Central Perk: SEOptimise

vineri, 14 ianuarie 2011

SEOptimise

Keyword Temperature and Other Exotic Metrics

Posted: 13 Jan 2011 08:45 AM PST

Do you measure keyword temperature to improve your SEO? You don’t? Well what about keyword density? Also there are other exotic metrics to fool you into believing you do something for your site’s SEO. Sounds weird? Then read on. The story starts like this:

In recent days I’ve been haunted by the ghastly specters of the past.

In several cases I’ve had to do with metrics long gone or which weren’t ever meaningful in the first place. There seems to be a need for simplistic metrics that can make complex issues appear straightforward and clear.

Such metrics are

Keyword Density

In the nineties of the last century some first generation search engines were easily tricked by repeating keywords on a page. So the more you repeated a keyword the higher you ranked. It may have worked back then and in some cases even later but it was always a SEO trick never a best practice for a legit business. Still the term keyword density appeared. It signified the number of keyword mentions in a text. Your keyword mentioned 10 times in a text with 100 words equaled a keyword density of 10%.

Google hasn’t counted keywords on page, instead it relied on links to a site or page to determine its worth. Thus the first generation search engines disappeared. Keyword density stayed with us though. to this day some people offer keyword density tools and advice on the best keyword density. It’s all nonsense. You’re better off measuring keyword temperature, really, at least it won’t affect your SEO. A keyword density beyond the common sense median will hurt your site. You will be treated as a spammer.

Google (Toolbar) PageRank

Until 2007 it was still quite common to obsess about the Google (Toolbar) PageRank aka the little green bar in your Google Toolbar. It was never an accurate representation of your actual PageRank and only in the early days was there a real correlation between TPR and actual rankings in Google but it was a good thing to brag about. Also people used it to sell links, the higher the TBR the higher the price for a paid link.

Sometime in early 2008 Google ended this madness by manually adjusting the TPR of link vendors. From then on nobody serious about SEO really cared for the little green bar. Still just recently a client of mine called me out that a blog of mine was a failure beacuse (it has a ranking of 0). He meant PageRank of course and he didn’t even consider that it was on a new domain and thus couldn’t display toolbar PageRank yet. Toolbar PageRank is not a metric you use in SEO. It hasn’t been used for years. In case you don’t know that or accept that I can’t really help you. You can buy some high PageRank links from a text link broker or from a spammer and then you might get more TBR. Your site might get banned in the process as well. Again you are better off measuring something else, for instance page radiation.

Google Backlinks

It has been said and written countless of times: Google doesn’t show an accurate number of backlinks with its “link:” operator. To say it’s inaccurate is like saying that an elephant is not as tiny as an ant. There is a huge difference between the real number and the few links Google shows you.

Just compare it to the number of links Google Webmaster Tools shows instead. for the client who complained that has only 9 backlinks in Google the number in GWT was something like 270k (thousand) links. There is a small difference don’t you think? So measuring SEO success by the Google backlinks number is as accurate as counting Matt Cutt’s hair to determine it. Especially when he’s.

Number of Links

OK, the number of links as offered by Google Webmaster Tools must be it then! Isn’t it? Nope. The sheer number of links says as much about your SEO success as the number of sex partners about your love life. One link from an authority site might by worth as much as 100k from scraper and other low quality sites. You don’t measure SEO efforts be the number of links. Each link has, depending on its anchor text, topical relevance, position on the page and a plethora of other factors, a wort of it’s own.

You can’t compare a Rolls Royce with a Tata Nano. Even in case you count 100 of them with one RR. Ultimately links are just a means or a tool to accomplish a task or even a series of tasks like getting attention, traffic, conversions and/or sales. So you have to determine lots of factors having impact on link quality and report them, don’t you? In case you get paid by the link or have to measure your link building efforts you might try this approach. Still, showing of quality or authority links doesn’t prove that you have doe your SEO properly. You might as well measure link anxiety to find out how afraid you are of losing each one of them. Counting or measuring links for reporting purposes is the road to excess not success. Measuring the quality of your sex partners doesn’t mean a healthy relationship either.

Number of Keywords

The more keywords you optimize for the better! Don’t you think? Still many potential clients approach me with huge keywords lists, often directly from Adwords. Then after a few hours of market and keyword research I come up with just a few, sometimes as few as three they have to go after and focus on. They are often not the most prominent ones like cars, SEO or hotel but the rather keyword phrases, combinations like [used cars uk], [local SEO services] or [hotel munich]. In the past often disappointment would set in: “What? Just a bunch of keywords? Not even the big cool ones among them? You must be a very bad SEO if you target just a few low level keywords at once.” Market and keyword research is not the process of compiling huge lists of keywords though. It’s the process of finding out the keyphrases that you can reach within a reasonable time frame on a realistic budget. You want to find the few “money keywords” that will bring the revenue.

You’re after the few terms where you can compete within your industry or area. Also you can’t compete for everything at the same time. Your business has just one home page and one description. You can’t keyword stuff it unless you want to scare off your potential customers. A few years ago some SEOs would just automatically generate pages for each of your keywords and redirect searchers to the home page. Were these guys the good SEOs? No, they failed. I’ve seen client sites dropped from the index for such “SEO tricks”. So it’s not the number of keywords you optimize for, it’s the choice of keywords. Treat your keywords like friends, better a few good ones than hundreds of fake ones you don’t really care for or even know. Instead of measuring the number of keywords you could also count the number of times you have to pee as a SEO metric.

I hope by now you understand what I tried to express. There are no simple SEO metrics. Even the metrics we still use or use more and more these days are always a compound of several aspects of SEO, web design, usability, pricing, product and service quality etc.

bounce rates
conversions
ROI

depend on numerous factors:

The industry
the time of year
general market trends
the economy
the geographic location.

Don’t blame SEO for everything.

Also don’t forget that you can’t measure everything: You can’t measure your image, trust, or brand loyalty. You can try to. You can’t depend on these metrics though. You have to think for yourself and not let simplified numbers decide for you. Keyword temperature is a great metric don’t you think?

* Image by Daniel Novta.