175 replies to this topic

[floatingworld]

I agree with Torka that the KEI numbers of Wordtracker aren't a good measure of keyword competition. For example, the words "rammed earth" have a dismal KEI but, focusing on these two words, we were able to bring a website into a consistent number 2 position on the front page of Google.

Aaron

[chrishirst]

but does it bring any useful visitors ??


Welcome to HR Aaron

[floatingworld]

Thanks for the welcome!

Yes, it does bring in useful visitors-because the company specializes in rammed earth construction.

He was able to get front page ranking for this keyword very easily, despite having a limited amount of content on the site. I've been urging him to get content up ASAP to hold his position. We'll see.

A

[chrishirst]

He was able to get front page ranking for this keyword very easily, despite having a limited amount of content on the site.

Yeah, but with only around 800 pages for the phrase, it's not the most cempetitive thing to go for!

[floatingworld]

What do you mean "not the most competitive?"

Thanks in advance!

AAron

[Randy]

800 competing pages instead of 80,000,000 competing pages.

[floatingworld]

Thanks so much for this! I'm still trying to learn all these terms.

How did you discover the competing pages? I did a google search for "rammed earth" and came up with 220 000 plus pages. Yes the vast majority are not targeting the phrase- but how did you come up with the number?

I can't believe how useful this forum is! Thanks to all of you who offer your time and expertise.

Aaron

[torka]

Search Google using intitle:"rammed earth". No space between the colon and the quote mark. Or allintitle: "rammed earth" (this time with a space).

Either of these will show you there are approximately 800 pages that use the exact phrase "rammed earth" in their titles.

Pages that contain the exact phrase "rammed earth" in their title tag are much more likely to have been actively optimized for that specific phrase. Those are your competition, not those pages that happen to rank randomly because they have the phrase "rammed earth" somewhere in their text.

HTH!

--Torka

[RobertM]

Good afternoon Mr. Thies,
I was reading your post#1 back on Jan 23, 2004.
Please forgive me I am so new to this website marketing that it's embarrassing.
I do not off line marketing very well.

I didn't understand these directions. I did go on google and followed them but I didn't know how to interpet them. I would like to know there real competittion on keywords
rather than yahoo or word tracker.

this is what you wrote:

[COLOR=red]First, the very least someone would do to optimize would be to include all the words in the page title. To find out how many there are, do an "allintitle:" search on Google. For a 3-word search phrase, your query on Google will look like this:
allintitle:keyword1 keyword2 keyword3

Was I to copy and past this onto google or use my keywords instead using this format.

Thank you

Robert

[Jill]

Please forgive me I am so new to this website marketing that it's embarrassing.
I do not off line marketing very well.

I would suggest you hire someone who is familiar with both online and offline marketing.

You're trying to get ahead of yourself if you're doing competitive keyword research without first knowing the basics.

Have you read our Tips for Newbies articles. Start there first and/or hire someone for money to help you get things set up correctly to start.

[raj4encoders]

Thanks! Dan, for a great information and a descent advice.It'll surely work for me.

[rayjoy]

I start with the keyword phrases that are the MOST relevant to my site. I don't really care if they're "easy," "hard" or indifferent. If they're relevant to the site, especially MOST relevant, then those are what I need to start with.

I love the way you simplify things. I have just spent over an hour reading this one post and my head is spinning. I have appreciated everybody's input - this has to be the single most valuable post I have read on this forum, but my brain hurts. Then I read this one sentence, and I know what to do. KISS.

[Jill]

Glad to help!

[Pamela]

Then we take that list, sort it by popularity, and start looking at relevance. Relevance, we measure as a percentage. What percentage of searchers, who have just used that search term, would find your site relevant?

This gives me a "weighted popularity" for all the search terms. Then I can sort my list again, and the best search terms will be at the top. I will definitely target anything that is highly relevant, so that we get the highest quality traffic.

Hi! This is a very interesting approach. How do you formulate your factors for weighted popularity? i.e.-how do you determine what percentage of searchers would find the site relevant?

Thanks,
Pamela

[identity]

Pamela,

this is a subjective measure, often best done by the website/business owner, whether that be yourself for your own sites or your client.

I think it helps to have a good conversation about relevancy with your client before having them do this. Most people will score relevancy higher than it may be. They assume that if their site sells "blue widgets" then someone searching for "blue widgets" would 100% interested in their site. But maybe they were searching for a replacement to blue widgets, which might be their next search after finding all these sites about blue widgets.

Or maybe they were looking for information about the blue widgets they already own, but your site just sells them and doesn't have any info on using, installing, fixing, etc.

But if someone searched for "buy blue widgets" then maybe that would be 100% relevant.

It is probably hard to get a 100% relevant phrase of two words or less... but this might just be splitting hairs.