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For those who own a site promoting their products or simply writing blogs, I assume there are times you consider thinking about the kind of keywords to use.

From SEO stand point, you want to use keywords that are more relevant to what users are searching. You also want to consider choosing the right combination of terms to match the keywords that are searched more than other relevant keywords.

So here is a basic process to use to kick of you list of keywords that are more user-centric.

For this specific example, I will use search terms relating to SEO to come up with possible content ideas and keywords relating to SEO that are relevant and effective.

1) Create a general list of keywords. Perhaps five of them. Let's call this List-A.

It is advised to start by thinking what your readers or customers are thinking. Try not to come up with terms that are industry specific or too granular. Start off with general terms that associate well with your readers.

You can ask your friends, family, customers, and colleagues. Let's start with these examples.

List-A
SEO
SEO Optimization
SEO Tools

2) Do some research!! Then come up with second list of keywords. Let's call this List-B.

• Find out what your users are talking or searching about SEO.
• Visit your competitor's websites: Check their backlinks and keywords they are targeting
• Visits blogs of your industry.
• Check out reviews, comments, and testimonials.

List-B
Google SEO
SEO Services
SEO Keywords

3) Combine the two list Final List = List-A + List-B

Final List
SEO
SEO Optimization
SEO Tools
Google SEO
SEO Services
SEO Keywords

4) Analyze the list and come up with keyword matrix

I recommend using Google AdWord Keyword Tool to come up with potential keywords related terms for your SEO strategy.

Once you make the first column within the keyword matrix table, select relevant terms associating to your content. Create additional columns based on your keyword selections.

Now, you have a list of keywords that you could potentially use to better optimize your pages for search. Welcome to SEO!!

Note: Don't forget to leverage competition and CPC data given in the Google Keywords Tool

Overview of 301 redirect

The code "301" means "file moved permanently".

A 301 redirect is implemented in your .htaccess file. In the .htaccess file, after the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name.

A 301 redirect is the most efficient and spider and visitor friendly strategy around for web sites.

Why you should consider using 301 redirect for site relaunch

It's easy and simple to set up 301 redirects and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you HAVE to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option to redirect pages without impacting your page ranking.

A lot of site lose out on valuable search engine traffic due to incorrectly configuring the redirects. It is very import that when a search engine comes to crawl your website it is able to follow any redirects you have set up.

Suppose you have a website http://www.xyz.com and you create a redirect such that whenever any visitor types in the URL http://www.xyz.com he is automatically redirected to http://www.xyz.com/abc/, If the Search Engine is not able to follow the redirect it would think that http://www.xyz.com has no contents, http://www.xyz.com would end up ranking very badly in search engines.

Common way to track it through web analytics

I track my 404 error page by adding the google analytics tracking code in it.

I remember at one point, I updated all of my URLs to reflect best SEO practices by replacing URLs that contain "_" to "-". However, I missed out several pages, so I carefully looked at what pages resulted in 404, and added the new page URL to the 301 redirect.

This is one way you can leverage your analytics and error pages to make sure all of the page requests are redirected to proper page URLs.

This is a great basic introduction to Google PPC advertisers.

We come to think that highest bidder will always rank higher than lower bidder due to the nature of traditional auction. However, it doesn't work that way with Google Adwards. Here are the main takeaways of these three key points that determine ad positions and CPC (cost per click) for Adwards.

What determines the Quality Score

1) Quality score is determined by Relevancy, Landing Page, and Click-through Rate (CTR).

2) Relevancy is determined by language used within the ad, and its language against the keywords used in the search query.

3) Landing page should have relevant, original content, quick load time, minimal pop-ups/unders, and transparency of site interaction between the server and users.

What determines Ad Ranking

1) Ad ranking is determined by Bid Price (BP) and Quality Score (QS):
Ad Rank = BP x QS

2) Ad with highest Ad Rank gets the top position.

What advertisers pay

1) Paid price is the bid amount the price is set by the advertiser below him/her.

2) Advertisers do not necessarily pay the max bid price.

3) High quality score will yield lower price or CPC.

4) Advertisers have to pay:

P1 = Price that Advertiser-1 pay
Q1 = Quality of Advertiser-1 ad
B2 = Bids of Advertiser-2
Q2 = Quality of Advertiser-2 ad
Note: Ad Rank = (B2)(Q2) = Bid Price x Quality Score

(P1)(Q1) = (B2)(Q2)
P1 = [(B2)(Q2)] / (Q1) = CPC

Here is the video. Check it out!

Link: Introduction to the ad auction

Keywords used on search engines that referred traffic to a site are usually listed in the traffic source section of the analytics tools. These keywords are very insightful because it allows you to know what users search online to arrive at your site.

We need to remember that your site content that are available to internet users determines the keywords users will use to arrive at your site. That will we based on various factors from Page Rank, external links, content relevancy, etc. (SEOMoz has great content regarding SEO). Therefore, "what" is available on your site will contribute to "what" you'll find in analytics tool under search engine keywords referrals.

One reason I am writing about this topic is because analyst could report top popular keywords from search, best converting keywords, keywords with great ROI, etc., but that doesn't address a common behavioral pattern internet users perform.

For major sites that promote their brand, branded terms from search is pretty important to know. Because if your site's objective is to build brand awareness and exposures, it'll be very important to reach audience who are looking for your brand.

If you are trying to reach new consumers who don't know about your brand, and want them to remember your brand through your site using SEM -- it is critical to remember that you'll need to reach them by promoting search terms that are associated to your brand. For example, for an apparel company, it could be related to a type of cloths (t-shirt, jeans, sweater, etc.).

Once you reached your users, assuming your site did a great job in brainwashing them with your brand and products/services, they will likely and possibly return back to your site (may even buy or convert, too!!) through search terms related to your brand or company's name.

Here are some steps I would use in approaching to gauge your initiatives in transforming non-branded referrers to your brand referrers.

1) Assess and acquire knowledge on current distribution of users coming from branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords. Let's say 80% branded vs. 20% non-branded to demonstrate this example.

2) Invest in acquiring traffic from non-branded terms utilizing your data acquired through analytics -- perhaps increasing traffic from the long-tail of non-branded keywords segment, participate in PPC campaign, increase content to acquire organic search traffic, etc.

3) Create two segmentations (or simply track) traffic from organic search traffic via non-branded terms, and returning traffic from branded terms.
Note: you can also generally look at overall traffic from search vs. returning traffic via search as well. However, it is advised to look at it more granular.

4) Measure the performance and results against different time. Before vs. After, Month to Month, Week vs. Week, etc.

Hopefully this gives you a different perspective on how you look at branded terms to non-branded terms, and understand how to assess traffic impacted from users converting from non-branded referrer segment to your loyal branded referrer segment.

Assessing your site traffic from search engines by the keywords your visitors used, is a pretty important practice when determining your site's visibility against these terms.

There are many articles out there addressing "Long Tail" of keywords, and to assess all of the keywords that are under your Long Tail strategy requires huge amount of efforts.

One way to help you start initiating such research is by categorizing the key terms and graphing it out.

Here is an example of from a fictional blog site that writes about California in general.
The kewords listed in this chart would be hand picked by your analyst, based on key keywords that would be imporant to your site.

This chart tells me 50% of all searched terms from search engines contained a word "Event". Obviously, this will tell you that a lot of the search traffic are coming from event related terms. More than "Museum" or "Food" related terms.

This is nice to know because it also tells you how you are positioning the site's content. The opportunity for this site would be to write more relevent content pertaining to food and museums. Perhaps in San Francisco or Sacramento.

That new goal you set, will allow you to plan what content to write and re-position your site.

It is a common conversation in marketing agency in discussing what topic or content to add on a site, newsletter, blog, etc. I'm sure true journalists would hate such discussions, since we're talking about adding content based on what your audience would want to read instead of what you think they should know.

Web analytics could tell you which of the content on your site is popular based on traffic coming from different sources. With enphasis on search engine marketing, I'd like to discuss several different options for you to determine the content demand from your audience.

Traffic coming from search engines would obviously involve some keywords that users searched on Google, Yahoo!, Live, etc. Search engines would serve relevant content based on their complex algorithms and indexed pages (search engines' inventory). The majority of web analytics applications would be able to tell you what keywords users used to arrive to your site or pages. If you segment your traffic from search engines and view top content, you'll be able to see which of your site content has the most traffic from search.

If you're trying to use web analytics applications to determine what content to add or write about in the near future, I would be careful about few things. First, web analytics and referrals from search is only based on the pages that are available. Second, web analytics applications won't tell you the content demand, popular search keywords don't equate to a lot of people are searching for those topics.

To shed a little light on web analytics tools, perhaps you have a page writing about topic A, but you may coincidentally have many keywords within that page related to topic B. In that case, you could be lucky in a sense that users searching for topic B could end up on your page about topic A. Bounce rates for it could be high, but I would keep an eye on this aspect.

Opportunities
So what content should you add? Obviously, you're goals and objectives would be different when willing to add content on your site. Your goal or objective could be:

- Writing a blog (I would recommend you to keep on writing based on your passion and goals)

- Determine content to add on newsletter to avoid fatigue and increase consumer interests.

- Increase site traffic by adding relevant content for your audience.

- Simply out of idea, and want to know where to start.

- Increase traffic from the long-tail aspect of keywords from search.

Since this article enphasizes on search engines traffic, I would like to state SEO (search engine optimization) as a relevant method to increase traffic for current and upcoming pages. There are several tactics to consider if you're thinking about adding content to increase traffic from search engines.

1. Obviously, SEO. Make sure your SEO due diligence are well executed (Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Linking across internal pages, seeding pages on social networking sites, update your site map xml for better indexing, etc.).

After doing the basic SEO practices, I was able to double (even more for some sites) site traffic from search. Be aware of black-hat methods and stick to the basics first. Tweak your site little by little and you'll notice the difference soon.

2. Run surveys, polls, quizzes, etc. Your users would be able to tell you what they like and what they don't like. Depending on how you question your users, they can tell what they want to know more about.

It's amazing to hear directly from your users, it can't get better than raw voices. This may be limited to the way you ask your users, but it would be a tactic you want to execute.

3. Research online. There are so many ways to research and even know what to research on. However, leverage what's available online to see what topics are hot in your industry, has buzz, sites with many traffic, etc. This can inspire you on what to write next and generate new traffic opportunities. Seasonal or annual events would be great way to look at in order to guess what users would be searching for and want to read.

4. Utilize tools available from search engines. I personally love Google tools such as Google Webmaster Tools, Search Insights, Google Trends, and advance search filters on Google. These tools would definitely open your eyes on keywords that could potentially give you an idea to new topics/content to add on your site.

Google webmaster tools would allow you to mitigate your duplicated page titles or meta descriptions, and understand what keywords your site is showing up, but not getting many click-throughs, etc. Additionally, Google Search Insight would give you raising keywords related to the terms you're researching on.

5. Add content and measure. Track what kinds of content are available and understand what you added or wrote on your site.

That spike in traffic could be that new article you wrote on XYZ. Maybe you can write more about that to give more contexts and opportunities for your reader to think and comment.

The great advantage of Search Engine Marketing is that you're able to get a deeper understanding of what people are interested in, and target ads based on what keywords are searched. Search engines like Google are storing the information users searched, and providing that data to support ad agencies, small businesses, corporations, researchers, etc.

For example, Google's "Insights for Search" allow us to gauge interest in pertinent search terms. This is really interesting, since we are now capable to see search trends and compare against other terms. It can help us determine trends in seasonality, brands vs. brands, choosing ad messages, and opportunities by geo location.

In this post, I'll use an example from major shoe companies and see what this "Insights for Search" tool can do for us. Note that this tool may change and be deleted by Google anytime. So this example and material could be outdated in upcoming months.

In my example, I chose the keywords Nike, Adidas, Puma, and Reebok. These are pretty popular shoe brands out here in USA. After entering these keywords, and selected 2008, the following appears.

Note that the index valued circled in red, is "normalized" values. That means, it allows the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. Obviously, Nike is very popular, and it could mean that Nike has better brand awareness than other shoe brands. However, the term Puma could associate to the animal Puma and some other product names.
Let's narrow the category to Shopping > Apparel > Footwear, and set the country to USA. Very interesting! Now Adidas and Puma has the same interest level of 25.

This is very interesting because the spike in August for Puma, tells me that they must have done something around Beijing Olympics to capture higher awareness and interest amongst the people in USA. My personal hypothesis is, Usain Bolt (Jamaica's sprinter) was wearing Puma shoes, which caused a viral effect on consumers to search online. Well, that's for you to research and confirm, and hopefully you can prove me right.

I really like the "Growth relative to category" tab next to "Interest level" tab. It shows you how each terms or brands are doing relevant to its category. I stretched the timeline to 2004 to present, and noticed something crazy going on with Reebok in 2005. What happened there, and why is it trending downwards after that.

Although Adidas seems pretty stable within its category, I've noticed the growth level was high in Germany. Check it out (below)! Also it is interesting to see it peeking at 2006 summer. If you follow soccer, you'll immediately know that Germany hosted the World Cup in June 2006. I also find this chart interesting, because Nike is growing, and has the highest growth rate in 2008. Good job Nike.

I can go on and on breaking it down by regions, and search terms including rising terms. However, I'll stop here, I hope you get the point. This tool is pretty powerful to trend the brand awareness and interest. I hope this will help you get a better understanding of search and how it can help you research the market. To those marketers for Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and Puma, I hope this helped you, too. Enjoy analyzing!!

Link to Google Insight for Search

Google made their "Google Ad Manager" (beta) public, and anyone with AdSense account is able to access the Ad Manager now. Google Ad Manager is a free, and it is a hosted ad and inventory management tool that can help publishers sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventory.

It is suppose to help publisher spend less time with ad management so that they can focus more on building contents for their web site or working with their advertisers.

Here is the official announcement from Google: Inside AdSense: Ad serving for everyone

Original announcement in early 2008: Official Google Blog: Our solutions for ad serving

Apparently, this Ad Manager is a complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center, which focuses more on smaller sales/publishers.

What I find very interesting is that Ad Manager integrates well with Ad Sense (contextual ad serve). Additionally, publisher is able to create ad slots, define placements, define custom attributes for better targeting, and manage orders/inventories.

According to Google's blog, it says, "Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory."

Going forward, it'll be interesting to see small and mid size web sites having the power to serve relevant ads and utilize their site properties as ad inventories.

In my experience with Ad Serving platforms, there are a lot of challenges working around uploading flash or rich media ads on to the site. So it'll be interesting to see how publishers, advertisers, and agencies work around the challenges with Google.

Meanwhile, if you have a small site like mine or starting to use Ad Manager, the inventory checker may result in low impressions. To get a better understanding on how you should slice up the placement, you can use your web analytics software to understand which sections/pages on your site get a lot of page views, so you can determine what to define as placements within Ad Manager.

For those marketers, analyst, or even people who are interested in learning what Google AdWords is all about, you have to check out the learning center that is offered from Google.

Obviously, Google AdWords is a paid per click (PPC) management tool, where you can set your keywords, creatives, links, ad groups, etc. Although the concept of PPC is pretty simple, when you consider all the factors around costs, creatives, setting up different ad groups/campaigns, and setting up links to different landing pages, it could get pretty confusing for people who are new to this.

I highly recommend going through these learning materials which are offered through multimedia or text. It is totally free, and it only requires your time.

Don't forget to take those quizzes as it will help you to grasp the concept even better.

Google AdWords Lessons Catalog

Other related links to this article
A Learning Center for everyone

AdWords 101: the building blocks of AdWords

There is one method that I favor in taking a holistic look at search keywords performance, and a great point to start off in optimizing your site's content.

In Google Analytics, their "Traffic Sources > Keywords" report is a very useful tool in tackling such analysis. Take a look at the sample list of keywords.
* This collection of data is made up for the purpose of this topic.

Assuming that the site is called "California.com", and the site is about introducing various places and lifestyle info. Using that Google Analytics' keywords reporting, you can query several main keywords that are relevant and important to your site.

The key metrics to look at is highlighted in the red box, which are:
Keywords
Visits
Visits - % of Site Total
Page / Visit
Avg. Time on Site
Bounce Rate
Basically, we're looking at a metrics associates to collection of keywords that contain the terms, like "California", "Los Angeles", etc.

This is very powerful way of looking at it, since it gives actionable insights to:

• Important and popular terms associated to the main objective of the site.


• Engagement by keyword, which will tell you if those contents are engaging or not.


• Gauge the disconnect between your content and search engine acquisition strategies.

Let's look at Keywords vs. Traffic.
It is obvious that referring terms associated to California ranks high in terms of # of visits, which is great, considering that the site is about California. In addition, California related keywords accounted 16.8% of the site visits.

Now, using this method of looking at this data, this tells me that Sacramento and Orange County related terms are pretty weak in terms of traffic. That means, you need to either add more content relevant to those terms or simply invest in buying more keywords if you are participating in paid search.

Now looking at Engagement vs. Keywords
Some how the keywords associated to "San Francisco" and "Food" are getting relatively high traffic, but low page per visit. Additionally, average time on site is lower and bounce rate seems high. This tells me that something is wrong with the content related to these key terms. Perhaps there are some contents that aren't engaging, which are causing users to not view through the pages.

This is a good starting point to tackle a deeper analysis by digging into granular keywords containing those low engaging keywords, and looks at popular entry pages by those terms as well. It won't be surprising to find one particular page receiving high level of traffic with low engagement.

Finally, Content vs. Search Acquisition Strategies
As mentioned earlier, the objective of the site is to build awareness of different places and life styles in California. So observing that the keywords "Sacramento" and "Orange County" contributing few traffic is something to look into. It could mean that there aren't many content introducing those places, or it could mean that the existing contents aren't relevant and Google is ranking them very low.

Whatever reason it is, these metrics tells you that it is something worth looking into and take some actions.

The case study introduced here is just a beginning for deeper analysis. Obviously, it will be your job to dig into these main keywords and look at a much granular level. For example, the term California may be broken down into multiple combination with terms associated to food, like "California Pizza", "California Tacos", etc.

The caveat here is not to focus too much on keywords from pure acquisition stand point, but rather look into it from serving relevant content. When you have great relevant content and you execute the necessary SEO due diligence (pate titles, meta tags, header tag structure, anchor text, etc.), eventually your web pages will be index and properly served by search engines. This method in analyzing the keywords, allows you to balance out your content strategy with what people are finding relevant to their search.

Google Adwords is a powerful search engine marketing tool offered from Google. It allows businesses to purchase keywords, and serve ads in the search engine results page (SERP) when users search through Google using the purchased keywords.

There are few tips to think about prior to investing in Google's Adwords or paid search.

1) Know your audience
You want to be able to read the right users at the right time. Review what your site is offering (products, content, service, etc.), and understand who is buying or consuming it.

2) Identify your goals.
Stay focused on how to reach your customers, while understanding the goal to measure success. Since you are likely to measure your goal based on specific campaign categories, call to action, or creatives, structure your campaign based on necessary category. For example, product line, theme, topics, etc.

3) Choose relevant keywords
I would suggest start brainstorming by making your list of keywords starting from broad terms. You can then narrow down by being more specific on the broad terms. Once you understand what keywords work best for you, you can go ahead and increase your bid on those effective words to maximize your return.

4) Work on ads that would make users click
You have to work on the creatives that would describe the title and description of the ad. Google Adwords allows you to test different creatives and optimize the rotation by best performing ads. So coming up with ads with compelling words would be very important.

Some advice to executing effective ads are:

• Include your keywords in your title and description.


• Convey key product/service benefits.


• Get to the point quickly.


• Write copy that includes a strong call to action, such as "buy now" or "sign up today."


• Direct users to the landing page that most relates to your ad.

5) Target by regions
To even increase the chance of reaching the right audience, try targeting your ads by specific region. If you business is serving to consumers on a global scale, then write your ads in different languages. If it is local, try serving it only in local areas.

6) Measure the performance
Continue to measure the success of your ads by linking it to conversions. Make sure that keywords performance is analyzed from different angles such as spending, position, conversions, and popularity. You can easily tie the performance to conversions via Google Adwords, and Google Analytics would be a great tool to see the data by traffic behavior.

7) Test, Test, Test
You have to optimize your keywords list, creatives, and landing pages in order to maximize your return on those keywords you bid. Testing your ads and its performances is the key method to give you the next action to optimize your campaigns. Don't just let your money drain out to ineffective ads. Don't be afraid to try new or change things around. Just make sure that you test it.

A lot of marketers and businesses are investing on PPC (Paid per Click) ads for various reason. Some of the reasons are obtaining higher traffic, promote certain pages, increase conversion through targeted users, etc.

Obviously, if you invest in PPC campaigns, you might want to know how it performed in many ways, so your money is well spent. You need to analyze it to understand the return on the investment.

WAA had an interesting article on 10 simple ways to use web analytics to optimize the PPC campaigns:

1) Traffic Volume & Conversion Rate Comparisons: Measure how many traffic you are obtaining via PPC and understand the conversion rate differences from various traffic sources. The good thing about PPC is that you have the option to take visitors to any landing pages so optimizing the landing page could be an option.

2) New Keyword Opportunities: Look into the keywords your visitors are using to come into the site and leverage those keywords into your PPC keywords strategies.

3) New Traffic Source Opportunities: Evaluate the conversion rate from different traffic sources, and look into opportunities to acquire traffic and qualified visitors from high converting traffic sources.

4) Budget Forecasting: Understand the balance between how much money you are paying to acquire traffic and conversions. Allocate the money wisely across different campaign levels to sustain and grow better conversions.

5) Segmenting User Behavior: Click path from different search engines may behave differently. Understand the difference between which keywords and path the visitors took to achieve higher conversion.

6) Identifying "Influencer Keywords": Consumers search multiple times before making a purchase and refine those searches from generic keywords to more refined words. Use analytics to find out if they do indeed bring converting users, even if it's for that initial introduction to the site.

7) Identifying Conversion Latency: Not everyone converts immediately. How many days pass before a visitor returns to convert? Therefore, don't judge PPC success until the latency period has passed. Basically, know your audience sales cycle and build that into campaign expectations.

8) Finding Day-Part Opportunities: Certain time of the week may have different conversion rate. Adjust PPC budget allocation according to the cycle.

9) Hot Products, Top Converters: With a limited budget and possibly thousands of product pages, be aware of the various metrics that are applicable to measure what really needs to be focused. (Product page visits, revenue/order size, profit margin, conversion rates, quantity of orders, etc.)

10) Landing Page Analysis/Bounce Rates: When there are multiple landing pages for the PPC campaigns, use A/B or multivariate testes to improve the landing page performances and 'stickyness' to reduce the bounces.

These are simple examples on how to approach what to measure and optimize for the PPC campaigns.

Source: http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/art/?484

An article from CNET on "Ad spending moving from portals to search, entertainment site" is pretty interesting. As more marketers are investing in paid search, that means more competition and higher price for popular keywords or phrases.

A lot of the wise advertisers would look into the details of what keywords from search engines are driving traffic to your site, and analyze the effective keywords that bring qualified visitors. Additionally, when investing in keywords, it is optimal to look into the phrases that would fall under the "Long Tail" of the keywords that drive traffic to your site.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other earch engine-related activities. SEM can deliver huge numbers of qualified visitors or prospects to your website.

A comprehensive SEM campaign and strategies should also aim to persuade prospects to take the specific actions you want them to take. Your SEM strategies should close the loop by providing metrics and analytics to drive ongoing improvements that will net you the highest possible online marketing return.

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN provides a comprehensive online marketing platform. With those tools, you can reach your potential customers at the exact moment they are seeking online information realted to your products or information offered from your website.

Zoommetrix would like to help you manage your search engine marketing campaign, and drive successful online campaign results.