Archive for the ‘Keywords’ Category

The first and most critical step to an effective SEO campaign is choosing the right keywords to target. Over and over, I consult with business owners who choose keywords that are too competitive, too vague, or too small. This post is a step toward helping you solve this problem. Choosing the right keywords is not as complicated as it may seem, and it isn’t by pure black magic that SEO consultants choose the best keywords for your campaign. Here are four things we evaluate to determine the value of a keyword. Are People Using It? The first step to effective

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What’s the one thing about keyword research that matters? It isn’t traffic, it isn’t competition, and it isn’t CPC. It’s conversion potential. It’s a common fallacy, both inside the search engine optimization industry and out. You have clients that push you to target “babies” just because it gets hundreds of thousands of searches a month, even though they only provide Lamaze classes to the suburbs of San Francisco. You might think that, since you sell real estate in Denver, ranking for the term “Denver Colorado” would be a good idea, since it gets so much traffic. And look, low AdWords

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You might have heard the term “semantic analysis”, “latent semantic analysis” or even the terrifying “latent dirichlet allocation” (LDA) batted around in conversations with local SEO company reps, or by SEO newbies who want to sound smart. It’s a moderately complex topic that’s strikingly undocumented from an SEO perspective, so here’s a simple explanation: Latent Dirichlet Allocation is a model that determines the meaning of a word or document by looking at words that appear nearby. There you go! Not so bad, is it? The complex part comes in when we start looking at how the search engines use LDA

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  Duplicate content issues and keyword cannibalization are closely related problems. Both occur when multiple pages on a site compete for rankings for the same query. Pages “cannibalize” keywords by taking traffic from each other and spreading page authority, links and other nifty SEO factors across multiple pages, resulting in lower overall rankings. While targeting distinct keyword phrases combats this, it’s very easy to want to make several pages for phrases that your main pages does not expressly target that are semantically similar, as is often the case. How is cannibalization different from duplicate content? The duplicate content issue and

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