But which keywords are best?

There are 3 factors to consider when selecting key phrases and keywords:

• Relevance:
  Give each keyword a relevance score from low to high. Is this keyword right for your content? Test it with an actual search. One word may not pass the test but a phrase may be more relevant – combine keywords.
• Competition level:
  Very low to very high. Do some searches to assess your competition.
• Popularity:
  How often is that keyword actually searched for? Also known as ’search volume’. Google’s Keyword Tool can help you out here.

And which are the most useful for you?

Usually those that strike a balance between popularity, relevance and competition:

• high popularity/ high competition/high relevance:
  If drawn into a fight the words should be extremely relevant. There’s no point putting your entire SEO efforts into trying to rank for ‘spanish villas’ unless you have a six figure sum to spend and this is extremely relevant for your page.
• high popularity/ low competition/ high relevance:
  The ideal candidates for your shortlist. Hard to come by. WordTracker calls the popularity vs competition ratio ‘KEI’ (Keyword Effectiveness Index). This is a score that can help you see quickly which phrases are searched for frequently but have little competition.
• low popularity/ low competition/ high relevance:
  Not many searches for this, but if people do search, your page may come up first. These will add up. Known as ‘the long tail’ of search or ‘niche’ keywords.

‘Long tail’ tips:

• Compare your niche markets and target readers – some may have more future potential or be more ‘you’ than others
• Use web analytics to keep an eye on how people are finding your site
• Include niche terms in your web copy.

For local niches:

• Know your geography and all the local place names, plus what local people call them
• Make sure you note landmarks and places of interest – include these in your copy
• Find local business directories and review sites – they’re invaluable for getting your pages noticed.

Match to web pages

Then match each phrase or keyword to a page on your site. This page shouldn’t usually be your home page. It should be relevant to your keywords, but doesn’t need to contain them now. Don’t make one page work too hard. Do you need to create new pages for particularly useful keyphrses?

Thanks to Stephanie for suggesting the topic of this article.

Just after lunch, whilst teaching my Search Engine Optimisation course at Book House, we were told to quickly gather together our things and leave the building, as there was a strong smell of gas downstairs.

So I grabbed my memory stick – it has all my passwords on it – and the remaining handouts and left the building with my delegates. I suggested that we go to the Huguenot Graveyard behind Book House and finish the subject we had started looking at. But it was too wet to find anywhere for us to sit. We made it onto the traffic island and were about to go to the East Hill pub to continue, when we were directed to the Steam Bar over the road. We found a little private dining room at the back of the restaurant, removed the glasses and napkins from the tables and carried on.

No computer and no Internet connection.

Now 12 years ago the thought of teaching a course about that most interactive of web services, search engines, without an Internet connection, let alone a computer, would have filled me with horror. But a kind of ‘Blitz spirit’ kicked in amongst the delegates and I. We vowed to carry on. I ‘drew’ my examples in the air. Thankfully the delegates had good imaginations and a lot of experience with using search engines and could imagine my examples and diagrams.

After being accompanied by gentle folk music for half an hour the music was turned off and we offered tea, coffee and biscuits. Thanks to the kindness of the staff at The Steam Bar I carried on and successfully finished teaching for the rest of the afternoon. Teaching will never be the same again.

The approach usually involve combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics. There are two aspects to this:

1. Social network discovery via search

Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

2. Ability to attract links for improved SEO

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in many relevant inbound links.

Social media SEO tips

Find out where your audience is interacting and sharing content.

Over the coming weeks I’ll look at SEO and blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.

But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page.

During the swine flu panic of late April 2009, the most popular topic (known as ‘trending’) was ’swine flu’. A few weeks later I saw the addition of ‘H1N1′ as a trending topic. So anyone writing articles about swine flu would have been wise to include these two phrases, rather than the European Union’s favourite ‘novel flu’. Hardly anyone used the term ‘novel flu’ in their ‘tweets’, so you can bet that people weren’t typing that phrase into Google.

The main tools we use to find out what terms are ‘hot’, like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, have a time-lag of over a week. But with Twitter you can see the topical words that people prefer to use straight away – in real time.

Real-time Web

Some have hinted that Twitter may evolve into a search of the ‘now’ – what’s going on right now and what has been published now – about any subject people are interested in. They are currently looking into ways of factoring reputation into Twitter search.

Of course Google looks to fight back. Take a look at the link ‘options’ next time you do a Google search. You can now order by date so the most recently changed pages come up first. Google is apparently set to make lots of other changes so that their results show timely rather than just trusted pages. I’ll kep you posted…

Now Matt is an interesting chap who is worth listening to. He’s head of spam detection, in other words, knows about the tricks that webmasters play on the search engines to get higher rankings.

Here’s some videos that will interest Web writers:

• Does the ordering of heading tags matter?
• Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR (click through rate)?
• Which is more important: content or links?
• Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

He’s adding new answers almost every day. Go to Google’s Webmaster Central You Tube channel to see his latest videos.

Make sure you write it down so people know whether it has dots, hyphens or underscores. For example, here is a Technorati search for ted2009 (over 200 results). And here is one for ted09 (just 3 results).

Here’s how the New England Chapter of ASIST asks attendees to do it. And here’s the principle in action at Flickr for Bath Spa’s Institutional Web Management event.

Enforcement is another matter, but at least if you let people know what the right format is, they are more likely to use it in their writing and when tagging blog posts, slides, photos etc.

UKOLN have a great briefing paper Use Of Social Tagging Services At Events.