SEO – Link Building Series: Keyword Research & Optimization (for Short & Midterm traffic boost)
Ajith | Feb 2009 | Site Promotion, SEO
Since a lot of people are enquiring about keyword research and optimization technics, I thought of posting this article ahead of the scheduled posts on backlink building. Also, the SEO Challenge ’09 competition has just got over and a post like this would be a logical conclusion to some of the wonderful discussions that we had during the competition.
What is Keyword Optimization?
We defined the term keyword, in our context, when we talked about the role of keywords in links. Keyword optimization is nothing but the process of enriching your content with relevant carefully picked keywords so as to attract a lot of search traffic to your website or blog. Now let us get into the details of how practical keyword research & optimization can be done (Let me warn you that it is a very long post)
Keyword Optimization goals
According to me there are long term as well as short term search traffic goals that decides how to optimize for keywords. I will be touching upon the short term optimization in this post.
Short term optimization or optimizing keywords for the current trend is done with the intention of attracting instant burst in search traffic and this involves realtime analysis of the search trend. One of the free tools that helps us in doing this short trend research is the Google Trends. Please note that in the case of short term keyword optimizing, the timing is very important and this methodology can work a great deal for blogs that are updated quite frequently (once or more a day) and/o dealing with current affairs as main topics. It can work for other blogs as well if you have the ability to connect your topics with the current hot keywords but the search hits will have high bounce rate.
Before proceeding further, I would request you to read the post on how can you do a quick seo on your blog posts. The method described in that post will be used to for optimization while we use keywords and search words obtained via the keyword research methods described here.
Finding hot search words for instant traffic boost
Step #1: Open Google Trends and click on More Hot Trends
Step #2: Make sure that you are on current date with respect to the hot trends page and click on one of the top four or five searched keywords. You should select one of those keywords that you can actually write about or can easily tie to your post topic.
Step #3: The search word picked should be having a ‘hotness’ of Volcanic or On Fire or Spicy (indicates top searches at that point of time). Also, the word picked should not have peaked not too long ago in terms of traffic. If this is not satisfied, repeat from step #2.
Note: You may not get the perfect search words and keywords on every single day but you can try your luck with lower rated search words as well
Step #4: If you are satisfied with the search word use that as the starting phrase in your title of the post. This should be part of the permalink as well. In addition, add four our five related searches (as suggested by the tool) to your All-in-one-SEO keywords of the post and the post tags. In addition check for related words in the 100 search words of hot trends. Now, make sure that your post body’s first ~150 characters have at least one reference to the selected search word. This is good for better search ranking as it would be taken up by the All-in-one-SEO plugin for the post meta description.
Step #5: Publish the post. You should have your favorite ping services listed in your WordPress settings. For a list of must-have ping services please read my post on Update Services or Ping Services. The listed ping services will make sure that your post is immediately listed in most blog aggregators. It will be a bonus if your post gets social bookmarked which will make the indexing even faster.
Step #6: Go back to Google Trends and click on the search word that you just used. You must be already seeing your blog post indexed in the blogsearch results there in. If you are lucky and did a good job on time, you may be seeing on the first SERP of Google search as well.
That’s super simple isn’t it? Unfortunately, Google Trends is not the right tool for you if you are ready to post something that is not in hot trends. In this case we use yet another free tool called Google Insights for search.
Finding realistic keywords for your posts with Google Insights
Google Insights can provide your rich search information based on geographics, time and category. If you are looking for good quality sustainable traffic for a few days/weeks, you may use this tool instead of Google Trends.
The following would be the steps involved in finding top search words using Google Insights.
Step #1: Select your filters in Google Insights i.e. Geographic, time filter and the category filters (See the picture for an example). You don’t need to select the country if you are not targeting country specific traffic. Add Search terms (e.g. Nokia). Now hit the ‘Search’ button.
Step #2: Among the results shown (Top searches) click on a major category (e.g. Nokia e71) that is related to your post topic.
Step #3: Check if your topic is part of Top searches or Rising searches. If so you got your keywords. You could further drill down from your Top Searches.
Step #4: If you are not satisfied with the top searches, start all over with different search terms or combinations.
You can use the obtained set of relevant search words to SEO Optimize your posts as in the example with Google Trends. Google Insights and Trends can be used to dig out inspirational hot topics to write about as well.
Other tips for short and mid-term keyword optimization
- Use your Google toolbar’s suggest feature to find more related search terms
- If you want to optimize for keywords related to Google product’s competitors, (e.g. Bidvertiser) you may not find much information in Google Trends, Suggest or Insights. In that case you should go by instinct or purchase a paid keyword research service/tool
- Certain ping services are slow to react (e.g. MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog etc). In this case logging on (just one visit) to those respective accounts will result in faster indexing and hence additional traffic potential
- Make it a habit to go through Google Insights for search words before publishing any of your blog posts
- When you do research with Google Insights, you need to worry about keyword competition as well if duration (time filter) is very long
If you want to convert short-term optimized posts for long term usage (timeless posts) or you prefer only long term sustainable traffic you need to do a bit more clean up work and/or better keyword research. We will talk about that part in another post.
Thanks. Nice run-through. Surprisingly, I have never used the Google Insight tool, but it has now been bookmarked.
As for Google Trends, it’d be great if they could add more features so that you can categorize keywords by ‘industry’… Either way, I will try my hand at using Google Trends for some upcoming posts and maybe I’ll find myself getting nice little bursts of traffic.
Shirley – Velvet Blues’s last blog post… Google Is Finally The #1 Website On Alexa
Google trend is great but the problem as Shirley mentioned it would be nice if they could categories it. Also it will be better if they do it for different countries..like top 100 for each country.
Thanks for this great article buddy. Cleared some doubt.
Kurt Avish’s last blog post… I am eating KFC and today is a busy day!
Ajith, Super post. You are rocking!
I knew about google trends. but not insight. Thanks for this. From now on i will try to do some research on google insight before posting the post.
Thanks you very much! I will check for cricket and live links related keywords to get to top on cricket match days
Nihar’s last blog post… How to Convert Word DOC or DOCX files to PDF – Online
Looks like a good way to find relevant keywords but I prefer wordtrack and google adwords keyword tool, but those who want to catch a event and news for blog topic google trend is a great tool.
Ajith,
You continue to surprise me with these super useful and more importantly actionable posts. Btw if you are planning to do a post on a keyword hot in google trend then you will do well to check the level of competition. It is not a great idea to post about a keyword that is being discussed by Times Of India
Btw controversies are great traffic pullers. I remember, I had made a post about Shahrukh, Salman fight and ended up getting 5000 visitors. This was when binaryday used to get 5000 visitors in a month!!!!
Also new products are a great source of traffic. Windows7 must have got a lot of traffic for technosamrat is my view.
Binaryday’s last blog post… Comprehensive guide on ‘building backlinks for Bloggers’
great post!! bookmarked and it deserved to be printed and used for day-to-day blogging!!
I just stumbled this for you. With the kind of keyword optimization you have done for yourself in this post, SE traffic is guaranteed in a long run. Lets all help with stumble/digg traffic by bookmarking
Raju’s last blog post… 10 Ways to Watch 81st Annual Academy / Oscar Awards Online For FREE!
@Shirley, Insights beta was launched only five months back and I had written about it then
http://www.dollarshower.com/google-insights-for-search/
@Kurt, you are right… categories and geographics are present only in Google Insights. However, even Insights’ last seven days data can provide that kind of specific insights. Probably they should have merged it into one tool
@Nihar, thanks. Topics like cricket have huge traffic potential even without optimizing much. But take it as a challenge and see whether you could have done anything differently in the SEO Challenge competition
I personally think that you can achieve three times search traffic in another month or two, this being a major cricketing season and IPL is in the offing.
@Chinese Girl, as I mentioned in the post long term keyword optimization was outside the scope of this post and it;s already being drafted
I wanted to concentrate on real keyword optimization, converting short term trend posts to long term, keyword competition etc in another post.
@BinaryDay, you are right about controversies and the competition part. Unfortunately even the keyword competition data that you see on Google Adwords keyword tool do not provide the right information. Probably WordTracker is good in that but then you have to pay for it.
I am sure Samrat leveraged a lot on Windows 2007
Wonderful post
thanx for that
Nabeel’s last blog post… 2009 first semester and my subjects
Thanks for taking time to answer my comment.
I think keyword optimization fro short term trend for quick results are only for those guys who can create a buzz quickly after posting a post, for me it took quite a while to get my found on the search results with a decent ranking, any way your information is will be bookmarked for future reference, I hope it wont be too far away.
Chinese Girl’s last blog post… Qingdao Ocean Hotel
What a wonderful series this has been Ajith! I didn’t know about insights and am going to definitely take a look at it. I have to admit I don’t think too much about keywords – I just write about what I am interested in at the time.
Kim Woodbridge’s last blog post… How Twitter Can Assist You With Your Job Search
@Ajith,
wordtracker is almost useless for India. Btw I had done a post about how to check level of competition for a specific keyword..Take a look at it and let me know your views on it.
http://binaryday.com/2009/02/17/keyword-difficulty-analysis/
binaryday’s last blog post… Comprehensive guide on ‘building backlinks for Bloggers’
@Chinese Girl, thanks for your views. Yes, getting indexed immediately matters a lot for time critical search workds and trends is exactly for such blogs.
@kim, thanks kim. Even I do not do much keyword optimizing unless I am completely motivated to do so. I might do it for a post that I think is not at all influenced and is absolutely unique. Even for my home page, I have not done enough SEO.
@BinaryDay, I have not used the paid version of WordTracker yet, so I cannot comment on it.
Your post on keyword analysis is very good
This is a great article. I knew about insight but never used it. Google trends is very useful. I, myself use the site given below, it provides a combination of both free & paid Internet marketing & SEO tools.
http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/
Pushkar’s last blog post… Nokia at MWC (09)
yet another amazing and Informative post, Keywords do play an important rule, I use Google Keyword research tool to select the best keywords for my blog. Thanks for sharing
Nicholas | Pixobyte.com’s last blog post… Valentines Day Giveaway Contest Results
Awesome article Ajith, clear and well explained. Its time i also start paying attention to keywords for my blog too.
Madhur Kapoor’s last blog post… Organize Open Windows on Your Desktop with WinSplit Revolution
@Pushkar, @Nicholas, @Madhur , thanks for your comments and views. I will try to cover Google Keyword research tools and others for long term optimization
[...] we saw in the post related to short term keyword optimization was the means of receiving quick and short-lived bursts in traffic. However, for long term [...]
Google Insight tool is great. And I really love google trends. I’m only waiting for them to include more options in it – I just love looking at statistics, they let you see a big picture and reach conclusion without getting too much into details (which is good while doing stuff like Search Engine Optimization)
Hi Ajith,
Thanks for sharing us a very helpful technique. It’s quite impressive on how you share & present your ideas about SEO and blogging. Thanks a lot