Target keywords
Of
the billions of searches made, you need to decide which ones you want your site
to come top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for.
These
will be your target keywords. Later we’ll look at some online tools that can
help you find and choose your target keywords.
Organic and paid search
results
The
results of my donuts delivered search contain lists of both paid-for (pay per
click – PPC) and free (aka organic) website pages. These paid and organic
listings are highlighted on the image below.
SEO
will help you improve your site’s position in the organic search results.
How search engines work
If you understand how a search engine works then you have the
foundation for getting your website to the top of the search engines’ results.
Let’s take a simplified look at how a search engine works:
Crawling
Google visits billions of website pages. Google finds more pages by following (crawling) the links it finds
on those billions of pages.
Indexing
Google stores the information it finds in its index. Google’s index is like a huge filing system for all the pages it
finds.
Matching
When you search for donuts delivery Google searches its
index for all the pages containing donuts delivery.
Typically, Google will find thousands, even millions, of matches
for a search.
The image below shows there were 6,620,000 matches for a donuts
delivery search.
This
means that 6,620,000 pages are competing to be shown on the first results page
for that search and have a chance of being visited.
If your site does not at least contain the words in a search then
it is not even in the race to be found for that search.
Google
must then decide what order to display its results in.
Ranking
Google
uses over 200 factors to decide what order to display the matching pages. Each
matching page is scored for each of the 200-plus factors and the scores
totaled.
The
total score is then used to rank the matching pages and decide the order the
results are presented on the search results page (highest at the top).
This video with Google’s head of
webspam, Matt Cutts, gives Google’s own simple introduction to the basics of
how Google works.
Ranking
factors include (for each page) …
On the page
•
How often the keyword - for example, donuts delivery - is used on the
page
• Do the keywords appear in the page title and the URL (example
below)?
•
Does the page include synonyms (words that have a similar meaning) for the
keyword?
On the site
•
Is the page from a high quality website, or is it low quality or spam?
• How many links from other pages and sites point to
the page (and how important are those links)?
•
The use of the search query (keywords) in the anchor text of any links pointing
to a page. Anchor text is the actual words you click when following a link.
Like these words which link to the Wordtracker Academy.
User behavior
•
The percentage of searchers that click through (clickthrough rate – CTR) to
each listed page.
•
The percentage of searchers that, once they have clicked through to a page,
come straight back to the search results.
Social reference
•
How much (and by whom) a page is referenced on social sites like Facebook,
Twitter and Google+.
•
Whether or not others in a searcher’s social network have shown a preference
for a page (giving personalized results).
Local
•
The location of searchers, the web page and its business if it’s deemed the
search query deserves a local result.
If you’ve got comments or questions, please let us know at
Chapter 3
The
long tail of keywords :
The long tail of keywords is the vast number of different keywords
used on search engines. So many searches are made with long tail keywords that
the number of searches made with popular ‘head’ keywords is insignificant. Consequently, the long tail offers more
potential for profit than the head. The
image below shows monthly organic search engine visits numbers for three
different sites.
Here are the figures showing how many different keywords were used
for those visits:
Site A: 307,408 visits via 177,305 keywords (57%)
Site B: 172,116 visits via 104,670 keywords (61%)
Site C: 124,069 visits via 66,590 keywords (54%)
That’s a lot of different keywords.
That’s the long tail of keywords.
83%
of Site C’s 66,590 keywords brought just one visit. That’s the long tail of
keywords again.
Google
says: “The different combinations of words used are almost endless, with 20%
of keywords used each day being either unique or not used for six months.”
We’ve
said that SEO needs target keywords. But
clearly we can’t target over 66,000 different keywords. So we target groups of
keywords …
… keyword niches
A keyword niche is a group of keywords containing a single ‘seed’
keyword
Eg,
not just donut recipe … … but all keywords containing donut recipe
... … including some of the suggestions shown by Google in the image on the
left. If you’ve got comments or questions, please let us know at
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