Session 4: Content and Keywords
How do you know what keywords to use on your website? We learn in today’s SEO training session.
There are two ways to go about choosing what keywords to use in your site content: you can guess or you can analyze. Most companies with web sites employ the guess method. You MUST take the guesswork out of the equation. To win traffic you must persistently use analysis feedback.
Following is a sample of research results on the keywords dealing with IPOD. Notice the huge difference in traffic between the keyword “ipod nano” and “ipod nanos.” Also notice the “ipods” does not even show up but “ipod” is at the top of the traffic column. If you had to choose one term – what would it be?
Keywords can be categorized as Big Head words or Long Tail words.
Big Head words are high traffic words that require deliberate and conscious effort to obtain ranking on. These are the words used to create titles, headers, meta tags, content, and generate external links.
Long Tail words will naturally be searched because of the way you lay your content out. There isn’t as much traffic on these words as they are more specific. However, the aggregate of Long Tail words can represent substantial traffic. Building out inner pages based on Long Tail words will result in additional high purpose, targeted traffic.
Here is a strong example of how long tail traffic can make a significant increase in traffic. This is based on the search term “Villancicos mp3s.” (Villancicos is a Spanish Christmas album).
The following are traffic stats for a sample site taken for a 30 day period:
The #7 organic traffic driver to the above sample site was the keyword Villancicos mp3.
A search for Villancicos mp3 in Google gives the following results
The music site is the top result! Then we went into our keyword research and sure enough, Villancicos mp3 has a comparatively strong KEI:
Just a couple external links were enough to get the Villancicos page on the music site to the top Google ranking! Here is a high ranking external site that links to the Villancicos page:
There’s a tremendous amount of traffic on long tail artist names, album titles, and song titles. The music site is strongly positioned to get a lot of this traffic with some tweaks to the site.
As you apply keywords to your content employ the following two guidelines.
Density: The number of times a keyword/phrase occurs in the content. The suggested density is once for every 28 – 32 words of content.
Prominence: Where the keywords are placed in the content. It is most effective to place keywords at the beginning of content paragraphs.