The HeavyChef Project

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.

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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
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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

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