Well.. it can't. At least not exactly. But it can certainly
help!
First, what good are hit counts? They don't matter as much as sales
numbers. Do you go into a motel room because it has "sex" on the sign? Or
do you stay away from sleazy places like that?
Web pages with too many hot keywords are search engine poison! Our
experience has been that search engines will not crawl from the top page
of se_report because it has too many unrelated hot
keywords. But when we feed one of the bottom pages, pages focused on one
topic, like
http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/hotel.html search engines crawl the
bottom quarter of our site. Why? The top 75 keywords are just too hot,
too full of words and phrases that are in too many web pages, and so
appear too unrelated to anything specific. That strongly suggests that YOU
need to be as specific as you can get on each of your web pages. Search
engines penalize for extraneous hot keywords, both for having them, and
for your having too much competition. Get specific, and you will not only
get better placement, you will also get more qualified buyers.
a search engine phrase.
On that cyber-street,
your store front is your TITLE and META description tags. Are
you on a busy
cyber-street? Does it matter? Only if YOU have what THEY want!
A good placement in the search engines, obtained by using
the right key words and key phrases lets you get more done with a
smaller, cheaper site. That is what the Search Engine Report is all
about -- Finding Motivated Buyers
What Cyber-Street is Your Customer On?
"Why are people using your product?" If your product is a commodity,
it isn't the qualities of your product that are important, as everyone
carries the same thing. Once you are on that cyber-street, you need to
know the "psychological association distance" between your prospective
customer and your product -- where you are in the "thematic
landscape", the landscape of themes that the minds of your customers
travel in. (What some people call psychographics.) Where in your
customer's thematic landscape are you?
What are the hills and river valleys in the thematic landscape near you
that attract web traffic?
If you are marketing that motel room, do you want to be at the top of
the list of 900,000 motel related pages? What is in that thematic
landscape? Mostly random cities. The chances of one of those people
contemplating a visit to your area are practically nil. Lots of hits,
zero sales, and heavy bandwidth charges. Why bother
wasting your time competing in that random thematic landscape? Fight
the battles that you can win a worth while reward for!
Do you want to be at the top of the list when they pick "motel" and
the name of your city? That is better, at least they want to come here.
Yes, you do want to be there. But what does your prospect see when he
clicks on his "back" button? Isn't it your competition? Is that what you
want?
Do you want to be on a search engine list where you have NO
competitors? Strategic keyword and site planning can get you there --
Zero Competition!
Marketing Convenience, Not Commodity
What is on their mind when they start looking for you and your
competition? What is unique about what you offer them? Nothing! Face
it, you are marketing a commodity. You can't sell a commodity
just by selling what you are selling. To get Zero Competition,
You have to sell your prospect before he starts looking for your
commodity.
Sell the Neighborhood
How can you sell someone before he even knows he needs you? By
putting yourself in the middle of his thematic landscape. Ask your
customers what they were thinking of when they decided they needed the
services you sell. Not why they chose you; why they were in your area
long enough to need a motel. Search for your city name (or what they use
your product for) in the search engines. What do you find on those web
pages? Do some leg work, look for plaques and other historical markers, as
well as other points of interest. Whether you are renting motel rooms, or
selling drills, look at what is in your physical neighborhood too --
encourage your prospects to make one shopping trip for two or three
purposes -- team up with your allies in your geographic and thematic
neighborhoods.
Web Keywords Define Position
With those answers, you can come up with a list of fundamental
keywords, keywords related to why people use your product or service; why
they want to be in your spot on the thematic landscape. Whether you have
too many, or too few keywords to fit the roughly 1,000 character limit of
the Meta tags, you probably have not picked all of the keywords and
phrases people actually use, and maybe not even the best ones. That is
where we come in.
It isn't just the meta tags, either. Header lines and text are
important too! Very Important! Make sure your header lines contain
search phrases.
Finding Search Phrases
Two important search phrase sources are your web logs and our web
reports.
Check your web logs for the HTTP_REFERER field. In it, you will find
the keywords people use to find your site, as well as others who link to
you. Of course, your web logs will not have hits you lost because of
unknown keywords; but they will have words you have not suspected as
important.
To find more unknown or unsuspected keywords, check our web site.
http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/. Are any of your keywords in the
top 100 keyword or associated lists? Subscribe to our top 200 freebee
report, and see if any of them are on that list. Or better yet, subscribe
to a Custom Top 500 or Top 1000 list, and in the process of setting it up,
we'll help you determine which of your keywords and phrases are more
common, and likely to be worth tracking. We can even discuss site
strategies and architectures, which is our main service.
Strategic Marketing Allies
The next strategic move would be to develop a directory page and
perhaps a series of pages for groups of keywords commonly used together.
Involve your allies in the thematic landscape.
Hub and Spoke Architecture
The extended form is called a wheel and hub, or spoke and hub
architecture. The circumference is made of pages peripheral to
your services, but designed to satisfy common search engine queries -- the
themes that interest your potential clients and make them happy by
providing useful information. Use those pages to draw prospects into your
hub -- the core business service or product pages of your site.
You do not need to own the peripheral pages, but you DO have to swap
links with them. It can be better if you do own those pages and provide
them as a service to the clients the pages are about, and to your
customers.
Make a Web Directory
The simplest way is to simply swap links with the pages of others in
your immediate thematic landscape, and to become a directory to these
other pages. That lets you legitimately add the keywords and common query
phrases that reflect the interests of your clients. You need to exchange
traffic that seeks both your services and the services of other allies in
your prospect's thematic landscape.
With that, you come closer to the top on your primary keywords and
something else type queries. (E.G. "Blacksmith and Motel", "Cape Cod and
Motel", "Cape code and Wellfleet" etc. Even though the last two are
mis-formed in that they are equivalent to "cape OR cod AND "...) But that
is often not where the most productive hits can come from.
Use Popular but Specific Search Phrases
With multiple keywords, you also show up at the top for queries
naming two or more of those attractions. (e.g. "blacksmith and Cape Cod",
"blacksmith and beach") Now you are getting hits from qualified
prospects who will need your services, and you are showing them
what else your area has to offer. By finding out where their thematic
landscape is, by hitting the right search phrases, you can become a hub
for their web exploration, and act as a genuine hub in their exploration
of the real world around you.
And by the way, did you see any other motels on those search
engine pages that brought them to you? Didn't think so! ZERO
COMPETITION!
Who is your Web Competitor?
Now, Before you put up those lovely pictures of your motel rooms, ask
yourself again, what pages does that page compete against? Why did you
get that hit? Because your prospective customer wanted something else.
Who is your primary competitor of the moment? Your primary
competitor of the moment is the search engine's list of what the customer
wants. What do you have to give him to keep him? Either give him
a more focused list of things he wants, or the specific information he
wants. And don't forget to ask him to bookmark your page.
How do you insure your are in the right part of his thematic
landscape, on the right "cyber-street"? Don't try to be on "the right"
cyber-street, be on many of them! Using a circle of pages, each on a
specific area of interest in your area, which also mentions the other
areas of interest. For "blacksmith and cape cod", you are talking about
blacksmith shops in Cape Cod first, and then other attractions in that
area. Your motel info is off on another page, probably linked by a 1/8th
page or _smaller_ picture or logo of a cozy motel room on the upper right
of each information page. He looks at the blacksmith info, checks out
other things of interest in your area, and decides YOU are the handy place
to stay. And he NEVER looked for your competition!
Sell Yourself as a Convenience
If you find out where your prospect is in thematic space, what
cyber-street he is walking on, and put good information in the center of
it, you are no longer a commodity, but a convenience.
Using psychographics, you have qualified them, psych'ed them, and
converted them into customers before they ever started searching for the
commodity you and your competitors are selling. (That is why Pep Boys
sponsor auto racing TV shows, and Ace Hardware sponsors home workshop type
shows.)
And we helped you find the magic words to do so.
Marketing This Page
Did we use our reports for marketing this page? Of course!
Because the term "marketing" scored much higher in the search engine
stats that selling, we replaced many of the sales words with marketing
words, particularly in the titles. We also removed the word "m a r k e
t", because of the high correlation of "m a r k e t" with "s t o c k - m a
r k e t". (Which is why we spaced it out here. We don't want their empty
hits.)
Next, we used the report to decide what to use for subtitles.
Subtitles should have key search phrases and search terms whenever
possible.
We reduced the number of meta keywords to those close
to the top of the list, keywords clearly relevant to the pages. Our
initial guess contained more counterproductive terms used for non-web
marketing queries, than for web marketing queries. Don't guess, be sure!
Then we created a meta description tag that
incorporated the five top web marketing related search phrases, covering
95 percent of the queries on the topic.
Finally, we submitted the page to the top search engines by hand. Many
of the submission services will submit a page where it should not be.
This has nothing to do with the top S words; whether that be two people in
a room, or a bunch of men throwing various spherical objects around on a
flat area outdoors or indoors. We don't want their hits, we want YOUR
hits.
Keep Up with Change
Is that it? Hardly. What people look for changes with the seasons
and the moods of the nation. You need to keep up, to watch what is
happening in your thematic landscape. You need to keep asking your
customers what they are thinking about. We can help with our
weekly lists.