Measuring the competitiveness of keywords

When writing a new website and choosing keywords, it's easy to make the mistake of choosing ones which are far too competitive. For a new website, it will be difficult to rank well for competitive keywords unless you can get some very high quality links from high PR sites.

Competitiveness is a difficult thing to measure and it has to be balanced against the search volume for any particular keywords. It might be worth optimising for competitive keywords if the search volume is very high and you don't mind taking a longer term view of ranking well. Taking the opposite view, it isn't worth optimising for uncompetitive keywords if the search volume is very low.

One way of investigating the competitiveness of keywords is by using Google's own keyword research tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool shows monthly search volumes for keywords together with a rough gauge of the competition for the keywords.

Another rough way of gauging the competition is by using the allintitle: operator when doing a search. Using the allintitle operator makes the SERPS only contain those pages which have the search words in their title. Since a page title is a key SEO factor, the number of results returned is a rough and ready gauge of competitiveness. For example, if you want to measure the competition for web design, do the following search on google.co.uk:

allintitle:web design

This returns 9,800,000 results. Trying:

allintitle:seo

returns 13,800,000 results.

Contrast these numbers with a set of keywords that we can guess are pretty uncompetitive:

allintitle:british vineyards

This returns 639 results, or ...

allintitle:web design worcester

which returns 1050 results.

Of course, the number of pages that include keywords in their title doesn't tell you the full story of how competitive a set of keywords are but it is a start. For one thing, allintitle doesn't tell you how well optimised the pages are, e.g. the first 50 pages in the results might have good links and content and be hard to beat without a lot of work. allintitle though is a useful tool to add to your SEO arsenal.

SEO: Doing it professionally

After helping out a few friends and acquaintances with website optimisation, I've been approached by a web designer about doing SEO work for them on an ongoing basis. They would like me to propose a service or set of services I could offer together with a set of prices.

The easiest and cheapest service I could offer is sets of directory submissions. To do these I could use my development version of professional directory submitter, SliQ Submitter Pro. This should allow me to do a hundred or so submissions an hour.

Of course there are a lot of other techniques I could use to do link-building. The more I think about it though, the more I feel a fixed price service won't do the job. SEO is a long-haul activity and needs to be spread over a number of months. Ideally I would spend 6 or so hours a month doing offsite optimisation for a website using directory submissions, articles where appropriate plus other link-building techniques I've become familiar with.

Spreading the SEO work over a few months should give better value and satisfaction to the customer. With a one-off hit at link-building, there won't be time to see any results before the work is completed. It's also likely to be unsuccessful. To do optimisation, you have to be able to monitor the results and make changes over a period of weeks. with newer sites this is especially important as the sites tend to perform well for a period before dropping back.

The other aspect I've got to price up is the on-page optimisation. Do I charge per page? Do I have a minimum charge that makes it worthwhile doing the job in the first place? If I think back to when I was looking for SEO help, I would often get quoted £350 a site or £100 per page. I never felt entirely comfortable with quotes like that since they didn't quantify what work was being done. Now, I've got more experience I can also see that it's pretty hard - or at least less optimal - to optimise a single page on a website.

I'll also have to think through whether I offer any PPC, e.g. Google Adwords advice. My feeling right now is that I shouldn't since I don't think it's a good medium to long term way of getting traffic/ sales, or rather I think that organic SEO will be the most cost-effective after a 6 month to 1 year period.

Free Directory Submission Software

It's about 3 months since I made a new release of my free directory submission tool, SliQ Submitter. Since I made the release, I've been busy on other projects. One of those projects is a faster directory submitter that should make the whole submission process much quicker - perhaps as little as 1 or 2 seconds if the directory doesn't have a captcha.

SliQ Submitter was my first attempt at writing directory submission software. Initially I made 3 releases very soon after each other - first with a free web directory list containing 450 directories, quickly followed by 2 more releases until the package listed over 2000 web directories. I initially tested submissions to all the listed directories and was confident that all directories worked and would accept submissions.

Soon after the last release though, I realised that web directories don't stand still. Before long the PR of the web directories changed, with a lot going to PR0. Whether this caused a number to give up I don't know, but quite a few of the 2000 went offline. As the months have passed, a number of the domains expired and a good percentage of the directories switched to paid.

In the last few days, I've rechecked the directories, removing those which are dead or have switched to being paid. Of the original 2250, there are now about 1250 left. As of today though, all of these are free and if a submitted website gets accepted by a good proportion of the 1250 directories, the site should get a good boost in PR and performance in SERPs.

SliQ Submitter - New Release

SliQTools have released an updated version of their free directory submission tool SliQ Submitter.

After feedback from beta testers, a number of enhancements have been made:-

1. SliQ Submitter now attempts to learn directory categories selected by the user on the directory page. This means that the user is no longer restricted to a small, fixed set of categories to be filled in automatically - the more categories you use when submitting to directories, the more categories SliQ will learn.
2. If SliQ Submitter can detect that a website has been successfully submitted, SliQ will load the next directory automatically.
3. A number of GUI enhancements have also been made.

The end results of these improvements is that SliQ Submitter is now easier to use and makes the process of web directory submission faster.

Read the original release post for SliQ Submitter.

Keyword Research Tools

Google have recently released a new keyword research tool at this link:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This new tool gives estimates of search volumes for different keywords and can be configured to specific regions, e.g. the UK. If you need to choose keywords for a new web page where ranking in SERPs is important, this tool can provide a better way of picking good words and phrases than simply guessing which might be good.

Keyword Research Tools for SEO

The following links point to great (and free!) tools to research popular keywords and longtail keywords for web pages.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Tool for creating a sitemap for a website

As my website grows larger and acquires more pages I want to give Google all the help I can indexing my pages so I submit a sitemap using Google's webmaster tools.

I've been looking for a good tool to create a sitemap for my website for a few months on and off.
I found a few shareware programs but the majority of these would only scan the root directory of my site or cost more than I was prepared to spend for something I would only use 3 or 4 times a year.

However, I've now found a site with a great, free sitemap generator:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

It scans subfolders and also works quicker than the shareware programs I've been using. It also exports sitemaps in a number of different formats including compressed and uncompressed sitemap format as well as ROR sitemap format.

Favourite Tools for SEO

This post contains links to some of my favourite SEO tools.

Keyword Density Checking

These tools check for the occurrence and density of keywords in websites.

www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php
www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/
www.keyworddensity.com/

Measuring your PageRank

Tools that can be used for measuring the current PageRank of a web page.

http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php
Google Toolbar - installs a toolbar into your browser and includes the option of displaying the PageRank of pages you visit.
http://www.smartpagerank.com/

Predicting your future PageRank

These links provide tools that attempt to predict your PageRank. Note: The tools are for curiosity only and the predicted values are sometimes wide of the mark - they aren't really SEO aids.

http://www.rustybrick.com/pagerank-prediction.php

Google Results for Multiple Countries

This tool allows you to see how a website performs in multiple countries. There is no single "google" and the results from Google data centres for different countries can be very different.

www.link.ezer.com/tools/google_serps_rank_checker.asp

Find out who owns a competitor domain

This tool allows you to find out who own a domain. The report also provides an SEO rating.

http://whois.domaintools.com/

Find Blogs on a particular topic

This tool allows you to find blogs on particular topics. Posting comments on blogs can give you free backlinks.

http://www.commenthunt.com/