I have furthered this post with; Keyword or Phrase Research and Targeting

It’s been said what is old is new again, and it seems the days of on-page optimization, specifically keyword/phrase targeting are once again upon us. Since 2004 SEO was all about links and link text. Sure, we created content and did some basic on-page optimization, but we understood Back Links were king and he with the biggest pile wins.

The search engines began to combat Link Spam in a variety of ways, from methods of identifying link profiles better to placement of weight on other factors in the ‘document indexing and retrieval’ process. The end result is that one can no longer count on ranking well by throwing a ton of paid and otherwise manipulated back links to ones site. Developing a strong link profile is still an essential element of any SEO program, it is merely not the ‘path’ to the top - that it once was. Fine by me… it made it too easy for my web spam-M8s anyways.

Changing Gears

The resulting adaptations to ones SEO programming is that other elements start to take on a new sense of importance in an effort to construct a comprehensive strategy. One such area that is often overlooked is Keyword Research and Development. Right away I’d like to step back and add an element; Phrases. While one certainly can target ‘keywords’ (KW) such as ‘buy’ and ‘widgets’, searchers are more sophisticated these days and many of a sites search referrers are queries built with phrasing – ‘buy widgets online’ – in our example.

When researching and developing KW/P lists the essential task is establishing, as best as possible, the terms most likely to have a positive ROI (return on investment). Every SEO campaign is generally targeted to a term; there is a relative cost to be associated with garnering a favorable ranking for said term(s). This can work in a few ways;

Targeting a term that is very competitive raises the initial investment and raises the risk that the ensuing traffic flow will ‘pay off’.

Targeting a term that is less competitive may not produce enough traffic to break even on the investment in a reasonable time frame.

The happy balance

In some markets, ranking for the ‘money terms’ may not be all that daunting a task and so the KW/P research becomes more about getting into the consumers/users head to establish what they are searching for and maximizing the ‘money terms’ as best as possible. Then you can build out the ‘phrase targeting’ and ‘natural phrasing’ targets after you have landed the high ranking ‘money terms’. A less competitive market certainly allows for a more comprehensive SEO plan as the related costs are lowers and investment dollars can be spread around.

Working in a more competitive market, one then has to start looking at the budget and make some hard decisions as to how and where they will spend it. Should one put all of their eggs in one basket and target a few ‘money terms’? Or bypass them for the moment and target a variety of ‘phrasings’ and ‘long tail’ options? The general rule of thumb is to go after the more competitive ‘Money Terms’ once the site is more established. You can also supplement young sites with PPC and other options.

Tracking and Tweaking

I would not suggest targeting more than 3 terms per any one page, less is even better if you can split them up and avoid redundancy. Once you have some targets and are running your SEO Program, be sure to track the rankings for each term and the corresponding Web Analytics to get an early sense of a terms true value as far as traffic is concerned. Analytics can also show you your conversion rates for each, but that is another area for another time.

One of the more important aspects of targeting is establishing the competitiveness of a given term. That, is for next time

I have furthered this post with; Keyword or Phrase Research and Targeting