Yet Another SEO : SEO Concepts and Tools

This is fourth part in the series of my SEO Hubs. Here I will discussion only about those concepts and tools that is necessary so far my SEO series is concerned. There could be innumerable concepts and tools to discuss about but what I discuss here will simply be those concepts and tools that has been spoken about in my previous Hubs of this series and needs explanation.

Page Rank: It is all about earning a good page rank and maintaining it high. But the question is, what exactly is page rank? Simple, it is a rank given by Google search engine to all the pages it has indexed so far. Google search engine uses page rank of a page to decide at what position the page should be placed in the SERPs (seach engine result page). So it is clear that page rank forms the basis of Google search result position (which we are all fighting for!). However, this rank follows opposite sequence unlike the usual norm. Page rank of 1 is considered lowest and 10 is highest.

Now the million dollar question, how is page rank calculated? Google has not and will never reveal this calculation; webmasters around the world have been doing various research and experiments to find the secrete. What I present here is the best explanation that I have come across. Here it is;

The formula to calculate page rank is:

0.15 – It is actually the least page rank that a page can have. To us it is shown as 1 for our convenience.
0.85 – It is a damping factor. Consider it to be just a number that is included here for some mathematical reason.

Remember I had told you before in Off Page Optimization the value of a page linking to you will go on decreasing with the increase of number of links on that page. I guess it is clear now.
Now let me show you actual example. Consider the follow scenario where each of the pages A, B and C has initial rank 1. None of them contain any link.

Now let us see how the rank changes if page B is linked by page A.
Page rank of A = 0.15 + (0.85 * 0) = 0.15
Page rank of B = 0.15 + (0.85 * 1) = 1
Page rank of C = 0.15 + (0.85 * 0) = 0.15

The above calculation is done by search engine hundred and thousand times (depending on number of pages it is linked to) before it finally finds out the page rank of any page. Mind you, there are billions of pages!

Page rank tools: I have spoken at a number of places about the page rank for example it is very important to know the page rank of the page you are giving your link to and going by the discussion of previous topic you will be think that you have to do that rigorous calculation on your own. Relax; there are huge numbers of tools available that will work for you.

One handy tool that I use is firefox addon, a Google toolbarthat shows me the rank of each page that I browse. You can download it from http://toolbar.google.com. Put your mouse pointer over the tool after the page whose rank you wanna know gets loaded in your firefox browser and you will be shown the rank of the page as a tooltip.

But if you don’t want to use this tool then you have option to from a huge list of online tools. I could have given you huge list of such online tools but this is a very minor things and most of these online tools do not remain on net forever. Therefore, instead of suggesting you some URL that may not exist tomorrow I would rather suggest that you do a simple search using keywords “find page rank” and use any of the tools that come up in the search result.

Keyword Research: Keyword research forms the core of total SEO techniques. It is keywords that you distribute all over the place and it is this that is read by search engines to rank your site or page. Hence, keyword research should be done very carefully and ample amount of time should be give to it.

Google external keyword tool: I use Google keyword tool for my keyword research mainly because it is free like most of Google products, it presents a vast list of keywords to research on and the data it gives are reliable. I will just tell you how I do my search so that you too get an idea of the same and proceed ahead.

• First go to the site https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Remember I told you in the first part of this SEO series (On Page Optimization) that you should make a list of main words that you think is important? Put those words/phrase in the text area provided. Make sure to check the check-box “Use synonyms”, this will make sure to return potential keywords that are synonyms to the words you enter.
  
  You can also specify words that you are sure not to use as keywords in the section “Filter my results”. To see the result click on the button “Get keyword ideas”. The result will contain all keywords that matched the list of words (and it synonyms) that you specified in the text area above removing those that you mention in “Filter my results”.

• On the result page as shown below choose those words that have more “Approx Avg Search Volume” but has less “Advertiser Competition”. Less advertiser competition means less number of pages is using that keyword and hence, if we use that keyword then the chance of our page come up in SERPs is more. More volume means more number of people are doing search using that keyword hence, if we use that keyword the traffic to our page will be more.
  
  If you are using Google Adsense then keep a close eye on “Estimated Avg. CPC” too. Higher the value more will be the amount you get for each click on the Adsense ads if you use that keyword. Cool isn’t it? But it is not so easy because of three reasons. One, you will be shown hundreds or even thousand keywords and you have to make your choice from there. Two, not all keywords shown here will be relevant to your site. Three, almost everyone is using this tool! That is why I said, “You have to give keyword research a good amount of time”.

• Apart from the above list of related keywords, we are also presented with a list of keywords that did not exactly match the keywords you gave but could be considered. This list lies below the list shown above. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see it. I never felt the need to use keywords from this list but that does not mean you too will feel the same! Here is a snap shot;

• Let us go back to the beginning of the page where we entered our list of keywords in the text area. On the right of the text area you will see two radio buttons “Descriptive words or phrases” (this is what we have already used now) and “Website content”. Look at the snap shot of the the page below.
  
  Select the radio button “Website Content”. This will give you an option to enter the URL of an existing site. Make sure to check the check-box “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” so that other pages of your site are also taken into consideration or if you want then you can go each page at a time. Going one page at a time is good in the sense that you will know which page you are doing keyword research for but it could be hectic.

• The result returned here will contain those keywords that matched with the keywords used on the page that you have mentioned above (and the pages linked to it). The keywords list will be grouped based on the keywords used on your pages. Have a look at the snap shot below.
  
  Here too the same rule applies more “Approx Avg Search Volume” but less “Advertiser Competition” with an eye on “Estimated Avg. CPC”!
  
  This option should be used to update the keywords of the site from time to time. Keywords used by search engine users are not always the same for the searching the same stuff over a period of time. You have keep updating your site. When I say update your keywords, it doesn’t mean blindly replace all your present keywords with the new one. The whole content of the page will change. Remember, the keywords should be used in the normal flow of the content and it should normal to the visitors of your site!
  
  Honestly speaking I never felt the need to use any other tool. This proved very sufficient for my needs and I am sure it will prove sufficient for most of you here.

Google trends: This Google tool gives you an idea of the top 100 keyword searched for everyday. However many people find it not so useful & accurate and at times I have even come across articles that make fun of this tool. But I feel that it can prove to be very helpful provided it is used very carefully. I say carefully because it does not expose much data about keywords. One must do the analysis carefully and should not make wrong inference. A wrong inference will give you wrong keyword, which will lead you to disaster!

As I just said this Google tool do not give us information about keywords in detail hence it becomes very difficult to judge if a particular keyword should be used or not. I will suggest to use this tool only if you are into some very hard core SEO and if you have enough of time & patience.

• Go to http://google.com/trends. This will take you to Google trends USA
• On the home page look at the list shown below (refer to the snap-shot below) click on the link “More Hot Trends” which will take you to another page that show the top 100 keywords that visitors has searched for on the current date. For me it is 14^th of April 2009 now.

• Result page that shows the tops 100 search keyword on 14^th April 2009 is shown below, please refer.

• Since you already know your main keywords, so start searching for the one that is related to them from this list and when you find one click on it. You will be taken to yet another page where they give you an idea about how much the word has been searched that day (14^th April 2009 in this case). Have a look below.

• Refering to the previous snap-shot of the page showing the performance of a keyword, one must take a note of the way the data is shown for the selected keyword “lil kim wardrobe malfunction”. It says “On Fire” and there is a graph which does not give any proper information about how many people searched it and at what time etc, just a simple curve. It is difficult to infer what exactly the phrase “On Fire” or the height of the curve mean. But nothing doing, we have to work with what we have.
  
  If you look carefully you will notice that “On Fire” is represented by four coloured lines out of total five lines. I would suggest you not to go for the keyword that has coloured lines two or less. So you got one keyword, hurray! Similarly look for other keywords too from the list of those 100 words shown earlier. This will complete your collection of keywords for a day.

• Do you think one day’s of keyword will help you optimize your site? I don’t think so! Therefore, change the date to previous day’s (off-course you cannot look for keywords that will be searched tomorrow). On the page where you are shown a list of top 100 keywords, you will see a link “change date” just beside the current date. You can change the date here.
  
  Keep going back in date and collect the keywords you find on each day. It is not necessary that you will find the keyword as per your requirement on each day, so don’t feel dishearten! I would suggest you not to go back in date for more then two month and less then 15 days. If you go back two months, you will be collecting keywords that has become stale now and if you do it for less then 15 days then you will not get enough of keywords that have been searched for lately.

• Now that you have collected a bunch of keywords, it is time to filter them out as not all of them maybe helpful. To do this go back to the home page of Goole trends at http://google.com/trends. In top part of the page, enter your keywords separated with comma as shown below.

• If you have a large number of keywords then enter 5 words/phrase at a time as the next page will not show result for more then 5 keywords. Click on the button “Search Trends”. You will now be taken to the result page that shows the comparison of search volume of entered keywords in the form of graph as shown below.

  Here math leads the race. Note down the topmost searched keyword i.e. math in this case.
  Now take the next set of 5 keywords (assuming you have one) and pick the best among them like the way we did just now. Keep doing this.
  The above process will give you have a list of best keywords from each bunch of 5 keywords.
  Repeat the above process again for the latest list of keywords formed. Keep doing this until you get narrowed down to 10 keywords.

• I know you are loosing your patience but please hold on. I told you it will take time and you have to have patience. But don’t worry, this is the last step!

  
  The 10 keywords collected above does give us an idea about the latest hot keywords for our business but it is all based on assumption. The above graph that we followed did not give us the concrete and accurate data and so I will call it an assumption. So what to do now? Simple, take these 10 keywords and use Google external keyword tool (I have discussed about it above) to get the list of exact list of keywords to use.

Note: You may collect a whole bunch of keywords following above method(s) but the main thing after this is to categorise them into important, average or less important keywords. This is important so that you will not have confusion when you go to use them. Important keywords should be at important places and less important keywords should be used at not so important places.

Not only this, you may collect 100s of keywords but that does not mean you them all. Use them only when required. I have discussed about how to use keywords at different places here in On Page Optimization.

Traffic analysis: After everything is done it is important how your site is doing. Again, Google comes for the rescue. Google offers its free online tool called Google Analytics. All you need is an account in Google portal. Sign in and click on the link “My Account” link on the top right of the Google home page. In the “My Account” page click on the link “Analytics”. There get your site registered whose traffic you want to follow. After you have registered your site you will get a code that you should paste anywhere in the home page of your site. That’s it, Google analytics will take care of rest of the stuff.

The analytics will present to you various types of detailed statistics about the traffic to your site. I found this tool to be very helpful and the best part is that it is free!

However, if your are not comfortable pasting any foreign code to your site then you have to take the help of other tools like compete.com and quantcast.com. There could be many such online tools but I know about these two in details so I will mention only about them. However, the problem with them is that they do not show all statistics free. For reports that are more detailed you have to pay them. Hence, I would suggest you to go for Google Analytics. All you are required to do is register and paste a harmless piece of code in your home page.

Keyword Density measuring tool: There is nothing much to write here. I had mentioned earlier during On Page Optimization techniques about the importance of keyword density. Here I will just give you some of the online keyword density measuring tool URLs. They are all free. You can use any other tool too, they are many of them. So following are some of the online tools for measuring keyword density.

live-keyword-analysis.com
tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density
gorank.com/analyze.php
seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html

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