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  1. “BBQ tips on cooking” Posted in Recipes for Success, Concocted by Mike Perk July 31, 2006 7 comments

    As some of you may know whilst we undertake our heavy chef projects, we like to work with one of our existing clients on that subject topic. This month we’ve been working with Sophia (in Cape Town, South Africa) from The Cape Table.  This weekend Sophia has been sifting through a keyword analysis of around 600 possible keywords to find one she is going to focus her blog on. Those that have been following our blog experiement this month wll know we chose "profitable websites" as our keyphrase. Sophia has yet to decide but trialed one possibility this weeek in a blog post of her own. I then recieved the following email, which I though I would share with you.

    ——————–
    Dear Mike

    Just a quick question have you seen my latest post?  Is this what I am supposed to do (see where I used bbq tips on cooking)?  If not, please help.

    Furthermore, I went to Goggle and typed in these words – as given to me on your list now and came up with the following results: 7 650 000 sites came up and 6 sponsored links.  However, from your list I understood that there were no competing sites for these keywords.  I must be (mis)understanding this in true female fashion  Please help!

    Warm regards,
    Sophia
    ——————–
    My Reply was as follows:

    Hi Sophia,

    Thats definitely the right idea with regards putting the word into the blog. To make it more prominent, you could have added it in the title, underlined it or bolded it. That would give it more power in terms of relevance for the search engines. The key to its success would be to keep using that same term in each post. This is where the difficulty lies as bbq tips isn’t necessarily right for each of your posts. But it need to be quite frequently used.

    With regards the numbers, you are quite right in what you have tested:

    bbq tips on cooking = 7,640,000

    but when placed in quotation marks:

    "bbq tips on cooking" = 0

    What does this mean?

    When something is placed in a googles search using "quotation marks" it will only give you the results of the sites that use those words, that are together in that exact order.

    When we use wordtracker to discover the competitiveness of a keyword it analyses them with quotation marks. The argument is that a site which has that keyword phrase in exactly that order, throughout the site (or blog) will been seen as more relevant to that search term even when searched for without quotation marks. It may to longer to see an impact, but it stands a far greater chance of success in the long run.

    Having said all of that, one also needs to be aware that in the results that were found without the quotation marks, they had all three words in the title of their page. Therefore we need to give more prominence to those words your blog post.

    Hope this helps,
    Mike

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  2. Optimising our Blog for the keyphrase “Profitable Websites” Posted in Recipes for Success, Concocted by Mike Perk July 21, 2006 1 comment

    Now we know the phrase we want to get the blog found for we can ensure that whenever we are writing our Blogs we include the phrase profitable websites somewhere in each of our blog posts (when possible).

    Don’t sacrifice your key message just to get your keyword into your blog, but when an opportunity arises take it.

    The search engines should then pick that up and due to the frequency level within this blog post being high for that phrase, it rates us more highly for it. Over time if included in enough of our posts the ranking will improve.

    Something to remember when optimising anything for search engines is that Google (for example) will rate the words in bold and italics higher than normal text. Larger text is more important than smaller text and the title of the page is important. And if you can get your keyphrase as a link thats even better. And if you link back to another one of your sites that will also benefit that site.

    So in this post for example we have managed to get our phrase "profitable websites" in there three time. Once in bold, once in italics and once in the title.

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  3. Profitable blogs find the gaps? Posted in Recipes for Success, Concocted by Mike Perk July 18, 2006 4 comments

    If one of the objectives of your blog is to bring in new traffic (and our is), one possible way of getting that traffic there is via the search engines.

    We optimise quite a few sites for particular search engines, but it not something we have promoted enough for blogs. The great thing about blogs is they are usually relevant and up to date (which the search engines like), which can’t always be said of websites.

    So how do we go about optimising a blog? The first thing is deciding which keywords you want to optimise your blog for. In our industry we could go for:

    web sites
    web design
    web marketing
    marketing online, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless.

    But we need to give ourselves a bit of a chance of getting to the top. The best way to do this is with a keyword analysis (something I’m sure we’ll have as its own heavy chef topic in the months to come). It simple really:

    "Find the words people are search for that few websites are competing for."

    As a stats geek I love this sort of research, but others will hate. There are however tools out their to help you, such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery and a new piece of software we are using at the moment for our PPC keyword analysis called Keyword Elite. We will cover these in more depth another time. For the time being if you are doing this analysis fo the first time I would recommend Wordtracker as the tool to use, because you can purchase it for a period of time and as such can use it for a day for as little as 5.

    We brainstormed all the possible words people could use to find our site – always bearing in mind the focus of our business and blog. We expanded these with Wordtracker and the tested them to se if any gaps existed in the market that we could exploit. We are also working on Sophia from The Cape Table Club who is brainstorming her possible keywords at the moment. Which we will then show her how to test for possible effectiveness.

    Our choosen keyphrase from the results for World Wide Creative and The Heavy Chef Blog was:

    "Profitable Websites"

    And our initial target market is South Africa.

    - Mike

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  4. Step 1: Focus your blog!!! Posted in Recipes for Success, Concocted by Mike Perk July 14, 2006 No comments

    I come across quite a few web companies that say to clients "you must have a blog". Crikey, we even said it to ourselves twelve months ago when we started ours. Off we go and start writing, and writing, and writing………One month later we are struggling to write anything worthwhile and start to resent the Blog. I call it Blog Rage, where you blame the Blog for all things going wrong in your life:

    "Sorry love, I got stuck at work because I had to write my blog",

    "I wish I could help with the cleaning but my wrists are tired from writing for my blog"

    "That other women was research for my blog, I do love you really…"

    As marketers we should know better. Before we do anything we should be asking: "What is the objective?" "What do we want to achieve through writing our Blog". Lets face it, I’m not going to write for our Blog every day if I’m not going to get anything in return. I couldn’t think of anything more boring!

    So in true Heavy Chef style, this month we are going to be working on Blogs (specifically for businesses) and the starting point should therefore be clarifying the objective of our Blog. We are also going to be working closely with our most dedicated blogging client – Sophia from The Cape Table Club. Sophia is truly committed to writing on a daily basis buts wants to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of a reward for her efforts. I’m sure we’ll also have Karin from Wood You Like joining in, as she is another one of our dedicated bloggers whose blog is certainly help build her business.

    So the first question we need to ask is "What do we want to get out of our blog?"

    I’ll start the ball rolling:

    1) Higher search engine position
    2) Greater awareness of our company
    3) Opportunity to up sell products (providing we have subscribers who read it)
    4) Opportunity to keep in contact with your current customers (if they go there?)
    5) Gain feedback from clients on the things you are doing.
    6) MORE BUSINESS

    Fred will correct me if I’m wrong, but the focus of OUR new blog is to bring about greater website profitability which is gain in three ways:

    1) We need more people to find us in South Africa via the search engines, so we are going to use the blog as an optimising tool to gain higher positioning.
    2) Testing ground for new ideas that we can then recommend for our clients to make their website more profitable. Thereby growing our knowledge and reputation.
    3) A focus point for generating some PR.

    - Mike

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