CHAPTER # 2:

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 Employing Keyword
Research Techniques and Tools

• In this chapter, we talk about picking and choosing your keywords. This is an
extremely important step. You might say the mantra of search engines
should be “keywords, keywords, keywords.” Search engine spiders (the bots
that go through your page gathering web page data) are looking for
keywords that match or closely relate to the search query.
•A keyword is a specific word or phrase a search engine looks for in its index
(the list of websites it looks at during a search), based on what the user
typed as the search query. For example, [cars] could be a key word for a
website that deals with restoring classic cars.
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 Brainstorming for keywords
• Afteryour theme is clear in your mind and you’ve clarified what your
business is really about, you have a good starting point for your keyword
brainstorming sessions.
• Brainstorming is an appropriate first step for choosing good keywords. At
this point, there are no bad keywords; you just want to compile a big list of
possibilities. Here are some possible viewpoints to consider and questions
you can ask yourself:
• » Natural language: What would I search for to try to find my product?
•» Customer mindset: How do regular people talk about the products or
services I offer?
• » Industry jargon: What do the experts call my products or services?
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 Building a subject outline

After you have a large list of

keywords that you might
want to use, your next step is
to create an outline using
those keywords.

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 Evaluating Keyword Research
• After you’ve done your research and your brainstorming, you have, with
luck, acquired a good, long list of keywords that can be used. Now it’s time
to figure out which ones you’ll actually be using.
• Infiguring out how often your keywords are searched for, you can use a
variety of tools for keyword evaluation. Using some of these tools, you can
monitor how often a certain keyword is searched, what the click-through
rates are, and whether it would be a good, usable keyword to keep. Some
tools you have to pay for, but there are free ones out there. A couple of
examples:
• Google Keyword Planner
• Search Engine Optimization/KSP

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 Evaluating Keyword Research…
• » Google Keyword Planner:
• Google has its own keyword research tool. You have to have a Google Ads
account to access the Keyword Planner keyword research tool located at
https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/. (Microsoft has a
keyword tool as well, which also requires you to establish an account.
• Find the tool login page at www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords.) Note that the
Keyword Planner gives you additional suggestions based on seed keywords,
competitiveness of keywords, and average number of searches for
keywords. What’s really cool are the different ways of breaking down
keyword popularity by mobile devices and location of searchers.
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 Evaluating Keyword Research…

• » Search Engine Optimization/KSP:

• Bruce Clay, Inc., provides a free keyword tool at
https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/free-keyword-research-tool/. Simply type
your keywords into the Please Enter Keywords box and click the Run KSP
button. You’ll get keyword counts, plus demographic information.

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 Evaluating Keyword Research…
• The following services are paid services, so you have to cough up a little bit
of cash for them. They actually do research and check out your competition
for you, so they might be something you want to invest in.
• Thatdoesn’t mean you get out of doing the brainstorming and researching
yourself; they just make it easier. Here are some paid services:
• SEOToolSet
• Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com)
• Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com)

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 Evaluating Keyword Research…
• » SEOToolSet:
• Inaddition to the free tools offered by Bruce Clay, Inc., you can also
subscribe to a suite of fully integrated SEO tools. There is now one version of
the SEOToolSet, and it’s available for $24.95 per month per project.
• » Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com):
•A keyword tracking service that you have to pay for, but they do offer free
trials. Several monthly and annual pricing plans are available starting at $27
per month.
• » Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com):
• Made by Trellian, this is another paid keyword tracking tool. You can
subscribe for $49.95 a month. 9
 Researching Client Niche Keywords
• Afteryou know the keywords your competition is using, it’s time to start
thinking about what your targeted visitors are using to search for your
products or services. The language the industry uses and the language the
customer uses are often two entirely different things.
• Forexample, people in the auto industry use the words auto or vehicle, but
the guy on the street is not going to refer to his Ford as his auto: He’s going
to call it his car. The same goes for search queries. Most people are not
looking for [classic automobiles]; they’re going to be looking for [classic
cars].

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 Selecting the Proper Keyword Phrases
• When putting keywords in the content of your site, make sure that the
words surrounding those keywords are also good, searchable keywords.
• » Classic car customization in Cheras
• » Reupholstery for classic Mustangs
• » Chrome, wheels, and paint for classic automobiles
• » Kuala Lumpur classic cars
• These can all be used as headings for paragraphs or as links to their own
pages. Remember, search engines also look for keywords in hypertext links
(where clicking a word or phrase takes you to another page on the web)
within the page, and using a search phrase within the hyperlink leads to a
higher search rank for that phrase 11
 Reinforcing versus Diluting Your Theme
• If
you have a list of thousands of keywords that apply to your website,
unfortunately, you probably can’t use all those keywords — not unless you
have a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages, anyway.
• » Clarity: Are the keywords clear and concise?
•» Relevance: Do the keywords relate to what you’re actually offering on
your website? (False advertising is never a good idea.)
•» Categorization: Can the keywords be grouped into understandable
keyword phrases?
•» Audience appropriateness: Do the keywords give a good mix of both
industry standards and what your clients use in their searches?
•» Targeted keywords: Are the keywords specific to your product? Three-,
four-, even five-word phrases are best. 12
Picking Keywords Based on Subject Categories
• Havinga clear site theme, plus many relevant keywords, is a good start. But
now you’re going to have to break it down into smaller categories in order to
best organize your website and all those keywords you picked out. You can
make an outline of your list of keywords, grouping them into categories and
subcategories.
• The high-level terms represent broad keywords, and then they’re broken
into longer, much more specific keywords as you go down the outline. Using
this detailed outline, you can arrange your subject categories for your
website.
• High-traffic keywords
• High-conversion keywords

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 Picking Keywords Based on Subject Categories…
• High-traffic keywords: The next step you want to take with your keywords
list is to determine which ones generate a high amount of traffic and which
ones have a high conversion rate. High traffic keywords are the keywords
that bring the most people to your site.
• » The keyword isn’t relevant for your web page.
• » The text on the web page isn’t relevant enough to the keyword.
• » The content or layout of the web page doesn’t hold a user’s interest.
• » The page loads too slowly, so a user loses patience and abandons the page
before that page fully renders
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 Picking Keywords Based on Subject Categories…

• High-conversion keywords: You want to figure out what keywords are

going to draw buyers, versus just window shoppers, to your website. It’s nice
to get a lot of traffic, but it’s better to get conversions; and it’s best to have
both ROI (return on investment) and high traffic.
•A high-conversion keyword is a keyword that brings you a lot of sales, sign-
ups, entrants, or whatever action you consider a conversion on your site. A
high-conversion keyword also could be a high-traffic keyword, but not
necessarily so.

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 Analyzing Your Pay Per Click Campaigns
for Clues about Your Site
• Youcan use pay per click (PPC) ads to provide clues that help you optimize
your website for organic results, such as
• » Which keywords bring traffic (lots of visitors) to your site
• » Which keywords don’t bring traffic to your site
•»Which keywords bring the right kind of visitors to your site (for example,
ones that convert to customers)
• » Somereal traffic volume numbers from that search engine for a particular
keyword
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 Analyzing Your Pay Per Click Campaigns
for Clues about Your Site …
• What’s nice about using PPC ads for this kind of research is that you can test
ads scientifically. (Note: It’s difficult to set up scientific tests of keywords in
the natural search rankings because the search engine’s methods are largely
a secret and their algorithms are constantly in flux.)
• WithPPC ads, you can control which ads appear for which keywords, and
you can set up comparison tests. For example, you could test
• » Two different versions of an ad: To see which wording draws more people
• » An ad that appears for two different keywords: To find out which keyword
is more effective
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 Analyzing Your Pay Per Click Campaigns
for Clues about Your Site …
• Brand building
• You want your company name to be seen and recognized in your industry
without becoming generic — that’s branding. When you think Nike, you
think of a lifestyle, not merely a pair of running shoes. When your company
is branded, it becomes a search keyword all by itself.
• Successful branding associates you with your particular industry so tightly
that you’re nearly synonymous. The key word here is nearly, of course. You
don’t want to have your brand name become so watered down that you lose
control of how people use it. For instance, when you sneeze, do you reach
for a tissue or a Kleenex? When you need a paper copied, do you photocopy
it or Xerox it? A recent brand struggling with this problem is Google.
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 Analyzing Your Pay Per Click Campaigns
for Clues about Your Site …
• Identifying keywords with low click-through rates
• Payper click ads let you easily test different keywords. Write your ads by
using good marketing copy that’s highly relevant to the keyword phrase
you’re bidding on in a search engine’s paid search.
• » Approximately 70 percent of search queries contain at least three words.
•»People tend to use short, one- or two-word search queries for information
gathering; those searches usually don’t convert into customers.
•»When users refine their search by using longer queries, they tend to be
more seriously looking for a product or service.
•» In general, users are getting more sophisticated and using more refined
searches (meaning they type in longer search queries) 19
 Planning Subject Theme Categories
• Searchengines rank individual pages, but they do look for overall site-wide
themes in determining how relevant your web page is to a search query. As a
general rule, the home page should use more broad-range terms, and the
supporting pages should use more specific and targeted terms that help
support the home page. Assuming that you want your site to rank high in
searches for its major theme, you want to
• » Make sure that your site theme is included in your home page Title tag and
Meta tags (HTML code located at the top of a web page).
•» Use your site theme in your page content so that the search engines
interpret the theme as keywords for your web page. Making your theme part
of the keywords helps your web page come up in searches for those
keywords. 20
 Understanding Siloing “Under the Hood”
• Now that you understand the importance of grouping content on your site,
you might be wondering how to accomplish it. If you have a gigantic website
with thousands of pages that need to be reorganized, don’t panic. You can
do your siloing in two ways. Either can be successful, but you get the most
bang from your buck by doing both:
•» Physical silos: Ideally, the physical structure of your site — the directories
or folders — should reflect your silo organization. This is the simplest,
cleanest way to do it, and it keeps everything nicely organized as your
website grows. With this organization, you want the top-level folders to be
your primary subject categories, the next-level folders to contain the
secondary subject categories, and so forth.
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 Understanding Siloing “Under the Hood”…
•» Virtual silos: Websites that cannot adjust their directory structures can
accomplish siloing by creating virtual silos. Instead of moving related web
pages into new directories, virtual silos connect related pages using links.
You still need to have one landing page per subject, and you need links on
each landing page to identify the sublevel pages within that subject’s silo. So
no matter how the directories are set up for our classic cars website, the
Ford landing page would have links to the Ford Falcon, Ford Mustang, and
Ford Thunderbird pages.
•» Doing both: Incorporating both virtual and physical silos can be very
powerful for a site that has pages that should exist in more than one silo or
category.
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 Understanding What a Search
Engine Sees as Keywords
• In
this section, we take a step back first and talk about what search engines
really see as keywords. When someone enters a search query, the search
engine looks for those words in its index. Here are some general things the
search engine looks for:
• » Web pages that contain the exact phrase.
• » Web pages that have all the words of the phrase in close proximity to each
other.
•» Web pages that contain all the words, although not necessarily close
together.
•» Web pages that contain other forms of the words (such as customize
instead of customization). This is called stemming. 23
 Understanding What a Search
Engine Sees as Keywords…
• » Web pages that have links pointing to them from other pages, in which the
link text contains the exact phrase or all the words in a different sequence.
•»External web pages that link to this site from a page that is considered to
be about the same keyword.
• » Web pages that contain the words in special formatting (bold, italics, larger
font size, bullets, or with heading tags).
• Thepreceding list gives you some of the clues a search engine would use to
determine your site’s keywords. They are not listed in order of priority, nor
do they represent an exhaustive list (because the search engines keep their
methods a secret).
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 Organizing Your Primary and
Secondary Subjects
• Searchengines look for depth of content. Your landing pages should each
have at least three or four pages of supporting information that they link to.
These subpages need to be within the same theme as the landing page that
they support.
• Having several subpages linked from each landing page that all talk about
the same subject theme reinforces your theme and boosts your landing
page’s perceived expertise on the subject.
• The concept of organizing a website’s content into distinct subject
categories, each with its own landing page and supporting pages, is called
siloing.
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 Organizing Your Primary and
Secondary Subjects…
• Here are a few recommendations for building landing pages:
•» Keep each landing page’s content focused on its particular subject
category.
•»Make the content engaging — consider including video, audio, images, or
dynamic elements along with highly relevant text (not in place of it!).
•» Customize the keywords on each landing page to reflect that page’s
subject theme.
• » Be sure to include the keywords in the page content as well as in the Meta
tags.
• » Include links to secondary pages in the same category.
• » Don’t include links to secondary pages under different subject categories.
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 Consolidating Themes to Help Search
Engines See Your Relevance

• In
order to rank well in search results for a particular keyword phrase, your
website must provide related information that is organized in clear language
that search engines understand.
• When your textual information has been stripped away from its design and
layout, does it measure up to be the most relevant aggregate information
compared to that of other sites?
• Ifso, you have a high likelihood of achieving high rankings and attracting
site visitors who are researching and shopping for products and services that
you offer.
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 Consolidating Themes to Help Search
Engines See Your Relevance…

• Your goal, if you want your site to rank for more than a single generic term,
is to selectively decide what your site is and is not about. Rankings are often
damaged in three major ways:
• » By having too little content for a subject on your website
• » By including irrelevant content that dilutes and blurs your theme
• » By choosing keywords that are not well matched to your theme.

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 Understanding Keyword Frequency
and Distribution
• Keyword frequency and distribution are two factors that marketers look
closely at in SEO land. Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a
keyword is used on a web page. Any word (or phrase) is considered a
keyword if it’s used at least twice on the page. (Note that search engines do
not include stop words such as and, the, a, and so forth as keywords,
although they may be part of keyword phrases.)
• Keyword distribution measures whether a keyword is evenly distributed
throughout the page and the site. It’s important to make sure that your
keywords appear throughout the page but especially right up front because
search engine spiders generally put more weight on the first 200 words,
including words in your navigation, headings, and so on.
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 Understanding Keyword Frequency
and Distribution…
• Here’s
an example, and remember this is just a recommended guideline, of
how you might evenly distribute a main keyword throughout a page that
had 750 words divided into five paragraphs:
• » Once in the Title tag
• » Once or twice in the description Meta tag (in the HTML code)
• » Once or twice in the keywords Meta tag (in the HTML code)
• » Once in the first sentence of on-page (user visible) text
• » Twice in the first 200 words (including the first sentence)
• » Once each in paragraphs two, three, and four
• » Once or twice in the last paragraph 30
 Adjusting Keywords

• After
you optimize your website for your selected keywords, be aware that
your job is not done. Search engine optimization involves continual
monitoring, testing, and tracking.
• You need to keep track of how your keywords are performing as you go
along. If a keyword is not drawing in as much traffic as you think it should be,
or it’s drawing in the wrong kind of traffic (visitors who don’t convert), it’s
time to go in and change it. (This is why you do a bunch of research into your
competition, and look up synonyms while you’re at it)

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 Updating Keywords
• The thing about keyword maintenance is that it’s not an exact science. There
is no one guaranteed keyword out there that will always bring you a ton of
traffic today and into the future. For one thing, no one knows what the
Internet will look like two years from now, let alone five or ten. Language
changes very rapidly.
• In2000, Google was a small upstart search engine; today, Google so
dominates the industry that it’s become a word in the dictionary and is often
used as a verb.
• Youcan’t stay still in the online world. Things that are common sense to us
today might not stay that way.
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 Using Tools to Aid Keyword Placement
• You want to use these tools to check out the competition. You need to know
not only what keywords your competitors are using but also in what
frequency.
• There are a couple of ways you can go about this. You can count the
keywords by hand and probably drive yourself nuts. Or you can use a helpful
tool called the Single Page Analyzer.
• The Single Page Analyzer measures and analyzes how effectively Meta tags
are written, how often you are using your intended keywords compared to
the total number of words on your web page, and other useful word metrics
about the page. This tool measures frequency and prominence and graphs
the distribution of keywords.
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End of Chapter

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