While many factors influence the rankings of a web site, any
search engine optimization effort isn’t worth even
a second of your time without one and single unknown: relevant
and competitive keywords.
Let’s examine an example: a local moving company decided
to optimize its website. It knows (or assumes that it does)
that the most popular keywords for their type of business
are “movers” and “moving”. At a first
glance, looks like everything’s fine: the keywords
seem to be relevant, and should produce good results. However,
there are two mistakes made here. The first one is keyword
relevancy. What’s the use for our local moving company
of people that are looking for “movers” or “moving” in
Denver, CO, Boston, MA or New York, NY, if they are located
and offering services in and around San Francisco only?
Another mistake is keyword effectiveness. It’ll take
much more time and effort to get top rankings for such popular
and competitive general keywords as “moving” and “movers” than
to get same results for something more specific and relevant,
such as “movers San Francisco” or “moving
San Francisco”. Not only are these keywords more likely
to convert visitors to buyers, but also it’s a much
easier and less time-consuming task. If the world we live
in consists of atoms, the smallest and most important particles
in search engine optimization world are keywords. In fact,
there’s nothing complicated about them, if one remembers
three things about keywords: relevancy, effectiveness and
Wordtracker.
Wordtracker.com is an UK based company that offers an irreplaceable
search engine marketing service tool: keyword research and
analysis. It helps to find and pick keywords that are both
relevant and competitive. Relevant mean that the keywords
are related to your website, and that these are the words
people are typing in Google, Yahoo or MSN in order to find
your kind of business. Another important factor in determining
a “good” keyword is its effectiveness. Let’s
say we have a keyword “movers” which has a record
of appearing in Google search list for 1009 times; there
are 15400000 different web pages competing for this keyword.
This means that this keyword’s effectiveness index
is 1009/15400000=0.066. This index shows that the keyword
is far too competitive and you’ll probably end up somewhere
in the middle of Google’s search results if you try
to optimize your webpage for this particular keyword.
A rule of thumb is to find keywords that are quite popular
and at the same time have fewer webpages competing for them.
A good keyword is considered to have an effectiveness index
of over 100, although anything in between 10 and 100 can
be targeted as well.
Needless to say, without having the right keywords that
are both relevant and competitive it’s impossible to
succeed in any search engine optimization campaign. Without
knowing your niche words, you’ll probably end up competing
against web sites with thousands of inbound links optimized
by search engine optimization gurus and will be lost in millions
of search results – no one will even ever find out
you exist. On the other hand, all it takes to get your web
traffic from 0 to couple hundreds a day might be something
as simple and cost-effective as Wordtracker.
Marty Pukstys is a co-owner of Search
Engine Marketing Service LLC and specializes in search
engine optimization services such as meta
tags optimization services
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