'Net Features : keyword seo

Determining Keyword Complexity in SEO - Part 2

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:01:00 GMT

Yesterday we discussed how the number of results in the search results and the number of queries conducted were good ways to determine how complex it will be to garner high rankings at popular search engines. Today let's look at the variables of the website that you will be competing with and how their strength (or lack thereof) plays a role in the difficulty of ranking for specific keywords. Two very important factors are the age of the domains on the SERPs as well as their overall link strength.

Age of the Domains: Gone are the days when registering a new website and appearing a few days later for competitive keywords was possible. Increasingly, the age of domains is playing a significant part in how well (or more precisely how quickly) sites will rank for competitive terms and phrases. If you plan on launching a new site, keep your fingers crossed that your domain (or the domain you are working on) is at least several years old, or that you've been aging domains properly the past few years and that you can leverage one for a specific keyword if necessary. To find out how "aged" the domain you are competing against actually are, use this Whois Domain tool or the Website Magazine Whois Domain Tool and look for "record created on". That will give you a good idea of what you are up against when it comes to keyword difficultly and domain age.

Overall Link Strength: Google has made link building a business in itself. If you didn't know, there are people in the SEO world whose sole function is to acquire links from related properties for the purpose of moving a particular site up in the search results pages. Over time, these link builders realize that the links they build must be of high quality, for example a link from Wikipedia and DMOZ are incredibly valuable. As such, the Google PageRank of websites you are competing against is an important measuring stick in determining how difficult it will be to generate high rankings. One popular free way to get a handle on the overall link strength of a site is MarketLeap, a free tool that helps web professionals benchmark against other sites when it comes to inbound link popularity. Website Magazine also has made available a tool to determine overall link popularity at Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Determining Keyword Complexity in SEO - Part 1

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:50:00 GMT

What are the factors that influence the difficulty of achieving high rankings on certain search terms and phrases? As you can imagine, "difficulty" is a moving target with many factors but over time professional SEO's have uncovered a few primary indicators. Over the next few days, we'll explore how you can determine keyword SEO complexity for your own website promotions. We'll start today off with two factors, the number of searches conducted each day, and the number or results that appear when a query is performed.

- Number of searches for the previous day:
Most SEO's have had clients that say they would like to be first on popular search engines for obscure search phrases/keywords such as 'North Dakota weather widget'. Savvy SEO's will say "OK, no problem". If no one is searching for a particular word or phrase, then it's usually pretty simple to achieve high rankings. With some basic on page optimization and a handful of inbound links you'll get there pretty quickly. Those keywords with more searches are obviously going to be a little more difficult. If you don't know how many searches the keywords you are optimizing for are receiving, then check out the free keyword suggestion tool at WordTracker.Using this tool we found that the keyword "widget" results in over 3,000 searches a day, "weather widget" had 90 searches per day and "North Dakota weather widget" had, you guessed it, zero searches per day.

- Number of total results appearing upon query:
There are no hard and fast rules in determining keyword complexity in search engine optimization, but one of the ways that SEO's can quickly determine how hard it is going to be and consequently how long it is going to take is to look at the number of results returned upon conducting a query. All popular search engines provide this information at the top of search results (see below). The best way to use this information is to compare two search terms or phrases in an apples to apples comparison. For example, "north dakota weather widgets" has 19,200 results, while "widgets" has over 92 million results. The perfect fit for this SEO campaign may be to focus on weather widgets.

Tomorrow we'll look at how to use specific search commands such as "allintitle" to determine keyword complexity.