Some people achieve a top 10 placement
in a major search engine and get plenty of traffic. Others do the
same but get nothing. Why?
Simple. The first group selected keywords that
many people are searching on, and the second did not!
"If you've read past newsletters, you
probably know that the most important first step to marketing your
Web site to the search engines is proper keyword selection. I've
said it before, and I'll say it again, if you target the wrong keywords,
all your efforts will be in vain!
For example, if you optimize your Web
pages for keywords that you think are important, but few, if anybody
on the Web searches for those keywords, then you can have all the
number one rankings you want and still gain no new traffic from them.
Sometimes people use WebPosition Gold and achieve many top rankings
but then they complain that they didn't receive any traffic from
their efforts. At first they tend to blame the software. However,
in almost all cases, the explanation is simple. They targeted the
WRONG keywords!
Another danger of choosing keywords
is selecting keywords that are TOO popular. Selecting keywords that
are overly broad and popular poses two problems. First, if the keyword
is too popular, it will require more work than it's worth to achieve
a top ten ranking. Second, and most importantly, if the phrase is
too broad, then the traffic you receive will not be targeted enough,
and thereby will not result in as many sales as a highly targeted
phrase.
For example, we sell software. However,
we don't attempt to optimize our site for just the keyword software
for both the reasons mentioned above. On Google alone there are over
41 million matches for the keyword "software." However,
for something more specific like search engine ranking software,
there are only 75,000 matches. Still a large number, but not impossible
to achieve. One of our WebPosition resellers has the number one slot
on that phrase demonstrating that someone with the right tools can
achieve top rankings if they put their mind to it.
The question is, what is the best way
to choose the right keywords? Finding the BEST keywords can help
you achieve greater amounts of traffic with less effort on your part.
More traffic for less time spent, a desirable goal right? In the
past, I've given many tips on how to do this and pointed people to
the free keyword service at www.goto.com. The problem with www.goto.com
is that their servers are not terribly reliable (often slow or unresponsive),
and the amount of flexibility in finding optimal keywords is rather
limited. For example, they give counts of how many times a keyword
was searched, but they give no indication at how competitive those
keywords are in relation to their popularity.
I'm happy to report that I have discovered
a MUCH better way for discovering the best keywords available, and
how to accomplish it in a shorter amount of time. There's a new service
called WordTracker based
in the U.K. that has no equal in the industry to my knowledge.
I've tested several keyword products
and services over the years and found none that worked better than
Goto.com's less than stellar keyword service. Without any better
choices, I've continued to recommend using them in conjunction with
the many tips we give in finding the right keywords, until now.
If you've tried Goto.com, you know
that you can enter a keyword like "travel" and it will
return all the popular variations of travel like "air travel," "travel
reservations," etc. along with how many times the keyword was
searched during the previous month.
Unfortunately, Goto.com has several
flaws. It condenses terms so that "bank" and "banks" are
both lumped under the singular form of the word. Some search engines
differentiate between singular and plural keywords so it helps to
know how much traffic can be expected from each. Goto.com can't help
you here, but WordTracker let's you do both a compressed search like
Goto.com, as well as a simple search that lists singular and plural
terms separately.
1. WordTracker will estimate the
amount of "projected" traffic you can expect from each
search engine if you achieve an optimal ranking for that keyword.
They do this by taking the known popularity of the search in relation
to other statistics they have acquired. Admittedly, there is no
way to predict exactly how much traffic you will receive for a
ranking since that will vary on many things such as how good your
summary description is, how targeted the keyword is to your site,
and the exact ranking you achieve. I think they could still improve
on the accuracy of their "projected" number of hits,
but what they have is useful already.
2. As with Goto.com, WordTracker
will give you a count of how many times a keyword was searched
over a period of time. One difference is that WordTracker's database
is always current with old data being bumped out in favor of new
data each day. They pull their results from multiple metacrawlers
on the Web.
Some search terms surge and fall
in popularity. Therefore, seeing changes in trends more quickly
will give you a competitive edge. In addition, they have a cool
feature that lets you see the top 1000 most popular keywords for
both the last 36 hours or the last 54 days. You can check either
of these at any time if you're an entrepreneur looking for up and
coming new trends on the Web.
3. WordTracker has
features for the professional Web consultant by allowing you to
setup multiple "project" files. You can create projects
for different Web sites or clients where your various keyword lists
that you accumulate are saved and organized for you. There's even
a handy export option that lets you send keyword lists to a list
that can be pasted quickly into WebPosition's Reporter, or you
can have it e-mail the list to a friend or client.
4. One of the best things about
WordTracker is its ability to "brainstorm" for you. Many
consultants get paid big bucks to evaluate a business and come
up with a big list of highly targeted keywords and phrases. You'd
be surprised at how many excellent keywords and phrases you (or
your consultant) will overlook after you start getting second and
third opinions from different people. WordTracker solves this problem
by taking a single keyword or phrase from you, doing a search for
Web sites matching that keyword, and then extracting keywords from
their meta tags.
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WordTracker then
assembles a big list of dozens of keywords, many
from your competitors or related sites, that you may never
have thought
of. You can then go down the list and check only
the words you deem are appropriate to your site. Once you
do that, WordTracker
will then optionally go out and do a "competitive analysis" and
rank the keywords based on how often they are
searched AND how competitive they are. It estimates
the competitiveness
of the term by how many times it appears on the
Web for a search on a major search engine.
When doing a competitive analysis,
keywords that are searched often yet appear on the Web fewer
times are ranked the highest. In this way, you can easily locate
and target highly popular keywords that relatively few people
are competing for. If you optimize for these keywords, you then
gain MORE traffic for LESS work. Anything that allows me to get
better results for less work, I'm all for! (Yes, I admit it,
I prefer to be lazy when it comes right down to it).
If you've tried WordTracker in
the past and walked away, I'd encourage you to give
it another try. I originally evaluated them earlier this year
and decided
they needed to polish their service more, expand
their database, and fix some technical issues before they were
ready for "prime-time." I'm
happy to report that they have been very responsive
to my suggestions and criticism. I believe they care about
their customers since
they send a follow up e-mail to everyone who tries
the service asking them how they could improve the service.
It's obvious
they've been listening since they now have dozens
of different search options to choose from in a fairly slick
online interface.
One criticism I had was that the
size of their database appears to be much smaller than Goto.com's.
They admit this is true although they are continuing to expand
it from the 30 million records to potentially 100 million down
the road while keeping it more current than any other service.
Many more obscure terms return only a couple of "hits" in
their database.
However, they make a good point
that if it's only searched a couple times out of 30 million searches,
the traffic you'd receive from even a number one ranking on that
type of keyword across all the major engines would not be worth
the effort to optimize for. I tend to agree that there is a law
of diminishing returns. If a keyword is not searched a reasonable
number of times, you should not waste your time with it.
Despite this, WordTracker covers their bases. If
you want a second or third opinion, they have an option to search
the Goto.com database as well as the 7Search database right from
their interface.
I ultimately have few gripes with WordTracker. If
I were to wish for one improvement, I'd say their help files could
be a little better. They actually have a lot of online help if
you take the time to look for it. They are busy adding more hyperlinks
and pop up windows to explain all the terminology no matter where
you are in the program. If you were to get confused, check out
their help or FAQ, and if you still have questions, just e-mail
them. Their support from my experience appears to be pretty responsive.
WordTracker charges
a fee based on how long you wish to use the service. Pricing
starts around $19.95* for a one week subscription. However, this
is plenty
of time to build your "optimal" list of keywords
to target since they make it so easy to do. They also have
longer term options
if you're optimizing a lot of sites over the course of the
year, or wish to stay current on what the best keywords are
at any given
time. If you're serious about optimizing your Web site, the
one year subscription may be well worth the investment. If
it helps, I've
seen no better service regardless of the price. The help
it provides in brainstorming keywords is worth the price
in itself.
You can test the waters with their free trial that
takes you through a wizard style interface to select and find keywords.
The trial is limited in how many keywords it will return as well
as in other features. It does give you a good feel for some of
the things WordTracker is capable of.
The free trial is somewhat deceptive
in a way since it shows you only a fraction of the number of cool
search options that you receive in the full version. For example,
the full version has many options such as simple search, exact search,
compressed search, comprehensive search, keyword universe, full search,
misspellings search, keyword projects, top 1000 reports, and stuff
you probably never even thought of. They are apparently confident
you'll be impressed since they offer an unconditional money-back
guarantee if you're not fully satisfied with the paid service."
*Wordtracker now has a daily rate
of £4.20, but in the opinion of Pixelators Anonymous, for
beginners, the weekly rate is going to give you the most benefit
of this powerful program; it does so much that you will want to
spend the additional time utilizing all the reports that are generated.
You can, however, spend one day with this program and your meta
keywords will never be the same again. This is a powerful program.
"If you are serious about search engine
optimization, then WordTracker is
an essential investment, a must have resource for any
search engine marketing professional. It combines both a respectable
search term database with tools that make mining the
information
easy." Danny Sullivan
Search Engine Watch
"I
have been
providing search engine
consulting
on the web
since late 1995, this is
the tool
I have been
waiting for. In my business
it is vital
for me
to know exactly
what is being searched
on
the web. Wordtracker does
that for me. Also
for my company to be
effective for our clients
we must have accurate
information as to what
is being currently
searched on the web.
Go To.com's database
was inadequate for
our needs because it
only represented 3%
of the market and did
not word stem, which
made finding important
keywords related to
our client's business
very difficult.We have
also used Search Spy's
database. But after
extensive testing,
we discovered it contained
numerous instances
of SPAM throughout
their index.Our emails
to Wordtracker have
always been
answered
in a timely
fashion
and on one
occasion
a phone call
was placed
to make sure
our issue
was resolved.
That
is the support
we need in
this industry."Jerry
West
Director of Internet Marketing
Webmarketingnow
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