importance of keyword research

[jonra01]

While the coloring book I have online is doing better in the search engines it still doesn't get the traffic I think it should. Even though I expect it to do better over the next few weeks I decided to do a little research with this tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/), which is in the list of seo tools in the sticky thread at the top of this forum.

My page titles are optimized for the keyword phrase 'online coloring book' I did a check and found that I've been using the wrong phrase all along. Here's what I found when I looked at what the most popular search terms are for this kind of site.

coloring book 465.0 /day
online coloring book 59.0 /day * my main keywords
free online coloring book 29.1 /day

Then I checked coloring pages and found this:
coloring pages 6,643.0 /day
free coloring pages 2,823.0 /day
printable coloring pages 1,630.0 /day
kids coloring pages 933.0 /day
coloring book pages 577.0 /day
tinkerbell coloring pages 563.0 /day
free printable coloring pages 520.0 /day

I obviously need to do some rewording for my page title meta tags and for the content on the site to optimize for 'pages' instead of 'book' I'm going to make those changes as soon as I'm finished with this post.

I wonder how many other people on this forum have made the same kind of mistake?

John

[webado]

I get nothing from no matter what I put in LOL! And no suggestion either, so I guess all mine are hopeless :lol:

[jonra01]

Which site, Christina?

John

[The Gent]

I would imagine a lot. One of the reasons why so many pay for SEO is because they think that once the site is written that is job done. No way, that is the start of the job. The continual tweaks that have to be made to keep on top are the hard work.

[webado]

Well, either of my webado sites: webado.com or webado.net .

I tried simple web stuff and simple website - nothing from either and no suggestions.

I tried it before with other sites and got the same results. At one time I think thsi or another simialr tool recommeded a weird combination for me to optimize on - "value added webhosting" - cripes, I'd never search for this, never :lol:

[JWJ]

An interesting tool John. Running it for watercolours (my main target) shows an appalling result of just 31 per day. Trying 'original art' returned 299 per day, but 'paintings' gave 1743 per day in Wordtracker and 7948 in Overture. I'm going to have to do some serious tweaking also.

Thanks for the tip. :wink:

[webado]

Try Watercolor and maybe use UnitedStates. It would bring a bunch.

[webado]

Err... what they should give the keywords most often requested which return teh elst number of sites that qualify. Now that would be more useful.

If I look for web hosting or webhosting, sure it's used a million times a day, but it also returns about 5 million sites, guess where mine would be? around 4,999,999 .

Web design hosting is used a log, but again way too many results are always returned for poor little me to be anytwere up there. The nature of the biz, that's all. I hold no hope of any breakthrough. Even if I were to plaster those words 100 times each on my web pages, it wouldn't make a dent. Good thing I'm not trying to make a living with this stuff.

[JWJ]

Try Watercolor and maybe use UnitedStates. It would bring a bunch.
I did ... 323 and 487 respectively. Better than watercolour admittedly, but 'painting' has got to be the way to go.

[jonra01]

www.webado.com comes up #11 for 'simple web stuff', but that doesn't help much when you see this
How many times is this phrase searched for?
Wordtracker
Check out what else Wordtracker can do for you.
No data for phrase: simple web stuff

Overture
No data for phrase: simple web stuff

www.webado.net won't do very well until you do something about your page titles. The home page is simply titled "Home - WEBADO.NET" That's fine if you want to get found for the keyword(s) webado.net. It doesn't do much for anything else.

I get a lot of hits on the css demos pages and I think it is because of the page titles. One of those pages brings in 50-60 visitors per day. The title of the page is 'css overflow property examples' and it does very well in the serps. It comes up #1 for 'css overflow property examples, #7 for 'css overflow property', and #12 for 'css overflow'. Two of my other css pages come up #5 & #6 for 'css demos'

The proper page title is critical for best ranking on the serps. Especially, for google.

John

[webado]

Well, that idiotic Mambo CMS package doesn't allow any other titles, or my idiotic self hasn't found where they can be put in. :oops:

It also has that other notion of "SE friendly url's" and they don't look any friendlier than query strings to me, but somebody said search engines prefer those. Whatever.

The best I can do is try to force keywords and descriptions in meta tags on pages, but even that looks half-baked to me. I seem to get more commas than actual words.

Actually simple web stuffu sed to come up in top 3 - but maybe just on my Google. Right now webado.com came as #5 for that, #1 when put inside quotes. But I am the only living soul looking for this keyphrase as you said.

That site is really found more through audio streaming searches, ironically. Mayeb I shoudl actually write stuff properly on that :lol:

I kind of feel about that Mambo CMS the way I feel about hard to adapt templates. Webado.net was made usign Mambo. Webado.com was made using good old html and php, hadncoded by yours truly. I have a ton more satisfaction out of webado.com than webado.net, and I find it infinitely easier to modify too.

[The Gent]

Not at all familiar with that system but there must be something in the CMS that says <title> or Page title goes here! I handcode so don't get involved with all that ;-)

[webado]

Not at all familiar with that system but there must be something in the CMS that says <title> or Page title goes here! I handcode so don't get involved with all that ;-)

Well, as I said, I haven't found it if there is.


-----

Later

Egad! I found it. It was referred to as Site Name and it already had the domain name in it - never though to put anything else in that spot .

It also is an item which not only appears in the page title but in the page content - so now I have to go inside the actual code ion teh templaet and force it to use a different content title as it looks bad.

The word Home comes from some place else deep inside the CMS code.

A CMS like this is 90% database driven and 10% code drive. The 10% is made in part of bits and pieces of html which get put togetehr to make a template, and php for driving the logic. Spread over hundereds of scripts, modules and what they call Mambots.

The database side is buitl from inside the application. I tried going straigth into the database but failed miserably, as I had no idea where anything was. All items are just numbers.

[The Gent]

Good because I was just looking at Mambo - decided it was er ... not for me! Anyway, this thread is going to go off at a tangent if we're not careful.

[jonra01]

Tangent, smangent, who cares? :)

That's the way my mind works. I might start out a conversation about black holes and end up, after a few leaps in thought, talking about the life cycle of the mayfly. :)

Just like now, I'm only posting because I want to see what my new sig looks like.

John

[webado]

Well, John, it's not that I don't want to take your advice. It's that at least for a crazy thign like Mambo I cannot, unless I absolutely want to spend my time rewriting half the code.

So I got a title in. Good - but it applies to the whole site and I cannot force differnt things based on context. It's very simplistic and at the same time ultra complicated. First and last time I dabble in CMS, mark my words. If I should ever be tempted to do it again, somebody bong me on the head. :lol:

Actually, I might just redo it all without CMS. And then I'll be able to make it bilingual the way I wanted to do it in the first place and couldn't. Mambo can be in various languages, but only one at a time can be implemented. And actually the various languages really mainly apply to the site management more than ability to have multilingual content.

A CMS like this is OK if you want to keep on changing bits and pieces of content on the front page, like in a magazine, and have several people who can do it too. But the structure is very limiting. What goes to secondary pages is hard to control, and deeper than that it's more by fluke. At least for me it is.


----

Is that blue eyed Whitey?

[The Gent]

Tangent, smangent, who cares? :)

That's the way my mind works. I might start out a conversation about black holes and end up, after a few leaps in thought, talking about the life cycle of the mayfly. :)

Just like now, I'm only posting because I want to see what my new sig looks like.

JohnI don't. I am quite partial to doing it myself.

By the way, your signature looks to me like a cat and I can't wait to find out if I'm correct :lol:

[jonra01]

I wanted to dress up that link from the kids' site to the story so I found a picture of a white cat on http://sxc.hu That's the royalty free photo site I mentioned in another post. I searched on 'white cat' and saw this picture. It was perfect - it matched the description of Whitey in the story. The eyes really give it some 'pop'. I added it to my sig to share it with you guys 'n gals.

John

[trackerm]

Then I checked coloring pages and found this:
coloring pages 6,643.0 /day
free coloring pages 2,823.0 /day

John

Sometimes small humans don't have the capacity to know they want to do a drawing till you shove a crayon up their nose... so I put in some others for you John:

kids games 7,471.0 /day
kids online games 1,593.0 /day
free kids games 1,339.0 /day

Then the biggie...
games 122,205.0 /day
games cheat 74,387.0 /day
play games 32,609.0 /day
free games 29,844.0 /day
online games 26,584.0 /day
free online games 23,685.0 /day

[jonra01]

That's the next phase. I'll have to make sure I do some seo on the games part of the site.

Something else just dawned on me. I setup a sub-domain called coloring-book.jonra.com. Now that I know pages is a better word than book I'm going to change that to coloring-pages.jonra.com. The site has only been up for about 1 week so I should be able to make the change without too much harm.

John

[trackerm]

That's the next phase. I'll have to make sure I do some seo on the games part of the site.


John

no, you missed the point. Use "Games" as a keyword for the coloring books too.....
Often people search for something to do. They don't know specifically what they want to do, first up.
So if Mum says "Go to your room and do your homework!" the brat will go to his comuter and type in 'Games' and come up with your coloring book and do that. get it? :)

[jonra01]

no, you missed the point. Use "Games" as a keyword for the coloring books too.....
Often people search for something to do. They don't know specifically what they want to do, first up.
So if Mum says "Go to your room and do your homework!" the brat will go to his comuter and type in 'Games' and come up with your coloring book and do that. get it? :)[/quote]
I get it, but they are the same site, sharing the same navigation, so I can optimize one section (sub-domain) for games and the other for coloring pages and get the best of both worlds. Don't forget, it's not a matter of getting your site high in the serps - it's about getting one page up there If I can get one page to show up for 'free games' and another to show up for 'free coloring pages' I'll be very happy. I'm not going to splash the 'free games' keywords all over the coloring pages and I won't have 'free coloring pages' all over the games pages.

John

[trackerm]

right you are :)

[bushman7]

When I first started my website back in '03, I was targeting the phrase "Balsa wood bridge designs" after using the Word Tracker tool. They gave this term a KEI of 1764 on Altavista.

Now, it has a KEI of less than 1.

People change what they are looking for.

[DSL Guy]

Hello friends,

I would like to add it really depends on the search engine and what it's looking for and where it's looking.

Keyword "DSL" on average generates a few million hits a month. MSN indexes on average about 40 million pages for this one. I get #2 spot. If you look at the page it brings up I pretty much stick to the basic html, and because it's a marketing site I went way overboard with the header tags.
No PR to speak of. DSL is in the title, the url, the meta descriptions, the content, but also I have thousands of other out-side in links pointing to me using that keyword.

Google will pull me up pretty high if you add to "DSL" a specific region or phrase like "DSL prices for the wilmington area", so that tells me Google is searching harder on the content than the url or keywords or meta info but probably uses those to some extent.

Yahoo works similarly. It's only MSN I get the one word keywords.

Yet in spite of no PR to speak of...? Check on the number of other sites you have linking in to you. Are they relevant to what you do? I think this is one area I need to put additional focus into. If you find very few other sites or very few relevant sites linking in to you, it may not matter what you do to your titles, urls, meta tags, content. I say this because I'm under the impression that every major search engine is now looking more closely at that detail.

[jonra01]

If you find very few other sites or very few relevant sites linking in to you, it may not matter what you do to your titles, urls, meta tags, content. I say this because I'm under the impression that every major search engine is now looking more closely at that detail.
I disagree completely. At least when it comes to google. I did a little research on your dsl site and found that it doesn't come up in the first 1000 sites for 'dsl alabama', which is in your footer as anchor text. Even though your index page has a PR of 2. It also doesn't show up for your example "DSL prices for the wilmington area".

This could be because you are using seo tactics that google frowns on, like duplicate pages and keyword stuffing. The MSN search is still in beta and will no doubt implement the same kind of filters eventually.

I find that the title and relevance of the content is much more important on google than links from other sites. Now, whether this holds true for really competitive keywords like 'dsl' is another matter.

John

[tracy16]

Keyword Research ] is very important but there's good news. it has become very easy for me.

your try it out for yourself. :)

Cheers
Tracy16