It was the
Best of Terms. It was the Worst of Terms.
A Story of
Keyword Search
Is it better to
optimize your web site for a more general term that gets
searched for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times per
week or for a more specific term that will get searched for
considerably less frequently?
The correct
answer to that question lies somewhere in the middle. But first
let’s take a look at the two extremes. After all, this is a
tale of two search terms.
We’ll take a look
at the subject of real estate. A real estate broker in the Los
Angeles area of Southern California wants to have the pages of
his or her website optimized to raise rankings in Yahoo, Google
and MSN natural listings. One could automatically think the
best term would be “los angeles real estate”. First, let’s do a
little research:
The search phrase
“los angeles real estate” gets searched for 69 times per day
which is close to 500 times per week. Not bad. However, now
let’s take a look at how many webpages in the Google database
contain that exact search phrase – 2,040,000 – over two million
that’s a lot of competition. Even if you use the Google
operator “allintitle” to see how many of them have that term in
the title of the page by typing into the Google search bar:
allintitle:los angeles real estate, you still come up with
203,000 pages. Still a lot of competition, especially when you
think that your page will have to have better optimization,
content and links than 197,000 other web pages in order to rank
somewhere on the first page of results.
If you have the
budget you’re probably better off turning to pay per click to
get listed on the first page for that term.
The keyword or
search phrase you pick can also fall under the category of being
too specific or niche’. It is completely pointless to optimize
your website for a term for which nobody ever searches. Here
we can try the search tern “new foreclosures in los angeles”.
According to the Word Tracker website this term gets searched
for less than once per day. Google search results show 622 web
pages containing this search phrase. AllinTitle shows up on 76
pages. This would be extremely exciting if it weren’t for the
fact that pretty much nobody searches for it. So, it’s
obviously too specific, too niche’.
When it comes to
the effort involved in optimizing a page for ranking well in the
natural search engine results choosing a term for which nobody
searches is a waste of time and effort. If you’re paying an
optimizing company to do this work for you it’s also a big waste
of money.
In pay per click
advertising this doesn’t create any real problem. If no one
searches and no one clicks you don’t get charged. It can’t
really even hurt your click through rate (CTR) since no
impressions have occurred. (Take a look at the definition of
CTR for more information.)
As you can see
from the above to find the right terms you need to know certain
information. And it’s important to remember since each page of
your website has the chance of ranking well in its own right you
do not need to choose only one term. But do try to select the
best one for your home page.
* Here are
the things you should look for when selecting the best terms for
which to optimize your site:
* How many
searches does that term get in a specified period of time?
* How many
other pages are found when typing that phrase into Yahoo, Google
or MSN? (It’s interesting to see the differences between
the three)
* How many pages for AllinTitle?
* What does
your competition look like? If many of the sites that come up
are huge, well established, gov or edu sites it’s probably
best to look for a different term.
* Look for
a competitor who is about the same size or a little larger than
your company and find out what search phrases they are
ranking for and which one’s they are paying for. You can do
this with a good competitor analysis.
Follow these suggestions and, to totally
destroy poor Charles Dickens, you can then say to yourself,
"It is a far better
optimization I do now than I have ever done before;
it is a far, far better ranking I go to than I have ever known...."
Meridith Berk
Content Writer
UltimateSitePromotion.com
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