ISEdb.COM » Tinu Abayomi-Paul

5 Ways You Can Triumph in Keyword Selection

Tinu Abayomi-Paul — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:25:23 +0000

Get Your Keywords On-Target by Avoiding These Mistakes

Learn from The Top Five Mistakes Made When Choosing Keywords to Target – and Find Out How to Avoid Them

When you’re building a strategy to get visitors to come to your site, your choice of keywords to focus on are among the most important ones you’ll have to make. If you focus on the wrong keyword, you will focus on creating the wrong content, and could even take you in pursuit of less effective link building options.

It doesn’t matter if you’re doing the work yourself or if you’ve hired a professional to do it for you – getting even the best results for the wrong keyword will not bring you the kind of results that bring you viable prospects.

(Although hopefully if a professional is helping you, they’ll advise you to target better keywords. Do yourself a favor – if one does, seriously consider their advice.)

In my time helping companies with overall traffic solutions that include search, these are the mistakes I see most often. I’ll also discuss a few tips you can use to avoid or correct them.

Mistake #1 – Choosing Keywords that are too difficult

I’m not saying it’s impossible to rank for the word “jobs”. However, there are several things to consider here. First, it would be exceedingly difficult and could take years, especially if you’re working with a shoestring budget. Even then, it’s improbable that you’re going to knock a site like Monster or Career Builder out of their spot. Second, it’s woefully untargeted, and untargeted keywords get you people who aren’t even sure what they want yet.

Finally, there are so many easier choices out there that bring you much more traffic.

Think about the last time you were looking for a job. You probably typed in “post a resume”, “job search” or even the exact position you were seeking. Or you looked for a site where you could look for jobs. There are lots of good reasons not to pursue single word keyword phrases, but you’ll probably find your own experience to be convincing enough.

But just in case it isn’t, here’s a quick story.

One of my clients gave me a reason why he wanted to target the keyword “travel”. He told me, “my customers are the greenest of the green.”
Here’s what I told him.

My mother is not a big web person. Out of the last ten years, it’s only in the past two that she’s had even a slight understanding of what I’m “doing on the computer”.

I’ve recently had to show her how to attach files to an email.

And even she knows that she’s not going to find her favorite pair of Manolo Blanik’s by typing in the word “shoe”.

How to avoid this mistake:

Give your future customers and clients at minimum the same credit for brains that you give yourself. If you want the latest Stephen King novel, you don’t type in “book” because you don’t want just any book.

Also, when you’re doing keyword research, don’t just look at numbers of searches, look at difficulty, too. And if you’re tempted to target the hardest keyword anyway, remember – it doesn’t matter how many visitors come from a keyword you’ll never rank for – zero traffic by any other method is just as bitter.

Mistake #2 – Choosing Keywords that are too easy

I’ve witnessed several people who had mistake number one figured out, then target keywors that are too easy, thinking that they’ve bested the search engines. But it’s just a whole different type of wrong.

Yes, you want to target keywords that are easy enough to attain, but ONLY targeting the very easiest keywords does not a search engine strategy make.

It’s not just that it’s hard to find enough low-traffic but highly-targeted keywords to generate enough traffic to be worth the effort. Easier keywords typicially (though not always) bring less traffic.

There’s also all the money you’re leaving on the table. Sometimes targeting a slightly harder keyword can double your traffic.

How to avoid this mistake:

When choosing your keyword, you want to strike an elegant balance between the difficulty of the keyword, and the amount of traffic it will send. You face the same danger in picking keywords that are too easy as you do keywords that are too difficult – lack of traffic.

Mistake #3 – Choosing to Target for Groups of Keywords That Aren’t Related

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. In search strategy, the simplest way to get your customer to cross your path is to make your path intersect with theirs. For example, show up in the searches they do in Google and Yahoo.

Having a tightly focused and targeted topical site is one of the many strategies you could use to get in the searches – create great content that people will link to, and get a nice rankings boost. It’s passive, and it’s slower, but it’s free. And if you do the supporting work in the background to penetrate the influencers in your network, it works.

So when your search professional or coaching expert asks you “what keywords are you hoping to rank for” and you say “Poetry, hula-hoops, and bear attacks”, expect strange looks.

Not only should each of these topics have a separate site, if your site doesn’t address the entire spectrum of related words within one keyword family, you may want to target even more tightly. Even poetry.com could do better than targeting the word “poetry” – they specialize in publishing amateur poets.

They’d do better having a site for studying classical poetry, one for contemporary, a forum site for hobbyist poets, a call for submissions site for those more serious about their art, etc.

If you look at the situation with brick and mortar logic, you’ll see the light. How much would it throw you off to walk into your local grocery store and see row after row of stereo equipment with one little corner of basic items in a back corner?

I’d be wondering which of these things this store did better, if either.

And let’s say you run, as a serious hobby. Are you going to go to any department store to get your running shoes? Or would you rather go to an athletic shoe store where the people know a little something about your sport?

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Specialize in one core idea per site.

It’s one thing to splinter off into a closely related item on a regular basic, or even to go completely off-topic from time to time, but it’s quite another to try and go in two different directions from one site.

Think about what big corporations do. GE, NBC Universal, MSNBC, and Microsoft are in the same corporate family, corporate cousins, so to speak. But they don’t share a website, nor should they.

Even if each of the companies were owned by the exact same entities in the same proportions, since they offer different markets and serve different audiences, they still need separate identities in order to be promoted properly.

Mistake #4 – Choosing Keywords that aren’t related to your product

There are actually several ways to screw this up, and having done them all, I’m quite familiar with the process. You could pick a keyword that illustrates what you offer, but doesn’t quite tell the correct audience.

You could choose a keyword that brings other peers to your site instead of your potential customers and clients. Or you could pick a keyword that has two meanings, neither of which lead your ideal customers to you.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Start your keyword selection process by thinking and acting from the perspective of your ideal customers and clients.

What problem does your product solve? How would your prospects phrase it? Are they already typing that into Google? What comes up when they find it and how would your site be better than that?

Ask yourself these questions and write down the answers. Actually do the searches – if you can, interview your potential customers and ask them. Incorporate them into your keyword research.

Mistake #5 – Choosing Keywords for show, rather than for targeting buyers

I know this one sounds out of the blue but you’d be surprised how often this happens. Here’s the scenario.

A small, successful company gets interest from a group of investors. To impress them they say, “Well, by next month, we’ll rank on the first page for a phrase which will bring us twice the search traffic, which we believe will double sales. So we’d be profitable again in a couple of months.”

They base this on the fact that they currently rank in the top 100 – how hard could it be to move to the first page?

Investor guy says “Okay, call me when you do it and the money’s as good as yours.”

So executives at small company tell marketing to make it happen. Finding that they’re unable to do this themselves, they in turn call whoever rumor has it is the latest search miracle-worker expert.

Ms. company owner says, “Can you get us on the first page for the keyword phrase baby water?”

Ms. Expert replies, “Perhaps. What do you sell?”

Ms. Company Owner says, “Baths.”

So now the expert has a problem. Technically, yes, she can get them that listing, for their current site. But it will interfere with their ability to be found for baths, and kill their profits, so they still won’t reach their goal.

Either way, they’re shot. And they don’t want to hear that changing their keyword strategy to appeal to the people who buy their antique baths and bath fixtures would likely make them more than the investor was offering.

I love that story because something like it actually happened to me.

But more commonly, folks start finding out what keyword choices they should have made right when they’ve almost achieved their initial goal. And they get caught up in the idea of ranking number one for something so much that they forget that ranking number one for the wrong keyword phrase isn’t helping them.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Take targeting seriously. Don’t be lured by easy traffic in great quantities if it isn’t targeted to your niche. At best, you want to start another venture in that niche, or develop a product to serve it.

But don’t ever settle for a whole lot of bad traffic over a moderate amount of good traffic. You’ll end up with fewer leads who are less likely to buy.

It’s like successfully getting 40,000 teenagers to express interest in owning a home. Many of them may even be sincere. But how many of them are going to buy from you in the suburbs in the next six months?

Maybe – maybe if you targeted an area with a high population of teen stars, you’d get a few. If you’re lucky.

The point is, even a great quantity of untargeted leads is still no good. You’d be better off with half as many really interested prospects. The truth is, you could get a lot more for half the effort if you target more precisely. It’s just easier.

The Right Keyword Brings You The Right Traffic

Getting the right keyword for your site is of critical importance. The right keyword is the foundation for everything else you will do in your efforts to get better organic search results. It’s not about keyword density or even latent semantic indexing, or any of the factors that Google, Bing or Yahoo may or may not be using to rank your site.

Your keyword choice informs a myriad of decisions you will make about your site and how you will prepare documents to reflect the topics your site is relevant to, other traffic strategies you’ll use, as well as your link strategy.

So even if your keyword choice rarely appears on your site, and your ranking is purely link driven, it would still have to be topically related to that keyword or your prospects won’t stay around long enough to click, subscribe or buy.

Let’s face it. A quick article isn’t going to solve all your problems picking keywords. But getting this one element right could drastically improve the effectiveness of your entire organic search campaign.

5 Ways to Evaluate Search Experts or Search Software

Tinu Abayomi-Paul — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:06:41 +0000

There have been a lot of new search experts coming on the scene lately, and that’s not a bad thing. You can also find a lot of great new search tools as well. The search world can always benefit from new blood, whether it means unique new thought leadership, or just new examples of what Not to do.

It’s that second part that’s the problem – the what Not to do list seems to be getting smaller and smaller, as more people realize that some folks will do literally Anything to get more traffic from search engines.

It’s a serious thing – some businesses are dying because regular customers are buying left, and their only plan for new exposure is search.

Equally serious is the recent proliferation of hustlers and snake oil salesmen, hiding alongside the legitimate search experts. The question is, what do we do about it, as search and website promotion experts.

i vote for exposing them. I vote by pulling back the curtain and showing you their tricks.

One note though – this isn’t purely altruistic. I love helping people, but it’s not just that – these folks are making my job harder. Now instead of just performing traffic miracles, I also have to undo catastrophes.

And I’m getting too old for all that. So let’s get started, shall we?

Have You Fallen for The “False Proof” Tactic?
Here’s a trick people fall for all the time. It’s so common the really scuzzy people have a name for it – it’s called “False Proof.”

The one that has been chapping my behind is when a supposed search expert will say, “I’m number one out of 33 million results.” And you think, really? 33 MILLION?

Then you get their software, ebook, or system, and you find out that even though you’re also able to rank number one for a term that gets 33 million results, none of it sent you any sales, or leads – and really, not much traffic either.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that this ranking isn’t an achievement for some people. It’s just that it HAS to be put into perspective. If someone is telling you – hey, I’m kind of a newbie to search, and I figured out how to do this. Let me share my research with you – that’s information to trust.

The same person claiming it makes them an expert? Not so much.

If you don’t want to get hustled by this little trick, remember that proof has to be MEANINGFUL.

It’s fine to profit from a JV deal with a friend or colleague, I’m not knocking it. I’ve done it and when I have, I’ve slept great, because I make a conscious effort to only promote the highest quality products from my peers.

So I think endorsements are okay.

What’s NOT Okay is when the testimonials of friends are the Only testimonials a person has for their product.

What did their peers think?

What did their clients think?

What do people who didn’t know them before they tried it think?

If a person selling you an SEO product or search consulting is a layperson, and they figured out how to get results better than the next guy, and they say so, that is completely above board.

But if they’re claiming to be a guru or expert in any way, and they’re using keyword rankings or number of links generated, or anything else to prove their results, make sure they stand up to closer scrutiny.

Let’s continue with five specific things to look for when you’re looking to purchase search services, or supplement your do-it-yourself efforts with that shiny new software:

5 Things to Look At When Evaluating Search Experts or Search Software
1- The number of results doesn’t always tell you how comparatively difficult the keyword is to rank for. A good keyword difficulty check like the one at SEOmoz.org will help you figure this out. Go see if the keyword is a challenge – or at least as difficult as the keyword you’d like to rank for – before you put stock in a number one ranking.

2- If the keyword phrase is 4 or more words long, a monkey could probably rank for it under the right conditions. This isn’t always true, and by itself it’s not damnable evidence that you’re being hustled. Just look out for it as a ‘claim to fame”.

3- Even if it is hard for a newbie to rank for, and the software tool/person will help you get to the next level of expertise, if the terms you would rank for are those that don’t send any traffic, or won’t help you build up to terms that will send traffic, it’s a waste of time. To check how much traffic a term can get you, try the tools at Aaron Wall’s SEOBook site.

4- If just one keyword ranking is their claim to fame, they aren’t an expert. if they’re saying they are, or that their tool is worth paying for, based on this, be wary.

You do NOT really know what you’re doing with search until you have been able to maintain hundreds or thousands of rankings for a few years.

You can get to number one by cheating in the short term – until they catch you and ban your site.

Luck or cheating doesn’t make you an expert.

5- If the number one or first page result they got is one of many, and passes all the difficulty and traffic tests – is the result they have in Google or Yahoo for their own site? It if it, and that’s all the information they’re selling, don’t buy it. I’ll tell you how to do that for free in a minute.

First let me explain one thing: it’s not that it’s a bad thing to get to number one using Ezine Articles or Hub Pages. It’s that you don’t control the ranking when it’s not on your site.

It’s that you don’t need someone to teach you something fancy to get that ranking.

Anyone can get a popular site to rank at the top for an article they’ve contributed – there are free articles for how to do this around the Net. If I’m not mistaken, Chris Knight wrote about it last year on this blog.

That’s not some coveted secret worth the price of a large pizza or a fancy dinner.

How do you do it? You use your keywords in the title of the article you’re contributing, and make your article semantically relevant enough to out-rank whatever listing is presently number one. It won’t work with every keyword, but when it does, that’s how it happens.

The real trick is getting that ranking to mean money for you. That ranking doesn’t automatically mean they’ll click the link to visit your site.

(How do you do make sure they do? That secret takes way more room than one article.)

So again, this Can be a good technique. But knowing that doesn’t make you an expert.

Now, I won’t sit here and say that every expert trying to get you to buy a search or traffic related product is full of it. There’s a lot of good programs out there. But the instant you’re being promised outlandish results with a minimum of effort, it’s right that your BS radar should go off.

The second you’re being peddled a quick fix that is meant to supersede or replace good knowledge, you have to ask yourself if what you’re paying and the results you’re getting are worth the risk.

It’s not that there isn’t good stuff out there – it’s that you have to really look at whether what you’re paying is going to yield results worth your investment.

There are a bunch of great experts and great sites that can help you get better search results in Google and Yahoo. I could name ten off the top of my head. Just remember, in order to see what’s worth your money, scrutinize your expert, and investigate the promises of your favorite search tool.

You may be surprised at what you find.

What Google Says About Google Bombing Can Teach You About Link Building

Tinu Abayomi-Paul — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 04:00:00 +0000

Are Some Links Better And, for that matter, should you focus on sheer quantity of links to your site, or the quality of those links? For our first piece of evidence, let’s ask Google.

In a post to their blog in September, we find the following: “By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.”

While that doesn’t mean you should engage in the practice of Google Bombing, by any means, it does give you a clue to how effective it can be to use the description of the site that is being linked to, where appropriate.

It isn’t a secret that a sheer volume of links can help you get better rankings. If you could get 25,000 links legitimately referencing your site, sure, that would be a great thing.

When you look at the work involved in the reciprocal link process, even with the powerful tools available on the market today, the objective would be to reduce the amount of time generating links back to your site as much as possible. This makes it seem that it’s more important (and more realistic for entrepreneurs and small businesses) to get quality links, if these links are going to carry greater weight than their reciprocal counterparts.

While that goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom about getting better search results, the truth is that search engine optimization is a bit like adjusting the graphic equalizer on your stereo. There are several ways you can adjust your settings to get the desired effect.

In light of that, let’s revisit quality link building. What is it?

In general, each link pointing to your site is sort of a “vote” for your sites contest. But all votes aren’t equal. If you sell airline tickets on your site, pages that are about travel will get a more powerful vote than a site about butterflies.

And if two pages that have unrelated content link to you, the tie breaker will be the anchor text, or the words in the hyperlink that is linked to you. Nirvana would be an anchor text link on a search-engine favored page that is related to the linked page..

Therefore, a quality link would be the kind of link that carries the most weight in favor of your site. Since their “vote” counts more, you don’t need to get as many quality links to get the same effect as pure volume of raw links.

Quality link building, then, is the process by which we discover links that can help us build more valuable document relationships and favor getting these over links that create weak correlations.

The lowest quality link to my site would be a raw link like http://www.freetraffictip.com , on an unrelated page.

A better link would be one that links to me using the phrase free traffic, on an unrelated page. The fact that they use a phrase that is descriptive of my site to link to me, put that link in a better context, so that even when it’s from an unrelated page, it’s even better.

Slightly more lovely would be a raw link to my site that was on a page that is related.

The best I’d hope for would be a link that uses the phrase free traffic from a page that has something to do with any topic related to traffic generation.

There are even better scenarios than that, but they are only in play when you’re in control of the link pointing back to you. In the meantime, from watching what Google itself has said about Google Bombing, you can learn that not all links to your site give you the same voting weight.

The question then becomes, why do all that extra work if you can get the same benefit with 25% of the effort?

Why indeed.

5 Ways Google Will Help You With Your Traffic

Tinu Abayomi-Paul — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 04:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever had a severe drop in your Google rankings in search results, you may think of Google more of an enemy than an ally.

But if you knew what I do, you’d realize that there are tools provided by the search engine that help you learn more about your traffic, and may even help drive visitors to your site.

Here are five ways that Google provides free traffic assistance.

1 – Google will Help Your Pages Get Discovered with Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is a program that gives you the opportunity to present your site’s pages to Google in XML or text. Google will then come by and spider the pages, getting you indexed faster.

Take note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that your pages will be listed for your favorite keywords, only that discovery will take place a lot faster than with manual submission. Google Sitemaps will also give you some basic site stats if you verify your site, such as the top keywords for discovery, errors it found when crawling, and the types of documents at your site.

If you find compiling your sitemap for Google in the correct format difficult, try the SOFTplus GSiteCrawler Google Sitemap generator. It’s my favorite Sitemap generator, free and easy to use.

2 – Google Will Talk To You or Your Webmasterwith the Webmaster Section

The Google Information Page for Webmasters should be your first stop when you want to know more about anything that has to do with your site and its relationship to Google and any of its many flavors of search such as Froogle. Particularly for new site owners or operators, checking this page first has saved many from needless anxiety.

Most of the basic information is in straightforward language, with links to details for geeks like me.

3 – Google will Tell You What It Knows with Web Page Information

If you type info:yoursite.com into Google, Google will tell show you a page that has your link at the top of the page, with a short description, and the following phrase “Google can show you the following information for this URL”.

This special page compiles several queries about your site including pages that contain your URL (all the pages Google knows of that are linked to you).

4 – Google will Help You Analyze Your Traffic with Google Analytics

After a recent purchase of Urchin Stats, a free online version has been made available, and re-branded as Google Analytics. This cookie-based invisible visitor tracker can give you information that go a bit beyond standard stats such as bounce rates, visitor loyalty, keyword discovery results for a single day, click paths through your site, and page views per visit.

With the ability to analyze your traffic, you can help learn where the holes in your site are, and how to keep them on your site for longer periods of time, as well as better ways to steer a visit towards a specific action, such as a subscription. Results come in flavors for the executive and the search marketer alike.

There’s currently a waiting list to use Google Analytics due to popular demand.

5 – Google Will Advise On Getting the Most from Your Traffic with Conversion University

Google Analytics also has two content sections that are available to all, called Conversion University. While the articles are decidedly slanted towards AdWords users, a prudent read yields many clues that can be applied to preparing for visitors who arrive through organic search discovery. One reference area is called “Driving Traffic”, the other “Converting Visitors.”

At the end of the day, the process by which your site gets ranked in Google search engine results is a computation of a complex algorithm, which means Google – the search engine – really isn’t capable of being your best friend or your worst enemy.

Meanwhile, Google – the company – also provides access to resources that will help give your site a fighting chance.