Study: does it pay to invest your time in long-tail keywords?

Here is a study documenting the value of long tail keywords ("LTKW"). These are "... long and specific keyword phrases that generate little traffic and few conversions each" as defined in the study.The are really referred to as "long tail" because of the shape of the curve on a graph of frequency of use of a set of keywords. These are the phrases less often searched for, and the graph shows a "long tail" going out to as far as there are phrases being graphed.

This study was done using data from AdWords campaigns, but the principle pertains to optimizing your web pages just the same.

The study revealed that the impact of  LTKW is different for different businesses. Some receive a large percentage of their total traffic from these phrases, while others receive only a small percentage. These phrases appear to be more important to SKU-based commodity retailers. That seems to me to make sense.

The author of the posting also pointed out that a company in the study that received "... only 8% of its sales through the long tail keywords made a significant amount of money with them." That got my attention! Even when the percentage is smaller, there can still be real money involved. Who wants to leave money on the table when doing business?

In the clinic, we always emphasize the value of paying attention to LTKW. It is nice to see some documentation of that concept.

Google Local Business Center Categories

I just discovered another tool that could be very useful in optimizing a site for a local business. This is a list of the categories that Google uses to identify local business listings. The really handy part of this list is that it includes a list of keywords that are associated with each category. This makes it easy to scan the list for ideas of categories that might be relevant to your business. Using this in combination with the Google Toolbar, which allows you to highlight words on a page that match those entered in the Google search field, makes it very easy to scan the listing for occurrences of selected phrases to determine what categories Google thinks they are relevant to.

I came across this list while browsing the Search Engine Guide blog, which is another handy source of useful information. While not completely clear what the source of the list is, the information should be helpful as a reference for any of your keyword optimization efforts.

To see the complete listing, click on the title of this article.

Google Strikes WebPosition!

I have long used, and often described in class, a rank checking program called Web Position Gold. The software does many things beyond checking ranking positions, but I have never used other features, nor advocated their use. I have found this a very handy program for evaluating how well the search engine optimization and marketing techniques that we teach are working in practice. I have used it only periodically, perhaps only on a monthly basis, for any given site, in part to avoid overuse that would attract the attention of the search engines, and in part because one can obsess over rankings to no good end. Nevertheless, I find it very useful to occasionally see how my rankings on different sites are standing up on the web.

Google has never liked any of these programs becuause they can eat up so much bandwidth and processing capacity, but the only program they have ever specifically identified as something they disapprove of (at least as far as I have seen) is Web Position. Recently, they appear to have disabled the program completely. When I run the program against any of the sites I check, there are no Google results returned!

As a replacement, I have turned to RankChecker, an application that is an add-on to the Firefox browser and available from SEOBook at no charge (for now, they reserve the right to begin charging for it in the future). This is a web site with a number of good tools available and some good information about search engine marketing. It is definitely worth taking a look at if you are looking for tools to use to evaluate your web site performance.

6 Tips for Blogging in 2008

"... blogging is an excellent way to manage PR ..."

This is a nice piece on blogging with tips that we can all use. The key message that came across to me from this article was that you really need to pay attention to the small details of working your blog in order to get it to work most effectively for you.

For example, the author recommends hard coding keyword-rich links on the sidebar of your blog pointing to blog entries that are particularly important to your site. This kind of technique goes well beyond the concept of posting regularly to your blog to keep your content alive and fresh.

He also talks about writing keyword-rich titles for your entries, then, after posting them (and presumably, letting them get indexed?), returning to the entry and changing the titles to something that will be more eye-catching for readers. This reminds me of the difference between how newspaper headlines are written and how article titles or headlines need to be written for the web. Newspapers have had to adjust how their writers create headlines in order to make the stories findable on the Internet. I have even heard that search engines have made special adjustments to their search algorithms to accommodate newspapers' need for both kinds of headlines.

Overall, the message remains, the rewards go to those who pay attention to detail and have the persistence to apply good techniques to their work.

Make Your Blog Work Better!

"Google shows more recent results if a search query that wasn't popular before suddenly gets many searches. Google analyzes the search volume and the blog post volume to decide if a special search term or topic is hot or not."

A recent newsletter posting points to a way to make your blog perform better for your site. The key seems to be to stay aware of what is "hot" that might be relevant to your site, and make sure that you get a blog posted immediately. What this article says is that Google provides additional ranking emphasis for current blog entries for searches that suddenly take a jump in volume. What this means is that if there is a news item, for example, that attracts a lot of attention to a subject that is relevant to your business, it is to your advantage to put something up on your blog commenting on the event.

Suppose, for example, that you are selling coffee on the web. One day you see a news report saying that coffee has been determined to be good for your health in some way that was not realized previously (a story that was prominent recently). News stories like that attract a lot of attention to a topic for a short while, and you can anticipate that this will be reflected in search volume.

What you should do is to think about what people who hear about that story and want more information might search for, and post a blog immediately using those words to make some comment or observation about the story. You don't have to have anything earth-shattering to say about it, a simple article mentioning the story line and saying what you think about it will be sufficient. The point is to get something on-line immediately to take advantage of the boost that Google will give the topic for a short window of time.

If you are lucky and the story does attract attention, and if you have picked the right terms, you could get a huge boost for your blog in a very short period of time. This kind of short term volume increase for your site can also have a persistent, lingering effect on your rankings in searches over time.

As always, the advantage goes to those of us who stay on top of our field and are persistent in applying the right principles to our marketing eforts!

Which elements lead to high Google rankings?

Axandra reported back in a May 2007 newsletter on the results of a ranking study performed by the German firm Sistrix. They include a link to the study report, but, unfortunately for me, that page is in German!

The summary is good, however, and reinforces the lessons that we have consistently promoted in our clinic, with only one new note.

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

In summary, the importance of these elements follows the order in which they are listed with the exception of inbound links, which are cited as being quite important. As with any such study, it is impossible to assign any specific measure of impact to the different elements. We emphasize understanding the concept of which is more important, and utilizing them all.

The one note that stood out from our general understanding of element significance was that H1 headline tags appeared to show less significance that the effects of tags H2-H6! This point really jumped out at me from the findings, and could be explained by Google continuing to battle the efforts of search engine optimizers.

Underlying all of this information is the understanding of the importance of getting the right keywords in use on the site in the first place! The elements discussed all relate to the proper use and placement of the keyword phrases.

Almost as an aside in the report, there was a mention that sites with very few parameters in the URL appear to rank higher than sites many parameters in the URL. This is interesting, as it is slightly different from the perspective that we have always taken on the structure of the URL, which is that it seems to inhibit the depth of crawl of a site. These are two slightly different perspectives on the issue, but with the same bottom line: complicated, parameter driven URL's don't perform as well!

Optimize Your Text for Search Engines!

"Notice that I also changed the sub-title of the book from “Fire Your Boss, Toss Your Alarm Clock, and Double Your Income With An Easy Transition Into Self-Employment” to “How To Work At Home With The Perfect Small Business Opportunity” for the Amazon copy."

Reading an excellent blog about how to start a business on the Internet, I came across this quote. I have often talked about how newspapers have had to change the way they write their headlines in order to accommodate search engines, and I thought this was a great illustration of the point I was trying to make.

Brian Armstrong, the author of this fine blog, goes on to say that "... very few people search for terms like “breaking free”, “fire your boss”, or “self-employment”... " so he rewrote his text to something that people would be searching for. In this article, and in several other of his posts, he talks about the importance of keyword research to determine what people are actually searching for. This is crucial to making your website deliver the kind of traffic you need to support your business.

I highly recommend this blog as a reference for great information about making money from the Internet. Brian's focus is more on how to make money from a blog than from moving product or services, but his writing style is easy to read and full of great information.

Meta Description Makeover

"The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked..."

This article from a member of the Google "snippets" team outlines the appropriate strategy for crafting meta Descriptions for your pages that will contribute to the quality of traffic you receive from ranking in the search results.

As a reminder, and as the author points out, descriptions do not contribute to the ranking of your pages. What they do is allow you, the writer, to communicate directly with the reader to tell them what you think they should know about the content on your page and, therefore, why they should visit this page rather than the others displayed in the search results.

What are the key points?

• Each page should have its own unique description.
• Targeted keywords should be included in the description.
• Descriptions should be brief, but comprehensive.

As we continue to stress in our weekly clinics, the desired end result of search engine optimization is to get the searcher to visit your site, but the desired end result of the effort overall is to get the searcher to communicate with you, either as a lead, or as a sale! Better descriptions can contribute to the quality of traffic that you get from the web, and to the conversions that you experience!

New Google rankings study

"The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results."

Another recent study re-confirms the information that we provide in our weekly free Internet marketing class at the Small Business Development Center in Houston! (We always enjoy getting confirmation of our approach from other authorities!)

The study analyzed the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank. All were found to have an influence on rankings.

While the article did not emphasize this point, it seems relevant to point out the importance of finding and using the right keywords. The study focused on what you do with the words in the construction of the web site in order to gain the most impact, but did not stress the importance of finding and using the right words to begin with.

This might be a harder fact to study and report on, but the importance lies in understanding the thought processes of the people that you are trying to attract to your site. Optimization is a matter of finding the "edge" over your competition in every small way possible and making use of that in constructing your site. Begin by understanding your target audience, then use the information presented in this report to communicate to the search engines in the most effective way!

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine - New York Times

Here is an article that everyone interested in search engine optimization should read and think about. I took away from this several thoughts about how to improve my own optimization, which I will point out below, but you should read and think about this article from the perspective of your own practices and experiences to see what you can glean from it.

"Recently, a search for “French Revolution” returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign — in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions — rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI. A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like “French Revolution” rather than pages that simply had both words."

This description leads me to believe that the specificity with which we place keyword phrases on our pages will become more important in ranking. We talk about this every time we cover use of keyword phrases in our clinic, but this tweak seems to make those lessons more important! It also emphasizes the importance of finding those "low ranking" or little used phrases to include in the site, because this tweak can cause them to float right to the top on any particular search.

"... Google’s formulas were not giving enough importance to links from other sites about Palo Alto."

This seems to say that links will become more important, particularly links that are related to your site from what we refer to as a "neighborhood" on the web. One indication of a neighborhood relationship is that a number of sites all link to similar sites. This is one of the things that we know Google takes into account when looking fr relationships between sites. It seems that it may be more important in the future.

"... Google has preferred pages old enough to attract others to link to them."

This point tells us that we have some special opportunities whenever something on our site is related to current news. If there is a surge in searches for a topic that is related to something on your site, it may be much more important that you have some fresh content pertaining to that topic. In other words, you can't rely on having been prescient and having information already on your site. Google looks like it will add emphasis to sites that have new content relating to the topic!

"Once Google corrals its myriad signals, it feeds them into formulas it calls classifiers that try to infer useful information about the type of search, in order to send the user to the most helpful pages."

I am not sure what to make of this comment except that what Google is doing with its algorithm is very complex and fluid, meaning that making the optimal use of techniques requires continual updating!

The influence of semantic indexing on your search engine rankings

"Semantic indexing means that search engines try to associate certain terms with concepts when indexing web pages."

Semantic indexing is something that webmasters and developers should understand in order to more effectively utilize the keyword research that should underlie all site development efforts. Semantic indexing is another technique that search engines use to try to "understand" better what particular web pages are "about".

The technique is built on associations between words that the search engines find in their crawling of the web. Words that are frequently found together on pages are taken to bear some meaningful relationship to one another. Simple, but effective and reasonable!

How do you make us of this knowledge to improve your site? Consider it when creating your focus for your pages and the keyword emphasis on the page. Consider it also when you create your links within your site for site navigation. And, finally, consider it whenever you look for related sites with which to exchange links. Finding sites with the same words on them that characterize your site will help you join "web neighborhoods" that are relevant to your business.

Keyword Research Tool

One of the things that we emphasize in creating an effective website is the importance of identifying the appropriate keyword phrases for the traffic you are attempting to attract to your site. There are several tools that we have used in class to illustrate how to go about finding and evaluating these phrases, and a new one has just come to my attention.

Our principal tool that we have used in class has always been Wordtracker, supplemented by Google's free tool provided in conjunction with its AdWords program. Each tool has certain advantages over the other. My preference for Wordtracker has always been based on ease of use, both in researching phrases and in downloading data to be used in other analysis, and on reasonable pricing. Google does not provide the same kind of data convenience, but adds the value of providing seasonal information about the searches in their database. On the other hand, it is free!

This new tool combines the features of both extensive database information and seasonal data. In addition, it offers some other features like focus on industry oriented searches, and keyword density analysis for pages. The disadvantage is that I find the tool much more expensive to use (than Wordtracker or Google).

For more information, you can go to their website at "KeywordDiscovery.com Keyword Research Tool". They provide customer testimonials for your reference.

Using Keywords Effectively in Copy!

"One primary goal is to write copy so that the keyphrases are virtually undetectable when read by someone with no knowledge of SEO. "

Here is an article with some nice tips on how to utilize keywords in the copy that you write for your web site.

As we point out in our clinic, the point of your copy is to provide valuable information to your readers, and not to offend them with padded or unreadable content. The author of this piece, associated with Wordtracker, one of the sources of keyword information on the web, makes some very useful suggestions about how to write copy that makes use of keyword focus without being offensive to the reader.

Her suggestions?

• Keep It Sounding Natural
• Don't Use Keyphrases To Describe Your Products/Services
• Add A Word
• Break It Up

Natural: Keeping it natural is common sense. If it doesn't read right to you, it won't to your reader Don't feel compelled to add in keywords to meet some quantitative measure.

Keyphrases: "DON'T use keyphrases to describe your own products or services. Instead, use them to describe what your product or service is not, or what it is similar to or what it is better than."

Add: "The phrase "web design for small business" seems out of place because, most often, we would use the plural term (small businesses) when we were writing. To correct the problem, just add a plural word to the end of the phrase. Perhaps you might talk about web design for small business startups or web design for small business owners. "

Break: "One keyphrase I had to work with was "Texas Hill Country real estate." That would get pretty cumbersome if it were left as it is seen there. But by breaking it up with some punctuation, it sounds perfectly natural. Here's how it can be done."

There is no more beautiful place than the Texas Hill Country. Real estate listings in this area are filled with stunning homes that …

Note that the search engine will not notice the period. It will consider the phrase to be coherent.

*****

Always remember that you are writing to the reader (while considering how the search engine reads).

Keywords: Speak Your Audience's Language

Choose the keywords that will lead to your site's success in the marketing competition. We have shown methods in our clinic for researching and ientifying the right keywords. Here is another article from a leading SEO expert making the same point.

As he puts it in his article, "Marketers think of solutions in their own terms, not in their audience's terms." This is a classic mistake in choosing the keywords to build your site around.

He provides a great example in the article: "A major bank's executives recently asked me to ensure their site could be found on every search for "lending" because they're one of the world's largest "lending" institutions. I pointed out what I thought would be obvious: Their audience wants to "borrow." Smiles slowly formed on their faces. They got it."

Use the tools we have shown in the clinic after you have thought about your business to discover how your prospects are thinking. Then you can become a successful Internet marketer!

Writing to reach search engines

Searchenginewatch recently reported on the way search engines are having an impact on newspaper headlines. The article, referring to changes at the New York Times, illustrates the fact that search engines 'read' differently from human readers, and creators of web sites must take this into account in drafting content for the sites.

"The Times, like most newspapers, has a long-standing tradition of writing compelling headlines that grab human-readers, but that may not literally describe the news story. For example, when the Pope died, Times reporters headlined stories with titles like 'Papacy Change' or 'Pilgrims converge on the Vatican.'

Marshall has now trained many editors and producers to write content friendly to both users and searchers. 'We encouraged them to use 'Pope John Paul dies' and offered a more literal approach based on keyword research and internal metrics,' said Marshall. 'The response has been great. Everyone so far is very excited to reach audiences through search and help users find our content.'"

Compare the headlines as they are traditionally written (by professional communicators who are very good at what they do!) to the headlines written after the emphasis on drafting for search engines. Think about what anyone interested in this particular story might think to use to search for information. The compelling headlines that would have appeared "pre-search engine impact" do not contain phrases that searchers would be likely to use.

As web developers, we have to always remember that the first audience we have to attract is the search engines. They must be able to "understand" what our pages are about, and the way they determine what they are about is by observing the words that are on the page. After finding the words on the page, the search engine will pay attention to the placement and treatment of the words, for example, attribution of more significance to words that appear more frequently on the page, words in the page title, words used in headers on the page, words that are highlighted or set apart with different colors, or words that are used in links.

Understanding that the words that searchers might use to search the web must appear on your web site, and then understanding how to place them to convey their importance to the search engines is the basis of successful search engine optimization.

Just How Important Are Top Rankings?

Another insight to the iProspect study:

"As I've explained time and time again to small business owners, there's something to be said for going after the long tail. I've given dozens of companies examples of what I call 'alternative keyword targeting.' The idea here is to skip over the super popular, super competitive phrases that apply to your market and to go after the highly specific, less competitive phrases instead"

This observer points out an important factor in marketing that we continually emphasize in our Internet Marketing Clinic, which is, pay attention to the long list of keywords that are relevant to your business.

There are several important reasons for this statement.

• It is typically easier to rank on more specific, less frequently used terms.
• These terms may also reflect a more targeted searcher, which is better for your business.
• Your ability to provide material on your target page that responds directly to the query string is better when it is more focused.
• Ranking on more terms that are related will help you to rank on the more competitive terms.

Once again we see that effective marketing on theInternet involves a longer view than just ranking on top terms, and persistence will pay off.

Does your URL matter in ranking?

Here is a very good thorough discussion of what a URL is and how it should be constructed to help you with your ranking on the terms that are important to your site.

The author points out that keywords are currently important to the major search engines in varying degrees.

"Currently, Google, Yahoo, and MSN each appear to be giving some ranking boost to pages that contain the keywords in the subdomain of the URL. We believe that Yahoo places the most significance on keywords in the domain name, closely followed by Google. MSN doesn't seem to place quite so much emphasis on this, but it does appear to factor it into their scoring."

I emphasize the currently because this, like almost everything else about Internet Marketing, is changing constantly.

This article takes you through the structure of a URL, describing each of the elements in turn, and points out appropriate and reasonable strategies for incorporating keywords into your URLs. He includes some very good, and some subtle points.

He discusses the question of how and why to use subdomains on a site, and whether to use hyphens in your URL to separate keywords. In short, subdomains are good if they are justified by the site size and content, and keywords in the subdomains will help you. Hyphenation, according to his findings, is no longer necessary to allow search engines to distinguish keywords in your URL, because search engines are becoming more sophisticated at separating English (he specifies) words from one another the same way a reader's eye will do. My experience with other automated tools like spell-checkers makes me a little leery of this advice, but it is what it is. Judge for yourself!

He also says that search engines now examine URL's with multiple hyphens more critically with an eye to identifying spam techniques in operation. This makes a lot of sense to me, and is consistent with avoiding "too long" URL's, which can cause other problems for you.

He includes a discussion on dynamically generated URL's and some of the problems inherent in their use. In the past, these were simply death for a page, but times have changed somewhat. As he says,

"Note: a large number of URLs with session variable have begun appearing in Google recently. This appears to be a glitch in Google's indexing process that should be resolved soon, as Google states on their webmaster guidelines page that they do not index pages with session variables."

In this case, the basic rule that we have always taught seems to remain sound, "Do not allow your site to utilize "session variables" and outlawed characters like "?" in the URL's of your pages." This avoids the problem, and is not that difficult an issue for your development team to work around. they just have to recognize the importance of doing so!

This is a very good article for everyone to review, as it is a good reminder of some basics that everyone should keep in mind, with some additional information and insights that are less obvious, but still quite important for marketers.

Inside the Searcher's Mind: It's a Jungle in Here!

"For those doing research, the following items were mentioned and listed in order of importance to the user, in getting them to clickthrough:

The exact query in the title and description
Product information: features, comparisons, reviews, prices
Trusted sources of information, i.e. Consumer Reports
Trusted brand names and vendors
Trusted URLs

For a purchaser, some of the items are the same, but different factors are also introduced. Again, these are listed in order of importance:

The exact query in the title and description
Offer product information: features, comparisons, reviews, prices
Trusted brand names and vendors
Promises of added value: discounts, free shipping, etc
Ability to buy online
Trusted URLs

"

Here is a research article that says that 80% of searchers skip past sponsored results to go straight to "organic" listings. It also emphasizes that searchers go from the "general to the specific" in their searches.

The quote describes the important factors, in order, to searchers in considering how to respond to search results. It says that searchers are primarily looking for information when searching, in other words, researching their interests, and those web sites that provide information to the searchers will get the most click-throughs.

Based on this research, a good site should give the users information about the product or service first, then take steps later to entice them to commit to the product or service. Offering discounts or incentives to purchase too early in the process is a wasted endeavor.