Target the right keyword phrase
Date Written on 06/9/2004Article Written by: Albert Ghergich
http://www.seoptimizational.com Staff
Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
So it's a crap shoot right? You sit around with your friends and take a guess on what people are searching for when they are looking for (insert what your site is about here). Well, that is one way to due it, although not a very good way. A better way would be to make use of a site called digital point and find out for yourself.
So get out that pad of paper with all the keywords that you and your friends came up with, and let's do some keyword searching http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion. Just enter you text and you will see how many people are searching for your keyword phrase. This is a free resource so it is not pulling results directly from Google. The keyword phrases are taken from a company called Word Tracker. They give out free results from MSN. So the actual number of searches done across all engines is usually a lot higher. The Overture results are from Yahoo's pay per click. So the results can vary but you will get a really good idea. Once you have found all your target phrases it is a good idea to visit www.wordtracker.com and buy a one day pass or maybe a weekly pass and get actual results from most major engines. A one day pass will run you around 8 bucks and is a must for and SEO. Try it and you will love it, it will take out the guess work for you by ranking what keywords that it thinks you should use, based upon an analysis of the competition.
However, let me show you how to get a good idea what keyword phrase to target without spending any money. If you understand this concept, it will help your SEO efforts tremendously.
We will pretend you are selling golf bags. I am not sure why I thought of that
because I have never golfed in my life but let's go with it anyhow. You should
have a large list of phrases to choose from and one of them will of course be
the keyword phrase 'golf bag.' So type that exact phrase in Google. One of the
first things you should look at is the number of results given. Look up at the
top right and you should see something close to this: Results 1 - 10 of about
3,260,000 for golf bag. This shows us how many pages are indexed
for that keyword phrase. 3 million pages mean that golf bag is a competitive
phrase but is not out of the question to try and rank a page for by any means.
There are 2 huge things to look for and one small one. Lets start with the small
one first. Visit the first few sites on the few pages of results and look at
their pr. While this is by no means the best way to judge a site you can get
an idea of the competition. So if you see Pr 7s 8s and 9s you know that it will
be harder to rank for that phrase than if you see 4s 5s and 6s. (Pr stands for
page rank…download the Google toolbar if you don't have it already to
see it.) A quick check show that the top 2 sites are pr 4 and the 2 under that
are Pr 5. You see Pr is not everything; a well optimized page can overcome lower
Pr to rank better for the same keyword phrase. Well, that gives a quick idea
that this may be a good target for us.
Let's see how many people are using our keyword phrase in the title of their site. Use the search command intitle: golf bag. This shows us that only around 24 thousand or the 3 million pages are even using the keyword phrase golf bag in their title, which cuts your competition down to size really quickly. You can narrow this even further by searching like this intitle: 'golf bag' this shows the pages that have the exact search phrase in the title. Well that brought us down to 16,000 which is quite nice, that number can really drop if the phrase does not always go together. A search for intitle: 'Nike golf bag' brought in 311 results but if you search for just Nike golf bag you get over 3 hundred thousand results.
The next search you can do shows you how many people have the keyword phrase in a text link, which is another good way to boost a site rank. Search using the command intitle:"golf bag" inanchor:"golf bag" the inanchor part is for the text link. This is a good command that shows how many pages are using the term golf bag in their title and in their link text, around 10k which is very manageable. Remember the top ranking site was only a Pr 4. If you optimize your title, links, and text on every page of you site for a specific phrase and go get quality relevant link that point to your site you will have a Pr 4 or 5 in about 6 months if you do it right so you can see this is a good phrase once you dig under the hood.
I hope you visited digital point because you would have noticed something huge. Around 150 people a day search for the keyword phrase golf bag but around 900 search for golf bags. While search engines ignore upper and lower case, they pay attention to plurals. So, let's test golf bags out. intitle:"golf bags" inanchor:"golf bags" produces 5k pages. So, we have a term that has less competition but way more people searching for it, so you should optimize your page for golf bags instead of golf bag. A search for intitle:"Nike golf bags" inanchor:"Nike golf bags" show only 93 pages down from 311 before for Nike golf bag. After consulting digital point we find that 8 people a day search for Nike golf bag while 40 a day search for Nike golf bags, and again it's less competition. That would be a great targeted keyword phrase for an interior page of your site. I think I am off to start a new website selling golf bags lol. I hope this helps you understand how to find keyword phrases to optimize your website for.
