Organic Keyword Research and Selection: PubCon Las Vegas Dec 2007, Day 3

Developing keyword lists is a mission critical step for organic search engine optimization. This panel will review how to mine keywords, research keywords, expand keywords, and refine keywords.

Moderator:

• Detlev Johnson

Speakers:

• Ryan Smith, Lead Systems Architect, Beyond Ink
• Seth Wilde, Search Engine Marketing Manager, uShip
• Craig Paddock, Managing Partner, Boost Search Marketing

First one to share on Organic keyword research was Craig Paddock, a managing partner from Boost Search Marketing.

• Keyword Discovery
• Go through log files
• Employ 3rd party sampling (WordTracker, Trellian)
• Track organic conversions vs. paid conversions

Use Competitive Intelligence

• HitWise
• Trellian

KWP Expanders/Variations

• Best /online / buy / cheap / discount / wholesale / accessories

Protect your band names/terms

• Highest converting (2x+)
• Easiest to rank for
• Include misspellings, variations (locale, etc)
• Affiliates will target branded terms you miss
• Target more than one result
• Include on ranking reports

How to decide which keywords are most important?

• Let your customers decide
• Organically, it's tough to determine the most significant ones especialli if you're not ranking somewhat for those terms in the first place

Craig's tactics:

• Start a paid campaign just to get data
• Within 48 hours you can get very good impression data
• Use exact [keyword] and broad match in setup
• Set no daily limit and bid high enough to be on the first page
• Monitor impressions and CTRs specific to your site

Points to remember:

1. While performing Craig's tactics, minimize impressions for "broad" terms
2. Purchase both broad and exact so you can see both what people are searching for and what people are clicking on

Keep a note of:

• Competitiveness of KWPs
• Wordtracker exports popularity and competing sites
• If possible, SEO Quake plug-in for FireFox, the SEO for FireFox plug-in
• Check the current ranking for a particular keyphrase. Even if you already have a high rank, it shouldn't stop you from targeting it

Google Clustering: If 2 pages naturally feature from the same domain within the same SERP, then Google will cluster them together. Example: If you have #1 and #9, they will appear as #1 and #2 (indented). If you have #1 and #14, they will not be clustered because they do not appear on the same page.

Personal Research:

• Create a spreadsheet to organize all data collected on each term
• Use that to make educated choices
• While making your keyword phrase selections, it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than to
• jump into a big pond as a small fish

Allow your customers to make up their mind on the keyword phrases you should target. Let your PPC data steer your organic campaign. Keyword Phrase research is much more than just Keyword Phrase popularity.

The second speaker from the panel is Ryan Smith, Lead Systems Architect, Beyond Ink.

API means (Application Programming Interface):

• Allows you to get data straight from search engines without removing HTML
• This speeds up and automates a lot of your Keyword research
• API helps generate lists of keywords found on your site
• Also t suggests keywords, etc.

How to write an API:

• You should know a web scripting language like PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP/ASP.Net, or Perl
• You need to know how to make Web Service API XML requests, or how to hack their example code
• You might need to know a little reexp voodoo for parsing HTML results
• You'll also need some type of database like MySQL, SQL Server, or even Google Gears

Advanced Web Ranking XML Reports

• This is inexpensive, reliable and easy to manage for small jobs
• It can use G/Y API keys if available
• Pulls keyword data via API's
• Will use proxy servers
• It is harder to develop automation cs. Web APIs
• Bad for automating large and numerous projects with multiple keyword groups

Yahoo Web Search API is great. Windows Live Search API is also great. Google is currently working on a new API. Ask.com stopped their API.

• Web Harvesting
• Violates search engines TOS
• On the other hand, closing the API access violates the trust of developers

Anonymizer.com Proxy Services:

Anonymizer lets you prepay for 1 million proxy requests ($1,000). With this you it operates CIA-style front companies who own IPs. These companies regularly blacklist detection to rotate out bad IPs. If they have to, they completely kill off front companies and start new ones to get around blocks and blacklists.

Auto keyword extraction:

• Yahoo Term Extraction API
• WordsFinder.com
• Keyword Extractor API
• ClickTracks API

Apparently, Overture is not the best for availability as it tends to scramble search terms. The Google Trends API and Microsoft AdCenter APIs are better. WordTracker is cool, it's cheap. But I get a lot of zero results so I'm not exactly sure I can recommend it. The best so far is, KeywordDiscovery.com but it's $500 a month. Nevertheless, it's worth every cent though.

Last speaker was Seth Wilde, Search Engine Marketing Manager. Poor Seth couldn't open his presentation.

Main points:

• Site's internal search is a wealth of information
• Continually mine data to see which keywords are actively used for searching once they're on your site
• Visit competitor's sites

  Make note of title tags

  Find out what they are buying

  What are they trying to rank for

• 1 word phrased might generate traffic but are not great for conversion. 1000 hits with a 15% conversion rate is much better than 10,000 hits with a 1.5% conversion rate
• Use 1-3 keywords per page
• Regularly adjust your keywords

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