Hi,

I have not got any formal education on SEO. Whatever I am doing

presently from whatever I learnt from internet and various SEO

forums. I am very much interested in keyword analysis. I will tell

you my method of doing that and will be expect suggestions and

corrections from all you the seniors guys.

I first understand the product or service of the website and then

note down all the keywords that comes into my mind. Then I use those

keywords in google keyword tool and look note down all revelant

keyword avariations. I see the popularity of the keyword. Then I go

to google and use each of the keywords from my list and look for

links of the websites against that keyword in link popularity

software. If I don't find websites of less links whom I can beat I

don't use that keyword. This is a process of selecting keywords I am

presently using.

I am not sure, if it is the best one or not. I would like to learn

from your experiences and I would be looking forward to all sorts of

suggestions and advices.

I will be grateful for your suggestions.

Regards,
Ravi

Thank you very much sir for your great reply. I am grateful. I would like to add here another question, Suppose I want 1500 visitors to my website per month using 3 keywords. So should I select each keywords having 500 visits per month or should I select each keywords having 1500 visits.

Regards,
Ravi Verma

Yes, it does help and your are superb. One more question, I hope I am not disturbing you too much. I checked the keyword with inanchor command in search engine. Suppose my keyword is "abc cba" and on typing inanchor:"abc cba" in google it gives the result 300, so does that mean, if I create 301 anchor links for my keyword then I will top the chart and get the first page position?

I don't know if I am able to ask the question properly or not. I hope you understand.

Regards,
Ravi Verma

The way your finding out keywords sounds fine. I also use wordtracker for keyword suggestions.

When finding out levels of competition i use the allinurl:"keyword", allinchor:"keyword" and allintitle:"keyword" searches. Doing all these will give you a better idea of what youre up against. I dont usually try and calculate the amount of traffic a keyword is going to provide and just go for the ones that i know are going to bring relevant visitors. Remember quality of visitors is the most important factor to think about.

Also, if someone has 100 links and is number one for a certain keyword it doesnt mean that you need 101 links to outrank them. Links are one of many ranking factors and there are many quality factors involved in judging the quality of a link. One high quality link can help more than 1000 poor quality ones.

This may or may not be of assistance to you:

http://www.gooruze.com/articles/220/Understanding-Allinanchor-to-Improve-Google-Ranking/

If that doesn't assist you to find the answer that you are looking for, try this link instead:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22allinanchor%22+command+strategies&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

This is taken verbatim from another forum I post on where I started a thread on this topic:

Ok, I should be working but I thought I'd get this subject going

This is how I do competitive keyword analysis, I'm interested to see how other people do it, how I can improve it, what I'm doing wrong, what I'm doing right etc. Maybe together we can come up with a guide to add to the FAQs.

Keyword count strength analysis

1. Ok, I've done my keyword research and got my seed list of highly relevant keyword phrases from all the various keyword suggestion tools. There might be 300 keyword phrases on it, for example. I have them in a column on a spreadsheet.

2. Wordtracker has the least skewed search counts so I use that as a rough guide to find out how many people are actually searching for my keyword phrases. I use to use Yahoo as well but it's out of date now. I add the search counts, actual and estimated in two columns to my spreadsheet.  (I now use Google External keyword tool)

3. I get rid of all the keywords below a certain number of searches which will vary depending on how many searches the most searched phrases are getting. If some keyword phrases get low search counts but are very relevant and might convert really well, I keep them for the next phase anyway, I'm not just going for the big numbers, anything that might convert well and is competitive is a contender. I might be down to 60 or 70 phrases at this point.

Keyword competition analysis

4. For the remaining phrases I look at Google (because it accounts for 90% of UK daily searches) and I look to see how many pages return for each and every keyword phrase and enter that figure into the next column on my spreadsheet.

5. Then I do an intitle:"keyword" search for every keyword phrase and make a new column for that figure.

6. Then I do an intitle:"keyword" & inurl:"keyword" (both together) for each keyword phrase. Any page that has my keyword phrases in both the Title and in the file name is likely to be optimised for that phrase so they're my assumed optimised competition, I'm hoping to see low numbers for this particular search (under 30 is good, under 10 is great, I'm not looking to go head to head with loads of optimised competition).

7. I score each keyword phrase using an algorithm I made up that uses a logarithmic weighting for each of the values (search count, total pages, keyword in title pages, keyword in title & anchor pages) and gives each keyword a score (kind of like KEI, I just improved the original idea a bit)

8. Depending on the scores, I carry through maybe 30-50 keywords phrases that scored the highest to the backlink analysis. The algorithm is design to score the phrases on their competitiveness so even low search count keywords can do well if there is little optimised competition.

Competing pages BackLink analysis

9. I Google each keyword phrase again but this time I'm looking at the top 10 returning pages and analysing the strength of their incoming links. I take each page and use Yahoo's Site Explorer to look at all their backlinks. What I'm looking for in particular is the use of the actual keyword phrase in the anchor text. I don't look at every single IBL, just enough to get a feel for whether or not they're optimised for that phrase in particular. Sometimes, I'll even look at the backlinking site's own backlinks but I don't usually have time for that depth of analysis, gotta keep the client's costs down....

I also use Google's PR figure to get a very rough idea of what Google thinks of the quality of their IBLs but this is not a factor in how relevant the links are. I add all the link numbers to the spreadsheet and average them out to get an idea of how competitive each phrase is for IBLs, are there a lot for this phrase or is the average quite low? It's just an general indicator of whether I can compete or not though and the important thing is the individual pages and their IBLs. I want to get into the top 5 minimum so those competing pages get the most attention usually.

Choosing the keyword phrases to recommend

I usually end up with a handful, 20-30 keyword phrases that have good search counts and a low number of optimised competing pages. From those I choose 10-15 that I think I can get the client a ranking for and that most importantly, are likely to convert to a sale.

All this usually takes about half a day, another half day to implement on-site changes and build up some relevant backlinks and a further half day to monitor, report and tweak over the next 6 months. I think that's pretty good value for money. I give the clients all the keyword analysis data so that they can see what they paid for and sometimes even to understand how I did it (except for the algorithm which is the only bit they couldn't get for free off any search engine).

And that's it.

[I haven't gone into much detail on why each step is important, I'm assuming a basic knowledge of how search engines work and the importance Google places on back links and relevance, I can't wait to see what people would change or add to this, get posting guys ]

I don't use 'allin' because my experience of using 'allinurl:' is that the return is usually zero and that's not very helpful when trying to find competing pages, obviously there are still a lot of comepting pages even if none of them have all the keywords in the page URL and just adding them to my file name isn't going to beat those pages so I don't think it's representative.  So I use 'inurl:' and 'intitle:'.


Yeah, the number doesn't necessrily mean anything but since I don't believe that the majority of google users know about search operators, that SERP list is what they're going to see if they use the keyword phrase and so those pages are the ones I'm competing with.

Because the pages that appear in that search are raely the same as the ones that appear when I do combinations of 'intitle:' and 'inurl:', I dn't place to much stock in the KEI figure, I just use it as a rough guide to how competitive a phrase might be.  IT's a good way to winnow lists down fast but I ebt some good phrases are getting thrown out with the bath water.  But who has time to individually look at the top ten returning pages for the 300-800 keyword phrases that might be on the seed list?  Not me.

Agreed on the long term keywords.

Not sure about the allinxxx: searches though for the following reason.  I did an experiment where I searched using a term without any operators and made a list of the top ten returning pages.  Then I did the search again using various combinations of the operators and recorded the pages showing up again.

The pages that returned for the search using the operators were rarely the same as the pages that ranked well for the phrase without operators and since most Google searchers don't use operators those are the pages that I'm competing with so they're the ones I need to be looking at in terms of their backlinks etc and evaluating whether or not I can beat them, IMO.  That being the case then, there's an argument for not using KEI at all and just Googling each search phrase and looking at the top ten pages and using the 'force' to determine the strength of that competition. 

What do you think?


What if you have 800 keywords on your seed list, how can you use them all?

If you find a keyword that's getting searches but has no returned results for the allintitle search try adding a page with the keyword in the title... You'll be in top results...

With a lot of my clients there are keywords which they want to rank for no matter what so the level of competition is something that Ill make them aware of and from there I'll tell them how long and how much work I think it will take to accomplish top rankings.

But the client is interested in their big keywords and the idea of long tail never occurs to them. So I'll target the ones with lowest levels of allin searches first (usually the long tail) and work up the list. As the site improves (links etc) the more competitive keywords can be targeted.

I figure that the allinanchor is a good indication of how many links Im going to need, the allintitle is a good idea of how many pages im actually competing against (there will be pages that rank well without a direct title tag match but the title tag has so much seo weight that a direct match will usually beat most of these) and the allinurl gives me a good idea of how many pages are optimised well for the keyword, well its a clue anyway!

All my allin searches have "speech marks" by the way and I find certain websites will keep appearing so Ill check these out as well and check what we said about backlinks etc. And i always you the force!

Look guys, with all respect to all of you. This keyword stuff is basically an overused and extremely 'abused' part of SEO.  To set up a site with planned keywords is one thing, fine, create a page using keywords, anchor text, call it what you will.  But, what so many people forget is that the equivelent of 'Mother Nature' in SEO takes over.  'The Cache' - My recent searches show me the following.
new historical fiction books
      historical books
      the adventures of michael fane
      the last queen cw gortner
      new historical fiction
      historical fiction books
      wells judge jeffreys
      daniel defoe rebelion
      george jeffreys
      taunton executions bloody assizes
      david castle michael fane
      new fiction books published in 2009
      fane news
      daniel defoe monmouth rebellion
      judge jeffries 'hanging judge'
      new fiction books coming in 2009
      new fiction books,uk
      historical fiction picture books
      judge jeffreys books
      historic fiction
      ferguson black box
      taunton matrys 1685
      daniel foe added the de to his name when he
      transcript of the last queen by c w gortner
      authors of historical fiction
   rosalind miriam franklin uk
      diggory press court case
   recently released historical fiction books
   books judge jefferies
      fane lyme
      colonel percy kirke
      new historical books
      best new release historical fiction 2009


Now, some of those are page titles, but most are not.  All the keyword planning in the world is never going to beat the simple fact that if you base your text on likely searches, then the good old 'cache' will produce results.

Good post Matt, its about ROI.

Can i pick up on your point about long tail search terms that largely go unnoticed by you and your clients, i find it worthwhile every know and then to keep an eye on some of the 'larger' long tail search terms (if that makes sense), quite often you can find a keyword or ten that can easily be pushed up the serps and capture some reasonable traffic for minimal effort.

I also find long-tail phrases tend to convert better, than the big generic phrases, so don't disregard the long tail too quickly.

Yep... agreed. As far as optimising for them - most of the time you pick them up by default just by having decent content and plenty of it. Sometimes you spot one of the shorter long tails that needs a bit of content to pick up a ranking so you get on it and hey presto!