Online
Marketing Newsletter
- August 2003
Keyword
research is a vital
first step in online marketing
When it comes to online marketing, keyword research,
that is finding out what keyword phrases people
in your target market(s) are searching on (such
as “red widget manufacturers”) is
a critical first step.
We
use the results of keyword research for almost
every phase of an online marketing; optimizing
the pages of a web site to improve search engine
positioning, link building (finding potential
sites to add a link to your site and possibly
advertise on), as well as finding targeted email
lists and newsletters letters to sponsor, and
more.
We
get many calls from people asking us to help
improve their results with one or more specific
keywords phrases (I’ll refer to keyword
phrases as either just keywords or search terms).
We have to ask them, “have you done the
research on these phrases and you’re sure
they’re important keywords?”
More
often than not they haven’t done any research,
but they ‘know’ these are important
search terms. When we do the keyword research
for the client we often discover that very few
people are actually searching on the keyword(s)
they thought were important. Focusing on the
wrong keywords can sabotage your online marketing
efforts!
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How
we discover the most
important Keywords for a web site
We use a database that contains a large sample
of the searches performed daily (over 300 million
searches) on some major search engines during
the previous 60 days. We go through you web
site (if there is one), any other business communications
you can provide us, as well as competitor web
sites looking for words and phrases that people
might search on. The database system shows us
how many people actually searched on that keyword
within the sample database and it calculates
an estimate of how many times people search
on the keyword everyday across all major search
engines.
At
the same time, the keyword database system analyzes
up to about 200 web pages that contain the keyword
phrase. From those pages it displays a long
list of other, related keywords so we can determine
if any of those keywords apply.
And
there’s more, the system looks up each
keyword in a thesaurus and displays those results
so we can see if there are other related terms
that might apply.
When
we are done with a keyword research project
you can be sure we have found an evaluated most,
if not all, of the keywords that are important
to your web site. The system even shows us how
much competition there is for the keywords from
other web pages indexed at important search
engines like Google.
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When should keyword Research be done?
Ideally keyword research should be done before
you start designing a web site. We use the results
to influence the text that you or we write for
the web pages in order to improve the results
you’ll see with the search engines. We
also use the most important keywords to create
the tags (such as the meta tags I’m sure
many of you have heard about) that we imbed
within the code of the your pages that many
search engines read. In addition, we can use
the results of the keyword research to help
determine the names given to the web pages,
even to help to determine the most effective
domain name (yourname.com) to use for marketing
purposes.
The
results of the keyword research can even help
us determine what pages to include in your web
site as it may make sense to have some pages
that focus entirely on one or two important
search terms. In addition, we often find that
people are searching for information related
to your product or service. It can help to provide
this related information on your web site. In
time the search engines will index this information
and list these pages in the results of the searches
being performed. Some people will visit your
web site to read the information. While they
are reading the information they’ll also
be exposed to your sales messages included on
these pages and they will see the links to the
rest of your site and may be enticed to learn
more about your organization and the products
and services you provide.
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Using
keyword research to help
determine if a web site should be developed
In fact keyword research can even help you determine
if it makes sense to build a web site in the
first place. If the primary goal of a planned
web site is to attract new prospects via search
engine marketing then a keyword research project
(a feasibility study) can help you determine
how many people are searching on important keyword
phases and the results can help you decide if
it makes sense to invest in a web site to try
to attract them
We
recently performed a keyword research project
for a Connecticut insurance company. They would
like to build a web site to attract people looking
for health insurance in Connecticut. But first
they needed to know if enough people are searching
on related keyword phrases that include the
word Connecticut or CT. If most people search
on broader health insurance search terms without
including a location then our client would be
in the very difficult situation of trying to
compete with a huge number of web pages on a
national basis.
In
our initial research we found almost 300 keyword
phrases related to the types of insurance they
carry! This is fairly typically. We usually
find a large number of related keywords that
the client didn’t think of. We then categorized
the keywords and narrowed the list down to a
‘short list’ of important related
keywords. We were then able to determine that
there are enough related searches being performed
every day that include the all important location
keywords to justify building and marketing a
web site to try to attract them. The client
is moving ahead with the web site project.
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Open
Directory Project getting back to normal
It
looks like The Open Directory's problems are
just about over. For months we've seen problems
at this important but troubled volunteer directory.
Very often submissions could not be completed.
More over the directory was unavialable during
most of the day.
The
Open Directory Project is a human-powered directory
supplying Google and many others. They are just
about completed doing a massive upgrade to the
directories backend, which includes the addition
of several new servers. George
Aspland
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