Marketing On The Web: Keyword Selection Tutorial Part 1

Sunday, August 7th, 2011 at 11:06 pm  
Comments (188)

It’s All About The Keywords…

 

Building a website is simple. Getting your site’s content ranked at a meaningful position within the search engines is not.

It all begins with your keyword choice.

You can build the perfect website. You can optimize each page for a designated keyword perfectly. You can even get those pages ranked #1 in the search engines for those keywords, but if you chose the wrong keywords to begin with none of that is going to matter.

Let’s look at a keyword phrase as an example:

If you have an ecommerce store that sells outdoor light fixtures what keyword should you target for the homepage of the site? You could (and should) target multiple keywords, but for the sake of simplicity let’s just focus in on one that we will call the site’s primary keyword phrase.

Since our example site sells outdoor light fixtures a good keyword phrase to start with would be just that: outdoor light fixtures.

At this point there are two very big questions we need to ask:

1. Does this keyword phrase generate enough daily traffic to make it worth targetting?

2. Is the level of competition in Google light enough that we can reasonably expect to land our site on the first page of Google? (Preferably in one of the top 3 spots)

To answer the first question we can go into Google’s Keyword Tool and run a search on our target keyword.

Here is what we find for Outdoor Light Fixtures:

  • BROAD MATCH – 1,331 searches per day with an expected CPC of $2.12
  • PHRASE MATCH – 177 searches per day with an expected CPC of $2.81
  • EXACT MATCH – 62 searches per day with an expected CPC of 3.36
The first thing I want you to notice is the inverse relationship between the search type (broad, phrase, or exact) and the expected Cost Per Click (CPC). As the number of searches goes down the expected cost you would pay within the Pay Per Click (PPC) marketplace increases.

 

NOTE: This article is about ranking sites “naturally” or “organically” within the search engines. You may wonder why I am talking about things like “cost per click” which pertain to the paid search market. The reason is very simple. The higher the CPC the higher the potential value of a keyword. In other words if a business is willing to pay $5.00 per click for the search term “mountain hiking boots” you can be pretty sure that the search term “mountain hiking boots” is generating high quality buying traffic, which is the exact type of traffic that we want to bring to our websites through the search.

 

 

To understand why this inverse relationship exists let’s take a closer look at the three different match types:  Read the rest of this entry

Marketing 101 – Bad Design Is Bad Business

Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 12:20 am  
Comments (9)
I was driving down the freeway one day not too long ago and I saw a work van of some sort with its companies logo all over it.The logo looked flashy.

The design looked cutting edge.

But there was one BIG problem. I could not read it. It looked like a bunch of gibberish. The name of the company, there phone number, even the company website was listed on the side and back of that delivery van, but it was impossible to make them out unless you were within a few feet of them. Even then you still would have to strain your eyes to do so.

What I was looking at was a classic example of bad design.

Take a look at the picture below:

Not the easiest thing in the world to read right? The problem here is threefold.

  1. The font color does not provide enough contrast against the background image making it hard to read.
  2. The font is too stylized which makes it hard to read given the busy background.
  3. The background is heavily textured making any text placed on it difficult to read. Read the rest of this entry

Internet Marketing 101 – A Beginners Guide To Ranking Your Website

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 at 10:45 pm  
Comments (360)

I have been surprised over the years by the number of times I have been asked by web visitors, clients and friends how to rank websites in the search engines. Typically what they are really asking is how to rank their website in Google specifically.

The process is actually very simple.

The first thing you need to understand is that with Google you do not have to worry about submitting your site to their search engine for inclusion. In fact all you really need to do in order to get your site indexed by them is to build it.

Just like in the Field of Dreams “if you build it they will come.”

In this case the “they” is referring to Google’s spiders. The spiders are basically little web programs (bots) that crawl the world wide web and learn everything they can about every website in existence. They work 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

If you build a website they will find you and they will index you.

They are unstoppable.

Kind of like the Terminator.

Of course there is a major difference between getting your website indexed and getting it ranked for specific keywords. Read the rest of this entry