How to Evaluate Data for Search Engine Optimization?

Selecting the right keywords can be one of the most important aspects of search engine marketing. This is equally important for search engine optimization and for pay per click search engine marketing. In my last article, Part 1 of this series, I discussed several free methods to use to evaluate keywords and end up with a list that will work the best for your business. Most people can come up with a list of keywords, but the trick is then to know which ones are going to be useful to you. The free tools you can use to evaluate the importance or value of the keywords are: 1. The monthly number of searches on the Yahoo network, shown by their online tool 2. The number of people using those keywords to find your site over the last few months 3. Your ranking for those keywords on Google 4. The Google Page Rank of the top site on Google for that keyword 5. The type of sites coming up on organic or paid search listings for that keyword in the last article I discussed items 1-3 above. Now I’ll discuss items 4-5. The Google Page Rank of the Top Site on Google for That keyword, this is what I call the "reality check" tool. There is a toolbar you can download from Google that will show the Page Rank of any site showing in the browser. The Page Rank is a ranking system developed by Google to show the relative importance of a given site or page. The tool shows a bar graph, and if you mouse over it, it shows the number. The scale is from 1-10. So for this step, I go to Google and enter the key phrase, hit enter and see what comes up. Then I go to the first site that comes up in the regular, or organic search results (not the sponsored listings at the top in yellow or on the right), and see what the Page Rank is for that site. Enter that number in column five. Here is the significance of this. If the top site for a given keyword has a high Page Rank, that means that they are a well established site and have done some serious search engine optimization, have a lot of links to them, etc. For our purposes we will define a high Page Rank as 5 or higher. Especially if your site is new or you have never done any SEO work, I would not recommend selecting a keyword where the top site has a Page Rank of 5 or higher. You won’t be able to effectively compete for that keyword. You need to find keywords where the top sites have lower Page Ranks, so you as a new site coming into that market can compete more easily. That’s mainly for SEO. For pay per click, this method doesn’t matter as much. So go through your entire list, go to Google and enter each keyword, go to the top site coming up on regular (non-paid) search, note the Page Rank, then mark that on your spreadsheet. The Type of Sites Coming Up on Organic or Paid Search Listings for That Keyword For this method, you go to Google and/or Yahoo and see what types of listings are coming up for each keyword. This is important because it gives you an idea of what the people typing in that keyword is seeing when the listings come up. The major importance here is to see if the other listings show that you would be reaching the right type of public with that keyword. For example, one client of mine is a recruiting company, and they wanted to target companies looking to hire people. They already had tons of job applicants, but they needed more companies wanting to hire. So by using this method we could see that some of the keywords we were looking at were bringing up listings geared to job applicants. And others were geared more towards companies doing hiring, which were the ones we wanted. It’s good to use this method just to check and make sure you’re on the right track and targeting the right public with that keyword. Write down a very brief summary of the types of ads you see in the spreadsheet. Final Evaluation Now that you have all the data in your spreadsheet, you can now go through the list and select the keywords you want to target. You might first want to go through and eliminate the ones you don’t want, and highlight them in some color like red or pink or something. Then go back and start selecting the ones you want and highlight them in green. How to Evaluate This Data for Pay Per Click Campaigns You want to stay away from single word key words and go more for 2, 3, 4 or more word phrases, as research shows that the people typing in these are more in the buying phase and not in the lookie-loo phase. The number of people who are using that phrase to find your site is of some importance here, but not as much as the Yahoo/Overture search numbers. The Google ranking and Page Rank of the top site have no real relevance for selecting keywords for pay per click. However, #5 above may be important to you, depending on what public you’re targeting.