How often have you used the Yellow Pages recently? As for me, I can’t even remember the last time I used it. I’m guessing 7 years ago?

Google is where we go now to look for anything that we want, although the Yellow Pages might be preferred by some because their searches would be made easier because everything was categorized.

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As an SEO copywriter, it sometimes falls under my tasks to find or research the best keywords for the article I would be writing. Although often it is the client who would provide me with the keywords.

I enjoy doing keyword research (if I am not heavily loaded with other work) and I am using the Google Adwords free keyword tool. I have tried Wordtracker before, but it is not free. So far Google’s tool seems to be working just fine as my clients have nothing against using only that tool.

However, I have just come across a free SEO tool that looks promising. It’s called Traffic Travis. It even got a great rating from Cnet’s Download site. It is not just for keyword research, as it is primarily a good starter all-rounder SEO analysis tool.

I have yet to use it, mainly its keyword research functions. And I might write about it soon whether it could replace Google’s keyword tool as my favorite or it could just be a good complimentary software.

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When you are a freelance writer working mostly for online content, you have to learn all that you can about search engine optimization or simply SEO. That is because what good is your written content if people cannot easily find it through the search engines?

The following are the top 3 SEO blogs that I recommend to every fellow freelance copywriter:

1. Matt Cutts

He is the head of Google’s web spam team and the unofficial spokesperson when it comes to anything Google and search-related topics. He is always a fun to read, even with his non-SEO blog posts.

2. SEO Book

Aaron Wall published what is considered to be the first ebook authority on search engine optimization, the aptly titled ‘SEO Book’. Just by that name alone he was able to establish a reputation as one of the top SEO experts and has created a successful business around it through consultancy and an exclusive forum only for paying subscribers.

His blog posts are often lengthy but a breeze to read as well as complete with his insights about the SEO topic at hand.

3. SEOmoz

Rand Fishkin and the guys at SEOmoz are among the most unselfish individuals when it comes to sharing their thoughts, opinions, tips, suggestions, and more about anything that is SEO. It is always a treat to read Rand’s entries as he goes all the way creating graphs and doodles, almost anything just to help visualize his ideas.

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It has only been a month since I started to optimize this blog for the keywords “freelance copywriter” and now it has started to go up Google’s U.S. search results.

The first time I noticed that it appeared in the results, it was on the 12th page. Now, as of this writing, it is on the 3rd page, ranked 26th overall. All I can say is, I’m satisfied with the way things are going. But of course my target is to be on the first page, which I believe is not that hard to achieve.

Also, my girlfriend’s blog, www.CallCenterGal.com, which is one of the first blogs we ever set up, is now ranked second in the Google U.S. search results for “call center blog”. We started to optimize that blog for that search term about middle of last year so it took us more than a year to get to where it is now in the search results. I guess it is more competitive in the call center search arena.

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What do you do when your competitor is so much bigger than you?

You join him. Or at least use him to gain some leverage even though you’re competing in the same field.

In the case of Microsoft’s new (or newly branded) search engine, Bing, they opened their own AdWords account and started advertising on Google’s search results.

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Steve of Success Factors asked: what is the minimum volume you should consider in examining the keyword results, and what is too much volume (e.g., making for too much competition)?

A very good question because otherwise a keyword researcher can just go on and on with his research and come up with a million keywords. So probably the question here is when do we know when enough is enough?

There are 2 factors that you should consider:

1. How big is your site?

2. How much competition do you want?

Photo by cambodia4kidsorg

Keywords and Size of Site

If you are doing keyword research for a website that has thousands of pages, then a list of 50 or more keywords would be normal.

This is especially true with large corporations that have a gamut of products. General Electric is one and if the company is using keywords in its website, I would not be surprised if they are using at least a hundred keywords.

But if your website consists of only a dozen of pages, don’t aim for more than 10 keywords. For this size, I would suggest that you focus on 5 keywords at the most. More than that then your SEO would be muddled, your keyword focus would be lost with all the keywords you might be using.

Blogs can be quite different because a blog post can be optimized for one keyword. And that’s it. I don’t suggest using one or more than two different keywords in a single post because it would lessen the effect of both.

How Much Competition Do You Want for Your Keywords?

They say ranking success by aiming for a highly sought-for keyword is almost next to impossible. I agree and I’m sure any capable SEO expert (redundant? no,because there are some who just pretend to be one) would suggest that do not focus on popular keywords, rather focus on related keywords that have less competition.

Try making a Google search for ‘sex’ and you’ll find that there are currently 764,000,000 results. Millions! Good luck ranking for that keyword.

Now let’s try to find a better niche for a keyword. I tried ‘sex freelancer’ and it showed 634,000 results. Compared to ‘sex’ you’ll have much greater chances of ranking with ‘sex freelancer’. Why would anybody want to use that keyword is beyond me. We all have our own reasons and agenda.

They say the true mark of an artist is in knowing when to stop. Leonardo da Vinci knew he already had a masterpiece when he stopped adding paint on the “Mona Lisa”. The Beatles knew they already had enough “Na, na, na, na, na-na-na-na…” in “Hey Jude” when they ended the song or faded away for that matter.

Set your limits early on in your keyword research and use both common sense and gut feel to know when you already have enough keywords.

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Step-by-step Tutorial on Finding the Right Keywords to Optimize Your Site

This basic keyword research tutorial is the result of a suggestion made by The Lady Programmer. For this purpose, let’s pretend we have a freelance writer’s website. So obviously we want to find the right keywords starting with the keywords “freelance” and “writer”.

Why Google Keyword Tool?

I have 3 reasons why I’m using it for this tutorial:

1. It’s free!

2. I have used it at work.

3. It uses Google search results data. In short, it’s Google and more people are using it for their searches more than the other search engines.

Here’s the link to the tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Step 1: Collect the Seeds

Seeds are the main keywords or the general keywords that our website is known for. And for the sake of our example, our top seeds would be “freelance”, “writer” and a combination of both which is “freelance writing”.

From these seeds we are going to find other keywords to help optimize our website. One main reason behind this is because our seed terms are usually general terms and therefore we will find more competition in the search results. By finding more specific keywords, we can have better chances of ranking using those keywords.

Step 2: Expand Those Seeds

How do we do this? I have two ways to expand seeds. First thing I would usually do is to get a thesaurus and find the synonyms to those seeds. So for “freelance” and “writer”, I found these synonyms:

self-employed, non-staff, free agent, unaffiliated

author, editor, journalist, columnist, biographer, copywriter, freelancer, scribe, screenwriter, reporter, blogger

Second, I would find a competitor website and spy…err…I mean, find out what keywords he is using. If you do this, at least find a competitor with a better ranking than yours.

Step 3: Preparing to Use the Google Keyword Tool

Okay, first thing you will have to do is decide what country’s search results data do you want to know. What this means is, in your opinion, from what country do your site’s visitors usually come from?

Find the phrase “Results are tailored to English, United States” and click on Edit. Choose the language and country of your choice. But for this tutorial, we’re going to use English, United States.

Step 4: Type Your Seeds and Start Looking for Your Keywords

Type your main keywords one keyword or phrase per line. You might want to cover all possible related keywords so better include both the singular and plural forms of your keywords as well as the misspellings.

Leave the box for “Use synonyms” checked to help you expand your keyword research. But when you have seen the results and you find that there are a lot of unrelated keywords, repeat the process but this time do not check the box.

Your results will look like this:

Whew! It’s quite a list, isn’t it? And as you can see, I just cut the image so there are still a lot of results.

Now you will want to download these data to your Excel or OpenOffice Calc and sort them all out. To do this, go to the end of the results and click on .csv.

Step 5: Sort Out Your Search Results Data Using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.Org Calc

Download the .csv file of your keyword research data and sort out data in any manner that you prefer. As for myself, I prefer to sort the data based on the Approximate Average Search Volume.

So that’s it! Now we have a fresh list of possible keywords that we can use to optimize our website. You can repeat the whole process with another set of seeds or main keywords so you can build on your previous data.

One thing that I want to point out is that a keyword research tool is still just a tool. It is up to you to form your own insight on the keyword data that you will gather and decide which keywords are the best ones for your needs.

As a rule, do not rely on just one tool. There are lots of other tools out there, both free and proprietary. You can use Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SeoBook Keyword Suggestion Tool, and many others.

Good luck on your keyword research!

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Why the Anchor Text and the Keyword Should Go Together

First of all, what is an anchor text? The anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Do I need to explain what a hyperlink is? I hope not.

An example of an anchor text and a hyperlink is this: my favorite place in the whole world!

The anchor text there is “my favorite place in the whole world!” and it is hyperlinked to another blog.

Now for the keyword. A keyword is the word or sometimes a group of words (usually referred to as a key phrase) that you want your website to be known for. Keywords are very important in search engine optimization (SEO) as these help your website to rank well in the search engines.

Perhaps the best example of the power of the anchor text is the key phrase “click here”.

Do you know what is at the number one spot for that key phrase when searched on Google? And take note that the search yielded more than a billion results!

It’s the page for downloading Adobe Reader.

Amazing, isn’t it? Most especially since the keywords “click here” are nowhere to be found on that

Adobe page.

The only explanation for that is the power of the anchor text.

The Adobe Reader is one of the most popular free software and also one of the most used because of the popularity of the PDF format. Websites that offer downloads of PDF documents and ebooks would usually place a link to the Adobe Reader’s download page so that people who still don’t have the software can easily get it and read the PDF file the websites were offering.

And I think you can guess what anchor text they usually use.

CLICK HERE

So what is the importance of the anchor text to your site? If you want your site to be known for a specifc keyword or set of keywords, it is important that you place your keywords in the anchor text that will be pointing to your site.

So if your keyword is “Sagada”, it is best to write your anchor text like this: …learn more about Sagada.

An extra point with that technique is not only did you make good use of the “Sagada” keyword, but you also included the keyphrase “learn more about Sagada”. So there is a greater possibility that if someone makes a Google search to try to learn more about Sagada, he might find that site in one of the search results.

In parting, always make an extra effort in using your anchor text especially if you are exchanging links with other site owners. Always ask them to make use of your desired keywords for the anchor text when they link back to you.

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I have a friend who has just created her first blog and she is almost completely new to the whole blogging concept. So I decided to give her the basics of what blogging is, how she can rank well in the search engines based on certain keywords and also the fact that she could earn from it.

She was actually very interested in the whole search engine ranking idea. So when I asked her what’s the keyword she would like to rank for, she said ‘Prudence Charlz’ which was the pseudonym she was using for her blog.

I asked her why and she said it’s her name so that’s what she wants to see in the search engines.

Big mistake, wouldn’t you agree? I told her the same thing and she would not accept my explanation that nobody would be searching for her name (a pen name that is not yet even well-established).

To give her an example, I made a search for ‘prudence charlz’ on Google and as I expected, it gave a very small amount of results. Only 160 results.

But she was adamant in wanting to see her pen name on the number one spot. I told her okay and that it would actually be quite easy given the small number of competition for that key phrase.

That’s when she decided to give me a helluva of a task. When I told her it would be quite easy to make her blog rank first for the keywords ‘prudence charlz’, she said she would also want to rank well for the keyword, ‘prudence.’

I didn’t need to make a Google search to know how many results would yield the keyword, ‘prudence’ but just the same I made a search for it.

8,430,000 results. Now that’s a lot of SEO work!

How about you? Do you think you can give the ‘prudence’ keyword a shot?

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I’ve mentioned in an earlier post about the keyword research that I’ve been doing for an online swimwear retailer. I’m now done with that and have moved on to Pay Per Click advertising at Google for the keywords that I’ve gathered.

A few days ago, I was surprised to learn from the client that they have been experiencing a rise in their sales from the United Kingdom.This given the fact that winter is just around the corner.

Images of Brits wearing bikinis and thongs in the middle of the snow flashed before my eyes. Then the client told me they have just found out that about 3 million Brits go abroad to warmer destinations during the Christmas season.

So that’s why.

This is what I love about doing this keyword research and PPC because I’m learning new stuff.

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