Category: SEOTech Talk

Ad Hoc Keyword Research is Dead

Determining an optimal keyword list can be a very involved process and is always considered the lynchpin of any successful search marketing campaign. Gone are the days of focusing your search marketing efforts on a phrase list consisting of one or two keyword terms. These “short-tail” phrases might prove to be over saturated in the search engines results or are lacking in specific relevancy to your message thus leading to a poor conversion potential. Finding those “long-tail” terms will always lead to a great ROI potential, and greater user retention.

The Process –In a Nutshell

The phraseology process has in recent years has truly become an art form and each analyst will have a core set of tools and different methods of data collection when crafting their final targeted terms.

The first step of this process typically includes the collecting of related search terms en masse. Generating large groups of search terms varying in length are gathered using keyword search tools and one should utilize more than one set of tools. Relying on one keyword tool can be detrimental to the end result when assessing your keyword targets. It is always a safe bet to back up your search data comparing the results between multiple sources. As one can imagine different search data sources can lead to very different results.

I have been sending and enforcing Cease and Desist letters for a while now and I have observed that people can be really emotional when you let them know they may be doing something wrong. I will share a unique instance and I will provide some helpful tips to survive your own C and D experience.

In a brilliant move yesterday, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)  has updated their ‘Crawl Errors’ section by adding the ‘Source URL’ to the Errors for URLs in Sitemaps and Not Found (404) reports. Why is this brilliant? Well previously, for those users with challenges acquiring server log files in order to determined the source of the link for those errors which originated from external URLs, a band-aid redirect was the only option (not very many low level programs would declare the referring page so this was quite a challenge for most). While that corrects the HTTP error it doesn’t address the root cause which was a website owner posting a malformed or outdated link to your website. If this link arrives from a highly reputable source, you’ll be doing them a favour by informing them of the error which will also help with their own site’s user experience and will get you some well earned brownie points. As well, correcting the link would swing any Page Rank (PR) your way and you’d also have a great excuse here to solidify a healthy link relationship.

Show me Where these Dead Links are Coming From

Okay, here’s a snip of the new feature;

“Don’t Break the Web” is a rule that the Internet Explorer development team has been applied to six major versions of IE over the past decade, with each of these versions seeing the application of this rule in a different way. It is a rule may appear ironic for some, given that IE has been the source of many problems for web developers since the wide-spread adoption of CSS, and with the more recent popularization of standards compliant web pages. It is also a rule that represents the balance that the IE development team attempts to find between backwards-compatibility and interoperability (web standards), and a new post on the IE Blog this morning shows that the IE8 development team may have found the way to achieve this balance.