Master Your Keywords, Part 2: New Web Sites

The comments and emails that I received in response to Part 1 of this series demonstrate that keyword research is a fundamental issue for many web developers -- and rightly so. There are undoubtedly many real challenges to tackle when performing keyword research in order to shape your online presence.

The problems web developers face from an SEO perspective -- particularly when launching a new site -- include the following:

You have absolutely no history on which to base your keyword decisions.
Your site has no history in Google's index.
Your site has no inbound links.
If you were to ask around (for example, on SitePoint's SEO Forum) for advice on how to overcome these problems, the standard response you are likely to receive is that, until you have those incoming links in place, you're likely to fall victim to the "Google sandbox."

Reputedly, this sandbox is a staging area that lives somewhere on Google's servers, although there is some debate as to whether it actually exists. The theory is that new sites are sent to the sandbox until they age a little, at which time they are promoted to Google's regular index. If this much is true, clearly the sandbox represents a real obstacle for new web sites.

However, whether the sandbox exists or not isn't really the point -- what matters is that the effect of the Google sandbox exists. In other words, the way the Google algorithm works leads to the hurdles that many people blame on the sandbox.


One standard approach to launching a new site is to publish the site, get some low-quality links, leave it for a year, and then come back to the site after it has an established history.

In the real world, though, it's not practical to just leave a site for a year -- you've got to do something. And I'm convinced that by performing good keyword research, creating good content, and soliciting high-quality inbound links, it's possible to develop new sites that quickly prove successful.

With this in mind, here's how I approach the launch of a new site:

Determine the primary keywords (and the hot issues).

Find authority sites.

Start publishing web content and attracting keyword-rich links.

Look for early evidence of search engine success -- no matter how small.
Determine the Primary Keywords (and the Hot Issues)
The success or failure of your site will depend on the quality of the research that you do. Start by looking for as many related or lateral keywords as you can find. For instance, if you were performing research for a comedy club, you could use Wordtracker's lateral search to suggest related keywords such as "comedians," "comedy shows," "nightlife," "night clubs," "standup," "stand up comedy," and so on.

This process will require you to be persistent and think outside the box a little. For example, after finding related words for comedy clubs, you should then apply the same process to keywords like "nightlife," "stand up," and so on. You'll need to spend some time and think laterally and creatively in order to build a collection of seed keywords.

Once you've compiled a comprehensive list, group them and compare their relative popularity. (You can do this using the free Wordtracker tool).

Here's a snapshot of some of the results of this process for this comedy club example.



Find Authority Web Sites
Authority sites are important for two reasons: they can tell you a lot about the market, and they can be a source of future links. Once you've determined the authority sites for the industry you're targeting, look for trends, debates, and major issues upon which you may be able to piggyback.

Then take those "big" keywords (the most popular terms) and perform a few searches -- not on Google's regular web search engine, but on Google News and Google Blog Search. This process will yield some very useful information.

For our comedy club example, you can use this information to:

Become informed about the news in the comedy industry.
Identify journalists from major news outlets that write about comedy.
Identify specialist publications on comedy.
Identify bloggers who really know the subject.
What we're trying to do here is map out the online marketplace around the focus of our research -- in this case, comedy.

As you work through this, keep a spreadsheet open that allows you to keep notes as you read. Include columns such as keywords, hot issues, authority sites, names, and content details.

Here's a small selection of the sites I found that are related to comedy:

http://comedyspeak.com/
http://www.punchlinemagazine.com/
http://www.chortle.co.uk/
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/
http://www.stagetimemag.com/
http://www.funny.co.uk/
http://www.rooftopcomedy.com/
Your next step is to sign up for the newsletters or RSS feeds published by the best of these sites. I'd also recommend setting up Google alerts for those big keywords.

After a week or so of immersing yourself in this world and devouring as much information related to your keywords as possible, pull all of your findings together and draw out the most pertinent information.

If you're performing this research for a client, now is a good time to meet with them and present your research in detail. Your goals for this meeting are to give the client confidence that you really understand the industry you've been researching, and to gauge the client's reaction and thoughts about your approach. That feedback will guide you in the next step of your research -- starting to publish.

Start Publishing Web Content and Obtaining Keyword-rich Links
I always try and publish as early in the project's lifecycle as possible, in order to start building some history in Google's index and within the industry, and I recommend that you do the same. Of course, you should submit your site to all of the standard directories -- both general and industry specific -- but don't expect any great results initially.

To really give your site a kick-start, you should begin to explore one or two issues in depth. Focussing on these issues will provide a platform for you to start building your web presence.

Consider our comedy club client again (actually a real client of mine). While we chatted about this project, he mentioned in passing that he had just published a great video clip of one of his comedians dealing with a heckler in a funny and effective way. I immediately paid attention -- that's the sort of thing that can be built into a worthwhile piece of content.

I immediately did some searches on "heckle," "heckling," "dealing with heckling" and found over 1,500 videos on YouTube, over 240 current stories on Google News, and over 100,000 results in Google Blog Search. These results convinced me that heckling was a hot issue in the world of comedy.

So how can we put this to use? The answer is to spend a lot of time developing creative ideas for content around that topic -- in this case, heckling.

Try this exercise yourself. As yourself questions like:

How can I create something that is newsworthy?
How can I create an idea that will spread virally?
How can I build relationships with some of the bloggers and journalists in the industry?
How can I leverage user-generated content?
The formula I use to guide my thinking in this exercise is a simple one:

Keyword + Hot Issue = Content Idea

For the comedy club, you might come up with a content idea like "Comedy Club's Classic Heckler Put-Downs," where the keyword is "comedy club" and the hot issue is "putting down hecklers."

You should invest a massive amount of time developing this simple idea into something creative and spectacular. Time spent developing great content that will bring in links will be time well spent; the tedious job of soliciting links is unlikely to be as effective, and the links usually turn out to be low quality anyway.

Once you've nailed your content, issue press releases about it on PRWeb.com, and contact bloggers and journalists that you identified during your initial research. This takes time but is certainly worth it.

Look for Early Evidence of Search Engine Success
Your early success may be minimal, but don't lose heart -- you'll now have some initial inbound links, some real visitors, and some search engine traffic.

Two important tasks now need to be addressed:

Look at the inbound links that your content has attracted. How can you build relationships with the people who have given you a link?

Look at the keywords that have brought you traffic. Take each keyword in turn and explore its long tail for more keywords that you can optimize on.
Here are some long tail keywords for the phrase comedy club.



Finally, remember that finding keywords and building links and traffic is not easy. Many people do give up. But to be successful, you really must push yourself the extra mile.

In my next article, I'll look at the challenges faced when conducting research for sites that already exist. Until then, good luck with your keyword research!

Master Your Keywords, Part 1: Organize Your Keyword Research

Too often, webmasters either perform no keyword research, or do their research on an ad hoc basis. As a result, they miss out on many opportunities to drive more traffic to their sites. In this article, I'll explain why planning is so essential and should be closely aligned to your business strategy.

Good planning and a systematic approach will allow you to get the best results from your keyword research. Don't dive straight into a project! Take the time to think it through and understand exactly what you're trying to achieve before you start work. People who think about keyword research before jumping in are much more likely to spot and exploit major opportunities.

Organizing your Keyword Research
Why do we need to conduct keyword research? Can't you just publish useful content? Won't people find it anyway?

If you simply guess at what people are looking for, you take the very real risk that you'll be wrong. Why take that risk when keyword research can give you such tremendous insight into what people are really looking for?

Henry Ford once said, "If there is any great secret of success in life, it lies in the ability to put yourself in the other person's place and to see things from his point of view."


Of course, Ford wasn't writing specifically about keyword research -- but he could well have been. To perform keyword research properly you must put yourself into your customer's shoes.

If you do your research properly, not only will you be able to optimize your existing web site content, but you'll also be able to tap into an endless stream of ideas for new content that you know people will be interested in. You may even uncover valuable niche markets for your existing products as well as some clever ideas for new products.

The aim of keyword research is to help you make more money from the content you've got at the moment, and lay the foundations for creating even greater profits in the future.

So what's the basic approach you should take for a keyword research project? Here's how I approach the challenge of keyword research.

Step 1: Start with a Good List of Seed Keywords
Seed keywords are the words you use to start a keyword research project. In themselves, they're not very useful, but the directions they take you in can produce a rich source of money-making keywords.

Suppose I'm researching keywords for an information site on family business. 'Succession' might be a promising seed keyword, because it leads me to 'succession disputes,' 'conflict resolution,' 'mediation,' and so on.

The greater the number of promising seed keywords you have at the start of a project, the more comprehensive your final results will be.

Jotting down notes will get you started, but it won't give you anything near a full list of possibilities -- you'll need to do something to stimulate your creativity.

When I start a new project, my favourite method is to get myself out of the office and deliberately give myself some thinking time.

I'll go to the nearest newsstand or magazine store and buy three or four magazines in the area that I'm researching. Then I'll sit down in a coffee shop and read through the magazines looking for good articles. I want to understand the subject area and the important issues or ideas that are currently being discussed.

I'll pick the best of the articles I've found and go through them in detail. I'll keep a notebook by my side and jot down the main ideas and concepts that are covered in the articles, and list what I think might be important keywords.

From this exercise I'll generate a list of at least 20 seed keywords. Now's the time to go online and do some real keyword research.

Step 2: Find Related Keywords
We're obviously very proud of the service we can offer webmasters at Wordtracker, and one of my favorite features is the fact that Wordtracker provides two main types of keywords: 'related keywords' and 'long tail keywords.'

Related keywords are words that are often used in a particular subject area. For example, related keywords for 'back pain' would include 'sciatica' and 'spinal problems'; related keywords for 'home business' would include 'weekend entrepreneur' or 'working from home'. (These examples come from Wordtracker's Keyword Universe tool.)
Long tail keywords for 'back pain' would be 'back pain treatment,' 'lower back pain,' and 'exercise for back pain'; long tail keywords for 'home business' would include 'home business opportunities,' 'how to set up a home business,' or 'home business support.' (These examples come from Wordtracker's Keyword Researcher tool.)
I'll take those seed keywords that I collected from my magazines and look for 'related keywords' for each in turn. You may be tempted to delve into detail, but you should resist this temptation for now. Find as many related concepts as possible -- you're not looking for the first right answer, but for many right answers.

If I'm researching a web site on buying property overseas, I'll not only be interested in keywords such as 'homes abroad,' 'property abroad,' and 'international property' but also 'international mortgages,' ' global real estate,' 'property rights,' 'buying off plan,' 'health insurance abroad,' and 'expatriates.'

Always look for niche opportunities. Keyword research is one of the most effective ways to identify niche markets that others have failed to recognize.

This process should give you hundreds of related keywords. You can now test their popularity -- how often each word is searched for on average every day. These numbers, together with your own assessment of how important the keywords are for your business, allow you to prioritize your keyword lists.

Step 3: Map Out Your Web Content Structure
You can use the keywords to map out the content of your site. Group them into themes -- for example, 'legal pitfalls' might be grouped with 'property rights' as part of a major section on the laws of buying and owning property overseas.

How you perform this grouping task is entirely up to you. You should aim to have groups that reflect your products and services and are targeted to specific target markets. Start with 6 to 10 themes, then build on this later.

Step 4: Find Long Tail Keywords
Now's the time to get into detail. The keywords you've grouped into themes are the starting point for digging into the long tail. Take each of the keywords you've researched in turn and analyze how they're used in longer search terms. For example, 'property abroad' is used in these longer search terms:

property for sale abroad
property abroad
investment property abroad
buying property abroad
mortgages to buy property abroad
mortgages second property abroad
residential property investments abroad
eco investment property abroad
resale property abroad
Next, look at the daily search counts to get an idea of the relevant importance of each term. Using this technique, you can very quickly build up a matrix of hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords.

Step 5: Create Your Detailed Content Plan
Now start looking for specific content ideas. I'll often go back to my original notes and follow this formula to create content ideas:

Hot issue + Popular keyword = Content Title

If, for example, you know that working with local estate agents and officials is a hot issue, you could combine this with the keyword 'homes abroad' to create the content title:

'Legal pitfalls in buying a home abroad'

Don't be afraid of highly competitive terms. Include them in your web site copy, even if you have no immediate chance of ranking well for them -- you're laying the foundations for the future.

Good keyword research helps map out a detailed content plan. This means that you won't waste time on irrelevant content, but will focus on highly relevant content ideas that will bring the traffic you're after.

Keyword Research Complete?
Now that you've established your focus, you're ready to start creating your content. But your keyword research needs to be an ongoing process. Once you've published your pages, your need to monitor your performance, make adjustments accordingly, and then systematically expand the keywords that you rank well for. We'll look at how to do that in future articles in this series.

SEO for Multilingual Marketing

English may be the so-called lingua franca of the World Wide Web, but consider this: three-quarters of the world’s population speaks no English whatsoever. Online, over 460 million internet users communicate in English. Yet there are over 1.5 billion internet users across the globe, which means that over a billion web users claim a language other than English as their native tongue. That’s a lot of people. The Web is a linguistic labyrinth and the need for businesses to talk to customers in their own language can’t be overstated.

There's a cacophony of cultural complexities that must be considered before localizing a web site’s content for international markets. With this in mind, businesses that want to go global need to think local.

World Languages
There are over 6,000 languages spoken across the globe. However, many of these are spoken only in small pockets in localized regions. Indeed, 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by only 4% of the world’s population, while 90% lack any real representation on the Internet.

So, from an online marketer’s perspective, there’s no need to have a web site anywhere near 6,000 languages.

However, if we look at the European Union (EU) alone, there are 23 official languages spoken in the 27 member states. English is the most widely spoken, with over half the EU population speaking it to some degree. From a native-speaking perspective, almost a fifth of Europeans claim German as their mother tongue. English, Italian, and French have roughly the same amount of native speakers as each other, followed closely by Spanish.

Figure 1. Top five European languages



Globally, Asia accounts for over 40% of the world’s internet users, while China has 30% more internet users than the US. Research has also shown that over half of all consumers only buy from web sites in their own language.

Distinctive Dialects
When targeting international markets online, it’s important to be wary of the differences within languages too, that is, dialects. The contrast between, say, French and German is fairly obvious, even to those who speak neither language. But the distinction between the French language spoken in France, and the French in Canada, or across Switzerland and Belgium is less obvious. There are, however, some key differences.

For example, Canadian French (Québécois) tends to literally translate English terms into French, rather than importing English terms directly as Anglicisms. So the word “weekend,” for example, is fin de semaine (which translates literally as “end of the week”). But in standard French, the word is simply le weekend.

There are many examples in French-speaking Europe that demonstrate some of the nuances between dialects, some of which are outlined in Figure 2, “Some differences across French dialects”.

Figure 2. Some differences across French dialects



The same applies to other language dialects. Take Spanish, for example. In Spain, the word carro is a cart that you push or pull to transport items; in Latin America, it’s a car to drive around in. Alternatively, a car in Spain is called a coche, while a coche in Latin America is a baby stroller.

Besides English, the main European languages on the Internet are German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, although the latter two are boosted considerably due to their proliferation in the Americas.

Although English is the leading language of the Web from a content perspective, over half of all Google searches are in other languages. This figure looks set to grow, with the Internet population of emerging markets such as Russia and China increasing faster than in Western markets. Figure 3, “Top 10 languages spoken by global internet users” shows the distribution of the top 10 languages spoken by internet users around the world.

Figure 3. Top 10 languages spoken by global internet users



SEO, Localization, and the Web
Online marketing is one of the most potent tools available to modern business. It connects companies to customers and helps build mutually beneficial business relationships between the buyers and sellers of the world.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a pivotal part of many businesses’ online marketing strategies. A study by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) indicated that two-thirds of marketers in Europe were increasing their SEO resources this year. Moreover, 94% of European marketers plan to increase their total internet advertising spend in 2010.

Figure 4. Online marketing methods (2009)



However, domestic markets are just one part of the equation. Launching fully localized and optimized foreign language web sites are another problem altogether. It goes without saying that you should always use professional translators when converting your English text for international markets, but it’s important that you refrain from translating your keywords from English. And here’s why: a correct dictionary translation of a keyword may be substantially different from what people use to search for products or services online. They may use colloquialisms, abbreviations, or a different word altogether that has a similar meaning. So, in the same way as you would identify your industry-specific keywords to optimize your English language web site, you have to research the terms that people use to search in the foreign market you’re targeting.


To help demonstrate this, consider the following situation. A company that sells car insurance to the English-speaking market dedicates a considerable amount of resources towards ensuring it ranks highly on Google for the search term “car insurance.” It then decides to make inroads into French markets.

An accurate translation of “car insurance” into French would be l’assurance automobile. However, Google’s French keyword tool indicates this term achieves very few hits. Instead, people tend to use assurance auto or assurance voiture. As you can see, a major SEO travesty can be avoided by carrying out just a little research.

In some markets, it may be possible to use the English keywords on a foreign language web site. In Germany, for example, English phrases are often used, particularly with web-based terminology. So a web design company that ranks highly in the UK or Australia for the term “web design” could incorporate it directly into its German-language web site.

Foreign Language Search Engine Rankings
It’s worth being aware that keyword saturation on non-English language web sites is nowhere near what it is on English language web sites. So it’s quite possible for your business to attain lucratively high positions for key search terms on non-English search engines quicker than those of your native tongue. Taking our previous example, a car insurance company requires fewer resources to optimize its French web site for assurance auto on google.fr, than it does for “car insurance” on the US, UK, or Australian Google.

Summary
A multilingual marketing strategy should be the cornerstone of any international initiative. Businesses of all sizes can go global with nothing more than a web site, a networked computer, and a bundle of entrepreneurial savvy. But to do so, it’s vital to think local. Using inappropriate style, grammar, tone, and terminology can hamper progress in new markets, hence why localization is a key underpinning facet of any global strategy.

Search engine optimization is central to web site localization and any organization that fails to localize its web site properly is missing a trick.