The Best Keyword Research Secrets Are REVEALED by Wordtracker! - Part 1

In the next few seconds I’m going to share some insights with respect to keyword research that I hope will make some significant impact in your Web site’s business. As we’ve always said that the single most important aspect of your SEO work is researching the correct keyword phrases that are being used by a target audience. If you do not optimize for the correct keyword phrases, then even the best optimization skills in the world may not result in any increase in your business.


In our workshops we also teach people about how to research their “ideal buying audiences” search behavior, which can be even more powerful that general keyword research.

The techniques are also described in my e-book Wordtracker Magic and I have also offered free instructional audios to help people understand how to save tremendously on their keyword research time. I trust that you have already understood the value of using Wordtracker.com if you have ever subscribed and taken even just 30 minutes to do some research. Many of you have written to me saying how excited you were with what you were able to discover inside Wordtracker using these techniques. Okay, onward now with some more tips and insights that I hope you will find helpful, next time you go into Wordtracker exploring landscapes of searcher behavior

Separating truth from error and myth from fact: Q & A with John Alexander

QUESTION: John, inside Wordtracker’s database they have over three hundred and fifty million (350,000,000) keyword queries. I have heard that there are other services touting similar data as Wordtracker, only they claim to have over Ten billion (10,000,000,000) keywords in their data.

As an expert in the business of behavioral research, would you not think it wise to have access to 10 billion keywords as opposed to Wordtracker’s 300 million in comparison?

ANSWER: Actually, quite the opposite is the truth. You need to be aware of the quality of the data
being gathered into the database. Wordtracker is in my opinion, light years ahead of anything else around for this exact reason.

Do you believe this Myth? : Bigger is always better.

The myth of bigger is always better…..is simply untrue. Quantity simply does not and can not ever
replace quality. Think about it. Just because you have billions of keywords does not mean you will find billions of
niches. In fact what you will probably find is a load of duplication. But there is something else to be aware of
too.

Fact: Not all search result data is equal and you better be able to know the difference.

Did you know for example that some search engines and PPC engines have hard
coded links directly connected into other sites? So if for example they have a search box or a large campaign connected with a gambling site, the keywords arriving through the source, will be heavily skewed towards the gambling specific keyword terms and phrase clusters.

I'm not saying Wordtracker data is perfect, (nothing in this industry is ever perfect) but I am suggesting that if
you want the best quality data, use Wordtracker.


Okay, now let's think back to the old routine of Search Engine Submission scams. Do we
all remember those fly-by-night companies that try to say you’ll get loads of traffic by using their service to submit to thousands of different search engines?

Myth: We all know by now I hope, that those submission scams just don’t work.

Fact: It’s not hard to fathom once you understand that most qualified traffic comes from the big 3 major search engines. Most of those so-called "thousands of other search engines" are just FFA list designed to capture your e-mail address and send you Spam. It does not matter how good the sales pitch sounds, we have to examine the truth. The only way these scamy submission type services survive is that they prey upon people who do not understand how search engines work.

But from my experience, here’s what you need to understand when you hear me talk about the values of Wordtracker. My real vote of confidence is not just within the Wordtracker system itself, but it’s also in the expertise of the guys behind the scenes who work very hard to keep the data of high value. I'll talk more about the list of benefits I've found in Wordtracker in part two of this article but I just want to it clear that it's not just the product "Wordtracker", it's the people that are managing it behind the scenes that make it the power tool that it is.

QUESTION: I am stuck here in the keyword research process and cannot find a decent keyword phrase for one particular page I want to optimize. Do you have any suggestions for me?

ANSWER: Sure. Why don't you reverse the process and try it the other way around for a change.

1. Research a great keyword phrase on a topic that you are comfortable writing about
that pertains to your Web site.

2. Once you find a great keyword phrase, create a Web page based on what you know the searchers
are looking for. This is opposite to what most people do, but give it a
try. The results you get will sometimes be an eye opener.

Think of it as being very similar to the market research you might do before you spend money developing an actual
product. It always amazes me that some firms will develop some new product working on it for 2 or 3 years (or more) and then they try and sell it ONLY to find out their buyers never wanted it in the first place. It makes much more sense to first research the market place and then offer a product that you know there is a demand for.

This same principle holds true as it applies to Internet marketing and for
serving up original Web content. Don’t serve up the content until you truly understand what the online searcher is looking for. There is a powerful difference and thanks to Wordtracker you can eliminate guess work.


QUESTION: I do all types of keyword research for a variety of clients. For two clients I am really having a
hard time finding some niche phrases with high KEI values. Please help.

ANSWER: If you want niche phrases with high KEI values but don’t want to spend hours searching for them, here are a few suggestions:

1) Listen to these short “audio tips” that explain things step by step.

Each tip is only 2 or 3 minutes long and they’re free.

http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/audiomagic.html

2) Consider purchasing the Top 20,000 keywords report from Wordacker: http://www.wordtracker.com/reports.html This can give you some good insight into all of the other possibilities beyond the top 1000 that you get with membership.

3) In Wordtracker Magic, I explain how to tap into high KEI values in just seconds. It is just a short little guide but if you don't want to listen to the audios, you can buy the guide for just $29.95 and download it right now. http://www.wordtracker-magic.com/

4) Come out to one of hands-on SEO Mastery Workshops and we'll not only teach you these skills but we'll teach you the full scope of search engine marketing and work with you in person for 5-Days. Once you've had a little training and coaching and some practice time, nothing will be able to stop you.

QUESTION: I
have heard it said that Wordtracker can be used for optimizing a press release. Does this differ in any way than when I am optimizing a traditional Web page?

How important is it to have a real high KEI value for a press release?

ANSWER: In some ways there is a significant difference. You do not need a high KEI value to optimize a press release. Often you can use a low KEI phrase for producing higher mainstream traffic so long as it relates to your story. Remember that with Press Releases the most important thing is that you are always focused on telling “a story” that is either “hard news” or “newsworthy.” Wordtracker can be quite helpful though. This is another high performance strategy that we teach to our Search Engine Workshop students.


You can literally make a donation with some news services to move your position up in the news feeds and so at initial stages you want to ensure you are at least within the top 10 stories going out for that day. Be sure to use your researched keyword phrase as a “complete phrase” within your Title, Body Text and in the summary. Depending on which service you use to release your story, you can have options that could get you exposure in literally hundreds or even thousands of news related publications including many of the search engine news areas too. Eventually your press release could show up in the regular search results even after the initial release so this is where optimization also helps a lot.


Another strategy you can try is to watch the Top 1000 (Short Term Report) for important subjects and topics that might be occurring within the last 24 to 48 hours as a result of something happening in the news.


TIP: Watching for other press releases on soon to be released products is also a good way to prepare a strategy based on something that is being scheduled for release in the next 3 to 6 months from now. If they have an affiliate program and you think the product will be hot, why not find out more information on it and start working on your optimization now for products to be released in 3 to 6 months from now? Remember, focus on delivering original, quality content based on what you learn from your research.

Next week, I'm going to give you a list of my top favorite benefits for using Wordtracker. Some of them may surprise you but once you are on to these aspects of Wordtracker, it'll open up your scope of thinking and hopefully it'll give you even more insight and all make sense. Watch for part two of this article in just a few days.

Highest regards,
John Alexander
John@searchengineworkshops.com
Search Engine
Worksops
Online Web
Training
Search Engine
Academy

Watch for part two of this article where I give you my list of essential benefits for using Wordtracker.

Is someone draining your pay per click account? Find out & stop them.

Clickfraud - Is really a crime of pure "fraud" plain and simple
Perhaps you've experienced it first hand? Okay, let's first define what "click fraud" is first. Overture defines it as clicks not conducted in “good faith”. Google, on the other hand terms it as “malicious” or “artificial” clicks. Another definition could be: The systematic act of stealing money from PPC (Pay Per Click) internet search engine/marketing campaigns via human or automated means by synthesizing clicks.Clickfraud is reported to be as high as 30%. Some sources have said that it is even much higher.
The term "Clickfraud" may sound like a buzz word these days but it's really a crime of "fraud" pure and simple. The crime is that someone may be just clicking on your PPC campaigns for the purpose of draining your wallet. We all know the ever increasing price of paying for certain keywords and the last thing you need is a competitor someone repeatedly clicking on your pay per click links (for whatever reason).
The reason you are running a campaign is to attract genuine business. Many people have no idea of the implications of clickfraud or how much it is affecting you but the fact is that someone who is engaging in clickfraud is actually stealing from you. You can imagine the impact this can have on competitive businesses that may be paying upwards of $6.00 to $10.00 per keyword. Some industries are paying even much higher rates for certain keywords than that. The previous challenges with trying to stop clickfraud are that you must be able to prove where fraudulent activity is coming from. Just a few of the things that come into play include:
click behavior
click timing
location
IP address
proxy detection
double clicks
robot detection
cookies
click volume
plus more
Important Questions to consider:
How can you possibly pin down the exact time when the crime is occurring? What would possibly alert you that clickfraud is occurring right now? What type of follow up would be necessary to get it stopped?
Finally - Someone's created A Watchdog Solution to Clickfraud. Let's talk about a smart system which acts as your watchdog. With this system, every single click is assigned to one of three risk groups. In simple terms, low risk clicks are "legitimate" medium risk clicks trigger "potential fraud" and high risk clicks are flagged with a high probability of "fraud." But even more importantly, this system will flag a click as high risk under conditions like: Anything over one click from an IP address in under two hours No JavaScript turned on (a potential Robot Click) No cookies turned on (a potential Robot Click) Clicks from high risk countries (we know who they are) Click from a "known" anonymous proxy server. Clicks from users with an "unknown" operating system This system delivers:
instant e-mail alerts sent to you as soon as the system detects an increase in fraudulent clicks. automatically generates detailed but user friendly reports to give you the details produces automated fraud refund requests you get immediate access to a rapidly expanding blacklisted database as a resource. plus many other features.
Okay, are you ready to start? Are you ready to take a stand against Click Fraud? The name of this system is called Click Sentinel and all it takes is just five minutes. Are you ready to get the evidence you need to process a refund claim and get 30, 40 or even 50% of your PPC advertising dollars returned to you?
Be sure to take the tour to see all of the benefits and features.www.clicksentinel.com/moreinfo.htmlWishing the very best of continued online success.
Best regards, John Alexanderjohn@searchengineworkshops.com About John AlexanderJohn Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with partner Robin Nobles as well as online search engine marketing courses through Online Web Training. John is author of an e-book called Wordtracker Magic and co-author of the Totally Non-Technical Guide for A Successful Web Site. John is also an official member of the customer support team at Wordtracker.com. Click here to go back to the index of search engine marketing articles

What is url canonicalization?

Canonicalization is the process that search engines use to determine the best URL or website address when several different choices exist. This is a common issue that is predominantly related to home page files at the root level. In other words, the following URL’s all appear to be the same for a web user:

www.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/
www.yourdomain.com/index.shtml
yourdomain.com/default.asp

On the other hand, search engines view the above URL’s as different pages. Web servers sees each URL differently and treats each independently, therefore each of the above URL’s could display different content if desired. When a search engine attempts to –canonicalize– a URL, it tries to choose the best page to represent the website.

The simplest way to discover if you are experiencing this issue would be to perform a search using part of the content found on your homepage. If one then one result appears, on the search engine result pages, you may want to correct this issue using a 301 redirect on your web server. The 301 redirect will instruct the search engine as to which URL you desire to be “canonical.” The 301 redirect will perform a permanent redirect to the specified URL as seen in the sample below:

User types address into their browser:

http://yourdomain.com

The 301 redirect will redirect any request to the specified address:

http://www.yourdomain.com

I have seen countless websites displaying the same content on two or more different URL’s. Search engines penalize duplicate content causing problems and poor performance for the site owners while obtaining organic rankings. The funny thing is most website owners don’t know this pertains to their sites.

DMO.

David Montalvo is the CEO of UnReal Web Marketing LLC. He has achieved over 15,000 top 10 positions for Fortune 500 companies since 1997.

Organic Search vs Paid Search

Unlike organic foods at your local grocery store, you aren't required to pay extra to reap the healthy benefits of "organic" search. So what are the benefits of organic over paid search?Pros:Greater Click-throughs: People trust "organically grown" search results more than they do sponsored results. While the engines business is supported by paid ads, many consumers prefer the organic search results. Due to the contextual nature of organic search, the listings can be more relevant and offer a greater depth of choices. Therefore, while paid ads can play an important part in your marketing strategy, ultimately it is the organic search results that will more likely yield the greater click-through rates when all other things are equal. Therefore, it's this type of listing that will maximize the traffic to your site whenever you climb to the top.Power of Branding: More and more large corporations are investing resources into organic search to gain the marketing benefits of promoting their brand. For example, most consumers would expect to find Dell.com in a search for computers. If your company does not show up for the keyword results in which you'd expect to appear it can be embarrassing. Consumers may wonder if Company X is as important as they once were if they don't even show up in MSN, Yahoo or Google. Conversely, inserting your brand in the top search results can give the impression that your company is important. Therefore, smaller companies can give the impression of big business importance by securing aa better position in organic search than their larger rivals.Greater Trust Equals Greater Conversions: Most adults learn to apply a healthy dose of skepticism when they see a commercial on TV, a banner ad on the Web, or a sponsored ad on a search engine. After all, we know those ads are commercially motivated and may not always be the most relevant product or solution for our needs. It may simply represent the company that was able to spend the most money to get their message in front of me. Sometimes bigger companies do offer the best products, but there's no guarantee. There's certainly not the same level of trust that we see from visitors arriving from organic search. Organic search can, of course, be commercially influenced. However, a recent survey shows that people tend to trust organic results compared to sponsored listings. On the whole, you should see more visitors from organic search converting to sales, assuming your rankings were for targeted, relevant keywords. In the business world, ROI, or Return On Investment, is king. Fortunately, organic search can give you the high ROI you're looking for or your boss is demanding.Organic is Free: After all these years, it's still free to submit to Google, arguably the most popular of the organic search engines right now. Google has always been adamant about not charging for inclusion in its index of 4.2 billion pages. Most other organic engines will also index you for free, although some like Yahoo do have paid inclusion options. Paid inclusion simply guarantees your page will get indexed quickly and stay indexed for as long as you maintain your subscription, but does not promise a particular ranking. However, if you have a Web site with good quality content and links from third party sites, paid inclusion is "nice-to-have". It can be very useful in getting pages indexed or re-indexed quickly. This allows you to quickly test various page designs and to feed news and other time-sensitive content to the search engine as quickly as possible.Cons:Organic Rankings are Not Automatic: With organic listings, you cannot simply hand over a certain amount of money and be guaranteed to quickly and automatically achieve any ranking you desire. Instead, achieving positions in organic search requires the proper technology, skill, and know-how. There has always been a cloud of mystery around the process of achieving top rankings. How's it done? Where do I start? That's why resources like this newsletter and products like WebPosition Gold are essential to a business's success in search engine marketing.Organic Rankings Require an Investment in Time: The age-old adage of "nothing worthwhile in life ever comes easy" rings true with organic rankings. While they are monetarily free, simply submitting your pages to the search engines is not enough to bring in a flood of new visitors to your Web site. Far too many businesses have been fooled into spending $49 or $99 to submit their site to "thousands" of sites, 99% of which are obscure names you've probably never heard of. The key is that someone doing a search on a major search engine must be able to easily find your Web site.If your site is buried at the bottom of the list, or simply fails to appear in the first few pages of search results, you can kiss your chances of being found good-bye. The key is to use responsible best practices to create pages that are highly relevant to the keywords that apply to your Web site and the products or solutions you have to offer. . In other words, optimize your pages for search engine visibility and see how fast your position improves. To do this, you simply need to know what each search engine needs for maximum visibility. Then tweak your Web page's content while paying attention to off-page factors like the number and type of links coming to your page. Tune the pages of your site to the preferences of the major search engines and then watch your rankings and traffic climb.While optimizing your Web site to rank well for organic searches takes more effort than simply buying an ad, it can provide your business with one of the highest ROI results that you're likely to find. Numerous studies have placed search engine optimization at the top of the list of the most effective forms of online marketing. Its low cost, high relevancy, and high conversion rates make it an ideal marketing vehicle for almost any business.The catch? As with any area of marketing, SEO is a competitive field. Arming yourself with the best technology and knowledge is key to gaining a competitive advantage. Long-time readers of MarketPosition know that WebPosition was the first product on the market to track a Web site's rankings on the search engines and to help improve those rankings. That early lead has given WebPosition more time for its technology to grow and mature than any of its competition. WebPosition's Page Critic module contains a wealth of advice and statistics designed to move your site to the top of the organic search results. Not only that, it also tracks your rankings and gives you advice on how to achieve the best results in both organic and pay-per-click search engines as well. Therefore, you can capitalize on the best of both