Search Engine Academy Rolls Out Brand New SEO Training Modules Globally #SEO

For November, we are pleased to announce our newest and freshest upgrades to the SEO Mastery Workshop
live training program around the the globe. I thought it might be appropriate to give you a first hand look
at many of the newest subjects to be included at all of local the Search Engine Academy Workshops.

Here is a quick overview of the entire 5-Day SEO Workshop:

Day 1 – Basic SEO Essentials

  • What is Search Engine Optimization
  • How Search Engines Work
  • Organic Versus Paid Search
  • Anatomy of a Search Results Page
  • Why Apply SEO to Your Web site
  • How to implement SEO
  • The Benefits of Doing SEO
  • Examining a Stress Free System of doing SEO
  • Google Trends
  • Making Your Content Effective
  • The New World of Web Content
  • Google Panda and SEO
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • Questions and Answers

Day 2 – Basic SEO Essentials

  • Linking Strategies Through External and Internal Linking
  • Key Concepts – Authority, Relevancy and Pagerank
  • A Comparison of Various Links
  • Links and Google Penguin
  • External Linking Strategies
  • Types of Links
  • Understanding Link Diversity
  • Authority Site Links
  • Getting EDU Links
  • Building links externally to you
  • SEO Strategy for Cleaning Up Links
  • Tips for Finding Links
  • Try a Link Discovery Tool
  • Tips for Finding Links
  • The Power of Internal Links
  • Internal Linking Strategies
  • HTML Sitemaps
  • XML Site Maps
  • Directory Style Sitemaps
  • No Follow Attribute
  • Absolute Versus Relative Links
  • How to Stay Out of Trouble with the Search Engines
  • Disavowing Links
  • Getting the Most Out of Your Blog
  • Blogging and SEO
  • Optimizing Your Blog Posts
  • WordPress and SEO
  • Tips For Increasing Your Chances For Popular Posts
  • Understanding the Value of Trackbacks
  • How to set up and use Trackbacks
  • Blog Resources
  • Blog Search Engines
  • Student Website Reviews
  • Questions and Answers

All New Search Engine Academy Training Announced
Day 3 – Advanced SEO Workshop

Advanced Keyword Research
Keyword Forensic Analysis
Other Advanced Keyword Research Tips
Semantic Search
Resource Links
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Understanding How To Take Advantage of Themes

 

 

  • Information Architecture
  • What is IA
  • Why Do IA
  • 4 I/A Categories
  • Labeling Systems
  • Global Navigation System
  • Local Navigation Systems
  • Contextual Navigation Links
  • Supplemental Navigation Systems
  • Site Search
  • Examples of Well Developed IA
  • Local SEO
  • Google’s Venice Update
  • Major Data Providers – Who powers whom?
  • How to Submit to Top Data Providers
  • About Universal Business Listing
  • Rating Local Search Factors
  • Business Listing Quality Guidelines
  • More Google Quality Guidelines
  • Google Local
  • Google Local – Photos, Videos and More
  • Video SEO
  • Optimizing Your Videos
  • Video SEO
  • Keywords for Video
  • Create a Video Sitemap
  • Video Distribution
  • Mobile Search and SEO
  • Mobile SEO Strategies
  • Duplicate Content Issues
  • Crawler and Indexing Issues
  • Student Website Reviews
  • Questions and Answers

Advanced Day 4 – Google Day – A Day Dedicated To All Things Google

  • Paid Search
  • Planning Your Paid Search Campaigns
  • Google Adwords
  • Google Display Ads
  • Personalization of Search
  • Google Plus
  • Google Authorship
  • Google Analytics Advanced for SEA
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • Google Panda and Penguin Rollouts
  • Measuring What’s Important KPI’s
  • Advanced Google Analytics
  • Student Website Reviews
  • Questions and Answers

Day 5 – The Final Day of Advanced SEO

  • Competitive Intelligence for SEO
  • Why do CI for SEO?
  • More Reasons for CI
  • How to Do Competitive Intelligence Analysis for SEO
  • Off page Factors
  • How to Analyze What You Collect
  • Social Media and SEO
  • Social Media Platforms
  • Social Media Guidelines
  • Social Media and SEO
  • Measure Social Media Reach
  • Schema.org and SEO
  • Schema.org and Google
  • Schema.or Resources
  • 5 Schema.org Applications
  • Site Technical Issues
  • Diagnosing Problems
  • URL Canonicalization
  • 301 redirects
  • Crawler and Indexing issues
  • Source code Validation
  • Persuasive Copywriting for the Web
  • Anatomy of A Sales Letter
  • Components for Building Sales Copy by component
  • Examples by Category
  • Student Worksheets and Examples
  • The Power of Article Writing
  • Life After Google Panda Update
  • Guidance on Writing Quality Articles
  • Easy Ways To Find Markets For Your Articles
  • Creative Commons
  • Press Releases and SEO
  • Tips for Press Releases
  • 9 Reasons to Optimize Your Press Releases
  • Tips for Professional SEOs
  • New Customers the smartest Way
  • Build A Genuine Reputation Right Now
  • How To Convert Prospects to Clients by Establishing Credibility
  • Steps for Building Powerful Proposals
  • Building and Defining Your Business in the SEO Industry
  • Questions and Answers
  • Certification Exam

Where are the next SEO Mastery Workshops being conducted?

See a complete list of Search Engine Academy Locations and dates here.

 

 

 

 

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

The Importance of Finding SEO Pricing to Fit Your Budget

Most people understand that their primary role as an online entrepreneur is to drive as much quality traffic to their website as they can get.  There are many ways to do that and most people will use several methods to get the best result. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those methods.

But before you dive in and hire an SEO company to do your SEO for you, you will want to check out SEO pricing. There are companies online that specialize in doing all the SEO your website needs. The prices for such services will vary depending on several variables.

For one thing, the number of keywords you will be targeting in your SEO campaign will likely be a factor. The more keywords you want to target, the higher the cost will be.

Another aspect is considering your competitive landscape. The more competitive the keywords you use, the higher the cost will be too. SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” method or an apply it once. Good SEO will take ongoing attention to detail. That’s why the more competitive keywords will cost more, they will take more time and attention.

Most SEO companies will sell their services in packages. Usually they will be divided up something like: 1 – 10 keywords, or 11 – 50 keywords, etc. The package you choose will be based mostly on your budget.

Another important element to website SEO is back links. Many times companies will set their pricing structure on the number of back links they are creating.  Back links will gain more importance, and cost more, if the link comes from a highly ranked site relative to your industry.

The truth is for most new, and smaller Internet marketers, SEO campaigns are out of bounds from a financial point of view. But that doesn’t have to mean that you can’t still benefit from search engine optimization.

There are many places online where you can learn to do simple SEO techniques that will allow you to benefit from optimization. You can use these methods for your website, your blog posts and your articles.

Increase Your SEO Expertise.

If you do decide that you have enough of a budget to hire a company to do SEO for you, then you need to carefully check them out. Find out what they will offer, how much it will cost and how much time and attention you can expect to get from them.

It’s also a good idea to find out what other people have to say about the company and their services. This can be a fairly big investment and you want to make sure that you hire a company that knows what they are doing, and can really help you get the results you want.

You also want to make sure that there are no surprises, that you know exactly what you will get and how much it will cost. Having a written contract in place is very important too. That way there can be no misunderstanding; both parties know what is expected of each other and how much it will cost.

When it comes to SEO pricing remember that cost is only half the issue. You want to make sure that you get the service and results that you are really looking for.

One last thing to keep in mind. These days, more and more business owners are investing in building their SEO skills and knowledge. After all, once you’ve been trained and have a good SEO comfort level, there will never be anyone more focused on building your business Web presence than you, the business owner.

For corporate SEO training conducted in-house, feel free to ask any one of our SEO Master Trainers for a free quote on what it would cost you to have a full  SEO workshop conducted in-house for your team.

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

Internet Marketing – How You Can Find An Authentic Niche Market By Being Original

Let’s start with a definition of niche …

1. A recess in a wall, as for holding a statue.
2. A cranny, hollow, or crevice, as in a rock.
3. A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s abilities or character.

Finding a niche is important whether Internet Marketing
or real world marketing:

I think I always knew that choosing the right niche market, was considered
essential to business success, yet for me, as for many professionals, choosing
a niche felt something like the “kiss of death” in a way. When we dig in our
heels against choosing a niche,  we are probably responding to the first two
definitions above.

After all, who wants to do business in a hole in a wall or in a tiny, rocky
place, right? 

If you believe that defining your niche market means choosing a hard,
cramped, and confining space, it’s no wonder we resist.

People who bring their heart and soul to their work will resist niche
marketing that tells them they must restrict the ways in which they
offer value added service to the world.

But the good news is that choosing your niche market will do exactly
the opposite: it will free you to be the biggest, most authentic, and
most complete offer possible.

Consider the third definition of niche.

When you look at niche in this light, you will see that your perfect niche
market is that location or domain in which you are most readily accessible
to the people who are most likely to benefit from (and thus value) the offer
that you are and in which you are simultaneously most free to exercise
your brilliance.

Your niche market is the place where you have a natural competitive
advantage because you occupy the right place in the right ecosystem.

A good niche market is one in which:

  • You are highly visible and easily accessible to the people
    who are most likely to benefit from your work, including
    prospective clients and customers, prospective collaborators
    and partners, and others with whom value-adding activities
    are most likely to be mutually beneficial.
  • You can employ the widest range of your talents, skills,
    and training (your offer) using unique and original concepts
    that separate you from even those who are in that same niche.

Importance of targeting your niche market

There’s a paradox in naming your niche market.  When you give people a
category to put your products or services in, it is easier for them to get a
handle on what you do (and also to remember it.)

It’s also much easier for them to appreciate how you differ from other
professionals in that category. In other words, by putting yourself in a
category, you can also make yourself stand out because you distinguish
yourself from others in that category.

This is best referred to as your unique selling proposition (USP) or as
some migh call it, a unique selling point.

 

A personal example in summary:

Over 10 years ago, when I first started teaching SEO skills to small groups
of business owners, I had a vision to create a form of event, unlike any of
the other more common SEO seminars or conferences. There were plenty
of good SEO type conferences around, so how would I creat my USP?

Most conferences are big events with dozens of speakers. Great for the big
money type of event and great for networking too. Plus they’re a lot of fun.
But I decided that I wanted to do small groups and do them more in the
form of a hands-on SEO Workshop, where each student would get
individualized attention to detail, plus actual drilling and hands-on
practice.

Many big conferences offered upsells and add on services that aim to
extract even more money out of the attendees for things like cioaching or
mentoring.

But for our Search Engine Academy Workshops, we chose to include the
complete 6 Month Mentoring program for ongoing support at no extra
cost. There are lots of other things we did  differently too, like we do daily
evaluations to benchmark each students progress day by day, instead of

only doing one evaluation after the event is over. We also made it a priority
to ensure we answer every student’s question while they are in the SEO
Workshop.

So you can see that with all of these USP type things in mind we started
the very first SEO Mastery Workshop back in January 2002 in San Antonio,
Texas. Today we have a  network of SEO trainers and school locations located
all over the globe
, helping ordinary business owners to understand SEO, Social
Medial and a wide variety of high performance Internet marketing topics to
boost the success of their online business and enable them to compete.

Always consider your own USP carefully and build out your business in an
original way so that you separate yourself from the crowd in whatever niche
that you choose.

 

 

 

 

 

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

Has your SEO Practioner Ever Told a Little Fib While doing Your Web Analysis?

Have you ever heard your SEO practioner tell you a fib and if they ever did tell you one, could you be able to recognize it? It may start as early as the SEO describing your Web analysis. Or it can start with the use of redundant dialog perhaps to describe their services. Some extraneous explanations of some secretive process that only they know about.

Have you ever been advised, “I have a very good friend at Google that can pull some strings.” Better run the other way.

Or how about this one…”I can guarantee you top number 1 rankings!” What’s wrong with that, you ask? Google themselves tell you to run the other way from anyone making that claim.

Before I go on, in all fairness I do know lots of honest, top quality SEO practioners who would always tell their clients the truth. If you need the name of a top, quality SEO who will live up to their claims write me and I’ll make some suggestions of people who I know are top quality.

But for a minute let’s look at another subset of people who think they can bluff their way with some techno babel. What kind of dialog has your Webmaster given you in their Web analysis?

Descriptive words are the best way to attract and communicate effectively with any audience, regardless of what a person is writing about or trying to explain. But sounding redundant is one of the worst things possible for an author or a speaker, teacher or educator to do. After all, in the human dialog there are thousands of descriptive terms that are available that are fully capable of describing even the most technical or intricate subject matter regardless of Web analysis.

If you have ever hired a Search Engine Optimization or Internet Marketing practioner, have they perhaps told you little stories or fibs giving you some sort of explanation of what it is they do, that just seemed to make no common sense at all to you.

Has Your SEO Ever Told You Little Fibs and How Can You Know?

A professional search engine optimizer (one who has been trained in the skill of gaining top search engine visibility to your Web pages to the most correct searching audience) should be able to describe what it is they do and how they do it. But too many times, there are those who claim to be experienced in SEO, but have never had any professional training.

There are far too many people that seem to talk the talk, but honestly have only learned what they know through trial and error. Try something they hear from someone, if it fails go back and change it. Then try something else to see if it helps or hinders. One of the biggest problems with the trial and error method, is that it can be very expensive for the person who has put their trust in this person or company (because their talk was so impressive.)

Learning to recognize redundant techno babel when you hear it, can help you sort out someone who knows precisely what they are doing, from that someone who is just taking your cash and only talking the talk.

Let’s give you some actual examples and see if you have ever any of these typical stories that some Webmasters may tell you.

One of the oldest cons has got to be:

  • “I’m going to submit your Web site to hundreds of search engines to get you listed in the search results.”

Why this is false: There are only a few major search engines you need to focus on such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Also just getting you listed is not enough. I actually met someone who was considering coming to training one time and he bragged about charging some client $60,000 to get him listed with the search engines. Now he was in trouble because
months later the company had gotten no results so he was thinking about coming to learn. Being listed in a search engine means nothing unles you pages are coming for the right key terms and then, for the right searching audience and then, for the maximum percentage of the time.

Here’s another one.

  • “Google changes is algorithm continually so you need to pay me each month so I can tweak the source code and reverse engineer the algorithm.”

Why this is false: It is impossible to reverse engineer a search engine’s algorithm. It don’t make sense to continually change the source code to try and keep up with Google’s algorithm changes. It is true that you need to continually work on a Web site each month because all the other competition will be working on theirs. But a precisely optimized Web page don’t need to be changed to stand the test of time. Remember, you are not trying to beat Google. They don’t care if you rank top spot for a phrase, but it’s your competing Web pages you are trying to stay ahead of.

How about this one.

  • “I like to measure each influential ranking signal one at a time, like the Keyword proximity in the Title Tag and the link reputation etc.

Why this is false: There are nearly 200 ranking signles and they cannot be measured “one-at-a-time” in isolation and expect any true accuracy. The reason is that all ranking signals have an effect and an influence on all the other ranking signals, so IF you are going to accurately measure them, they mused be measured a very specific way and all at the same time (if you want exact preciseness.)

Have you ever asked an SEO practioner for advice once you are finally in top spot and so you say, “What should I do now that I am in top spot.”

The SEO practioner gives you a rather strange response in a reverently (nearly whispering tone of voice) saying…”Don’t touch it. Whatever you do…don’t touch it.”

The only possible reason an SEO would respond this way is because they are fearful if you change anything the top spot will be lost. More over, what this reveals mostly is that that SEO probably does not understand why the page is in top spot, so they are fearful to change it.

Remember, these are only a few common examples. Perhaps I’ll write a Part 2 with more examples in the future.

Are you interested in having your staff upgraded with the full scope of exact SEO, Social Media, Analytics, Mobile Search, Video search engine optimization and more?

Did you know that our certified Master SEO trainers are happy to give you a quote on the complete SEO Workshop and 6 Month Mentoring program conducted in-house at your corporate facility. It is far less expensive to bring one of our trainers to you in-house, than it is to send your whole team out to us.

We have globally located SEO educators in communities in across the United States, in Canada, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong Indonesia, The Philippines, United Arab Emirates and soon in Central and Eastern Europe.

For a no obligation quote on in-house training, give any one of theses SEO educators a call and ask them for a quote to bring them to your facility.

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

Managing Multiple Google Analytics Properties and Accounts

Google Analytics data is wonderful; Google Analytics account management is maddening.

(If reading is not your thing, I’ll be covering these topics in an upcoming webinar (unless you’re reading this after August 22, 2012, in which case a recording of the Webinar should be posted on the site or on the SEO how-to pages at the Rocky Mountain Search Engine Academy website.)

If you’re a professional SEO or someone in charge of a lot of different website domains for a large company, you’ve probably become addicted to the vast amounts of free tracking data that Google Analytics provides.  But you may also have found it hard to keep track of multiple accounts in GA.

Why Does Google Analytics Account Management Have to be so Dang Confusing?

Man pulling out his hair in frustration about Google Analytics and SEOFirst there’s the terminology.  You have a Google account, one or more Google Analytics accounts, properties, profiles, users, user roles, and all sorts of other stuff.  Many of these can exist in a many-to-one or a many-to-many relationship.  For example you can have up to 25 Google Analytics accounts tied to one Google account (many to one).  You can also be an admin on many different Google Analytics accounts, and any given Analytics account can have multiple admins (many to many)

Then there’s the problem of separation.  If you’re not paying attention you might set up a Google Analytics account for a client tied to your own Google account.  Then if the client ever wants to take their GA account and part company with you, you find that you can’t give access to them and you can’t give them the data either.  Talk about a bitter split.  It becomes a “who gets custody of the Google Analytics Data” battle.

But there is a better way that can give you two solid advantages:

  • Centralized management for me (I don’t want to have different logins for different clients)
  • Independence (if my client ever leaves the relationship I want to be able to give them their data and their account without compromising the privacy of any of my other clients)

Google’s Organizational Structure

If you look at the documentation for getting started with Google Analytics, they say that the Analytics “Account” is “the topmost level of organization.”  That’s accurate if you are looking at this solely from “within the framework of Analytics.”  But from a business perspective, that’s not really the “topmost level.”  The topmost level really is the Google Account.  This is the account that you originally create when you sell your soul to Google, which of course we all have done.  This is not the same as a Gmail account, because you don’t need a Gmail address to have a Google Account.

With this added super account included (I call it the “Mother of all Google Accounts” or simply the “Mother G Account” for short), the Analytics structure looks like this:

Google Analytics organization structure diagram

When I was starting out with Analytics, I did the natural thing when setting up new GA accounts for my SEO clients, namely, I created their GA account while logged in to my own Mother G account.  That’s fine, up until you hit 25 accounts, whereupon Google tells you that you’ve maxed out.   When it happened to me, I didn’t see a clear path forward.  So I created another Mother G account and started the process all over.  Very tedious.

Now that we understand better these limitations, instead of creating multiple Analytics accounts within one Mother G Account, I take the trouble to create a separate Mother G Account for each Analytics account I want to set up.  The way I set it up is like this:

The Step by Step

Let’s say I have a client named Big Sleep Rental Houses (you’ll only understand the name if you’re a Humphrey Bogart fan, heck, maybe you won’t understand it even then), who has the domain name bigsleeprentals.com. Here’s my step by step on getting them set up in GA:

  1. I create an email address called analytics@bigsleeprentals.com.  It doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you can take the next step, which is…
  2. I put a forwarder in place on this email address so any notifications come to my usual email in-box
  3. I create a Google account (that’s a Mother G Account, not an Analytics account) using this email address.  I don’t bother to create a Gmail address for this.  It’s not necessary.
  4. Next I log in to that Google account and create the Google Analytics account.  I set up the Analytics account with the client domain, install the UA code, etc.
  5. Now I go to Admin > Users (tab) > New User and add my usual email address (not the one I just created for the client) with this account as an Administrator.

I can do this any number of times without coming up against a limitation on number of administrators.  As far as I can tell there is no limit on the number of Analytics accounts that a person can be an administrator of.

Once I log into Google Analytics with my usual email address I will see in one location all the accounts where I’m an administrator.  One login, one management interface.

What Happens When the Love Dies?

Let’s say a client wants to fire me or I want to fire a client.  Here’s what I do:

  • I remove myself as a user on the Analytics account
  • I send the login information for the Google Mother G Account I created for this client to the client
  • I’m done.

I hope this helps you to regain your Analytics sanity.  Now if we can only figure out what Google did with all our souls, maybe order in the universe will be restored.

(Google Analytics is just one of the tools that we cover in depth at our Search Engine Academy workshops.  Check out our schedule for dates and times that are of interest to you.)

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

Web Analysis and That Popular “Not Provided” Keyword – One Partial Workaround

Sometimes I feel like I’m having a stroke.

OK, so Website analysis perhaps doesn’t deserve that kind of melodrama.  After all, I can’t really know what it feels like to have a stroke, since I have never had one (wait…I don’t think I’ve had one…).   What pushes me into the realm of hyperbole is my experience with Google Analytics (GA) and my cursory knowledge of one of the early symptoms of stroke: a blind spot in your vision.

It’s probably no surprise to any of you who have taken a Search Engine Academy SEO workshop recently or have been regularly following the progress of your website story on that channel known as GA that one choice at least in the GA constellation of features is becoming increasingly fractured and hard to see with clarity, namely visits prompted by specific search queries.  For example, when you log into Google Analytics one of the common, and tantalizing, navigational destinations is traffic that originates with specific keyword searches on Google, as you can see in the following screen shot:

Google Analytics screenshot 1

(Click on the image to see it full size)

Promise and Disappointment

To someone who has just a cursory acquaintance with Google web analysis and its many mysteries, to first see this is an exciting moment.  How wonderful to actually know what keywords people are using.  And until fairly recently, at least in terms of geologic time, this indeed was a fair measure of the success of your website in Google search results.  In fact, checking on traffic from keyword searches had the promise of being the best method of determining the success of SEO, since the worth of checking rankings has been called into question because of the increasing impact of personalization of search.

So it sounds like a great idea: instead of checking where we place in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), we track the effectiveness of our SEO efforts by monitoring the amount of traffic we get as a result of keywords used in organic search.  But there’s a flaw in this model as well. That flaw was blown into large proportion earlier this year when Google announced its expansion of secure search.  The net effect of this is that the keyword phrases visitors use to find your site are not passed along to Google Analytics if a user is logged into their Gmail or Plus account (which of course amounts to almost one and the same nowadays).

When this change came down the pipeline Google was quoted as saying this would affect at most about 5% of search results.  Well, of course no one believed that. And the skeptics were justified.  Here is a screen shot from that same GA account that I showed above, expanded a bit to show the keyword searches registered in Analytics:

screenshot of Google Analytics data

(click on the image to see it larger)

So, as we can see, the hidden “not provided” search terms are suddenly a large enough chunk of our analytics report that our data is becoming useless, at least for this metric.

So, how do we compensate?

Landing Page Visits to the Rescue

Now that we’ve been effectively deprived of consistent and clean SERP ranking data (due to personalization of search) and hit  with a massive “not provided” blindspot in our Google Analytics data (due to personalization of search), what sort of website analysis can we do to measure the effectiveness of our SEO efforts?  There is no magical answer, but there is a pretty good workaround, depending on how you handle the creation of your website pages.  That answer is to track the performance of landing pages.

Typically, if we are building landing pages to target specific search engine terms, and if the focus of those landing pages is pretty tight, and if our link building efforts are also focused on those keyword-specific landing pages (yes, I know, lots of “if’s”), then the traffic that those SEO engineered pages receive is a very good indication of how well or poorly our SEO efforts are holding up.

To track the performance of your landing pages using Google Analytics, you will be drilling down into the content section of your GA account (see the screen shot below):

screen shot of landing pages data in Google Analytics

(click on the image to see it larger)

Yes, this is a class “b” solution to the blind spot in your SEO efforts, but just like a stroke victim, we need to do the best with what we have.  And hope for a cure, of course.

Learn about in-person, hands-on SEO workshop with one of our expert trainers!

Right Brain Web Analysis, Keyword Competition and the “intitle” Operator

Web analysis is an area of tremendous frustration for me.  I’m definitely a left-brain kind of guy.  I’m not proud of it, I’ve sought counseling and intervention, but try as I may to dwell in the nirvana of warm and fuzzy I prefer a world of concrete and steel, metaphorically speaking.   Maybe that’s what attracted me to the arena of computers and programming when I first got caught up in it in the mid to late 80′s.  I found I could handle “if-then-else.”   I knew that if I had a problem in code, 99 times out of 100 I’d find out the root of the problem through patient analysis.  And that root would often be something as simple as a misplaced curly brace, or the absence of a double quote mark.  Very concrete.  Very clear.  Very solve-able.

mercedes ad illustrates right vs. left brain dilemma

Mercedes Benz has gotten a lot of mileage out of the right vs. left brain dilemma in their ads. I wonder if even Einstein could have figured out the ways of Google.

SEO web analysis is, on the other hand, definitely a world of warm and fuzzy.  Well, fuzzy anyway.

One of the key aspects of successful SEO is identifying how competitive a keyword phrase is.  In SEO, “competitive” means the number and quality of the websites competing for visibility in the search engine results pages (SERP’s) for a particular keyword phrase.  Identifying the competitiveness of a keyword phrase is one of the key factors in predicting SEO success or failure.  If you target a phrase like “women’s clothing,” the competition is so established, and so intense, that in practical terms you have little chance of succeeding within a time frame and budget that would make SEO worthwhile.

How do you make the determination that a keyword phrase is “competitive”?  The first measure that people apply, which is basically useless, is to count the number of pages returned when you search on a phrase.  Let me take a different example, this one from a site that I’m actively working with.  The keyword phrase is from the sport of bicycling, and it’s “road bike jerseys.”  When I do a search on Google for “road bike jerseys,” but I do not place the phrase inside of quotation marks, I get 1.34 million results.  For the person who knows nothing about Search Engine Optimization, this seems like enough “competition” to give up at the outset.

image of a keyword search in Google

The person who knows a little bit about the way this works understands that Google is returning all sorts of results that aren’t really competing for that phrase.  For example results with the word “road” but not “bike” or “jerseys.”  So that person would probably progress to a search using that term inside of quotations.  This will search Google for the complete phrase “road bike jerseys.”  The change is dramatic.  But the wrong way.

image example of a second Google search

Hey, Google, luv ya guys, but what’s up with this?  Here we run squishily into the fuzzy world that I’ve been complaining about.

Those who have been through the Search Engine Academy’s SEO training workshops know there’s a better way.  That better way is to do research based on Google special operators such as “intitle,” “inanchor,” “allintitle,” “inurl” etc.  I will use some of these operators to try and get to the bottom of the competition for this keyword phrase.  (If you’d like a [not entirely accurate] reference to these terms from Google, here’s at least one Google page explaining special operators.)

For review, or as an explanation for anyone who has not used special search operators, the “intitle” operator, when input to a Google search, will filter results so that only sites with a certain word, namely the word immediately following the “intitle” operator, in the title tag of the site will be returned. Take a look at the screen shot from our search.

 

web analysis example 3, search results from google

 

This query tells Google to search for the same phrase, namely “road bike jerseys,” but to only display results that contain each of the words in the title tag (we have to use the intitle operator 3 times because each one only acts on the word immediately following it).  Much better.  I can compete in a field of 2,000+ results.

Now if you’ve read the Google page on special operators, you’ll immediately spot a short cut to this syntax, namely the “allintitle” operator. So, let’s give that a spin and see what we get.

 

web analysis example 4, search results from google

Hmmm.  No results?  I dun thin so, Lusy (as Ricky Ricardo would say).  If I’m reading the documentation correctly, we should be getting the same results with these two queries.  But which one is accurate?  Easy, the first.  I can tell this because when I execute the search using a series of intitle statements I can take a look at the results and see that there are plenty of pages with “road bike jerseys” in the title tag.

So what have we demonstrated?  There are three takeaways from this, and they are not academic technical trivia, but they have a significant effect on your ability to navigate in the world of SEO Web analysis:

  1. Don’t trust Google’s documentation.  Unfortunately you need to experiment to see how things work, and even then you won’t be able to tell with pinpoint accuracy
  2. Special operators like intitle can be extremely useful
  3. You are going to have to rely on intuition and you’ll never be able to base every thing on hard-edged, laboratory grade analysis.  (Us left-brainers just said, “Damn!”)

So no matter how analytical you want to approach search engine optimization, be prepared to take a soft focus, let your brain relax, and think in terms of intuition.  Welcome to the oxymoronic world of right-brained web analysis.  Enjoy your fuzzy stay here.

Take a look at this handy little cheat sheet if you want to figure out which side of your brain is most developed in you.

Take a look at this handy little cheat sheet if you want to figure out which side of your brain is most developed in you.

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