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
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7 Comments
Sorry, another question. If I am Suzie Soap from Ireland and I want to search for bbq tips for cooking, how will I know to place this in quotation marks?
You wont.
But Google thinks a site that contains those words together in exactly that order is more relevant to suzzie soaps search (all other things being equal) than a result that has the words jumbled up. However the key here is repetition. Continually using the same phrase. This is why we have decided on one phrase to focus for WWC: “profitable websites”. You need to decide which one or two phrases is relevant to all your blog posts. Hence the first question on this quest was: What is your focus. We now need to take that focus and look at the results and decide on a phrase that best fits the bill.
Let me know what you come up with.
I reckon keeping a blog going is hard enough on its own, without having to constantly think about slipping the right keywords in. Either you’re going to start writing irrelevant (and probably boring) posts about bbq tips, or you’re going to run out of inspiration.
I would say to Sophia, keep going with writing good posts, and grow your blog by quality, not tactics!
Hey Mike
Interesting! I struggle a bit with applying SEO rules to a blog post…comes across a little fabricated - but hey, that’s just my opinion. I’m all for blogging about stuff that you know people will search for, but when you are writing a personal account of something I dunno. Maybe this is where we need to seperate “business” blogs and “personal” blogs?
Really good point. I think thats why the first we need to do is decide on the focus of the blog. What do we want to achieve from it?
Personally doing the heavy chef project blog makes sure I’m proactively looking at ways of making ones website profitable. So its a way of keeping disciplined about my researching of new ways of promotion. But just as importantly I want to use it as a way of getting more traffic to our site so optimisation is important for me in this case. i suppose even without optimising this blog, just ebing able to help our current customers and also provide a cool two way process so we can all learn from each other is worth it alone.
Just read Andrews post. Sorry bro, Fred seems to get the alerts for new comments and not me, so missed you totally.
As I mentioned to Shane, I agree that the spirit of Sophias blog is what makes it great to read and stifling her natural flow would be a bad move.
However I do believe there can be a balance. Trying to find the natural balance between good writing and optimisation can be hard at times, but check out her lastest post (http://capetable.typepad.com/cape_table_club/2006/08/lunches_and_lau.html#more) which is spot on.
Stick to your free flowing lively blogs and just always be aware of any opportunities that may arise to slot in the keywords, without destroying the natural flow. If they don’t go in, they don’t go in, if they do its a bonus.
In terms of “growing your blog by quality”, again I agree. I think the quality keeps the reader coming back and certainly helps with referrals to the blog, but the objective of the site is to get people from the states and europe to the blog, to be convinced of sophias expertise and then come down to Cape Town. Therefore we have to do as much as we can to get new traffic to the blog. optimisation is part of this process.
A wonderful post and very interesting tips! To discover so many things about cooking is a real pleasure.