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Table of Contents for this issue.....
1.
Authors
Comments
2.
Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments
3.
Keyword
Spy Software
4.
Good
Keywords Tool
5.
Next Tag
Price History and Other Data
6.
Eons and
Cranky – An Experiment
7.
You Need
Top SERP Position
Author's
Comments
Poof!
Another month gone in the blink of an eye.
As we get older, time definitely moves faster.
This
issue focuses on keywords. The
Internet runs on keywords. Keywords
are what Google and the other search engines use to match a search with
the search results. If you
have the right keywords and your content is good, your website or blog
will be the one presented to the searcher.
If
you pick the right keywords and write killer content on your web page or
blog, the search engines will reward you for it by driving traffic to
your site.
Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments
We
received many requests for advertising this month.
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advertising requests also grow in number.
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Keyword
Spy Software
There are many
keyword spy software packages on the market that give
you insight into the overall competition for a particular keyword
and into how your competition
does with that keyword. All
the information that you can get from these packages is public domain.
It is information that you can get yourself if you spend hours at
your computer searching for the information.
The
good news is that most of these websites have free demos
to try to sell you their services. You
can use these free demos to find information about keywords that you are
considering.
SpyFu
– www.spyfu.com
Cost - $38.50 per
month subscription, 3-day trial for $6.75, annual for $296.00
Alexa
rank 6,902
Keyword
Spy -
www.keywordspy.com
Cost
- $89.95 per month
Alexa
rank 19,301
KeyCompete
- www.keycompete.com
Cost - $39.00 per
month, one-day trial for $19.00, annual for $299.00
Alexa
rank 33,792
I like the free
information you can get from SpyFu.
It shows a quick summary that includes the cost per click range
for the keyword you enter.
You
can get a lot of information from these sites without subscribing.
If you are a serious about pay per click (PPC) advertising, these
services are something to consider.
They will save you hours of grinding out your own research on
keywords and competitors.
Even if you are
not into PPC and you have a website or blog to which you are trying to
attract traffic, you need to know about the keywords for each page on
your website or the keywords in the article that you write in your blog.
If you choose a keyword that has stiff competition, you will
never attract traffic since you will not make the first page of the
search engines. A little
research can help you find some keywords that do not have tremendous
competition, but still have enough search volume to make it worth your
time.
Author’s
Note: The information in the
following pictures from SpyFu is from its
February
1, 2008
data. There are some
differences between what is shown in the SpyFu results pictures and the
current Google search results.
As an example,
let’s take the keyword “retirement”.
This keyword is VERY popular.
If you search Google for “retirement”, it has 123,000,000
results. When you look at
the top results you see the “big boys” CNN Money, Social Security
Administration, Wikipedia. The
top AdWords are purchased by T. Rowe Price, Schwab, Old Mutual, and
Zecco. You can be certain
that they paid a handsome price for those positions.
SpyFu says that the top price for “retirement” is $3.83 per
click.
What does this
information tell me? That I
do not want to even attempt to compete for the keyword “retirement”.
Now, let’s
narrow the keyword. We will
use the keyword “retirement jobs” which is the keyword theme for my
website, www.retirement-jobs-online.com
(RJO). The Google search for
“retirement jobs” shows 601,000 results.
We have reduced the competition by 99.5%.
We are now into a “niche” of the keyword “retirement”.
When we look at
SpyFu for “retirement jobs” we find:
Using
“retirement jobs” as a keyword and with the help of Site
Build It, www.retirement-jobs-online.com
is number 2 for Google Search for that keyword.
Now, let’s
narrow the niche a little more with the keyword “jobs for retirees”.
Google shows 235,000 search results for this search.
Here are the results from SpyFu:
Using this
keyword, I created a page on the RJO site that is ranked number 1 on
Google. The link to the page
is:
http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/retirement-jobs.html
In summary, there
are numerous tools available to you to use to help you analyze keywords
before you spend hours creating content that will never be read because
no one will ever find your website or your blog because it will never
make it to the top five search results.
Don
’t
let passion for your topic overcome logic and reason.
Do your research first. Create
your content with keyword intelligence so your efforts are not wasted.
Good luck on your
future website or blog. May
your keywords put your website or blog on the top of the first page of
the Google.
Good
Keywords Tool
Since we are
talking about keyword tools, Good
Keywords v2.01 is a free tool for doing keyword research.
You can find it at www.goodkeywords.com.
This is freeware from Softnik Technologies.
The download page
for it is http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw.
The
main feature I use is the misspelling tool.
I am running a pay per click campaign on Microsoft AdCenter and
Google A
dw
ords for various GPS units. I
needed to come up with all the various spellings for the word “garmin”.
Garmin is the company that makes many of the most popular GPS
units being sold today.
The misspelling
tool will take a word and create all kind of misspellings.
There are options for the types of misspelling variations you
want. The Duplicate
Characters option will generate accidental double key strikes.
The Missing Characters option simulates the user not quite
hitting the key hard enough to enter the letter.
The Swapped Characters option simulates character transposition
(one of my big problems), and the Keyboard Proximity option creates
words with the letters from keys near the correct key.
To start creating
misspellings, we start with the word “garmin”.
First, I got
Linda to help me with the normal misspellings.
Linda is great at this since she likes word games.
She works the crossword puzzles everyday.
When she cannot sleep, she doesn’t count sheep.
She does word games in her mind like taking a word and seeing how
many words she can make from the letters in the base word.
The first
misspelled words were the normal changing of vowels.
Swapping a,e,i,o, and u.
Here is the start of the exercise.
garman
garmen
garmin
– this is the original word which is left out of the final list
garmon
garmun
german
germen
germin
germon
germun
.
.
.
gurmun
From my keyword
research, I found that some people misspelled “garmin” as
“garvin” so we did the same thing with “garvin”.
Then we entered
each of these into the misspelling tool and came up with 1,220
misspelled words.
These
misspellings coupled with the Garmin model number give me possible
misspellings for the various Garmin GPS models.
Other variations are whether the searcher enters the model number
before or after Garmin and whether or not they leave a space between the
model number and the word. Examples:
Garmin 350, 350 Garmin, Garmin350, 350Garmin.
Now all I have to
do is combine the model number with all the misspellings in these four
formats. What? That is 4,880
combinations to type!!! Then
there are many, many models of Garmin GPS.
Never fear.
I use Excel for this type of letter and word manipulation.
It has the ability to handle letters and words just like it can
calculate numbers. The
ampersand character “&” is the “string” combination
character. A string is a
group of text letters.
I created a
spreadsheet with formulas to create the four possible entry combinations
we previously discussed. Now,
I can enter the model number into the yellow cell and Excel will combine
the model number with the misspelled word for me.
The starting misspelled words are in the left column and the
calculated variations are in the next four columns.
Here is a picture
of the upper left of the spreadsheet:
The formula in the cell that contains “360 garmen” is
=$B$1&" "&A3. This
tells Excel to take the fixed cell containing the model number ($B$1),
combine it (&) with a space “ “, and then combine it (&)
with the contents of cell A3 which contains the base misspelled word “garmen”.
This creates the string “360 garmen”.
There is one more
step to make the words acceptable to AdWords.
The cells that you see above contain formulas that create the
words. If you copy these
cells to AdWords, you will get the formulas that created the words, not
the words themselves. To get
the words as text, we highlight the column we want to convert to text
and click “Copy”. We
then move over to an empty column on the spreadsheet and right click the
cell where we are going to start the Paste operation.
Select “Paste Special” from the dropdown box and then select
“Values”. This will
strip out the formulas and leave the results of the formulas which are
the misspelled keywords we want. These
can be copied from the spreadsheet and entered directly into AdWords or
AdCenter.
You say, “why
go to all this trouble”? The
reason is that these create cheap keywords to put on Google AdWords.
You only pay if someone clicks on these.
If someone is searching for a Garmin model number and misspells
the name, your ad will be there for them to see and you will be at the
top of the Sponsored Links at the right side of the page.
Set these
misspellings up and leave them. They
will stay as long as you leave them up and odds are the sometime in the
next couple of years, some searcher is going to find your ad and
subsequently your landing page from some of them.
And the click cost will be LOW.
If you would like
the Excel model that I use for this, contact me using the contact page
at Request
Excel (This is the suggestion form) and I will email it to
you.
Next Tag Price
History and Other Data
Did
you know that you can find price history and other key information on
many popular products sold on the Internet?
The
website www.nextag.com is a
comparative shopping site that has that information if you know where to
find it. I use this resource
to check the price history for some of the electronic products that I
sell through affiliate links. It
also tells the number of sellers selling the product and the number of
leads by month that hit its website.
I
searched for the Garmin Nuvi 350 and here are the results.
The price history graph is in the bottom right corner.
When you click the image, you will get a larger view with additional
information. This is where
you see how many sellers were detected by NexTag and how many searches
it received for the product.
This
can be valuable information when you are evaluating the popularity of a
product or you are looking for the number of competitors.
Eons and
Cranky – An Experiment
In
Volume 1, Issue
48 3-9-07, we wrote an article about Eons and its associate search
engine www.cranky.com. At that time
Eons limited its membership to Boomers.
It has changed the age limit and even though it still targets the
40’s and older group, it is open to anyone over 13.
I
request your help with an experiment on Cranky.com.
Our
website, Retirement Jobs Online.com (RJO), fluctuates between fourth and
fifth place in the search results on Cranky for the keyword
“retirement jobs”. In
January 2008, RJO received 90 visitors from Cranky.
In February, it received 46 visitors.
The
difference was that in January, RJO was in fourth place on the search
results much of the time which is on the first page (there are four
search results per page). In
February, it spent most of the time in fifth place which is the first
position on the second page. When
I checked on the morning of
2/29/08
, it had slipped to sixth place.
It also had a result in seventh place.
Cranky
allows viewers to review the search engine results and give the results
star ratings. RJO has one
4-star rating and I admit, I wrote it myself.
The experiment is to determine if
Eons member ratings have any effect on the position of the search
results
or if the results are strictly based on the search engines.
To
participate in the experiment, join http://www.eons.com
if you are not already a member. It
is a great site focused on Boomers, and I think you will enjoy it.
If
you have not been there before, go to www.retirement-jobs-online.com
(RJO) and get a feel of what is on the site, how the site is organized,
and the mission of the site.
With
your knowledge of RJO, go to www.cranky.com
and search for “retirement jobs”.
Find the first search result for retirement-jobs-online.com and
write a review about it. You
pick the number of stars based on you opinion of RJO.
I think it is a 4-star site, but I am prejudiced.
I
will report back next month on how many reviews were entered and in
which position RJO is on Cranky.
I
ask that you help with this. Linda
and I work hard to bring you this ezine each month and you can repay us
by taking some of your time to participate in this experiment.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Just
as a footnote to this. On
2/29/08
, the first place for the keyword
“retirement jobs” was held by my friendly competitor, Dave Wright,
with his website pppretirementplans.com.
His site is a Site Build It website as is our RJO site.
This is just more proof that Site Build It helps its owners build
successful websites (and successful online businesses).
If you haven’t done so lately, check
out Site Build It.
You
Need Top SERP Position
What in the world
is SERP? It stands for
search engine results page. For
your website to be seen, you need to be “above the fold” on the
first page of the SERP for your keywords.
We wrote an
article entitled “Living Above the Fold” in http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I44_020907.htm.
Basically, you live above the fold and die below the fold.
The fold is at the bottom of your monitor when a web page loads.
Below the fold is the part of the page you cannot see unless you
scroll down to view it.
Here is a picture
of the traffic analysis for retirement-jobs-online.com for January 2008.
Notice that the top 25 referrers to RJO came from search engines.
This is free traffic which is the best kind.
Most of these came from keyword searches where the results were
above the fold on the first page.
Whether you are
writing a blog or building a website, research and plan your keywords to
land on the top of the first SERP. Find
niche keywords and build a page just to take advantage of that keyword.
Not all keywords have to have high volume traffic.
If you build enough pages on your site that attracts “a
little” traffic and move the viewer to your home page, all those low
traffic landing pages add up to substantial traffic over the month.
That wraps up
this issue. Until next
month, stay tuned.
John and
Linda Howe
www.boomer-ezine.com
www.the-best-gps.com
www.the-best-web-host.com
www.boomer-guru.com
www.boomer-marketplace.com
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