Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [60]
Simply focusing on a single element of marketing, such as search engine optimization, without including other factors of usability, analytics, design, marketing, and customer testing, neglects the necessary components of building a successful campaign. Everything must be done in context in order to effectively reach a targeted audience and build a long-term association.
Review and Hands-On
Review your site by looking at pages that are about specific ideas or topics. Have you used the keyword in the prominent text areas of the site, such as the title text, headline, headings, and body copy?
In evaluating the incoming links from other websites, who is linking to you, and do any of those sites use anchor text in their linking?
Run a comparison between your site and sites that are ranking ahead of you for some key phrases. Don’t be too general in your keyword selection. Select something a bit more detailed (sometimes three to four words), and see who is ranking ahead of you. Create a spreadsheet and begin to make comparisons of the structure and primary text areas of the pages in the rankings and the most logically relevant page of your website. Compare the text areas, back-links, back-link anchor text, navigation, and recurrence of words.
Chapter 6 will go deeper into selecting and using keywords on the page, so don’t get locked into thinking that simple repetition of a keyword on a page is the key to rankings; there is much more to all of this, and SEO is just the start.
Chapter 6
Week 3: Jump into Keyword Research
SEO is a great foundation, keywords are the foundation of optimization. Many people understand the concept of keywords but neglect the simplest method of understanding how to develop the words that are most important. As with the rest of this book, this chapter is focused on developing the skills necessary for online marketing, rather than being a survey of available tools. The tools are only as good as the person performing the research and analysis. This chapter focuses on the types of keyword-research analysis and on understanding searcher behavior. By developing skills to gear the keyword research toward your business goals, you’ll be able to attract searchers and persuade them to take action.
Chapter Contents
Monday: Call It What It Is
Tuesday: Develop Keyword-Research Skills
Wednesday: Understand the Buying Cycle
Thursday: Find Searcher Behavior Types
Friday: Organize for Optimization
Monday: Call It What It Is
The first rule of keyword research is simple: call it what it is.
Get rid of the corporate jargon; remove the fancy PR “fluff” and the marketing hype. Searchers don’t have your internal language on their mind. They have questions and problems and are searching for solutions and answers.
Searchers Search Based on Need
Here is one of my favorite examples of what happens when a web page delivers content too focused on brand and not enough on what the product actually is. Diapers.com sells a product known as Boudreaux’s Butt Paste (see Figure 6-1).
Figure 6-1: Diapers.com’s Boudreaux’s Butt Paste page
This begins our first foray into keyword forensics. There is a distinct difference between brand names and functions. If your brand name does not mirror the function, then you have an issue to overcome. Searchers are looking for an answer, in other words, a function, and your brand name may not be known to them. Because of this, when a search is for the function of a product, the results do not match the brand name.
This is the case of Boudreaux’s Butt Paste. The typical parent is searching for diaper rash ointment, but that phrase appears only once on the Diapers.com product page. In the navigation, the product appears under the category of Creams & Ointments. The headings, descriptions, images, and context of the page all surround the concept of