Charities have a unique SEO problem: there’s not a lot of people searching to give to them, which makes keyword discovery difficult. I saw that with Mada Center, a soup kitchen in Montreal that I tried to do PPC for but we failed for lack of keywords, and recently have come across a similar challenge for Achiya, an Israeli charity for learning disabled kids whom I work with via illuminea, a web agency in Jerusalem.

Without giving away the farm, what we’ve decided to do is produce content to brand them as the experts about their issue, and target terms related to learning disabilities.
For instance, we want to give parents tips about coping with ADHD kids, giving techniques on doing homework with the kids and so forth.

Some that sell products as a means of fund-raising have it easier, or participate in well known stuff like ‘adopt-a-child programs’ but it’s generally uncommon for people to be searching for charities to give to.

I’d be curious to hear if you guys ever did SEO for a charity?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

The following is a guest post from James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

eCommerce SEO is a unique beast. There are technical issues to consider, scalability challenges to think about and countless other opportunities and drawbacks that need to be taken into account. We work a great deal in the eCommerce space; here are some of the ways I know will take your or your client’s business to the next level.

Put an End to Ranking Cannibalism

The problem

eCommerce websites are notorious for having multiple versions of very similar pages which can cause serious SEO headaches. This is because there might be multiple URLs as a result of sort/search parameters or category labels.

In an ideal world, you will have one page that ‘champions’ each keyword so you can concentrate resources and measure progress.

I’m not talking heavy anchor text linkbuilding here e.g. all links pointing at your page for ‘picnic blankets’ need to be for ‘picnic blankets’. I mean a general awareness across your organisation that you are trying to get ‘yoursite.com/picnic-blankets’ to rank for ‘picnic blankets’.

There’s nothing wrong with getting multiple listings for a term –if you can. But if a client isn’t visible for a term because they have split links and social signals between 2 or even more pages, get a first listing ranking, then you can worry about a second listing.

The solution: How to eliminate page overlap in ecommerce SEO

1. Generate a crawl report using SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool (or comparable software).

2. Run a Google Analytics Top Content report.

3. Go through the sitemap (and the site itself) to identify content that overlaps and go through the crawl report to identify pages with duplicate content.

4. You should now have a list of pages that need some attention from you.

5. Using the data from both the crawl report and the top content report, you can now run through each page and analyse the best resolution – this might be redirecting or canonicalising one page to another, building out the content on a page to make it sufficiently different or useful, or perhaps consolidating content from multiple pages into one hub and redirecting all link juice into one place.

If you are unfamiliar with the term canonicalising, then I am simply referring to the use of the rel=canonical tag. This indicates to Google and other search engines which version of a page you want to rank.

The rel=canonical tag is easily implemented by adding the following tag to the of a page that is not your keyword champion, but has similar content.

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example/product12345.html" >

Manual implementation of rel=canonical across a site could take a great deal of time but there are numerous plugins for a variety of platforms which can make the process a lot less painful. Also, many of the leading eCommerce software platforms have started to incorporate automatic rel=canonical tags into their system to make the process very straightforward indeed. Check with your eCommerce provider or web developer to see what the situation is for you.

Caveat: Social shares don’t appear to redirect in the same way link juice does so take this into account when deciding what to do with a page.

If you are an SEO practitioner then I think you will be amazed at the impact you can have on a client site just by doing this kind of housekeeping. As Warren Buffett would say “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

Optimise Detail Pages’ Content with Structured Markup

There’s more to on-page optimization in today’s richer web than titles and keyword use, and with stronger competition, the need to go that extra step is increasingly important to gain an edge.

On-page optimisation for eCommerce websites is an extremely diverse subject but one area I would concentrate on initially would be on-page markup since it is apparent that Google will be focusing more and more on this in future. In particular, I would be looking at adopting the Schema.org principles.

Schema.org is a set of html tags for structured data that is supported by all the leading search engines. It allows you to add rich context to your website’s pages, by telling search engines what parts of the content refer to commonly sought information such as price, average review score, number of reviews, colour etc.

In turn, the search engines use this to make your search listing that extra bit jazzy. They create rich snippets in the search results displaying things like price, rating, availability, brand, condition, model number and much more besides.

The main benefit is an increased clickthrough rate. Over time, it could also actually improve your rankings because Google is working user feedback metrics like clickthrough rate into its algorithm.

Schema-Creator.org is a fantastic free tool which allows you to easily add the required markup to your pages. You can enter all the details about a product for example and it generates the markup code which you can then copy and paste into the page on your site.

Afterwards, you can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to make sure you have implemented everything properly.

Scale is currently an issue when it comes to implementing Schema.org but as this area advances, readily available tools to automate and scale this will almost certainly follow. There is already a WordPress plugin (I haven’t tested this yet though).

I would also suggest that many of the leading eCommerce software companies out there will create of add-ons or plugin because the future of SEO is all about a richer web.

If you have an able web developer then chances are they will be able to advise you as to the best way to implement structured markup in your particular situation. Planning a redesign or a restructure – now is the time to look at ways Schema.org can be incorporated into your code.

Finally, also in the context of richer markup, you might also consider implementing rel=author for any content, blog posts or guides you have on your site. Rel=author is an html attribute for the link tag (like the alt attribute for images) indicating who has created the content, and allows authors to carry their authority around the web with them, regardless of what site they write on.

This will ensure you or your client, any authors on the site and the website itself will all start to build a reputation within your chosen industry. At some point in the future when Google really starts to take into account the Google Authorship Markup (rel-author) you will be ahead of the curve and likely gain an edge over the competition.

Don’t Set and Forget Keywords

Very few organisations review their keywords’ performance regularly, if at all. That’s a big mistake.

To many, keyword research, is a set and forget exercise, believing it is possible to make your keyword selections and then just plug away building links and content for months or even years, regardless of whether that particular keyword is still performing well in a business context.

The first step we take with clients is to understand and analyse their keyword portfolio, in particular the performance of individual keywords and categories of keywords.

How you decide to structure your audit depends on the goals of your client, but we mainly analyse looking at metrics like current ranking, current traffic, current conversion rate, revenue contribution, future potential and time to conversion.

Time to conversion is a particularly interesting metric because it helps you to identify what stage in the consumer decision making process a keyword might fit into. This helps you tailor content that targets this keyword to be as relevant as possible to the user.

For example, a keyword might have an average time to conversion of 35 days, a relatively long period of time.

Such a keyword is likely at the problem recognition or information seeking stages of the consumer decision process. You would do well to encourage users who arrive via this keyword to download a product brochure perhaps, get a product tour or even a demo.

In contrast, if you identify a keyword with a short average time to conversion – say a few minutes to a few days – this would suggest the consumer is much further along in the decision making process. So you should be encouraging ‘add to basket’ type actions as visitors are clearly on the verge of handing over their money – offering up a product guide or a product tour is inappropriate this late in the process.

Point #6 in my recent SEOmoz post talked more about performing keyword audits.

Auditing keywords is no easy task. There is quite a bit of data to trawl through but it will be worth it because it can help you to shape an overall SEO strategy that delivers a far higher return on investment, over a strategy that relies upon throwing links at the wall to see what sticks.

• Look specifically for keywords that contribute a high-level of revenue or have a particularly high conversion rate – identify ways you could increase traffic on these keywords. Are you ranking as high as you could be?

• Look for keywords that have strong traffic but a poor conversion rate – this could be an indicator that something is going wrong and is a good place to start when it comes to fixing and optimising the performance of a site.

• Look for ways to branch out around high-conversion keywords. Identify common themes amongst your top performing keywords and see if there are associated terms that you could be targeting.

Essentially a keyword performance audit is about identifying opportunities and looking at ways to capitalise on them.

Build a Community

SEO and social are now inextricably linked – we are hurtling towards life after link trust so your website and your business need to be ready.

Building a community serves multiple purposes both now and later down the line:

• Build a loyal base of customers – brand loyalty, less churn, increased profitability.

• Helps with SEO – user generated content can help scale your SEO.

• Future-proofs your website – if Google switches to more of a social trust algorithm, you’re not going to end up out in the cold.

First and foremost, your community should be respected – don’t be ‘that company’ that fakes a community or sells them out to turn a fast buck. Building a community can be a long term strategy that is beneficial for both business and individual alike.

You can leverage the power of your community in the following ways:

• For content – encourage community members to add comments, submit reviews and generally contribute to your website. All of this is long-tail content that enriches your pages and helps improve visibility AND you haven’t had to write it yourself or pay someone else to.

• For linkbuilding – As Patrick Altoft from Branded3 points out: “Commercial sites struggle to attract natural links.” This is because the person you are requesting the link from knows that in some way you are going to (over time) benefit financially from the link, in the form of direct traffic and increased search engine visibility. Leveraging a community for links can mean running competitions and prize giveaways to generate social shares and actual links. Rewarding users for linking back to you, or even giving them an identity (and a widget/badge) to show their commitment to your community.

• Grow your revenue – encourage advocates/ambassadors by offering rewards and incentives for helping you as a business achieve your goals. Referral bonuses or community points that can be exchanged for goods or cold hard cash are great ways to kickstart a community growth explosion.

Use Punchtab – a great engagement app that helps you easily reward your community when they perform a particular action e.g. like you on Facebook, makes a comment, submits a review and so on.

For further reading, you should try Motivating a Community and Gamify your Community; both provide valuable insights and tactics for encouraging and building a community even in a commercial context.

More posts on ecommerce and ecommerce SEO:

Don’t Leave Shipping Rates To The Cart
5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence
Ecommerce Widgets and more – video
How Inhouse SEOs can Add Value Beyond Search
Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Shopping

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Short tip for today, scratchpad style:

Retargeting ads are very successful … because they target an audience that already visited your site, and because they tend to offer deals to people who almost bought, but for whatever reason left before purchasing. These deals help push people across the threshold and get them to buy.

What if you did that offline? Someone comes into your car dealership and walks away with no keys… Call them back the next day with another offer based on what you think would close the deal. Don’t start chasing the next prospect [yet].

Have you guys ever done this? Or taken other online tactics offline?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by Phil Golobish, Senior SEO Consultant at Slingshot SEO. When he’s not writing posts for Gab, Phil helps Slingshot achieve digital relevance for deserving brands. You can follow Phil at @saintphilip or +Philip Golobish.

In 2006, AOL accidently released a ton of Google click through rate data. Clever marketers then used this data to estimate traffic a site could receive in any ranking position, and to forecast SEO ROI.

Since then, Google has made countless algorithm changes, incorporated personalization options, and blended results with images, videos, news, etc.

Given these changes, are the AOL CTR numbers still relevant? More specifically, what impact has blended search results had on CTR? The study Slingshot performed after the jump!

To answer the questions above, Slingshot SEO’s Research and Development department decided to do its own Google click through rate study using 2010 – 2011 non-branded keyword analytics and ranking data from its portfolio of clients. Enquiro and Optify have done similar studies and their much-appreciated results are overlaid in the graph below.

The graph above is incredibly useful for making current CTR estimates for ranking positions. However, analysis of Slingshot’s client data suggests that in some cases CTRs on traditional organic listings can vary wildly specifically when a non-branded query triggers a blended SERP that contains images, videos, news, etc. See the graph below for details. Note: Only the Optify study was included to simplify the comparison.

Aside from position one, the most significant change in CTR in a blended SERP is between positions two (2) and three (3). This difference between the two proposes an interesting SEO strategy question:

Should SEOs target keyword phrases that trigger blended results over like-volume keywords that do not, in order to win more traffic?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer and sample data is still being collected. We should have more conclusive data come August. However, savvy SEOs should be mindful of the different spreads of CTRs and should consider blended results during keyword selection for every search engine optimization campaign.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Ever try creating lots of Facebook ads that you wanted to track using Google Analytics? If so, you probably know Google’s URL Builder, which generates URLs with tracking tags. (See post-script for an explanation if you’re not familiar.) It does this for a spectacular amount of URLs at a time! Exactly one URL at a time, to be precise.

Frustrated by Google’s URL Builder tool? Here’s how to build URLs with tracking tags in bulk.

Use SEO Book’s “Keyword Concatenator” tool, and instead of inputting lists of keywords, input your URL and variables.

If you’ve never used SEO Book’s concatenator tool before, let me explain how it works. You input 2+ or more lists of words. You then press generate. The tool takes each word in list 1 and combines it with each word in list 2, to generate list #3.

For example, suppose I have these two lists.

List 1: car, cars, auto, autos
List 2: used, new

The tool will generate list #3: car used, car new, cars used, cars new, auto used, auto new, autos used, autos new.

Obviously, it’s important to get the order of the lists right.

The trick is to just use some creative thinking – exactly the kind of lateral thinking I teach in my book on advanced organic search marketing – and replace the keyword lists with so-called “name-value” pairs. That is, your tracking variables.

(A name-value pair is just the technical name for variables listed in a name-of-the-variable=value-of-the-variable format. You’ve all seen this before in math class. Y=X+1 And you’ve seen it in meta description tags and image tags. < Meta name=”Description” content=”This is where you put your meta description to try and generate a high CTR.” > < img src=”url of your image.jpg” alt=”description of the image for blind users and Googlebot” / > )

Step 1: In word list #1, you input your URL(s) and the first tracking variable:

Ex.: http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=

(You can’t see it because of the underline on the link, but there’s an underscore between “utm” and “source.”)

Step 2: In word list #2, you input the values for the first variable. Note: Only use commas, not spaces, or the tool will add spaces into your results:

email,bing,blogs

Step 3: In word list #3, you input the second variable:

&utm_medium=

Note: You must include both the ampersand (“and” sign) and the equal sign. The ampersand connects what follows to the rest of the URL. The equal sign tells Google Analytics that the text before the equal sign was the variable name and what follows is the variable’s value.

In word list #4, you input the values for the second variable:

cpa,cpc

In word list #5, input the third variable:

&utm_campaign=

At this point, you run out of lists in the tool, but that’s no problem. Step 6 is to generate results and turn those results into a single list so you can iterate in the tool.

- Click “Generate.”

- Copy-paste the results into a text editor (Word, Notepad etc are fine).

- Use find and replace to add a comma after the third variable, on each of the URLs you generated. In my example, I’d find “&utm_campaign=” and replace it with “&utm_campaign=,”. This makes the URLs fit to be used as words in the keyword list generator again.

- Copy-paste the resulting URLs back into SEO Book’s concatenator, in the text-input field for word list #1.

In word list #2, input values for the third variable… you get the idea.

Finally, generate your new list and import to Word. Use “Find and Replace” to eliminate the spaces inserted by the tool between keywords. Recall that the tool was built for concatenating keyword lists, not URLs. So you’ll usually get results with spaces. Ex.: seoroi.com/blog/?&utm_source= facebook &utm_medium= cpc

Bonus tip: Though Google Analytics requires input for the source, medium and campaign variables, you don’t need to use separate lists for each. That’s only the case if you’re using multiple sources, each with multiple mediums, each with multiple campaigns.

More commonly, you’ll just be tagging URLs for one source (ex.: AdWords), and it’s all CPC or email. So you can just concatenate that using one list, saving time. Ex.: In list #2, write: ?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=cpc .

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. In about 2-3 minutes, I bulk built 126 tagged URLs using this technique. Here’s just a handful for show:

http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=linkbait
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=google
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=bing
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=cpc
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=cpm
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=adwords
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=new-years &utm_term=commercial intent
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=linkbait
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=google
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=bing
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=cpc
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=cpm
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=adwords
http://seoroi.com/blog/?utm_source=email &utm_medium=cpc &utm_campaign=news-event &utm_term=commercial intent

Post-Script: Google Analytics will track any marketing campaign you’d like. You just need to add tracking tags as above, and Google Analytics will use those tags to organize the collected data for you. For example, tagging a URL with “utm_term=keyword-goes-here” will allow you to see a report on the visitors who came on URLs tagged with that term – how many visitors you got, your bounce rate, conversion rate etc.

P.P.S. Some of you may recall I shared a similar idea for local keyword list generation.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by John McElborough, who runs an SEO consultancy and Brighton web design company in the UK

In my last post here I shared some tactics for how you can cash in on long tail keywords using various content generation strategies. There’s no doubt that the long tail is where the traffic’s at but today I want to talk about the mid-tail which in many sectors is where the moneys at!

What’s this mid-tail then?

Well basically it’s the bit between the head and the long tail or to bastardise a graph from SEOmoz…

Mid-tail's where the money's at!

Mid-tail keywords are those terms which you want to rank for, you pro-actively optimise for but which don’t usually get your boss or clients all hot under the collar like a head term does. They’re the unsung hero’s of many SEO campaigns. Here are a few examples…

……….

Head: “Car insurance”

Mid tail: “Compare car insurance quotes”

Long tail: “What’s the best car insurance for a green Ford Mondeo 2002″

……….

Head: “Hotels”

Mid tail: “Brighton hotel deals”

Long tail: “Best price on Kings hotel Brighton in June 2011″

……….

Head: “SEO”

Mid tail: “SEO agency brighton”

Long tail: “Best brighton SEO agency under 500 pounds per month”

……….

Why target the mid-tail?

There’s a few reasons I think the mid-tail should be where you’re spending most of your SEO time…

The mid-tail converts in most cases far higher than the head or long-tail. Most purchase decision keywords like ‘compare’ or ‘buy’ keywords fall into the mid-tail category and most mid-tail phrases will be made up of 3-4 keywords, which statistically convert the best- again this SEOmoz graph paints the picture nicely

Mid-tail keywords are far, far easier to optimise for than head terms and more practical for small sites to target than the long tail. Just look at the drop in the sort of link numbers required to rank from head to mid-tail:

“Hotels” – about 2000 linking domains

“Brighton hotel deals” – about 70 linking domains

This puts these terms within the grasp of SME’s, new websites and local businesses who don’t have the budget to take on the big players for head terms.

[Ed: Check out my advanced SEO book for some chapters on converting homepage [e.g. head] traffic better and likewise for the long tail.]

Optimising for the mid-tail

There’s a few tactics and techniques which I use to optimise for these mid-tail terms beyond the standard SEO stuff which you already know about.

Clustering keywords

When you target head terms there’s usually very few keyword variations you can use but when you move down to mid-tail terms you can take on 5-10 variations of each keyword in what I like to call a cluster which might look like:

• Brighton hotel deals
• Hotel deals brighton
• Cheap brighton hotel deals
• Find brighton hotel deals
• Deals on brighton hotels

To manage these keywords I tag up each of these clusters in Raven or Advanced Web Ranking so I can look at ranking reports across a whole cluster rather than just for individual keywords. The thing about the mid-tail is the traffic on individual keywords often isn’t that impressive, but when you look at the total traffic for a cluster of 5 or 10 related keywords the total can often be greater than what you’d get off a single head term. It also makes sense to look at your rankings in aggregate across the cluster of mid-tail terms rather than looking at the rankings of individual keywords, which will fluctuate from month to month. here’s the type of reporting view I look at in Raven to analyse the performance of each cluster.

Here's an example of an aggregate traffic and ranking report for a cluster of keywords. The cool thing about Raven is it will also display your competitors average rank for the same cluster head to head.

Onpage optimisation

I try to take on one mid-tail keyword cluster per page with the main term from the cluster being the page name then the different variations scattered through the page title, H1 and body. In most cases it doesn’t matter if the exact keyword variation is written on the page or not because these keywords are very closely related and hopefully not uber-competitive.

Internal linking

This is absolutely the key to succeeding with the mid-tail for me. The trick here is to vary the anchor text used to link to your mid-tail targeting pages rather than using a fixed anchor in the navigation across the whole site.

The traditional internal linking model- all internal links use the same anchor text

The dynamic internal linking model- internal links use alternating anchor text from across a keyword cluster

By mixing the anchor text and cycling through the different keyword variations from the cluster your internal linking will be helping that page to rank for 5 variations instead of one. You can either dynamically vary the link anchor text in your menu system or if you’re using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla you can use a plugin like Gab’s excellent wordpress internal linking plugin or JV content links for Joomla. You may also enjoy this post on anchor text variation.

Link building

Assuming your mid-tail keywords are likely to be moderately competitive you’re going to need some external link building to these pages to get them to rank.

What I like about optimizing for mid-tail keywords is that you can accurately predict the amount of link building effort, number and quality of links required to rank; something which is hard to do with very competitive head terms these days. Factors like brand strength and domain trust are less of an issue at this level of keyword and most of the time you’ll find the pages with the most anchor text links and best PageRank occupying the top few positions.

Therefore the best strategy for link building to these pages is to be quite methodical about your link building and work to a number target. Just like your internal links cycle through your cluster to vary the anchor text you use to link back to the page. Again I’ll reference Raven Tools here as it makes tracking your clusters of links really easy using tags (Buzzstream also does this just as well)

Assign a tag for each of your clusters and tag each link to that cluster page with it.

I won’t go into details about how to actually get these links as that will vary from industry to industry but to me it makes sense that a mid-tail term should have a medium quality link, one which is permanent and not rented- so you might want to check out the SEO ROI link building services

I hope this post will make you rethink your keyword strategy and question whether going after those fat head terms is really the best use of your time and money. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by John McElborough, a [ed: awesome!] freelance SEO from Brighton, England who blogs at johnmcelborough.com

There’s been a lot of talk in the SEO world of late about the idea of ‘content farms’-  sites which exist principally to attract mid to long tail search traffic through large scale content generation.

Several high profile SEO’s have been pretty critical of sites like ehow, mahalo and livestong who use these tactics. Personally if a sites earning that much cash through SEO I’d rather learn from it than criticise so for my first guest post here on Gab’s blog I want to take a closer look at long tail tactics and share some practical tips for how pretty much any site can cash in on their markets long tail potential.

Step 1: Long tail keyword research

Although essentially the concept of long tail keywords implies that research isn’t necessary I would still recommend starting any long tail campaign by researching keywords. This research will help to inform your decisions about what new content you can create and how you can best optimize existing pages for new keywords. It will also give you a better feel for how people search so if you’re producing content you’ll instinctively use the language of the searcher and drop in long tail combinations without even thinking about it.

Personally I use Wordtracker here because, despite the anomalies it throws up it makes it easy to identify low competition long tail keywords using its KEI3 scoring system. Start with a few seed keywords on a topic of your choice then sort the results by the KEI3 score and pick off all the keywords which you think you can use in your campaign.

If you’re already getting a fair bit of long tail traffic you might want to try out Hittail- its come along quite a bit from when it was first released a few years back.

Step 2: Add content to existing pages

One of the best ways to start your long tail campaign is to identify pages on your site which already rank and expand on their content to introduce more long tail keyword combinations. Although to really max out on your long tail potential you’re gonna need to be developing new content pages eventually at first what I like to do is to identify thin content pages on my site where I can add extra words and introduce more long tail combinations. The good thing about this tactic is that if your sites newish and lacking trust you’re not diluting your pagerank by creating lots of new pages to soon.

To do this I start by getting into analytics and looking for a few pages to work on. Here I want to find pages with the most search traffic but fewest keywords- the logic being these pages are likely to be performing for short tail keywords but not driving much via the long tail. I you’re using GA you can do something like this…

You can also use the top pages on domain tool (or just webmaster tools) to identify your most linked to pages and then running a word count check on these pages to pinpoint where you’ve got strong pages with low content. The fact these pages are well linked to means you should be able to bulk out the content and they should start immediately ranking for a bunch of new keywords and driving more traffic.

It should probably go without saying that you need to apply some common sense when doing this. Fill a landing page with a load of copy and you run the risk of damaging conversion rates so tread carefully if you’re doing this with key sales pages and make sure you’re measuring your conversion rates so you can measure the profitability of this tactic.

Once you have these pages identified look at the keywords which are already sending them traffic and search for related terms.

Here’s a quick example…

Webmaster tools tells me these pages have a few links pointing to them:

But right now those pages are pretty thin, lets take the Playa Den Bossa page as an example….

Check out the entrance keywords for that page – only 51- that’s not many. If we double the content of this page it could easily double the number of referring keywords and the traffic it receives. Not to mention there’s an opportunity to turn that page into a better resource. On a crude level a page with 600 words is probably more likely to attract links than a page with 300.

So with that page identified all I need to do is to reshape the content of that page to include these extra combinations. This sort of work should be real bread and butter stuff for a decent copywriter. I’ll talk a bit more about some content strategies later.

Step 3: Optimise under performing pages

Basically this is about flipping the process above and looking for pages on your site which should be driving long tail traffic but aren’t. Usually this will either be a case of tweaking the keyword strategy or boosting the page up with a few links.

To find these pages again go to Analytics and export a list of pages which get low traffic from natural search (use your own judgement what ‘low’ is for your site).

Remove pages like your privacy policy or contact page which are likely to be in there then go through and select the thick content pages which you think should be doing better. As a guide if a page has got 300 words or more on it I’d expect it to get at least a trickle of long tail traffic in most cases. Here’s a beauty…

There’s 3 things you can do with these pages, ideally do all 3.

1. Tweak the copy to include new long tail keywords from your keyword research.
2. Increase internal links to the page – ideally link to it from a page with some decent PageRank like your homepage or a top level category.
3. Build external links – if it’s a case this page is in the supplemental index it should only take one decent link (or a handful of crap links!) to lift it out. I still fall back on article marketing in many cases to link to pages like this.

Step 4: Create new pages

Like I said before to really reach your sites full long tail potential you’re gonna need to be injecting new content rich pages into it. It’s best to approach this in a complimentary manner to your other search activity so don’t just look at keywords but try and structure these new pages in a way that they have a decent chance if attracting organic links as well (link bait) and offer good value for returning visitors.

The biggest challenge here is pumping this new content into your site without damaging conversion rates or diluting the PageRank distribution of your existing pages to a point where it disrupts your rankings. Where those big ‘how to’ sites do well is by using a really efficient publishing structure so they can add hundreds or thousands of new articles a day and they all get indexed quickly and get enough exposure on the site and internal link juice for them to rank very quickly. If you look at most traditional publishers like newspapers and magazines, many of whom churn content at a similar pace, where they let themselves down in many cases is by having a poorly optimized structure so old content gets pushed down the archives and eventually drops out of the rankings.

When you’re planning your content campaign think about how new content can be integrated into your website structure. A blog is probably the simplest option although you should think about the type of content you’re going to be adding and whether it lends itself to the blog format. Q & A’s, FAQ’s, tutorials and glossaries all work really well too.

Once you have the ability to publish on your site in a scalable way you can pull together your content plan. Turn your keyword list into a list of article titles, then write a brief synopsis of what each article will contain. If you know the subject turning keywords into titles should be pretty easy, failing that ezine article has a pretty cool little title suggestion tool which I use a lot. Some of the suggestions it gives you are pretty mental but you usually get a few good ones as well…

At this stage you can either get busy creating this new content or you can just outsource it. I’ve used services like textbroker, content customs, content now and a few others in the past. The results are mixed but what I can say for certain is having very tightly focused titles and detailed article synopsis’ greatly improves the quality of work you’ll receive from this type of service.

Nowadays I prefer to hire a writer directly who actually knows the subject and can work off their own initiative. If you’re an affiliate or a business with a lack of internal resources for this type of thing I reckon this will probably be your most cost effective option.

Step 5: Dynamic content creation

This is where we get a bit more clever and take the campaign into overdrive. You’ve probably heard stories about adsense millionaires who’ve made their money with auto-generated sites? You’ve got to be pretty hardcore to make a go of this sort of thing and it doesn’t work as well as it used to, but there’s a lot you can learn from it. Here’s a few techniques which might work for your site…

Tagging & dynamic page generation

By converting your long tail keyword research into tags and gathering all the information you’ve got on your site for a that keyword you can quickly create lots and lots of new pages.

Boilerplate or macro content

I’ve talked about this before in my post on ecommerce product page optimization. Basically you take a paragraph of text and a database, like a product database and use database values to fill in blanks in the paragraph, this lets you create lots of semi unique pages.

Spinning & rewriting

Gab’s talked about this one before. It’s a bit dodgy but if you think about most of the articles demand media churn out they’re basically just rewritten from other places (actually most of the information in the world is if you think about it!). Spinning multiple versions of the same article onto your own site might not be great for user experience but it will help you target more long tail keyword variations. Why else do you think ehow would have 6 articles on cooking a damn turkey!

Content feeds

These days if you try to fill a new website with duplicate content off a feed you probably won’t get very far but established sites with strong domains still make a killing off copying other peoples content and pulling together feeds from different sources.

This page on mahalo – http://www.mahalo.com/stub/rye-bread is a nice example, a hundred words of copy rewritten from wikipedia then Google images, Youtube videos, Amazon products feeds, Twitter search results and a whole lot of ads. If you can’t beat em, join em!

Transcription

Transcription of video and audio content can be a really cost effective way to boost your long tail. Just look how much content SEOmoz get out of one of their whiteboard Friday videos. Although you need a real person to do proper transcription you can also do it with software.

UGC

Plenty of people have talked about UGC before. Reviews, comments, forum threads, answers, anything where you get other people to write stuff for you is going to boost your long tail massively.

Dynamic keyword insertion

Nothing too sophisticated about this one. Basically you take all the keyword variations you want a page to rank for and spit them out on the page under the guise of something like ‘Searches used to find this page’ like this one:

I hope this post has given you something to think about and take away. In my opinion exploiting the long tail is the biggest opportunity in natural search at the moment (and has been for a while actually) so if you can get your head around streamlining the process of long tail optimization you’re onto a winner. Please leave me a comment to let me know if this was useful, or to share your own tips.

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I dunno why this is the first time I ever saw this, but this tool essentially enables automated long-tail exploration and discovery. And while a similar valuable tool is available via SEOmoz Pro, this one is free (for now) via Yahoo. (Though obviously, SEOmoz has a lot of other tools Yahoo does not.)

I’m talking about Yahoo’s Term Extraction Tool. You give it a page, it tells you the relevant terms found there.

For example:

“Italian sculptors and painters of the renaissance favored the Virgin Mary for inspiration.”

italian sculptors
virgin mary
painters
renaissance
inspiration

Use something like that on a Wikipedia page and you’re getting into the money…

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Here’s a secret … I LOVE Aaron Wall’s Keyword List Generator Concatenator tool.

You take keywords, input them in a series of boxes, and it concatenates (glues) them together (with a space in between). If that sounds like gibberish, play with the tool. It’s super intuitive and you’ll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

In short, it’s a shortcut to building long keyword lists for exact or phrase matched ad groups.

Instead of typing out:

Adidas basketball shoes

Nike basketball shoes

Air Jordan basketball shoes

Kobe Bryant basketball shoes

point guard basketball shoes

You type out the modifiers in one group, with commas and no spaces: Adidas,Nike,Air Jordan,Kobe Bryant,point guard

And you type basketball shoes, once.

Then it sticks them together for you like with the list above. It can also add on quotation marks (” “) or square brackets ( [ ] ) for phrase or exact match purposes.

I was doing some of this myself in a local context and decided to save some time for the rest of you. Here’s a list of states, stuck together and only separated by commas, as you need them for Aaron’s tool. Note: I skipped the Marianas Islands (also some other islands I deleted, I think) and turned District of Columbia into Washington DC.

Alabama,Alaska,Arizona,Arkansas,California,Colorado,Connecticut,Delaware,Washington DC,Florida,Georgia,Guam,Hawaii,Idaho,Illinois,Indiana,Iowa,Kansas,Kentucky,Louisiana,Maine,Maryland,Massachusetts,Michigan,Minnesota,Mississippi,Missouri,Montana,Nebraska,Nevada,New Hampshire,New Jersey,New Mexico,New York,North Carolina,North Dakota,Ohio,Oklahoma,Oregon,Pennsylvania,Puerto Rico,Rhode Island,South Carolina,South Dakota,Tennessee,Texas,Utah,Vermont,Virginia,Virgin Islands,Washington,West Virginia,Wisconsin,Wyoming

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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I’ve been reading up on the Content Network before launching a first campaign there in years. The following’s a list of posts I’ve found useful and the key takeaways. They may repeat and overlap in some ways. That repetition is summarized below. The links are accompanied by notes on what’s unique in that guide.

Google AdSense unit image courtesy of Frank O’Dwyer.

All these guides broadly suggest:

1) Don’t just copy search network campaigns to the content network

2) Your content network adgroups should be formed with modifers added to you base keyword/phrase. E.g. Air Jordan Basketball shoes | Nike basketball shoes | Nike high-top Basketball shoes

3) The ads have to shout, not speak politely. This is because people are in info-gathering mode, not search mode. You need to INTERRUPT!

4) Content quality score = CTR

5) Individual keywords don’t trigger ads, it’s the adgroup theme that determines where ads are syndicated.

6) The corrolary to #5 is that tracking happens at the adgroup level. If your campaign is small in keyword #s, you can have 1 keyword per group to see what keywords perform best.

7) Run placement reports regularly to see where ads showed up. Cut the low CTR and low conversion rate sites.

Use negatives liberally, but be careful not to misapply them in the wrong context. Should the negative be at an adgroup or campaign level?

http://www.pointit.com/blog/10-ways-with-google-content-network/ – Several unique keyword research tips there, as well bidding advice. “Don’t be a wimp!” [regarding bids].

http://www.adhustler.com/google-content-network-strategy/ – His last point on pruning and reviewing sites from the placement report is juicy.

http://www.ppce.net/ppc-management-google-content-network.html – Clever point on bid management for content towards the end, regarding placement targeting (aka site match).

http://www.webrageous.com/ppc/contentnetwork – Section on multimedia ads and what niches they work for makes sense.

http://tommiepowers.com/the-importance-of-placement-targeting-research-for-your-adwords-content-network-campaigns/ – Couple of tool links, including a free one, w0000t!

http://sites.google.com/site/gcreativebrief/google-content-network/gcn-case-studies – Case studies I found around

This wouldn’t be a valuable bit on content network ads without linking to Dave Szetela’s articles, free book etc.

I also found this SEW article useful for having some nice tool links at the end, though I haven’t tested or compared vs the free one listed by Tommie.

Lastly, I’m currently trying out PPC Blog’s private community and getting some great, fast responses.

If you liked this post on PPC, add my rss feed to your reader for more!

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If you could find out your competitors’ top converting ads when you enter a market, you’d save a lot of time optimizing campaigns, wouldn’t you?

It would be like knowing where the jelly is in a jelly donut – you’d bite right into the good stuff and skip the mostly-dough areas.

The principle that applies in this case is to look at the length of time an ad has been running. Duration is indicative of ad performance.

The problem is that when you search for a given keyword, you only get a snapshot in time of competitors’ ads. So you don’t know if what you’re seeing is tried-and-true copy that converts well or if it’s the flavor-of-the-month split test.

Fortunately, SpyFu (aff) has two new products that enable late-comers to catch up quickly, and for serious optimizers to get premium competitive intelligence for instant inspiration.

SpyFu’s Ad History tools – Domain Ad History and Keyword Ad History – provide you with data on competitors’ copy going back 12 months.

Domain Ad History focuses on a  single competitor’s keywords and copy for those keywords. It shows you changes over time. You can see if they keep returning to the same copy, and thus what is working best for them.

Keyword Ad Historyshows you all competitors’ ads for the past year – but on a single keyword. This way, you can quickly identify patterns between competitors’ copy on your primary head terms. Take your top 100 keywords, plug them in, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what benefits and what offers convert, and which don’t.

The bottom line is that that these tools let you learn from others’ mistakes, which saves you time and money on testing. For $59/month, the subscription is well worth it for anyone doing PPC!

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Is PPC necessary? Why is PPC necessary or not? If so, when do I need to do it?

These are questions I recently got in fielding a proposal for search marketing services. For others who might have the same question, here’s the answer, and an explanation.

PPC is necessary when you’re just entering a market.

At that point, you have no idea what keywords will or won’t convert. By buying ads on those keywords, you can tell what does and doesn’t convert. This is essential to keyword research; you can’t perform SEO that delivers a positive ROI without knowing whether you can make money with traffic from a particular keyword.

Additionally, pay per click ads are extremely valuable to compare the value of keywords before you start your SEO campaign. When you’re just entering a market, you may know that two keywords you’re targeting are commercial, but not which will deliver higher conversion rates, average order sizes, or bottom line value per visitor. PPC can tell you that in a few weeks, whereas SEO would take several months.

Arguably, if you need to compare the relative value of keywords that you know will convert, you can skip PPC. If you’re going to make some money, and that’s enough for you, then you can go straight to SEO.

But if you want to prioritize more lucrative keywords to make the most money – which you MUST do if you’re in a competitive market – then PPC will be necessary.

Why is testing with PPC a MUST for competitive markets?

It’s a must because competitive markets are driven by ROI. Testing keywords, copy and landing paths is the way to generate a higher value per visitor.

In competitive markets, most players are using such testing to maximize their value per visitor and thus their ROI. This means that they can afford to spend more to attract those visitors in the first place.

It’s like a lemonade stand and a Ferrari dealership competing to buy ads in the local paper. Guess who’s going to get the ad inventory? The Ferrari dealership will get to buy the ad space, because it makes more money from the ads, so it can spend more on the ads.

Well, what about if two Ferrari dealerships are competing to buy the same ad space? In that case, it still boils down to whoever can make the most money from the ad. It comes down to better ad design, having salesmen who close a greater percentage of sales, selling more expensive Ferraris or leases etc.

The same thing happens online. Whoever makes more from a given piece of ad space will buy it instead of their competitors. If you content yourself with whatever ROI you can get, competitors who are more serious about maximizing their ROI will eventually price you out of the market. Over time, this means you won’t get any traffic at all.

This is equally true of SEO. If you can only afford some crummy directory submission service, and I can afford advanced link building tactics like linkbait, guess who’s going to rank first?

My backlink research (see also backlink research part 2) shows that in most commercial markets (not just the most competitive ones), you need to build links constantly – just to keep up!  Let alone surpassing others in the rankings.

Testing with PPC makes your business more efficient and grows profit margins. That means you can to spend more on link building and have a chance to succeed with SEO.

When is PPC not at all necessary?

If you’ve already worked in a market and know what keywords convert and what their relative value is, you can skip buying PPC traffic.

Well, kinda. While PPC is great for getting data on the value of a given keyword, it’s also valuable for testing ad copy and landing paths. And if you’re in a competitive market, your competitors are buying PPC traffic to maximize their value per visitor.

And furthermore, the organic search results get more competitive daily. So if you want to be able to afford the SEO services it takes to rank, you need to test with PPC.

To summarize:

• PPC is necessary when you’re new to a market, because PPC lets you test keywords out. This tells you which keywords are worth more money.
• PPC is also valuable to maximize your value per visitor, by testing different messages and landing paths to find out what ads and versions of the website make the most money.
• Competitive markets require PPC. Otherwise, you’ll get priced out of buying any ads or buying seo services to get organic traffic.
• If you already know what keywords are most valuable, you have a lesser need for PPC.
• You probably still need it to be able to test and maximize your profitability, however.
• Update: Josh Sciarrino, of Tampa internet marketing company Refuge Design, highlights that PPC can also be more valuable when bidding on brand, by driving additional marginal sales (be prepared for some cannibalization of your SEO-driven brand sales.

p.s. If you found this interesting, you may want to check out my buddies at Wordstream, who offer keyword research and organization software.

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I recently had the opportunity to discuss some information retrieval theory with Dr Edel Garcia, who is a researcher and professor in the field, as well as a longtime SEW Forum moderator (aka Orion). He helped me understand what Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) is, and what it has been used for in the information retrieval field. Dr. Garcia generously agreed to let me publish our conversations on this blog.

(Update: Apparently Dr. Garcia is no longer active at SEW as a moderator.)

Inverse Document Frequency isn’t a measure of a page’s relevance, but can [potentially] be valuable for keyword research. However, Dr. Garcia recently presented a paper suggesting that an adaptation of IDF may be more valuable to keyword research.

Any grammar, spelling or other mistakes are my own.

Dr Garcia:

“Thank your for taking the time to email me. I hope this helps.

1. “I recall a point you made about keyword density being a silly metric, since it’s only valuable relative to the total index.” [Citing my email]

The first part of this statement is correct, but I don’t recall ever claimed the second part; i.e., that KWD is valuable relative to the total index.

KWD is not a collection-wide statistic, but a local one and at the level of individual documents only.

2. “I was just thinking – suppose you looked at the keyword density of pages outside the top 100, on non-competitive terms.

That is, scraping results 100 – 200 and then measuring the keyword density across all those pages, as your representative sample.

(The reason for going outside the top 100, and on a non-competitive term, is to find non-SEOed content, because it [SEOed content] would have more keywords than average.)”

Sure you can try to find collection-wide statistical averages of any kind … but why use a metric that is not used in IR for trying things [that are IR related], and on top of which does not attenuate term frequencies or lacks of relevance information?

It makes more sense to use one of the many local weight IR models for this purpose, like

1 + log(f)
[or]
log(1 + f)

etc. Or use normalized versions of these or entropy-based versions of these. [Ed: Entropy is a measure of how uncertainty a piece of information is, per Wiki.]

These models have the effect of scoring local weights and dampening down term repetition abuses (keyword spam).

Better, by using these your results are closer to what is measured by an IR system. These can then be combined with collection-wide weights in the presence and absence of relevance information (IDF, IDFP, entropy, RSJ-PM, OKAPI, etc)

3. “That would then give you an idea of the average keyword density across
the ‘index’, which you could perhaps apply to your own site? Or else you
could look at the median number of times a keyword appeared in these
non-optimized, “natural” pages and use that?”

It is hard to see a statistical justification for doing this at all.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
site: http://www.miislita.com [Features a lot of valuable research, for those who can handle the technical jargon.]
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Gab:

Hi Dr Garcia,

That helps broadly, but as with most of the content on your site, the jargon is way over my head so you lost me at point 2.

What I meant about KWD being valuable relative to the index is perhaps what you refer to as inverse document frequency.

In plain English, I understand IDF to mean that the less a word is used (up to a point), the more likely it helps describe that document’s content. And so, terms that are infrequently used across the collection are probably keywords (as opposed to stop words), and therefore worth paying attention to if you’re a search engine.

My point being that if you can figure out what range is “infrequent use” in a search engine’s collection, then you can edit your content to ‘infrequently use’ the keywords. Am I making sense?

Besides that, as a friendly tip, your content is evidently very erudite and researched, but it’s quite inaccessible to laymen. As you claim to want to help bust SEO myths and other silliness, you might be more effective (both directly in your communication and indirectly by gaining more links…) if you translated your material into simple English.

Best,
Gab

Dr Garcia:

Thank you again for taking the time to email me.

1. KWD is not IDF. KWD is just the frequency or number of times a term is present in a document divided by total number of words in that document.

This is why it is a local weight [i.e. as opposed to "global," which in information retrieval refers to your whole index aka collection of documents]. It is also not a log.

2. IDF is the log of total numbers of documents in a collection divided by number of documents containing a particular term, regardless of how many times
it appears in a document.; ie. IDF = log (D/di), where D is the total number of
documents and di is the number of documents containing a given term, ‘i’ [counting each document only once, even if a keyword appears in it multiple times].

[Emphasis added.]

3. IDF and KWD do not incorporate relevance information.

So, for all of the above, KWD is not IDF. They also measure different things. IDF is a measure of the discriminatory power of a term in a collection.

IDF was useful with early search engines and IR systems. But because large size search engines on the Web are too generic, it has been slowly phased out by models that incorporate relevance information and more stable as the size of the collection grows.

In the early IR literature, IDF was mistaken for a measure of term importance. Terms important to average users tend to have high search volume, regardless of their IDF values.

By contrast, very rare terms might have high IDF, but this not necessarily makes these important.

In fact, very rare terms are more likely to have low search volume simply because they are rare. Average users are not prone to query very rare terms at all.

If you want to find useful terms from past the top 100 or 200 results, I would suggest to identify those within that window containing high search volume instead. If you do that, you don’t need to worry about KWD or IDF.

With regard to my writing style, my target audience are graduate students and faculty colleagues, more than marketers.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Gab:

Hi Dr. Garcia,

Heehee, I like your tips and explanation on why it works. Matter of fact, I have used that technique before and continue to advocate it, as I did at SMX West as a Q&A mod on the KW research panel .

Cheers
Gab

Dr. Garcia:

Hi, there:

Here is a simple procedure for mining the Web for useful terms:

1. Query a search engine for a specific topic. This query can be of x number of terms or a single term.
2. Collect top N ranked titles (or entire documents).
3. Remove stop terms.
4. Remove dupe terms.
5. Evaluate with query tools their search volumes.
6. Sort these in decreasing order of search volumes.

(Try also by sorting combination of terms; i.e. phrases).

Note: The top N should belong to a topic in common (the so-called Cluster Hypothesis). [I didn't follow up on what that is.]

However, at times, if you use too ambiguous terms in your initial query, as you moves down N values it might be possible you will find that past the initial top N there will be topic transitions.

[Translation: If you use ambiguous keywords to start with, the further you go into the search results, the greater the chances you'll find keywords on a variety of topics.]

This also occurs when queries consist of combinations of too semantically disconnected terms are used (e.g., try with “aloha hawaii” versus “aloha anystate”, where anystate is any state of the Nation). I believe I covered this in an old Search Engine Watch Forum [post?] back in 2004-2006 or so.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com

Gab:

Thank YOU for taking the time to respond.

Also, I appreciate you keeping things at a level I can understand, since I’m sure that is an extra effort, given your main target audience.

Actually I found that very helpful, and was wondering if you’d mind my sharing that as a post on my blog?

Cheers
Gab

Dr. Garcia:

Hi, there:

1. Feel free to publish.

2. Glad you have figured that out. I spoke on that at SES NY 2005 in a remote presentation on co-occurrence theory.

3. I no longer speak at those events, although they were a lot of fun. To be honest, I realized those conferences are full of speakers promoting a lot of non-sense and SEO myths/hearsays/own crappy ideas, etc., which is a real shame. I have ever since concentrated on academic research events.

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Dr. Garcia:

“Bit of a shame you no longer attend search shows just cuz some goofs DN what they’re saying. Doesn’t the free debate of ideas lead to the truth?

I’m thinking your presence would help minimize the spread of said crappy ideas, hehe!” [Citing my email]

My speaking engagement policies are clearly outlined in my site; i.e., I speak for free at non-for-profit events.

However, I don’t speak for free at for profit events. The only three for-profit marketing conferences I attended outside Puerto Rico were because the organizers generously supported my presentations (travel & hotel). These were Jupitermedia’s SES (NY 2005 and San Jose, 2005) and OJOBuscador Congress, Madrid, Spain 2007.

I prefer to spend the limited time I have to teach graduate courses on IR, and mentoring graduate students and their thesis work.

With these duties, writing my IR Newsletter, acting as peer reviewers of scientific journals and serving as program committee member of W3C’s AIRWeb Workshops, I simply don’t have the time for marketing conferences, nor do I like these when presenting “experts” are not so.

As for debating ideas in the open, that’s why I have the IR Thoughts blog: to debunk SEO Snakeoil. The blog is also used to contact students taking my graduate courses.

BTW: I am teaching a new graduate course on Web Spam wherein SEO Snakeoil Myths and case studies of these will be dissected. The syllabus is announced at
http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/airweb-course-announcement/

Talking about SEO Snakeoil, recently I have had to expose some flawed arguments from a Stompernet video regarding LSI.

They tried to debunk LSI, but the arguments used were completely flawed and did more harm than the myth they tried to debunk.

As mentioned to the creator of the video, before trying to debunk something at least we need to know (understand) what exactly is that we’re trying to debunk. We cannot just debunk hearsay with more hearsay as they did. Now, that is a shame. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Check here:

http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/finally-seos-are-getting-the-lsi-myth/

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

[My next email to Dr. Garcia just had some questions.]

Dr. Garcia: Questions 1 and 3 are related so I will answer both now. After that, I will
answer question 2.

“1) Why is a log function used for calculating IDF?

“3) Would it be accurate to describe IDF as ‘the ratio of documents in a collection to documents in that collection with a given term’? I’m guessing your answer would be, IDF is the [LOG of " the ratio of documents in a collection to documents in that collection with a given term"]? Which brings us back to question 1, I guess? hehe”

These are recurrent questions students have asked me before. The reason for using logs is due to two assumptions frequently made in most IR models;

i.e.

I. Scoring functions are additive.
II. Terms are independent.

While in some models II might not be present, both (I and II) play well with logs since these also are additive.

These functions and ‘why the use of logs?’ is explained in the recent RSJ-PM Tutorial:

http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-tutorial/information-retrieval-probabilistic-model-tutorial.pdf

Document Frequency (DF) is defined as d/D, where d is number of documents containing a given term and D is the size of the collection of documents. If we take logs we obtain log(d/D).

But since often D > d the log of d/D, that is log(d/D) gives a negative value. To get rid off the negative sign, we simply invert the ratio inside the log expression.

Essentially we are compressing the scale of values so that very large or very small quantities are smoothly compared.

Now log(D/d) is conveniently called Inverse Document Frequency.

Now going back to d/D, this is a probability estimate p that a given event has occurred. Let the presence of a term in a document be that event. If terms are independent, it must follows that for any two events, A and B

p(AB) = p(A)p(B).

Taking logs we can write

log[p(AB)] = log[p(A)]+ log[p(B)]

It is easy to show that for two terms

log(d12/D) = log(d1/d) + log(d2/D)

[Ed: This isn't 12 in the sense of 6x2. See the explanation just below, marked as an update.]

Inverting and using the definition of IDF we end up with

IDF12 = IDF1 + IDF2

validating assumption I; that IDF as a scoring function is additive.

That, is the IDF of a two term query is the sum of individual IDF values. However, this is only valid if terms are independent from one another. If terms are not independent we would have two possibilities; i.e.,

p(AB) > p(A) + p(B)

or

p(AB) < p(A) + p(B)

and we cannot say that the IDF of a two term query (e.g, a phrase) is the sum of individual IDF values. Assuming the contrary as many SEOs think is plain snakeoil.

Update/Clarification: I asked for a clarification on all this, and Dr Garcia again generously shared his knowledge:

“The “1″, “2″, and “12″ above are mere subscripts, not values.

So IDF1 stands for the IDF of term 1, IDF2 for the IDF of term 2, and IDF12 for the IDF of terms 1 and 2. An example follows.

A collection conssists of 100 docs (D =100)

20 docs mention t1=search, so IDF1 = log(100/20) or about 0.7
40 docs mention t2=marketing, so IDF2 = log(100/40) or about 0.4

What would be the IDF of a combination of terms like search marketing?

If we assume that terms are independent IDF12 should be the sum. I.e. IDF12= IDF1 + IDF2 = 0.7 + 0.4 or about 1.1.

This sum corresponds to 8 documents of the 100 documenst mentioning both terms.

If we find out that more than 8 docs of the 100 docs, mention both terms, these are not independent from one another, but actually positively correlated.

For example if 15 docs mention both terms, the IDF12 will not be 1.1 but actually log(100/15) or about 0.8

The reverse scenario, if less than 8 docs of the 100 docs actually mentioned both terms is an example of terms negatively correlated, still not being independent.

Consequently, the exercise made by SEO keyword researchers of adding individual terms IDFs to come up with some sort of IDFs for phrases is flawed by all accounts.

[Ed: It just occurred to me that at any rate, you'd need to know the total size of the index in order to calculate IDF. AFAIK, that # isn’t public.]

2) What do you mean by ‘discriminatory power’ in the phrase “IDF is a measure of the discriminatory power of a term in a collection.”

This is legacy idea from Robertson and Sparck Jones. The discriminatory power of a term (aka term specificity) implies that terms too frequently used are not good discriminators between documents.

If a term is used in too many documents its use to discriminate between documents is poor. By contrast, rare terms are assumed to be good discriminators since they appear in few documents.

One particular research project I am working on contradicts the whole notion of defining the discriminatory power of a term using IDF. I cannot comment too much on it, however I presented preliminary results last month at a local scientific conference. The abstract is at

http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/sidim-xxiv-conference/

Cheers,

Dr. E. Garcia
email: admin@miislita.com
site: http://www.miislita.com
blog: http://irthoughts.wordpress.com
newsletter: http://www.miislita.com/irw/ir-watch.html

Gab: p.s. Read also Dr Garcia’s post recapping the SIDIM conference and sharing an explanation of IDF and “vector space models.”

p.p.s. If you liked this post, you’ll likely enjoy some of the other interviews in my related posts section, especially this one with Ruud Hein: “How I Stay Ahead of the SEO Pack”. It’s probably also a good idea to add my rss feed to your reader!

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To all my readers: If you’re going to SMX Advanced, I’d love to meet you. I’ll probably check comments on this post etc Monday n see what’s up, but the easiest way to meet is to:

1) Find me after my presentation on the Keyword Research Artistry panel, on the morning of day 1 (Tuesday, June 2).
2) Look for a guy wearing a kippa (aka yarmulke). There’s probably just going to be a handful of us afaik, so you shouldn’t have much difficulty. If you don’t know what a kippa is, here’s an idea:

See also Flickr for some cool shots.

It’s the little hat the guy is wearing.

For those of you not attending, my preso is up on slideshare. It’s mostly self-explanatory, but I’ve reserved a number of goodies for the oral/in person part of my preso.

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The Pirate Bay – the world’s largest peer-to-peer site, which focuses on torrent technology – lets you view what people are searching for (Not Safe For Work (NSFW)) as well as its tag cloud (NSFW), which I presume is what people are sharing, in the most literal sense.

At the risk of stating what may be obvious to most SEOs, when pirates share their booty, keyword research is a lot easier.

My first affiliate marketing campaign back in 2006 broke even despite my Azoogle AM (hi Fraser!) never installing my tracking code so I couldn’t optimize the campaign. I succeeded because my CPC remained low, thanks to keyword research I did by reading niche forums with an eye to the jargon they used.

If you’re just relying on the engines and various tool providers for data, you’re shortchanging yourself and your clients – though it’s OK in the latter case if they’re short on change, themselves.

If you look at the language people are using – gasp! shock! – you can also get an idea of what they might be are searching for.

Perhaps more obviously, if you see it in tag clouds on social media sharing sites, your topic is likely a good topic for linkbait. Because people are already looking to share material in that area, which – like getting them to accept new ideas – is easier if it appears related to their current thoughts/activities than contrary to them.

Some starting points:

Del.icio.us’ tag cloud.
Marty’s tutorial on buzz pocket mining
StumbleUpon tags
India’s Digg’s tag cloud
Some entertainment pligg site’s tag cloud
Digg Tag Cloud
Metafilter has a cloud.

Mixx won’t let you see its whole tag cloud, but if you have the SEO digger extension for firefox, you can reorder the results of this search by Pagerank, and get an idea of what are the 100 hottest tags – http://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Amixx.com%2Ftags&pws=0&hl=nl&num=100 .

This query will help you find more tag clouds as well:

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=nl&safe=active&pws=0&q=inurl:tags&num=100

If you google ‘list of social media sites’ you can expand on this minilist of social media sites with pretty significant depth. (Yay bloggers writing list posts!) JoeWhyte claims to have them all, Andy Hagans’ got a neatly formatted list, Ben at SEO Discovery threw 44 together himself, Vlad has 100 of his own, Arsenal Marketing has them annotated by PR for your inner spammer, Traffikd has probably another 200, and on it goes. All told I’ve shared over 500 resources for you to hit up, so get cracking mining those clouds! (First programmer to write a niche/industry-categorized scraper aggregator wins a prize .)

Caveat: Be sure you only use communities’ tag clouds – individual bloggers’ clouds are too narrow and metaaggregators like Technorati cover everyone, and therefore no community in particular. Ideas spread in hives, so it’s useless trying to spread ideas by throwing them at the general public.

Thoughts? Hate it? Love it? Is this way behind the pack? Am I just rehashing Marty’s point or elaborating on it in a useful way? Is this stating the obvious?

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Nothing new here for the marketing pros in the audience, but you intermediate guys and newbies will like today’s post on why you need to rank for purchasing oriented terms rather than selling ones, imho… I want to expand on Seth Godin’s bit on making a new market vs taking a share of an existing market.

“Our software enables you to find data and trends that no one else can find.”

“By combining protein and chocolate, we’ve developed a new food that’s both dessert and dinner.”

These are ‘making’ statements. Riskier, sure, but they stand for something, they don’t just steal share. The Dummies guides made a market, the Idiot’s guides took from that market.

You need to be clear with yourself and your team about which one you’re after, because they bring different costs, different benefits and different time frames.

In SEO, you have to prioritize “buy” keywords for your marketplace website. Sellers who know there’s a market will bring their wares (or find some) and hop in. Conversely, buyers can be attracted for other reasons first – a community, for example. Or a terrific suite of software that you’re offering for free. Or interesting content on a blog or a million other reasons.

Sellers fins appear in the wake of schools of buyers.

Most search marketing spending goes to PPC because PPC guarantees you clicks, and traffic. The sellers are following an established presence of buyers.

Most new mom-n-pop retail operations go to established auction sites or markets like eBay, Sitepoint and NamePros because the buyers already there. Spammers knock up Y! Answers and Craigslist because they already have traffic that can convert for whatever it is the spammers are promoting.

And whether we like it or not, SEO doesn’t create awareness, it fulfills it. Our clients are taking market share and therefore we need to prioritize buy keywords for them. We’re responding to demand.

Conversely, if you have a brand-spanking new product and are making a market, you need to do push marketing. Public relations, blogger relationship building and media-buy advertising (i.e. non-search advertising) are where your efforts need to go. This means the PPC content network – preferably with banners if those will increase your CTR.

The reason is that you must create desire for your product. You’re generating demand.

Ironically, as you do these human PR efforts your green PR goes up, too. By the time there is a market searching for your products and services, you’re already ranking.

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Are domain names the internet’s real estate? Can keyword research be considered intellectual property? I put these and other questions to Eric Goldman and Mark J Rosenberg, both of whom are speaking on SES San Jose’s legal panel. (Clarification: This is an interview, not coverage of an SES session.)


(Image: Jason Burrows)

Note: This post only offers information. It does not offer legal advice, counsel or opinion, and should not be relied upon for such. Speak to a lawyer who is a member of your local bar if you need counsel.

1) Are domains really an equivalent to real estate? I asked my real estate prof that and he highlighted a variety of reasons why they aren’t. Ex.: No rights-of-way, usufruct, and other such items.

Eric Goldman (EG): No, domain names are not virtual real estate, and I always chuckle when I see the domainers bloviate about this analogy. Personally, in almost all cases, I’d rather own the top spot on Google for a keyword than to own the keyword.com. I expand on this point more in this lengthy article: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=635803 [Requires some kind of subscription; password confirmation email not hitting my inbox so I'm not linking to them. Talk about SE friendlines... Abstract looks interesting though!]

Mark J. Rosenberg: He [your prof] is right. Domains are like any other personal property. No different than a baseball bat. They can be bought and sold without any special terms and conditions. If used incorrectly, they can cause damage.

2) Can SEOs be considered fiduciaries/trustees for their clients, at least with respect to the site? What criteria would militate in favour and what criteria would oppose such a characterization? Is implementing non-best practices a breach of trust that can constitute a cause of action?

EG: No, I think the analogy to fiduciaries or trustees is way too strong in most cases. In some cases, SEOs can be “agents” of their clients and have the power to bind their clients to legal commitments, but this is probably not the case with the standard SEO-client relationship.

EG: However, like any professional service provider, SEOs could face malpractice or related claims for botching their jobs. I’ve never seen an SEO malpractice claim but I suspect they will come in the future. Even then, the standard for malpractice will be loose (i.e., general incompetence will probably not be deemed malpractice; it will take a higher degree of incompetence to be actionable).

EG: In all cases, an SEO who does a lousy job will develop a poor reputation and suffer some economic consequence accordingly. Also, this issue becomes less important to the extent clients are paying performance bonuses or other compensation tied to results.

MJR: [Whether the SEO is a trustee or not] is most likely a contract specific issue. Unless specified in the contract and/or SEO given special responsibilities, the answer should be no.

MJR: Some of the criteria that would militate in favour are handling money, extensive control and/or operation of site including content. Those that would oppose such a characterization include an SEO acting as a consultant merely providing advice, and having limited or no control over site or its operation.

MJR: [As to breaching a trust by forgoing to implement best practices,] This is case specific. For example, in some situations, there may be a legitimate reason for not implementing a best practice. Otherwise, I would say that depending on the extent of the violation, there may be a claim for breach of contract.

3) Keyword research – can it be considered as intellectual property? If an affiliate manager gives yours away, or a search engine does… are they violating your rights?

EG: It’s possible for the insights derived from researching keywords to be protected under IP. Most likely it would qualify as a trade secret (if it qualifies as IP at all). In order to remain a trade secret, the SEO would have to require everyone who has access to those insights to agree in writing to protect their confidentiality. This can be tricky–especially with the search engines, who aren’t promising anything!

EG: Note, however, that depending on an SEO’s contract with its client, the contract may transfer ownership of the SEO’s work (including their keyword research) to the client. Clients are often as concerned about confidentiality as the SEO, so this can set up some conflict during the contract negotiations. SEOs really interested in protecting their work product, including their keyword research, need to retain an attorney to help them build the proper legal
protections into their contracts and operations.

MJR: It can be considered a trade secret if it is treated as such. If given away without permission, there is a definite violation, provided that it was a trade secret in the first place.

4) What is the standard of care SEOs need to employ in carrying out work for their clients ?

EG: As I mentioned, I don’t think the standard of care has been defined in the courts, and I expect it will take some time before it is. In all cases, the legally defined standard of care will be less rigorous than the marketplace expectations of SEOs’ ability to deliver results. Add value to your clients, and you will be richly rewarded. Chunk it, and your phone will stop ringing.

MJR: There is no special standard. It is to abide by contract terms to the best of their ability while governed by the usual implied covenants and standards under the UCC [Uniform Commercial Code, a US inter-state legal convention aiming to harmonize signatory].

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You heard it here first folks: Google has recently updated its keyword tool to share precise volume numbers. Whereas the tool only returned relative numbers before, it now shows the precise amount of monthly search that occurred last month, as well as an average amount of monthly searches.

(Removed the keyword the tool was showing cuz that’s private.)

Here’s another one:

This comes right as the Overture tool from Yahoo has finally been put to rest, after showing data from January 07 for over a year. A smart move by Google that will not only gain it attention from SEOs, but surely the domaining world as well.

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Big ideas and food for thought:

How the social web is helping propagate racism: Online Antisemitism 2.0. “Social Antisemitism” on the “Social Web”

Seth’s Blog: Music lessons

Search geekery:

Adwords Support – Get It!

Note: It won’t be great, but you might still get minimal help. Requires the ability to read between the lines [of bs].

TypoHound – Find eBay Typos and Misspellings

Keywords with two meanings? Inconceivable! | SEO Woman

Project Wombat: the Difficult Reference Question Mailing List

Simple Block segmentation analysis • Tim Nash UK SEO Blog

Hiding the Sphinn Button When a Post Fails to Go Hot

SEOmoz | Does “Query Deserves Diversity” Algorithm Exist at Google?

YOUmoz | Bad Bots Confound Web Analytics By Executing Javascript Tags

Reputation management:

Avante Gardens: You Had Me at Hello – Cameron Olthuis

FTD.com Sucks – Cameron Olthuis

On a related note, I was chatting earlier tonight at Yulbiz with a webmaster called Nicolas who apparently ranked on Google.fr for things like ‘dictionnaire’ ‘synonyme’ and ‘cigarette’ . Anyways, this pro was happy that someone else was ranking for his last name as it drew attention away from him; he’d rather the competition not be able to find out about him. Also why he’s not on Facebook. Interesting approach I thought I’d share.

On being a value added affiliate, see these two (especially for SMX Advanced ):

Webcam Reviews

The Best Rate Guarantee Blog – Best Rate Guarantees, Free Hotel Rooms, and Other Travel Deals: Seattle

I’m working on a meatier post to release later this week or early next week. I’ve taken on Ice.com as a client for SEO work (have a look at their Pearl pendants or Diamond Rings and keep an eye out for an interview either here on in the Domaining press on the true story behind the acquisition of Diamond.com) and between that and current clients, am briefly swamped until I get some things sorted.

That said, I wrote what I think is a kickass post on email marketing for linkbait, and because I wrote yet another crummy title, Sphinn didn’t promote it to the front page (http://sphinn.com/story/47807 ) and for whatever reason Rebecca didn’t feel it was main blog worthy …

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Want to find out competitors’ keywords? Here’s how to find what keywords competitors use on their sites – and protect your own!

There are three ways to find out what keywords competitors your are trying to rank for or buy with PPC ads. Click any link to skip to that technique.

Technique 1: The Competitor Site Analysis

Technique 2: Buy That Data and More From A Keyword Monitoring Service

Technique 3: Buy The Data From A Panel Measurement Service

Competitor Site Analysis

Step 1: Look at their sitemaps. This is a page, usually created for search engines, where every valuable page on a site is linked to using the keywords the page is targeting. In technical terms, the anchor text of those links is keyword rich.

Step 2: You can either:

• Copy-paste the code on that page into a  file. Then use CTRL+F to find all the links starting with the first one and then copy paste those into an excel file. That excel file will then show you your competitors’ main SEO keywords.
• Or you could get a web spider, and have it crawl the page then extract the links for you. Again, this will show you competitors’ main SEO keywords.

This technique has limits, though. It doesn’t:

• Show the relative value of keywords. Linda Bustos of Elastic Path Ecommerce asked me, “Should I target body wash or shower gel? Your technique doesn’t answer that.”
• Show the absolute value of a keyword. Does it convert, at all? Imagine an ambiguous keyword. Eg “bass” – Is that bass fish or bass guitars?
• Tell you what competitors’ message is, in their PPC or SEO listing. Are they promoting a deal or upmarket? Special feature or ease of use?

Solution (in principle): Find out how many competitors and how long competitors have been buying a keyword. If many of them have been advertising on it for a while, it’s effective.

Spyfu can do tell you that…

Technique 2: Buy The Data From A Keyword Monitoring Service, such as Spyfu

Spyfu has 2 tools that answer the limits of the analysis we ran of our competitors’ website.

1 – Spyfu Domain History tells you what keywords a competitor bought over the past year, and for how long. By seeing the keywords they’ve bought for the longest time, you can see what keywords are most valuable.

2 -Ad History shows you all the competitors who have been bidding on a keyword in PPC auctions for the past year, and for how long they’ve been bidding.

Ad History shows you their ad text, too. By seeing the patterns in competitors ads, especially over time, you can see how to pitch the people searching.

I also like Spyfu for other reasons. Spyfu helps find keyword patterns or categories I hadn’t discovered during my own keyword research. It seems years are often used with car model names, when people want to get car insurance.

Spyfu also tells you the competitors’ ad ranking in the search results. The higher the ad’s position, the more that traffic is important to them. A good indicator of value…

Spyfu value-maximization tip Look at trends in position over time. If you see a competitor gradually raising their ad’s position, chances are that the keyword is proving better than expected. And if they’re dropping, it’s probably a poor keyword!

Compete Inc offers you similar keyword data. Their collection methodology is more reliable, though because it includes data from a “panel” – a group of 2 million people. Their actual use of the search engines is tracked! (The downside is that it’s a lot more expensive than Spyfu, starting at $199/month.)

With Compete you can see the actual keywords that are referring traffic to given websites, and which websites are getting the greatest CTR from the SERPs.
So you can “Build better search campaigns by understanding the competition,” as Compete says, which I think is a fair positioning statement since their data is looking at traffic stats as opposed to what another SEO/SEM is trying to do (my technique and Spyfu).

How do you protect your own keywords then?

While I’m no expert in SiteMaps, it’s my understanding that you can submit an XML sitemap without having a separate html sitemap on your website. If that’s the case, I would avoid making the sitemap if getting your keywords ripped off is a concern.

If you must have an html SiteMap on your site to submit one to the SEs, then this is where breaking usability convention is allowed. Hide it 5 clicks/folders deep and link to it with misleading anchor text like “ugly fat bearded ladies.” And give each folder users need to navigate to get there 5 other folders, each of them titled something really helpful, like 1,2,3,4,5…

So to get to the site map, the person would have to know the “combination” to your “folder lock” e.g. 4-2-5-4-1. You get bonus points for doing this all in Ajax – which doesn’t load a new page each time you click a link – so that they can’t use the URL to locate themselves unless they finally reach the site map.

While any decent SEO can find some of your keywords, you can at least make it a lot more difficult and laborious if they try to take shortcuts by swiping your keywords. Besides, there’s no guarantee they’ll find all the keywords you’re targeting, on their own. If you can keep them out of at least some of your markets/keywords, you’re preserving profit margins there.

Note: by observing the navigation elements of a site, competitors can find out some of your keywords anyways. Nevertheless, it’ll be very time-consuming and the competition may not be thorough enough to find all your keywords. If it’s being done by scrapers, you can try and detect them and cloak for the scrapers to not find what they needed.

Another way to protect your own keywords is to keep in mind how Spyfu and Compete work. They give information about particular domains. So if you split your PPC campaigns amongst multiple domains, your competitors would have to know all your domain names to get all your keywords. This can minimize the risk of losing all your keywords to a competitor in one swoop. Of course, that might be offset if one draws much higher CTR, but it’s a delicate balance…

Experienced direct marketers will tell you that 80% of their success lies in the ‘list’ of prospects they send their mail/email to. In search marketing your list consists of your keywords. So go find out competitors’ keywords!

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