Oh, so many (good?) questions

[Richard]

Hello all -

Thanks for a killer looking site. I am getting started with SEO and have a few questions...apologies for the naive questions! Read the tutorial - thanks very much for that. I've got my 50 or so words and need to group them. I thought they were all decent words/phrases based on Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) When I went back with my list some of them didn't even have hits. Uggg. I did some combining that I though made sense, but I guess not. Anyway, I'll just lay all my Qs out and see who bites..

1. SEO GUY mentions to check with the PPC/ bid-for-placement engines and determine the conversion value. I can't see where to get the cost per click on each term. Assuming that Google is one of these, all I know how to do is start the Adword process(haven't ever paid for it) but these are all bid. How do I know what people are bidding/paying for a certain term? Or am I off track?

2. It sounds like the home page of a site should be optimized just for the 3 terms that describe the site at a high level? Or should many of the terms within the site be included on the page or in the key words? I'm guessing it's a stand alone page in that it is just optimized for those 3 words.

3. Is 3 words a hard rule, or does it hurt target 4 or even 5 terms on a page?

4. I think I read that plurals, synonyms, etc. are to added to the keywords section. Should I also pull important descriptive(adjectives) from the body of text? I hope this isn't a premature question since I haven't actually read the section on writing the body text. :)

5. I read on another site that we should "place the copy above any navigation links and other text." Was wondering how to do this if I wanted a menu of link in the first column of a 3 column table? Or if the Navigation links are in a header section?

6. Out of curiosity, how important is it to have the words in the domain name match the optimized words on say the home page? e.g. if my company name is JeffSmith.com but I do web programming.... would it make a difference to have web programming in the domain name: jeffsmithwebprogramming.com?

Cheers to all who venture some responses! I sincerely thank you for helping me get up to speed.

Rich

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=Richard]2. It sounds like the home page of a site should be optimized just for the 3 terms that describe the site at a high level? Or should many of the terms within the site be included on the page or in the key words? I'm guessing it's a stand alone page in that it is just optimized for those 3 words.[/QUOTE]
I aim at more words.

[QUOTE=Richard]3. Is 3 words a hard rule, or does it hurt target 4 or even 5 terms on a page?[/QUOTE]
Depends how competitive.

[QUOTE=Richard]4. I think I read that plurals, synonyms, etc. are to added to the keywords section...[/QUOTE]
Stemming is implemented so it will help on the page, but the keyword meta is not used by google.

[QUOTE=Richard]6. Out of curiosity, how important is it to have the words in the domain name match the optimized words ... would it make a difference to have web programming in the domain name: jeffsmithwebprogramming.com?...[/QUOTE]
Rules changes all the time and you might regret a super long domain name. I'd rather use the filename or sub-dir... to do this.
Some searches like 'english keyword' will list my site high just because of the filename since the word english is not on my page.

[seo guy]

#1: You actually go to overture.com and type in your kw. I for instance type in "SEO Company" then I am shown a search results list ordered by bidder. Now if you look at the top right corner you will see "view advertisers max bids" click on that link, it will give you a security code to verify your not a bot and then Boom there are your bids in order.

Now I dont use it necesarily for just conversion purposes but here is my rationale.

If someone is willing to pay a lot of $ for the traffic that comes from a kw then they must have done their homework on that keyword especially if it gets a lot of searches as it ends up costing and arm and a leg. if it didnt convert well they wouldnt pay so much, or its value would soon be identified as much less and people would all lower their bids. PPC marketers arent stupid

Currrently the top bid for SEO Company is $9.99 per click and it gets around 4000 searches. This tells me that this is a good keywrod as someone is shelling out a forture to capture the traffic. Now if the next bid was 20 cents then I would be less convinced but it is $4.00 so still pretty damn competitive price wise.

Makes me glad I rank #1 in virtually every search engine for that term muahahahahha

Keep in mind however the more a term costs in PPC the more desired it is and thus people will be more willing to hire an SEO for Google and Yahoo search results if their PPC is eating up their ad budgets, bottom link higher PPC = harder kw to rank on.

My opinion, the better you get as SEO the more expensive terms you go for, but dont going trying to tackle $20 words with $.05 of experience. Go after $.05 words and work your way up :) you will find you get better and better the more you practice and it is much easier to test what works and what doesnt in less competitive markets

I will answer your other questions as well just in different boxes so you can read one at a time
WELCOME TO THE BOARD :D

[seo guy]

#2: ITs not "words" its "phrases" and no you should go for any more kw's then you can feasibly fit within the stop text of your title, as for any competitive phrase you basically should have your kw in the title its the most important part. Stop text is around 65-70 characters including spaces BTW

For word choice try to choose phrases that complement each other with what I call distal proximity. What I mean by this is the phrase "big blue cars" contains the absolute kw "big blue cars" "big blue" and blue cars" however it also contains the distal phrases "big cars" and "cars big" Hope that makes sense, if not just post and I will clarify.

Remember you have many pages so tons of opportunity to go for diferent kw's on different pages. Dont make the mistake of going after the same kw on 30 pages as users will only ever see a maximum of 2 in the listings anyways, thats 28 wasted pages that could rank for something else.

[seo guy]

Just an addendum to #2 if your terms are quite easy then you dont really need them in your title and in that case you can go for them in the same page as your competitive phrases without them in the title. An example is "seo expert" I dont have it in my title yet I rank #1 because of its association with my other kw phrases and the fact that it isnt very competitive thus I cna rank on "onpage copywriting + page reputation for "SEO" alone In this case I am going for more then 3 phrases however my target is really only 3 and I get "seo expert" for free by mentioning "seo expert" just once or twice in my copy

[Richard]

jocelyn - thanks for the feedback. Just one question. Can you explain stemming for me?

Thanks
Rich

[QUOTE=jocelyn]I aim at more words.


Depends how competitive.


Stemming is implemented so it will help on the page, but the keyword meta is not used by google.


Rules changes all the time and you might regret a super long domain name. I'd rather use the filename or sub-dir... to do this.
Some searches like 'english keyword' will list my site high just because of the filename since the word english is not on my page.[/QUOTE]

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=Richard]jocelyn - thanks for the feedback. Just one question. Can you explain stemming for me?

Thanks
Rich[/QUOTE]
Do a search for games for example. Look at the descriptions. You'll see bold words.
Some match games but also game, gaming ... these are stemmed words.
They are plurals or same family words that get some credits as games does in the calculations.
A page optimized for widget may get listed in widgets because of this.
So using stemming when making your pages may help.

[Richard]

Thanks. That makes sense.

Rich

[Richard]

Thanks! I checked out my top words and phrases on Overture and they are cheap! Top bid was like $.19 Overture is listing bods only within there PPC system right? I would assume that this is case for Google's adword suggestion page(just thrie history being reviewed)

I am happy to have a simple site with which to test all this out. My client is a trendy hair salon here in Colorado. Interestingly they show up as #1 for Yahoo without any effort! Andy they don't list in Google yet. Now if I can only get they client to give me the copy for their pages I could get a better handle on wher to go with the SEO stuff. I have my site map ready to go....

Thanks for all your help!

Rich


[QUOTE=seo guy]#1: You actually go to overture.com and type in your kw. I for instance type in "SEO Company" then I am shown a search results list ordered by bidder. Now if you look at the top right corner you will see "view advertisers max bids" click on that link, it will give you a security code to verify your not a bot and then Boom there are your bids in order.

Now I dont use it necesarily for just conversion purposes but here is my rationale.

If someone is willing to pay a lot of $ for the traffic that comes from a kw then they must have done their homework on that keyword especially if it gets a lot of searches as it ends up costing and arm and a leg. if it didnt convert well they wouldnt pay so much, or its value would soon be identified as much less and people would all lower their bids. PPC marketers arent stupid

Currrently the top bid for SEO Company is $9.99 per click and it gets around 4000 searches. This tells me that this is a good keywrod as someone is shelling out a forture to capture the traffic. Now if the next bid was 20 cents then I would be less convinced but it is $4.00 so still pretty damn competitive price wise.

Makes me glad I rank #1 in virtually every search engine for that term muahahahahha

Keep in mind however the more a term costs in PPC the more desired it is and thus people will be more willing to hire an SEO for Google and Yahoo search results if their PPC is eating up their ad budgets, bottom link higher PPC = harder kw to rank on.

My opinion, the better you get as SEO the more expensive terms you go for, but dont going trying to tackle $20 words with $.05 of experience. Go after $.05 words and work your way up :) you will find you get better and better the more you practice and it is much easier to test what works and what doesnt in less competitive markets

I will answer your other questions as well just in different boxes so you can read one at a time
WELCOME TO THE BOARD :D[/QUOTE]

[Richard]

Thanks for the advice on the distal stuff. This imay be a naive question. If I come up with terms that I would type into SE and they have no ranking in overture or google should I assume that they are dead words? Sounds dumb, but ... for example if someone does decide they need a "hair perm" in "boulder" they might try that combination. I'd like it to be there in case someone does enter that. OIr should I assume that it's not popular and not waste my time? Maybe just include it on an auxilary page with stuff that isn't optimized.

Is there a name for those pages/content? The stuff that is on all sites, but that is not optimized?

Cheers my firiend -

Rich

[jocelyn]

[QUOTE=Richard]If I come up with terms that I would type into SE and they have no ranking in overture or google should I assume that they are dead words? Sounds dumb, but ... for example if someone does decide they need a "hair perm" in "boulder" they might try that combination.[/QUOTE]
I look at ouverture and other to have an idea of what they look for.
But some people will for example write this wrong. For example 'mots croisés' in french, is always spelled this way. Well I tried 'mot croisé' which is wrong, surprisingly I get trafic off of this page.
Some high expected trafic keys will just bring a handfull a visits.
Think like a dude looking for stuff... some will just tipe 'hair'.
There is some trial and error to be done all the time.
Look at your competitors pages too... they might have researched their keys.