Web sites are cataloged and then returned as search results. The way things
go, you first put up a Web site. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy — maybe
it’s your personal blog about your busybody Aunt Louise and how crazy she
makes you, or it could be a serious site about how frogs hibernate in the muck
at the bottom of ponds during winter. The topic of your Web site doesn’t
matter, but you have to get it on the Internet.
After you put up a Web site, a search crawler — a specialized software program
that examines Web sites and categorizes them by keyword — finds your Web
site. Search crawlers are designed to crawl every Web site within parameters
that are outlined by the search crawler’s designer. A designer could order a
search crawler to, say, examine Web sites contained on a list drawn by the
designer.
The crawler’s first stop is the first Web page of the first Web site on the
designer’s list. The crawler reads through the pages of the Web site, looking
at each word on the site.
Crawlers also look at what words are used together. For example, cosmetic
makeup is different from exam makeup, but the crawler knows that makeup
is used in two completely different ways because it looks at the words surrounding
it.
While the crawler makes its way through a site, it records the number of times a
keyword, a keyphrase, or a set of keywords is used on the site. If exam makeup is
used in the title and then three times in a 300-word section of text, it’s probably
a good bet that the Web site being crawled is about makeup exams. Of course,
the search engine crawler isn’t betting on anything. The crawler’s like the skeptic
who doesn’t count on anything that’s not immediately visible and physically
touchable. Exam makeup may be there, but it needs proof!
The crawler uses a very lengthy and complicated algorithm as its search
formula. The algorithm compares the number of times a keyword is used to
indicators that tell it if that keyword is important on the Web site. Like color
coding, that algorithm makes it possible to define a Web site in terms of how
it relates to a specific topic.
Algorithms in general are computer programs that systematically solve problems
such as determining how many times a keyword is used on a Web site.
They’re complicated creatures, highly technical in nature, and they are a
search engine’s lifeblood — which is why they’re so jealously guarded. Just
try to pry Google’s secret algorithm from their tightly clenched fist and see
where that gets you.
The crawler takes a stab at what your Web site’s all about by registering the
site’s keywords. The crawler then takes another look at the site, this time
considering those keywords in the context of the Web site — not just the keywords
but also things like keyword placement (where on the site the words
appear), the alternative text you put in for graphics (the stuff that shows up
if the graphic won’t load), and the links into and out of the Web site.
After looking at all these elements and many others (some search engines
use over 100 different considerations), the crawler makes a determination
about where in the great scheme of things a particular Web site belongs.
That information is then stored in a database the size of Manhattan.
Okay, it’s not really the size of Manhattan, but it’s huge. Way larger than any
database you’ve ever encountered before.
After the Web site’s cataloged, it can be pushed to visitors that do a search
based on keywords related to the main keyword of the Web page. That’s
another algorithm altogether. That algorithm cross-references the search
that a user makes with the data stored in the database to determine which
sites — of the billions of cataloged sites — are the best fit for the keyword
or phrase that the searcher used.
In other words, your Web site basically boils down to the keywords on which
it’s built. To rank successfully in any search engine, you not only need the
right keywords but you also need keywords that are closely associated with
the topic of your Web site. Those keywords also need to be at the right
places on your Web site. If they’re not, the search crawler won’t feel completely
confident about which particular section of the database is the proper
home for your site — so the site might be put lower in the rankings behind
many other (perhaps far less relevant) sites
Choosing the right keywords
Choosing the right keywords is a bit of a science — but it’s also a bit of oldfashioned
luck. No keyword guide is out there for the perplexed that can
tell you whether the keyword is perfect for this or that subject. Instead, the
words that apply to your subject are what they are. So, the best place to start
looking for the right keywords for your topic is to brainstorm all the words
that are most prevalent when the topic is in discussion.
Use search engine optimization (SEO) as an example. In any conversation you
ever have about SEO, you’ll hear the term keyword come up time and again.
Keyword is clearly one of the top keywords for SEO — come on, SEO is built
around keyword marketing!
Okay, that was the easy part. Getting the number-one keyword down is like
shooting fish in a barrel, but you can’t stop there. You need a larger pool of
keywords to get you started. If you keep brainstorming additional words,
you’ll probably come up with the following keywords:
Search engine
Search
Marketing
List
Link
Linking strategy
Alt tags
Metatags
Metadata
Media
Content
Social media
That’s just the short list. If you really put some time into brainstorming the
SEO topic, you could come up with a couple hundred words. And don’t forget
phrases, too — up to three words. They’re more useful and help you target
better than just single words.
You’ll find hundreds of words for your own Web site topic, too. Sit down with
a pen and a piece of paper and think through your topic. Write down all the
words that come to mind as you consider each aspect of your business. Don’t
worry about compartmentalizing the words, just get them on paper. When
you’re done, cover up the page and walk away for half a day or so.
Walking away gives the list time to rest. Take the time away from the list to do
something completely unassociated with determining keywords. During that
time, try to keep your mind off the list so that when you come back to it, you
can look at it with fresh eyes.
When you do return to the list, read through it slowly and take the time to consider
each word while you read it. Ask if a particular word is really a term that
a searcher would use to find your Web site or a page on your site. If the answer
is a resounding “No,” cross the word off the list. When you’re done, you should
have a reasonably sized list from which to choose that magic number of words.
So, what’s the magic number? Who knows? Just use exactly the number of
words you need (to market your site properly) and not one more. Here are
some general rules you should follow:
Start with a list of 50–100 keywords. You won’t use all the keywords,
but the list gives you a good point from which to narrow the words that
are most likely used to find your Web site.
Don’t use more than three words on a single page. Also, only use three
words if they’re all contained within a phrase. It’s better to use one word
or phrase per page on your Web site, but each page can have a different
word or phrase.
Avoid words that are overused. Overused words are obvious search
terms, but they’re also the most competitive terms and can cost a fortune
if you’re targeting them for advertisements. No kidding. It’s not unheard of
for some words to cost as much as $50 per click to advertisers who want
their ads prominently displayed if someone searches for that keyword.
Advertisers would have to have an endless budget to market with these
words. On the other side of that equation is AdSense — which arranges to
display those superexpensive ads on Web sites like your own — and yes,
those words pay really well, but the competition for sites to place those
ads on is also very tough. Best to stick with something that will get you a
regular listing of some great ads that will truly interest your visitors.
Try to think like site visitors think. What keywords represent your
visitors’ interests? One way to keep up with this information is to use a
Web site analytics program, such as Google Analytics (www.google.
com/analytics). An analytics program tracks visitors to your site, such
as where they came to your site from and what keywords they used to
find your site on search engines, along with many other statistics. If you
don’t have a Web site analytics program, get one. Right now.
After you narrow down your keyword list, put in the hard work — research
the words on the list. Researching keywords isn’t difficult, but it can be
time-consuming. That’s one of the reasons you don’t want to start the process
with a list of 500 potential keywords. You’d never have enough time to
research them all. It’s also unwise to use too many keywords on your Web
site because it makes it hard for crawlers to properly classify your site — a
problem that could leave you without well-targeted AdSense ads.
The first step in researching keywords is to select the top 20 or so words or
phrases that most accurately reflect your Web site. Then, with that list, start
searching for each word or phrase on the list.
Look through the first couple results pages for matches to your site. Do the
pages returned by your search engine reflect the content of your site in any
way? If not, how do the sites that do get returned differ from yours? Are they
structured differently, for example? If you examine your results critically, you
can find clues that help you decide how well the word or phrase you selected
will actually result in traffic to your site.
The next step is to look at statistics, such as the amount of competition and
the cost of advertisements for the keyword or phrase. Keyword research
tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.
com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and the Yahoo! Search Marketing
Keyword Tool (http://pixelfast.com/overture can help here). You
must have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account to use the Yahoo! tool, and
while I write this, Yahoo! Search Marketing is still under construction, but
should be up and running soon.
The Google AdWords Keyword Tool performs two functions: It allows you to see
what other keywords you might be missing when putting together your keyword
list and it also lets you see which of those keywords are most valuable to you as
a publisher. The Keyword Tool is easy enough to get the hang of. At first glance,
it may look like it’s just a generator for keyword ideas, but as you dig deeper into
using it, you can learn valuable facts about keywords, such as how much competition
there is for a keyword, what kind of placement an advertiser can expect
for ads targeting that keyword, and what the search volume is for the keyword.
Here’s how a typical keyword search using the Keyword Tool works:
1. Point your browser to https://adwords.google.com/select/
KeywordToolExternal.
2. Under the How Would You Like to Generate Keyword Ideas? heading,
select the Descriptive Words or Phrases radio button.
3. Enter a few keywords from your list into the center text box, as shown
, and then click Get Keyword Ideas.
After a few seconds (the exact time depends on the number of words
you enter), the suggested keywords appear beneath the search box, The default information shown includes the Advertiser Competition
(how many advertisers are bidding on that keyword), the previous
month’s Search Volume (how often that keyword was searched for in
the past month), and the Avg Search Volume. (The average is figured
monthly, based on the number of searches each month for the past
year.) Each statistic is represented by a colored bar, representative of
what you see in a bar graph. The more color in the bar, the greater the
competition or volume.
The average cost of a keyword to the advertiser doesn’t appear automatically,
but you can change the way the keywords are filtered (see
with the Filter drop-down menu.
4. To determine the average cost of a keyword, choose Show Estimated
Avg. CPC from the Filter drop-down menu.
The CPC, or cost-per-click, is the amount that it costs an advertiser every
time one of their ads based on that keyword is clicked. That amount is
paid to Google, which then distributes portions of the money to AdSense
publishers that allow those ads to be shown on their Web sites. Of
course, Google keeps a fair chunk of it to line its own pockets, too.
After you make your selection from the Filter drop-down menu, another
small section appears immediately below the Filter drop-down menu 5. Choose your currency from the menu provided; and then in the text
box beside it, enter the maximum CPC and click Recalculate.
The keyword list changes slightly, and a new column appears with the
estimated average cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword suggested,
. Now you not only see the competition for the
keyword or phrase, but you also see what it costs advertisers who use
those words. Only a percentage of that is paid to publishers (you) who
show the ads, but this gives you an idea of how valuable your available
ad space is, based on the keywords you use on your Web site.
income in mind, use a high figure for your maximum CPC, like $50 per
click. This really doesn’t determine how much you make per click on
advertisements that appear on your site, but it gives you an idea of
which keywords you’ll be paid the most for. In keyword marketing, the
advertiser pays a fee to display ads. How much they pay for that privilege
directly affects how much you make. So, the more a keyword costs
the advertiser, the more you’ll make as a publisher of those ads.
Keep in mind that whatever keywords you choose should be used intelligently
on your Web page. If you include the keywords but don’t use them properly,
you’ll do yourself more harm than good by causing inappropriate ads to
appear or by causing Google to disqualify your site from the AdSense program
for not following proper Web design practices. More information about Web
design practices can be found in Chapter 3, and I address how to properly use
keywords on your Web pages in the next few sections, so keep reading.
The importance of keyword placement
After you finish researching your keywords and then selecting the most
valuable — those worth most to your pocketbook — and the most appropriate
words for your Web site, you have to actually integrate them into your Web
site. Using those valuable and appropriate keywords in your site’s content is
good practice, and more information about how to use those words in your
content is in the section “It’s all about placement,” later in this chapter, or you
can flip back to Chapter 3 for even more Web design help. But there’s more to
keyword placement than just putting the words into the content on the page,
as the next few sections make clear.
Placing keywords in site design
Face it: You don’t need much of the old gray matter to place keywords in
prominent places in the content of your Web site. Stick them in a title, a few
headings, or the opening paragraph and voilà — you’ve placed your keywords.
The thing is, if any idiot can do it, many will; which means that all
those Web sites with keywords prominently placed in the text start looking
alike — at least to Web crawlers sent out by search engines. To make your
site stand out, feature your keywords in the less-obvious corners of your
Web site, such as places that may never be seen by Web site visitors but are
visited by Web crawlers. “Where are these dark corners?” you ask. Read on
to discover the hidden mysteries of Web site design.
When you’re designing your Web site, there are places under the hood — in
the actual HTML (HyperText Markup Language) structure of the site, in other
words — that you can use as hidden storage areas for placing informational
tidbits about your site. Because all this stuff is information about your Web
site content — information about your information, in other words — such
tidbits are referred to as metadata, or data about your data. Metadata is
placed within special HTML tags (dubbed, curiously enough, metatags) within
the code for a Web site that search engine crawlers then read when cataloging
your site for inclusion in search results. As such, you’d be smart to stuff
your metatags with as many keywords as your HTML structure will bear.
Metatags where keywords should appear include the following:
Title metatags
Description metatags
Keyword metatags
Heading metatags
Alt text
Now, for those of you out there who are faint-of-heart when it comes to HTML
coding, be aware that you need to physically place these metatags (with the
exception of the alt text) in the top section of the HTML code of your Web
page, between the tags that indicate the head of your page.part of the raw HTML code for the Google Geek Web site, including the head
tag, metatags, and body tag.
As I mention earlier, metadata are usually indicated within the HTML of your
Web site as metatags.
The head tags usually have far more information between them because this
is where the heading of your Web site is set up. Information about the colors,
images , and styles of the page are also included here, but those don’t really
concern you when you’re thinking about keywords. Those elements are all
associated with site design, not keyword placement.
Working with alt text
Another area in which you can place your keywords is the alt text on your page.
Alt text is the alternative text that’s used to describe images on your page to
search engines and to site visitors who can’t view the images. This alt text is usually
included in the image tag in your page’s HTML and looks something like this:
Alt text should be limited to as few effective words as possible. So, if the
image on your Web site is a magnifying glass, the alt text might simply be
search if that’s one of your keywords.
Adding keywords to the HTML descriptors on your Web site is far from a difficult
task. When you know where to put the keywords, it takes little time to do it. If
you’re writing your Web site code from scratch, you can insert your keywords
in the appropriate places while you write it. If you’re using an HTML editor or a
WYSIWYG — what you see is what you get — Web site design program, you can
switch to the HTML view for the HTML editor and add the tags that way.
The extra effort improves the search engine rankings for your site and ultimately
makes it easier for Google to find the right AdSense ads to appear on
your site. The tags also help to ensure that ads appearing on your site are
targeted to the correct audience — assuming that the keywords you’re using
are well targeted.
The secret of keyword density
If you’ve been following along in this chapter so far, you’ve already found
out that your chosen keywords need to appear somewhere in your content.
(D’oh!) Clearly, your Web site articles and other elements (stuff like video
content) should be targeting the topics your potential visitors are searching
for — which means your articles and other elements will have your keywords
embedded in them somewhere.
That’s pretty much a no-brainer. But if you take this a little bit further, it gets
a bit more interesting. Some folks might be tempted to adopt what I call an
in for a penny, in for a pound strategy — if a little bit of something is a good
thing, a lot of something is a very good thing. Why settle for a sprinkling of
keywords on your Web site when, with a little bit of effort, you can saturate
your Web site with a veritable blizzard of keywords?
Why indeed? Because if you yield to temptation, you’re guilty of committing
keyword spam, the act of deploying your keywords merely to increase
search engine results placement (bad!) rather than using them to provide site
visitors with desired information (good!). No one likes spam. You don’t like
spam, your potential Web visitors don’t like spam, and even spammers don’t
like spam. Keyword spam doesn’t even help you increase your search engine
results placement. In fact, Web crawlers that recognize keyword spam can
get your number and list your site deeper in search results, or worse, completely
de-list your site from those results.
The secret to having the right balance of keywords in your site content is
keyword density — the ratio of keyword occurrences to the overall number
of words used on your site. Search engines vary on what’s acceptable for a
keyword density. Google, for example, looks for a keyword density of around
2 percent, whereas Yahoo! and MSN look for a keyword density closer to 5
percent. Remember, these are guidelines. So, if your keyword density is less
than 5 percent, your page will still appear in Yahoo! and MSN search results.
But over 2 percent and you might be penalized by Google.
Most folks who do search engine optimization for a living tend to stay around
the 2 percent keyword density mark to stay in Google’s good graces.
Time to picture what a 2 percent keyword density might actually look like.
Think of it this way: If the page contains an article that’s 1,000 words in
length, your selected keyword or phrase should appear no more than 20
times in the article. Twenty seems like a small number until you start adding
keywords to articles and then you find that it takes some serious work to
spin 1,000 words around one word or phrase and still have everything make
sense and not sound repetitive.
The key here is to build an article around a specific topic, like “credit monitoring,”
but then not to go overboard using the keyword or term — which in
this case is “credit monitoring.” The article should be a coherent information
piece, and the use of the keyword or phrase will automatically grow out of
that. You just have to be careful not to stuff that keyword or phrase into the
article out of context in a misguided attempt to use your selected keyword as
often as possible.
One trick that might help, though, involves thinking outside your body text
box. It turns out that putting keywords into the body text of your article is
only half the work when you’re dealing with keywords. Keywords should also
appear in the title and the headings of articles you place on your Web site.
Titles and headings are also given additional weight in search engine rankings
because those are the elements on a page that catch a visitor’s eye.
Think of it as being like reading a newspaper. Most people scan a page of the
newspaper before committing to reading any of it. They look at headlines,
paragraph headings, and bold or italicized text before they decide which
stories to read. Reading behavior is the same online — someone clicks onto
your page, scans the titles, headings, and specially formatted sections of the
articles there, and then decides to read deeper or click away.
Keywords in your titles and headings help pull readers into the content of the
article and help search crawlers classify your site by those keywords. See,
search crawlers are designed to weigh the appearance of keywords in certain
places — like titles and headings — just like people do. It’s written into their
programming, so you might think of a search crawler as the ultimate reader.
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