For webmasters trying to rank in Google organic results, it can often feel like you are all on your own with little help and guidance. There are the published Google guidelines and of course the great amounts of SEO blogs where writers can share their knowledge and opinions, but other than that companies and website owners are mostly on their own.

It can be a fine line between optimizing your site correctly, and doing something that you thought would be OK but ultimately Google didn’t like and penalized you for.

Fortunately, there is one medium for communication where webmasters can view data on their website, as seen by Google, and receive notifications to any possible issues on their site. This area is Google Webmaster Tools, and if you are reading this and haven’t yet set up and verified your site, I suggest you go and do this immediately. I’ll wait.

With that now set up, you can see lots of data on your website from links to crawling errors and site performance, but what I am most interested in for this blog post is keywords. There are a couple of areas in Webmaster Tools that can help with your keyword research and onsite optimization, both of which can be found under “Your site on the web” on the left hand navigation.

Keywords

The first of these sections is aptly named “keywords” and shows you the keywords that Google thinks are important to your website based on the content of your pages.

The first page of data you are shown isn’t necessarily the most accurate; the first term for Vertical Measures is “market”, but you can click down to greater detail for related terms such as “marketing” which is more relevant to our site.

So how can this report help you? Well using this information you can see the words that are repeated most on your website, and how this correlates with the terms you are targeting with SEO. If your most important keyword is hard to find on your site, then you might wish to think about rewriting your website content to make it more prevalent (without keyword stuffing).

Looking at verticalmeasures.com we can see the following top 10 list of words on the site. Obviously market/marketing is important for our business, as is building/link building and SEO. However, more important from this list is what isn’t listed, for example our content marketing or local search services don’t crack the top 20, so we could rewrite our important pages accordingly.

You can then drill down this information to see which pages are using these keywords the most, and check that these pages are those you are targeting with that keyword, and again rewrite your content accordingly if it isn’t.

This tool could also prove useful for ensuring that you are using other related terms suitably throughout your website. By checking that other related terms, such as synonyms or related products, are also being used various times on your pages you can ensure that you can rank for other searches and long tail queries.

Search Queries

The other area in Webmaster Tools that can help you find and target keywords is the “Search queries” report. On this report you can see the keywords that Google is returning your website for in search results (impressions) and when these searches are actually resulting in visitors to your site (clicks).

This data is worth evaluating in closer detail to see exactly what it is telling you, and how this should be used. Firstly we can see that almost all of the impressions for “Google Images” took place on one day, when we were ranking on the second page, as shown below:

If we use the AdWords tool to try and see the approximate search volume of this keyword, we can see the following data for broad, phrase and exact matches:

Reducing this figures to a single day, this still leaves us on broad match with either 111,666 a day or 50,000 local, or 91,000 queries on phrase and exact or 40,000 local. Either way these figures differ greatly from those in Webmaster Tools, so it is possible that they are in fact more accurate. However, that does not mean that we were necessarily exposed to 60,000 searchers yet received less than 10 visits. If we use SEOBooks approximation that only 10% of searchers look at second page, it is likely that this figure is closer to 6,000 impressions (in reality given the search term itself, I suspect it is far fewer than this).

The bottom line for website owners is that this impression number is likely to be far higher than reality, unless you are ranking in the top three positions, and even then the AdWords Keyword tool is known to be inaccurate.

However, the piece of data that you can verify in Analytics is the clicks you get from various keywords.  Looking at our own data for these keywords these numbers appear to be mostly accurate, with Webmaster Tools reporting 150 clicks and Analytics reporting 144 visits. I was also able to look at the position Webmaster Tools gives for a keyword in the SERPs with a separate ranking tool where the information was again validated, so we know that this too is accurate.

So knowing this information, what can a website owner learn from this report and how can they change their keyword strategy accordingly? Firstly, this report can be useful for highlighting keywords that you are already ranking for without targeting, and you can then focus on these more directly for better rankings.

You can also look at these reports to see those keywords with low click though rates to troubleshoot any potential issues (without trusting the impressions figure too greatly). This information can then help you understand the intent behind certain keywords, what they are looking for, and how you can better attract clicks once you are ranking, for example by tweaking your Page Title and meta description.

Summary

This is just a small amount of the information that is available in Webmaster Tools, and I highly recommend that every business owner use the information Google gives you as much as possible. It is the one area where the Almighty G gives you some kind of feedback, and by combining it with other tools you can find mistakes your website is making, and fix them to achieve improved results.

In addition, following several announcements by Google over the past month regarding Webmaster Tools it in an area that I believe they are focusing on at the moment and expect to grow in functionality and information available – use it wisely.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

Are you using Google Suggest to supplement your keyword research? I was talking to one of our clients the other day about keyword research and which keywords we both felt were best for his site and business.  I would love to mention his site here and drop a link but because we are considered our clients "secret weapon" they typically do not want to reveal their search engine marketing secrets to their competitors.

As we were talking he mentioned something about “this keyword shows up in the drop down menu” whereas “this keyword does not”.  I had no idea what he was talking about so I asked him for clarification.  He was referring to “Google Suggest”.  Google suggest is what you see when you start typing a query in to Google.com.  Google is trying to guess at what they think you want to find and it can give you some great insight in to what potential searchers may be using to find your products, service or information. After doing some research I realized this is not exactly a new concept but certainly one worth visiting.

My clients rationale was when someone starts typing his keyword in to Google what comes up first in the suggest list MUST be a “good” keyword.  Is his rationale right? I think it’s pretty safe to say it is.

After our conversation I went to Google.com and started typing in “link building service” which is one of our primary keywords here at Vertical Measures. By time I got to “link bu” I immediately spotted a new keyword we had not been focusing on.  See illustration below:

Here is Google’s explanation of Google suggest: "As you type, Google Suggest communicates with Google and comes back with the suggestions we show. If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, suggestions are drawn from searches you’ve done, searches done by users all over the world, sites in our search index, and ads in our advertising network. If you’re not signed in to your Google Account, no history-based suggestions are displayed. Data you send to Google is protected by Google’s privacy policy".

The fine folks over at SEOmoz had a post on their YOUmoz blog about this same concept recently if you want to read their take.  Tony Soric also did a nice piece on it last year you can read here as well.

Here are some quick tips if you want to use Google Suggest for supplementing your keyword research:

1. Open notepad or your favorite text editor
2. Be sure to sign out of your Google account
3. Type one letter at a time and watch carefully! As you type each keystroke can reveal some valuable keywords.
4. The words that show up first in the suggestions with the fewest keystrokes are the most competitive which means they may not necessarily be the best.
5. Watch carefully as some words disappear as you type
6. As you see possible keywords add them to the list in notepad each on a new line
7. Repeat with other variations of your keywords
8. When done use the free Google adwords keyword research tool and check the search volume of the keywords.  The reason I had you create the list in notepad and one per line is because now you can just copy and paste the whole list in at once.  Be sure to click the link that says “filter my results” and check the box that says “Don’t show ideas for new keywords. I only want to see data about the keywords I entered.” Since these keywords did show in Google suggest it’s safe to assume they have search volume but this tool will allow you to quickly see which have the highest. 
9. Sort by either global or local search volume and export
10. Because you may have chosen keywords that are trending now but may not have solid long term search interest you may want to consider checking them in Google Insights before you bet the whole farm on them.

We would love to hear more about your experiences using Google Suggest for keyword research or any other keyword research “secret weapons” you would care to share with us and our visitors below in the comments.

Vertical Measures

Website – More Posts

The internal link structure of a website is a search engine optimization factor that is often overlooked by webmasters.   We often tell our clients that taking care of your internal links is one of the easiest ways to actually gain links and improve on-site SEO.  This article, provided by our friends at Axandra – an SEO tool we use every day, suggests seven things you can do to improve the link structure of your website.

Why does the link structure of your website has an effect on your rankings? 

The internal link structure of your site allows you to spread the link power of your home page to the individual pages of your site.

For example, if 1,000 other websites link to your home page, then your home page has a certain link power that can be spread to the other pages of your site. If you link to 50 pages on your home page then each page will get 1/50 of the link power. If you link to only 10 pages, then each page will get much more link power passed to it (1/10).

The more link power a page receives, the more likely it is that the page will get high rankings on search engines. Your internal link structure allows you to direct search engines to your most important pages.

How to improve the internal link structure of your website

There are several things that you can do to improve the rankings of special pages on your website:

1) Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines. 

2) Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page. The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.

3) Use your targeted keywords in the links to these pages. Make sure that you use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted.  Show search engines for which keywords your web pages are relevant.

4) Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you’ll get backlinks from these sites. 

5) Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren’t important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn’t be listed in search engines.  The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site. If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages. 

6) Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. This is very similar to tip 5. If search engines don’t have to parse your unimportant pages they can take a close look at the pages for which you want to be ranked. 

7) Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages. You might want to use the link checker that you can access in the new IBP 10 beta (not an affliate link). 

By optimizing the structure of how your web pages pass their link power, you can influence how search engines treat the content of your website.

Once you have optimized the link structure of your website, you should try to get more links from other websites.

It’s hard to beat a website with a great internal and external link structure.

[tags] search engine optimization, internal links, SEO, keyword research, internal link structure [/tags]

Vertical Measures

Hopefully you have selected a couple of keyword research tools and are ready to go.  Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO.   Without this component, all of your efforts to create a website and rank well in the major search engines may go for not.  The process of keyword research involves several phases:

Check Your Website Analytics- Seeing how past or potential customers found your site is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what’s likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates.

Brainstorming – Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc).

Applying Data from Keyword Research Tools – All of the tools we recommended in the previous post offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in keyword selection.

Term Selection – The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyzes the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy, and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target.  We suggest keeping this fairly simple.  Just list the number of searches and the KEI index if available.  The KEI (or similar metrics) tell you how difficult it might be to obtain a high SERP ranking.  Again, we highly recommend you select only phrases with 3 words or more unless you have a very established website.

Today’s Task:  Create a list of 10-20 keyword phrases to target for your website.  Choose one phrase as your main keyword phrase.  Do not select more than 20 phrases.  This list will be updated over time, but will serve as your starting point.

[tags] keyword research, KEI, SERP, SEO, keyword phrases [/tags]

Vertical Measures

Keyword research is the cornerstone of your SEO plan.  Many website owners dream up an idea for a site, build it, and never truly consider the proper usage of keywords.  It’s critical, as that is how you are found by the search engines and the searchers themselves.

People often start searching with broad results in mind. However as they get closer to making a decision, they narrow the results by adding more keyword to their search.  The "long tail" in search can be anything from three words to as many as ten.  It is very important to create content that shows up when your potential customer enters that longer keyword phrase in the box.  This means that you most likely will need a detailed keyword analysis to find out what your customers are really searching for with their keywords.

There are a few fee-based tools you can take a look at: Keyword Discovery, Keyword Country, Keyword Elite and Wordtracker.  However, one of our favorites is actually free.  Take a look at SEO Book’s free keyword tool.  One last recommendation is IBP4 from Axandra, which is primarily an SEO tool but also includes a keyword research feature.  We will be recommending IBP4 in the coming days, so you might consider purchasing it now.

Today’s Task: Choose a keyword research tool or two for you to use and get it!  Tomorrow we will begin the actual research.

[tags] keyword research, keyword discovery, keyword country, keyword elite, wordtracker, seo book, IBP4 [/tags]

Vertical Measures