Web site Promotion | Website Development

In the first part of this search engine optimization article series, we covered keyword list building and selecting keywords that are potential candidates for further SEO analysis.

Now that we have built up a massive list of possible keywords (hopefully), how do we whittle it down to the select few to target? What if we have hundreds of potential keywords for different products/services to sift through? Ironically, to select only the most targeted keywords that drive quality traffic to your site, you would have invest in a small pay-per-click search marketing campaign. We would only do this on a small scale and for a short while to unlock the true value of your list of keywords. Rather than guess which keyword phrases will drive quality traffic, you'll know for certain which ones truly will from your web analytics. I recommend starting up a Google Adwords campaign to test these keywords. For this trial though, I would recommend turning off the Google Content-Matching option where the search ads could possibly appear on Google Adsense publisher sites. If you don't already have web analytics, sign up for a free analytics account courtesy of Google Analytics. This process increases your chances of only going after the best possible keywords and not spend months on an optimization campaign to drive search engine traffic that doesn't convert to sales (or do whatever action you wish them to like opting in to your mailing list).

Once we have identified profitable keywords to optimize for, we are not done yet. We still have to perform keyword competition analysis on the keywords. Again, what drives the most traffic is not necessarily the best one to go after at this point of the site promotion process. It would depend a lot on what you have done in the past to optimize the site. If no search optimization has been done previously, it's best to avoid those very high traffic key terms because they typically have large amounts of competition. To know for sure what the competition truly is for your search term, you would search each term in Google with each key phrase wrapped in double quotes (eg. "online dating service")

Let's run through an example. When you type in "online dating service" (with the quotes) in Google, you'll notice that it reports that you have "Results 1-10 of about 1,570,000 for ...". Hmm... That seems like a huge amount of competition to go up against. Let's see if it really is the case. First, I would set my browsing preferences in Google to list 100 sites at a time by clicking on preferences near the Google search box. Note: cookies in your browser will need to be enabled. Now instead of showing 10 results per page, you can view 100 results.

Since Google only shows 1000 results at a time, we click on the last page of the search engine results pages. During the time of this search for this particular key phrase, I see 10 pages of 100 results each. When you click on the last page (in this case, 10), we find that we truly only have 818 "real competitors"! The other pages were not shown because Google deems them as not so relevant to the searcher. Most of these unlisted pages are in Google's supplemental index.

We now have the number of real competitors for this keyword phrase. The next step is going to make or break your SEO campaign and this is keyword phrase difficulty. From our experience as SEOs, we know many clients simply don't have the patience to wait for more than 9 months before they start seeing their web pages show up in the top ten search results. If a website owner embarks on a campaign to achieve higher rankings for a very difficult search term, they are almost certainly doomed to fail. That's because it'll take lots of effort to rank the search term and they will not see much progress, even in a year. Many give up before reaching the finish line.

The good news is that you don't have to be one of these victims. By carefully analyzing the difficulty level of your search terms, you'll increase your probabilities of ranking higher in the search engines faster and with less effort and resources. We will covered it in our next article.