I have many ghostwriters helping me write website articles. I have always believed that building good content for your online presence is the lifeblood of successful Internet Marketing.

One of the key items on my training agenda for these ghostwriters is to teach them how to research online keywords correctly. I have noted that even some of the more experienced ghostwriters still confuse the concepts of “most searched” keywords and “highest CPC keywords” (CPC refers to Cost Per Click).

Indeed, looking for these two types of keywords applies to two different situations. Let’s discuss each, one by one.

When you look for “most searched“ keywords, actually you are looking for keywords that most visitors are interested in. From the standpoint of Search Engine Optimization, you are looking for the related topics that people mostly seek. You increase the chance of being exposed to more online visitors if you are able to find the most searched keywords and at the same time rank your website in the first few positions of the chosen keywords.

However, usually the most searched keywords are also the most competitive, and are targeted by many webmasters at the same time. So the number of competitive websites for these keywords is also great, making it difficult to rank highly among those targeted keywords. We need to consider the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) before choosing the best keywords to be used.

For details of KEI, refer to the post

http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/52

Keywords with highest CPC (Cost Per Click) refers to keywords for which online advertisers will be most willing to spend advertising dollars. Take one of my recent works as illustration. I asked one of my ghostwriters to write an article on pursuing an online degree. Having done thorough research using this Keyword Research Toolbar, I realized that the highest CPC of the related keywords are “online accounting degree,” “master degree in psychology online,” “masters degree psychology online,” etc. (If you are interested , refer to this excel-table for the results of this research completed using this tool.)

Those keywords are with a CPC of at least US $20 or higher. Targeting these keywords in your articles can potentially bring you more revenue per click by visitors visiting your website with pay-per-click advertisements such as Google AdSense. So I asked my ghostwriter to write an article targeting these keywords, and the resulting article is shown here.

This article is actually targeted for earning Google AdSense dollars, and that’s the reason it was written aiming at high a CPC.

So when you do the keyword research for website copywriting, keep the objective of your writing in mind. Are you targeting SEO, or are you aiming for Pay-Per-Click Advertising dollars like what is offered by Google AdSense program? (There are other popular Pay-Per-Click Advertising Networks such as Bidvertiser and Chitika. Search for the phrase “alternatives to Google AdSense” for those programs.)

The best situation is to have both goals in mind, as these two objectives are not mutually exclusive. However, it does involve more effort and time to figure out keywords that suit both objectives, so sometimes you need to make a choice before you proceed with your keyword research.

I hope this article helps as you research the best keywords to use in your content building. Just keep in mind that you need to do careful keyword research before writing website articles. Feel free to leave me comments if you have further questions.

Tags: Keywords Research, EverProfits Toolbar, Search Engine Optimization

The social bookmarking phenomenon emerged several years ago as the trendy habit of people using free social bookmarking sites to categorize and manage their favorite webpages.

Traditionally, we resorted to the search engine’s internal classification system to handle your website’s themes. Search engines use the keywords on each webpage together with the keyword density to classify webpages by topic types. However, since search engines do not really understand webpages and keywords, they rely on statistical methods to classify your webpage according to their existing database of webpages with similar keywords.

Detecting when words are “similar” is easy for human beings. However, this is not an easy job for search engines, which are powered by computers. Computers do not understand synonyms that are different in spelling but similar in meaning. As I discussed in a previous post, several years ago Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics that attempts to handle this problem with its own invention, semantic technology.

Now the practice of “tagging” comes along to solve this problem. The best entity to determine a particular webpage’s classification is the webpage’s author, who is human being, fully understanding what the webpage s/he has written is about. Thus s/he “tags” it, using different words or sets of words to summarize the content of his/her website pages.

For example, since I am the author of this webpage, I can tag this it with keywords such as “social bookmarking”, “tag”, “tagging”, “Applied Semantics” or even some other related topics (such as social marketing sites “Technorati”, “de.licio.us”) that I think are the most important keywords related to this page. On the other hand, as viewed by a search engine, this webpage might be classified as “webpage” as this word appears most frequently in the article. Do you see the differences of machine versus human being?

At the same time, websites like Technorati and de.licio.us emerge as the mainstreams of so-called social bookmarking services as they allow users to register an account and bookmark their favorite websites with appropriate tags they themselves assigned to the webpages. They can even share their database with others (hence the term “social”). These bookmarking websites steadily emerge as a good source of “commentaries” and “classifications” of webpages in cyberspace. Some people further comment that the goal of tagging is not to classify, but to memorize.

It’s very logical that search engines will also consider the information from these bookmarking websites as a source of authoritative sites and webpages for particular popular keywords. This leads to the practice by some people of manipulating the social bookmarking websites (e.g., creating multiple user accounts to bookmark their own webpages with the carefully chosen tags as keywords) to artificially generate their own “popular” webpages within social bookmarking websites. Such people hope this will increase the search engines’ positioning of their webpages in search results.

An interesting book on this topic can be found here. This book teaches you how to use this tactic when blogging using popular website software like WordPress, and actually reveals the drawback of referencing a webpage by tagging from the search engines’ perspective. This is because they are able to be manipulated by human beings, and so can create bias for a webpage.

The use of different variations of a keyword, such as “programme”, “program”, “programmes”, “programs” for the same concept can create a lot of confusion as well, creating additional problems with tagging.

One way to take advantage of this growing trend is to add a user-friendly component in your webpage to allow users to easily add your webpage to their favorite social bookmarking websites. If you take a look at the end of each post in my blog, you will see some lines of popular bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us, Spurl, Furl, Simpy, Blink, Digg, and those specializing in blogs like Technorati. Those lines allow my visitors to easily bookmark my webpage in their social bookmarking accounts. Someone coined the term “Social Media Optimization” (SMO), parallel to what we commonly referred to “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). But note that SMO also extends to Web 2.0 sites’ optimization such as Facebook.com, Myspace.com, etc. We’ll talk about this in a later post.

Tags: Social Media Optimisation, Web 2.0 Optimization, Social Bookmarking

Aside from my previous posts about two indispensable toolbars:
http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/56/
http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/20/

I have just installed a new toolbar that provides a lot of turbo-charged features to aid in my website analysis work.

This toolbar can return the following useful information for any particular website you browse: Google page rank, Alexa ranking, inbound links, instant keywords analysis, domain registration information . . . all at your fingertips. It’s really impressive!

The only drawback is that you need to register before you can gain access to these advanced features. This is a typical opt-in tactic to attract subscribers, but you can unsubscribe anytime you want. They use aweber.com for the newsletter subscription so you can easily remove yourself from the list.

Ready? Get the toolbar here: http://tinyurl.com/5cnywr

Note: Currently, only an IE version is available, but a Firefox version is coming soon.

Tags: Google Toolbar Keyword Analysis

I have noticed that Google has just released its Toolbar 5 BETA . In case you don’t know what a Google Toolbar is, it’s a function bar added to your browser (IE or Firefox) to make browsing the web more efficient and easier. In particular, I appreciate the Page Rank feature that helps me to determine a particular web page’s ranking in Google Search Engine.

You can get Toolbar 5 BETA here:

http://toolbar.google.com/T5/intl/en/

Read my post here about the two indispensable toolbars available to incorporate in your web browsing.

Currently, the Google Toolbar 5 BETA can only be installed with Internet Explorer. It offers the following additional features that may help you browse even smarter:

• A login feature allows you to use your customized toolbar setup at other computers.
• The new Google Notebook allows you to clip contents as you browse, working much like a scrapbook.
• A more customizable toolbar button feature allows you to add your favorite services like Google Map, Wikipedia, Google Finance, etc., so they are always at your fingertips for easier access.

So download the beta version now and enjoy web browsing!

The term keyword has become very popular in the world of Internet marketing. But what exactly is a keyword? At least in the Internet marketing context, the term refers to the words, phrases, or even sentences that you use on your website to describe your website, services, and/or products that you offer.

Why are keywords important? Because people are constantly looking for information when they surf the web by typing words or phrases into various search engines, ebook directories, download directories, and other search tools. These words and phrases are what you want to choose for your keywords, since this is how those search tools list you in their search results. The careful selection of keywords for your targeted services/products can be crucial to you on-line business.

For example, if you are setting up a website to sell scuba diving equipment (one of my favorite sports), how should you consider your competition? And how should you structure your website so that you can attract customers looking for scuba diving information on web?

I have found out a tool is very useful when I am choosing my keywords for scuba diving. You can find this tool at: http://www.imarketings.net/cgi-bin/c/click.cgi?id=10
Use this tool to generate helpful information about keywords you’re considering, and also to find highly effective niche keywords you might not have thought of on your own.

To use the information generated by this tool to its best advantage, let’s consider keywords from two aspects: the demand side and the supply side.

The Demand Side of the keywords

Here is a typical list generated by the tool when researching scuba diving:

You see? We have a list of 500 variations of the keywords!

Let me explain what all the numbers mean. The first number is the index, the second one is the number of times the keywords are searched in the search engines, and the third one is the predicted number of times the keywords would be searched for in a 24-hour period in all search engines.

So now you can get a good idea of what keywords regarding "scuba diving" you should target if you submit your websites to search engines, or what titles/names of the publication you should take for your newsletter, e-books and services. Choose keywords that are frequently searched by surfers and your chance of winning top positioning in search results will be higher. This takes into account the demand side of the keywords.

The Supply Side of the Keywords

But don't forget the competition. We have to look at whether those keywords are frequently used by other competitors. This is the supply aspect of choosing keywords.

By looking at the tool used above, the competition aspect shows up like this:

The first number is the index, the second one is the KEI Factor (explained later), the third one is the predicted number of searches in all search engines within a 24-hour period, and the fourth one is the number of sites that match this keyword description (where the competition is).

So you know that the keywords "Scuba diving" and "SCUBA DIVING" are predicted to be searched 11 times, but with 894000 competing sites. The chances are low for you to get high placement with this keyword since you’d have to struggle with those competing sites for top ranking.

But take a look at the first one in the list: "Nude Scuba Diving Pics." Notice that there are quite a number of searches for this phrase, but with no competing sites! (Although it should be related to adult content, and if you have no nude scuba diving pictures at your website, choosing this one might greatly disappoint people who come to your site looking for them!). How about "Scuba Diving Problems" on index eight? This could be a good keyword to target because it is predicted to be searched 18 times with a few sites competing.

So taking the time to go through this exercise will give you more ideas on what keywords to target. Target at least 30 keywords that have frequent searches, but with few competing sites. Then you can plan your search engine optimization strategy and the content building of your site, offering related services, books, forums, and more on your targeted business.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. It is a measure of how effective a keyword is "predicted" to be for your site, measured against three factors. First, let’s look at two of those factors:

1.  Popularity (P) of the Keyword, measures how many searches occur for the keyword, as previously discussed in the demand side above.

2. Competitions (C) of the Keywords, measures how many sites are competing using the same keyword, as discussed in the supply side above.

Based on the above two considerations, the KEI is calculated as follows:

P divided by C = P/C = KEI
where P = popularity, and C = competition as stated above.

However, there is one more factor to take into consideration: 

3.  If both the popularity and the number of competitions increase at the same rate, the P/C ratio should remain the same. However, a more popular keyword should be more preferred if we assume that the increase in the difficulty of gaining top positioning in a keyword list is compensated by a higher number of people searching for that keyword.

Therefore, we multiply the ratio P / C by P again, to create the new formula:

P x P / C = KEI

putting more weight on the popularity of the keywords. The final formula is expressed as:

"The Square of P divided by C"
or
P² / C = KEI

You might be asking, why not "The cube of P divided by C?” Why not use an even higher order of P divided by C? Yes, you can customize your own KEI factor calculation by varying the power of P. The higher power of P indicates even more emphasis on the popularity of the keyword. If you are especially confident that you can achieve a higher position in the search ranking despite high competition among the keywords chosen because of the keyword’s very high popularity, then a higher power of P may be justified.

However, in the tool we discussed previously, as a rule they use the generally accepted Square of P for their results.

So now you should have a good idea of how to choose keywords with a high KEI. It is recommended to use keywords with KEI greater than 10, and the very best are those with a KEI above 100.

Let’s consider again the list shown previously:

You can see that you should choose those keywords such as:"pro gear scuba diving mask",
"Pictures Of People Scuba Diving"
Ones that catch my eye are "scuba diving clipart," "scuba diving jobs," and "scuba diving pictures."

The KEI was invented by Sumantra Roy. Subscribe to his "The 1st Search Ranking Newsletter" by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/newsletter.htm

The Concept of Keyword Density

Keyword density is the ratio of the number of times keywords appear in your webpage to the total number of words in your webpage.

Most search engines consider the keyword density in determining each website’s ranking in search results. So if two web pages are competing with the same keywords in a search engine ranking, the one with higher keyword density is likely to have added advantages.

Of course, there are many other factors affecting the ranking results. But at least when creating your "doorway" pages, consider this factor. Try to repeat your keywords often throughout your content.

So are you getting a better idea of how to use keywords in your website content? Here are some on-line resources that you can use to check the keyword density in your webpage:

http://www.webjectives.com/keyword.htm
http://www.keyworddensity.com/

You can also find out more by searching for "keyword density" using Google.

By the way, don’t miss out on this relevant post about keyword semantics here: http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/41/

And this one about keyword density: http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/31

Tags: Keyword Research SEO On-page Optimisation

To SEO or to PPC?

That is the question . . .

In today’s ever-growing online marketplace, with companies constantly jockeying for top position to grab the attention of potential customers, two different methods of promoting websites have emerged: SEO and PPC.

So, what do those letters mean, and which method is best for your goals?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This method works to position your website as far near the top as possible in search engine results, by embedding certain “keywords” throughout your site’s content. The presence of these keywords (words that users might type into a search engine such as Google in order to find information on a given subject) in your site is what causes search engines to find your site and list it in search results.

Many people consider the SEO tactic for web promotion to be a “free” method of bringing customers to your website, since they are not paying a fee for it. However, it’s not actually free. It takes a lot of time and effort to optimize your website and build content, and that can be very costly. You can learn more about SEO at this link:

http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/category/seo/

Also, check out my e-book on this topic here:

http://www.jdcnet.com/index.php/free-ebook-download/

get-ranked-high-in-search-engines.html

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is an advertising technique that is gaining popularity on the Internet. PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads (appearing both in search engines’ result pages or their affiliates’ websites) and graphical ads (usually appearing in affiliate websites only). Advertisers pay per visitor who clicks on the advertising link, hence the term “pay-per-click.”

PPC is the fastest and easiest way to set up in your advertising campaign. Take Google’s popular Google AdWords program as an example. With Google AdWords, you can go to http://adwords.google.com to set up and register an account. After creating a simple text ads message for your website and choosing your targeted keywords, you are ready to start your campaign immediately.

In most pay-per-click programs, you can control the daily budget to be spent, and through the Internet, you can easily track your campaign’s effectiveness by taking measure of the visitors’ activities on your site and tracking their behaviors using website software. Google now offers a very popular free service called Google Analytics to track visitors. To access this service, simply go to http://www.google.com/analytics/indexu.html and start your online tracking.

Which method is right for you?

That depends on your goals at this point in your development.

In short term, if you are in a hurry to bring customers to your site and test the effectiveness of your newly built web page(s), go for pay-per-click. There is no easier or faster way to set up an advertising program than PPC, which you can use immediately to bring your website to millions of Internet visitors all over the world. And you can also target specific niche customers by using carefully chosen keywords, regions, and languages. But remember, it is a recurring expense that could eat up a lot of your advertising budget.

In the long run, try your best to capitalize on your efforts in using SEO techniques to build your website to receive free referral traffic from search engines. This method can be costly at the beginning, but your effort will pay off in the long run.

Tags: SEO Vs PPC

When people talk about keyword density in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), they usually limit themselves to saying, “use the exact the same keyword throughout your web copy to stress the related keywords”. And the general rule is: the more repetitive the keyword is, the more it looks relevant to your site from the standpoint of search engines.

However, search engines have become even cleverer now. They do not simply index your page by keywords in your site. They also use applied semantics technology to aid the work.

Applied semantics is a technology that teaches search engines to group variations of your targeted keywords into meaningful clusters. What this means is that synonyms and other related, relevant words are counted into the calculations of the keyword density of a particular keyword.

It is not an easy job to apply the semantic technology to different articles using the exact words. Let’s look at an example to illustrate what I’m talking about. Search engines have to distinguish the word “Apple” in a website discussing Apple, Inc – the manufacturer of iPod and iMac – from that of the site that discussing farming technology or agriculture.

Here’s another example of what could be a headache for you. Search engines have to understand more than a dozen variations of the same word, “design”. According to Thesaurus.com, design could also refer to:

• Architecture
• Arrangement
• Blueprint
• Chart
• Composition
• Conception
• Constitution
• Construction
• Diagram
• Draft
• Drawing
• Idea
• Layout
• Makeup
• Method
• Model
• Outline
• Paste-up
• Pattern
• Perspective
• Picture
• Plan
• Rough draft

And that’s just 23 variations. There could be many, many more! So do you see why I say that it could be a headache?

In 2003, Google acquired Applied Semantics, giving it a new platform for its contextual pay-per-click Google Adwords and Adsense Program. However, what I have been watching closely since then, is that its adoption of the semantic technology can effectively be put to use in their search engine technology.

Many SEO forums are discussing the changes in the past few years in Google’s ranking algorithm. However, few of them are able to attribute it to this acquisition of Applied Semantics

What I conclude is that the tactic of using a carefully planned list of identical keywords in a single passage is no longer a good strategy. You now need to use a variety of synonyms of the specific theme in your website copy.

So is this good new or bad? The good news is you are no longer tied in your copy to using the identical keywords just because you want to build keyword density in your article.

However, the bad news is that you don’t have a simple formula to calculate the keyword density of your website copy any more.

Perhaps there is one conclusion can be drawn: Search engines are getting smarter. The SEO game is becoming more difficult to play.
Related Topics: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Applied Semantics, contextual advertising, pay-per-click advertising, keyword density, Google Adwords, Google Adsense

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a consistent plan of building your website to achieve higher ranking in particular sets of keywords and phrases in a search engine’s search results.

Why do we need to know about this? Because the result pages of a search engine can bring you a lot of targeted visitors who can be easily converted into your customers. And this method of bringing in new customers is free!

Why are they highly targeted customers? Because they have found your site by searching for a particular keyword or phrase. If that keyword or phrase is related to the theme of your web business, chances are they are very likely interested in knowing more about you and your services. Therefore, they are more easily converted into your customers.

When I say “. . .a consistent plan of building your web site. . .”, I mean that you have to follow a structured process of using on-site and off-site optimization strategies for a considerable period of time before you will see the results. You have to stick to a plan and work it until you see the positive outcomes. And it’s not going to happen overnight. This is one of the pains of doing SEO. At the beginning, you’ll find that you have invested a lot of time, effort and money without seeing any immediate reward. It can be frustrating.

There are two classes of SEO strategies:  Black-Hat SEO and White-Hat SEO.

Black-Hat SEO refers to the short-term tactics that target consumers, like auto-content generation and automatic inbound link building, to trick the search engines to believe that the relative importance of your site is equal or higher than others with the same theme as yours.

This used to work quite effectively in the past. From time to time, you’d hear people shouting in the market, trying to sell you information on how to do a particular trick where you can see immediate search engine ranking improvement. Those days are gone! Search engines are smarter now. You’ll soon see your efforts of using Black-Hat SEO vanish. And worst of all, search engines can ban those sites that they consider spamming the search engines using the Black-Hat SEO.

White-Hat SEO promotes the idea of using a legitimate site building philosophy – building your website with highly targeted, content-rich information. In fact, most successful search engine experts that can stand the time in the market agree that this is the ultimate strategy in SEO. It’s just that most people do not have the patience to wait it out. They prefer Black-Hat SEO because they can see the results fast and it seems easy to do. But they forget the risks that they run. Their entire web site could get delisted from search engines if they are got caught using the Black-Hat SEO technique.

Strategies, like natural link building (off-site optimization) and structuring your site with rich keyword targeted site content (on-site optimization), etc., are all you need to do consistently to be successful with White-Hat SEO.

Want to know more? Subscribe to my Internet Marketing Journal to keep yourself up-to-date on this.
Related Topics: Search Engine Optimisation

Take a look at this video talking about how you can ease your pain of ranking higher in Search Engine by one tactic revealed there.

http://goaddr.com/dhr

Have you got that?

If not, subscribe to my newsletter to know the answer…

Damen
 

In On-Page Optimization, we use keyword density to track the performance of a particular keyword (or a series of words forming keyword phrase).

Keyword density is expressed as a percentage of that keyword (or keyword phrase) out of the total number of words on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is calculated by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The generally accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 7%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Why? It is because search engine might consider this as one kind of spamming.

This rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 7%.

You can use a word processing software to check the keyword density. Here is how:

1. Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
2. Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
3. Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
4. When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
5. Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Or there are online services out there to help. Here is the one on my site:

Keyword Density Analyzer Tool

In my opinion, Off-Page Optimization is even more important than On-Page Optimization in SEO. We’ll talk more about that later.

Keep yourself updated on this blog by subscribing to the Internet Marketing Journal Newsletter

Best SEO,

Damen

Related Topics: Keyword Density Analyzer Tool