With today’s technology there is no excuse for being caught flat footed by a competitor’s big moves. The following list of sites and techniques will arm you with everything you need to stalk keep a close eye on your competitors every move.
Before you go all Austin Powers, take a second to think about who or what you should be spying on. A good technique is to head over to LinkedIn or Crunch Base and search for a rival company. Make a list of their important employees and their positions. I just recently read an article where a company was following around rivals key sales people and watching them check into locations on foursquare or Twitter (with geo location turned on). They would then use that data to determine which clients the competition’s sales people were talking to. Pretty sneaky indeed! You would be surprised how much info an employee might give out over Facebook or other social media channels.
Website Stalking
“I always feel like somebody’s watching meeeeee”.… Umm yeah, it’s ChangeDetection.com. These guys have been around since 1999 monitoring changes to webpages. For the low price of free you can be alerted to any changes your competition makes to their page. This sure beats obsessively checking their page 5 times a day but who does that anyway 
Also, if you are already using Google Reader you can now subscribe to updates from pages that do not have RSS feeds. So it is very simple to keep tabs on important changes to webpages.
Use the Way Back Machine to look at changes to a website over time. What you are looking for is changes they made that have stuck around. If they kept the change it probably had a positive impact.
Social Media Stalking
Social Mention is a real-time social media search engine that also includes social media alerts that can be emailed to you daily for any search phrase. The search results display a ton of data including which social media sources are generating the most buzz. You can even drill down to see conversations from specific sites as well as the top usernames at those sites.
This is a great way to see which channels are working best for your competition or brands. You can also reach out to power users in the various networks you find. For good measure you can download all of this information to a csv/excel file!
The search results can be a little slow to load and I do not really trust the sentiment calculation they use but overall this is an amazing site to collect free information.
Topsy is a social media search engine with some great sorting options so you can see conversations by the hour, day, week and month. A really nice feature of Topsy is that you can search within a specific domain or a specific Twitter account etc. Example: “site:domain.com” or you can do “site:domain.com from:TwitterUsername” and it will search for those specific Twitter conversations.
Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create your own custom “buzz” page around any topic. Each source they display has its own box that you can toggle off or on under the available sources menu. Bookmark the page and it remembers your settings. This is a great way to have the information you need, displayed in a clean and efficient manner.
How Sociable measures brand visibility across the web and assigns a score to each channel such as Facebook or Twitter etc. It is very simple to use and compare yourself to competitors to see which channels you need to improve in. You can also setup email alerts which is handy.
Check User Names is a great service but one sneaky way to use it is to enter in known usernames of your competitors and or their employees. The service quickly checks over 160 social networks to tell you if the name is available. Keep track of all the taken names and you can see where your completion is engaging on the web and where you can go to follow/friend them from an account they won’t suspect.
Google Stalking
As you know Google is a great source of information. Make sure you are getting the most out of it though. Using the new left menu updates, discussions, blogs, and news sections are really great for staying up on the latest information. Being able to sort by hours, days, weeks, and years is also a really nice way to filter out old information.
Example Search – [domainname.com -site:domainname.com] So that you show mentions of a site from external sources. Or add (&as_qdr=d (past one day) to a query string to get searches in the past 24 hours.
I have read that people search for PDF files on competitors sties hoping to find something juicy but it is a harder one to get results on. Try something like (site:domain.com filetype:pdf “plan” OR “roadmap” OR “timeline” OR “strategy”)
Google Alerts is a very simple way to spy. Simply tell Google what you what to be update about and how often and it will email you whenever there is new information. You can also create an RSS feed with it as well.
I suggest putting quotes around your “keyword phrase”. Pretty much any search you can do on Google you can setup an alert for. So get creative.
Google Ad Planner will give you estimates of unique visitors, their interest, keywords searched and sites they also visited simply by typing in a competitors URL.
Google Insights & Google Trends are a great way to track brands over time.
You can input a URL into the Google Keyword Tool instead of a keyword phrase to see what keywords your competition focuses on.
Also, if you enable it you can use Google Analytics Benchmarks to compare your site to similar sites in your niche although the data is anonyms.
Stalking Demographic Data
It is always nice to get an idea of your competitor’s demographics as well as your own. Use the sites below to develop a profile of your competitions customers. You can learn their gender, age, race, education level and even salary ranges for free.
Quantcast
Compete Site Analytics
Alexa
Keyword Stalking
Before you start an SEO or PPC campaign you need to know what your competition is doing in both of these areas. The tools bellow will help you to see which keywords your competitor is running advertisements on Google and what keywords they rank for organically.
These sites give limited data for free but offer a lot more for monthly subscriptions. They all really do the same thing so find the one with the best info for your niche and start spying.
SEO Stalking
The two best things you can and should be doing to stalk the competition is to go to Yahoo site explorer (download the csv file) and the Open Site explorer from SEOMOZ and to grab all of your competitors backlinks. Use this data to snipe links from that they have that don’t link to you. I recently mentioned how to do these in a previous article.
Honorable Mentions
Below are some sites that are really good but you should only focus on them after using the other services I mentioned.
Kurrently is a real-time search results from Twitter and Facebook. The conversation stream updates live which is really nice for following a trending topic. It also enables you to control the flow so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Besides having a killer domain name Twazzup is another real-time search service worth giving a look. You can follow a conversation stream and see how the top influencers are for that particular keyword. If you hover over a particular user it gives you their stats, location etc. without having to click on anything.
BackType is another good place to find conversations and influencers of a competitor’s domain. In that past they had more functionality but they seem to have scaled back the free version of their service.
You can also, type a rival’s Twitter name into Klout and it will tell you who they influence and who influences them.
Ok by now I am sure you are itching to begin stalking. If you know of any great sites or techniques I didn’t cover be sure to leave a comment and if you if found the post helpful be sure to stalk follow us on Twitter @authoritydomain and RT.
One of the first things I do when conducting an SEO site review is to check a sites major keywords VS its top ten competing sites in Google.
Two recurring problems I find are a lack of keyword rich links from unique domains or way too many keyword stuffed links being built. Both of these situations can wreak havoc on your search engine rankings.
People spend a lot of time picking out the keywords they want to rank higher on Google. However, they usually assign arbitrary goals for how many links they need to acquire for each keyword.
This is a huge mistake but one you can easily avoid or correct. There are many free tools that can get you the information you need I recommend http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer/ but there are plenty of others out there.
Both tools are free although you need a paid account to get all of the data from Open Site Explorer but the free data is available instantly and easily exportable to excel.
Simple Steps
1. Make lists of the top 10 Google results for your major keywords.
2. Run one or both tools on your own site as well as your competition. Make sure you filter out internal links. (Open Site Explorer even has a way to filter out no followed links which is nice)
3. Once you have your list, filter out duplicate urls. Google is not going to count 500 links from the same site. So the best way to do this is to act like site wide links are all just one link for our purposes.
4. Sort your anchor text by unique occurrences and be sure to count things like “SEO” and “seo” as the same word. (Do not worry about capitalization)
You should now have everything you need to compare your anchor text density to your competition. This is great information because these sites are already doing well for the keywords you are targeting. The perfect anchor text density is whatever Google is already showing you it likes.
This will eliminate you simply guessing how many links you need for each keyword. However, there are a few things to watch for. Sometimes you will see people ranking with very few keyword rich links. So they may have a super low density and still rank. In these cases just build up links slowly but don’t worry if your density is 6% and there’s is .02% etc.
Sometimes nobody in a niche is actively building keyword rich links and you can reap the rewards. You just don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb and have your anchor text density be 45% while everyone else is in the 3 to 10% range. The key is to have a natural looking anchor text keyword profile.
All links are not created equal so if you are in a situation where you cant have too high of an anchor text density to be successful make sure you use POWERFUL links for that keyword because you won’t be building as many.
Do not worry about having a high density for your company name or url. That is actually pretty normal and can help bring your other anchor text densities down to a natural looking range.
Use your discretion because each niche will have wildly different acceptable percentages but whatever you do, stop guessing when it comes to anchor text density and develop a customized strategy.
Bonus
The list you just put together is linking to your competition. Why are they not linking to you? Simply run their results VS your domain’s backlinks and now you have a highly relevant list of sites to target for link building.
I have been using SEOmoz tools now for a while so I thought it would be nice to do a review of some of the SEO tools they offer. There are many free tools but I will be focusing mainly on the PRO membership.
Knowledge Resources & Guides
One of the best things that a Pro membership offers is actually not the tools at all but resources. One of the best sections is the SEOmoz Q&A. This gives you the ability to connect with the SEOmoz staff directly. You can either ask them a question in private, or post in the public section. This great feature allows you to learn from other members questions as well as your own. It’s like having your own private SEO specialist available to you at all times. Questions are generally answered within a couple of days or less.
Your membership also includes access to a ton of reports & guides on various aspects of SEO with titles like “The Professional’s Guide to Link Building” and “The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO (Local Search)”etc. These guides are very instructive and are updated pretty frequently.
You will also have access to a ton of video and audio cast all aimed at teaching the latest SEO techniques. This can be a great way to supplement SEO training for a new staff member.
SEO Tools
Along with the Guides and Q&A sections, your pro membership will also give you access to the SEO toolbox. The SEOmoz Toolbox functions very well, and is very reliable.
The mozBar for firefox is extremely valuable. When you are logged into it as a pro member it gives you even more valuable data. One of the huge advantages of this toolbar is that it won’t get your IP banned by Google. Most toolbars scrape link data and PR from Google so this can result in a temporary ban on your IP address. The mozBar pulls internal data so you can use it without fear of being banned.
The mozBar also connects to arguably the best tool seoMoz has to offer. Open site explorer – will let you see up to 10k links pointing to a specific URL. You get the data in an easy to use tabbed format and can download it to excel. The data loads almost instantly too which for SEO research this is truly a gold mine!
The two features I use all the time are how many unique Root Domains are linking to a URL and the anchor text breakdown of links pointing to the site. I find these both to be very telling stats. It doesn’t matter much that you have tons of links, it matters that you have tons of unique root domains linking to your site. Also, anchor text density for specific keywords can be too high and too low. Check your site vs. the top 10 to find out what is working in your niche.
When you are doing your on page analysis, the SEOmoz toolbox will also come in handy. You have access to a Term Target tool that helps you decide whether your pages are doing a good job of targeting your relevant keyword phrases. The crawl test tool will help you fix any internal server errors, and helps you fix any duplicate title/meta tags.
Previously the best tool SEOmoz had to offer was Linkscape. However, open site explorer really has replaced it and IMO it’s really not needed anymore. The company is now recommending pretty much the same thing.
Problems
In general there have been few issues to date but I will list out a couple because no service is perfect. Initially the Keyword Difficulty tool was basically not reliable. It has since gone through a major overhaul and is much better. However, I do find the % score they give out can be confusing to a client at first. The % is from 1 to 100 but they start saying things in the 50% range are “highly competitive” and it goes up from there to extremely competitive etc. The issue is a person not familiar with their score is going to see a batch of keywords and think oh look this keyword is only 56% that’s not too bad and it gets a ton of traffic etc. Anyhow, my advice is to not look at the % just look at the description bellow it, such as “extremely competitive” to get the real feel for it.
Open site explorer is truly amazing but one thing that is very annoying is that when you look at the anchor text used in links pointing to your URL it separates upper and lower case keywords that are the same word. So..”Widgets” and “widgets” are considered two separate keywords. I have seen sites with like 6 keywords listed that were all really the same exact keyword just with different capitalization. I realize some may want to see that but I should be given the option to standardize the data. This would make it much faster to see the true anchor text density.
The Crawl Test Tool is really neat but is no match for the IIS SEO Toolkit which is also free. However, it is super-fast and nice for quick hits…and again its free so no big deal.
To be honest the problems we have had are very minimal and we have seen seoMoz actively improving its tools all the time.
Conclusion
Overall it is well worth your money to buy a pro membership. I did not have the time to cover all of the tools SEOmoz has to offer. These are just a few that I find the most useful. Head over the SEOmoz website to learn more about the membership packages they have available.
What is your take on their services?
If you’re reading this, then you no doubt realize how important the online world is in establishing and maintaining your authority. Regardless how big the offline portion of your business is, online is the key to your future success. But let me ask you: how are you measuring your online success?
It’s a difficult question – and there’s no one single answer for everyone. But there isn’t a business (or individual, for that matter) out there that can’t benefit from using an analytics tool to help track, measure, and improve their online presence. I specifically reference Google Analytics, because it is free and best in class, but really any package will do the same thing. What does analytics measure, anyway?
How do people find you?
Wouldn’t it always be nice to know how people find you? You can ask everyone who ends up being a buyer, but when it comes to website customers, you can even find out about people who just came to browse as well as those who make a purchase.
Analytics holds a scary amount of detail about each and every person that visits your website, including:
- What country they’re from (and in some cases, state/province, or city)
- What browser they’re using
- What website (banner ad, director link/etc) they used to find you
You can use the tool to segment these visitors into different groups, and understand the buying patterns of each better. Does your site seem to resonate more with Germans and less with Americans? Is that banner ad a waste of time, whereas the premium directory listing sending in lots of leads? All here, just waiting for you to have a peek.
What do people really think about your website?
In the old days (read: less than a couple years ago), you had to ask customers for their opinion, and hope that enough people took you up on your offer and actually told you what was on their mind. Something of an inexact science, to say the least. Now, you can see your online buyer’s behavior without them even knowing. Consider the statistics that analytics provide:
- Do people linger over your sales pages, or immediately turn away when they find them?
- Do you have key content that nobody ever manages to find?
- Are there popular pages and content that is missing a strong call to action?
These are all fairly easy problems to fix, but only if you know about the problem.
How’s your search engine optimization?
You know how important getting backlinks is. Maybe you’ve researched your keywords and maybe you’ve done a little outreach to get your website more visible in search. But do you measure the traffic search engine send you?
Google Analytics provides data from all the major search engines (not just Google). With this information you should be asking yourself two key questions:
- Are the search phrases you expect to see actually sending traffic?
- Any surprises on keywords you didn’t know you were ranking for?
After all, it just goes to say: you cannot tweak performance if you aren’t measuring.
Andy Hayes is the managing director for Travel Online Partners, a travel online marketing firm. Don’t miss their popular Google analytics ebook, a simple yet effective resource to keep your own authority in check.
To Brand or Not to Brand
First and foremost you have to decide what is right for you. If you’re more concerned with branding and don’t get as excited about the traffic you could potentially receive from a high value exact match domain, then exact match is less of an issue. You should also take your competition into consideration. Is your niche saturated? Are the people in your niche generally SEO savvy or have they not caught on? One way to find out is to type your topic into Google and analyze the results. You can easily do this with a tool such as SEO toolbar from SEOBook. When you have the SEO toolbar installed and you perform a search on Google, the results show up with all the important information you need to determine how competitive your marketplace is. This tool allows you to see the volume of your competitor’s backlinks, whether or not they are listed in important directories such as DMOZ, what their Alexa rank is, and other valuable information listed directly below the result.
Keyword Selection and Domain Brainstorming
Once you get a better understanding of your market and determine whether or not you can devote the time necessary to move perform well in this niche, the next step is to locate available domains. Start brainstorming and write down several variations of the top 5 or so keywords for your market. Plug these variations into keyword research tools such as Google or Wordstream to see traffic estimates and remember to specify exact in the search. If you’re pleased with the amount of search traffic that particular keyword phrases yield, start checking if they are available for purchase or if they are already taken.
Premium Exact Match Domains May Cost a Pretty Penny
Typically, popular keyword phrases are not available, and if they are, the price for a premium exact match tends to be significantly higher. There are various places to look for premium domain names and some of the sites to utilize are Buy Domains, Sedo, and Flippa. Don’t be discouraged if all of the names you’re looking up are already taken, and don’t rule out a .net or .org extension. In terms of SEO, .com, .net, and .org are all eligible for an exact match bonus.
If all of the extensions are taken for the phrases you’re typing in, you might want to consider using a catchy name with only one of your major keywords in the title. Although you won’t be eligible for the exact match bonus, you still have a keyword in the domain and it might actually work out better for you in the long term if you focus on a catchy name that is good for branding rather than exact match traffic.
Exact Match is not a Sure Thing
Remember exact match traffic is not a sure thing! If you think you can buy a domain name that gets a ton of exact match traffic and sit back and get rich, you need a reality check. Just because you buy an exact match domain doesn’t eliminate the hard work that it takes to actually start ranking for your keywords. This is especially true in a saturated market. Buying an exact match only increases your chances of ranking but remember, it doesn’t guarantee them.
Guest post by Sarah Harris, of Zen College Life, the premier directory for online schools. Find out more information about criminal justice degrees.
You may have heard Google is rolling out “Brand Links” suggestions for a ton of generic keyword searches.
So far I have heard a ton of whining about how this is going to kill mom and pop shops (again!). Where others see despair I see opportunity. Here are 4 ways to use Google brand links to your advantage.
SEO/Link Building
- Search Google for as many generic terms that relate to your products as possible.
- Write down all the various brands that show up.
- Sort your list between brands you carry and your competition.
For the brands that you do carry make sure to check your search engine rankings. Concentrate your link building efforts on your brand pages that are lagging in the search engine. Maybe do a contest giveaway for brand x. That always nets some good links.
Also make sure you take a look at your on page optimization. Could you internally link to that brand page more? Are your internal links to that brand keyword rich? Would a new title tag be more effective than the one you have?
Content Creation
I know some of you are thinking…but I only sell MY brand not my competitor’s brand and this new Google feature is going to kill my organic traffic. First, the longer you complain and envision the sky is falling, the longer you put off doing something about it. Second, although generic searches can yield a lot of traffic they rarely offer high conversions. These searches represent someone at the start of the buying cycle, not the end.
A simple solution would be to create a landing page for each of these competing brands and compare your widget to their widget. Be honest and show the pros and the cons and why you think you come out ahead. If you do not want to host a review on your own site then leverage the domain authority of a site like squidoo and do reviews of brand X and compare it yours.
Drive some links to these review pages and you can get them ranking in no time. Especially by leveraging web 2.0 sites like squidoo if your domain is not an established authority.
As a customer gets closer to the end of the buying cycle they start doing brand searches and comparing widgets. By positioning your site to rank on the various brand searches Google is suggesting, you will keep yourself in front of the customer and do some positive branding of your own. This will be huge for your site if you do it right.
PPC
I tend to skip biding on generic traffic like “laptops” because it converts poorly and is usually bid up too high by people with “broad match” turned on. Google brand links gives you an opportunity to gobble up some quality traffic by bidding on their suggested brands.
Again, you don’t have to sell that brand to put up a PPC ad for it. You will have to test but from my previous experience you are likely to see a nice ROI on those branded searches.
Also, getting your ad there now before everyone else figures it out can help you to establish your click through rate and account history for that keyword, which is huge for adwords.
Research
Looking to expand your product offerings? Take a good look at all the brands Google is suggesting in your niche because that is where you know additional traffic is going to be headed. I have seen some rather small brands showing up for high volume search queries. Jump in and start carrying that brand and establish your site before your competition does.
I also find these links extremely helpful when researching a new product. Simply do a generic search and Google shows you some popular brands. You can quickly build a list of who you would want to start out carrying or who you would need to beat in that sector.
I hope this sheds some light on the possibilities this new feature brings. While everyone else is complaining, take action and get a leg up on them!
If you have additional ideas please post them in the comments.
There are some major benefits to increasing the speed of your website:
- Google recently announced that your websites response and page load times are now going to be factored into your search engine rankings with them.
- Improve your visitor’s visual experience, by allowing their web browser and your server to handle and process the data in a streamlined way.
- Decreases bandwidth usage and number of simultaneous connections to the server, thus reducing your servers load, allowing you to scale your growing business needs more efficiently
- Faster webpages are proven to lower your bounce rate. If more customers stay, more may convert!
There are several online tools and browsers I use to help assist in identifying what steps I need to take in order to increase my page speed and load times.
The primary one that I use all the time is the Page Speed plugin for Firebug on Firefox, it can perform analysis on any page that you are on, and give you nearly instant details as to what needs to be done, this tool even provides you with some direct SEO tips, along the way.
The Page Speed plugin is made by Google, and it’ll even tell you “Nice job!”, if you have a high score in the mid 90’s or so, once you see that, you’ll know you’re good to go!
Now keep in mind, you absolutely must fully cross browser and user test your site while making specific enhancements, such as the combining of external JavaScript and multiple cascading style sheet (CSS) files, as some of those may need to load in a specific order, or at specific times, and could cause your pages functionality and visuals to need more work, it should not be anything major though.
Another tool I use all the time is the wonderful SmartOptimizer by Ali Farhadi, this PHP tool, allows you to give it a comma separated list of JavaScript (or CSS) files, and it will automatically place them into 1 file, minifying and gzip compressing it, such as:
Those 6 http requests, now get turned into a single line, and a single http request:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/smartoptimizer/?/js/jquery.js,core.js,ajax.js,jquery.ga.js,index_scripts.js,authslider.js"> </script>
Also, with SmartOptimizer automatically minifying and compressing the request as well, your interactive JavaScript will load faster and be available to the website visitor in a quicker time; their browser doesn’t have to wait as long to finish loading the site.
SmartOptimizer’s CSS minifier also will take small-sized images via URLs out of your CSS sheet and actually put the image data directly within the CSS file, thus even furthermore reducing the number of requests your web browser and server have to process.
I’ve seen all of these tools working together, on fairly large projects (websites) reduce the number of calls to clients servers by nearly 50%, sometimes even more, it is very beneficial to your business, customers, and servers!
Bonus Tip:
If I could only do one thing to improve site speed I would turn on gzip compression. Make sure your server admin is at least doing this because it is a major speed gain!
If you have any questions or additional comments, please respond below, thanks!
There are several benefits for finding exact match domains for a website. There are probably many business owners with websites who are completely unsure about what the term, ‘exact match domains’ even means. This means that one should make certain that the domain name or web address of their website matches their business name or most targeted keyword. It is not a new method and is certainly one that is recommended. Regardless of the products or services that are offered, it is important that a good domain name is used.
It has been known for years that the name of a company should describe exactly what it does. If a company name is confusing, it deters new customers. The same is true when online. The domain name should describe quite briefly what it is that the website in question specializes in. This helps customers feel confident when clicking on the web address. This helps customers to remember the domain name. This helps customers to not have any confusion whatsoever.
Customers need to have an easy time finding what it is that they are looking for. By having exact match domains, they are able to search for the item they want and easily find the solution since there is no confusion. The average consumer is not professionally trained about how to do internet searches. That is why it is critical to make finding the website of any company one that will be easily found and understood. While it is important to avoid confusion, make searching easy and describe what the company does in an exact match domain, there is also another reason it is such an important choice to make.
The simple fact of the matter is that having exact match domains helps websites’ search engine rankings to be much better. Search engines use algorithms to decide which websites should be put at the top of the search results. These algorithms are based on a variety of factors and change continuously. Something that has been discovered, however, is that exact match domain names have proven to have better results with search engine optimization. That’s why a website that sells DISH Network, for example, should have the term, ‘DISH Network’ in the domain name if possible. Indeed, there are several benefits to having exact match domain names. So be sure to do that when selecting the website domain name for any webpage.
This is a guest post by Eric Rea.
4 WordPress SEO Tips To Help Optimize Your Blog
After you’ve signed up for your free WordPress account it can be a little daunting trying to give your blog proper SEO optimization. Lucking there are so many free plugins and guides online that you can optimize your site in no time. Here are some simple steps you can take in the next 15 minutes.
1. Optimize URL Structure:
Your first step is going into the permalinks section; you will find this under your settings tab. It gives you a few options to choose from.
You will want to choose the last option “custom structure.” In the empty field you will want to enter /%category%/%postname%/. This will automatically assign your category and postname section as your URLs.
2. Prevent Your Archives from being indexed:
Yoast has a great plugin that takes care of this for you. Simply download and install it for free and use the following settings.
While you are under this settings tab you can choose whether or not to use the www in your root domain. We would suggest using the www for your URL structure. Since the categories and postnames are going to be used as your URLs you want to use rich keywords phrases.
3. Blogroll Optimization:
Your blogroll links really do not need to be on every page. Google is not going to count them anyhow so why not stop all the duplicate content and site wide links and just have them appear on your homepage.
4. Related Post
Give your old post some link love with the simple “Yet Another Related Post Plugin”. With a name like that how can you not want to install it. It really works well and I would suggest just using the default settings at first to see how you like it before making changes.
I have also found that these leads to more page views per visit. Because of their nature blog post usually have a high bounce rate but this little add-on can entice someone to keep reading.
Summary:
These are just a few tips that will help you get started on optimizing your WordPress blog. By taking full advantage of all that WordPress has available and inputting your own creativity you can create a unique and successful blog.
Of course the most important part of your blog is content. No amount of plugins or optimization can fix bad content so make sure you nail the SEO basics and then get back to churning out great content.
If you do however want to diver deeper http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ is about the best guide you will ever hope to find. Oh and one last thing…I would suggest just looking these plugins up from within the WordPress console because it makes installation quick and painless.
Keyword Research – another oldie but goodie. To reap rewards from a good SEO campaign, you need to select powerful keyword that have high volume and are attainable in terms of rankings. Simultaneously, you can also search for “long tail” keywords that are highly targeted, even if they have very low volume. The traffic from long tail keywords have to convert at an extremely high ration. We see this all too often: people running high budget campaigns to websites that have not implemented appropriate keyword research and selection. This minimizes the benefits gained from a link popularity and SEO campaign.
In this article we will go back to basics again and give you detailed information on how to select profitable keywords for your website.
Finding Keyword Gold
The key to keyword research is finding keywords that have a high volume of search traffic with a low amount of competing pages. These are the “keyword gold” phrases that will lead to high rankings and targeted traffic. Trying to rank for keywords that have a high amount of competing pages may be completely ineffective as it may not be realistic for your site to rank for those keywords. For example, if you have a small dealership selling used cars in Valencia, CA – you will NOT want to try to compete for the keyword “used cars” – it is too competitive and there are too many “giants” competing for these terms. You would want to focus on targeted phrases like “used cars Valencia” or “used vehicles Valencia” as these are more attainable. Optimizing for keywords that are not attainable will only result in disappointment – you will waste your budget and efforts going after these keywords, and find yourself not ranking or receiving targeted traffic. So we recommend choosing keywords where you can realistically rank in the top 10, even if they have lower search volume.
So how do you determine these two factors? We’ll start by using Google’s Keyword Sandbox tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Establish Search Volume
Start by typing a keyword into this tool based on how you think your customers will find you. Be as detailed as possible. Also, it’s important to use “exact” in the “match type” column to get more accurate results. For example, start by typing in Used Cars into the keyword search box:
We typically recommend using the “global monthly search volume” column as it reflects more accurately general keyword search volume over time. This tool will tell you just how many people are searching for the phrases that are relevant to your website. Select keywords that are highly specific to your site/business – the more targeted, the better.
Click on “export to CSV for excel” so you can get these in a list.
You can then keep fine-tuning and adding other keywords that are increasingly relevant to your business / site. Search and export them all so you will create a comprehensive list of keywords. Once you have them all in excel, go through these keywords and select only the most relevant ones for your website/business, and delete all of the rest. These keywords will give you an idea of what people are searching for.
Establish Competition in Google
Then, go to Google and search for each of the keywords on your list, using the following qualifier: allintitle:keyword. At the top right, you will see the number of pages in Google’s database that contain this keyword in the title:
Enter in the number of competing pages into a new column in your excel sheet.
Determining Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)
Then, in a third column, create a formula where you divide the number of searches from the Google Keyword tool by the number of pages in Google. This will give you the Keyword Effectiveness Index for each of the keywords, or the KEI.
Once you have a number for each of the keywords, then you can look for the keywords that have the highest KEI – this indicates that they have high search volume with a low number of competing pages.
For example, if we were looking at the following 3 keywords:
Out of these keywords, the ideal keyword to go after would be “used cars sales”, as it has the highest KEI.
You can then sort your list from highest to lowest and that will help you get a better idea of which keywords are the most valuable keywords for you to target.
The disadvantages of using KEI as a measurement
Keep in mind, however, that this is a very broad method of searching for keywords and doesn’t take some critical aspects into consideration, such as the quality of the competition or the authority of the sites competing for those same keywords. For example, you may find a keyword that has a very high KEI and looks like it’s incredibly attainable. However, if you manually look at the sites and study their backlinks, you may find that they are very authoritative sites that will not be easy to compete with. Therefore, KEI should only be a “stepping stone” into your keyword selection process. The benefit is that you can have a better idea of what keywords may simply not be attainable and this step can be fundamental in “whittling” down your list.
Sometimes you can select the keywords simply by using common sense and intuition and the KEI measurement.
Combining KEI with Competitive Backlink Analysis
If you want to take keyword selection to another level, you will have to do some competitive analysis for each of the keywords. Our preferred method is the following:
Set up the SEO for Firefox application. Then search for your keywords in Google while the application is turned on. Once you get the results for all of the top 10 results, click on “export to CSV”.
Once we have these in excel, we then apply a formula to find the Average, Standard Deviation, and Median for the Yahoo backlinks of each of the keywords searched for. This will give you an idea of how competitive each of the keywords are based on the backlinks and/or any of the other data you wish to add from this report. It also helps you to gain an idea of the statistics for some of the sites that you will be competing with.
This is what the formulas look like:
Average: =AVERAGE(L2:L11)
Standard Deviation: =STDEV(L2:L11)
Median: =MEDIAN(L2:L11)
Once you have all of this data, enter it into your excel sheet. Your excel sheet will look like this:
Now, looking at this data tells a completely different story. If we were simply looking at KEI, we would’ve chosen “used cars sales” as the ideal keyword. However, once we look at the competition, we find that this keyword requires too many links in order to rank. If your site is new and/or has a low authority status and a low number of inbound links, this level of competition will be unattainable in the beginning. As your site gains authority status and you increase the number of backlinks, you can reconsider competing for keywords that have a higher competition level.
Consequently, this data indicates that the best keyword to select would be “Used cars Dealer”, as it has the lowest Yahoo links median. Although the traffic to that keyword is significantly less and there is a high number of competing pages in Google, those competing pages have low authority status and a low number of inbound links thus presenting a more attainable goal in terms of rankings.
Summary
Using this time consuming method, you can attain quantifiable data to help you select the best keywords to target for your market. After doing this for some time, you will develop an “eye” for this and may not need to do so much work.
If you want a much simpler, faster method, then please read Striking Keyword Gold:
http://www.authoritydomains.com/blogs/seo/striking-keyword-gold.php
This will give you a quick and easy way to find keywords to target. It will not be comprehensive but can help you find highly targeted and “available” keywords for your campaign.
Happy hunting!
