My rankings have gone haywire, I use to get top ranking on phrases like ‘sales recruitment’ and ‘specialist sales personnel’ and now I’m nowhere to be found.

My web designer says its something to do with Jagger (I know its nothing to do with Mick, here’s been nowhere near the site!). I jest, I know this is something to do with the latest Google update, but is there anything I can do to return to normal?

Incidentally, your readers may like to know we’ve had extraordinary success in recruiting and retaining sales people for our customers, just visit our site to find out more www.highgrowthltd.co.uk (sorry about the blatant commercialism but Ive been jaggered!)
Peter Hills, HighGrowth , Manchester

ANSWER:

Glad you can retain a sense of humour. The web forums are awash with people suicidal since their rankings have disappeared. Some claiming they are rapidly going out of business.

Yes, Jagger is the name given to the latest Google update. Their stated aim is to eliminate spammers – those guys cheating their way up the rankings – but inevitably there is collateral damage with some innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. Word on the street is that it should right itself in a couple of weeks (if you are not actually spamming) so hopefully normal service will be resumed. Let me know if its not.

The main specific transgressions the update is trying to address seem to be as follows:-

1. Hidden text on your pages. In particular if you use CSS check the stylesheets that contain visibility: hidden;. It may be that these are considered spammy.

2. In bound link structure. Too much artificial use of the same keyphrase in the anchor text. If you use anchor text then you need to vary the keyphrases used and link to a relevant page/content on your site.

3. Link farm issues. Too many non-relevant sites linking to you. Make sure the sites linking to you are as relevant as possible (non relevant sites shouldn’t harm your rankings but if you have many of them, and they appear very quickly, it may be that your are considered a link farm spammer.)

Incidentally we’ll address the last two points in our ‘link strategy process’ in the next issue.

This, I also believe, indicates the importance of not becoming reliant on any one search engine for your business.

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Quite often, but it depends on how competitive your online competitors are. If they do all the things you do you’ll need to out link them to out rank them.

Now before you get fazed by this backlinking process, let me assure you it is quite straightforward if you do it in a controlled and structured way). In fact I’m going to spoonfeed you and starting next time I’m going to guide you through a process, such that over a period of a few months you will out rank your competitors. But for the moment lets see why this is so important. Also I’m going to show you some great tools for checking your current links ( and your competitor’s links). Remember also, you are not trying to outlink Amazon, just your nearest competitors – which is a doddle by comparison.

Backlinking – What is it and Why is it Important?

In short, its just getting your url on other websites such that people will click the link and end up on your site. Not a bad thing in itself as this will lead to more traffic and sales, in fact if you are on a major directory, like Yell, or Applegate or Kellys – to name but three – people are quite often more likely to find you that way than directly finding your site. (I’ll show you how to find the important directories for your site later).

However its more important than that, we have a double whammy affect here because the more backlinks you have (sometimes referred to as ‘inbound links’) the more important you are in the search engines eyes and the higher up the rankings you go.

Its obvious really if you think about it, this is the basis of conventional offline networking – the more authoratitive you are in a subject, the more likely you are to get other people in your network to make referrals to you. Its the same with websites and this was basis of Google’s grounbreaking algorithm and why they generate such relevant results.

All Links are not Created Equal

This is also obvious I believe – getting a link from your mum’s site is not as important as getting a link from the BBC site, so when we start the structured process we will prioritise the sites we want links from. In fact there are several important factors relating to the quality of links you should be aware of:-

1. The more authoratitive the site you are getting the link from the better (We have a rough way of measuring this which we call Page Rank – more about this later)

2. The more relevant the interlinked sites the better – clearly if you are a hotel, getting a link from a travel directory is more important than a link from the local lingerie shop.

3. The better structured your link is the better.

This last point is crucial – because not many people know about it its a sure fire way of going one better than your competitors. Quite often just restructuring some of your existing links will give an immediate boost to your rankings.

Essentially what we mean by this is including the keyphrase your page is optimised for in the link text of the incoming link. For example if the keyphrase in question is ‘crunchy widgets’ then this phrase should be included in the inbound link text (sometimes referred to as ‘anchor text’.)

the way the link would appear in the code in the external site ( the one linking to you) would be as follows:-
href=”http://www.domain.com”>Crunchy Widgets

All that would appear on the external site would be the phrase ‘Crunchy Widgets’ and clicking on it would hyperlink to your site.

You don’t always have control over the way people will link to you but where you do, for example your suppliers and customers websites, you should send them details of the link text you want them to use.

Incidentally this is the basis of ‘Google Bombing’. Some guy at a conference asked the audience (about 500 of them) to put a link from their site to George Bush’s site and include ‘dumb idiot’ as the anchor text. Subsequent Google searches for ‘dumb idiot’ listed George’s site in number one spot, thus showing the power of structured backlinking.

We can measure the importance of a site through the Page Rank (PR). PR is a number Google assigns to every web page out there as a measure of its importance ( from 0 to 10). For example the BBC News site has a PR of 9, most small businesses are anywhere between 0-6. Clearly the higher the PR of the site linking to you the better.

How do you measure Page Rank? Go to http://toolbar.google.com/ and download the Toolbar – it takes minutes and will give you the PR of every site you visit. (Incidentally there are other goodies to be had with this tool including an effective ‘pop up’ blocker)

Be careful about getting links from sites with a PR of zero. Sometimes this means the site has been penalized and this could have a negative impact on your rankings.

Some Useful Web Tools to help with your Linking

Here are some tools to help you understand your own link performance and, importantly, your online competitors. A good strategy is to look at your competitors links and use this as the benchmark for your own efforts. This is the strategy I’ll guide you through next time.

www.linkpopularity.com is a reasonable way to estimate your backlinks. Just go to their site, type in your url and your links will be displayed. You will see that it shows you links identified by different search engines. The reason for this is that in order for a link to be recognized by, for example, Google, the Google spider needs to have spidered both interlinked pages – yours and the external page linking to you. Clearly this will not always have been the case and this is one reason why different engines report different links.

This will show your internal pages linked as well as external links. Also Google only shows some of the links.

There is a command you can use at Google to find the links. At the search box type in links: yourdomain.com and you’ll get them listed. NOTE links is plural, there is a space between the colon and the domain name, and also there is no www. (link:www.yourdomain.com doesn’t work anymore).

My personal preference is to use the tools offered by yahoo.com – it doesn’t really matter which agent you use to check your links. A link is a link regardless of whether search engines have recognised them yet or not. So, at yahoo.com you’ll have the following options:-

To check links into a domain (complete site), type –

linkdomain:www.yoursite.com

To check links into a domain (complete site) excluding internal links, type –

linkdomain:www.yoursite.com –site:yourdomain.com
(note the space before the minus sign)

To check links into a specific page, type, for example -
link:http://www.yoursitse.com/subpage.html

To check links into a page excluding internal links: link:http://www.yoursitse.com/subpage.html –site:yoursite.com

As you can see from above its also useful to know what anchor text has been used in a backlink. You can check this at Google. For example to check the links into www.yourdomain.com that contain the anchor text ‘yellow widget’, at the Google search bar type -

inanchor:yellow widget site:yourdomain.com

(Hopefully you wont have any ‘yellow widget’ anchor text links!)

Finally, if you want to automate all of the above in a useful web tool, there are a couple of freebies I use. They are in beta at the moment but seem to work OK but you’ll need to download them. They are ‘Back Link Analyzer’ and ‘PR Weaver’.

A Google search will locate them for you. My favourite is Back Link Analyzer which shows each link and the corresponding anchor text, all on one line for each link.

So have a play with these and next time I’ll take your through the process of out-linking, out-ranking and out-competing your competitors.

Give me a call if you need any help – 01928 788100.

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ANSWER:
Yes, there are one day courses ( please call me on 01928 788100) and also a new range of workshops running from January next year in various locations throughout the country.
The workshops actually take you through the process and you will arrive at a complete optimisation plan – I have included full details on another part of the blog at http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/10/what-does-it-take-to-get-no-1-on.htmlAgain – please call if you need more info.
Best Regards
Jan

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Next month we’ll discuss ‘off page’ factors to add icing to the cake and get you above all your competitors.

You will remember that last month we focused on the TITLE tag and stressed its importance. The other tags you will need to optimise are the KEYWORD, DESCRIPTION and H1 tags.

THE KEYWORD TAG

The KEYWORD tag used to be important for ranking. It’s not anymore, however, it’s best practice to include entries here as some search engines still pay some attention to them. Also there is evidence that the major search engines look for consistent entries across the tags.

So in the keyword tags put the keywords (actually keyphrases) you discovered in your keyword analysis. Actually you need to restrict it to a maximum of 25 words. Also use lower case and separate each phrase by a comma and a space.

A perfect example can be found at the following site. Select ‘view’ than ‘source’ to view the metatags behind this site – www.youreventsltd.com.

Should you have the same keyword tag on each page?

Ideally you should change the order of the phrases, and put the phase being optimised for at the beginning of the list. So in the example above the homepage is being optimised for ‘event management’, so this is the first phrase in the list.

THE DESCRIPTION TAG

This is more important than the KEYWORD tag ( but less important than the TITLE tag).
Quite often this gets listed in the hitlist directly below the title so it will have an impact on whether people click through or not.

For example:-

Your Events, Manchester UK – Christmas party organisers
Christmas party organisers by Your Events uk, looking after your christmas
production, venue, catering and entertainment.
www.youreventsltd.com/christmas.php – 14k – Cached – Similar pages

This is the result of a google search for ‘christmas party organisers’. (Yes folks its nearly that time again!) The first line is the contents of the TITLE tag; the text below the content of the description tag. So ideally it needs to be a bit salesy – encouraging people to click through.

Again – no longer than 25 words, and put the phrase being optimised for at the front of the description.

If you do a ‘view’ and ‘source’ at http://www.youreventsltd.com/christmas.php you will see a perfect example of this.

THE H1 TAG

Unlike the other tags we’ve discussed the contents of the H1 tag appears as visible text on your web page.

Its best practice to include a version of the title tag as the H1 tag.

If your title tag says ‘Briggs International – Technical Translations and Software Localisation Services’ The H1 tag could be something like ‘Fast Turnround on all your Technical Translations and Software Localisation’

That is, a bit more ‘call to action’ oriented. Essentially this has the affect of placing your keyphrase for the page being optimised for as a headline at the top of your page. Something the search engine spiders seem to like a lot.

I this case the page is being optimised for two phrases – ‘technical translations’ and ‘software localisation’. Generally we should try to optimise one page for each of our keyphrases. Sometimes we can get away with two but three is pushing it as you will see when we discuss copy writing below.

There’s on more thing to do to ensure your pages get top rankings….

WRITE ‘KEYWORD RICH’ VISIBLE TEXT FOR YOUR OPTIMISED PAGES

Search engine spiders thrive on keyword rich content. Also the higher placed it is on your webpages the better.

If you can get 200 words of text at the top of each page of your site (ideally right below the H1 tag content) and include your keyphrase (the one the page is being optimsied for) around 6-8 times, that is pretty optimal.

This is not always easy and we’ll discuss some issues in later lessons to help when it isnt.

Essentially the TITLE tag content for a particlar page is compared to the keyphrases which appear on that page. The more the better, within certain guidleines.

Here’s an example of someone who thinks he’s optimising his text for the phrase ‘yellow widgets’….

‘Our Yellow widgets are the best in the UK and if you buy our yellow widgets you will be sure you have bought the best yellow widgets you can buy and absolutely envied by the rest of the yellow widget buying community both here in the UK and the rest of the yellow widget buying community throughout the world. Yes, you really need to buy our award winning yellow widgets. Click here to buy yellow widgets.’

Obviously a pretty naff bit of copy writing, but this guy doesnt care – he’s writing for spiders not humans. Actually even the spiders will choke on this.

The trick is to stay within certain ‘keyword density’(KD) limits. Around 3%-9% is good. Five keyphrase repetitions in 100 words would be a KD of 5%.

This should satisfy the spiders and also you should be able to put together reasonable copy for human visitors.

A good axample can be seen at www.asgservices.co.uk. Note the repetitions of ‘warehouse rack labels’.

If you want to check the keyword density of your pages go to:-
www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
Type in your url for the page in question and you will get an analysis.

The keyphrases with optimal density will show up in green. Other colours highlight problem keyphrases – too dense or not enough.

So that’s it folks. It’s about all there is to it. Do this for one or more of your pages and you’ll begin to get good rankings.

Next month I’ll show you how to out compete even the fiecest of online competitors. Until then happy optimising and don’t forget to get in touch if you need help. Our ‘Traffic Builder’ Service goes from strength to strength as you can hopefully see from the above examples and the quotes below( but not the ‘yellow widgets’ guy – I made him up).

“I employed Jan Klin Associates to get me higher rankings at all the search engines.
Within a couple of months we were high in the rankings for our products and now some six months later we are in the top three on all the major search engines.”
Steve Bithell, Managing Director, Noisekiller UK, www.noisekiller.uk

“From being very cynical about what search engines could do for my businesses I am now reaping the benefits of having number one rankings in Goole and the other major search engines for all my important keyphrases. This is as a direct result of working with Jan Klin to achieve this”
Tony Gresty, Managing Director, ASG Services Ltd, www.asgservices.co.uk

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Nothing exists …..
until it is communicated ….. David Ogilvy

How effectively is your web site communicated?

Businesses have their sales multiplied by getting top rankings on Google.

Here is your opportunity to join them.

There’s no reason to pay expensive consultants to do it for you, the process for you to DIY it is straightforward, and that’s what you’ll learn in this powerful new workshop – the secrets of getting top rankings.

What you will take from the workshop:

Your own structured action plan completed from the workbook provided to get you top search engine rankings

- The latest techniques and approaches for out-competing your top competitors

This is not a seminar presentation – this is a workshop which will provide you with the tools, knowledge and structured plan to enable you to succeed in Search Engine Marketing.

You will also have access to the course tutor (who is an acknowledged expert in the field) during and between workshop sessions to address your own issues.

What is expected of you:

- Attend 3 x 3 hour sessions, once per week for three weeks (morning or evening)
- During the sessions you will be encouraged to complete your structured action plan as the modules progress
- In between each module you will have some ‘homework’ to do on your own site (tools and templates will be provided to simplify this)
- You (or your web site designer) should then implement the plan you have put together and watch your business increase.

What is the cost?

£97.50 plus Vat per module (£292.50 plus Vat for the whole course)

If you implement your plan following the course this should represent the highest return on investment you could ever hope to get through any business activity.

To sign up for a course in your area call Jan Klin now on 01928 788100 or email at jan@janklin.com.

“Having been on the course I can say that applying Jan’s teachings has certainly paid off for Maid2CLean and our Alexa rankings have gone up by some 400,000 points. Frankly, the course was worth every penny”
Mike Hanrahan, Managing Director, Maid2Clean, www.maid2clean.co.uk

The modules in detail:

The tutor will guide you through the process to successful optimisation, showing you real live examples and the use of web based tools. As the course progresses you will make appropriate entries in your structured workbook leading to your blueprint for high search engine ranking performance.

Module 1:

Content includes:

- An outline of the ‘best practice’ structured process to optimisation
- The major factors which will provide good ranking – both within your website and external factors
- How search engines work and which are important
- Using web based tools to assess your current position
- How to find the most effective keyphrases to bring relevant visitors to your site
- Using the latest web tools to identify the best keyphrases
- Assessing the ‘relevance’, ‘popularity’ and ‘competition’ for your keyphrases

Homework: Using web based tools and the spreadsheet provided to identify and shortlist your keyphrases.

Module 2:

Content includes:

- Identifying ‘roadblocks’ – are there any impediments in your site preventing good search engine performance?
- Using web tools to identify any issues
- Assessing your sites ‘spiderability’ and internal link structure using web based tools
- Explaining metadata and identifying the most important metadata in your site for top search engine performance
- Structuring your title, description, keyword and H1 tags for optimisation
- Explaining ‘keyword density’ and the importance of effective copy writing for high rankings
- Using web based tools to analyse your existing copy and keyword density

Homework: Optimising your metadata and existing content for optimum search engine performance (for your homepage; it’s the same process for all other pages). Structured online templates will be provided to facilitate this for you.

Module 3:

Content includes:

- Submitting your site to search engines and directories
- Some web based tools to help with the process
- A structured approach to developing your linking strategy
- The importance of backlinks to your search engine rankings
- How to develop and assess links from the best sources
- Structuring your ‘anchor text’ for optimum search engine performance
- Analysing your links and your competitors links using web based tools

Homework: Progressing your link and directory strategy. Online templates will be provided so you can do this in a structured way; Kicking off your optimisation blueprint.

Typical agenda for each module:

8.30 Registration and light breakfast

9.00 Session 1 starts for this module

10.30 – 10.45 Coffee Break

10.45 Session 2 starts for this module

12.15 Close

Who should attend:

This is for senior members of small and medium businesses who wish to generate more businesses through their website. You may be a business owner, or you may be responsible for your company website. The course will be delivered at a business level (not technical) although additional content will be provided in the workbooks for the more technical delegate’s requirements.

It is not sector specific – it is relevant to all business sectors and as much to service companies as consumer focused and manufacturing companies.

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Many of you will know the importance of building good content around these phrases and this is something we will discuss in detail later. In addition there are other important areas to put them; in fact there are four main places:-

1. In your metadata ( the part of your site that search engine spiders see and human visitors dont)

2. The visible content – keyword rich content as referred to above – visible to both humans and SE spiders

3. Internal links – to different parts of your site

4. External (in-bound) links – in the anchor text of these links – more about this later.

and other places – alt text, footers etc

Many would argue that the TITLE tag (part of the metadata) is the most important in terms of ranking. Here I’m going to give you the optimum structure and content for this tag. That is, one that actually works.

The search engine spiders will scan this when they visit your site to work out what your site is all about.

If your site is about selling ‘yellow widgets’ you need to include ‘yellow widgets’ as part of your title tag on your homepage.

More specifically you need to include different title tags on different pages of your site reflecting the different content on that page. For example if you have part of your site devoted to tandoori widgets – this keyphrase needs to appear in the title tag. This practice gives searchers multiple access points into relevant parts of your site. Those searching for yellow widgets would be directed to the homepage; those for tandoori widgets to the page relevant to that content.

So, here’s an action point for you:-
Check your title tags by choosing ‘file’ then ‘view source’ from your browser toolbar.
(You’ll see you title tag at the top, in the HEAD section of your code just before the meta description and keyword tags.)

Do they reflect the content on the pages they appear on?

Anyway here’s an optimum structure for your tag. The example here is for a company who are pretty hot in the widgets market (incidentally, the only company I know in the UK that sells edible widgets)

Jones Brothers Bury UK – Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets

(this should be enclosed in the title tag delimeters as you can see in the examples referenced below – eg www.universalarches.co.uk)

Note: The company is Jones Brothers – always good to have your company name up front in the tag and UK put in there (if you’re looking for primarily UK based customers).

‘yellow widgets’ and ‘dark crispy widgets’ are obviously the two keyphrases we are optimising the page around (ideally it should be one keyphrase per page, but often we can get away with two; three is pushing it)

No more that 10 words, because most search engines dont read beyond this number.

No words repeated more than twice

No identical words next to each other.

Steer clear of non text characters (particularly & which sometimes causes problems with some search engines; hyphens, commas and pipes are OK).

Thats it! Do that on every page and you’re moving in the right direction and sometimes ( if everything else has been optimised) this will have an immediate effect.

Here’s a personal example; Mrs Klin runs a B&B. Incidentally, in two years Mrs Klin’s B&B has gone from 90% of guests coming from the UK to 90% coming from overseas – all to do with the power of the internet and that fact that she sleeps with an on-line marketing consultant (most nights). By changing one word in the title tag (‘Kingsley’ to ‘Frodsham’) rankings moved from nowhere to number 2 on Google. This is because the directory she is a member of (doesnt have her own website!- not big enough) had included lots of content on the page about Frodsham. Admittedly its not always as simple as that but it does show what a major contributor the title tag is in the Google algorithm.

When your site gets listed in say, a google hitlist, the first line shown, which is blue, is your title. This is where it gets displayed. So in our example what will be displayed in the google hitlist would be:-

Jones Brothers UK – Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets
Makers of fine edible widgets in a wide variety of flavours and colours…

Hopefully in position one where we will get a 15% click through rate!

The sentence in italics below the title is from the description metatag which we’ll adrress next time.

So you see the title is also important because searchers will see this and it will determine whether they click through or not, which of course is the ultimate objective. In the example you will see that I have used capitals to begin each word. Search engine spiders are not case sensitive but the reason I have done this is to make it more searcher friendly and maximise the click through rate.

Here’s another example – and a perfect example of how to structure your meta tags – go to google and type in ‘profile bending’. You will see that www.universalarches.co.uk comes pretty near the top. Go to the file menu at your browser then select ‘view’ and ‘source’. You will see that the title tag is perfectly structured as detailed above, but also the keyword and description tags are also good models on which to base your own.

Best of luck and please feel free to call me if you wish to discuss or get clarification. (01928 788100). Also you may wish to consider our ‘Traffic Builder’ service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.

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ANSWER:
I hinted to this at the end of the last lesson. (Lesson 5) Actually I think that if any web page includes your keyphrase it is a competitor. However they may not be a serious competitor. A better measure of how much serious competition there is, is to use the Allintitle command: If you go to Google and type in allintitle:marine sound proofing - in the search box. You will see that there are only 14 sites out there with this phrase in their title tag, so indeed very little serious competition (although there are over 28,000 pages which include this phrase in them).

The TITLE tag is the subject of this weeks lesson ( Lesson 6) – and you will see that it is a major factor in optimisation, so its a good assumption that those sites which include your keyphrase in their title tag have optimised their site to some degree. You can construct and prioritise another KEI list based on the allintitle results – but this is seldom necessary unless you are in a very competitive online business. The good news is,you have found a phrase with very little serious competition.

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ANSWER:
Like you thought – don’t be tempted to follow this practice. If you get caught by the search engines you may get blacklisted. If you do the problems in getting reindexed are colossal, as your competitor will ultimately (very probably) find out.
I have several clients who are always number 2 on Google ( several who are number 1 also!) and its for the same reason, we have done everything right except that there is a spammer in front of us. Its frustrating and very tempting sometimes to react.
The practices vary from hiding text, to having masses of dooway pages to ‘cloaking’ but the effect is the same – they have cheated themselves to number 1.
Console your self with the thought that the click through rates for positions 2 and 3 are not dramatically different than the number one spot and that, almost certainly, your competitor will eventually get his comeuppance.

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We’ll use a fictional company involved in furniture removals. (Incidentally I use the word ‘keyword’ and ‘keyphrase’ interchangeably to mean the same thing in the following discussion. ‘Keyword analysis’ is the generic name for this process; referring to ‘keyphrases’ accepts that nowadays people use multiple words when seaching)

There are four stages to the process:-

1. Identifying the popularity of certain keyphrases ( ie How many people search for the phrase each month)

2. Identifying the competition for the keyphrase (ie how many web pages out there include the exact keyphrase)

3. Working out the KEI factor ( the ‘keyword effectiveness index’ has been discussed in Lesson 3 and is a measure of the importance of the phrase for optimisation – the higher the KEI the better)

4. Prioritising the keyphrase list.

The example I’m going to give you relates to the UK market, but the same process is equally applicable to any market. Fortunately, the Overture Keyword Assistant ( see the detail of how to use it in last months posting) allows us to be country specific when researching keywords so this is an ideal tool for us to use.

STAGE 1 – Estimating the Popularity:
Lets take this company involved with furniture revovals. If you go to the Overture Keyword Assistant ( The UK version at www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/ac/index.jhtml and listed under ‘tools’) and start trialing a few keywords you think may be relevant to searchers of such servivces – eg ‘removal services’, ‘furniture removal’, ‘removal services uk’ etc. You’ll come out with a list of keyphrases (some suggested by Overture) and their corresponding ‘count’. Count is the estimated number of searches per month for the phrase. (It is based on all search engines except Google, so a good rule of thumb is to double this for the actual number on the basis that Google accounts for around half of all searches)

As an example, you’ll see that you get counts of 906 for ‘removal services’ and 1616 for ‘furniture removal’.

You may like to construct an Excel spreadsheet when carrying out this analysis with columns for ‘keyphrase’, ‘count’, ‘competition’ and KEI, so eventually when you have your complete list you can do a simple sort to get them in order of importance.

STAGE 2: Estimating the Competition:
This part of the process is a matter of going to Google and checking for the competition for each of the keyphrases you have identified.
At the Google search box type in the keyphrase in question. Enclose the keyphrase in quotation marks since we are looking for exact matches, check the ‘pages from the uk’ button since we are looking just to focus on the UK market in this example.

For the two examples above – ‘revoval services’ and ‘furniture removal’ – you will see you get figures of 77500 and 7380 ( You will see these figures in the top right hand corner of the Google results page, for example, Results 1 – 10 of about 77,500 for “removal services”. (0.06 seconds) . These are the number of pages in the Google index with an exact match for the phrase, that is, a measure of the competition.

Fill in the relevant part of your spreadsheet with this competition figure for all your keyphrases.

STAGE 3 – Calculating the KEI:
The detail and rationale behind the KEI calculation is included in Lesson 3, but here it is a simple matter of calculating the figure. This is achieved by squaring the ‘count’ and dividing by the ‘competition’. So for ‘removal services’ we get 906 times 906 divided by 77500 that is a KEI figure of 10.6.

For ‘furniture removal’ the figure you get is 353.8. Clearly ‘furniture removal’ is a far better phrase to ompimise around than ‘removal services’.

STAGE 4 – Prioritising yor Keyphrases:
If you use a spreadsheet you can obviously include the KEI formula to perform this calculation automatically, then its a simple matter of using the sort facility to get all the phrases in ascending KEI order.

That’s it! you now have a list of keyphrases ordered in importance for effective optimisation.

Incidentally you will see that ‘removal services uk’ has a KEI of 720.5 showing that a phrase which is less popular in terms of searches can still be very effective for optimisation since there is far less ‘competition’, in this case only 19 competing pages.

For many situations this is as rigorous as you need to be to find the best keyphrases and will work very well for you. It’s certainly a more scientific process than the vast majority of companies engage in. There are some situations however that are very competitive areas and for these we need to go into more detail and look at other aspects of competition.

For example using the google ‘intitle’ command to see how many sites out there have included the keyphrase in their title tag, and using the ‘inanchor’ command to see how many links to websites include the keyphrases as anchor text. These are measures of much more serious competition and we can work out KEIs relating to these figures also. Give me a call if you want more info on this but as Ive already indicated the process above will be more than adequate for most of you and will help you get much more web based business.

Best of luck and as always, if you want any help on this, please consider our ‘Traffic Builder’ service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.

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With Google AdWords I am towards the top of the list first thing in the morning then I disappear even though I’ve still got credit in my account. Why does this happen? Also, even if I bid the top bid price I’m still sometimes low down the list with Google although not with Overture. Can you explain what is going on here?
Mike Lomas, Northern Training, Bacup, Lancs

Answer:

Firstly Google’s algorithm for displaying your ads is more complex than Overture’s. With Overture if you bid for spot number three in the rankings that is where you will appear. With Google its different. They take into account not only your bid price but also your click through rate (they appear to multiply one by the other to get the ranking position).

The reason they do this is that they wish to reward you for putting together effective ads. Conversley, if you are getting poor click throughs you will be penalised (event though you may be bidding a higher price than others). So, good ads are good for you (and Google).

In terms of the first point they also seem to ‘spread out’ the appearance of your ads over a period along with competitive ads. This is also a function of your bid price and how much credit you have. I have also noticed that quite often when I have upped my credit the ad appears more regularly even though it doesnt cost more overall.

Although some argue Google is easier to use, its certainly the case that Overture is much simpler to understand. They both deliver good results though.

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