Most people are not aware of how powerful keywords are. The web world runs on keywords. A keyword is a very important SEO element as search strings in every search-engine are matched against keywords.
A keyword is a phrase or a word which a user may use in a search-engine. There is a lot of research done before arriving at a keyword that could be used in order to optimize the search engine results of any given website.
Raven Tools has been around us for more than 5 years and I have to say we @seo_pal also use it a lot. For us it is a great way to show the benefits of our work to the client. Since we think Raven Tools is suitable for every webmaster, who is responsible for more than 5 websites, we decided to make a getting started for Raven Tools and show you its most important features (at least to us).
The Link Manager is the feature we use most. There we upload all links we have created to the client’s website and track them. The best thing about it is that it alerts you in case something happens with the link – for example – URL has 404, 500, 302,301 status code or the anchor text is changed. Additionally the Link Manager allows you to add lots of information about your links, so you can easily get them organized. Here are the fields, you can fill in if you want to important lots of links to the manager:
Column header: Status
Column header: Link Type
Column header: Link Text
Column header: Link URL
Column header: Website Name***
Column header: Website URL
Column header: Website Type
Column header: Original PR***
Column header: Contact Name
Column header: Contact Email
Column header: Content ID (located in the Content Manager)
Column header: Cost*
Column header: Cost Type (Payment Frequency)*
Column header: Payment Method*
Column header: Payment Reference*
Column header: Start Date*
Column header: End Date**
Column header: Creation Date (leave blank unless you want to force it to a past date)
Column header: Comment
Column header: Owner Name
For more information and a sample visit this page. Addittionally, you can use the Link Manager and its integration with the users and tasks. This will allow you to keep track of the link building efforts carried by different people.
The next great feature we love about Raven Tools is the Research Central. Although, it is currently being further developed, the Research Central works quite well and allows you to analyze your website for crytical onsite issues, backlinks, organic search competitors and new keyword opportunities. Here is a video overview of all features that the Research Central have to offer:
The best thing about using this tool is that you can easily push all your data to the rest of the Raven toolset. For example, if you find profitable keywords, you can get them tracked immediately by just clicking on them. It sounds easy and it really is!
No matter what you are doing to make your website more visible in the search engines, you need to have a tool to track your results. There are many SERP trackers out there, but using them for more than 100 keywords, usually gets you banned from Google for a couple of hours. In Raven Tools, the SERP tracker updates every week and you get your data by Thursday latest. Beside your rankings in various search engines, the SERP tracker also keeps your keyword history since the time you actually added the keyword.
All keywords you select for your SEO efforts will be placed in the Keyword Manager. It allows you to also see their Adwords local search volume and other statistics. It is very important to remember that not all keywords present in the Keyword manager have their rankings tracked – you have to choose which to track and which not.
The Competitor Manager on the other hand allows you to find your top competitors in Google organic search based on your keywords and then search see how they perform their SEO efforts by digging into data about their backlinks and lots of other information. Here is a quick video about both features:
Raven Tools also comes packed with lots of social media tools that allow you to monitor mentions of your product, brand or any keyword that is important for you in various social media websites. You can create monitor of 20 of the most popular social networks using the Social Monitor and additionally you can create separate ones for Twitter, Facebook and Youtube + get detailed reports about the activity for your accounts. The best thing about the social media features of Raven Tools is that you can create a Social Stream on topic important for you and keep track of it, participate and answer questions related with your business.
Raven Tools can be quite useful for your business, if you want to keep track of your marketing efforts. Since it is not limited only to SEO tool, it can come quite handy for managing Adwords, social media and brand management campaigns. If you want to see for yourself, try the Free 30 Day Trial.
So, I grabbed your attention. Now let me explain why you actually need to analyze competitors in your target niche. For one, you’ll be able to see what made your competitor success (and do your best to replicate their success on your site). And you want to know how to make a website successful, right? Second, you’ll see which exactly methods they used (SEO, PPC, etc). That’ll help you to comprehend which exactly tactics they put into practice.That means that you’ll not have to dive in some guess work or something . And last but not least, you’ll be able estimate your budget to beat your competitors. With such info, you’ll be most definitely confident while discussing SEO budget either with your boss or a client.
Step-by-step
As a matter of fact, you need to follow a specific order of action so that it works right for you. I’m not saying that it’s the only correct way to do that, but I can say that it works for me. At start, you need to find your competitors, figure own what brings them traffic, and then break those traffic sources into components to get a better understanding of what exactly is going on.
How to find your competitors
You can use a few tools to find your competitors. The most obvious one would be to just use Alexa for that purpose. You can search the sites in your target category. Apart from that, you can use Alexa alongside with the SEOQuake plugin (it’s available both for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome). Having installed the plugin, you need to disable instant search, make sure that your browser shows 100 results per page (you can change that in your Google search settings), and just filter by the Alexa option in your SEOQuake plugin. Thus you can see the most successful sites for your keyword in ascending or descending order. Also, you can find your competitors using SEMRush. It’ll show you who your potential or real competitors are. Plus you’ll see what sites might want to buy ads on your site, but that’s a whole different story.
Alexa internet traffic rankings of RxPGonline.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Where the traffic is coming from
Alexa is a cool tool for a good reason. You can also use it to see where certain site’s traffic is generated from. It just shows what sites your visitors were on before they came to your site. Plus you can use SEMRush for the same aim as well.
Break down into most trafficked queries
Now it’s a good idea to use the same SEMRush to see which exactly search queries (keywords or keyphrases) are generating most traffic for a site. And you might also want to use a pretty cool (and I discovered it for myself just the other day) tool at ahrefs.com That service (or tool) will show your (or your competitors’) biggest traffic providers. There’s more. One can even see what anchor texts your links have and so on. SEMRush and SpyFu can also be used to see what your competitors pay for PPC.
Conclusion
You have plenty of tools at your disposal to see how your competitors are getting traffic and replicate the same on your site. Sure thing, some services and tools require financial investments, but that’s worth it because you’ll be able to beat your competitors with the info you’ll obtain in that case.
I’m an SEO freelancer. Plus I’m crazy about web design and development.
Anchor texts are the clickable and visible texts contained in a hyperlink. The modern browsers show them in blue color with underline. They link to another location or document on the web. The search engines can determine the subject matter of the document by reading the anchor text links.
Diversification
If multiple anchors texts are on the same page, this does not mean that they give more value. Users are not very keen about the same links on the same page and such links do not help in the SEO or search engine optimization side of things either. Therefore you should not be repetitive in using the same anchor texts again and again. Diversity in anchor text links can strongly benefit a websites’ overall SEO.
Anchor texts coming from multiple addresses can be helpful for SEO. But these anchor texts come from multiple domains then they are not useful and will not benefit in any way. Therefore you should see to it that your anchor texts are diverse and not redundant.
Anchor Text Fluctuation, First HTML Anchor Text and the External Anchor Text
Some people think that diversification or fluctuation of anchor text can help masking the spam and manipulation. Others think that anchor text’s link is all important and provides real value to it. You can apply this practice as it will avoid repetitiveness and bring freshness as the search engine often skim through the duplicate content (even in the case of anchor texts). You will also be able to avoid the pattern matching problems. Google and Bing count on the webpage’s first anchor text that is in the HTML code.
Matts Cutts, the Search Quality Group Representative of Google, has been able to confirm this fact. When the search engine Google has to choose between two links that point to the same page, then the first HTML coded anchor text links get priority over all the other redundant and repetitive anchor texts that are on the same page. The external anchor text links (the anchor texts that do not link to your own website) are more beneficial than the internal text links (anchor texts that link to your website directly) and therefore the web promotion experts and companies should spend more time building them.
Images as anchor texts
All attributes of the link usually become the anchor text when an image is used in it. This fact is useful in SEO and for screen readers. An example can be the screenshot of a website. If it is linked over then its alt attributes will serve as anchor text during the Search Engine Optimization. When there are no alt attributes in the picture then the search engines use the page titles or the surrounding text as an alternative to the anchor text links.
Surrounding text as contexts
If the anchor text does not have any context or lacks much value then the surrounding text is likely to be used by the search engine as a signal. The surrounding text matters, since it provides the context. When the information is being talked about a lot on the internet and is trendy then its importance increases further.
The search engines can now scan the webpage and analyze the paragraph and understand the main topic or the subject around which a given website revolves. A better contextual structuring and association can help in improved SEO.
About the author: Diana Maria is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology, health and parenting. Beside this she is fond of games and gadgets. She also likes reading various articles on gizmowatch.com & bornrich.com
The Top 10 Most Expensive Keywords are:
Insurance
Loans
Mortgage
Attorney
Credit
Lawyer
Donate
Degree
Hosting
Claim
You’ll notice that these top ten most expensive AdWords keywords deal primarily with financing and industries that manage vast sums of money. The fact that the educational keyword “degree” is one of the top ten most expensive Google keywords, right up with lawyers and credit, reminds us of the growing cost of education.
The next ten most expensive keywords complete our total list, resulting the top 20 most expensive AdWords keywords:
Conference Call
Trading
Software
Recovery
Transfer
Gas/Electricity
Classes
Rehab
Treatment
Cord Blood
There you have it – the highest cost keywords. If you are considering entering into one of these industries, be ready to pay high cost per click rates for the top keywords. While some may start treatment facilities for the greater good, be aware that you’ll wind up in one of the most expensive niche groups, and your paid search marketing wallet will suffer from those high CPCs.
The most expensive SEM keywords may be frustrating for those in the industries, but they are the best keywords for Google, who makes 97% of revenue from advertising on Google sites (AdWords, AdSense). In the last four quarters, the biggest player of search engine history brought in $32.2 billion in total advertising revenue.
![Where Does Google Make Its Money? [ infographic ]](http://www.wordstream.com/images/where-does-google-make-its-money.png)
WordStream is a provider of PPC management software, PPC tools, and a FREE keyword research tool for discovering profitable keywords (key words) for PPC and SEO.
With our rapidly growing, global world, there is now a lot of competition for almost every niche. Different companies keep fighting for more customers and clients in their respective spheres. But inside every niche, there’s probably one or two particular products and services that are very specific, as opposed to the ones most commonly provided by the companies. If something is specific, unique, and of particular interest to someone, those people are likely to be converted from viewers to customers of a website more easily than those who search for the more popular and generic term.
The theory stated above is the basis for using long tail keywords in SEO. If you’re not already familiar with long tail keywords, you might want to think of them this way: long tail keywords are more than 3 words, often as much as five words long, and they are more descriptive than the top keywords. If we want to rephrase the latter sentence , we could say that out of all the keywords, the ones that are short and most searched are the top , head keywords, and the rest are long tail keywords.
So where’s the benefit, if they are not the ones that are most searched ? Doesn’t that mean less traffic ? Well, yes it does, but in order to explain where the upside of using long tail keywords is, we need to introduce a new term called conversion rate.
Conversion rate is the metric that specifies how many of the website’s visitors have bought or obtained the product.
Long tail keywords tend to have a drastically higher conversion rate compared to other keywords. An often cited statistic claims that while short , head keywords get 80% of the traffic, it is long tail keywords that get 80% of the conversions, even though they only get 20% of the traffic. This 80/20 rule can be applied to most , if not all businesses, and that is why SEO specialists all over the world have started to pay attention to this phenomenon.
But even keeping in mind the importance of long tail keywords, one cannot afford to be careless with them – they still need to undergo a process of careful selection and analysis that other keywords undergo. Using various tools like Google AdWords and Word Tracker will help you with the selection and monitoring of the long tail keywords, so that your business can benefit from the viewers that are converted into customers. You can also brainstorm for new keywords that may come to the mind of your potential future customers, people who search online. Google has stated that 20% of all search queries every day are tried for the first time, so trying to come up with and optimize something that might have not been searched for yet may make optimization even more efficient.
Of course, as with anything in the sphere of SEO, you need to be careful with content. Using content that matches the specific long tail keywords you use will help you a lot in optimizing the website, and is generally a good practice worthy of being mentioned. Sometimes , it’s even worth it to pay for content that will match your particular needs.
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