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Introduction

This blog post will give a brief and very basic insight into keyword analysis and what is involved in the process. These processes are just a guide but a lot of the points are very important and should be used on any website that is analysed.

Homepage links

To determine the number of links required for the chosen keywords there are a number of things this involves:

• Finding the number of links to the client’s homepage – once these have been acquired you can then compare the number of backlinks to your own site and see how many would be needed to make up the difference. There are many tools out there that will help you see the backlinks such as Open Site Explorer and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

• Search the top ten for each keyword – your aims may vary however if you wish to try and get a top 10 position. It would be to your advantage to search the top 10 results for the keywords you wish to optimise for to get a feel for the competition and how competitive the industry is.

• Find out the number of page links using Yahoo! Site Explorer for a number of competitors with their homepage in the top ten. The same process could be carried out for subpages.

• Calculate a rough average of links – from finding out your main competitors and the number of links they have, you can then use this data to get a rough idea of the number of links required.

Homepage / subpage comparison

When carrying out a keyword analysis for a particular phrase / keyword you may find that there are only sub-pages ranking in the top half of the results. If you are wondering how to work off these results, here are some tips to consider:

• Find the highest relevant homepage to gauge an idea of competiveness for that chosen keyword.
• Examine difference between links to the subpage and the sites themselves.
• Take note of the power of links to the subpage generally, high subpage links and lower site links are stronger than the inverse of this.
• Internal links – most important to track the amount of link juice going to the subpage.

Judging how clean the site is

To judge how “clean” the site is, we use the site command in Google. This looks like Site: www.url.com. Using this method will most likely answer the following; whether the site is properly indexed, whether there is any duplicate Meta data, whether the correct pages are ranking for specific key phrases and whether there are any GET parameters causing duplication.

Domain age

The age of a domain provides us with a method for judging a site during analysis. A widely accepted notion in SEO is that an older domain will rank more highly than a newer one with all other factors remaining equal. This is not always true however. Domain age is only helpful when the domain has been promoted for a long time. Examples of finding this out include Majestic SEO link history, content updates during the period of domain existence and domain registration length.

How important is URL strength?

URL strength is very important as a ranking factor. It is normal to find that most search engines will value a site with good URL strength. If a website has good URL strength then on and off page factors like organic optimisation and pay per click will become less effective. It is very difficult to judge how much preference Google gives a site with URL strength.

Link building for inner pages

While the homepage is the most commonly optimised page of a site, there are still the inner pages of a website to think about. In fact, the inner pages are often missed out as part of the SEO strategy. The thing to remember is that search engines like Google index individual pages of a site and not websites as a whole. This means that each of your site’s pages is unique and can rank in its own right.

As a general rule of thumb, inner pages should be targeted with long tail key phrases or weaker keywords as opposed to the homepage. The homepage is a website’s strongest page and should rank for generic terms whereas inner pages are generally weaker. A site with good domain strength and a well organised site structure will go a long way to helping inner page rank.

When analysing inner pages and choosing keywords to target, bear in mind the fact that the keywords should be relevant to the homepage and the website as a whole – this will ensure relevancy and will help the site in general.

When building links to inner pages, the ones to focus on are themed links with a high PR, or links with authority.

When analysing competitor links, the information gathered from Open Site Explorer can provide some insightful data and comparison which can be applied when doing link building. The data can be imported in .csv format which can be opened in various spread sheet programs for further analysis. Pivot tables can be created and the relative strengths of the linking domains can then be inspected.

Site relevancy – content

Quite often a straight links comparison between your own site and your competitors may not apply. We can usually make sure that our target website is extremely well optimised from an on page and anchor text linking perspective. In some cases, certain search terms can return sites that are not very well optimised or targeted for the search term at all. In cases like these, the search term will be relatively easy to target and rank for, with fewer links required.

Authors: Rob Bromilow, Ken Berkley and Julie Cheung.

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

from Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing Journal

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