Let's Learn SEO

How can Competition be a Factor in Driving Traffic to our Website?

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:54:00 +0000

Now that we are done with keyword evaluation, the next thing that we need to consider in our keyword research is the competition. I’ve divided the competition analysis into three different subtopics and these are the following:

Keyword Evaluation

Search Volume
Search Trends
Commercial Value

Competition Analysis

Competition Volume
On-Page Factors
Off-Page Factors

Exploration

Competition analysis is our way of analyzing the competition of our potential keywords. Some of our potential keywords may have very high competition and it may be impossible for us to compete with our competitors using that keyword. That’s why we have to be careful in analyzing the competition in our target niche.

Our aim is for our website to be displayed in the front page of the Google search result page for us to have a steady stream of traffic. The only problem is there are only 10 listings in the front page for each keyword phrase and there are often many websites competing for those top 10 spots.

For us to be able to reach that goal there is really no need for us to have a perfect website. What we need to do is to just be better than our competitors.

Having a very attractive design and a very interesting topic may be a good factor in driving traffic to our website. The problem is that if the competition is very high and impossible to penetrate, then all of those factors become useless. That’s why we have to be careful in picking our battles for us to avoid frustrations and money loss.

In my next article, we’re going to discuss competition volume.

Commercial Intent Indicators

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:35:00 +0000

Last time, we discussed what commercial intent is. In this article, I am going to discuss some techniques or tools for us to determine the commercial intent of our keyword. These are: Google AdWords, Microsoft OCI (Online Commercial Indicator), products related to our keyword in EBay, products related to our keyword in Amazon, E-Stores or Online Shopping sites, and Affiliate Programs. Here are some of the steps in using the different commercial intent indicators.

Google Adwords

In Google, key-in our keyword first and see if there are a lot of ads in the results page. It means that there are a lot of advertisers who are willing to pay just to promote their website. On the other hand, if there are no ads in the results page, it is a good indicator that the keyword that we chose is not a buying keyword.

Microsoft OCI

Go to the website of Microsoft OCI and key-in our keyword. Remember to select the query option. Then press the Go button.

As you can see, the keyword “buy weight loss equipment” has a 96% probability that the keyword is a buying keyword, while the keyword “free music” has a 78% probability that it is not a buying keyword.

It really shows that the “free” keyword is not really a good choice of keyword. I think that this is a very helpful tool because it shows quantifiable values to measure a keyword’s commercial intent.

Products Related to our Keyword in EBay, Amazon, E-Stores or Online Shopping Sites

For websites whose main intent is to sell products, a good indicator that the keyword has a high commercial intent is to try to search for the keyword in EBay, Amazon, or E-Stores or Online Shopping sites. It is a good indicator if there are a good number of search results in these sites. More search results imply that there are a lot of people selling the product. As a result, a lot of people are making money with that keyword. Thus, it has a high commercial intent.

Affiliate Programs

Another way of checking our keywords’ commercial intent is through the number of affiliate programs available in the web. If you are not familiar with affiliate programs yet, I found this site which pretty much explains everything about affiliate programs.

To try to see the number of affiliate programs related to our keyword, I do a Google search and key-in my keyword plus the word “affiliate program”. Then I check the top sites to see if the sites have affiliate programs. A link is normally found at the bottom part of their websites.

Just like EBay, Amazon, E-Stores or Online Shopping site indicators, the more search results we get, the higher the commercial intent is.

Those are basically the different ways on how to determine the commercial intent of our keyword. We are free to use any of the techniques mentioned. Maybe the Microsoft OCI is enough for us to determine the keyword’s commercial intent. For some of us, the Google AdWords is more important. Personally, I prefer to use all of the techniques mentioned and compare the results that I got with each to verify everything.

That covers everything about keyword evaluation. My next article will be about keyword competition so make sure to watch out for that.

Keyword Evaluation: Commercial Intent

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 07:58:00 +0000

Our last topic regarding keyword evaluation is keyword commercial intent. Commercial intent means asking if the user searching for the keyword is in a buying mood. Obviously, for most purposes, what we want is for online users to not only visit our website but to also buy the products that we are offering or avail of the services that we are offering.

Here are some of the keywords that we must not use as keywords because these keywords have very low commercial intent:

Free
Torrent
Download

If users key in these keywords in Google, obviously, they are not in the mood to buy something. On the other hand, here are keywords that we can use:

Buy
Cheap
Review
Bargain

Keywords containing these terms have high commercial intent because users keying these terms in Google are most likely to be in the mood to buy something. Of course it is not going to be this obvious though, that’s why we have to be familiar with the buying cycle.

The Interest Phase

The first phase in buying cycle is the “Interest” phase. In this phase, I as a buyer am not quite sure yet if I’m going to buy or not. I’m still in the process of looking for general information about the thing that I’m interested in. An example of this is when I became interested in learning about digital photography. During this time, I did a broad search in Google. I was searching for the keyword “digital photography”.

During the process of searching for articles related to digital photography, I became interested in buying a digital camera but haven’t decided on what brand to buy yet.

The Research Phase

The next phase is the “Research” phase. During this phase, I am starting to decide that I want to buy a digital camera but I want to have the best brand for me. I’ll start to search for more specific keywords and start searching for reviews and brand comparisons.

The Buying Phase

The next phase after doing some research is the “Buying” phase. During this phase, I was already able to decide on what brand to buy and all I wanted to know was where I can get the best price to buy the product. The keywords that I keyed into Google were “cheap Canon 1000d cameras”, “buy canon cameras 1000d”, and “canon 1000D price”. After finding the cheapest price, that was when I purchased the product.

That’s basically the buying cycle. Of course, for some people this can take very long as they are very deliberate and will spend days reading reviews and comparing different products. On the other hand, other people go through this cycle in a span of minutes or hours and do impulse buying decisions. Either way, we all go through this process when deciding to buy something.

Looking at the buying cycle, I can say that the broader the keyword is, the higher the traffic and the higher competition I will get. However, this will lead to a low conversion or low sales. On the other hand, having a very specific keyword will lead to lower traffic and lower competition but have a higher chance of selling a product.

Having a broad keyword does not mean that you made a bad keyword choice though. If the set of keywords that you have are fully optimized to your web pages, can compete against your competitors, and have a high conversion rate, then, I think you’re on the right track.

In my next article, we are going to discuss the tools that we can use in getting the commercial value of the keywords that we are going to use.

Keyword Evaluation: Search Trends

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 03:21:00 +0000

As promised, we’re going to discuss search trends today. If you’ve read my post, Let’s Do Some Keyword Research, I mentioned there that one of the factors in finding our “perfect keyword” is that it must have an upward trend or is consistently searched for. That is what search trends is all about. We want a keyword that people will still be searching for, months and years from now.

The tool that I used in getting the search trend is Google Insight. It is a very simple tool with a graph that shows the trend of my keyword. Here is an example.

As you can see, the keyword that I chose is my target market, photography. The graph shows that it has a steady trend which is a good sign for me.

Here is another example. This time, I chose the keyword “Friendster”.

As you can see, the graph shows that the trend for this keyword is on the decline and we don’t want a keyword that is on the decline trend.

I also made another test and this time, the keyword is “Halloween costumes”.

As you can see, the graph shows that the trend for this keyword inclines on the month of October. This is what we call a seasonal keyword. It is okay to use this kind of keyword but we have to make sure that the keyword is not on its peak nor is in the declined state.

To summarize things, what we want is a keyword that is on a stable trend or on an upward trend. If we want to use a seasonal keyword, we have to make sure that the keyword is on its low point and make sure that the keyword is not on its peak.

Now that we’ve discussed search trends, the next topic I'm going to discuss will be about commercial intent, so make sure to watch out for that.

Keyword Evaluation: Search Volume

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 02:55:00 +0000

As discussed in my previous post, Let’s Do Some Keyword Research, I’ve divided the keyword research topic into three different subtopics. These are the following:

Keyword Evaluation
Competition
Exploration

To begin with, there will be three different subtopics under keyword evaluation. These are the following:

Keyword Evaluation

Search Volume
Search Trends
Commercial Value

Competition
Exploration

Today, we’ll start discussing what search volume is.

In a nut shell, search volume is basically the number of people searching for a particular keyword. To find out how many people are searching for a particular keyword, we are going to use the Google Keyword Research Tool. You may want to sign in using your Google account in order to avoid answering the captcha every time you do a keyword research.

To begin my keyword research, I’m going to input my keyword (the market that I decided to engage in, photography) in the Word or phrase box. You may also want to add some options by expanding the Advance options section. In my case, I’m going to search for All Countries. Once we are done with our search parameters, we click the Search the button.

As you can see in the image below, the keyword “photography” is being searched 11,000,000 times monthly, which means that the search volume globally of the keyword “photography” is 11,000,000. In addition, the search results that were displayed are niches under my market, photography.

Another thing that I want to discuss in this article is about match types. Match types have three different types – broad match, phrase match, and exact match. In order for us to clearly see the difference between these types, let’s look at these examples. To make things a little bit simple to follow let’s look at the search term “photography ideas “.

Match Type	Description	Example
Exact Match	Relates to how many people are searching for the exact term “photography ideas” and then visits the top ranked websites.	photography ideas
Phrase Match	Relates to how many people are searching for a phrase containing the words “photography ideas” in this order.	photography ideas photography ideas for beginners wedding photography ideas
Broad Match	Relates to how many people are searching for a phrase containing the words “photography” and “ideas” in any word order along with additional words.	photography ideas photography ideas for beginners photography theme ideas ideas for wedding photography

By default, Google search implements a broad match. To further demonstrate, here is an example. I searched for the keyword “photography ideas” and here is what I got:

The 1^st ranking website contains the word “Ideas” and not “photography ideas”. The search result also shows other variances of our keyword phrase like photography ideas, art of photography, digital photography tips and ideas, and other variations.

For us to have a phrase match in our search result, we simply add a quote before and after our keyword phrase. Here is an example:

The search results now contain our exact keyword phase “photography ideas”.

The next question is – what's the relevance of match types in search volume? Here is an example for us to have a clear view of what are the relevance of these match types.

In Google Keyword Research Tool, let’s search for our keyword phrase “photography ideas”. Once the results have been displayed, we select the three match types in the Match Types section. The results will be refreshed and will show the results of the three match types.

As you can see, there are 33,000 broad match results, 18,100 phrase match results, and there are only 2,900 exact match results. These figures are very significant because these will give us an idea on roughly how many people are searching for our target keyword monthly.

We have to take note that the search volume is not the only factor that we are considering in finding our “perfect keyword”. There are other factors that we need to consider and one of those is search trends, which will be discussed in my next article.

Let’s Do Some Keyword Research

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 09:28:00 +0000

If you’ve read my previous article, What are Market, Niche, and a Micro Niche?, I’ve identified the different market niches that I want to engage in. I’ve also considered various factors for me to come up with my final decision. It was either to create a website about a topic that I am passionate about such as the asp.net web applications niche, or to create a site based on something I want to learn, like photography.

My final decision is to create a website about photography. The main factor that made me come up with this decision is that I want to document all the things that I will learn with regards to this and hopefully, readers will find my articles helpful especially if they are new to this field.

Going to back to SEO, now that I’ve identified my market niche, the next step is to do keyword research. This is like what most businessmen do before engaging in a business. They do market research first. They analyze different factors and come up with a strategy in order for them to penetrate their market. That’s what keyword research is all about. We research first on the best keywords to use in order for us to penetrate our chosen market niche. In my case, it’s the photography market.

To begin with, let’s start with the most basic of all questions: What are keywords?

A keyword is any term or phrase that users enter in the search field of the search engines. It may be a single word, a phrase or an entire sentence. What makes keywords important is that they serve as keys to unlock specific doors that provide access to market niches.

When we do keyword research, our main goal is to find the “perfect keyword” in our market niche. The “perfect keyword” has the following criteria:

Has a high search volume – People are trying to search for that term every single day.
Is on an upward trend or is consistently searched for – We want a keyword that people will still be searching months and years from now.
Has low competition – Websites which are badly optimized with that keyword and can be easily outranked by our website.
Is very specific – A keyword that is very clear and is exactly what the searchers are looking for.
Is a buying keyword – People searching for it are ready to buy and willing to pay money.

Now that we’ve defined what a “perfect keyword” is, the next question is how are we going to find our “perfect keyword”? That’s where the keyword research kicks in. In order for us to have an organized discussion of the topic, I’ve divided the keyword research into different parts (keyword evaluation, competition, and exploration) so make sure to watch out for those articles.

What are Market, Niche, and a Micro Niche?

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 09:32:00 +0000

I'm planning to put up my own website where I can apply all the things that I've learned regarding SEO. First thing to take note in putting up a website is to know what your market is.

So, what really is a market? A market is a community of people who share a common interest in a particular subject or activity. Often this community has its own language made up of terms and acronyms that only makes sense to other members of the community.

For us to have a clear view of what a market is here are examples:

Market	Area of Interest	Market Language
photographers	photography	SLR Cameras Canon/Nikon macro shots
web developers	web development	javascript asp.net web applications server side or client side scripting
bloggers	blogging	blogs Google AdSense blog directories

One of these markets is the market that I'm considering to use in my website as these are the things that I'm currently interested at the moment.

After deciding what our target market is, we have to identify our niche.

In every market, there are multiple niches. A niche is a subset of a market that relates to a specific topic. Here are examples of a niche:

Market	Example of Niches
photographers	digital photography basics photography course wedding photography
web developers	asp.net web applications php web applications open source web development
bloggers	blog host blog softwares free blog sites

Once we have identified the different niches of our market, we now have to identify its micro-niches. Micro-niches are niches within niches. Here are examples of micro-niches:

Market	Niche	Micro-Niche
photographers	digital photography basics	digital photography guide
	photography course	Canon photography course
	wedding photography	famous wedding photographers
web developers	asp.net web applications	c# web development
	php web applications	php web development tools
	open source web development	open source applications
Bloggers	blog host	best blog hosting service
	blog softwares	open source blog software
	free blog sites	most popular free blog sites

Now that I've identified the different markets, niches, and micro-niches that I'm interested to engage in, the next step is to identify the keywords which are related to our market niches. This will be discussed in my next post.

Popular Blog Directories to Submit Our Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 14:28:00 +0000

In connection to my previous post, here is an article that my friend gave me which can help the popularity of our blog.

Most of them are not free. What's your experience with these websites?

Increase Your Blog’s Popularity with the Help of Technorati

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 05:54:00 +0000

While I was working, my friend Pat Ambrosio messaged me and told me that he saw my blog and gave me some tips on how to make my blog popular. One of those is to submit my blog to Technorati. As I am new to blogging and I am not aware of it, I immediately checked the site.

According to the FAQ section of the site, by claiming our blog, our blog will be added in the Technorati’s Blog Directory under the categories that we have specified. We may also add tags for our blog so that our blog will be listed in their Tag pages for those tags. With that, Technorati users will be able to see our blogs under the categories and tags that we’ve specified. Also, if our blogs are doing well, our blogs may be listed in the Technorati Top 100.

Here are the steps on how to claim our blog in Technorati:

Go to the Technorati homepage and log in using your account by clicking the Sign In link. If you don’t have an account yet, click the Join link and register.
If you are now logged in, click your username beside the [sign out] link to access your profile.
Start claiming your blog by providing your blog’s URL and click the Claim button.
Fill in all the necessary fields and make sure to provide a good title and description for your site, as this will market your site to your target readers. Also, make sure to select the correct category and tags for your site.
Click the Proceed to the next step button.
An e-mail will be sent to you containing your claim token.
Verify your blog by posting something in your blog containing the claim token. You may want to delete your post after verifying it.
Go to your Technorati account and click the “Check Claim” button. I’m not sure how long it takes Technorati to show this in your profile page. Some say it only took them almost a day but some say it took forever for this option to show up. In my case, it took almost a week for this option to become visible in my account page. Now that this option is visible in my account page, I need to wait until Technorati crawls my site.
After a day, Technorati is now crawling my blog.

Now that Technorati is crawling my blog, let’s see what the effect of Technorati will be to my blog. What’s your experience with Technorati?

On-Page Factors Dissected

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:05:00 +0000

Before we talk about the different strategies that we’re going to use in order for us to improve our rankings, we need to familiarize ourselves first with the on-page factors which will be crucial in building our strategy. I’m talking about the different tags that are normally found in the upper section of our HTML page (as shown in Figure 1). So, let’s dissect the different html tags and discuss how it will help us in our strategies. Here are some concepts from the Google Best Practices Guide by Jerry West.

Figure 1

DTD Statement – It is the first tag on a webpage and we need to make sure to use the correct tag. Codes written in HTML 3.2 might cause problems if HTML 4.01 is declared in our DTD statement. For us to verify if we are using the correct tag, we can double check it in this site. Testing shows that having this tag in place not only allows our site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows faster indexing.
Character Set Tag – This tag tells the browser how to display the text and this should be defined before any text appears in the browser.
Title Tag – The title tag is the text that users normally see at the top of the web browser window. It is also the linked text in the search results of all major search engines. All search engines index the Title tag, that’s why it is important for us to choose the proper title. It is not advisable to place the company name in this tag because what we want is for our Title to grab attention, create curiosity, and evoke emotion to get customers to click on it. Our Title must be brief and concise because Google will only display up to the first 65 characters. Also, please take note not to use duplicate or near duplicate Titles across a site because it can harm a site’s ranking power.
Meta Description Tag – When users perform a search, the results displayed are usually the Title Tag and the Description Tag. If a Description Tag was not supplied, by default, the browser will use the first 30-40 words on the page, which may be critical because those words may not accurately describe the services that our site offers. Thus, we have to make sure that the content of our Description Tag contains our focused keyword phrases (we’ll discuss keyword phrases in my future entries). We must also limit the content of our Description Tag to 165 characters or less.
Meta Keyword Tag – Use 6-8 keywords phrases in the Meta Keyword Tag but make sure not to include “money phrases” (highest converting phrases) because the Keyword Tag is the first place where competitors look to steal information and we do not want that to happen. Please note that Google already stopped indexing this tag while Bing and Yahoo! are still indexing this.
Robots Tag – By default, the value is “index, follow”. This means that the search engine will index the page and follow links on this page. If we want our page to be indexed and followed by major search engines, it’s better not to include this tag because it makes no difference. However, we may add this tag to pages which are not important for SEO like Contact Us, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Use pages by simply adding the tag and instead of “index, follow” value we use “noindex, nofollow” or a combination of the options. Another way of doing this is by creating a robots.txt file. To understand more about robots.txt, please visit this site.
Google Sitemap – This is the best way to get a site crawled and deeply indexed. We’ll discuss more of this in my future entries.

What is SEO?

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:10:00 +0000

Imagine how many websites and blogs are out there. What are the odds that a user will just suddenly land in your website and find some time to browse everything that’s written in it?

How do you make your website popular and create traffic for your site? Some say you have to make your site visually pleasing. Others say that the content is more important. I believe that these two factors are essential, but what’s the point of all of this if no one is visiting your site? That’s where SEO kicks in.

As defined by Wikipedia, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a webpage in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.

What we all want to achieve is to make our website rank in the first or second page of the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Let’s face it – how many of us actually make the effort to browse the search results all the way to the last page? Personally, I normally browse up to the 3^rd page, and after that, I start typing in a new keyword if I was not able to find what I’m looking for. Thus, the higher the rank of our website in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the higher the chance a user will visit our site.

What are the strategies that we need to do in order for us to achieve that? That’s what we’re going to discuss in my future blog entries so make sure to watch for it.

The Reason for this Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Arwin) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:07:00 +0000

My friend Julls asked what’s wrong with me because for the past few days or weeks, I’ve been acting weird. Before, I usually spent my free time drinking and hanging out with my friends. But now, I’d rather stay at home and try to do something productive.

Maybe there is a point in your life when you get tired of the routine things that you usually do and want to explore new things. That’s when I started reading different blog entries from different blog sites and even subscribed through RSS feeds. This made me realize how outdated I am in a lot of things in the field of technology, politics, and even celebrity gossip. It made me think of putting up my own blog. Unfortunately, I can’t think of an interesting article to write. By the way, I don’t love reading and writing.

I’m a .Net developer and I do love my work as a developer. In my previous job, I worked in an SEO company where I was asked to create a ranking tool that will automate the pulling of the ranks of the keywords for a given domain. I was a bit exposed to the SEO industry but I am not fully familiar with the ins and outs of it, that’s why I became interested and wanted to familiarize myself with this. I then talked to my friend who works in an SEO company and asked for his help to guide me in my quest to familiarize myself and hopefully do SEO on my own.

I’m putting up this blog because I want this to be an avenue for readers like me who want to learn how SEO works. I’ll be posting all the things that I’ll be learning from my friend and things that I researched on my own. Readers are encouraged to comment and share anything related to the topic.