Would it surprise you if over 40 percent of the queries entered into search boxes at search engines consist of proper nouns, such as the names of specific people or places or things?

Or that combination’s of proper nouns and nouns might make up over 70 percent of most searches?

At least those are a couple of the conclusions from researchers at Yahoo who are trying to find effective ways to better understand the structure of search queries used by searchers.

A study of queries entered into Yahoo’s search engine in August of 2006 took a close look at The Linguistic Structure of English Web-Search Queries (pdf), and tried to get an understanding of the way that people phrase what they are looking for when they search.

The researchers behind the study came up with some interesting information about the queries that people use, and the structure of those queries.

For example, when people perform a second search related to a previous search, one of the most common things that they change in their search terms are numbers. Someone looking for information about the first Spiderman movie might type into a search box the phrase “spiderman 1.” Following up, they may then type in “Spiderman 2.”

The rest of the article dives into the use and structure of peoples query habits and tendencies, it truly will help get you in the mind of the searcher and user easier. As a SEM/SEO expert I sometimes don’t realize – I don’t search like regular people, I use it as a TOOL…most people don’t.
…..Click here to Read more Study on the Structure of Search Queries – SEO by the Sea

Thanks again to Bill @ SEObytheSea.com for such a great post…his site is awesome.

This is a very simple yet effective SEO tip for local businesses & regional brick and mortar stores, especially if you’re looking to rebrand or start a business from the ground up.

Make sure to make and brand your business name with your main keywords in it if possible. This is important for communicating what your business does along with achieving organic search results (and making sure your incoming links are using relevant anchor text, so when people link to you, they automatically link using relevant keywords).

Remember the days when every business was naming themselves “AAA Mechanics” or “1st American Modeling” to rank highly in the Yellow Pages’ alphabetical order listings? Well those days are long gone! Now it’s time to rank for organic local search results.

For example, if you have a modeling studio in say Florida. You can name the company Florida Modeling Studios. Rather than something like ABC Inc. that has no keywords. (Hopefully you can get a domain with similar keywords as well, which will assist with ranking.)

The advantage of this is you can easily use keywords in your content while referring to your company name. This will enable you to use keywords for on page optimization without sounding ridiculous or unnaturally forcing keywords into your copy.

Looking at article directory stats

Here’s a look at give top tier article directories and their traffic ranking and standings:

Using Compete.com for keyword research, here is a list of some of organic non-brand name keywords
each of these article directories ranks for:

Performing a page level backlink analysis on these pages showed that all but one had a very small number of external links. Instead of external links, these pages ranked on the combination of domain trust, internal anchor text, and on page SEO.

One of the benefits of using article syndication websites used to be the backlinks. However a look through most of these websites now shows that many are using the nofollow tag, negating the effect of any backlinks. The secondary benefit came from the links embedded in the articles that were being syndicated. Again, a page level backlink analysis showed that the majority of these inbound links were no-followed, removed, or on websites of low or questionable quality. However there were a few mid-level quality, straight links that turned up.

So is submitting content to article directories still worth doing? Once you leave the top tier article sites, the drop in quality and traffic is fairly steep. For anything more competitive than long tail 4+ word keywords, it is my opinion it’s not worth the effort. Unless you are targeting extremely uncompetitive phrases, with disposable URLs, mass submission and blaster software, is also not worth the time and expense.

However, that doesn’t mean article directories should be completely ignored. For new and developing websites, article syndication can have some value for self promotion and the occasional mid-level backlink. The danger however is having your article, on a domain with more trust, outranking you in the SERPs. Most article directories have fairly aggressively placed advertising, and the likelihood of someone not clicking a competing advertisement and making it to the bottom and using your link are fairly slim. So I would recommend using  second tier content that’s not quite good enough for your website. Never duplicate content on your website and an article directory. It forces the search engine to choose who is the original and who is the duplicate. Instead opt for a complete rewrite.

One of the more controversial ways to use an article directory is for reputation management. This approach allows you to use the domain trust, internal anchor text and on page SEO factors of the directory to your advantage. The likelyhood of an article directory outranking your main domain for your company name is fairly small. However, in many cases it does have the potential to outrank most user-generated content or review-based websites that might be ranking for your name. A carefully crafted title, combined with a few targeted links from your official website can carry a lot of weight, and usually displace negative listings.

In a previous article “Scalable On-Page SEO Strategies,” I discussed various approaches to optimizing large-scale web sites. In the article I alluded to creating “recipes” or formulas for optimized title tags, and allowing that automation to be overridden by manual optimization. Let’s look at this process in more detail, and applied not just to page titles but other HTML tags as well.

Programmatic formulas

To raise the content optimization of every page on the site to a 60-75% optimal level, first create formulas for the title tag, H1 heading, meta description and (optionally) the meta keywords that correspond to data fields in the database. Each template will have different data fields available to it, so each template needs its own formula. Here is a simple example from Amazon.com:

Subcategory Template: Business & Investing Books (http://www.amazon.com/Business-Investing-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=3)

Title tag: {subcategory name} {category name} at Amazon.com

H1 Heading: {subcategory name} {category name}

Meta Description: Earth’s Biggest Selection of {subcategory name} {category name}. Amazon.com strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find anything they might want to buy online at the lowest possible prices.

Meta Keywords: {subcategory name}, {category name}, amazon.com

Manual Review

Programmatic optimization is the first step to large-scale content optimization. But then a second pass is required.

For pages that drive high traffic and revenue (or that have the potential to be), manual content optimization should be done to target the more competitive keyword terms and phrases in your keyword list.

To make that keyword list actionable, you’ll need keyword to URL pairings. In other words, you’ll need to map your desired keywords to URLs on your site. It’s possible to do this algorithmically (automatically), though a solution that can do this well isn’t going to be cheap. Unless you have an enterprise-sized budget, probably you’ll be going with a manual approach.

Here is a manual approach that works well. Create a spreadsheet that contains every page you want to manually optimize. Paste in the keyword research you’ve already done, terms and popularity data. Then place one keyword next to every page — this is your primary keyword for the page, the keyword that you will target content optimization around to send the strongest signal to the search engines. Highest popularity keywords should be matched with the strongest pages, usually the pages at the highest levels of your site. If you still have keywords left, match the remaining keywords to pages as secondary keywords. These should support the keyword theme for the primary keyword. We refer to the primary keyword as the “declared search term.”

Once the keywords are mapped to the pages you plan to optimize manually, all that’s left is the writing. Easier said than done.

Long tail strategies

For this, consider a “Long Tail” SEO approach that we at Netconcepts call “thin slicing” — a term and concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book Blink. Gladwell uses “thin slicing” in the context of “rapid cognition,” where one makes snap judgments in their field of expertise. Surprisingly, those snap judgments are often times more accurate than considered opinion, i.e. assessments that have been labored over. There’s one important caveat: the phenomenon only holds true for experts, not for amateurs.

Thin slicing in the context of SEO involves touching key elements such as title tags, keyword URLs, H1 headings, and meta descriptions across thousands of pages quickly, monitoring for impact, and refining based on those results. Don’t try to optimize everything on the page, or you’ll get bogged down and lower your productivity.

We believe that thin slicing is as effective for the SEO expert as it is for Gladwell’s art historian. This may sound heretical, but with a daunting number of pages to get through, deciding on synonyms, verb tenses and word order should rely more on your intuition and a less on your keyword research. Make quick decisions; don’t overthink it or overanalyze it. Logically, by agonizing over the very best string of words to use for a title or H1 and continuously consulting keyword research tools, you get caught in the weeds and thus it costs you opportunity. After all, it’s holding you up from getting to the remaining thousands.

The “How” for thin slicing depends very much on your web site’s infrastructure. For example, a WordPress based site can employ the “mass edit” admin capability of our free SEO Title Tag plugin. It supports optimizing title tags and URLs (post “slugs”, more accurately) across many posts and pages quickly, without having to go to each post’s Edit screen individually.

Then there’s the “bulk upload” approach, where you import an updated list of title tags (or H1s or whatever) into your website’s underlying database. You start with a database export in CSV (comma separated values) format of your current title tags — along with the corresponding item ID numbers for each record, of course. Load the CSV file into Microsoft Excel and do your title tag optimization in the spreadsheet. Then upload the optimized title tags back into the database. Note that if your database does not have a field for the title tag, you’ll have to create it and re-code your site to override the programmatic title with the contents of this new field when it is populated with data. Rather than having to maneuver through phpMyAdmin or rely on your database administrator, have a CSV file upload function built into the admin interface of your content management system (CMS). When we added this capability to our GravityStream proxy admin, our optimizers and those at our clients and partner resellers experienced a nice boost in productivity.

If you prefer a forms-based web interface over working in Excel, you could build a “mass edit” view into your content management system’s admin interface, similar to the “mass edit” interface in SEO Title Tag. One feature we found invaluable when using web forms for thin slicing was to make the number of rows displayed per page user-configurable. Some users will want to display hundreds of records per screen, others will want much fewer, as too big of a web page will cause their web browser to crash or time out.

Next time you feel like optimizing 100,000 pages, remember the Two-Step: programmatic optimization first, then manual content optimization second.

Keyword research is often known as a “process” rather than just simple research, comprising of selecting the most popular keyword phrase(s) that will help internet users find your website (and therefore the information they are seeking!). Most web designers and administrators spend weeks and months on their web pages, fine-tuning them so that their pages can get a good ranking on major search engines but still find that they are listing near/at the bottom. This happens because of the simple fact that they have not chosen the RIGHT keyword phrases or their keyword research was not adequate/relevant to their audience needs. You should not make the same mistake (as long as you keep reading) if you are unable to reach your target audience and generate business – then what is the point of creating a website? Hence, the focus should be more on identifying the target audience as well as keyword research.

A good marketing strategy is one which focuses on its target audience and that should be your aim too. You need to reach out to them. Your focus can be geographical or demographical, region specific, location specific, age group specific, sex specific or even country specific. The focus can also be industry specific like trade, business, service, or products. It is about going niche!

Keyword Research Process
Now let’s get down to understanding the keyword research process. The process of keyword research involves certain steps, which can be identified as:

1.    Discovering Keywords: The discovering keywords phase will focus mostly on identifying as many optimum performance keywords as possible and at the same time they should be related to your website, business, product, service, and target audience
2.    Analyzing Keywords: In the analysis phase, you will be adding more information to search for keywords like identifying existing competition, certain limitations that are PageRank based and the actual potential for page ranking
3.    Selecting Keywords: Selecting keywords is the most critical phase in the entire process and requires objective measurement based short-listing of all optimum performance keywords. You need to focus on the website, how you want to project it to the customers and on the target audience within any limitations that you have identified or analyzed.
4.    Deploying Keywords: The Deployment phase focuses on how well you use the selected keywords or keyword phrases through HTML code, website copy, as well as tags.

NOTE: Avoid the “keyword density” pitfall! Don’t stuff your web pages with keywords as this will backfire and the SEO campaign will fail completely. Try SEOintelligence Today to increase your rankings and choose the RIGHT keywords the beginning!