Is your increased traffic a result of hard work or coincidence?
I got a few extra comments this week since I installed the SEO plugins from last week’s lesson. But I’m not really sure if that is a coincidence – perhaps the subject of SEO is popular right now (perhaps! ha.) and this has nothing to do with google searchers finding me. I’ve been reading several websites and books this week with more SEO data on “keywords”.
What are keywords – and do they matter?
Keywords are the words that when typed into a search engine, will bring up your website – right at the top (or near to). Oh, and you probably want the keywords to be useful. The author of the e-book I’m reading on SEO (I’ll tell you about it later) ranks No. ONE on google for “women painted to look like a tiger”. And this is not on a tiger-like blog, nor a body-painting blog- merely a marketing blog. So yes, YOU can rank #1 for something. But the trick is picking a useful something to rank for.
Another factor in choosing a keyword is the competition! How many OTHER people are also trying to go for that keyword. Note – anything ‘free’ will have lots of competition. If I were to try to optimize for “women painted to look like a tiger”, I could. And it wouldn’t take long to do it. But lets try and go for something with a little more commercial draw, shall we?
SEO Hands On: Go to Google, search for your desired niche in broad terms
For an example (& I was hoping this wasn’t the case), I entered “wordpress”. 288,000,000. That’s how many pages have “wordpress” as a keyword. And, which result goes to the top? Yes, its wordpress – but is it wordpress.com or wordpress.org? Apparently the better optimized of the two sites, is www.wordpress.org. The results are:
1. wordpress.org
2. wordpress.org/download
3. wordpress.com
4. codex.wordpress.org (this is documentation subdomain)
5. Wikipedia – wordpress entry
6. Smashing Magazine – 100 Excellent Free WordPress themes (see – I told you “Free” does well!)
I have a feeling this keyword stuff could get a bit addicting. I just know that there is a lot of good data that we could gather from this – but for a while, I had no idea
- which data is important?
- what am I looking for?
- how does this relate to my website?
Your homework:
Your website/ niche blog will eventually have the content and optimization to rank well for your niche. IF you pick your keywords carefully. For example, if you want to rank as a blog web designer, then you can stop trying to use the keyword ‘designer’. Unless your website outlives you, and then some, it won’t rank on the first page of search results for ‘designer’. But how do you find (and label) your particular niche? Go for really ‘broad’ terms at this point. Something that people will search for, and something that a potential buyer might search for. In the above example, we’d start wide with “designer” and possibly, “website design“.
1. Go to wordtracker‘s Free Keyword Tool. I think you only get like 5 searches with the free tool per day, so don’t waste them! Enter your ‘broad’ keyword, ie: “designer” and click on “hit me”. Of the 100 that show up, you will get some good ideas for keywords. From what I gather, this is where there is some guess work involved. You don’t want the word “designer”. And we know you don’t want “alligator skin theme for wordpress 2.3″. Somewhere in between the most-searched-for term, and the nobody-searches-for term, is where you want to be. Write down the top 5 keywords that you are interested in. we can come back here if they turn out to be duds.
3. Go to google and search for your first keyword. I searched “wordpress”, and at the top right hand side of the results page you will find the total number of search results. For wordpress, 288,000,000 pages have the term “wordpress” in it.
4. Now a wee bit of math to create our keyword ‘rating’, take the # searches from WordTracker (wordpress has 883) and divide by the number of results in google. 883/288000000 = .000031. For comparison’s sake, lets say my 2nd keyword search was “customize wordpress themes”. This had a search # of 9 on WordTracker, and google gets 39,700 hits. 9 divided by 39,700 = .000227. So this would be the better option to optimize for – it is closer to zero. So now, even though wordpress has far more searches 883 – it has too much competition to be viable. And ‘customize wordpress themes’ only has 9 searches, and yet has far less competition bringing in a rating of .000227. Honestly, neither of these are good viable options. Here’s a good keyword for a designer’s site: ”WordPress Custom Designers”. This has a search # of 2. And only 120 pages with that exact phrase in it. Our equation is 2 /120 = .016667. THAT is a far better rating than .000031, don’t you think?
We’re done the math. You can pay attention again.
You have now a few keywords that you can use in your blog!!
Of course there is far more information out there, and waaaaay more scientific explanations. I really appreciated Naomi’s book, SEO School, from which I gleaned nearly all the information for this post. It is truly down-to-earth, and soooo entertaining. Yeah, I know. I’ve no idea how she makes a topic like SEO entertaining -you’ll have to read it. It goes further indepth then this post is aiming for. And by the time you are done, you’ll have a good appreciation of how it all works. Warning – her language is absolutely ATROCIOUS! And I’m not talking about the spelling either. This is not something you read to your toddler. And you probably don’t want to read it in front of anyone who will judge you when you burst out laughing at the, ahem, English. Just sayin’.
