Now that we’ve discovered where we stand in relation to indexed pages, keyword rankings, and search engine coverage. We have a good idea of where Host Discussion now ranks and what it doesn’t rank on. Now that we know where we are - it’s time to find where we want to go.

Webmasters sometimes get lost in knowing what keywords to attempt to rank on. You may start with a random keyword list. You probably also don’t know if those keywords are well searched. You search what competitors of yours are ranked on for these random keywords. All time consuming and usually fruitless.

It would be nice to have a tool that makes keyword suggestions. It would be even nicer if that tool gave us a rough idea of how heavily that keyword was searched for. What if this tool also told us what keywords visitors were using to hit our competitors Websites?

That’s the beauty of RankSense and the true power of it. These kind of tools are readily available to you. If you know what keywords are heavily searched for, you erase the guessing game. Now you can focus on keywords you KNOW will bring traffic to your site. Using this tool you can discover obscure keywords that others may not even know visitors heavily search. It’s efficient and it’s easy.

Figuring out how humans search is part of the equation within RankSense and I love it. Now let’s see how these tools are used within RankSense.

Step 1 - Search Engine Selection

As most Webmasters know, a Website can rank differently between Google and Yahoo and other search engines. The Search Engine Selection tool helps you choose the search engine you wish to increase rankings for. For our review, I’ve picked Google, Yahoo!, and Live.com. Pretty basic here, obviously Google and Yahoo! are clearly the top two to pick here to reach the mass market for Host Discussion.

Step 2 - Keyword Selection, Keyword Metrics, and Keyword Grouping

I entered a few keywords (only 5 keywords) within the Keyword Selection tool and was pleasantly surprised as the software went to work and delivered over 400 keyword variations within 20 seconds. Not only did it deliver keywords that were related to the 5 I entered, it also told me the search volume for each keyword.

My next task was to pick and choose which keywords were worth going after. I moved 20 keywords I felt we could rank well on considering the audience we would like to bring to our Website. Of course, I chose the most searched variety of each keyword that was similar. RankSense delivered over 400 variations and many were similar. However, not all were searched in the same amounts. This is where RankSense pays for itself if it does nothing more than this.

The next step of this process is to gain a deeper metric understanding of each keyword I selected. Although the Keyword Selection tool told me raw traffic, we need to know more about the keywords we chose.

This is done with a Keyword Appraisal tool. The tool rates your keywords by search engine for the following items:

• Relevancy - Relevant to your website?
• Traffic - Relative number of clicks per keyword.
• Value ($) - Relative cost for Pay-per-Click ads.
• Competition - Number of competitors on keyword.
• Opportunity - Estimated value of the keyword for your Website.

After analyzing the results, I made a short list of keywords to start working on. I am limiting this to the top 5 in terms of traffic, opportunity, and . I threw out the top keyword returned as the competition is heavy and I do not feel we have enough authority within Google to rank well on. I am going to focus on these alternative keywords to help build authority. Once that is accomplished I will re-evaluate keywords and make an attempt on that magic top keyword.

To keep things neat, you can organize your keyword selections based on landing page types. Landing page types include:

• Navigational - Perhaps a landing page that provides information on other sections of your Website you wish to drive people to.
• Informational - Information only pages.
• Transactional - Related to purchases.

As all of our pages are informational on Host Discussion, I will be choosing ‘informational’ on all keywords.

To ensure proper tracking and how you make progress, you will now need to map your keywords to the exact landing pages RankSense has found. The software took awhile to generate a landing page list for Host Discussion. Most likely this is because we have thousands and thousands of indexed pages.

I took my time and matched keywords to landing pages as best I could. This process can take a few hours if you have a lot of pages or only a minute if you just have a handful of landing pages. Tomorrow we will discuss a topic everyone will be interested in: Competitive Intelligence.

NEXT UP DAY 4……

Tags: keyword discovery, keyword rankings, ranksense, review, search engine optimization, software

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.