Can I Get SEO/Keyword Advice?

[kentheriot]

Looking for a bit of guidance from those more experienced (which is pretty much everybody here, I'm betting:)).

I did a keyword analysis using Market Samurai, and it seems that although my product (teaching folks, in plain language, how to record and create excellent audio for the lowest cost from their computers) has met with much enthusiasm from people I describe it to, I think my competition may be too great and powerful.

The only keyword phrases that emerged as viable (optimizing for traffic, competition, keyword value, and commerciality) in the analysis were:
- free recording software
- voice recording software
- home recording software
- free music recording software

But although I certainly discuss software, especially for the beginners on a budget, that isn't really my product at the end of the day.

How would folks here recommend I proceed? I'm guessing I should either do another analysis and filter out "software" to get something more relevant. But I'm afraid if I did that, I'd have to settle for less-than-optimal keywords.

Otherwise, I may just have to accept that competition is just too high, and maybe try to target a less popular niche under "audio recording."

Any advice appreciated!

Thanks;)

Ken

[robert adams]

yes, you should filter out software.
if software is not your product then it should not be high on your list of keywords.

robert

[MikeF421]

What are you using as your basis to determine what an optimal keyword is?

Searches per day? Competing sites? An analysis of the first page of Google?


For the most part, I just use searches per day and a study of the first page of Google. There could be 750,000 listings, but I feel I can beat out the guy that is number 10, that is all that matters.

[Engage]

...but I feel I can beat out the guy that is number 10, that is all that matters.

And the simplest way to explain how to beat that guy at number 10 is...

More links.

If I recall correctly (I might not) you have 200 links or so? Is that right?

If yes...

Until you fix that...

Your products don't matter. Not enough people know about them.

Your affiliate links won't matter. Not enough people clicking on them.

Your Adsense ads will only matter a little bit. Not enough traffic to make any significant click income.

Your sales copy doesn't matter. Not enough people reading it, however good the copy might be.

And your keyword research won't matter too much either. With low links, few keywords with decent traffic will be available to you.

Nothing is going to work very well until you feed lots more traffic in to the machine. You won't have lots more traffic until you have lots more links.

In a way, this is good news. All the confusing complications can be set aside for now, and it all boils down to...

You do the work of getting links...

Or you don't.

[MikeF421]

And your keyword research won't matter too much either. With low links, few keywords with decent traffic will be available to you.



Your keyword research is vital. Having a thousand backlinks with the anchor text of "click here" or the root domain isn't going to do you a whole lot of good, unless you are trying to rank for the term "click here".

Obtaining 1000 or 2000 backlinks without first selecting good keywords is just spinning your wheels.

[Engage]

Your keyword research is vital. Having a thousand backlinks with the anchor text of "click here" or the root domain isn't going to do you a whole lot of good, unless you are trying to rank for the term "click here".

Obtaining 1000 or 2000 backlinks without first selecting good keywords is just spinning your wheels.

Sorry, mean no disrespect, but that's just not true. Keyword research is useful, but it's not vital. 800+ unique visitors a day to one of my domains, no keyword research.

Webmaster forums are full of folks looking for the clever strategy, the fancy shortcut, the special secret tool thing etc.

Webmaster forums are full of folks trying to sell the clever strategy, the fancy shortcut, the special secret tool thing etc.

Shoppers and sellers, working together, create thread after thread like this on webmaster forums, which tend to obscure the simple brutal truth that novices especially should be focused on.

We create lots of pages, or we don't.

We get lots of links, or we don't.

The majority of questions in threads like this can be answered simply with...

Go make the pages.

Go get the links.

Go do the work.

We don't need the perfect tool, the clever strategy, the most appealing theme, the advanced info, the inside connection, the best teacher, or any of all that.

We need to do the darn work... :-)

[MikeF421]

No disrespect taken.

While I can agree that many people see no success because they spend too much time trying to develope the perfect plan rather than taking action, I also believe that most people fail trying to run an online business because they do not run it like a business.

Those that fail to plan, plan to fail.

If you are prepared to do the work, you might as well focus on the right work.

As for your site getting 800 uniques a day with no keyword research, take no offense to this, but I would say you got lucky rather than pointing to it as a formula for success that others could easily duplicate.

Keyword research does not take up much time (usually) and pays off a thousand times over. I do think some people spend too much time looking for the perfect uncompetitive words. Most competition can be beat out with some effort.

[Engage]

We don't really disagree too much Mike, we're just addressing different problems.

I agree keyword research is useful, and for more than just rankings. It's good to know what our audience is actually searching for, it's good for sparking article ideas, and so on.

If keyword research was the only thing standing between novices and content and links, you're right, it needn't take long and is worthwhile. An hour's keyword research can easily fuel a whole week of work.

The thing is, keyword research is just one of a thousand things folk are being told they need to know, and buy, etc.

I agree I'm over simplifying my points somewhat. I agree I'm not a role model. I spent years learning Perl, so I'm the King Of Distraction. :)

What I'm trying to do, however inexpertly, is wipe the slate clean of all the complications and hiding places so that novices will come face to face with themselves in the mirror at the earliest possible date to encounter the question that matters most....

Do you want to build an audience, or not?

If the job is described simply as "content and links", then there's no where to hide, no delays, distractions, learning, or purchases etc which stand between us and getting down to work on building an audience.

Hmm... What do you think of this recipe?

One hour of keyword research per week.

All other hours focused on content and links until, um, say 500 unique visitors a day.

Then, a gradual shift of focus to issues like products, conversions etc.

Reasonable?

[MikeF421]

I don't know that you can really just pick an amount of time to devote to keyword research. I'm more of a task list type of person. It's done when it's done.

I do agree that more people need to take action versus making grand schemes of everything they plan on doing.

I just think the keyword research needs to be done so they know where to focus their energy. Also I think just like any other business, you need to track everything you do. Without knowing what keywords you are trying to rank for, you can't track your progress. I'm big on tracking everything.

[Engage]

Also I think just like any other business, you need to track everything you do. Without knowing what keywords you are trying to rank for, you can't track your progress. I'm big on tracking everything

Ok, let's say I have 735 pages on my site. I've carefully chosen a keyword phrase to base each page on. I'm creating more pages using this system every day. I'm tracking my rankings for each keyword phrase.

Now what? How do I use all this information I'm collecting?

I can see that using specific keyword phrases in my link text is helpful. Most of these controlled links will be on my own site. I can create these on site keyword targeted links just by having my page title used as the link text in my navigation system. That is, it's automated, and so doesn't require my attention.

What else? I need more external links to my site. Well, every minute spent monitoring my rankings over hundreds of pages is a minute not spent getting a new external link.

How does knowing a specific page is on page 7 of results help me get to page 6?

What will be the keyword and competitor market for my niche three years from now? Should I re-calculate and re-target all my hundreds of pages continually as the market changes?

Suppose I totally master Google's algo today. Yea! And then they change it tomorrow. Now what? Redo my entire site? Every time they change their algo?

Any attempt to game the search engine system opens a pandora's box of a hundred unanswerable type questions. This pandora's box is driven by an industry of experts and vendors that want it to be complicated, so they can sell us SEO advice, over and over again, as the markets change, the engines evolve etc.

I'm not arguing everybody should ignore SEO. Just trying to offer a simpler alternative that I suspect many people will benefit from.

Step 1: Forget all the above.

Step 2: Make lots of pages, and get lots of links.

Step 3: If you then immediately discover that you never quite get around to making pages and getting links, find a new career.

To each their own of course. There's no absolute right and wrong.

I just see lots of folks getting sucked down in to what look like unnecessary complications, and would hope to address that somehow.

The learning experience I'm having is the discovery that people, myself included, tend to actually love unnecessary complications.

Some people even learn Perl! What fools!! :)

[MikeF421]

Most affiliate marketers are not designing sites with 735 pages too often, but yes that can involve a lot of tracking. However, there are programs that do that automatically for you (RankTracker, Market Samurai, etc.).

Personally, I'd be more likely to develope 70 10-page sites than one 735 page site, but that's my business model that I work. Of course, a 735 page site that grabs feeds from Ezinearticles wouldn't be hard to create.

Although, it may take a few minutes here and there, tracking is vital.

I see messages all the time in forums of people saying their web traffic dropped by XX% and they have no idea why.

Well, if you aren't tracking your traffic sources and keywords, you never will know why. On the other hand if I can quickly look at a report and see that one of my main keywords dropped from #1 to #5, then I know where to focus my efforts to get that traffic back.

[josaphlewis]

keyword are most important factor in Search Engine Optimization. For every search engine, the most important SEO items are the keywords. They are matched against the search strings. Optimizing website for right keywords is necessary. You will have to put in equal effort in keyword research as you put in the SEO work.

[kentheriot]

Enage and Mike: Fascinating discussion! If I could find a way to do both keyword research AND getting links, I'd be happy. It's the HOW that eludes me.

Engage - What are 2 good ways to get links? Let's say you convinced me. What would be my action items to "get more links?"

Mike: In terms simple enough so....well....I can understand it (forget my grandmother...she's smarter than me:)), what 2 steps would I take AFTER I've done my keyword research? I use Market Samurai. Let's say I discover 3 keyword phrases that have SEOV over 30, SEOC under 30K, SEOT min of 80, and a PBR min of 15 (in other words...excellent keywords for my page). What would I do then? Currently I write a post optimizing for those keyword phrases. Then how do I track the effectiveness of those keywords for my efforts?

Awesome stuff guys! Thanks.

Ken

[MikeF421]

Okay, so you have written a keyword optimized post... I'm going to give you more than 2 steps in no particular order because I can't decide which 2 I would do.

I would submit that post to Ezinearticles. Once it is accepted, I would submit it to about another 300 article directories. I hand submit to some of the bigger ones, Ezine, Go-articles, etc., and use ArticleBot for the rest of the submissions.

Now many people will say to spin the article so that you have different unique variations. People insist that if you don't it is duplicate content and Google doesn't like that. That is completely wrong. If it was true, news sites would have awful rankings. Most of their stories are syndicated from the AP and other sources. What Google doesn't like is the exact same content on the exact same website. That's duplicate content.

Now that being said, I do usually spin my articles before submitting them. I do it because Google and other search engines may someday change the rules.

Next I would bookmark your post on your website and the Ezine article to social bookmarking sites. There are free services to do this (SocialMarker, OnlyWire, and others) or paid programs to do it like SocialBot and Bookmarking Demon. Bookmarking Demon is awesome. However, if you are just getting started and have just one website, it may be a little more than you need right now. SocialBot can be picked up pretty cheaply. If you are going the free route, OnlyWire is the best in my opinion. The worst part about all of these programs (other than Bookmarking Demon) is the account setup. Once that is done, it's a breeze to submit pages. BMD has auto account creation, a huge timesaver.

I would also submit the RSS feed of your site if you haven't already. If you have already, than I would ping the feeds since you added a new post. RSSBot is probably the simplest and cheapest paid option for this.

After all this is done, I'd start building some other backlinks both to the page with yoru post and to the main domain. Blog commenting is a good idea. To do it manually, I'd recommend Coment Kahuna. It's free. It has a pretty good search function to find different types of blogs. It will sort them by pagerank, and then you can visit them 1 by 1 and do some commenting.

Then it's time to write more content and do it all over again...

[Engage]

Excellent post Mike!

[MikeF421]

Thanks!

Hope it wasn't overload.

[kentheriot]

Thanks Mike! That was pretty awesome. Not overload at all. I appreciate all the info. You mentioned tracking the effectiveness of keywords once you do all this. How would I do that? I do have Google Analytics (probably haven't figured out half of how I can use it:)), and my site does have CPanel, so there are some stats being collected. What do you think is the best way to track one keyword/keyword phrase?

Thanks again!

Ken

[MikeF421]

You have a couple of options for tracking your keyword rankings. Google analytics and Awstats from cPanel will just tell you about your traffic sources, but not where you rank for your keywords.

Seo PowerSuite (http://www.link-assistant.com/)has a Rank Tracker module that is pretty good. There is a free version. If I remember correctly, you can't save projects in the free version. What that means is that it won't keep track for you if your keywords are moving up or down in the search engines. You would have to do that by hand.

There is a Rank Tracker plugin for Firefox called Rank Checker. (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/) It's a bit limited, but it's free. Not a bad place to start.

I like Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/spartan). You can download a free trial. I love the rank tracker module. It tracks everything I need for my keywords. I can export it easily to an Excel sheet, graph it, whatever I want to do. And I can track as many keywords as I want with just the push of a few buttons. Market Samurai is not free, but it has a free trial, so you can try it out for yourself and see what you think.

Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss it further.

[kentheriot]

Oh cool! I have Market Samurai, though I'm still learning how to use it. Thanks again!

Cheers,

KEn

[MikeF421]

One of the big strengths of Market Samurai is the training videos. I think they are the best training to come with any IM tool I have ever bought. All the videos in the 'Dojo' are well worth watching.

The Rank Tracker module is pretty useful. I probably use the Rank Tracker and SEO Competition modules the most.

[KurtScholle]

I would look to some of the other free keyword tools for additional insights and ideas. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com will give you a different take than Market Samurai because of methodologies and data.

Also the Google Adwords tool can be revealing: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Use a thesaurus to try different words that mean the same thing.

I wouldn't try to optimize for words with massive competitors. The long-tail keywords are easier to dominate and often show more buying intent. One of my presentations, I talk about some realtor customers: a search of "Naperville real estate" could be motivated by anything. But when people search on "Naperville Cape Cod home with 3 bedrooms" that is likely a buyer.

-- Kurt Scholle

[Engage]

You have a couple of options for tracking your keyword rankings.

I use SheerSEO.com for awhile, and thought it was nice. Pretty simple, 10 bucks a month, and responsive support.