Throughout the next few days I’m going to try to summarise and cover off the key points raised at this years SMX advanced. First session is “Keyword Research Artistry”. I must warn you, last night was a blast and I’m still feeling a little jetlagged, so please forgive any typos!
Keyword Research artistry
I walked into the session a little late, but I think I managed to get a great snapshot of the first presentation. Christine Churchill gave a great summary of some useful tools such as:
According to the meta description, Tweetvolume is a “Wowza Made Twitter Buzz Tool”. It allows you to monitor the level of mentions of a keyterm in Twitter. It sure makes a pretty screenshot – bookmark the link for some great presentation fodder!
Christine also suggested Viswiki and finding Wikipedia statistices using Wikirank.
Finally, Christine suggested using the related searches functionality in Google search to extend your keyword list. Use the keywords gathered in the results in conjunction with Google Keyword Tool to get the search volumes available for each term:
Gab Goldenberg gave us a nice case study example by showing a picture of a red Ducati motorbikeand asked the audience to discuss (amongst ourselves) all of the different keyphrases we would use to describe it. A very thoughtful way of engaging the audience at such an early hour. Nice touch, Gab.
Amongst some excellent advice, Gab told us to use SEOmoz’s term extractor tool to gather all of the words a page is optimised for. He mentioned that if you were being really sneaky you could scrape that tool (and auto submit to it) to gather a lot of data.
We also got a tip on using competitor sites for top searches data / most popular searches data. Some companies give away free keyword research by presenting their most popular products and searches on their homepage. Grab those lists and generate long tail and related keywords from them. Nice tip, Gab! also, crawl your SEO savvy competitor site maps to get a nicely arranged list of keywords by category.
Taylor Pratt from nFusion gave us some excellent tips on his approach to keyword research, most notably mentioning the different ways to gather research and insight into how people are searching and what language they use. One of my favourite tips was set up a question in Yahoo Answers and watch the language used in the replies. Asking a question in Linked in is also a solid way to approach this. Once you’ve got all of your replies (or enough at least) – take the language used and convert it into keyword lists. Nice.
Search Engine Land have very recently published a keyword research how to guide, which got a mention in the session. Definitely check it out! shaun Ryan expertly writes:
While SEO is a part of our daily lives, the process of digging into keyword research hasn’t gotten any easier. Yet, as we know, keyword research is critical to any SEO effort. While you may find the process of uncovering and selecting the most appropriate keywords for optimizing your site to be fairly painstaking, it doesn’t have to be. Using information from your site’s search box can save you time and provide additional keywords for consideration.
Hey Rich,
Thanks for the coverage and link dude! Just to clarify, I meant that the scraper would do what Term Extractor does, but on a large scale. I didn’t mean that you should scrape SEOmoz’s tool.
Excellent coverage – very informative stuff when developing a keyword analysis
It’s interesting to know approach people for what language they use is by using social network.