EzSEO Newsletter # 92
September 11, 2005 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 92
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part IV
2. Other Stuff
Hi again.
In the mini-series this week we start looking at how to organise, filter and group your keywords. This process is time-consuming, but doing it properly creates a detailed blueprint of your intended site.
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1. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part IV
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If you have been following this course so far, you will have:
a) identified your niche and checked for profitability
b) carried out your keyword research at Wordtracker.
c) sent yourself your keyword research from Wordtracker.
Today, we are going to start work on the keyword list.
How many keywords do you have in your list?
For any new site I build, I try to find at least 1000 phrases I can use. If you don’t have anywhere near that, you might like to go back to Wordtracker and do a little more (unless your have found a very small niche).
Note: Just because I find 1000+ phrases, does not mean I will create 1000+ pages. These phrases are used in groups, to “theme” the webpages.
So, which keywords should you target?
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In order for your pages to be found at the search engines, they needs to rank well (top 10) for the actual phrases that people are typing in when they are searching. That is why you used Wordtracker last week to find out what people are typing into the search engines.
The best keywords to use to build your site, are those that are searched for a lot at the search engines (high demand), but have not been targeted by many other webmasters so have relatively few competing pages in the search engines (low supply).
NOTE: Finding out how many competing pages a phrase has is simple. Go to Google, type in the phrase (in quotes), and see how many web pages are returned. For those that are about to email me asking why I use quotes, read newsletter #88.
Fortunately you don’t need to do this for all your phrases, as Wordtracker calculated this for you.
It would be great if we could find keyword phrases that were searched for 1000+ times a day and had no competing pages in Google. Unfortunately the sad truth is that any keyword phrase that has 1000 searches a day, will already have been found, and targeted by hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of other webmasters.
In general, the more a phrase is searched for, the more competing pages it has in the search engines. No amount of on-page optimization (the words on your webpage) is going to get you a top 10 position in Google for a very competitive phrase. As you will find out later in this course, off-page factors are more important, and these take more work from you.
Bearing in mind that high demand phrases are going to be very difficult to rank well for in the search engines, we need a strategy that allows us to get traffic to our “high demand” pages without having to rank well for those phrases.
The strategy I like to use is this:
1. Write articles, each targeting several low competition, highly-related phrases. These “themed” pages often rank well for multiple low-competition phrases.
2. Create main pages that pre-sell affiliate products. There can be one or more main pages, depending on the niche. These main pages usually target very high competition phrases because of the nature of these pages (more details later). It is difficult to rank well initially for phrases targeted on the main pages.
3. Funnel the traffic from the articles, to the main pages, where we have a chance of getting an affiliate sale.
Using this strategy, we get visitors to our main pages, without having to rank well in the search engines for the phrases the main pages target.
As time goes by, and you add more pages to your site, and work on the off-page factors, your main pages will climb in the rankings, and eventually rank well themselves, giving your site a massive traffic boost.
How to group you keywords
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The strategy highlighted above talks about two types of pages, articles and main pages. There is actaully a third type of page – the homepage.
These three types of page have very different functions:
a) articles – get traffic
b) main pages – sell affiliate products
c) homepage – to help your visitors find what they want on your site.
Let’s look at some real data, so I can better explain the differences in keyword choice for these types of pages.
My keyword research was carried out on “golf clubs”, and I found 1815 phrases at Wordtracker related to this niche.
There are various ways you could approach this site, but I think a good strategy would be to have main pages that target the popular manufacturers of golf clubs.
The articles could then be reviews of different golf clubs, help and tips on choosing golf clubs, even golfing tips would be relevant.
Let’s consider the main pages first.
For all of my keyword sorting, filtering, grouping and selecting, I will be using Keyword Results Analyzer (KRA).
***************** A Note about KRA ***********************
Wordtracker emails are quite difficult to handle unless you are a spreadsheet wizard.
I developed Keyword Results Analyzer to help. This tool will import your Wordtracker email and make it very easy to sort, filter and group your keywords, plus it does most of the work of grouping phrases for you.
I know I developed it, and I know I make money when someone buys it, so you have every right to think I am stringing you a line just to get a sale, but…
Keyword Results Analyzer is the most used tool in my SEO toolkit and that of many SEO professionals.
I think you will quickly see why as we work with our keyword list in the next few weeks.
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After importing my Golf Club Wordtracker email, KRA displays a list of all phrases and their corresponding data.
The technique I use to find the main pages is simple. Sort the phrases according to Count, with highest count at the top. 99.9% of the time, this allows you to quickly map out the main pages of your site.
Once you have ordered your keywords by count, go down the list, and select several phrases that “encompass” your niche.
In my example, I am looking for makes of golf clubs.
The 7th most searched for phrase is:
“golf club reviews” with 138 searches a day at Google. While it is not the make of a golf club (therefore not suitable as a main page of my site), it would make an excellent phrase to target for my homepage considering the types of articles I discussed writing earlier.
Here are the top makes that people are actually searching for (data is number of searches at Google every day, and competing pages):
125 153000 callaway golf clubs
92 43800 ping golf clubs
49 43600 cleveland golf clubs
39 22500 nike golf clubs
39 17700 cobra golf clubs
37 54800 adams golf clubs
33 32200 mizuno golf clubs
33 61400 wilson golf clubs
As you can see, these phrases have high competition. This backs up the point I made earlier that the phrases targeted by main pages usually have high competition because of their nature.
Trying to compete for any of these terms is going to involve a lot of off-page optimization (months of work). That is the reason our strategy uses lower competition phrases in articles, to drive traffic to these pages.
We have easily identified the main pages of our Golf Club site. What we need to do next, is to write the main pages, pre-selling our visitors to loosen their wallets. However, to complicate things further, we need to theme each page so that the search engines are left in no doubt about the topic of our page. This themeing will help your page get found for a variety of phrases related to the main phrase.
Sounds complicated, doesn’t it?
In the coming weeks…
Themeing pages, and how KRA can do most of the work for you.
How to write pre-sell.
Selecting and grouping phrases for articles.
How to link the various types of pages into a well optimized site.
And much more.
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2. Other Stuff
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September Niche Blueprint #1 was released during the week. I am calling it #1 instead of the usual secret or revealed, because now, all blueprints will be secret. While this is likely to lose me some customers, I feel that the secret blueprints better protect those who buy them. There will be a #2 this month, but there are still a few copies of #1 left if anyone wants one.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.
Have a great week!
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