How SEO'ers figure out what search terms to buy was the topic of an email exchange with FindMeFaster CEO Matt Van Wagner. I often go to Matt with SEM and SEO questions. My interest grew out of the series of posts culminating in Search Engine Keyword Strategies and Tools - Knowing what keywords your audience will use in a search.
As always, Matt's comments are in regular text, my responses in italics..
Enjoy.
Very interesting.I think that SEO'ers try to figure out which search terms bring lots of traffic and which are somewhat related what the site promotes. It's generally a pretty gross cut at 'optimization.' After data accumulates, they then refine for the traffic that converts to sales.
Yes, your description of SEO'ers at work fits with what I've learned.
I am curious to know how any tool could predict what words/pages appear above the fold in a SERP. There are so many factors that the search engines use to determine what pages to present and in what order... this can't be an easy thing to do.
The tool (really just applied math at this point. There's no interface yet) doesn't predict what will appear anywhere. It can determine what terms sincerely interested/motivated buyers are thinking when they do a search. Because these terms can be very specific (see Search Engine Keyword Strategies and Tools - Knowing what keywords your audience will use in a search if I didn't send it to you earlier) and because these keyword phrases aren't used by the masses, people searching using these terms go exactly to what they're looking for (as opposed to going to something close then winnowing through pages to get close to if not exactly what they want).
Hence it's not that the tool predicts what will appear above the fold, only that it predicts keyword phrases that dedicated and motivated people would think to use and that are not commonly used. Because the keyword phrase isn't popularly used the results of the search are highly targeted and are fewer in number, hence the top scorer (the client) is 90% of the time above the fold (on my computer).
Is it an easy thing to do? Seems to be. Then again (and you know me), I'm always coming at things from weird directions.
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Links for this post:
- SEO blog posts, part 1
- SEO blog posts, part 2
- Search blog posts
- Searching for Search blog posts
- Know How Someone Is Thinking in 10 Seconds or Less Half-day training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 13 June 08
- International Communication Association's Communicating for Social Impact, the 58th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association at Le Centre Sheraton Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 22-26, 2008
- SUNY Marketing Professionals Conference at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, 11-13 June 08
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For keywords research you should try SeoDigger.com.
What it does is it accepts a url from the user and it shows the keywords for which that site ranks within the top 20 Google search results.You can sneak on your competitors blog or site and find out what keywords it ranks for highly in Google.Obviously you can also check whether your site’s keyword rank within the Google top 20.
Posted by: G.Suvorov | May 13, 2008 9:38 AM | Permalink to Comment