Keyword Marketing

Our friend Aaron Wall was nice enough to publish a guest post on the SEO Book blog. The post is titled 3 Steps for Optimizing Content for Long Tail Keywords and in it I walk through three steps for effectively targeting multiple long tail keywords within your content:

• Step 1 - Build a Long Tail Keyword Basket
• Step 2 - Put it On the Page
• Step 3 - Build Links for Your Long Tail Keyword Basket

Please go check out the post if you have a minute!

It's an age-old question that many in search engine marketing struggle with: "How do I judge competition for keywords?" Do it wrong and you could waste countless hours and dollars chasing after an impenetrable market. Do it right and you could uncover a very profitable keyword vertical.

Given the importance competitive keyword analysis, we reached out to 35 of the world's top search marketers and asked them a single question: “What is your best tip/trick for determining how competitive a keyword is?” We've collected the answers and compiled them into the Web's first comprehensive guide to analyzing keyword competition.

Repeat after me. This year, I resolve to...

1. Get More Organized

Is your idea of "keyword research" just a bunch of keywords jammed into in a spreadsheet? Effective keyword organization and keyword management is a foundational component of paid and organic search marketing. In PPC, it means grouping together similar keywords and matching them with targeted ad text and landing pages. And in SEO, it means effectively targeting keyword niches in order to create and link together original themed content about specific topics, which in turn are more likely to rank highly for targeted organic searches. Start the new year off with strong organizational footing by checking out our Definitive Guide to Keyword Organization.

Yesterday I talked about using the Free Keyword Grouper to plot out a structure for a new website. Today I'd like to show you how to use our other new tool, the Free Keyword Niche Finder, to quickly set up a PPC campaign.

We believe that a high Quality Score is the key to an effective, cost-efficient pay-per-click campaign, and that a well-organized campaign structure is the key to securing high Quality Scores. Here's how the new tool can help you get there.

First, just enter a keyword.

The Free Keyword Niche Finder is a keyword suggestion tool and keyword grouping tool in one. Just enter a keyword, and you'll get back extensive, relevant suggestions, but instead of a scattered list, the results are organized into related groupings.

Let's use the perfume store example again:

When you're launching a new website (or doing a site redesign) it's vital to take SEO into account. From square one, you should do everything you can to make sure that the people interested in what you offer will be able to find you. And most people will be looking via search engines.

There's an endless list of things you can do to optimize a website for search engines, but at a basic level, SEO-friendly site design is user-friendly site design. It's important to create a site that:

• Is logically structured
• Incorporates keyword research to ensure relevance to your audience
• Is easily navigable from both the home page and deep pages

You can actually use our new Free Keyword Grouper to start planning out the structure—or information architecture—of your new website. Here's how:

We just posted a new guide on WordStream.com - The Definitive Guide to Keyword Organization: Build a Foundation for Search Marketing Success. This guide walks you through the benefits and process for organizing your keywords for both pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). Here are a few of the topics from the Keyword Organization guide:

• Keyword organization can be applied across all of your internet marketing channels and provide a roadmap to PPC campaign and website structures.
• Improve Quality Score and lower your PPC costs.
• Gain insights into ongoing content creation and information architecture changes for SEO.
• Learn how to organize your keywords and utilize free tools from WordStream in that process.

Happy reading and good luck cleaning up your keyword clutter!

The following is a guest post by Marshall Sponder of WebMetricsGuru.

Google Analytics has some very powerful capabilities for keyword research that are often overlooked. Using advanced keyword segments, you can find and isolate buckets of keyword traffic (organic, paid, or both) and their destination landing pages, in mass – and that can be very useful for your optimization efforts.

Take one of my blogs, ArtNewYorkCity.com – I’ve written about shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art quite a lot over the years. Taking all of my keyword traffic that contains the word “Metropolitan,” I can create an advanced keyword segment in Google Analytics.

Below is a list of all those keywords.

David Harry was nice enough to put up a guest post I wrote today: How to Identify the Best Keywords for Your Niche. In it I talk about:

1. Finding Keywords
2. Refining Your Keyword List
3. Evaluating the Difficulty of Ranking
4. Making Your Keyword Research Efforts an Iterative Process

Please check it out and let me know what you think in the comments!

Incidentally if you haven't checked them out, David's blog is excellent, his SEO newsletter is great, and he maintains an active community of very smart SEO/SEM folks.

This is Part 3 of a 10-part series on 10 things we believe about search marketing. These 10 beliefs form our product design philosophy.

Whether you're conducting keyword research primarily for search engine optimization (SEO) efforts or primarily for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, we believe that effective keyword grouping and organization techniques are crucial to long-term success.

This is Part 2 of a 10-part series on 10 things we believe about search marketing. These 10 beliefs form our product design philosophy.

We firmly believe that the best source of keyword data is your own customers. Too often, search marketers over-rely on third-party keyword suggestion tools and neglect their own website data (server log files and keyword analytics), a completely private, self-renewing source of keyword data.