CSS font stacks, media style sheets & web standards
WestNIC provides reliable web hosting services
25% off cpanel web hosting and reseller hosting deals. Promo: codestyle25off
This article outlines a technique that uses entrance keyword and bounce rate analytics data to select the most appropriate, highest volume keywords for pages. It promotes high volume keywords that have proved relatively "sticky" for an existing site.
This technique builds on the premise that existing entrance keywords with the lowest bounce rates are the most effective for a given page. In other words, these keywords match visitors' expectations about the content they find on the page and most people read-on and visit other areas of the site. Keywords must also have a significant search volume. This technique:
This keyword selection approach is best suited to sites that already have substantial search referrals and plenty of historic analytics data. The examples use Google Analytics, and Microsoft Excel and Word but other equivalent tools could be used.
The Google search index algorithm places less emphasis on keywords metadata than other tags. Yahoo! and other top search engines are more strongly influenced by the keywords tag. The keywords identified by this technique can also be used to optimise document title elements, description metadata and page content.
Many thanks to Alan Rabinowitz at SEO Image who reviewed the working draft of this article with some important refinements.
To get a representative quantity of keyword data to work with, set a broad date range. Click on the date range selector at the top right of the Dashboard page and set a start date up to a year before the current date. Click the Apply button and this date range should be applied throughout the current Google Analytics session.
Also click the Graph by button above the visits graph to display data in month intervals; this will reduce the number of irrelevant data rows in the CSV exports later on. And finally set the Show rows selector at the bottom of the data table to 100 to get a good size data set for keyword analysis.
In Google Analytics go to the main Content page, linked from the left hand navigation, and follow the Entrance Keywords link on the right hand side. This page should initially show requests for your home page over your chosen date range. If you have chosen a very wide date range you may see a notice "This report is based on sampled data" and a gap in part of the graph beneath, this shouldn't matter.
Use the drop down Content selector beneath the graph to pick the landing page you want to analyse further. It makes sense to optimise your most popular or commercially valuable landing pages first. Use the search input to find pages not listed.
Click the Export button at the top of the entrance keywords page and choose the option to download the data in CSV format. This comma separated value file format will open in standard spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel.
In Excel select the rows of graph data at the top of the entrance keywords spreadsheet; click and drag over the row headings until you get to the "Table" row. Delete these upper rows so that the Keywords row of column headings are at the top of the sheet; go the Edit menu and choose Delete.
Add an auto-filter to the data columns; in Microsoft Excel go to the Data menu and choose Filter > AutoFilter. This should add a drop down filter selector to each column. Use the filter selector to apply a Custom filter to the Bounce Rate column to Show rows where the bounce rate is greater than .69 for example.
This threshold will exclude search referral keywords for which 70% or more people immediately leave your site, so promotes the relatively "sticky" keywords that remain. The threshold bounce rate you choose will depend on the number of search engine referrals your page gets and the range of keywords used to find it.
If a high proportion of all entrance keywords have a high bounce rate, think again, your site may have more significant problems you need to deal with first.
Select all the high bounce rate lines by clicking over the top left row heading and drag down, then delete; go to the Edit menu and choose Delete. Reset the filter to show the remaining rows by choosing (All) from the bounce rate filter, or go to the Data menu, and choose Filter > Show All.
You now have a list of keywords that historically give the greatest volume of search engine referrals for your page with low bounce rate; query terms that self-select visitors most likely to appreciate your landing page content and explore the rest of your site.
Manually check the top 50 keywords to exclude single words, unless they are very important for your niche, and any irrelevant terms. People may find your pages by search terms that only match your content by coincidence. They may provide lots of referrals, but are unlikely to be high value.
Your optimised entrance keyword list should be sorted with the highest volume referrals at the top, but it is important to prioritise your list according to the total search volume for those terms. This ensures that you promote keywords that most people are searching on, rather than those that currently give the highest referrals.
Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to get the average search volume for the top 50 entrance keywords you created above. Select, copy and paste the keyword list into the keyword text area and complete the CAPTCHA. Choose the option to Filter my results and check the box Don't show ideas for new keywords.
Sort the keywords results list by average search volume descending and set the Match Type selector to Exact. You now have a priority list of the best keywords for your page; relevant, appropriate, low bounce rate and highest search volume. If you're logged into Google AdWords you can get actual search volume figures rather than percentages, but relative search volume is enough.
The Google keywords tool is designed for their AdWords service, not for natural search. For any given keyword AdWords may present your ad for broadly similar queries. For precision you need to ensure the figures you get are based on the exact keyword phrase you enter, not broad AdWords equivalents.
If you have an existing set of keywords and want to preserve some of them, go through the same process with your existing terms. Make a keyword per line list of current keywords and use the Google Keyword tool to check search volume, as above. Your current keywords may include terms that are important niche or high conversion rate keywords, even though search volumes are not large. Take note of those terms for manual amends later.
Combine current keywords and prime entrance keywords into a single list with one keyword per line and de-duplicate. The easiest way to de-duplicate is to sort the list alphabetically, a function often found in text editors like TextPad. Even better, TextPad has the option to Delete duplicate lines when sorting.
Feed the merged list into the Google Keywords tool to get a combined search volume estimate. Sort by average search volume descending.
Export a CSV copy of the Google keyword data using the link at the bottom right of the Google keyword tool results page and open in a spreadsheet program. Click and drag to select the column of keywords then copy and paste into a word processor to get a word count for the best terms from top to bottom. Decide a standard number of words to include in your keyword list and select or trim the master list by trial and error until you have a short list of the top terms. Code Style keywords are limited to 64 words for example.
Microsoft Word can be used to count words in a selected portion of your list; click and drag to select lines from your master list, go to the Tools menu and choose Word count.
Finally, use search and replace to convert your keyword per line list into a comma separated list. Search for a new line and replace with a comma and a space. Use ^p to match new lines in Word, or \n in many text editors.
<meta name="keywords" content="comma, separated, keywords" />
This keyword selection technique should help to improve the volume of search engine referrals for keyword searches that have proved "sticky" for your site. It does not take account of the commercial conversion rate associated with certain keywords, only those with the lowest bounce rates. The same approach can be applied to your most profitable keywords by search volume before appending the sticky keywords identified above.
Learn how to code for search engine optimisation with valid structural markup and description and keyword metadata. Open your doors doors to search engine spiders.
The Top 3 Tools for Keyword Research on the Fly at SEO Image discusses the Google keyword tool and the importance of exact keyword match.
