Politics and Policy


eg: UK or Brides UK or Classical Art or Buy Music or Spirituality

Business & Money

Technology

Women

Health

Education

Family

Travel

Cars

Entertainment

Recruitment And Selection Strategies

View:

Research shows that a person who enters a 2 or 3 word keyword is quite a bit more likely to buy. So generally stay away from the single word keywords. Go for 2, 3 or 4 word keywords.

Starting Your List

There are many valid ways to study keywords and I’m going to discuss a number of them in this article series. The first step, as I’ve covered in other articles and in my books on Internet marketing, is to create a spreadsheet. In the first column put your keywords. Here are some tips for coming up with keyword ideas:

1. Go to your company web site and see if whoever designed it placed any well though out keywords in the metatags section of the code on the home page. Of course if it was you who designed it, you will be the one who came up with that list. Go to the home page, then select View | Source. Add those to your spreadsheet.

2. Brainstorm for types of phrases someone might type in at a search engine to find your type of product. Add those to your spreadsheet.

3. Select 4-5 competitor web sites, and go to those web sites and see what keywords they have used in their metatags. Add those to your spreadsheet.

Evaluating the Keywords

By now you should have some keywords in your spreadsheet, and you’ll add more as you go through the rest of these steps. But how do you evaluate the data there? Which keywords are better? Which keywords are a must have? Which keywords should be thrown in the trash? Properly evaluating the list of keywords is vital to your success in either SEO or pay per click search engine marketing.

We’ll now discuss some free tools you can use to evaluate the importance or value of the keywords. These include:

1.The monthly number of searches on the Yahoo network, shown by their online tool

2.The number of people using those keywords to find your site over the last few months

3.Your ranking for those keywords on Google

4.The Google Page Rank of the top site on Google for that keyword

5.The type of sites coming up on organic or paid search listings for that keyword

I’ll explain each of these methods in detail. You don’t have to use them all, but some have more or less usefulness in certain situations.

Number of Searches on Yahoo

The very first thing you should do, now that you have spreadsheet started, is to go to the Overture Keyword Selection Tool, which can be found at:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Enter a keyword or key phrase in that online tool, and it will tell you how many people have searched for that keyword on Yahoo over the last month. You can generally figure that the total number of people who searched for that term on the whole Internet in the last month is about three times that amount, since Google has about twice the traffic as Yahoo.

This is by far the most important tool in determining which keywords to use. After all, you want lots of people coming to your web site or sites, and so it’s vital to know the amount of traffic for the various keywords on your list. The higher the monthly searches the better. In general you need a selection or group of keywords that adds up to some decent number of searches per month.

So go through your entire list and enter each phrase into the Overture tool, get the search amounts, and enter them into column two on your spreadsheet.

Overture (now owned by Yahoo) will not only give you the amount of the searches for each keyword, but also will give a list of other related key phrases, and their counts as well. So as you enter your keywords into the tool, note the other phrases on the list that Overture gives you and add any to your spreadsheet that look good. Often I print out these pages, go through the lists and highlight the ones that I want.

The Number of People Using Those Keywords to Find Your Site

The next thing to do is to get your web statistics program and get a list of the keywords that people are using to find your site on search engines. Any decent web stats program will give you this information. Unfortunately the free web statistics programs that most hosting companies give you are terrible. See my article on this for some good programs or online services you can get, some fairly cheap.

So take your web stats program and select a time frame that is fairly long, let’s say for the last six months. Now get a list of the keywords used to find your site. Your program should show a count of the number who found your site using each of the key phrases. Some stats programs will show counts for individual words. Forget that. You want the counts for the complete phrases.

Now go over that list and find those words on your spreadsheet, and enter the number in column three. If a phrase isn’t on your spreadsheet, add it.

This is important because these are the phrases that are already working for you. People are already finding your site using those key phrases. So by working on these keywords you can increase that number. If you have a brand new site this doesn’t apply of course.

Your Ranking for Those Keywords on Google

Next you want to find out your current ranking for those keywords on Google. There is a software program that will find this out for you called Internet Business Promoter. You can download a free demo at:

http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm

And the free demo gives you the functionality to check your Google ranking for a list of keywords. You can set it to check for the top 50 positions, top 100 positions, etc. It’s a pretty good software program.

Enter the Google ranking for your site in column four. Check the first 100 positions. If your site is not in the top 100, put “Not in top 100" in column four.

This is important because it will tell you if you’re already ranking for certain keywords, and how high. If you’re already ranking for a keyword, you want to take actions occasionally to reinforce that. If you are ranking but not very high, let’s say at between 30 and 70, then by taking search engine optimization actions you know you can raise that up. Also, let’s say there is a keyword where you’re not in the top 50 or top 100, but it has a lot of monthly searches, you could work on that one so you start ranking for it.

In my next article I’ll discuss the rest of the free tools you can use to evaluate the keywords on your list. Then in Part 3 I’ll discuss what to do once you have selected your keyword list.

Recruitment And Selection Strategies

In my last article, Part 1 of this series, I discussed several free methods to use to evaluate keywords and end up with a list that will work the best for your business. Most people can come up with a list of keywords, but the trick is then to know which ones are going to be useful to you.

The free tools you can use to evaluate the importance or value of the keywords are:

1. The monthly number of searches on the Yahoo network, shown by their online tool

2. The number of people using those keywords to find your site over the last few months

3. Your ranking for those keywords on Google

4. The Google Page Rank of the top site on Google for that keyword

5. The type of sites coming up on organic or paid search listings for that keyword

In the last article I discussed items 1-3 above. Now I'll discuss items 4-5.

The Google Page Rank of the Top Site on Google for That keyword

This is what I call the ?reality check? tool. There is a toolbar you can download from Google that will show the Page Rank of any site showing in the browser. The Page Rank is a ranking system developed by Google to show the relative importance of a given site or page. The tool shows a bar graph, and if you mouse over it, it shows the number. The scale is from 1-10.

So for this step, I go to Google and enter the key phrase, hit enter and see what comes up. Then I go to the first site that comes up in the regular, or organic search results (not the sponsored listings at the top in yellow or on the right), and see what the Page Rank is for that site. Enter that number in column five.

Here is the significance of this. If the top site for a given keyword has a high Page Rank, that means that they are a well established site and have done some serious search engine optimization, have a lot of links to them, etc. For our purposes we will define a high Page Rank as 5 or higher. Especially if your site is new or you have never done any SEO work, I would not recommend selecting a keyword where the top site has a Page Rank of 5 or higher. You won't be able to effectively compete for that keyword. You need to find keywords where the top sites have lower Page Ranks, so you as a new site coming into that market can compete more easily. That's mainly for SEO. For pay per click, this method doesn't matter as much.

So go through your entire list, go to Google and enter each keyword, go to the top site coming up on regular (non-paid) search, note the Page Rank, then mark that on your spreadsheet.

The Type of Sites Coming Up on Organic or Paid Search Listings for That Keyword

For this method, you go to Google and/or Yahoo and see what types of listings are coming up for each keyword. This is important because it gives you an idea of what the people typing in that keyword are seeing when the listings come up.

The major importance here is to see if the other listings show that you would be reaching the right type of public with that keyword. For example, one client of mine is a recruiting company, and they wanted to target companies looking to hire people. They already had tons of job applicants, but they needed more companies wanting to hire. So by using this method we could see that some of the keywords we were looking at were bringing up listings geared to job applicants. And others were geared more towards companies doing hiring, which were the ones we wanted.

It's good to use this method just to check and make sure you're on the right track and targeting the right public with that keyword. Write down a very brief summary of the types of ads you see in the spreadsheet.

Final Evaluation

Now that you have all the data in your spreadsheet, you can now go through the list and select the keywords you want to target. You might first want to go through and eliminate the ones you don't want, and highlight them in some color like red or pink or something. Then go back and start selecting the ones you want and highlight them in green.

How to Evaluate This Data for Pay Per Click Campaigns

Remember that at the beginning of this article we named the several methods we would use to evaluate keywords:

1. The monthly number of searches on the Yahoo network, shown by their online tool

2. The number of people using those keywords to find your site over the last few months

3. Your ranking for those keywords on Google

4. The Google Page Rank of the top site on Google for that keyword

5. The type of sites coming up on organic or paid search listings for that keyword

For a pay per click search engine marketing campaign, you mostly want to have keywords that have high traffic. So the monthly number of searches which you got from the Yahoo/Overture network will be one of the most valuable pieces of information.

You want to stay away from single word key words and go more for 2, 3, 4 or more word phrases, as research shows that the people typing in these are more in the buying phase and not in the lookie-loo phase.

The number of people who are using that phrase to find your site is of some importance here, but not as much as the Yahoo/Overture search numbers.

The Google ranking and Page Rank of the top site have no real relevance for selecting keywords for pay per click. However, #5 above may be important to you, depending on what public you're targeting.

How to Evaluate This Data for Search Engine Optimization

The methods once again are:

1. The monthly number of searches on the Yahoo network, shown by their online tool

2. The number of people using those keywords to find your site over the last few months

3. Your ranking for those keywords on Google

4. The Google Page Rank of the top site on Google for that keyword

5. The type of sites coming up on organic or paid search listings for that keyword

For search engine optimization, it's a different game from pay per click and the types of keywords you want to emphasize are likely going to be different.

However, once again the number of Yahoo/Overture searches is still the first criteria you want to look at. You want to select keywords that get a decent number of people searching for them each month.

But, especially if you have a site that has not had any SEO done for it yet, you do NOT want to select keywords that have too high a number of searches. This may sounds contradictory. But the thing is that as a new site, you will generally not be able to compete effectively for keywords with 50,000 searches. There will be a fair amount of competition for those keywords, which you will also see on method #4, the Google Page Rank of the top sites.

The number of people using that keyword to find your site now is important, because that means you're likely already ranking on the search engines for that keyword and it is bringing in public to your site. We'll assume for now that it's the right public.

So #2 and #3 above are similar. They are an indication that you are doing something right, and you should reinforce it by selecting those keywords and working on them.

And with #5, that gives you an idea of whether each keyword is targeting the right public for you.

So with SEO, #1-5 above tend to all be important. You don't have to use them all in every case, but in some cases you would.

In Part 3 of this series, I'll cover what you do now with those keywords now that you've selected them.

More Articles from

Latest Election News Pg8

Related Articles
Author
Most Popular

•	Advertising And Marketing Strategies, by Ajeet Khurana
•	Effective Recruitment And Selection, by Ken Charnley
•	Employee Recruitment And Retention, by Abbie Stutzer
•	Importance Of Recruitment And Selection, by James Davey
•	Learning And Motivation Strategies, by Michael J.

John Eberhard has sinced written about articles on various topics from Internet Marketing, Marketing and PPC Advertising. John Eberhard is the author of "Making Money with a Web Site, The Basics of Internet Marketing, Part 1." You can find out more about this exciting new eBook at

Cats For Allergy Sufferers
They are gaining popularity and practitioners of these techniques can usually be located in most major cities