SEO Studio #1 - Learning About Keyword Data
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a huge business these days, with consultancy firms, websites and software all dedicated to offering advice on how to improve a site’s ranking on Google and other search engines. And certainly it’s important, the most attractive site in the world is largely pointless if nobody can ever find it on the internet.
I’m not an expert on SEO, and have in the past worked on the basis that the most important and effective optimisation of a site in search engines is well structured, semantically correct, relevant and accessible content. I still think that’s the case by and large but I decided it’s also worth taking some time to look at other aspects. I’m going to talk about what I’m learning from time to time in the blog as an irregular SEO studio, hopefully provoking some discussion and feedback as well to point me in the right direction!
Over the last couple of days I’ve been playing around with Web CEO, a free piece of software designed specifically to help analyse a site and how effective it is in terms of SEO. While I’m still finding my way around the software it’s been interesting to have a look at some of the early results.
I’ve been focusing first on an analysis of the meta data of the site. The meta data is information placed in the header of a website, notably the <title>, <meta description> and <meta keywords>. While there’s some debate on the weight of this data in regards to how search engines use them, the general consensus appears to be that well structured meta data can have a minor positive effect, but that badly structured meta data can have a significant negative effect. Badly structured meta data includes ignoring your site content in your title, description and keywords, or using unethical practices like adding lots of popular keywords to your meta data regardless of their relevance to the content of the site.
While for Fog of Eternity the meta data was relevant, there were areas where Web CEO suggested it wasn’t providing much advantage. Most particularly its analysis suggested that a lot of the keywords were very rarely searched for on Google or were so broad that they were used by millions of other sites and thus had a very low Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). At the simplest level a keyword’s KEI is based on the number of times it’s searched for compared to the number of competitor sites which include that keyword. So, for example, while “css” is going to be searched for a lot, there are millions of sites which use it as a keyword and so adding it as a keyword has little advantage.
Web CEO lets you check on the KEI of various keywords, and provides data on the number of daily searches for those words and the number of competitor sites. It also provides suggestions for alternatives which might have a much greater KEI. As a result of this I realised that my keywords were far too broad, usually single words that had a very low KEI. So as a result I’ve made some changes to the keywords of the site that take more account of search phrases rather than single words (e.g. the phrase ‘website webpage design’ is commonly searched for and has a high KEI and is of course relevant to the content of this site). The program also identified some strange discrepancies which led to small corrections in my keywords - e.g. ‘website design’ has a much higher KEI than ‘web design’ because it’s searched for effectively as often but is a keyword in much fewer sites.
I worry at this point that an imperfect understanding of keywords might mean my updated keywords are too specific and less commonly reflected in the general writing of my site, so I’m not sure if the changes I’ve made are going to have a positive or negative effect (if they have any great effect at all). And my understanding of Google and other search engines is that much of their internal keyword weighting is based on the content of a site rather than meta data. But I’ll be doing my best to analyse any changes to the results and the impact of Google searches on site visitors to see if these changes have an impact.
This has just touched on one of the early aspects of developing knowledge in SEO. In the next SEO studio I’ll talk more about what I’ve learned in terms of maximising effectiveness for other areas of meta data.
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