Successful SEO: The Essential Elements - part I
it’s 9:39am, and we’re just finished talking about how to choose keywords… i guess it must be important. coffee break
Keyword Phrases
Keyword Discovery
what people are searching for (different from the company’s internal language)
information within your company
- web site
- press releases
- collateral
log files
- web server is logging exact phrases used by web site visitors
site search engine
- your site’s log files if you have searching capability
print and online magazines and trade journals competition
- content on their web sites
- meta keywords
focus groups / surveys (surveymonkey.com)
blogs/discussion boards/forums
variations of your keywords
- misspellings and typos
- abbreviations and slang
- plural and singular
Keyword Evaluation
relevance
- site’s products, services, and content — your business
specificity
- broad vs. narrow: how specific to be (long tail)
popularity
- frequency that the term is searched
competitiveness
- look at ppc bids to gauge based on price of bids (Google Sandbox)
Search Tools
comments
my own advice to the speaker: look at your competitors’ keywords!
Here’s a great comment from Rob Garner at iCrossing (WTF!): “One of the best tools you can use for choosing keywords is your brain.” thanks, buddy 
So… she wanted everyone to have a laptop to go to the “google sandbox tool”, so she spelled out a long and tedious URL “dot com, slash, capital K-e-y-w-o-r-d capital T-o-o……” why don’t you just tell people to search for “google sandbox”? hello? isn’t this a search conference?
links recap:
