Media Precision

Keyword Examiner

This week has seen the official launch of another piece of SEO time saving software called Keyword Examiner. Its Developer says “Keyword Examiner is a piece of software designed to take hours off your keyword research for search engine optimisation (SEO).” I have known about Keyword Examiner’s imminent release for a while now, so when I got the opportunity to review it, I was very excited.

What does it do?
In a nutshell Keyword examiner looks at the search volumes for your keywords or key phrases. It gets these figures from Google’s AdWords External Keyword Tool. Once it has these it then looks at the number of competition sites within your niche and is then able to calculate a KEI Score or Keyword Efficiency Indicator. The KEI score tells us how efficient a keyword is and enables us to make the right decisions about which keywords to target.

How is it to use?
As I did not have any outstanding keyword research to perform in this review experiment, I decided I would use some keywords I had researched towards the back end of last week. Now the research I had done was in the Mortgage sector, so it’s quite a competitive market and therefore imperative that I get the keywords right. What I decided to do was to run the Keywords through Keyword Examiner and compare them to the results I had got last week calculating the KEI score manually.

When you go to start the process you are asked whether you would like to choose global or local results. As the research I did last week was global I selected ‘All Countries & Territories’. Next you are prompted to enter your keywords. For this I added a handful of the most obvious ones. At this point you can choose whether you want the keywords as Broad, Phrase or Exact. I left this as Broad. After entering the CAPTCHA code, Keyword Examiner returns the AdWords search volumes for your keywords, but it also returns the search volumes for other suggested keywords.

The Next process is to obtain the competition data. Simply make your selections from the check boxes along the top and click the ‘Get Competition Data’ button and Keyword Examiner will return the results along with the KEI score for the keywords. That really is all there is to it, job done in just a couple of minutes. I need to point out at this stage, that for all you WordTraker fans out there that Keyword Examiner will ingrate with WordTraker, however you do need a WordTracker subscription for that.

The Results
One of the great features about Keyword Examiner is that the results can be exported to a spreadsheet allowing you to sort by size, thus making your decision for choosing your keywords easy. In my keyword research for this niche, I had chosen 4 key phrases. When I filtered the results from Keyword Examiner the top 4 were the same four that my manual research had come up with. Results 2 and 3 were in a different order but their scores were very close and there are a number of reasons why that may have been. What I also noticed was that result number 5 on Keyword Examiner’s results, was a keyphrase that Keyword Examiner had suggested, and that I had missed in my initial research. Now imagine if this had been the top result! I could have missed the most efficient keyword out there for my niche!

Is it any good?
Quite simply, “yes”. As busy SEO’s we all know that there are just not enough hours in the day, and anything that saves us time is worth its weight in gold. My keyword research last week took me the best part of an hour. Keyword Examiner came up with the same results, and highlighted a lapse of concentration on my part, in less than 5 minutes. So is that worth $29.95? Without a shadow of a doubt. Keyword Examiner is one of the most useful, cost effective, and time saving products I have ever used, and I hope you find it as good as I did.

Black Hat vs White Hat: Are the Risks worth the Rewards?

In internet marketing the terms white hat and black hat are common. However, what do these terms mean? White hat are ethical marketing practices that are used involving SEO, which follows the rules and does not do anything underhanded to get ahead of the competition. Black hat is the exact opposite. Marketers that use black hat techniques attempt to trick customers, competitors and search engines.

These are a few of the more common white hat techniques that are used by legitimate and ethical s and webmasters.

Creating legitimate and clear internal links in sites is extremely important. Try to avoid the use of logos or pictures as internal links because search engine bots cannot identify them. If search engines cannot identify an internal link, it is not an actual link.

Anyone that has done any research on SEO knows how important content creation can be. Websites that are rich in unique content are easily identified by search engine bots.

The content created for a site must be clear and concise using relevant keywords specific to the niche they are written about. They also need to be informative where anyone visiting that site can learn something from reading that content. One key factor in content creation is the proper keywords and keyword phrases must be used. Keywords that are relevant and specific must be used. The homepage of the site also must be optimized as well as the sub pages with the same keywords.

Effective site optimisation makes a better website appearance and a better chance of potential customers finding the site. Optimisation covers Meta tags, content, titles and links.

These are black hat techniques that are used by the less than legitimate and unethical s and webmasters.

Some websites try to fool customers into customers by having the text the exact same color as the background of the website. However, these websites are caught very easily by competitors and quiet often, search bots will recognize this trick as well. The results are usually the site being blacklisted. This is definitely not a smart tactic since it was easily discovered by someone who knows that to look for.

One of the most common techniques in content creation is keyword stuffing and one of the most popular black hat techniques. Keyword stuffing is when the website content has large amount of keywords or keyword phrases repeatedly mentioned throughout the content to the point that the content does not make any sense and are extremely difficult to read. Again, this technique is discovered very easily and will result in a website being blacklisted.

Another common black hat technique is cloaking. This is a method by where several black hat SEO techniques are used at one time for submitting information to search engines which is invisible to visitors. Sometimes these techniques will go undetected however; they can still be identified by competitors. The results are the website being banned by most search engines.

Be Sure to Check out the Ten Steps of SEO

With around 65,000 new websites launched every day, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is becoming more and more competitive. The need for businesses to have successful online marketing campaigns has increased beyond comprehension. Good marketing of your site could be a cost effective way of making your business successful, whilst a bad internet marketing strategy could see you waste a lot of money, and worse even go under.

This first installation of The Ten Steps of SEO looks at Initial Analysis. A lot of companies over look market analysis, and do so at their own peril. I always advise people to treat their online marketing campaign as they would any other marketing campaign. Analise the market before committing big budgets, and never, ever, go in blind.

Is there a market for your products/services?

As obvious as it may seem if there is not a market for your business then you stop right now. You will struggle to force a market. Ask yourself what your USP’s (Unique Selling Points) and if people are really going to buy from you. People buy for 2 reasons, they either need something or they want it. Do your customers NEED your product? If not is it going to be something they want?

What products & Services is your competition offering?

I don’t look too much into the competition at this stage, as this is something I look at a lot more in detail at a later stage. However have a quick look at who your competition is and what products they have to offer.

Who is your target Audience?

Identify as early as you can who your target audience is. Different target demographic will require different approaches, so think about who your site will be aimed at.

What is your route to market?

Now you know who your target audience is you must now decide what will be the best way to get your website in front of people. Social media is a great way of driving traffic to your site but the levels of success may vary depending on who your site is aimed at.

Put together a marketing strategy

Now you have gathered all of this information, put something down in writing. Put together a marketing strategy, it will help you keep focus of where you are going, and not to mention put you in a positive, proactive frame of mind.

To Summarise, make sure there is a market out there for you business. Look into who your site will be aimed and how you will target them. Put together a marketing strategy.

Finally, don’t be afraid to walk away. The whole purpose of this exercise is to clarify whether or not there is a market for your website, and whether it is worth you investing your time and money into SEO. If at any point you feel that there is not a market out there, this exercise has been a success.

Ten Steps of SEO is a series of articles written to give you an insight to the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Many people seem to be under the impression that there is some secret formula to SEO. In reality this is not true. There is no hidden secret, there is no one process that that will get you to the top of the search engine results. Good results are achieved by gradually, over time, using ethical (white hat) methods, to grow your website organically. Follow these Ten Steps of SEO and you will be on the right track to improving your online visibility.

1. Initial Analysis – Online Marketing is just the same as any other marketing campaign. To be able to monitor the progress of your campaign you must first know where you are starting from. It is also a good idea to check that there is actually a market out there in the first place.
2. Keyword Research – This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. My advice would be to spend a long time on this. If you get this bit right the marketing of your site will be a whole lot easier in the long.
3. Competitor Analysis – Knowing what your competitors are up to is essential, it allows you to plan your strategy. Look who is linking in to your competitor’s site and put these sites on a list of possible link partners. By getting these companies to link back to your site, you eliminate advantages gained by your competitors with these links.
4. On-page Optimisation – You may have heard the cliche “Content is King”, well search engines love good quality unique content. Mix in well a written meta title & meta description and you are off to a good start for a well optimised page.
5. Search Engine & Directory Submission – This is an easy way to get lots of initial links back to your site. Register with the search engines and this will encourage them to visit your site and index all of your pages. Some directories have good PR (Page Ranking) which means you will be getting relevant link backs from respected sites.
6. Blogging/Content Updates – Adding good quality content to your site on a regular basis will encourage search engines to keep returning to your site. Visitors to your site will also show the same loyalty. If you release interesting content on a regular basis, people will start to look out for updates and re-visit your site. The easiest way to do this is to set up a blog or news section on your site.
7. Article Marketing – Article marketing is a very effective aspect of SEO. Submitting articles to article sites such as EzineArticles has 2 key benefits. Firstly it allows you to build links back to your website. Secondly, as the articles are free to republish, if your article gets used by anyone, they will need to include the original links from your article.
8. Strategic Link Building – Links are vital to increasing your search engine rankings. However it is not just a case of building as many links as possible. Avoid building links from sites that are not relevant for your niche as these will potentially do more damage than good.
9. Social Media – There are many forms of social media. I amsure you have all heard of sites like Myspace, Facebook, & more recently Twitter. Social Media is great for driving traffic to your site and getting your website in front of your target audience, at the same time as building back links we know to be vital to your search engine positioning.
10. Web Ranking & Link Reporting – Reporting on where you are ranking for keywords, and who is linking back to you will allow you to monitor your online campaign closely. You could also run these reports on your competitors to know how your online marketing campaign

We will go into more detail for each of these points in coming posts so, be sure to keep an eye out for updates. You can subscribe to updates via our RSS feed or alternatively subscribe via email and we will send updates direct to your inbox. And, if you don’t fancy doing this yourself, we are more than happy to step in and help.

Click here to contact Media Precision about helping you improve your websites performance…

Welcome to the Media Precision Blog. Media Precision is a new breed of digital marketing agency specialising in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We take a fresh approach to SEO and use only ethical (white hat) methods. We would like to be looked upon as an authority within our field. However we understand we need to earn that accolade.

Search engine marketing is vital to any online venture. After all, there is no point having a website if nobody can find it. Equally there is no point driving traffic to your site if this traffic is not relevant, as your site will not convert.

We often hear people saying “What is the secret to SEO?” quite simply there is no secret. There is no quick fix way to get your site to the top of the search engine rankings. The way to get results is to organically grow you site over time. Search engines love organic gradual growth of websites, as it sees this as natural evolution. There are many methods that, when combined, can be used to achieve success in your online marketing campaign.

Over the coming weeks/months we will be posting a number of articles on these methods. We will also look at unethical (black hat) methods, and discuss why these methods should be avoided at all costs. We will also look at what you should look for when choosing an SEO company. Why would we do this you may ask? Well we know our industry is not squeaky clean, however we are, and we want to make sure you make the right choice. Yes we would love to work with you but if we can’t, we would hate for you to make a mistake and get lumbered with a long term contract with a company that may harm your online marketing campaign.

So, please come back and visit our blog. You can even subscribe to updates via our RRS Feed. And it goes without saying if you have any requirements ir even a question about Search Engine Optimisation, Contact Us