Basic Keyword Analysis

If you have finished our How to build a Keyword List Tutorials you should have in front of you a large list of relevant, targeted keywords.  But, as you know, there is more to finding Valuable Keywords than having a list of relevant keywords.  There are three other factors that we have to take into consideration: the type of keyword, the popularity of a keyword, and it’s competition (as we mentioned in our Basic Keyword Strategy Tutorials).  As such, you now have to properly analyze your keyword list for all of these factors. Then, based on your analysis, you will want to prioritize your keywords. First and foremost, you will want to optimize your site for those keywords which you have a decent chance of ranking well (as we will explain below). As such, this tutorial will focus on how to determine the competitiveness of a keyword, and how to use that information to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your search optimization efforts.

A keyword by any other name is not as competitive
What makes a keyword easy or difficult to optimize for?  It all has to do with the quality of your competition.  You can have a million sites competing for a particular keyword, but if none of them have properly optimized their site it will not be difficult to outrank them.  On the other hand, if you go up against a thousand well optimized sites you may have a very difficult time ranking at all.  Therefore, if you can make your site the most relevant site in the eyes of the search engine for a particular keyword then your site should rank #1.  Now, what needs to be noted is that this is true for each and every keyword in your list.  After all, the search engines want to show the most relevant results for each and every unique search term. 

As such, in terms of analyzing your keyword list, your ultimate goal is to determine the quality of competition for each and every keyword.  Nonetheless, when working with large keyword lists it is not practical to analyze the quality of competition for each and every search phrase (given the limits of today’s keyword analysis tools, it is just not possible). As such, we are forced to analyze the quantity of sites that you are competing against for any given keyword and to then infer from this number the quality of your competition.  Later on, after you have analyzed your list as a whole, you can focus in on individual keywords and note the quality of the competition for that particular term or phrase.

Determining how many sites are you competing against
There is a rather easy way to get a sense of how many sites you are competing against.  It involves two of the advanced search features of Google - intitle and inanchor.  Intitle tells you how many sites have the keyword phrase in question in their header tag.  Inanchor tells you how many sites have incoming links which include the keyword phrase within the anchor text of at least one link.  Perhaps an example will help clarify what these search functions are and why they can be so helpful.

Let’s start with a normal online search, let’s say for golf balls.  A search for that term on Google shows that there are some 20,400,000 sites which contain the words golf and balls within the text of their page, as shown below:
 

 

While this may sound like a tremendous number of sites, as we shall see the vast majority of those sites are not optimized for the search engine and as such are not really competing for this term. 

Let’s take a look now at the number of sites which include the phrase "golf balls" in the title tag of their page:
 

 

Note that there are 276,000 sites which include this phrase in their header tag.  This is a much lower number than the number of sites which include the two words somewhere (not necessarily together) on their webpage.  Given that one of the most important steps in optimizing a website is to place relevant keywords in the title tag of one’s web pages (as we shall learn in our Web page optimization Tutorial), the number of sites that include the phrase in their title tag is a decent indication of the number of sites which are actively optimizing their sites for that particular keyword. 

Now let’s take a look at the number of sites which have an incoming link with the keyword phrase Golf Balls included in the anchor text of the link:
 

 

There are 148,000 sites which contain the phrase "Golf Balls" in an incoming link.  What this means is that each of these 148,000 sites have at least one incoming link with the phrase "golf balls" included in the anchor text.  This statistic does not show us the quality of those links nor how many there are per each site.  Still this figure is helpful in determining how many sites one is competing against for a given keyword.  After all, incoming links are one of the most important factors in determining search engine rankings and the anchor text of a link is one of the most important elements of a quality incoming link. 

Even more helpful, though, is combining the intitle and inanchor search function as follows:

 
 

Combining these two search functions let us know how many sites both contain the keyword phrase in the title tag and in the anchor text of at least one incoming link.  Given that ranking well is a function of the successful combination of Web page optimization and link building, this figure best indicates how many sites one is actually competing against.  From this figure we can then infer the quality of competition based on the assumption that if a lot of people are optimizing their site for a particular keyword then most likely some of them are doing it well. 

The following chart helps illustrate this last point:

Keyword phrase	Number of Competing Sites (based on intitle/inanchor analysis)	Number of backlinks for top rated site in Google
Golf	15,400,000	44,000
Golf balls	113,000	26,500
Used golf balls	656	1,270

As we can see there seems to be a somewhat direct correlation between the number of sites competing for a particular keyword and the number of backlinks for the top site listed in Google related to that keyword (although it should be pointed out that this is not always the case).  Of course, there are other factors besides link popularity to take into consideration when considering the quality of one’s competition (such as the quality of those links), but nonetheless it is an indication of the quality of competition. 

Organizing your keyword list
Based on the above, we recommend that you purchase Keyword Elite and get in the habit of analyzing your keyword lists using the intitle and inanchor features (Keyword Elite seems to be the only commercially available software program which allows you to analyze large lists of keywords using the intitle and inanchor search feature). 

Once you have done that, you can organize your keyword list according to the number of competing sites.  For instance, you can group together every keyword which has no competing sites (i.e., for which no other site includes the keyword in both  the title tag and the link text of at least one incoming link).  These keywords should be rather easy to rank well for as there seems to be almost no competition for them.  You can then group together all those keywords which have 1 - 10 sites competing against them, and then those keywords which have 10 - 100 sites competing against them, and so on. 

You can then look for the most popular, relevant keywords in your first group of keywords and optimize your site for those keyword phrases.  Once you have used up all the quality keywords in the first group you can then proceed to the next group, again optimizing your site for the most popular, relevant keywords within that group. 

This method ensures that you are always competing for those keywords which are the easiest for you to rank well for.  At the same time, it helps to build link momentum which will help you to compete later on for the more competitive keywords.  This is an extremely powerful way to maximize your optimization efforts.  It helps ensure that you rank for the maximum number of keywords possible with the least of amount of effort necessary! 

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Meta tags tutorial

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

Meta tags are non-displayed text written into your HTML document intended to describe your page to the search engine for the purpose of cataloging the content of your page. There are two (and only two) meta tags that are worth including in your web pages: the meta description tag and the meta keyword tag (NONE of the other meta tags have any effect on search engine rankings, whatsoever! …never have and probably never will). The meta description tag is found in your HTML code and looks like this: <meta name=”description” content=”Place Meta Description Text Here - Include Quotation Marks”>. The meta keyword tag is also found in the HTML code and looks like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, etc.”>

Here are the basic rules of thumb regarding your meta tags:

1. Use the meta description tag on all of your optimized web pages.
2. Use only keywords that are relevant to the theme of your site.
3. Be careful to avoid trademark infringement.
4. Limit the number of characters to 250, including spaces and commas (once search engines reach their limit they ignore the rest of the tag’s contents)
5. Place the most important part of your description or keyword tag early, just in case the engine truncates the tag.
6. Avoid repeating keywords in your meta keyword tag.
7. Place commonly misspelled words in the meta keywords tag.

Meta description tags
The meta description tag is useful to describe your page contents to a web browser or search engine; however, it has no appreciable effect on actual search engine rankings. The meta description tag’s importance is that it is used by many search engines as the summary description for your page when your page is listed in the search results. It is often the sub-headline and sales description for your link (your title tag is the headline). It helps the searcher decide whether or not your page is relevant to their search. It’s what compels (or not) a real person to click your link, which is the reason for being listed by the search engine in the first place! If you omit the meta description tag, then the search engine is likely to fabricate a description for your site based on arbitrary text gleaned from somewhere on your page. This could lead to (not so) funny descriptions such as “click to go home” (which is a real-life example). Alternatively, the search engine may omit the summary description altogether if it fails to find something useful within your page to use as a summary. In either case, a potential site visitor is less motivated to click your link if you fail to properly utilize the meta description tag. Hence, in every case where you want a description for your link, be certain to include a relevant and enticing meta description tag. Here is an example of what of a proper use of the meta description tag might look like (for our example let’s imagine that we are optimizing a page which sells cell phone accessories): <meta name=”description” content=”The latest in cell phone accessories at the lowest prices for every known brand of cell phone on the planet!”>.

Meta keyword tag
The only other meta tag that is the slightest bit useful to search engines (and only slightly) is the meta keywords tag. This is because many search engines either ignore it or place only limited value on it because it has been so abused in the past. Here is an example of making good use of the meta keyword tag (again we’ll use cell phone accessories as the subject of our web page): <meta name=”keywords” content=”cell phones, Leather Cases, Cellphone holders, Antennas, antennaes, chargers, batteries, face plates, flashing batteries, hands free head phones, headphones, range extenders, bateries”>.

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

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The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

Keyword density tutorial

Worth mentioning is the often-misunderstood concept of keyword density.  In its pure form, keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears in relation to all of the other words on the same web page. For instance, if a page only contained one word of text, say “Chicago”, the keyword density for the word Chicago would be 100%. If, on the other hand, the only text on the page was “Eat at Chicago’s finest book store”, then the keyword density of Chicago would be 20%, since each word on the page represents one-fifth of the entire text (search engine’s ignore common words such as the, at, of, etc. - therefore the word at would not be included in our keyword density calculation).

Keyword density is one of the strategies that some search engine optimizers (SEOs) place way too much emphasis on. They’re usually under the mistaken impression there is some “magic formula” for calculating the optimal keyword density that will appeal to each search engine. While this was true in the past, it has largely ceased to be the case. At best, keyword density is only a bit-player in the big algorithmic search engine formula for top ranking pages. Regardless, you may still hear stories that Google prefers pages with a 5% keyword density or Yahoo likes pages with a 11% keyword density. There are a number of reasons why this is not an effective strategy for optimizing your web pages:

1. The concept of keyword density doesn’t take into account the location of the keywords on the page
   To say that a page has a 10% keyword density says nothing about whether those keywords are featured in your title tags, header tags, link anchor text, or any other of the important places to feature your keywords.
    
2. Keyword density also ignores the distance between keywords on a page, a concept known as keyword proximity.
   In general, the closer your keywords are to each other, the better. For instance, “Your premier resource for San Diego real estate information” is better optimized for the keyword San Diego real estate than “Your premier real estate information resource for the San Diego area”.
    
3. SearchEngineNews.com analysis of top-ranking pages in any search engine shows an enormous variation in the keyword density of those pages.
   Some top-ranking pages have a 50% keyword density. Others have as low as 0% keyword density. Indeed, we’ve found a few pages that rank highly for a keyword in spite of the fact that it doesn’t even appear on the page! In such cases, it’s the keywords in the anchor text of the offsite links that point to the page that’s causing it to rank at or near the top (which illustrates just how important it is to get your keywords into the anchor text of offsite links pointing to your pages!). Such a large degree of variation makes it all-but-impossible for anyone to determine just exactly what the “ideal” keyword density actually is.

The most effective search engine optimizers use keywords in ways that look natural and don’t waste a lot of time stressing over the exact number of times a keyword should appear on a page.

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Previous tutorial: Basic link terminology

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book
Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

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Body text tutorial

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

Body text is the visible text on your page which your visitors read when they visit your site (the HTML code looks like this: <body>Place Your Body Text Here</body>.

Here are the basic rules of thumb regarding your body text:

1. It is beneficial to feature your keywords throughout the rest of your page (but not as important as placing them in the title and header tags).
    
2. Generally, web pages should have about 200 to 300 words of text with special emphasis on two or three carefully chosen keywords.
    
3. Within your keyword-rich body text, search engines respond favorably to keywords placed within style tags such as, <b> (bold), <strong> (bold), <i> (italic), <em> (italic), and <li> (list).
    
4. Place your best keyword rich text as high up on your web page as possible (such as the first headline and the first paragraph on your web page).
    
5. Comine HTML Tags (i.e., your header tags, anchor tags, and style tags).
    

Placing your keyword rich text high up on your web pages
Search engines index page content (via the utilization of source code) in linear order and give priority to keywords found closest to the top of your web page. That is why it is very important that you place some of your best keyword-rich text as high up on your web page as you can (such as in your first headline and in the first paragraph on your page). It is equally important to limit (whenever possible) images, javascript, and other HTML code that precedes your keyword rich text.

Combining HTML Tags
We know that text inside <h1> and <b> tags are given more weight by search engines. And we also know that link anchor text is also given more weight. It follows that it can also be beneficial to combine them, when formatting allows (such as <h1><b><a href=’mypage.html’>Cell Phones</a></b></h1>). Therefore, whenever your page layout allows for it, place a sentence or two of text containing the primary keywords near the top of the page in an <h1> tag and then bold the keywords that you want to emphasize and make them links.

[Note: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be used to alter the standard appearance of any tag. In such cases, <h1> tags don’t have to make text unusually large, <b> tags don’t necessarily make text bold and links can even be made to not look like links. It all depends on whatever style you’ve assigned the tags within your webpage’s associated stylesheet.css file. You can also use absolute positioning in CSS to arrange your keyword-rich copy so that it appears at the beginning of the HTML source code, regardless of where it actually appears on the visible portion of the webpage. Be careful, however,
using CSS absolute positioning might also cause your page to look very strange if the site visitor uses their browser to resize the fonts for better readability. Be sure to test the look with different browser font size settings to ensure an acceptable design layout].

Next tutorial: Meta tags tutorial
Previous tutorial: Header tags tutorial

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.

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