Hospitalera's Blog » SEO SMO SERP

Keyword Strategy Tips 4 – Tracking Web 2.0 Articles

hospitalera — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:06:15 +0000

Click image to try it out yourself

I am actually not obsessing about rankings anymore, I am more obsessed about traffic With Google personalizing search results more and more, the first page of Google, as we knew it, could be soon a thing of the past. But sometimes, when I try out something new, I want to see some yummy data to get a better impression on how things are going and what is work or not working. And as I also just ‘talked’ somebody through the whole process ,via email, I thought that it would be a good idea for a blog post! Never waste content you have already half written

Until now I have used Market Samurai to do this, but it is not displaying rankings as we know it anymore. If you haven’t an idea about what has happened, have a look at their last two blog posts >here< and >here<. Don’t get me wrong, >Market Samurai< is still a great tool for evaluating competition etc, but their ranking feature is seriously broken, so what to do?

Tracking Web 2.0 properties with Keyword Strategy

If you want to track the rankings of articles you have on a Web 2.0 site like >Wizzley<, where you can’t change / add code easily, many keyword tools will not work properly. I show you how I use Keyword Strategy to do exactly this, plus the pro’s and con’s of doing so. If you don’t have articles on sites you don’t own, this will not be of interest to you, you might be better off writing more content for your own sites than reading my long-winded blog post Have a great day! Still there? OK, here we go finally!

What you need to do or try this out:

A full, or trial, version of Keyword Strategy with one free project. >Discrete Affi Link for your convenience<
The keyword and url pairs of the articles you want to track.

Caveat! Whilst you can track multiple domains in one project, you can’t assign the same keyword to more than one url. But yes, you can assign more than one keyword to the same url. Does that make sense?In other words:

You can assign many keywords to one URL, in fact, that’s the heart of the whole process, but you can’t do the opposite. So you can’t track many URLs for the same keyword.

Step by Step Instruction

Set up a new project and name it something descriptive, for example web2sites.com or something similar.
Set language and location as needed.
Un-hook the two import filters completely, if you want to use the tool later to find new keywords, you can change this easily.
Don’t bother to connect with Webmaster tools, Analytics or similar, not needed in this case.
Import your list of keywords as a text (.txt) or .csv file.
Tag as needed, for example with the name of each third party site, makes things more clear when you check your rankings.
Assign urls (copy and paste them from your browser window is easiest) to keywords.
Sit back and see keywords updating and the rankings appearing.
Done! Wasn’t that difficult, was it?

OK, here the pro’s and con’s of using Keyword Strategy to track articles on sites you don’t own

Pro’s

I already have the tool, so setting up a ranking project didn’t involve any additional costs for me.
Pretty accurate rankings when compared / spot checked with Scroogle.org.
Works as well for English web sites as for web sites in other languages. That is important for me!
Browser based and therefore platform independent, meaning it works on a Mac as well as on a Windows machine or any other geeky OS you are running
Google compliant, as it uses their official API, meaning your IP doesn’t get banned by Google. That is as long as you use the ‘tracker option’, as the browser extension scrapes Google, and it’s not something you should do. That’s why you want to switch everything over to the tracker-based ranking. That’s completely passive and Google compliant.
Fast, updates a few hundred keywords per hour and than keeps checking in real time when using the ‘tracker option’, meaning the rankings are checked with each visitor.

Con’s

Price – This might be prohibitive for those that are not already subscribers, as it is a monthly subscription starting at $29 / month. For this you get space for two projects, one would / should be your main website and one your ranking project for any other websites you have content on.
Unfortunately there is no way yet to import keyword-url pairs directly, that would be a great feature for those that are switching tools. Fraser, are you listening?
The tool determines when the ranking is checked, normally once a month when using the browser extension, or in “real time” using the tracker option. You can’t do a ‘forced rank check’ NOW when the fancy to know if your article went up or down the SERPentines in the last 30 nano seconds tickles you

Summary

So far, Keyword Strategy does the trick for me by keeping track of my articles on third party websites. The initial set-up is a bit of a pain in the back side if you have many articles, but then it works like a charm. If you want to do also further keyword research for the same project, it pays out to connect your Google accounts with it, but if you only want to track keyword and url pairs, the set-up here described is simple and effective, no need to get more complicated.

If you are still looking for a way to track your rankings and are not convinced of my method, have a look at Lis’s latest blog post entitled >Market Samurai – Rank Tracker Alternative< and see if you find there something that suits you better

And, as always, if you have a question, suggestion or simply want to say ‘Hi!’, feel free to leave a comment … For more tips on how to get the most out of Keyword Strategy, have a look here, all articles I have written so far in one handy list >Keyword Strategy Tips<.

Long Tail Keywords – Can you find them with Keyword Strategy?

hospitalera — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:10:17 +0000

Lis published a few days ago an article with the catchy title >Right Keywords + Right Platform = Cash!<, where she advocated to use another, additional, tool to Keyword Strategy in order to find long tail keywords, that is keyword phrases that are longer than three words. I disagreed, we do disagree often by the way, but we are still friends, at least I hope so

I have no clue about Myanmar, but I do know a lot about Prague - and how to use the Keyword Strategy Tool

So I offered a proof, and run into a major problem, her seed keywords were ‘Myanmar Travel‘ and I have no idea about the locations and geography of that part of the world. I simply didn’t know if a certain exotic name is that of a town in Myanmar or that of a beach in Thailand. Anyway, I found some nice keyword phrases and send them to her, but I decided to also make a blog post out of the whole exercise

Still there? Might be time to get yourself something to drink, I take a cappuccino please, thank you kindly, this will be a long article – again!

What are these elusive long tail keywords or keyword phrases everybody is hacking on about? And why do you need them to make money online?

Two main reasons really, they are really easy to rank for and they show you exactly what the searcher, the guy or gal that typed them into Google’s search box, is exactly after.

For the ranking part you only need a site with a bit of authority, either your own one or you can use something like Wizzley like Lis does in this case. The reason that these phrases are so easy to rank for is, that there is typically not a lot of competition for them, but often a highish search volume as people tend to ask always the same questions. Oh, and yes, a long tail is roughly any keyword phrase that is three words or longer, the longer the better

As for the second part, if you analyze the search query, you get an idea what the searcher might want to buy next – perhaps a nice travel guide? A map? Book a flight? And don’t forget about the Google ads, some of these have a rather good CPC as they are pretty targeted.

How to get them with Keyword Strategy – An Example

So, now let’s get real, fire up Keyword Strategy or sign up for a free trial >here< (Note: Only sign up only if you are really going to use it, otherwise you are wasting your time, their bandwidth and you are messing up my affiliate stats )

As I am clueless about south east asian locations, I used a location I know a lot about – Prague, where I live, to do this.

Set up a project with whatever pseudo domain name you fancy, I used prague.com and no, I don’t own that domain (I wish!). It is simply a necessary workaround to use the tool for keyword research before you have a domain and / or for web 2.0 properties like Wizzley.

I set the minimum search volume to 100 and made sure that the language was set to English (I use the tool also to research keywords for my German websites, so I do have to check this, if not results would become a bit weird) and the location to ‘global’. That is all I had to do as a set-up.

Seed Keywords – You Have to Start Somewhere

My first seed keyword was simply ‘Prague’. To get my first few hundreds of keywords, I clicked the ‘Get Keywords’ button in the left bottom corner of the screen, typed in ‘Prague’, again made sure that the language was set to ‘English’ and clicked ‘Get Keywords’.

Now comes the important part, you need to blacklist all the keywords that aren’t a good fit for your project! As we are here after long tails, I simply put {1,2} in the top left box of the window that pops up, also known as the keyword suggestion box, selected them all and blacklisted them.

By doing so I eliminated all one and two word keyword phrases, leaving me with only those that are three words or longer. Aggressive black listing is the key to handle what Lis described as the ‘noise’ of Keyword Strategy

As Prague is also a town, or more?, in the US and elsewhere outside the Czech Republic, I had a few of those around and again blacklisted them.

Equally I blacklisted everything that didn’t have much to do with Prague + travel, like things related to history and politics.

This way you ‘teach’ the keyword tool what you are after and it will not present you with these keywords again in that project.

A good useful filter in Keyword Strategy is also !, like in !Prague. This way you can see all keyword phrases that do NOT contain your main keyword. Normally a much shorter list to go through which saves time.

After I did all this, I imported the ‘keepers’ into the tool. Keepers meaning keyword phrases that were at least three words long and were a good fit for my ‘Prague travel’ topic.

Plus I deleted all keyword phrases that contained wiki or other website names like tripadvisor in them. People who type that in want to go to Wikipedia or Tripadvisor and Google knows that.

I equally blacklisted all misspellings and alternative names, leaving me with 600+ keywords that I imported into the tool.

I repeated that step several times with different seed keywords like ‘Prague Travel’, ‘Prague Visa’ and ‘Prague Hotel’, ‘Prague Prices’, ‘Prague Taxi’ plus a few more and did the same. Now I had a nice long list of hundreds of keywords. Then I went out to the pub with my better half and left the poor tool ~~slaving through~~ analyzing them.

When we came back I deleted everything with a competition >500,000 and that left me with a good clean keyword list of 500+ keywords.

Here my steps as a Summary

Brainstorm seed keywords.

Use {1,2} to find those that are too short and delete them.
Use !keyword to find those that don’t contain your main keyword and delete as appropriate.
Delete all that contain ‘wiki’ or similar in them.
Delete misspellings and alternative names etc.
Optional: tag before importing to make writing articles easier later on.
Import keepers into the tool.
Delete keywords whose competition is too high and whose search volume is too low for your taste.
Rinse and repeat.

Additional Tips

Instead of brainstorming keywords, you can now take them directly from the generated list. Simply check the one you want to use, click ‘Get Keywords’ and magic, magic, it becomes your new seed keyword.

You can use also the urls of the top ten results in Google for a keyword. Simply copy and paste the url into the ‘Get Keywords’ thingie and that web page will be searched by the tool for keywords.

I did this for a while and in the end I was left with a list of relevant, low competition long tail keywords that looks like this:

396 keyword phrases of 3 words
85 keyword phrases of 4 words
61 keyword phrases of 5 words
9 keyword phrases of 6 words
2 keyword phrases of 7 words

All with a search volume >100 per month and less then 500,000 competing articles online. The screenshot below shows the best ones I have found in terms of volume/competition index and yes, they are blurred out, because now I am off to write some of these articles.

My results after a few minutes of work and a bit longer of waiting

And yes, I could easily spend some more time with repeat and rinse, blacklist the short ones even more aggressively and find even more and longer ones, but for the moment I have enough keywords to write about for a few months.

Remember, only the articles you actually publish will make you money, research is only the first step. Keyword and topic research are great things, but they will not make you any money if you don’t hit the ‘publish’ button sooner rather then later

Keyword Strategy Case Study 2 Reindexed ;-)

hospitalera — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:26:22 +0000

Just in time, with the beginning of the New Year, my case study site has been re-indexed by Google If you haven’t a clue what I am taking about, you might want to have a quick look at my previous article >Keyword Strategy Case Study 1 – My Set-Up <. Here is what I have done, what I haven’t done plus a short status update.

Niche / Topic: Theology
Published Articles: 4
Indexed Articles: 5 (see below)
Rankings: highest 37, lowest 290 in Google
PR: 0 (from PR-)
Back Links built: 0
Visitors: 0
Income: 0 (No ads etc as of yet)

Follow the Keyword Strategy Case Study! Click image to see all posts already published in this category!

The Problems

The site had fallen out of the index due to the fact that there was barely any content on it and with barely I mean <100 words of ‘about what this site will be about one day blablabla’. So there was no reason at all for Google to put it in the index, why should be there?
I also noticed that there were some ‘residues’ of sitemaps and sitemap plugins I had used in the past and that I am not using anymore.

The Solutions

First I published keyword focused content in form of one post and three pages with background information on the subject.
Next I took care of the old sitemaps by deleting them (the plugins in my dashboard and, for good measure, the sitemaps themselves in my cpanel).

Big word of warning here! Only do this either with a new site or a site that is so messed up (read nothing is indexed) that you have no other choice! Never do this to a site that is indexed and working well!

And finally I reinstalled a sitemap plugin, let it create the new sitemap and re-submitted that one to Google in webmaster tools. Eh voilá!, less than a week later my site was fully indexed again!

And for the very clever math geeks out there that wonder how 1 post and 3 pages can result in 5 urls indexed … The site is so set up that the latest article appears on the front page, so that makes for one more url in the index, at least in Google’s logic

What I didn’t do

I didn’t build any back links of any sort as this Keyword Strategy Case Study is about to show how you can get traffic to a site and convert this traffic in online income by solely publishing keyword focused content that is actually useful for somebody that searches for >keyword< or >keyword phrase<.

Summary

To get this site back into Google’s index the only thing I had to do was to add more content and to make sure that the sitemap was working correctly, nothing else

The next step is now to simply publish more keyword focused content that is actually interesting and useful for readers. If you want to know how I chose my keywords and how I go about writing my articles, have a look here >How to Write a Blog Post<

Next post will appear, most likely, when the first search engine visitors appear or if I run into a major problem / do something really silly and mess things up royally. Has been known to happen