Quite frankly I added do follow to encourage commenters.  I’d like intelligent people to swing by and not only read but also comment on my blog.  I am also willing to give them a link back for their efforts, but I am not willing to support comment spam and I think I can have the best of both worlds as long as I use WordPress for this blog.

You can bet that before I added DoFollow I got my Akismet plugin up and running.  I also didn’t turn off the no follow for trackbacks and pings only for comments.  Most importantly I not only keep and eye on my comment I’ve set my WP discussion settings so that a commenter has to have an approved comment before they can have their comments automatically approved.

This means when I get a comment like

http://www.dental-web-marketing. com/ | contact1@sinaimarketing.com | 89.165.4.241

I’m waiting for next part.
Anyway thank you, that was good info.
Take a look at Dental Internet Marketing. I think you will enjoy.

I can just mark it as the spam it is and move on.  By the way that may look to you like a link to Dental Internet Marketing but really it’s just a trick of the eye .  Go ahead click on it I dare you 

Does it take a little dillagence yes, but it also promotes the spirit of links in the Google sense of linking.  If a commentor links back to their site in their sig or comment – I make sure I do approve of their content if if their opinon differs from mine before I give them a link.

]]> http://www.dewpointproductions.com/seo_blog/keywords/dofollow-for-wordpress-a-new-era-on-my-blog/feed/ 2 http://www.dewpointproductions.com/seo_blog/keywords/keyword-research-video1/ http://www.dewpointproductions.com/seo_blog/keywords/keyword-research-video1/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:40:46 +0000 david http://www.dewpointproductions.com/seo_blog/keywords/keyword-research-video1/ This video on keyword research is from a Webinar for nonprofit organizations, but the tools and techniques it demonstrates work equally well for all sites.

It’s no secret that we all search by trying to think of keywords and keyword terms that would have been used on a Web site housing the information we seek. What is far less understood by most Web site owners is how the search engines assign importance to these keywords to show searchers the best results. Unlock this mystery and you are well on your way to better search engine placement. That’s exactly what this video will help you do.

This isn’t the post I set out to write this morning, but while researching a title, yes I research titles, in fact you could call this behavior keyword search optimization I ran across an interesting little example of why some folks should slow down the trigger finger on buying pay per clicks.

Take a look at the image below:

In case the highlighted yellow is too small to read I’ll type it out here: keyword search optimization. Now notice that almost completely green bar on the left, that bar represents advertiser competition and with so many people competing for it you can guess the clicks are probably pretty spendy if you want to be at the top of the list.

The thing is that when you do an exact phrase match search for this term there are only 9,22o results. Only the first one is even halfway optimized. By this I mean it is the only one that uses keyword search optimization in the title, and it only does this after a couple of other words. Of course I say this assuming that you haven’t come to this page via search, when and if it works it’s way to the top, and I have ever reason to suspect that it will. Why I am so confident? Take a look at the Title in the browser bar, and at the url structure and at the title on the page and at the keyword density. Sure someone at Google could push it down, but barring that, this page with this low of competition almost can’t help but rise to the top.

So if I were adwords.google.com or allbusiness.com or any of the other advertisers that I see are paying for clicks for this term, I would really have had to give a second thought to optimizing a page for the term keyword search optimization. After all wouldn’t doing so generate a lot more credibility?

One of the most important decisions you make about each of your web pages is what keyword or keyword phrase you are targeting. Sure, in the end your page will get indexed for lots of keyword combinations. This is the long-tail effect, but in reality you are have only two or three key opportunities to tell the search engines what you would most like your page to be indexed for, so you need to choose wisely. Google Trends can help you do this.

In the example above drug rehab (the upper trend line) shows a great deal more search volume. However, make one small change and your search engine traffic could completely disappear, which is what the next example shows.

Simply by adding an “s” to the word addiction you go from having search volume for your keyword to not having enough volume for Googleä to even register the search. This doesn’t mean no one is finding you with your search term, but the damage is unmistakable.

There are many more tools that you could use for keyword research. Keyword Discovery and Keyword Tracker both offer paid tools with extensive databases and the ability to look at more subtleties. However, for the vast majority of your keyword research the Google Keyword Tool plus Google Trends will work very well.

So, how do you find out what people are actually searching on?

1. Brainstorm a list of words and phrases, which you think, best describe what you do keep these to 1 – 3 words e.g. drug addiction treatment. It’s best to do this on a computer in a text document.
2. Go to Google’s free keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal which looks like this:

3. Leave it set to the tab that says “Keyword Variations” this is the default 4. Leave the box marked that reads “Use Synonyms”
5. Enter one keyword phrase in the text area. Don’t do as it suggests and enter more than one phrase at a time
6. Enter the code you see on your screen and hit enter. You should be met with a screen that looks roughly like this:

7. Further down your screen you will be able to see additional keywords to consider. For example the keyword phrase addiction treatment has drug rehab, alcohol rehab, substance abuse treatment and several other phrases. Some of the alternatives for your term are phrases you will probably wish to add to your list.

Now don’t rush off and think that what I just described is all there is to it. Even for the quickest and dirtiest of keyword research you should always do two more things. First, you should always check the number of search result pages. To do this go to Google or your favorite search engine and type in the phrase you are considering with quotes around it. It turns out for example that a search for “Keyword Research” returns 1,560,000 pages in Google even though it will only get an estimated 31 searchers a day.  In the meantime there are only 988 results for the term “Keyword Analysis Research” with an estimated 95 searches each day for this term.  That’s not always the case and if I had found it to be the other way around I might have decided to focus on the shorter term rather than the longer.  It’s a balancing act between the number of competing pages and the amount of potential traffic.

The other thing that I do is to test Word Tracker against what Google says people are searching on.  To do this I usually log into my Google Adwords account, but if you don’t have one of those Google makes this tool available for free for folks who don’t have an Adwords account.  It won’t give you exact numbers of people who are searching, but it will show you if Google determines there is any significant search volume for it in the past month.  It does this with a bar graph.  The reason to do this, is that WordTracker doesn’t have access to the number of searches being done for a phrase in Google.  In fact WordTracker has a rather limited number of search engines they can pull from, so they must extrapolate based on the estimated search volume those  engines do get the total volume of all searches for a particular term.  So, if Google doesn’t show in search volume for a term, it’s back to the drawing board.

You can do a lot more in-depth keyword analysis research, pull in several other tools, graph it all and cross reference it, but if you’re wanting a quick method this works great.