The core of search engine positioning is this:
Find the keywords that will be utilized in search engines by the people potentially interested in your website.
All later optimization will be based on these keywords.
Now, the big question is: How can we achieve this?
You will need a bit of intuition. But, just by intuition you will not get far. You will need the proper tools readily available over the Internet.
While we are researching the keywords, we’ll need to access:
- Keyword variations using the one we have already identified. For example, starting with “car”, we can make up “car buying”, “cheap cars”, “cars on sale”, “pre-owned cars”, etc.
- Terms related to our keyword without containing it: “dealer”, “automotive”, “license”, etc.
- A ranking of the most utilized keywords to know which of them have potential to drive more traffic into our website.
Using search engines
A simple way of starting the search for variants on our keyword expressions is introducing them in search engines offering search suggestions.
One of the search engines offering good suggestions is Altavista; it doesn’t confine itself to variant searching with the keywords we use, but it also offers related terms that we can navigate to.
Alltheweb also returns related searches, but always with variants in the expressions we propose.
Another search engine that intends to offer advanced features in this regard is Teoma, but its results are not qualified enough compared to the rest, most of all in languages other than English.
Pay Per Click Suggestions
An optimization tool of great help is the keyword suggestions offered in pay per click programs.
Pay per click programs constitute the sponsored search results that the search engines and their affiliates offer. The advertiser pays every time somebody follows an ad link. The possibility to choose, widely and freely, the keywords that trigger the ad impression and the concrete web page to which the user is driven once he/she clicks the ad link, turn these systems into a very attractive marketing opportunity. Most of companies offering search engine optimization in their service portfolio also offer pay per click campaign management.
Overture and Espotting suggestion tools are very similar. Both return variants of the same keyword that we have introduced, and for each variant they display the number of times it has been searched in the last few months.
The main problem is that sometimes they feed the search database with little known search engines, and so there is insufficient data to say the least. Sometimes this data presents distortions because it is not a representative sample of the “real searches”. For example, sometimes very concrete searches are put higher than more general forms, and of course, there is the usual problem of not being able to group by language or country.
To be able to utilize Google Adwords suggestion tool we must go all the way up to the creation of an ad in the pay per click program. When we introduce a keyword, it displays frequent searches that include the keyword, but it doesn’t offer any kind of information about which one is being used the most; some professionals say, though, that despite the tool doesn’t display popularity numbers, the list of alternative keywords is sorted in decreasing popularity order.
After choosing the keywords it will present to us the estimate of people clicking through the ad. We must take into account that, if we don’t specify it, Google will build the estimate based on broad matches; that is, if we choose “garden”, it will print the ad for every other search containing the word “garden” (“garden tools”, “garden seat”, etc.).
Though these information is still useful, we must be aware that this is not an estimation of the number of people searching for a specific keyword, but of the number of people who will click through the ad. We can extrapolate the results, but not take this as the definitive estimate.
