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Keywords

Keywords (sometimes abbreviated to kw) are the words that users type into a search engine when looking for information on a certain subject area. For example entering the term:

vintage motorbikes

into a search engine should return a set of results that link to pages relevant to the keywords. The search engine uses a mixture of different algorithms to ensure the results are as accurate as possible. SEO experts will research the most common keywords related to a web page's contents and will then alter on-page and off-page factors in order to ensure high rankings for those keywords.

Each page on the website should target a small set of keywords related to the page content. Large, generic pages should be split up. The home page of the site generally has the most inbound links and should concentrate on the most competitive keywords.

In reality it is not quite such an all or nothing process. Targeting generic terms will still provide some weight for more specific terms. For example the single keyword "computer" will also target derivatives such as laptop computer and computer software services, although given two identical pages search engines will give a higher rank to more specific keywords. At the same time more specific keywords will dilute the value for other  combinations. Thus a site targeting computer software services will rank less well than one targeting computer software for the query term computer software engineering. It is a case of swings and roundabouts. Pages deep in a website should be much more focused on specific content and keywords. Focussing on more specific keywords, highly relevant to the content should also give more stable site rankings during algorithm updates such as Google's Florida. Although they will only attract niche traffic this should result in better qualified visitors.  Adjacency is also an  important factor, search engines assign more rank to pages where search terms occur next to each other.

It is worth being realistic about keyword choices. Keywords with up to 100,000 pages indexed Google or Yahoo! should be fairly easy to rank for with some basic search engine optimization. Up to a million pages and a high ranking will require inbound links coupled with relevant anchor text along with factors directly under the website owner's control: site structure, on-page optimizations, content and page count. Above a million indexed pages and any ranking in results pages gets exponentially more difficult and may well be beyond the resources of a small website. You can think of keywords as mountains. It may be more worthwhile to climb a large number of smaller mountains than try to scale Everest and fail.

The above is just a rough guide. There are queries featuring popular keywords but in odd combinations that can return huge numbers of results but a lot of these are accidental. Most of the websites are not competing for these keywords. A site that is optimized for the exact phrase can feature in the top ten relatively easily. This technique is sometimes used by search engine optimizers to show that they can rank highly for 'competitive' search terms.

The number of pages indexed by search engines for a particular keyword combination are irrelevant if no-one is searching for those words. A good example is the phrase "click here", this returns around 40 million pages in Google but very few people search on this term (although some do!). Overture <http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/> and Wordtracker <http://www.wordtracker.com> offer tools to help optimize keywords. There are some meta-tools on the Web that enable a user to consult both these resources from a single web page <http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/>. They give the popularity of keyword combinations and also suggest alternative keywords. Google provides a keyword alternatives tool <https://www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox> based on data from their adwords program. A number of search engines also show which are the current most popular keywords, Google's Zeitgeist breaks this information down geographically <http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html>.

Table 1: Keyword click-throughs plotted against position in search results

The information in table 1 shows an analysis of the some of the most popular keywords from the log files of a website. These keywords occupied positions 1 to 10 in Google search engine results pages. Looking up the popularity of the keywords in Overture and comparing with the number of Google searches arriving at the site enables a conversion rate to be plotted against the position in the search results. For example if 1000 people per day search on the keyword(s) and the site is in first position for the search in Google the site could expect 800 visitors for that keyword. If the site is in position two the figure drops to around 600 and in position 10 closer to 200. Only 15% of searchers make it beyond the first twenty results. The graph is for illustration only as it is based on a fairly limited sample size.

While achieving high rankings in search engines for single keywords is hardest as there are also more potential competitors. The Onestat survey <http://www.onestat.com> shows that two and three keyword searches are currently the most popular amongst searchers. The trend is towards using more keywords in searches showing a greater sophistication amongst users of search engines. Optimizers should therefore consider optimizing pages for two and three keyword searches. Here keyword proximity (or adjacency) is a factor as exact matches are given more weight.

Keywords vary in competitiveness. The following table shows five computer related keywords with the number of pages indexed in Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search.

The figure in the final column is a cost/benefit analysis. Wordtracker uses the term Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI and offers a tool called Competition Search to calculate this value. This tool may be useful if you have a lot of keyword combinations to check. The disadvantage is that you have to pay to use it. Competition Search uses a database of search queries and matches these against the total results for the query in popular search engines to give a measure of how popular and completive a keyword is.

It is possible to calculate the CBA figure by hand using query data either from Wordtracker or Overture. The figure was obtained by taking the number of people searching for the keyword over a month as reported by Overture and dividing it by the total number of web pages indexed by Google, currently the most popular search engine. The table illustrates that certain keywords are easier to target than others for the same traffic. In theory the higher the CBA value the better but this makes three big assumption:

1. The competitiveness of a keyword is proportional to the number of pages in the indexed. Except for some odd keywords like "home page" this is probably fairly reasonable.
2. For the same number of clicks, all keywords have the same value to a website owner. This is almost certainly inaccurate. Users searching for 'apple computer' may account for more sales revenue than those looking for 'computer keyboard'
3. The conversion rate is constant. This is not the case. Qualified traffic is more valuable than general traffic. An Apple computer dealer will covert proportionally more people searching for apple computer than computer into sales. An Apple computer dealer that is based in San Francisco with no mail order outlet will make more sales on: apple computer store san francisco than just apple computer.

Optimizers should also remember that many keywords are seasonal or related to specific events. For example the number of users searching for anything related to the Olympics peaks every four years, summer holidays in late winter and recipes for turkey around Christmas.

Once a set of keywords has been researched for a page the final step is to use them in the anchor text of inbound and internal links, the page URL, the page TITLE element, headings and also within the page copy itself. Optimizers should avoid keyword stuffing or "spamdexing" on the page.

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Keywords should be tracked in the various search engines. This can be done through custom scripts using the Google-API or by online tools. Digitalpoint <http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/> offer a Google keyword tracking tool on their website.

Table 2: Keywords Targeted as part of an eCommerce campaign

This can be used as part of a campaign to show the effectiveness of keyword optimizations or as part of long term tracking to ensure any problems are flagged up in a timely manner.

Multimedia

Many search engines can index multimedia including images, PDF files and Microsoft Office documents. Use keyword rich file names as these formats can bring in visitors. It is possible to set the title of Office documents and PDF files which should further optimize the content. The main problem with images searches are that the visitors are not well qualified and often don't stay long on the site.

See Also

Anchor Text, Competition, Inbound-Links, On-Page Factors

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