Last week, our mojo-gushing link builder wrote ‘Always Be Reading’: the Link Builder’s Mantra. Funny thing is, we all have this mantra at the office. So, what have we been doing this week (and every week)? Reading, of course. (Oh, and we did some work, too.) Here’s what we gave five stars this week…
Despite erudite analysts who claim that SEO and Elvis are dead, killing the impact of keywords on rankings is pretty tough to do. However, rankings are only part of the bigger keyword and SEO picture (which, of course, doesn’t include Elvis).
In my recent Search Engine Land column, The Keyword Researcher’s Guide To Creating Competitive & Compelling Content, I discuss four things you need to know that keyword research will help you better understand, including:
If reading my inimitable words of wisdom gets you All Shook Up, please Don’t Be Cruel. Fast-paced web marketing often demands an It’s Now or Never mentality. In vying for keywords and customers, you should be Playing for Keeps. (Thanks, Elvis.)
At Pole Position Marketing, we’re one heck of a smart team. Some of it’s just natural ability. The rest is because we read smart stuff written by other smart people in our industry. Enjoy what we thought was the best of the best this week.
There are many angles and avenues for researching keywords for your online marketing efforts. Some people focus on numbers such as search volume or keyword competition. Others might focus on the tools you use to dig up obscure keywords to target. While these may be good keyword metrics to consider, focusing on the keywords themselves should be the most important focus.
You can optimize difficult or easy keywords and high or low search volume phrases, and each will help you reach different levels of success. But choose the wrong keywords and you’ll see your marketing campaigns go a whopping nowhere!
Are you afraid that you’re missing out on an important event? Concerned that you won’t know what’s being discussed around the water cooler tomorrow? Worried that something is happening in the world right now that you don’t know anything about? Worried that you’re missing out on some very lucrative keyword opportunities?
Worry no more!
Here is a list of 10 tools that will help you stay in the know – from hot keywords that searchers are using on Google to what’s trending on Twitter or Facebook to what’s going viral on YouTube this very moment. These tools will help you stay informed (and potentially fill you with useless information) day by day and even minute by minute. Never get left in the dark again!
Website rankings dead last? Not getting the website results your business needs? It’s time to get back in the race! Sign up for Pole Position Marketing’s Search Ranking Crash Course, a one-day Web marketing seminar built for speed, intensity and souped-up search engine rankings.
The event, which will include four separate sessions that can be purchased individually or as a full-day package (discount!), will be held:
Friday, April 27
8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Gateway Event & Conference Center
North Canton, Ohio
Engaging in proper site SEO isn’t about pulling out a checklist that you can run through in a month, check them all off and say all done! A good optimization strategy consists of a variety of moving parts. Check one issue off your task list today and two more problems show up on your radar. Good SEO is kind of like an engine: There are many working parts, any of which can (and should) be improved, repaired or replaced to boost your vehicle’s performance. The more your engine is used, the more work there is to do to keep the engine in top shape.
With that said, there are some basic components of every SEO campaign (not to mention a really big checklist) that form the foundation of a successful campaign. Anyone who’s been around SEO for any length of time already knows these “basics,” but they bear repeating for anyone who is unfamiliar as to where to begin with their SEO effort:
If you’ve been to any kind of social media seminar lately, you may have heard that making videos is the next Big Thing in online marketing. Depending on your industry and your business goals, that may or may not be true for you. Of course, if you’re even the tiniest bit familiar with online marketing, you know that making videos does not guarantee that anyone will watch or share them. The competition is brutal. On YouTube alone, people upload more than 48 hours of video every minute and watch over three billion videos every day.
So, without a plan for how to create and optimize your video content, you may end up a Sisyphus. (Just saying that word makes me giggle like a junior high girl.) In Greek mythology, Sisyphus pushes a gigantic boulder up a hill every day only to watch it roll back down again. Every day. For eternity. That’s a rough gig.
Keyword research is important to online marketing efforts. But even more important than that is the keywords you select for your SEO and PPC efforts. Of course, you cannot select what you have not researched, but finding keywords generally isn’t the problem. There are tons of keyword tools available that will help you do that.
The question is, what do you do with your keyword lists once you’ve compiled them?
Just as there is no shortage of good keyword tools, there is also no shortage of metrics that you can use to determine the value of any given keyword. A few that tend to top our keyword selections lists are:
Keyword research is an important part of the optimization process. There are thousands of ways, tools and resources to do keyword research. Every SEO has their own methodology, favorite data and ways to organize and sort through that data in order to create solid keyword lists for their SEO campaigns.
But there is more to keyword research than just the research. You have to be able organize and sort your keywords into groups that will allow you to optimize them most effectively into your website.
This post will walk you through the organizational side of the keyword research process, using a customized keyword research spreadsheet I have created to make the process easy. You still have to do the research, but this tool helps us create keyword lists for on-page optimization.
Let’s get to it.
