Does Google Need Our Content?

Straight in today, does Google need our content? And how do we find out?

Google serves up results based on an algorithm which basically is a fancy piece of software that collects and sorts web pages. This software is highly secret or otherwise webmasters would just analyse it and find ways of artificially increasing their web sites rankings.

Like scientists who discover planets in the far off galaxies we can’t directly observe this algorithm, we can only measure it by the effect it has. Oh my god!!

There a few ways of determining whether Google will want the content we produce based on our keywords and although perhaps not entirely accurate it is based again on best guess.

So, we have found a keyword phrase of three to six words, now what? Well first we need to know how much other information is already out there that Google knows about.

The simplest way to do this is to go the the search engine and type in our keyword. Google will return a list of results with an indication of how many pages it thinks is relevant to the search. If you get a return of over two million you may want to start over.

Now to refine this very broad search is to enclose your keyword in quotes i.e. “keyword phrase” and search again. You will notice that now there are much fewer returns. This is called exact search and identifies pages that contain the exact phrase, hence the name. This gives you a much better indication of how many other pages you will be competing against.

As a rough guide I like to look for competition numbers of less than 50,000 and the lower the better. After you have done this there are a couple of other ways to gauge the work you will have to do but we will discuss them next time.

Keyword Tools I Use Part 1

Anybody trying to make money online or just get their web pages seen needs a couple of keyword tools. Here are some I use and one I don’t.

There are numerous keyword research tools available some free, some very expensive but the cost or otherwise is not neccesarily an indicator of how good they are. I use several different things to help me decide which keywords to target.

The Google Keyword Tool

This is a good first choice if you are starting out. Although free it will give you a headstart in the search for keywords that you may not of thought of yourself. The drawback is that you then have to flip backwards and forwards between the keyword tool and the search pages to get the competition numbers. The Google Keyword Tool is here

Mozilla Firefox and SEO Extension.

If you use the  Google Keyword Tool the Firefox browser with the SEO extension is a must. It allows you to get so much information at one place it is priceless. Firefox and SEO

Those are the free tools and they have their place on your computer however if you intend to get serious there are some paid tools which are worth considering. The best thing about them is not the information that they get you, you can get that for free as I have said, the best reason for buying them is the enormous amount of time that they can save.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a subscription tool that charges a monthly fee for access. It is a very popular keyword research tool for affiliate marketing and avoids the pitfalls of many desktop based tools in that you are using their bandwidth and proxy servers. You have a variety of tools in one and it is quite quick, the drawback for me was the monthly fee. If you are researching keywords a lot then this is a great tool and worth the money. Personally I look for a bunch of keywords in one go and then concentrate on content so I wasn’t using it to the full, however if you are into bum marketing or article writing this is heartily recommended. Find out about the free trial here

Microniche Finder

This is my favourite keyword tool at the moment. There, I said it, for the price this research tool is incredible. I am an affiliate niche marketer at heart and MNF allows you to get to keywords and search terms so quickly it is worth twice the price in my opinion. This is a one off payment keyword research tool that sits on your computer,I will be putting some posts up about how to get the most out of it but in the meantime check it out here.

Keyword Elite

In my opinion-Don’t bother! Sometimes hype and advertising overcome actual product. Think Windows v Mac, if your’e old enough think VHS v. Betamax. I did use this keyword tool for some time and occasionally it worked very well, but, most of the time it locked up, required captcha codes to be entered every 30 seconds and frequently got me banned by Google. This very expensive tool in my opinion is a waste of time.

Keyword Research & Page Rank

I would like to expand on the previous post regarding keyword research and the methods of determining the quality of a search term or keyword.

As I said Page Rank is a factor in deciding on whether you want to target a particular keyword.  Now perhaps this is not as clear to you as it is to me, but I have been doing this for quite a while and sometimes forget that other people have not got to the same stage .

When you perform any keyword research part of the equation is the competition and how strong is that competition. If you find a search term that has a lot of searches and few results pages, is that a good keyword?

On the face of it, yes, high search/low results= Good! But there is another factor and that is the PR (page rank) of the sites that are listed in the return. Lets research the term ‘fuzzy red widget’ Hey there are 120,000 searches a month, thats a lot of searches, lots of people want fuzzy red widgets!

Lets say there are only 5000 results for the term ‘fuzzy red widget’, this looks promising but if the PR of each page is between 7 and 10 you will have a lot of trouble getting your page anywhere near them. Remember PR is a measure of importance determined by Google and so a high PR is harder to beat than a low one. It may have 120,000 searches but you will never get any of them.

Lets try again, ‘red hairy widgets’ has 50,000 searches each month and there are 50,000 results. This does not look brilliant, fewer searches and more results. But, hang on, the PR of the sites on the first page never gets above 2, this means that you have a very good chance of beating any one of them. This would get you on the first page with a term that is searched for 50,000 times a month. Excellent!

Before you go checking up on me, the figures above are imaginery.

There is a tool that can speed this whole process up and it is free. The best browser around is Firefox, if you haven’t got it go get it now. You can download it for free here. Once you have that head on over here to get the seo Firefox extension. This allows you to view PR, back links, page links and much more. Once again it is free!