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Google’s *Brand* New Ranking Algorithm

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

There’s been a flurry of discussion on Twitter and various SEO blogs over the past 48 hours regarding what appears to be a new ranking algorithm for popular search queries on Google.

I could go spend an hour or two to go into great detail here, but Aaron Wall stayed up all night to write this incredibly insightful post about the issue so I recommend you read his take on it.

In a nutshell, it looks as though Google is now giving ranking preference to the sites of large or well known brands in the search results for certain queries, even when those sites aren’t particularly well optimized for search engine compatibility and were not ranking well with the previous algorithm. There’s been no official word from Google on the matter one way or the other, but plenty of people are voicing their concerns about the change so it probably won’t be long.

I have to admit that if this truly is what it appears to be, it scares me. Part of the appeal for me of optimizing web sites was the fact that Google SERPS were a relatively level playing field. Even with Universal Search thrown into the mix, you could still optimize the site of Joe’s coffee house in Halitosis, Missouri and have it outranking Starbucks and Gloria Jeans for target keywords if you knew what you were doing.

Perhaps this algorithm change (if that’s what it is) is an attempt to clear up the spammy scum out of the Top 20 SERPS, but it may also handicap the authentic underdogs from being able to compete with the big brands.

What do you think? If Google really is giving more weight to brands, is that a positive or negative? Please comment below.

Neuromarketeers, the Window to the Unconscious Processes of The Consumer Mind

By Jeremy Wyatt in Featured

A relatively new field in consumer research known as ‘neuromarketing’ adopts techniques that promise a window to unconscious processes, allowing companies to create more engaging, emotive and attractive products. But what methods are used, and do they provide added value to clients above traditional research methods?

The techniques

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive method of measuring electrical activity in the brain and offers excellent temporal resolution, allowing the measurement of activity the moment a stimuli is presented. However, the spatial resolution is not as accurate as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which can pinpoint the brain areas that are active.

EEG sensors can be incorporated into a headset or hat, with arguably little intrusion to the user. In addition, EEG has advantages such as relatively lower cost and vastly increased portability and maneuverability. While relatively new to consumer testing, EEG is widely proven in providing the therapeutic application of neurofeedback, to alleviate conditions from addiction and anxiety to migraine and stroke recovery.

More established physiological measures, such as galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart rate monitoring, have proved to be reliable stress indicators – GSR has evolved from lie-detection into areas such as self-help and self relaxation – and can be used to demonstrate the presence of emotional responses to test materials.

Insights can be gained when combining neurological readings at different levels (attention, engagement and emotional), with physiological readings (eye-tracking, facial expression recognition, galvanic skin response, heart rate monitoring) and in-depth interviews to provide a broader picture of user experience.

Consumer research application

Several application areas have benefitted from neuromarketing research which interprets and combines the outputs from these different levels into meaningful results. The application areas most relevant to neuromarketing are those which invoke high levels of engagement, cognitive load or emotional responses, including:

• Gaming
  • Real-time arousal and engagement levels can be used to inform game development as well as comparing different game experiences and environments.
• Advertising
  • Internet, TV, outdoor and in-game advertising can be studied by combining EEG readings with in-depth interview analysis to reveal the impact of first impressions, real-time arousal, engagement and emotional impact to different advertising vignettes.
• Product design
  • EEG and eye tracking can be combined to measure and evaluate impact, interest and emotional appeal of design features, as well as providing insight into the importance of different sensory and tactile elements to overall design perception.
• Brand perception
  • Measures of emotional arousal, eye tracking and in-depth interviews can be used to rank the appeal of different brands, products and services.
• Fast moving consumer goods testing (FMCG)
  • Combining arousal and physiological responses with self report techniques, a robust and reliable measure of the user experience of different products can be created, from the selection and purchasing process, through to consumption.
• Work environments
  • Emotive affects from different workplace environments can be compared, as well as the effect of cognitive load under stress conditions.
• Gambling
  • Factors ranging from cognitive and visual attention to emotional attraction and engagement can be measured to enhance the online gambling experience.
• Media
  • Combining EEG readings with in-depth interview analysis to reveal impact of movie trailers, real-time arousal and engagement levels, and the overall emotional impact to media.

However, it should be noted that the neurological and physiological techniques are more effective when testing subject matter with a high emotive or visceral quality, as a greater affect will be observable and more research interpretations can be made.

The arguments for and against neuromarketing techniques

The benefits of applying neurological techniques to consumer research is the ability to gather feedback on emotional state or level of arousal, without disturbing the participants experience with the distraction of interviewing and burden of self report. Additionally, readings could be gathered that do not rely on the inherent limitations of self-report methods, inaccurate reports (intentional or unintentional) and interviewer bias.

While the findings from neurological research can provide useful indicators towards consumers’ preference for a particular brand or product, there may be other extraneous factors, such as the observer’s mood state, attention levels, or environmental factors at work that are not being accounted for. There may also be limitations regarding pinpointing emotions towards a stimulus, for example, which specific emotion is being triggered in response to a particular design element. Further work is needed to develop a robust EEG measure that can gauge specific emotional triggers to a given reaction and generate outputs that highlight different emotional responses.

At present, there is also a lack of integration of EEG capture other measures, such as eye tracking. Once captured, the analysis and interpretation of EEG data is highly specialised and cannot be easily undertaken by the untrained practitioner. Further developments in this area would promote the wider adoption of neurological techniques alongside more established technologies such as eye tracking.

Two important questions to consider when applying neurological methods in user experience research are:

1. Would these tools necessarily provide greater understanding and added value for clients over traditional methods?
2. Which methodology and product type would such measures be suitable for?

Conclusion

Further insight about the workings of the human brain will certainly increase the usefulness and applicability of techniques such as EEG. The technology itself is yet in its infancy, and will surely become a more powerful tool to assess and quantify the needs and desires of tomorrow’s consumers, and is worthy of exploration now. fhios, a global user experience research and design consultancy, is exploring the feasibility of integrating measures, including EEG and physiological readings, eye-tracking, facial expression analysis and traditional survey methods, in order to better understand the user experience for a wide range of products and services.

Jeremy Wyatt BSc (Hons.), Senior Research Consultant

Jeremy graduated from UCL with a BSc in Psychology which emphasised rigorous research methods and experiment design. His first class dissertation focused on depression in young people, leading to a number of years work assisting patients in acute psychiatric wards. His creativity and skill for the practical lead him into design which he studied at Goldsmiths College; before working for an innovative product design and manufacturing company, where he worked in product design and development, improving manufacturing methods, workshop and retail design, as well as developing the website and advertising materials. Combining his love of Psychology and design, Jeremy is a Lead User Experience Consultant at fhios.

Martin Hicks Ph.D. MSc. BSc (Hons.), Senior Research Consultant

Martin holds a Ph.D. in Information Visualisation and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from the University of Nottingham. He gained a Masters degree in Ergonomics with HCI in 1999 from University College London. Before joining fhios, Martin worked as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Essex and as a Usability Specialist for Microsoft Research Cambridge. He has gained experience in user interface design and usability studies based on mobile communication and web-based applications.

SEO Web Design, Harnessing the Power of Alt Text and Images

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

Today I would like to share an invaluable SEO web design technique to refine the focus of your pages using images and alt attributes for create relevance for SEO.

SEO, Images and Alt Text

Sculpting the focus of your pages translates into coherence and relevance for search engines. For example, if you have repetitive elements on a page, such as a legal footer (that is 200 words of legalese), a tag line in your title tags, overpowering navigation (which breaks down as a cascading tree menu), then all of these things are impacting the word count, text to link ratio and either increasing or diffusing the relevance of each page.

With examples such as this, you may consider using an image as an alternative (make a high res image with that text instead and use that instead of text) to lower the co-occurrence or non specific keywords and replace the nebulous shingles of text.

If in doubt, then look at your pages Google cache in text only view by clicking on a search result (cache link then selecting text only) link to see how spiders really see your pages with all of the style sheet information removed.

Frequently when conducting an on page website review and analysis we see multiple pages in a website that for lack of better terms are so similar to the market focus of multiple pages (which essentially means, since they are so alike, nothing distinguishes it from others).

As a result, lackluster performance impacts the relevance score of the page by diffusing the keyword focus and jumbling the phrases, modifiers and keywords in an attempt to make sense of what that page is really about.

Add to the fact that the anchor text is typically wide open with no real regard for continuity using off topic keywords for links (click here, contact us, etc), linking from multiple methods from one page to another (from the home button or link, from anchor text in the body and say for example an image as well) confuses the order of importance.

The remedy for this SEO web design dilemma is:

1) Add additional text on the topic – you can either add 100-200 additional unique words to a page or add 2-3 more supporting pages and internally link them to the target page to increase relevance for specific keywords.

The fastest way to get in the top 10 is to get a link from a website already ranking in the top 10 for a keyword. Similarly, in order to make your on SEO page factors prominent, linking from a page (all about Topic A) with a relevant link (about Topic A) to you preferred landing page within your site, transfers that ranking factor through the anchor text.

The more competitive the keyword, the more internal links you should use, using a variety of modifiers, reversing the order of the words if applicable or related synonyms as links to the target page (you wish to elevate).

2) Use images as links when adding text links is not applicable. Images can be tactfully integrated into a page and the alt attribute harnessed to link pages with relevant keywords.

If you still have images on your page lacking alt text (spiders cannot interpret images so you need to tell them what the image is). For example, if you have an arrow leading to a free quote page, the arrow could say get a free quote as the alt attribute. If it is a link, then the text in the alt attribute counts as a viable link and that value gets transferred to the target page.

So, if you cannot change the text on the page (due to upper management bureaucracy , you don’t want to throw off the flow of the text, or whatever reason) you can use images to sculpt relevance, make a visual suggestion or act as internal links.

As a result, that page is infused with internal link relevance and then combined with the fact that the weeds have been removed or pruned (noisy words minimized while relevant keyword dialed in) your pages focal point is conveyed to search engines.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business

How I Choose Which Products To Promote

By Willie Crawford in Featured

Once it became known that my subscriber database was approaching 800,000 (across numerous niches – some fairly obscure), I started getting dozens of joint venture proposals every day. These “JV proposals” are generally just requests to become an affiliate for their product, or to help with an impending product launch.

Most of the proposals I get are in the internet marketing niche, while less than 1/4th of my database is in that niche. If a product isn’t a perfect match for a niche, I don’t consider offering it to that niche. Experience has taught me that offering inappropriate products is one of the quickest ways to lose your list!

What Kate Winslet, Penelope Cruz and Facebook Can Tell Us About Engagement

By Kevin Mannion in Featured

Did you see the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress presentations at the Oscars? This year they tried a new format in which five former winners take the stage and each in turn speaks to one of the nominees. More than their male counterparts, the women winners spoke from the heart. And in almost every case the nominated actress seemed on the verge of tears (Best Supporting Actress nominee Viola Davis clearly wept). Each seemed genuinely affected by her peer’s personally and intimately expressed admiration. A hundred million of us were eavesdropping on these tender moments.

In a way Facebook is like that, I am discovering. And it is leading the way to deep connections that really define “engagement” for any Web publisher willing to learn. Facebook is showing us the potential for people to reach each other in unexpected ways. People who seek and find us there and can then engage us in ways that really transcend traditional Web site experiences.

I say this because of several experiences I have had on Facebook over the past month.

When I was in sixth grade, I was crazy about the girl who sat next to me, but I didn’t think she could possibly have the same feelings about me. When Mrs. Rothaar changed everyone’s seats, the girl sent me a note through an intermediary, Sheila, who was now sitting next to me. The note said, “Do you like me?” I turned around and saw her sheepishly smiling. After recovering from a brief but intense panic attack, I sent back a note that told her I did. Ah, first love!

Last week I got another note from her. This time the intermediary was not Shelia, though. It was Facebook.

Facebook is affecting my life in ways I wouldn’t have imagined just a few short months ago. In addition to the innocent hello from my first flame, I have had a dialogue with a cousin I haven’t seen in 25 years. And based on these two compelling connections, I reached out to a guy I was close to in high school but haven’t seen since graduation. And I have had a series of chats with a friend whom I haven’t seen since I was 11 years old. We told each other our about our lives since childhood, and I had a chance to make amends for some things that I was not surprised he remembered well. All these years later — we were friends again.

And when I tell people in the media business about these Facebook moments, I find that I am hardly alone.

My experiences with Facebook over the past month are probably old-hat to my nephews in college and the most passionate users of the site. But they tell me that at as it approaches 200 million members worldwide (probably tripling the viewership of the Oscars!) Facebook is only in its infancy of potential.

When you think about the metrics that matter most to people in this business — audience reach, composition and engagement — you realize that there is no site in the world that will be able to compete with Facebook in delivering results to advertisers. Who will have greater reach? Who will know more about who comes to their site? And Facebook no doubt will become the master teacher of what engagement really means. The best online media companies — those that know a passionate audience is their raison d’etre — will be the ones who learn these lessons well.

Kevin Mannion is founder of Sky Road Consulting,which provides management, sales, and marketing solutions for online publishers.

Get Started Fast And Easy With These Blogging For Dummies Steps

By Cory Threlfall in Featured

The Internet is buzzing with ideas, comments, and social commentary from people of all ages, and all walks of life. If it were difficult the blogosphere would be pretty empty. For those of you who are still in a quandary over how to get started, blogging for dummies is here to help. This is a simple guide to getting started with a blog of your own so that you can share your personal insights, helpful tidbits of information, and comment on the world around you with the world.

Three Simple Steps To Blogging For Dummies

Use Your Content Creating Skills To Generate Revenue In A New Market

By B Hopkins in Featured

A new market is emerging for up and coming authors, marketers, and business owners that they can utilize to bring more exposure to their products and services. Ever since Amazon created the Kindle, the electronic book reader, it has been growing in popularity. The popularity of the Kindle has especially taken off since Oprah has named it as one of her most favorite things. What does this mean for the author or website owner?

The ease of downloading new ebooks and other electronic publications to the Kindle opens up a market of people who are used to getting it now. This means that a market is available to those who can provide content to hungry Kindle users. Those that know how to exploit this opportunity will be well rewarded for their efforts, not only in getting additional revenue, but also in using another opportunity to brand their business to a part of their target market they may not normally have access to.

Publishing your content to ebooks and making them available on Amazon through the Kindle store is a great way to re-use your original content. Amazon makes it easy to convert your content over into a format that can be published through their Kindle ebook store and read on the Kindle. All you need is a DTP (Digital Text Platform) account on Amazon, and you have access to their ‘Digital Text Platform’ center. If you already have a login on Amazon, you can simply use the same login.

Amazon provides a nice getting started guide that takes you step by step from the beginning to the to publishing your content. The step-by-step guide is only 9 pages long so the whole process isn’t really long and complicated. If you require additional support, you can access their online forums where, chances are, someone has already asked the question you are struggling with.

During the process of uploading and converting your content, you will need to determine the price that you want to sell your content for. You can sell your information-based product anywhere from 99 cents to 200 dollars. The price that you choose for your product will depend upon what purpose you are using your product for. If you want to publish your content to brand yourself and as a means of growing your customer list, then you should set the price of your Kindle book a lower price. If you are publishing your information product to generate income, then you should set a higher price. The most common price for Kindle ebooks is around $10.

There is a whole strategy for publishing your content in the Kindle bookstore that includes everything from what to name your product to how to categorize it and describe it, to what kind of ebooks are popular in the Kindle bookstore, and more. Before you decide what kind of content to create a Kindle ebook from, you should educate yourself with a strategy that will increase your chances of being a successful Kindle ebook publisher. Fortunately, there are a few ebooks available that focus on the marketing aspect of Kindle bookstore publishing. Use one of these books as a reference so the whole process of Kindle publishing will be much easier.

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B. Hopkins writes reviews for different Internet Marketing related products and services. To read more about resources that will help you publish your content for the Amazon Kindle go to this Kindle Product Review.

Webstock 09 : Open, Social Web

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

The following is a live blogging post of the Open, Social Web presentation at Webstock 09 by David Recordon of Six Apart.

David starts by saying that Friendster, MySpace and Facebook are like 3 different castles surrounded by moats. Ning turned that on it’s head.

This needs to be how all these social networks interact with each other. Not WHICH social network will be the most popular but HOW they will interact to make lives easier.

Social Applications

- Each has a few great features (the UNIX philosophy)
- Creating combined value
- Building blocks for new value
- Not a social graph of their own

Learn how to use social applications together. A few years ago it was easy to be Best of Breed because all you had to do was MORE than ask users for their password. Now things are different.

David asks the audience, what does it mean to blog now? How do we use a blog with social networking? How do we use multimedia to expand blogging? The DiSo Project enables you to use Open Source to build interactivity on top of platforms such as WordPress. It finds gaps for new applications and connectivity between social networking sites.

David has also seen an evolution to creations using platforms. E.g. Pinax. It’s an open-source collection of re-usable apps for the Django Web Framework.  These days, toolkits are built on the notion of all web sites having social features. Open Social allowed people to build apps on top of social networks.

Anatomy of “Connect”

- Profile (identity, accounts, profiles)

- Relationships (followers, friends, contacts)

- Content (posts, photos, videos, links)

- Activity (poked, bought, shared, blogged)

- Goal (Discovery of people and content)

Friends can be the best filters for what’s happening on the Internet.

What more can we be doing?

David says we can be doing three things to improve our social web applications:

1) Markup existing public data – make sure computers & search engines can *read* all data on your site. Make it easy for me to join – use XFN microformat services like hCard etc.

2) Stop leaking passwords! Emerging security service Ouarth – creates security without need for passwords. Use applications such as Movable Type’s Fireeagle that takes that process out of the eqation.

3) Support the OpenID application.  Plaxo used OpenID to great effect.

What Social Media Can Learn From Email Marketing

By Stephanie Miller in Featured

Psst.  Hey, marketer!  Trying to figure out your social media strategy before the boss asks again?  I gotta few tips for you.  Many social media challenges can benefit from hard won lessons we’ve learned through email marketing.

1.     It’s not free. There are plenty of free social media tools out there.  You can certainly set up a MySpace brand page or LinkedIn profile for free.  However, no social media program will succeed without time, resources and expertise.

Email lessons learned: Email marketing is still considered “free, or nearly free” by many executives.  Perhaps the inexpensive price tag is both our best friend and our worst enemy.  Too often, the poor email program manager is left alone to blast out message after message without creative, data analysis or technical support to really engage subscribers, grow loyalty and drive additional revenue.  Invest in your talent and give them the room to test new ideas and learn about the audiences they serve.

2.    Being present is not enough. Put up a corporate-speak Facebook page and see who comes.  Not so many, right?  But a Facebook page that has a cause or purpose is interesting because it’s meaningful and engaging.  At the same time, tell no one about your page and it’s all but invisible.

Email lessons learned: First, it’s not true that “just because we send, they will respond.”   Look at the high percentage of non-responsers (no opens, clicks or conversions from email in many months) on every house file.  Look at the very low response rates from non-permission files.  Any monkey can blast email.  The technology makes it easy and cheap.   Response, however, is driven by engagement and relevancy (and good timing).

Second, email marketers know well that the file doesn’t grow unless we advertise it.  Prominent and provocative invitations all over the website, catalog and call center scripts are essential to building an email community.  Third, not all subscribers are created equally.  Segment your audience and set up specific email programs and social communities and blogs to speak to their particular interest.

3.    Be authentic. This is a universal marketing truth, but worth mentioning because too many email and social programs lack it.  Our customers know when they are being sold.  Relevance, honesty, believability, integrity: these are the only things that create value and drive predictable response.

4.    Integrate, don’t imitate. Replicating your website on Facebook does not a compelling and engaging destination make.  Posting your email offers on Twitter will quickly tire followers.   Selling product may not be the best objective of your social strategy.  Perhaps your blog is about education and driving inquiries.  Your MySpace brand community may be about reach for video ads.  Twitter may be a great customer service outreach tool.

Email lessons learned: Use your digital and direct channels in support of each other.  A mobile or SMS campaign can be a great complement to email or a retail sale.  Email makes postal mail and online advertising work smarter.  Blogs can significantly improve search results to your Web site.

5.    Endorsements matter. Social media pulls the marketer off the brand pedestal and drags her into the throes of the messy, wild, unpredictable community.  In this equality, social media empowers brand advocates.

Email lessons learned: Beyond a conversion/sale, the best endorsement you can get in email is to be forwarded.  Forget the technology.  Content is only forwarded because it speaks to the subscriber and s/he aspires to own the message. Now subscribers “SWYN” — share with your network — expanding the reach further.  There are also endorsements for having a good sender reputation so your email messages reach the inbox — whitelists at the major ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo, and third-party services like Sender Score Certified, SurityMail and Goodmail.

6.    Measure well. All investments in social media must be linked to a business goal.

Email lessons learned: This is one we are still learning in email.  Opens and clicks do not matter to executives — all that matters is contribution to the bottom line.  Branding, retention, loyalty and share of wallet can be measured if the data is collected and trended over time, and by audience segment.

7.    Have something to say. This is perhaps most important.  Don’t start talking until you have something valuable to say.  Make the commitment and stick to it.  Fund it.  Be ready to maintain it.

Email lessons learned: Too much email marketing is boring.  Subscribers readily complain to the ISPs (click the Report Spam button which depresses deliverability for marketers), unsubscribe or just ignore much of what comes to their inbox.  What a missed opportunity!  We are successful only when we make it less about us and more about our subscribers.

Conversation takes two people who do both listening and talking.  This is the essential truth of our social Web 2.0 world:  Marketers don’t own the conversation.  Give your subscribers and community members what they want — engaging, interesting, relevant content and offers that are worth reading and talking about — and they will give you what you want: sales and loyalty.

Stephanie Miller is vice president of strategic services for Return Path, a 20-year veteran of direct marketing and online publishing, and a frequent writer, speaker and advocate for email marketers everywhere.

Finding Quality Keywords Free: How To Do A Keywords Search

By Thomas Christopher in Featured

For people to find your web page, you need high-quality keywords. A high-quality keyword is a keyword that many people are searching for but few other web pages are using. You need to battle past your competitors to get to page one of the search engines, so the fewer the competitors, the better. Once you get there, you want a lot of customers to find you. Here’s how you can find quality keywords.

Go to Google’s keyword tool — just search Google for the phrase “keyword tool” and you’ll find it. You want to find a good keyword for something that you are offering, so start off with some phrases that describe it. Type them in.

Google’s keyword tool will ask you whether it should “use synonyms.” Allow it to. Click the “Get keyword ideas” button and Google will give you a list of keywords with their search frequencies. Download them in “.csv” form so you can load them into a spreadsheet (“.csv” means “comma separated values”). Repeatedly try other phrases and download and merge the spreadsheets.

Suppose you decide to set up a free print-on-demand T-shirt store on the web. It wouldn’t cost you a thing to put a NASA image on a T-shirt. How to make money is less obvious. For that you need to find keywords for the products. What products will you be offering? T-shirts, of course, but how many ways are there to say T-shirt? At least these: T-shirt (which Google translates into “t shirt”), T-shirts, Tshirt, Tshirts, tee shirt, tee shirts, tees (but “tee” often means golf tee). There are other varieties of apparel: tank, spaghetti strap, camisole, baseball jersey, sweatshirt… For that matter, you could generalize: shirt, shirts, apparel, clothing. And there are non-apparel items: BBQ apron, coaster, tote bag, cutting board, mouse pad, or generally, gifts.

Since you are interested in using NASA photos, you need to consider keywords related to space and astronomy. Here are some words people may be using: astronomy, universe, galaxy, cosmos, space, nebula, star (although this is more likely used for movie stars), stellar, solar system, planet, moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, comet, asteroid, … and people may combine those with telescope, Hubble, photo, photograph, image, … There are a lot of combinations to explore — a lot of work and a lot of opportunity.

When you’re ready to find the high-quality keywords, add another column to your spreadsheet. Label it “Results.” Fill in that column with some huge number, 999,999,999 say. Sort the spreadsheet in decreasing order by the average number of searches. Cut off the rows at the bottom of the spreadsheet which have too few searches to be worth your consideration. If you want at least 50 searches per day, throw away rows with fewer than 1500 average monthly searches.

Go down the spreadsheet looking up each of the keywords in Google. Put quotes around the keyword phrase in the Google search field. If you don’t put in the quotes, you’ll get too huge a number of results to be of interest — potentially every page mentioning any one of the words in the keyword phrase.

Google will tell you “Results 1 – 10 of about NUMBER for KEYWORD” where NUMBER is the estimate of the number of results and KEYWORD is the phrase you typed in. For each of the keywords you look up, you can copy the estimated NUMBER of results back into your spreadsheet into the results column. When Google says “about NUMBER”, it is a crude estimate. When I looked up ‘”galaxy t shirts”‘ the original estimate was 6,480 pages with the keyword phrase. By repeatedly clicking on the highest result page number at the bottom, I came to the end of the list of results and found that there were only 106. If however you get to more than 600 and you get a message, “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 601 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included,” you should suspect Google is trying to discourage you. Maybe you’d better just go with the estimate on page one.

While you are looking at the number of results, you can glance at the first results page and see if the keyword has a special meaning it would make it unsuitable for you. For example, thinking of selling astronomy-related T-shirts, you find “la galaxy t shirts” are related to a sports team, utterly irrelevant to your purpose.

After you have gone far enough down the list, looking up the keywords with sufficient numbers of searches, sort your spreadsheet by increasing numbers in your results column. Among the top keywords in your spreadsheet should be up to three good primary keywords to optimize your page for. (It’s hard to optimize a page for more than three keywords.) They have enough searches to be interesting, and they have the fewest competing pages among the interesting keywords.

Your primary keywords won’t necessarily be the first three. A keyword a little further down the list may have significantly more searches and only a few more competing pages. Or maybe only one or two have few enough competing pages. It should be utterly trivial to get onto page one of Google if there are only five pages competing for the same keyword, it might take a little bit longer if there are 500, longer still if there are 5000, and if there are 5 million, forget about it.

When you get to NASA images of the planet earth, you find something like this; “Planet earth shirt” looks promising: maybe 880 searches a month and 112 competing pages (estimated). In itself, that’s not large. “The planet shirt” has 880 searches/month for 388 competing pages. Together they may be worth some effort.

“Planet shirts” has 1900 searches for 1810 competing pages; “the planet t shirt” has 720 searches for 1900 competing pages; “planet shirt” has 5400 searches for 4320 competing pages. “Planet shirt” and “planet shirts” have an attractive number of searches, but the numbers of competitors make it look difficult to get to page one quickly. “The planet t shirt” may not be worth the effort.

“Planet t shirt” has 2900 searches for 27500 competing pages; “planet t shirts” has 1300 searches for 35300 competing pages. “Planet t shirt” and “planet t shirts” have way too many competitors. It’s nice to know you shouldn’t devote any time to them.

There you have it: a cheap and easy — well, cheap and tedious way to find quality keywords that can bring your page a lot of hits.

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This article was adapted from a book by Thomas Christopher on opening online T-shirt stores. Visit his How-To-Shirts web site for information about the book. Dr. Christopher, a former CS Professor, loves to find out how to do something and explain it to others.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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