In her article for Search Engine Watch, Carrie Hill explains well the use of KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) in evaluating keywords. Basically, the KEI compares the frequency with which a keyword phrase is searched for with the number of competing web sites that show up in the results. If the frequency of search is high compared to the level of competition, that results in a high KEI, and indicates a “niche” keyword that may be easier to get great rankings for.

An earlier article in ClickZ also does a good job of explaining KEI, which is always a factor in our own keyword recommendations to clients. She also discusses the two keyword evaluation databases we like: Keyword Discovery andWordtracker.

Here’s another in our series looking at Bill Hartzer’s search engine tips. The meta keywords tag is one of the less important places for keywords in terms of impact on your rankings in the search engines. Back in the 1990s, “meta tags” were all the rage. But they were so easy to abuse that they count for very little today, and Google states that they explicitly ignore the meta keywords tag.

Why bother? Well, first it’s very little bother at all. Second, some search engines do factor in your meta keywords tag content. And third, it may be the only place you should list common misspellings of your keywords. Put those misspellings almost anywhere else and they’ll be visible in one form or another, making it look like you don’t know how to spell.

The meta keyword tag resides in the code for your web page, and  using this page as an example, it might look like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”search engine optimization tips, search engine spider, web pages that suck, seo, keywords, search engine optimization tips”>

Check out Bill’s article here.

Bill Hartzer has an excellent blog on search engine optimization (SEO), andhe’s started a series of search engine tips that I think you’ll find very valuable. Last month I wrote about his second tip, relating to the Meta Description Tag.

This month the focus is on using keywords in the text content of your site. It may sound obvious, but as Bill points out, a surprising number of web pages fail to use their keyword phrases more than once in their page content. Some don’t use them at all.

Bill suggests, “In an ideal situation, before the web page’s copy is written, the keyword or keyword phrase is given to the copywriter. And the copywriter uses that keyword or keyword phrase several times on the page.” I recommend Bill’s article on using keywords in your copy. Check it out.

Many SEO consultants simply ask a client what keywords they want to be optimized for, and then optimize for those keywords. At Rank Magic, the first thing we do is take those keyword suggestions from the client and do research to reveal all the relatedkeywords searched over the past year, and identify the ones that will provide the best return on investment.

RyanShamus.com has an excellent keyword research tutorial on the importance of selecting the right keywords, with good information on how to identify them and what to do with them once you know what they are. He has some suggestions of keyword research tools, too.<Check it out!>

Choosing which keywords you want to chase in your SEO strategy can be a challenging task. Go after terms that are too competitive, and you might not get there in time, or at all. Go after terms that are easier to rank high for, and you’re likely to get there much faster, but at what cost?

Helping clients choose the best keywords to optimize may be the hardest part of what we do at Rank Magic. In his recent column, “There’s More to Keyword Strategy Than the Long Tail,” Eric Enge suggests adopting a keyword strategy patterned after an NFL quarterback, with lots of options for short, medium, and long passing routes.

One of the worst things to ever happen to web sites was the discovery of keyword density. According to copywriting expert Karon Thackton, “the mere introduction of this concept led to the mutilation and destruction of innocent copy all across the globe. Without any regard to flow or customer experience, website owners around the world began shoving keyphrases into their copy like wild men. The results have been disastrous! Otherwise wonderful content has been utterly destroyed.”

One common mistake Karon  points out is that many web site owners replace every single instance of a generic key term with one of their chosen keyword phrases. In moderation, that’s OK, but often they get carried away with tragic results.

Here’s an example Karon cites:

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If you are looking for Spanish villas vacations, search our site for the best deals in Spanish villas. No other Spanish villas site has the selection of premium Spanish villas with the most sought after locations that we have. View some of our Spanish villas pictures or take virtual tours of our Spanish villas today.

Looks like they want to get rankings for “Spanish villas”. But copy like that will drive actual humans away immediately! Top rankings in all the search engines do you no good at all if your web site turns people off and nobody buys from you. Writing interesting and compelling copy for your potential customer is far more important than slightly higher search engine rankings.

Karon’s full article has some terrific concrete tips on how to include keywords without destroying your copy.

Some are alleging that what other web sites say in their links to you matters more than what’s actually on your web site. I don’t believe that’s completely true, but a couple of recent pranks clearly illustrate the power of link text.

Link text, if you’re not sure, is the text that comprises the actual hyperlink to another web page or web site. In the article below from August 24, the link for Google Talk points to the web page www.google.com/talk/ but it doesn’t say that. It says “Google Talk”. What the link actually says makes a big difference.

You may have heard that if you do a search for “miserable failure” or “worst president”, the #1 result in the search engines is the official biography of President George W. Bush. Try it: go to Google and type in either search term and see what you get.

Now if you go to President Bush’s biography and search it for the word “miserable” or the word “worst”, you’ll find neither one anywhere on the page. How can that be?  Apparently, many bloggers have created links that say “miserable failure” and “worst president” in the link text but which point to President Bush’s biography. So the #1 result you found in Google was driven entirely by link text.

The Moral of the Story

Take this to heart when you’re requesting links to your site. By default, most people giving you links will thoughtlessly give you a link that states your URL, like www.McHughAndMacri.com. That doesn’t help you nearly as much as a link pointing to the same page that says  Elderlaw Attorneys in NewJersey.

In the August 3 edition of the High Rankings Newsletter, noted SEO expert Jill Whalen writes the following:

… you’ve probably heard me say a million times “Make sure to have great keyword-rich content.”

… Does keyword-rich content mean you should find every available spot on your page to stuff your keywords? Of course not! In fact, if you are even using the word “stuff” in the same sentence as “keywords,” it’s most likely not something you want to do. Writing keyword-rich content has nothing to do with stuffing. (We save all our stuffing for Thanksgiving, thank you very much!) To me, it’s common sense that it’s a bad idea to stick keyword phrases everywhere and anywhere. But unless I specifically point out the exact places on a page where you might want to put them (and might not), some people will never quite get it.

Unfortunately, even when I do spell it out, like in my Nitty-gritty Guide there will always be people who will take my suggestions further than they should. They have not learned the most important rule in professional search engine optimization, i.e., always put your site users before the search engines in anything that you do for your website.

The sad (and kinda scary) thing is that even professional SEO companies don’t always get this. I’ve had 2 or 3 emails just this week from people who hired various SEO companies to do work for them, only to have the company make recommendations that actually made the pages of their website *worse* than they were before they hired the company. Not necessarily worse for the search engines, but most definitely worse for the site visitors. In this day and age, it’s hard for me to fathom that an SEO company would still be telling their clients, “You have to do this for the search engines, even though we realize it makes your site look dumb.”

No, you absolutely do not!

There is no SEO technique that you should have to do on your site that will make your site icky for your visitors. Don’t believe it for a second. There may certainly be some trade-offs that your SEO may suggest to you, but you should be able to pick and choose the ones that will work for your site and still get the results you are hoping for.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

A piece of advice from the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC earlier this month: Don’t request a link for the PageRank benefit: concentrate on the anchor Text.

What that means is this. Very often people request links from pages with high Google PageRank because that link will share a portion of that PageRank score with the page it links to. That’s not nearly as important as making sure you have an important keyword in the “anchor text”. Anchor text is the text that’s actually part of the link. On this page, for example, anchor text is blue and underlined.

A link with a keyword in the anchor text is far better than a link that says something like www.easthanoveronline.com. That link might pass along a little bit of PageRank to the target page, but a link like East Hanover Restaurants does far more – it passes keyword relevance along as well.

Where you rank in any search engine is essentially a function of two variables, relevance and reputation. Relevance has to do with how relevant your page is for the keyword being searched. This is what classic SEO addresses: on-page keyword relevance. The other variable is reputation, which search engines essentially measure by your link popularity. A link with a keyword in the anchor text helps on both accounts.

Tip:

Don’t request a link just for the PageRank benefit. Concentrate on keywords in the anchor text.