No matter what updates happen or what engines you work with one thing common to all is the underlying keyword research.

Moderator:
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Speakers:
Christine Churchill – Key Relevance
Richard Baxter – SEOGadget
Lasse Clarke Slogaard – MediaCom Denmark
Kevn Gibbons – SEOptimse

Richard Baxter – SEOGadget

This presentation is not so much about collecting data, rather on how to group it and make it actionable. By grouping phrases you can spot priorities in search behaviour that allow you to confidently construct site architecture.

Having been in the online marketing industry for a few years now, I’ve often come across people and businesses that are convinced that they can do better SEO optimization than professional SEO specialists, free of charge. One mistake that these business owners and admittedly, some (not-so-professional) professional SEO companies often make, is that of over-optimizing their sites. Let’s take a closer look…

Overdoing your keyword optimization:

The very first thing everyone learns in SEO is the implementation of keyword optimization for pages and websites as a whole. Newcomers to the search engine optimization (SEO) game will learn that having the correct keywords on a page will tell search engines that the article is relevant to a particular subject that users have searched for. So the first thing they do is completely saturate their pages with relevant keywords. The problem is however, that Google and other search engines are not stupid. They can EASILY detect someone who is overdoing their SEO optimization with keyword stuffing and quickly penalize the page with low rankings and a damaged reputation.

For those that may perhaps be unclear on the use of “stop words”, search engines (especially Google) do not take stop words into consideration when delivering results based on the users search query. There are exceptions to the rule, of course.

So how does this play a role in keyword research? Previously, Google’s External Keyword Tool delivered a fairly accurate set of results for your queries. Over the last couple of months, there have been minor updates to the engine, such as the Google Suggest feature that many of you will have seen when typing a query into Google (launched August 2008). Since then we have been noticing additional “incomplete” phrases that appear amongst the keyword results when performing keyword research using the Google External Tool. And when choosing the final keywords for SEO, people occasionally include these “incomplete” phrases in their final list owing to the high search volumes attached to them.