Posted by randfish It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post.

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21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012)

Posted by JoannaLord In paid search there are a lot of rough Adwords accounts out there. You've seen them I'm sure. I know I've worked on them

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Tool Review: Wordstream’s PPC Grader

Posted by stevewiideman This post was originally in YouMoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. If you're a patron at search events, conferences and workshops, you might walk away the way I typically do: full of “stuff” to try but no clue where to start

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Grassroots SEO – Strategy, Process & Life Cycle

Posted by Kenny Martin What do you do when you are being outranked by a spammer? It's one of the most frustrating things that an SEO can face, but before jumping to conclusions it's important to understand what exactly is happening

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I’m Being Outranked by a Spammer – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Kenny Martin When keyword targeting is approached separately from a content creation strategy, the concocted results can often leave us scratching our heads and pointing fingers at the malformed “Frankenpages.” By fostering a more cohesive relationship between these traditionally detached endeavors, we can greatly enhance our results and deliver considerable value to our audience.

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Mapping Keywords to Content for Maximum Impact – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by dannysullivan This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc

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A New Way of Looking at Ranking Factors

An integral part of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is the researching and choosing of keywords for your website. This is basically the words or terms that you are trying to champion in the search engine. Do you sell PEZ dispensers? Then you may want to use “PEZ”, “dispensers”, “flavored candy” or the more popular items, like “star wars PEZ”. Once you have these keywords chosen, you need to incorporate the keywords into your website’s content and tags so that it is considered relevant to the search engines when ranking your site. This includes all the copy throughout your website, as well as all the page titles, title tags and links. It’s not an easy process, but it is a necessary one for SEO.

When inserting your keywords throughout the on-page content, it is vital to understand the density at which keywords are optimized on a page. “Keyword density” is specifically referring to how often a keyword is used in your on-page copy. The search engines compute the keyword density percentage, and the more often they find a search term in your content, the more it will think that your page is relevant and should be ranked higher. However, there is a fine line between having an optimal keyword density and over-stuffing your content with keywords and terms.

Please Note: Just because you have the right amount of keyword density in your SEO campaign, doesn’t mean that you will automatically be ranked higher. Google’s new algorithm actually favors more related search terms than exclusively keyword density. Focus also on the quality of your content, rather than only focusing on your keyword density. If you do exceed the optimum keyword density, you can face an over-optimization penalty.

There is no “perfect” keyword density percentage in SEO, but Volacci strives to keep our density at or below 5 percent. The percentage of a page is relative to your content length, so it is recommended that you know the formula to calculate each page. The formula for keyword density is pretty simple.

1.) Count how many words you have on your page.
2.) Count how many times you have used your keyword
3.) Apply this formula:

Keyword Density = ([Keyword Count]*100)/(Total Word Count]

For example, let’s say that you have a 500 word article about PEZ dispensers, and you are optimizing for “PEZ”

Total Word Count: 500
PEZ keyword uses: 12
“PEZ” density = (12*100)/500

Keyword density for “PEZ” on the page is 2.4%

In SEO campaigns, having keyword optimization in your on-page content is very important to being relevant to the search engines. However, if you focus too much on keyword density, you can potentially lose focus on other important elements in the dynamic approach to optimizing your site. Use the keyword density formula to ensure that you are applying relevant uses of your keywords into quality content and links so that you are getting the most out of your research. If you abuse your keywords, the Google gods will get you, so don’t stuffers beware.

Gut instinct and superficial analysis just can’t cut it anymore when choosing keywords, a hallmark of search engine optimization (SEO).

The stakes are high for sophisticated marketers who need to give an SEO program the best shot at success in a competitive marketplace. It can take months to secure premium organic rankings for some relevant words that can bring traffic to clients’ sites. If they pick the wrong keywords, they’re going to waste a lot of everyone’s time and cash.

Fathom SEO, facing today’s challenges, developed the Keyword Refinery, a proprietary keyword selection decision support tool. The algorithm weighs 15-plus attributes for each keyword or phrase.

To be as effective as possible, marketers must find ways to find and evaluate huge numbers of keywords. Skilled marketers tear into a business and learn the target markets inside and out.

It’s daunting enough to find keywords given the numerous internal and third party tools that can produce hundreds if not thousands of keywords. Selecting the right ones is essential if a marketer aspires to improve a company’s bottom line.

Amazingly, our industry has struggled to produce a solution that handles massive numbers of keywords at one time. Some solutions have made headway but fallen short, looking only at a handful of variables and providing results for only one keyword at a time.

Much has been discovered, shared and debated about keyword research sources, including Keyword Discovery, the Google Keyword Tool, SpyFu, social networks and competitors.

When you have all of that data in hand, then what? How do you choose?

Paid search is the easier path. You can quickly gather keywords and then carefully test them out against some ads and existing or custom landing pages. With paid search, you have the added advantage of managing keywords and phrases you didn’t even anticipate (given the countless possibilities encouraged by broad and phrase match).

It’s tougher for SEO keyword selection.

You can’t just enter a bid and be No. 1 or No. 2 in a flash. Website age, content, inbound links and other factors come into play. How viable is the website? How do you know whether a keyword will resonate with website’s given its standing among the search engines?

Could Google develop rankings for millions of sites across millions of keywords without the support of their algorithm?  Choosing keywords should be no different.

Subjectivity and anectodotal data don’t paint an honest or complete picture. Is there room for human intervention with a keyword selection tool? You bet. Scoring methods will never be dead on for every possible term, but they’re clearly reliable. We’ve found that it’s usually not the weights and measures that throw off an occasional score. It’s more a matter of how the tool is used, including a judgment on keyword relevancy.

Here’s a closer look at some of the factors – small and large – that we’ve baked into our method:

We examine keyword criteria and group them by popularity, strength and quality. Based on the tool’s scores, we pick keywords with highest potential to yield relevant search traffic over a reasonable time period.

Popularity

Unfortunately, it’s common for marketers to choose keywords based on the estimated search frequency (whether that’s over 30 days or a year). However, search volume should be only one factor.  Keyword selection emphasizing this approach is flawed because it misses other key components and subtle distinctions. For example, 1,000 searches can mean two different things in if you are evaluating a national B2C term vs. a local B2C phrase.

A marketer who understands the dynamics of a client’s marketplace can easily adjust out tool to properly interpret relative popularity of the hundreds of candidates being evaluated.

Let’s pretend you want to rank well for “airline tickets,” which people search for 2.7 million times a month on average across Google and its search network. The website ranking #1 has 168,000 indexed pages and files. Not many websites can compete with that enterprise.

Relevance

Automated tools can’t determine whether a keyword or phrase is relevant. The data sources simply provide actual searches people conducted. Seasoned marketers must make logical choices based on this question: what is the likelihood that the searcher will convert into a lead or a customer after reaching the website? Relevance often is tied to the specificity of a keyword phrase. The more closely a search term is aligned to a client’s business, the higher it will score. For example, if you rank for “sports uniforms” and only sell soccer apparel, you might turn off visitors.

Strength

Strength is the X factor that most marketers in today’s search world don’t consider.  It’s hard enough to make a selection while looking at both Popularity and Relevance. Even then, marketers still make mistakes by going after the most popular and relevant phrases when their client doesn’t have a chance off competing for those terms. In other words, they overshoot and fail to pick search terms that could actually benefit a client’s company within a reasonable timeframe. Strength reflects the degree to which a business can compete for popular and relevant terms relative to their online competitors.

Here are some of the strength factors that come into play:

·    inbound links
·    keywords in a domain name
·    website analytics
·    website age
·    rankings (in view of competitors)
·    indexed pages/files

If a business website is older, has more inbound links, and has more page depth, it may be in a stronger position to compete for highly relevant and popular terms.

Your ability to settle on a sound set of keywords depends on how well you gather and interpret diverse data sets, including paid search market and conversion indicators. Algorithm-based scoring, ensuring that many variables get due attention, makes that job easier.

At the end of the day, you want to select the ideal keywords. As your SEO tactics kick in, you’ll know soon enough whether you’re making keyword ranking headway. If not, you may struggle to correct a bungled keyword selection effort that could have gone better.

Busby SEO News – The Primary objective of a business website is to attract potential buyers and convert them into paying customers. Relevant keywords allow you to fulfil this primary objective. They help you attract relevant traffic that want to buy the types of products you have to offer, however, the more relevant keywords that you rank well for, the more business you will do. By effectively expanding your keyword lists, you expand the potential market for your business.

Busby SEO News – There are two fundamental ways of expanding your keyword lists:

* Long tail keywords that give you depth and allow you to dominate a particular market – so, moving from ‘chocolate’ to ‘chocolate gifts’ to ‘corporate chocolate gifts’. These long tailed keywords tend to have a smaller advertiser competition, therefore you get a better PPC price, also, you dominate that specific niche market.

* Related keywords that allow you to broaden the range of market sectors that you can target. So, if you’re selling gourmet chocolate, you may find opportunities in related keywords such as ‘truffles’, ‘fudge’ or ‘luxury foods’. Related keywords can make you aware of markets that you might now have considered. So in building your online business, you need to make sure you have an effective sales process in place. Do that and you will have real benefit from expanding your keyword lists.

Busby SEO News – You need to convert people who arrive at your website into paying customers. If you don’t do that, then it doesn’t matter how extensive you keyword research is, or how effective your optimization efforts are in drawing new visitors to your website. If you can’t convert a visitor into a customer then your efforts will be doomed to failure.

Busby SEO News – Only when you have got an effective sales process can you get the real benefit from expanding your keyword lists. And when you have that sales process in place, like any business you will want to expand. You could add new product lines, associated products and other ways to expand your potential income from each of the customers you attract.

Busby SEO News – However, before you embark on the path of product development you need to be sure that you are getting maximum return from what you have already. Let’s suppose you’ve got a website that performs well – you get 100,000 unique visitors per month and you have a conversion rate of 3%. That equates to 3,000 paying customers per month. Not a bad business situation to be in.

Busby SEO News – Now look at your log files. From these you see that 30% of your traffic comes from search engines. Dig a little deeper and you find that 80% of this comes from around 20 good keywords. Here’s a quick calculation of what this means:

* 30% of your traffic comes from search engines so that’s 30,000 unique visitors per month. 80% of these come from your top 20 keywords – that’s 24,000 per month.

* With a conversion rate of 3%, those 20 keywords bring you 720 paying customers every month. Now, if you could find another 20 keywords that perform just as well, then you could add another 720 customers, giving you a total of 3,720 customers per month – an increase of 24%.

Busby SEO News – And if you could achieve this growth once, could you do it again? Of course, the answer to that depends on the potential in your marketplace but the underlying principle is that good keywords will bring additional revenue to your website and you really can’t get too many of them.