Marketing on Internet Road 

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts are tightly related to the keywords you are trying to target. The rule is always “one keyword (or keyphrase) – one page”. As such, it is obvious that the use of this major keyword you are optimizing the page for will be used on the page.

Note that the factors that impact SEO can be roughly divided into On-Page and Off-Page factors. When focusing on the on-page ones, we keep on repeating the phrase “Content is KING”. This means that there is simply no SEO without proper and relevant content, no matter what your optimization efforts are. Only then the rest of the factors come.

Once good, relevant (to the main keyword being targeted) and persuasive content is written, start working your keyword optimization into the page.

Here are the places you want to work out your keywords on the page:

• Page URL – Simply put, use the keyword in the name of the page (www.example.com/keywords.html). This will help not only your SEO efforts, but also traffic and potentially conversion since it will appear in bold on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and will get more clicks from those that were searching for the keyword.

• Page Title Tag – Maybe the most important place to put your keyword. This is considered by some SEO practitioners as a science on its own. Whatever you do, remember that the keyword is more important that your name. so use the keyword in the title with a sentence that makes sense.

• Meta Description Tag – The one place that won’t be seen to the end user, so becoming less and less important for SEO. Still, has some SEO value and similar to the title tag, will be presented to the visitor on the SERP.

• Page headers – Make sure your page as a header marked with <H1> tag. This header needs to support your title and present again your keyword. Just the same, break the page to section with sub-headers (<H2> tags).

• Page body text – You will hear different numbers on how many times your keyword should appear on the page. We found that 1.5%-2% (twice per every 100 words) is safe and good. Place your keyword on the text.

• Images – Depending on the industry, you may find that a lot of people find your page via searching for images. Regardless, it is yet another place to optimize, so the keyword is relevant here as well. Use the keyword in the image name, in the Alt tag and if possible in the text near the image (or even a caption if you place one below or above the image).

• Links Anchor Text – This one is different. You want to have links coming to the page from other pages (and other website), carrying text with the keyword you are optimizing the page for. This in a way tells the search engine that the destination page of the link is all about the text in the anchor text which is exactly what you want. Start with the correct internal links (internal site navigation) and place the correct keyword the page is optimized for in the anchor text of the link that points to this page.

You can probably notice that the keywords meta tags is not mentioned anywhere in the list. There is no mistake: all search engines announced they stopped analyzing the keywords in this meta tag, so it is simply pointless. Make sure to put your keywords properly on the page, where it does matter and you will improve your SEO results.

Last comment about secondary keywords: there is always a set of secondary keywords that are related to the primary one you are trying to target. Search engines expect to find those secondary ones in the text, otherwise the context is wrong and you might have a page risking keyword stuffing which will result in the opposite effect you are trying to reach…

Keywords research is a fundamental and highly important factor for any Internet Marketing and/or Search Engine Marketing activity; no news here. A new research by MarketingSherpa shows that the traditional ways of doing keywords research are not necessarily the most effective  nor commonly used ones.

Keywords research is not anymore about using a keyword suggestion tool like the one from Google, the one from WordTracker or others. Those are still very valuable but limited and are not considered as the most effective tactic. It's a good starting point for any campaign and surely for a new website, but it only a starting point and limited in its results.



The results of the research MarketingSherpa conducted shows that companies are using other means and tactics for getting effective results for their keywords research.

The most used tactics reported in the research is analysis of the Web Analytics data. This makes a lot of sense: since Google Analytics is free, there is no barrier to use it on any website and the profficiency of using the data collected by Google Analytics gets better all the time. Regardless of the tool, analyzing the keywords used by your visitors to find your site is a priceless tactics and actually shows any website owner if his/her SEO and PPC efforts are on the right track as well as gives new ideas for keywords that are a great opportunity to optimize the site's pages for.
As the research shows, a bit of further analysis on those keywords - which of the keywords convert better and which of them are being used more frequently - will take the keywords research to the next level. There is no surprise those are reported to be the most effective tactics, regardless of the size of the company.

The ease of using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track and analyze the search phrases visitors are using on the site's internal search makes it another great way to learn on the website's keywords to get optimized. What is more simpler than that: you collect data on what visitors are searching to get to your website as well as what they are searching when on your website.

But your site and company don't operate in a silo: how about your competition? More and more website owner realize that just like competitive analysis served them in traditional marketing, it is greatly effective online. What's better than to see which keywords your competitors are competing for with their SEO efforts and with they Pay-per-Click campaigns?

The new entrant in the list of most effective keywords research tactics is "social semantic mining". Using social media by monitoring the major social networks and bookmarking site (e.g.: delicious, StumbleUpon, etc') enable analysis of new words in your market and niche. If your target audience is using those keywords to communicate and engage in the social networks, what is better than to optimize your website (and your social media presence) for those keywords?

A word about the budgets: for some, the amounts that are presented in the image above might look irrelevant. They shouldn't: Most of the tactics reported for the keywords research don't cost or don't cost much (Google Analytics is free) and there is barrier to use those tactics. It is simply a good practice to see what the bigger spenders are doing and use the same tactics even if your budget is significantly less.

As a conclusion: there are multiple ways available to perform keywords research, beyond the simply straight-forward ones. Use a combination of the keywords research tools with your Analytics data, competitive analysis and Social Media monitoring to get to those best keywords you are looking for.


The full article on the effective keywords research tactics from MarketingSherpa could be found at: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?id=31582

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making web pages (and the site they belong to) relevant to search queries conducted by users. The main keyword here is "relevancy", and since there is no way to get relevancy without content, focus on plain, good, relevant content.

The web is full of various insights, tips and suggestions on how to optimize your pages for this purpose. However, it seems that too much effort is set on the "peripherals" aspects so in fact we are looking at the forest and forget the trees: the most important element is content. No optimization can be done in a way that you will see results if you don't have proper content, no matter how much you are good at optimizing all the other factors.

In order to achieve good positions for your pages (side note: since we want our searchers to find each of the pages we optimize, rather than the home page, our point of reference is a web page from now on, and not a web site) focus initially on your pages' content. Having good seo-content will not only make your web pages relevant to the search queries as it is, but will also set the foundations for any optimization you will do later, on-page or off-page.

Make sure to follow those principals in your content:

• Use an average of 400 words per page. Don't force it and it's OK to have somewhat less or more, but this is the average we found as a decent quantity of words per page.
• Use the main keyword optimized for that page (important: one page means one primary keyword!) about 2 times for every 100 words of content. There are different numbers for keyword-density reported as "the rule" by different SEO practitioners. Still, we found it is better not to risk stuffing, so don't go over 2%.
• Use bold and italics for some of the appearances of your keywords in the text.
• Think "newspaper": search engines are looking for fresh content (i.e. - news). Written news had been published as newspapers for centuries, so it will give you a lot of benefit to imitate the structure of a newspaper article. Therefore, invest in a title, headers, sub headers and paragraph.
• Don't think of SEO when writing your first draft of content. We sometimes risk forgetting our pages exist for visitors that need to read them and convert. Make sure it speaks to the readers. Then, "tweak" to optimize for search engines.

Following those points (do you have more?) will ensure that your content is relevant and acts as a great cornerstone for the rest of the search engine optimizations efforts you will put on that page.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

Search Engine Marketing has a huge advantage over traditional means by the fact that everything is measurable. Google Analytics is the tool that will enable you to measure how your SEO, Pay-per-Click and any other online campaign and initiative is doing.

The extent of information you can extract from Google Analytics is amazing. Practically any detail about of your website and your online presence is collected and can be analyzed to understand the status and to take actions.

Google Analytics is the tool that will help you tying all of your Search Engine Marketing, other Internet Marketing and even off-line traditional marketing together. If you are deploying an effective “integrated marketing” strategy, Google Analytics is the one source that will connect all the dots and will tell you how are you doing and where.

Proper analysis of data from Google Analytics will help you answer difficult questions such as (the list is much longer):

Where are your site visitors coming from?
Which marketing initiatives are the most effective for your business and website? 
If you are running an e-commerce site: Why and what points are visitors abandoning your shopping cart? 
What do people do while visiting your website? Which pages are the most interesting to them? On which pages they mostly leave your site?
What keywords and from which search engines visitors use to get to your website?

Out of the list of dimensions in Google Analytics, an important one deals with your search engine marketing campaigns and efforts. Keep track on future posts where we will review other dimensions.

Looking at only 2 of the very basic reports that will get you going for analyzing how are you doing with regards to the search engines. In order to enable you to start with Google Analytics we will refrain from using technical and/or too complicated aspects of Google Analytics. Instead, we focus on the basics reports and features; those that you are getting "out of the box" with Google Analytics with no need for any customization, segmentation and so forth.


Traffic from search engine marketing sources:

The What: Traffic that you got to your site from all the sources.
The How: Click on "Traffic Sources" link on the menu (default page will be the "Overview" one. You will get a dashboard with a graph showing the trend over the analyzed period (default - last 30 days) along with percentages analysis of the different sources: Direct Traffic, Referring Sites and Search Engines. You wish to focus on the Search Engines part so click on the link. Now you get a report that shows again how many visits came from people searching online on on which search engine. Per each search engine in the table you see four factors that will give you more insight on each of the search engines.
If you are running a Google Adwords campaign(s), before diving into the dedicated reports for Adwords (which I believe anyone who is running Adwords is doing...), you can take another small step to learn more: click on the right-hand drop down above the first line (left to the "Visits" title) and choose "Medium". Now you will have a report that divides Google to organic search and "cpc" (which means your PPC campaign) and get more data to analyze.
The Why: Are you getting visitors from search engine? What kind of visitors? Which of the search engines is your "best friend"? What percentage of traffic are you getting from search compared to direct traffic (people that types the URL of your site directly in the browser or used a bookmark)?


In-depth Keywords analysis:

The What: Keywords used to drive traffic to your site.
The How: Click on "Traffic Sources" and then "Keywords". You will get a report with all the keywords that shows you how many keywords were used in that period for how many searches to your site, and then the full list of keywords (ordered by the number of visits they drove) with four important factors per each such keyword.
The Why: Are visitors finding your site and its pages using the keywords that you have optimized them for? Are there keywords that drive traffic to your site that you haven't identified before (and you wish to optimize your pages for them now since they are valuable...)? Are more people finding you by the name of the company ("branded keywords") or by your products and services that you offer ("non-branded keywords")?


If you haven't installed Google Analytics on your site yet, make sure to do it as soon as possible. If you have, start looking at the basic reports it gives you. You will learn a lot on your online presence by simply looking at the default reports once a week.

Should you need help with that, make sure to check our offerings on Google Analytics and Google Analytics setup.

Comments and feedback are more than welcome.

Keywords analysis is one of the most important factors for any SEO project (some will say it's the single most important factor). However, in a broad Internet Marketing and Search Engine Marketing perspective, it is very much useful for web design and for PPC as well.

Keywords analysis in web design will be discussed in a future post. In this post, let's see how we can benefit from the keywords analysis in Pay per Click campaigns and furthermore - how the proper analysis of the keywords in PPC should help the SEO efforts.

Your initial keywords analysis should yield a list of the most important keywords you wish to target and compete on with you SEO project. Those are the keywords that you wish to be ranked high organically on the SERP (there are multiple resources available for the techniques and best practices in finding the right keywords for the SEO project and we will explain our approach in future posts). However, the one key ingredient for SEO is that one keyword equals one page. Simply put - you need to select a list of keywords and for each of the keywords you will need to have one page on your website optimized for that specific keyword and with valuable relevant content around this keyword. Unless you have (or planning on having) a very big site, your site will contain about a dozen keywords you will be competing on.

With PPC however, the situation is completely different: an average Pay per Click campaign should contain hundreds of keywords. You should still maintain a relevance between the keyword and the ad's landing page since (1) you wish to maintain high Click Through Rate (CTR) and make sure your visitors do convert, and (2) Google gives your landing page a score that influences your impressions, cost and overall performance of the campaign. However, you can find a lot more keywords that are relevant to your content without the need to pick up one to optimize for.


So, how do we combine between the keywords in PPC and our SEO efforts:

When you analyze the performance of your PPC campaign, give special attention to the performance of your keywords. With the multiple reports available on Google Adwords you can easily find out those keywords that perform better for you (sure - there are other reasons to take into account such as the ad's title and content, but we will ignore them for the benefit of making things simpler now).

The result of this analysis of the keywords performance should be applied in adjusting your bids as well as dropping the keywords that show poor performance.

Now, take a look at the conversion ratios on your site: there are keywords that drove visitors you wish to have to your site, and not only that they landed on your site, they even achieved the goals you wanted them to achieve (i.e. - converted).

Per each landing page, pick the one that performs the best and - assuming you have done a good job with the keywords analysis for your PPC -  you should be able to find a winner for optimizing this page for the organic listings. Furthermore, you should be able to find secondary keywords that should also appear on the page, support the main keyword and give you better results.

The last step is to track the ranking and the other factor of your SEO efforts and with this analysis to adjust back the PPC campaign on its keywords, it bids as well as its ads content.

Don't forget that with proper SEO efforts, you can simply drop keywords from your PPC campaign since you already are placed on the first SERP which means - reduced spending with better results. Now, isn't a combination of SEO and PPC seems an interesting thing to do? :-)


From a keywords analysis point-of-view, an interesting strategy could even be to start with a Pay per Click campaign (before doing any proper SEO on your site) and once the insight from the PPC campaign is analyzed  and the correct keywords are selected, optimize the site and its pages for the organic listings.

Comments and feedback are always welcomed.