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SEO Week 1: Keywords

by Liarspoker
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Ok, so let's make these threads a little more practical.

The idea is that we take one subject each week, discuss it, and more importantly implement it. Of course some here will have thin sites, others will have authority sites so a week per topic seems like a fair time to suit both type of parties (and those in between).

So, week 1, Keywords.

I usually just go to the adwords keyword tool and type in things related to my niche. I then find a word, or sets of words, with low competition and several hundred views per month. I then write one article per keyword.

I place the keyword in the header, the first paragraph and have keyword density of around 3% (I use the Yoast plugin).

How do you guys do it?

Remember guys, learn something, then implement it.

Go......
#keywords #seo #week
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by Liarspoker View Post

    I usually just go to the adwords keyword tool and type in things related to my niche. I then find a word, or sets of words, with low competition and several hundred views per month.
    ...
    The level of competition in the Google Keyword Planner has nothing to do with the level of SEO competition.

    You're doing it wrong.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    Originally Posted by Liarspoker View Post

    Ok, so let's make these threads a little more practical.

    The idea is that we take one subject each week, discuss it, and more importantly implement it.
    Thats actually an EXCELLENT idea. I'm not around as much anymore but I think its a reasonable way of going at things that could be very valuable.How are you determining competition level? I find that analyzing the top ten results for the the keyword is the way to go.
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    • Profile picture of the author AlphaWarrior
      Originally Posted by Mike Anthony View Post

      Thats actually an EXCELLENT idea. I'm not around as much anymore but I think its a reasonable way of going at things that could be very valuable.How are you determining competition level? I find that analyzing the top ten results for the the keyword is the way to go.
      How do you analyze them and what specific factors do you look at?

      Thanks!
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      • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
        There are some tools but to be honest I have never really found anything drastically better than installing Seoquake in Firefox or chrome which is free..With that installed you will get metrics underneath the results when you do a search on google. So you do the keyword search and look at some factors that show up

        Used to look for pagerank and still do but nowadays I also install mozbar in the event that some new sites have entered the competition. Pagerank has not updated in a year and a half so is useless for a new site entering the top ten.

        but before (let me organize this a bit more)

        1) You want to see if the keywords are in the title of the page on Google(or at least some close related words) -a good SEOd page will have them there
        2) You want to see if its in snippets drawn from the page
        3) then you want to look at the over all strength of the links coming. That would be the pagerank

        VERY IMPORTANT. - High pagerank or metrics does NOT mean the term is too competitive. Remember all metrics measure the ENTIRE strength of links coming in REGARDLESS of anchor text. SO you could have a PR4 on the result page and it shows up for the term "hairy widget" but have very few anchor text with widgets in it links. They probably are not even trying to compete for term. (Sometimes pages rank because the phrase is so uncompetitive google just ranks something close enough.)

        However if you go to the first page and see a bunch of older pages with NA and PR1 in the top ten then it DOES show the competition has some soft areas you could rank at because it doesn't have a whole lot of juice regardless of anchor text.

        If the pages are newer than a year and a half they might show N/A and STILL have good links. Those might not be showing up as PR because Google has not updated the toolbar in a year plus. .So then you need to look at the other metrics available such as Moz and Majestic to get a better sense..

        Anyway thats just a start and a quick way to identify weak serps. Theres more I hope others will fill in and then before you actually commit to anything you will want to do a backlink check of the other pages ranking to determine the real situation and take a look at all the pages themselves to see how they are optimized content wise.
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    • Profile picture of the author savidge4
      I would say that I have a bit of an unorthodox method to all of this. I gave up using adwords tool. I even gave up looking at the top 10 sites. I type in a keyword. I look at 2 things. the # of sites for that given keyword, and then I look at "searches related to".

      So my base keyword I put in a spreadsheet ( excel ) and then write down the comp # I then fill in each of the related terms, and click over to see the comp#. I then go through each of the comps, and follow the same process.

      IF you start this process at a very core term I will lay out Xbox One below as an example and follow through this process you should end up with a decent chain of terms from highest to lowest competition.

      xbox one: 199,000,000
      xbox one for sale: 54,800,000
      xbox one for cheap: 30,500,000
      used xbox one for sale: 24,100,000
      xbox one price drop: 14,200,000
      xbox one price drop rumor: 994,000
      xbox one price drop prediction: 329,000
      xbox one price drop 399: 149,000

      Obviously my list is going to be a bit more filled in than this, but I am just showing the potential flow of the terms. I personally develop pages from the top down. I have absolutely no expectations to get the top "short term" ranked. BUT, I believe it adds to the sites overall context diversity, and maybe with some time and development, that page may hit... you just never know.

      But ya..that's my basic keyword development process. I have given up the looking and poking and scientific stuff... I can analyze till I am blue in the face. but the truth is this, how can you know what your results will be, and exactly how much traffic there is until you try.

      Even the developing paid traffic across the page to determine potential traffic... you would know soon enough after you publish it and get ranked somewhere in the top 20 or so, so why bother with the expense, and the time.. the time you could have developed another page or 2.
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      Success is an ACT not an idea
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    • Profile picture of the author Bitcoin Explorer
      Originally Posted by Mike Anthony View Post

      Thats actually an EXCELLENT idea. I'm not around as much anymore but I think its a reasonable way of going at things that could be very valuable.How are you determining competition level? I find that analyzing the top ten results for the the keyword is the way to go.
      What i do is use first find some nice decently searched keywords using SemRush or google keyword planner and analyse the top 10 by using seoquake.
      from now on i plan to analyse top 20 instead of top 10.
      I see domain age though people dont believe in it. i dont take that into account much bu i feel it matters because one seo blog which was started in 2008 features on the first page of so many queries but it might also be due to different reasons.
      then i see backlinks and DA and PA and other essential metrics.
      i see the word count and go through the content. if i feel my content will be better than the top 10 ill go ahea and make a post. im not looking to make mone so compettion doesnt matter for me. i just want to pull in traffic.
      i dont really know which is the optimal keyword density. some people say 4% and some people say 1%.
      Nice idea to discusa one topic per week.
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  • Profile picture of the author taposh123
    Originally Posted by Liarspoker View Post

    Ok, so let's make these threads a little more practical.

    The idea is that we take one subject each week, discuss it, and more importantly implement it. Of course some here will have thin sites, others will have authority sites so a week per topic seems like a fair time to suit both type of parties (and those in between).

    So, week 1, Keywords.

    I usually just go to the adwords keyword tool and type in things related to my niche. I then find a word, or sets of words, with low competition and several hundred views per month. I then write one article per keyword.

    I place the keyword in the header, the first paragraph and have keyword density of around 3% (I use the Yoast plugin).

    How do you guys do it?

    Remember guys, learn something, then implement it.

    Go......
    Google adwords only shows how the keyword is competitive among advertisers.
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  • Profile picture of the author anymore
    You need to install Mozilla Firefox and add seoquake. Go to google and type in your keyword phrase. You will be able to see the page rank for the top ten pages. If most of the pages have a high page rank, you may want to select a new keyword phrase. R4 and above is high. If there are a lot of R6 and above, you are not going to rank on page 1.

    If all the top 10 listings have high page ranks, you would be wasting your time to create a page for that keyword phrase

    You would stand a better chance to rank a video on a page that has a lot of high ranking pages
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