Background
In October 2011, Google announced it would be encrypting searches for users logged into Google mail. This resulted in referral data from these searches being stripped out, leaving you with the very unhelpful ‘not provided’ keyword. (more…)
Having spent a large amount of time developing an approach to keyword research, I have come to the conclusion that the following goals are applicable to most campaigns:
- Find keyword themes to gear the website to for long term success
- Find key phrases/pages where concentration can quickly, and cost effectively, improve sales/leads (called ‘low hanging fruit’).
Whilst the former is incredibly important, this blog post is going to deal with the latter. (more…)
Featured, Keyword Research, Twitter
So, what does this random collection of words have to do with search marketing you ask? The answer is simple: they are all trending topics on Twitter in the UK. I wrote this blog because I wanted to see how important trending topics were when it comes to influencing search over a period of time, and whether or not they should be included within a comprehensive keyword research strategy. Also, we win £50 Amazon vouchers for the most read blog and I want the money, even if it is already mine!?! (I own the agency).
In case you wondered why these topics are trending, thousands of women are currently swooning over Michel Roux Jr making bread, and whose soft tones and French allure are really hitting the mark with the UK ladies. White Hart Lane is currently under siege from some marauding Italians. Dear Maria, an Internet-only released music track has sold 500,000 copies without receiving any radio air play (sounds like a topic for another blog!). Biggie Day is a day dedicated to the memory of the notorious BIG.
So the concept is, that if I am launching a new website or refreshing my SEO or PPC strategy, could I go through the last few months of trending topics and look for related terms to my products and services? If these keywords are new or hadn’t been high profiled before, they would not have registered on traditional keyword research tools. So I may be able to quickly launch new content on this topic, and rank highly within days naturally or get very cheap paid clicks.
I will monitor the ranking and traffic/referring keywords for this post over the next two weeks and report back my findings. Fingers crossed I win the £50 too!
Digital Marketing, Keyword Research, SEO, Yahoo
The fact that Yahoo have ceased to update their Overture keyword suggestion tool has been known for several months. Overture US was last updated in January 07 and the UK data was last refreshed in May 07 and Yahoo have officially commented on their termination of support for the tool.
This morning however, it seems that the tool has become completely defunct as no terms return any search results. Does this mean the tool is officially dead ? Either way this throws a serious issue for the little guys who relied on the fact the Overture tool was free.
So what now ?
With Wordtracker now using UK data there is now a solid alternative at a cost. £15 per week / £29 per month / £149 per year. Having now used this tool with the UK data (I wouldn’t have recommended it to the UK market prior) I can say it is a sound investment and the billing structure makes it accessible to both big and small whether you want to cram all your keyword research into a single week or have the tool on hand all the time.
That being said, I for one would like to see the Overture tool reborn as it provided another angle to compare with Wordtracker and the more thorough you can be with your research, the better the results.
Digital Marketing, Keyword Research, SEO
Keyword density refers to the amount of times a word or phrase occurs within any given page. The keyword can appear in a number of places, for instance:
Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Visible Text, Alt Tags, Comment Tags, Domain Name, Image tags, Linked Text, Option Tags and Reference_Tags. Each search engine prefers different density to each other and there is no formula to go by, only some recommendations which will follow.
Most website owners talk about their most important keywords, but very few really do anything about how they use them within their content and expect to feature well in the search engines. These often overlooked search terms that are so important to a website’s placement in the search rankings are a vital component of any search engine optimisation (SEO) effort.
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