Irrigate Your Mind With New Creative Internet Marketing Ideas For Your Web Site

April 16, 2013 By + Leave a Comment

A recent quote I found from well known author, CS Lewis states:

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

Over the last few years, this is one aspect in Internet Marketing that we can never encourage others enough with.  Learning new skills by reason of actual practice, testing and use, has always been our motto at the Search Engine Academy. You can read a good instructional book and learn some excellent things that way, but when it comes to our own Web sites, some people tend to spend all their time trying to study the work of others, but not too much time coming up with new ideas and  concepts of their own.

Why do you suppose people seem to have trouble coming up with the right content for their own Web sites?

There are at least 2 approaches to consider: Right and Left Brained Thinking

There are people who are left brain thinkers, which tend to be good at analytics, analysis and building something, so long as they have a plan or blue print to go by. They make great builders who know how to “get things done.” Then there are the right brain thinkers, who tend to be highly creative and they continually come up with new concepts and even entirely new ideas. Their greatest gifts are within their creativity or ability to look at the data, but instantly come up with brand new ideas and applications.  Then there are even a few folks that have both left and right side thinking capacity although most of the time, they will tend to be slightly stronger on one side or the other. The main thing to remember is that all of this is very good. All of it works together for your benefit in business because there is a requirement for both skills if you are going to be successful.

So why can it seem to feel so hard to work creatively on your own Web site?

If you have ever felt sometimes that your Web site is (for some reason) much harder to build than for example, working on someone else’s Web site, (then you’re not alone.) We’ve heard this from people over and over again. It’s like your project is nearly just a little bit too close to you at times and so you struggle to come up with the right ideas. It’s not uncommon to sometimes feel like all the fresh ideas have dried up. “It has all been done before and there just is nothing new under the sun.”  -  But don’t you believe it.

For this article, I want to share with you an easy ways to irrigate your mind and foster fresh new ideas without so much stress. Learn how to exercise your “lateral thinking skills.” This is one of the best ways to get your thought processes alive and flowing again. You have probably heard of the phrase “lateral thinking” which for some people is just a buzz word.

What is lateral thinking?

Lateral thinking is a term coined by Edward de Bono in the book New Think: The Use of  Lateral Thinking published in 1967. It primarily refers to solving problems through an indirect and creative approach. ( from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking ) Lateral thinking is about reasoning that is not immediately obvious. It is more about ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic or critical thinking.

What is Critical Thinking?
Critical thinking is primarily concerned with judging the true value of statements and seeking errors. (Critical thinking is much like the part of the CS Lewis quote to cut down jungles) But Lateral thinking is more concerned with the movement value of statements and ideas. Lateral thinking is much in line (with the CS Lewis quote to irrigate deserts.)

Keyword forensics research

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do I mean by lateral recall?

This is a term I use to describe recalling your researched information using the lateral thought process.   Let’s take for example keyword research creativity. So many people feel  stuck in a rut when it comes to keyword research. But lateral recall applies specifically to keyword research allowing you to connect ideas that seem to be totally independent but because of the end result of how they are combined, the result delivers a useful working SEO strategy. Most people search the Web  based on the conditions in their lives.

So let’s give you some early examples of user intent in search:

1. Probably one of the earliest examples was when I was researching user behavior around the topic of “baby names, boy baby names, girl baby name, Italian Baby names,  The meaning of baby names etc. It was very obvious that people were searching for actual name suggestions for their child. This resulted in some pretty interesting observations as I recalled an early client actually was interested in selling baby furniture, strollers, baby cribs, etc. The average person would be creating pages optimized for phrases involving strollers, baby cribs etc. But using this early trending, we shifted our focus creating a page with baby name suggestions and ultimately, the truth was that anyone who was thinking of a name for a new  baby on the way, could likely use some baby furniture too. Of course after I wrote an article about this common behavior, there were literally dozens of “baby names” pages being published all over the place. But for that very early SEO client this strategy attracted an average of over 13,000 user sessions a week. Quite a bit of  traffic for back in the year 1998.

2. An Insurance dealer once wanted to optimize for the typical type of verb-age that they thought they must compete for: “Auto Insurance Quotes.” However, I recalled seeing some interesting demand for an acronym “VIN” (which stands for Vehicle Identification Number.) Looking at the data of the time, revealed huge demand for
search phrases like:

  • VIN Ford
  • VIN Jeep
  • VIN Chrysler
  • VIN Chevy
  • Theft of VIN numbers
  • etc…

We ended up creating a total of 18 new articles all written by the Insurance man explaining where these VIN numbers could be located on each vehicle (since they generally are located all in different spots depending on the vehicle.) The 18 articles basically expanded the Insurance Web site’s traffic from about 4,600  user sessions per month, to just under 50,000 per month. What was the connection between insurance and the VIN article. Each article simply had a prompt asking the  question, “Are you Sure You Are Currently Getting the Best Auto Insurance Quotes?” Get a free quote by e-mail from our instant system (Click Here.) Sure enough just 18 pages created enough activity to keep this Insurance office busy with loads of new quotes each week.

A person would use lateral thinking when they want to move from one known idea to  creating brand new ideas. By practicing lateral recall, you can actually do some very creative and original keyword phrase research. It’s my understanding that that little insurance Web site with the 18 page strategy was finally sold for somewhere over 6 digits (not bad for an early investment of  around $2,500 back in the early days.

So how is your Web site doing when it comes to attracting the most correct searching audience(s)?

  • Are you feeling like there are no great windows of opportunity left for keywords?
  • Have you tried different keyword tools only spend endless hours collecting dozens of keywords that are just far too competitive?

If you are feeling like you wish there was a way to quickly tap into the hottest search trends based on real searches and you’d love to have an eye on the world’s searching behavior with a strategic look out for setting your online business totally apart, then there is good news after all. Last month, I made a decision to offer my keyword forensic research skills as a service to business owners. I have been helping clients find the hottest windows of opportunity and giving them reports that contain customized data including:

  • Exact phrases for their niche
  • Monthly search volume for each phrase
  • Competition Numbers based on AllinTitle Syntax (so you can see hot phrases with low competition)
  • A new more mathematically correct KEI3 value (to quickly show you the most stress free phrases)

Plus, I often can read into the behavior and offer you new and original strategies for your niche that you (and other Webmasters may never even think of) because I research all of the data that many folks can be bothered exploring. This aspect is especially helpful to those in very highly competitive niches. With my keyword forensics service, I can usually turn your project around in just 36 hours and provide you with a huge list of phrases based on your niche, which you can simply use to cherry pick the best phrases with the biggest windows of opportunity. If you’d like to order a report from me, or want more information on how to get a free no obligation quote, please visit http://keywordforensics.com/ for the details.

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Filed Under: Content Marketing, Insights for Search, PR Web, SEO, Workshops Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Top Keyword Research That Earns You More Income

September 13, 2012 By + Leave a Comment

Trellian Keyword Discovery is a feature-loaded keyword research resource. You likely have already realized that manually looking for the best keywords can be a rather tedious task. That’s why there are tools out there to help you save hundreds of hours of time doing effective and systematic keyword research.

If you are seriously looking for help to optimize your site on the search engines then you should look at the Trellian Keyword Discovery tool. It is a paid subscription keyword tool that offers quite a bit of data that will help with search engine optimization.

Much of the information they give you far outdistances the competition. They give you information on, not only, alternatives to the keyword you start with and the calculations on how much the keyword or keyword phrase gets searched for, this tool also will estimate for you how many other sites are using this exact keyword or keyword phrase and how many times the keyword or keyword phrase is searched for on a daily basis.

Ok, fine, but how do they justify the cost if this is all they do?

The short answer is, this is not all they do.

Another cool feature of Trellian Keyword Discovery is for SEO practioners, who like to optimize pages in various different languages. Many keyword tools, as good as some are tend to be strictly limited only to English. But not Keyword Discovery by Trellion.

Using their tool, you can do keyword research using data in  English, Australian, Canadian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and data from the United Kingdom.

Other cool features that tip the advantages your way:

What sets this keyword tool apart from the rest of the pack is the fact that they offer the subscriber the option of studying keyword trends and market shares of all the search engines at once by creating charts. You can see what is going on with all the search engines at a glance by looking at the charts.

Trending is important because it gives companies good information on when to offer up new products,

spend more on advertising and search spending, and up the original content their sites. Timed right this can mean a huge increase in sales and their bottom line.

Being able to see the market share data in chart form is another option offered by this keyword tool. You can click on the market share icon next to the each item of data and the charts for each keyword or keyword phrase will pop up so you can see how much the keyword or keyword phrase is being searched for among the leading search engines.

This is a great way to help calculate where to put your money for your pay-per-click campaigns too. More of your budget should go to the bigger search engines that get the most searches every month.

Makes sense, right?

If more people are searching these keywords and keyword phrases on the bigger search engines that is where you want a lot of visibility so you get the conversions and make lots of money.

So, if you want to figure out just exactly what it is that people are searching for these days, which keywords are the best for your traffic generation, and those keywords you should be targeting to get the most sales you should definitely get this tool as soon as you can.

If this looks good to you the Trellian Keyword Discovery tool will let you try the free trial version so you can see how beneficial it can be to you getting the most return for your investment by customizing your search engine marketing options.

Give Trellion Keyword Discovery a Free Test Drive.

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Filed Under: Duplicate Content, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Insights for Search, Pay Per Click Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What is a competitive SEO ranking metric?

January 17, 2012 By + 27 Comments

In the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) many want to know what is a ‘competitive ranking metric’. To answer this is to delve into the details of SEO and the competitive market place. Simply, a competitive ranking metric is one of the many attributes a web page will have that will determine where it will be ranked when its keywords are searched on. For each page of your website you will be aiming to target a type of visitor. You will have one or (preferably) more keyword phrases which you believe your target will use to find your pages. So the first important competitive ranking metric is:

  1. Each page is focussed on one keyword or keyword phrase. This will ensure your page has content which clearly shows search engines what your page is about. Then,
  2. Keyword Proximity: your keyword phrase should be placed close to the start of your page, again to show this is the focus of the page. Continue to use the keyword legitimately throughout the page. Finally, there is evidence to suggest that the last few words are heavily weighted for the search engines, thus, ensure you finish your page with a great, clear summary sentence including the keywords.
  3. Title Tag: The title that is seen on the list of search results must always include your keywords, not be duplicated on other site pages and be sensible to your human visitors.
  4. Meta Description: The details that show after the Title Tag in the search results should also be unique, contain keywords and make good sense to your human visitors.
  5. Alt Image Tags: Allowing search engines to ‘read’ an image is what alt-tags do in competitive rankings. Having keyword rich alt-tags on pictures allows these to show up quickly whilst the picture is slowly loading also improves your human visitor experience as well.
  6. Anchor Text: This is the text which has a hyperlink to another page. It is often the call-to-action text, so is very important. Ensure your page’s keywords are clear in the anchor text which will engage your users and clearly tell the search engines what to expect from those links and that the link is connected to the focus of that page.
  7. External Links: Search Engines look at the number and quality of links coming into your site. This metric effectively says, lots of quality links means you have lots of marketplace trust and credibility, thus your site will rank better. External links can be gained legitimately by creating excellent content and doing good marketing, both on and off line.
  8. Internal Linking: Internal links help search engines navigate you site more easily.
  9. URL: including the page name with keywords is a ranking metric which can put you ahead of the competition. An example could be a Sporting goods shop with a page about archery, the URL for the archery page would read www.sportinggoodsshop.com.au/archery-equipment

Should you work on these metrics for your web pages you will see your rankings improve for the keywords targeted. This is not an exhaustive list, but does include the most valuable competitive ranking metrics.

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