So without the facility to do free online keyword research how can we come up with a targeted keyword list.
Here is an interesting thread http://www.webmasterworld.com/keyword/3643349.htm which discusses the same.
Chameleon makes an interesting post in this thread
". If I might add a little flavor to the soup.. ;)
Word-stemming has become severely important to ranking well for selected keywords/phrases.
Some time back, Marcia (former moderator of Google search News) posted a few links to the Google patents.
They are well worth reading.
At first blush, one would think that a good start to discovering what Google might be looking for re: related words/phrases would be to examine No's 1,2,3,4, & 5 in the desired SERP's, click on "Similar Pages" below each, and see what's there.
Alas - not very reliable. Why, I can't say; But after months of trial & error... I made some pretty useful discoveries.
Re: A website that is 95% about "blue widgets", and 5% about "purple thingys" - the purple thingy pages would often out-rank websites that were 100% about blue widgets, for the "purple thingy" term...
Why? Because the few pages in the 95%/5% website had good internal links to adjacent pages full of related words/phrases.
Wikipedia (if applicable) was a good place to discover related terms
Google seems to be extremely smart about related terms.
E.G. A website about "telephones" is well served to include words/phrases such as 'DTMF' / 'dial tone' / 'handset' / 'cords' and other such words/phases that aren't in the typical layman's "telephone vocabulary".
Keyword-based File-naming gets tremendous mileage form Google for rankings. Again, it wasn't unusual to see a website with a PR of 3, out-rank a website with a PR of 4 or 5, simply because the site with lesser PR, had file names like "blue-widgets-for-dohickeys.htm" and the higher PR sites did not. {** Google likes dashes between the keywords much better than underscores, as well}
A web page about "purple thingys" MUST have these words, and preferably (1) related term in both the <-title-> and <-description-> tags. Old school for sure, but careful research shows this is still worth its weight in platinum.
Again - seemingly old-school, but Gbot absolutely loved pages with keyword-rich menus.
Websites that had redundant key phrases, that appeared in the same place in multiple pages, that differentiated the redundant pharses with an individual font-color or font-family from the main copy, fared far better than those that did not.
To supplement this, may I also mention:
Enclosing the redundant phrases in <-h2-> and <-h1-> heading tags did nothing whatsoever.. in fact, often it seemed to have negative value.
Having the redundant text at the top of the page, and related words/phrases at the bottom, both carrying the same differentiation from the main copy, was also effective
A web page that couldn't logically or aesthetically have good internal links to pages with related words/phrases could do almost as well with a clickable pop-up window included somewhere in the page containing word-stemming;
Moreover, Google would often list this pop-up page, (provided it was a full-flavored HTML page with good copy but with it's size trimmed by the pop-up command's dimensions) as the 2nd most important page in the site "about" the key phrase -
However, the pop-up page needed different <-title-> and <-description-> text; Again, using word-stemming.
A good question is: What's all this worth?
After many months, and following the above somewhat didactical policies, I drove three different websites from <50 to Top 5 spots in the desired SERP's.. and some of these SERP's had dozens of relevant competitors, with better PR! "
Labels: pay per click, PPC management
Post a Comment
Links to this post:Create a Link
<< PPC Blog Home