Divine Write Copywriting Blog

I’m working on an SEO copy job for a natural therapist, at the moment. They’re doing their own keyword analysis (with a little help from me along the way). Over the weekend, they spent a lot of time thinking about and researching their keywords. Having never done any keyword analysis before, they found this process fairly confusing, and they came to me for some advice this morning. I thought I’d post their question and my answers. Hopefully someone will find the exchange useful.

Client: Using SEOBook’s Keyword Tool, we came up with a list of possible keywords:

• “Digestive system” - 3336 hits from google
• “Digestive disorders” - 74
• “Natural health” - 205
• “Step by step” - 391
• “Naturopath” – 158
• “Naturopaths” – 61
• “Natural therapy” – 30
• Specific words - ailments and conditions - got higher hits and may be included on a specific page. E.g.: Autism, ADHD, Coeliac disease, Irritable bowel.

My Response:

1. I can combine “digestive system” and “digestive disorder” into “digestive system disorders”. Google is smart enough to recognise this combination, and would index you in searches for both. (Note that all things being equal, a site that targets the exact phrase “digestive disorder” will outrank you, but all things are rarely equal! This sort of approach makes very little difference to your overall SEO presence.)
2. I wouldn’t target “step by step” at all. Not in isolation, anyway. People who search for “step by step” could be searching for anything; if you managed to rank no.1 in the world for that phrase, the vast majority of your visitors wouldn’t be interested in natural therapies at all. They’d be interested in all sorts of things. However, because we still use “step by step” in the copy naturally, you’ll be indexed in searches for “digestive system disorders step by step”, and things like that.
3. I’d recommend targeting “naturopaths” over “naturopath” (see reasoning for combinations discussed in point 1 above). You’ll notice if you search for either, there are results for all sorts of similar words, including “naturopathy” and “naturopathic”. This shows you that Google is smart enough to find relevant sites even if the word isn’t EXACTLY what the user searched for. The only time it isn’t is when the user actually includes the quotes in their search. This would happen very rarely.
4. With only 30 searches reported, “natural therapy” might not be a very good phrase to target. There is a lot of competition for it. Do a worldwide search and you’ll see there are approx 10.5 million results. That means you’d have to work quite hard to rank for it, and you’d only get a very small reward (’cos not many people are searching for it).
5. Specific conditions - I’d recommend targeting only the ones that you’re really keen to win work from. i.e. If you really want to attract a lot of the traffic that’s searching for “autism”, then by all means target it. But if it’s only incidental, I’d think twice. There would be HEAPS of competition for this word. Probably for most specific conditions. So only choose the ones you really want. You can include the others, of course, but don’t make them your primary or secondary keyword phrases. Concentrate on the phrases that will bring you the most qualified traffic.
6. A note on using targeting specific words on specific pages… Generally speaking, targeting words or phrases on one page only will be pretty ineffective. Normally you need to have a lot of content related to the keywords you’re targeting – a lot more than just one page If google sees a lot of content, it assumes there must be something useful in there.

Popularity: 1%

Just a quick post this time… I quite often find myself recommending tools or specific applications of tools for copywriting and SEO copywriting. So I thought I’d cut out the middle-man and simply publish my list and a few comments on each tool.

So here’s my list of copywriting tools and SEO copywriting tools. If you have any extras or any comments, please feel free to reply to the thread.

Popularity: 8%

One of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for search engines (SEO) is your web copy. Google and the other search engines read the words on your page to figure out what your site is about and which searches they should display it in.

But they don’t read like humans. We actually make sense of the individual words and their combinations, (phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages, page hierarchies, etc). We even take visual design and aural elements into account.
Search engines aren’t that sophisticated (even Google!). In fact, they don’t really process meaning at all; they categorize a site’s subject matter based on the words that are used most often in the body copy, headings, links, etc. The logic behind this behavior is that if a site is about widgets, the word “widgets” - and similar words - will naturally appear in these places at quite a high frequency. (That’s a little simplistic, but it’s about as much as most of us need to know about how search engines work. Their indexing algorithms involve incredibly complex maths - more than my little brain can handle! Learn more about how search engines evaluate content.)

So if you want your site to appear in the search results for “cheap glazier”, then you’d use that phrase relatively often throughout your site. This is known as ‘keyword density’. Simply put, keyword density is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount of that page. For example, if your page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase appears 5 times, its density is 5%. (Here’s an easy-to-use keyword density calculator.)

Keyword density is a particularly problematic concept, mostly because people place great emphasis on it, when, in fact, the search engines don’t measure density like that at all. So when you hear all the rules about what density you should be aiming for, always bear that in mind. Don’t start thinking that the search engines are looking for a density of 5% or 3% or 10%; they’re not. Just use density calculations as a yardstick. A density of 3% will give you a page with plenty of instances of your keyword. If you can’t get a density that high without impacting readability, settle for a lower density. The important thing is that you use your keywords more often than any other single word or phrase.

Popularity: 14%

Before you can start optimizing your web copy and meta tags, you need to know what words you’re optimizing it for. What words do you want to rank well for? To answer this question, you need to know what words your customers (or potential customers) are searching for. This is called performing a keyword analysis.

Keyword analysis involves a bit of research and a good knowledge of your business and the benefits you offer your customers.

There are several websites specifically designed to make keyword analysis easier. Two examples are:

1. Overture’s inventory tool. This tool is free and very easy to use and understand, but (last time I looked) it only tells you how many searches have been conducted in the previous month for your keyword (and similar keywords).
2. WordTracker. WordTracker is a much more powerful tool, but you have to pay to use it (you can subscribe for a day for around $10). WordTracker helps you find the most appropriate keyword for your site by telling you what people are really searching for. Here’s how it works… You type in a word which summarizes what you do, and it tells you how many times that word has been searched for in the last month. It also tells you how many other websites are using that word as a keyword (i.e. targeting the same customers you are). Based on this information, it rates the word. The ‘best’ keywords are the ones that a lot of people are searching for but which few websites are targeting. WordTracker even suggests and rates alternative related words.

TIP: When you’re using WordTracker, bear in mind that it’s just talking about numbers, and numbers don’t always tell the whole story. So don’t just jump in and use the best rated keywords; you need to consider your own situation. It may be the case that you’re forced to select a keyword phrase which is not rated particularly highly. There are two situations in which this might happen:

• You’re in a niche market with relatively few customers searching for the keyword. In this situation, you’ll probably find it relatively easy to reach the top of the rankings, but you won’t generate a huge volume of traffic when you get there. 
• A lot of your competitors are targeting your keyword (it’s hotly contested) but it’s the only one you can use. If you target it, you’ll just have to work a bit harder on your backlinks in order to rank highly. When there’s a lot of competition for a keyword, it’s likely that the traffic payoff is good once you reach top.

Popularity: 4%

Search engines don’t see websites the way you and I do. They require your site to be designed a particular way. If you don’t observe a few rules of thumb, you can severely hamper your search engine presence.

Following is a list of the main things you need to be aware of. I’m no web developer, so don’t take the below as gospel. Just discuss these things with your developer first. If you engage an experienced SEO web designer, they’ll already know all the issues (far more than are listed here).

Do’s…

1. Design your site in HTML – i.e. HTML based copy and headings and text based links at the base of each page as per existing site
2. Use static URLs
3. Use standard rollovers and/or CSS formatting for navigation menu
4. Create a robots.txt file. This file is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed.
5. Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read. These tags are as follows:
6. tells the spiders to crawl and index your entire site
7. tells the spiders not to index anything.
8. says don’t index this particular page, but follow its links to other pages (e.g. for use on secure or private pages).
9. says to index the page but not follow its links.
10. Create a 404 error handling page, and place a sitemap on the 404 page.
11. Create a text based site map containing links to every page in your site (see http://www.divinewrite.com/site.htm for an example).
12. Create a Google Sitemap (Read an overview of Google Sitemaps and download a great tool for generating Google Sitemaps)

Don’ts…

1. Don’t embed your copy within a graphic (the search engines won’t be able to read it)
2. Don’t use frames (this is a contentious one - some people use frames quite effectively)
3. Don’t use internal JavaScript or Flash (ditto)
4. Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter if you want maximal Googlebot crawlage (many sites use “&id=” with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter)

Hope this helps.

Popularity: 2%