actinic
online marketing blog
Monday, September 17, 2007
Purple Venusian Cucumbers - The First Step To Better Google Ranking
Whenever people ask me how they can get higher rankings on Google for their web site, the first question I ask is, "Higher rankings for what?" Anyone could get a high ranking in Google for 'Purple venusian cucumbers' - but what's the point? They don't exist, and nobody is looking for them.
Rather than wasting time on guesswork, the first step in achieving better results on Google is to find out what 'key phrases' people actually use when they search for the type of things you sell. Incorporating these phrases in strategic places within your web pages will greatly improve your chances of attracting visitors who are searching for them.
1) Build A Seed List
There are a number of tools that can help you, but first stage you need a seed list - a very broad list of all the words and phrases you can think of that relate to your business and products. This should be as comprehesive as possible, and you will need to think a bit outside the box to be sure of covering all the bases. For more ideas, check out Aaron Wall's article on the SEO Book site.
2) Find The Most Promising Niches
Next, take a look at Wordtracker, http://www.wordtracker.com/. You can use the free version at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. But £14 will give you access to the full version for a week. This will give you more comprehensive results, and also automate parts of the process and save you hours of time.
Wordtracker searches its own Thesaurus and also interrogates the search engines of your choice to find literally hundreds of search phrases that are relevant to your business. It finds out which are the most popular key phrases, and also counts the number of web pages that each search term returns. In this way it identifies niches where there are plenty of potential customers, but not too much competition.
SEO Book (http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/) is another tool that can provide relevant UK-based search data, but for Google and MSN it only delivers estimated results.
3) Where Is The Money?
Having identified which key phrases are most popular, and which ones attrach the least competition, you need to decide which ones will deliver visitors who are most likely to make a purchase. You can probably make a first pass through your list and eliminate some that are clearly irrelevant, or seem unlikely to represent a potential customer - searches that are plainly of an academic nature, for example.
4) Check Out The Competition
Next, you can do a bit of competitive research. What terms do your competitors think are important? Go to Keyword Count (http://www.keywordcount.com/) and type in the web address of your main competitor, and it will tell you which words and phrases are the ones most used on his home page. Take the top ten or so phrases, then repeat for a few other competitors and make a master list. Compare this list with the one you got from WordTracker. Look for popular phrases that seem relevant to what you sell, that are not widely used by your competitors. These will hopefully point to a quiet but profitable niche where you can start establishing yourself. (You might choose to take on your competitors head to head for the most popular terms, or you might want to wait until you are in a stronger position).
5) Get To Work On Your Pages
Choose some relevant pages and optimise each one for 3-4 key phrases, optimising your home page for the most important ones. A good place to start is to search Google in the format 'site:www.yoururl.com key phrase'. This will list all the relevant pages of your own site, ranked for that phrase. Other things being equal, the easiest page to optimise for a given phrase will be the one that ranks highest already.
Provided you also have a reasonable number and quality of links pointing from other relevant sites to your own, this process should significantly improve the traffic you get from the main search engines.
# posted by Bruce Townsend @ 9:20 AM 
http://www.keywordcount.com seems to have stopped working. Well it isn't as of now! Shame.
# posted by 
: October 3, 2007 9:27 AM
Hi
As with WordTracker you can also try the KeywordDiscovery - Keyword Research Tool which has a much larger keyword database. Great for tail end and niche keyword research.
Cheers
Nicole
# posted by nicole : October 11, 2007 7:10 PM
For your keyword research try using KeywordSpy.com - a keyword research technology that will help you know what keywords your competitors are using and how it generates money for them, you can use those keywords to drive traffic to your site and give your business the exposure it needs. It offers Free trials.- http://www.keywordspy.com/
# posted by 
michelle : March 5, 2008 7:54 PM
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