Apologies to any offended emo fans…

Vertical search engines are like vertical stripes…ok in some cases, blatantly offensive in others. Well, at least they’re maybe NOT so ok in other cases, actually.

A vertical search engine is one that has many aliases, including topical search engines, vortals, specialty search engines, and niche search engines. They’ve been around for awhile, coming into favor and going out again, but for many industries, they’re really what matters and they have the potential to send more relevant traffic to certain sites than the regular major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. A vertical search engine’s database is a lot more focused than that of a major search engine, so queries tend to return results that are more defined for the user.

So what types of industries would most benefit from being well-placed in vertical search engines? Retail, travel, media, real estate, entertainment, and B2B services, to name a few. Most of us are familiar with the larger vertical search engines like shopping.com and kayak.com, but there are a ton of other smaller niche engines that are cropping up, and don’t make the mistake of ignoring them, especially if you’re involved with B2B sites (which they seem to be really perfect for right now.)

I have a client who’s strictly B2B, in a very well-defined niche, and fairly unable to benefit from many of the more modern marketing techniques (like social media and video.) This client has actually made me rethink how I conduct an SEO campaign, since they have a really good reputation to uphold (which means no crappy links, no spamming, no cloaking–you know, the usual stuff you do) and are truly one of the most pleasurable clients I’ve ever worked with.

Please note that I have worked with many other clients who have good reputations!

This one just happens to get most of their business from word-of-mouth so their reputation is extremely important to them, and to me. When someone needs your help but they don’t need it DESPERATELY, you really are able to step back and focus. If I keep them well-placed in their relevant vertical search engines, that could have the potential to give them more business than if I get them a top ranking in MSN (I’d take a top one in Google though, any day.)

Ideally you’d be able to rank well in any and all search engines, but that’s just not always a possibility. If you’re working for B2B clients and looking for a way to get them more relevant traffic, try a vertical. If it doesn’t work out, please blame someone other than me though. I’ve already taken the blame for way too much in the past few days.

Here’s a short list of a few vertical search engines for a variety of industries:
Thomasnet.com (Industrial product and service search)
Business.com (Business products and service providers)
Kayak.com (Hotel, airfare, and car reservations)
IT.com (Industry products, services, and solutions for IT and finance)
Globalspec.com (Engineering products)
Law.com (Legal staffing and law documents)
Healia.com (Consumer health)
Jayde.com (B2B)

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Yes, I know I should post a lot more often, but (without making too many excuses) I’m juggling a few too many things in the air at the moment, and days just keep slipping by… tut-tut!

OK, now down to business. I wanted to touch on a few topics related to keyword list building in general. Actually I’m about to talk more towards the PPC end of things, and hopefully one of my fellow Chicks will churp in (see what I did there) for the SEO part if relevant.

So I wanted to ask you - where do you find your precious keyword (kwd) “gold dust” these days?

With all these new kwd tools coming out of the wood work, each one claiming to be a lot better than the previous, how do you decide what to use? I’m primarily a marketer, and while I enjoy watching companies in competition trump each other’s offers, I also know for a fact that most of them are just rehashed versions of an old version…

So - I wanted to start a community vote of sorts - and prompt you to share how you find your kwds (give us all your secrets *grin*).

Here is my list of where and why’s - feel free to churp in with your ideas.

• Wordtracker - I will always start my search here. The data is still some of the most reliable there is, and my strategy is to do a quick test of the market - so this is ideal. If the phrases are here - they have enough volume…




• Google and Yahoo!’s own kwd suggestion tools - useful to get more specific variations for the search engine, but I take any of those suggestions with a ‘pinch of salt’.




• Web analytics log files - rummage through your web analytics stats to get some of the best targeted kwds you’ll ever get. The phrases you find in there are the ones people use to find you. If you get one or two specific ‘gems’ in there, you may end up not only cutting your CPC, but increasing your overall conversion rate too.




• Use an LSI tool - this is where you get to see what kwds are logically related to your core search phrase. I use Lexical, but if you know of another tool suggest it.




• Get a second opinion… and third and forth - yes, gather a random party of people - friends, colleagues, relatives, and over coffee and tea, ask them what kwds they’d use to find your site with… take notes…




• Google Suggest - although I must say I don’t use this often.




• Google Trends - for when you need to look for new ideas on the rise.




• Related site content - I sometimes perform a “keyword density” report of relevant content pages I find online. It’s not an exact science, but if you’re looking for ideas - it sometimes gives good ones.




So that’s what I have of value at the moment. I’m sure I’ve missed somethings, and I am sure some of you will have a lot of other good suggestions - so share - please.

Before I go though, I wanted to also leave you with this comprehensive list of other keyword research tools - courtesy of Andre Chaperon (you’d need to scroll down about a third of the way). These are tools that perfom a little more than just keyword research, but may be useful for some of you to know they are out there…

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Ok I have said it before and I’ll say it again, the meta description IS very important for your search engine optimisation efforts. Not because it will rank you higher, BUT it will distinguish your website from your competitors in the SERPs. Ignoring this tag, is plain stupid! Imagine you get a FREE ad in one of the most popular newspapers, would you ignore the content of the ad, would you bullocks! Rant over, but I’m sure I’ll bring it up again

But sometimes you can follow the rules, writing unique, descriptive meta description tags for each page, but when you check the SERPs you realize that’s NOT at all what you wrote. I bet you a bottom dollar that’s because you have recently signed up to the dmoz or Yahoo directory and they are feeding your directory title & description straight into the SERPs. Bugger! But don’t despair; there is a way out, thank god.

Now the NOODP tag has been around for a while, this tag tells the robots not to display the title and description from the Open Directory Project (dmoz). But until fairly recently there was no way out of the Yahoo! Dir description (I know people that stopped paying but still couldn’t get out lol). But now Yahoo! has finally given us a way out, enter the “NOYDIR” tag.

Here’s links to the Yahoo Search Blog where you get examples of both codes:

NOODP Tag for bypassing dmoz description

NOYDIR Tag for bypassing Yahoo! Dir description

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After reading Jessica Bowman’s recent article “When the Honeymoon Ends, In-house” I got to thinking about my own position as an in-house SEM and the problems with us folk moving around, going agency side and leaving to start SEM companies.

Does in-house SEM/SEO/SMOs have a limited shelf life? Yes - in a number of ways. Right now, SEM is the hottest thing since the programmer boom of the 90’s. That can mean that to fill a gap a company chooses someone in house, trains them up and gets them working on things. They learn a bit, think they know a lot, then after consulting on the side for awhile they quit to do their own thing. Or they get poached (and not in a white wine sauce).

SEMs also have a limited shelf life if they are not kept fresh. That doesn’t mean wrapping them in plastic wrap and placing them in the fridge to hide them away. Keeping an SEM fresh means sending them to conferences, giving them job-relevant projects, setting aside time each week for them to read blogs/news/industry chat, and getting them networking. Freshness extends shelf life.

Some companies feel they cannot invest time/money in training someone up (or hiring in) and so think simply choosing a SEM firm is the answer. Outsourcing your SEM work is only part of the solution – you will still need someone in-house to do the grunt work and implement those aspects of the assessment that are possible, while working with IT to get the rest done. If the company fails to get the SEM to talk with the developers, this cuts IT off from SEM. Really, that is a ‘bad thing’. Trust the voice of experience– your in-house SEM *must* talk to IT and have a direct line of communication with them. In teaching IT a bit of SEM and demonstrating in a practical sense that they have a clue, much more will be accomplished by your in-house SEM than by forcing them to direct all requests through someone with limited technical expertise.

Will you lose the SEM you spend time and money training? Possibly – which is why having a corporate culture of a blog or other accessible system for knowledge transfer helps. Your SEM can blog the work they did, how they did it and what they are working on, including timelines that they can refer back to when trying to examine ranking fluctuations. This is best used as an information repository and not a review tool.

Love your in-house SEM and they will love you back. Treat them well, understand their ways and keep them in the loop. Do what you can to integrate SEM in to your corporate culture and keep your SEM talking to as many divisions as possible. Train them well, keep them involved and you’ll keep them for years. Regular gifts of chocolate help as well *grins*

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Things that irritate people on a site will make them not want to come back…how hard is it to code a required field as such? When there are 10 boxes to fill out and 9 are yellow, one assumes that the yellow ones are required and the white one is not. However, that’s not always the case and those pesky errors that show up dictating what you must do are really, really obnoxious in cases like this. I spent a few years as a programmer and I can assure you that coding a required field takes only the smallest bit of effort.

Even if you aren’t at all trained in usability, you still know something about it from your experiences. You can tell when a site or program is easy to use. You may not immediately be able to name exactly WHY a site is highly user-friendly but if a piece of it isn’t, you can. Usability is something that you may have no control over but if you do, it’s something you really need to research and really think about if you want any conversions.

A site that’s not user-friendly may get tons of new visitors but they won’t get repeat visitors unless they’re really sweet Brits who don’t want to offend anyone (like my friend and SEO Bloke Ciaran Norris, who was lucky enough to have a napkin to spit his spicy nut (ha!) into, because otherwise he would’ve had to eat it so as not to be rude. Or the angelic Rob Kerry who drank a non-alcoholic beer in Seattle because it’s what he was handed and NOT drinking it would have been rude.)

My example of a required field not being indicated is a rather mild case of poor usability, but it still irritated me enough to write this post and eat a large hunk of chocolate cake for breakfast. It’s because I KNOW it doesn’t take much time to code, and it certainly doesn’t take much time to do a bit of quality assurance testing. Obviously if you have major issues with something like your shopping cart system it might take a tad bit longer but still, do some damn testing and FIX THE PROBLEMS.

So why is the web so rampant with glaring issues like this and what can we, as SEOs, do about it? Even if you don’t have access to a usability specialist you can still discover what’s bad about the user experience on a site simply by performing the tasks a user is expected to perform in order to convert. And don’t stop there…find your most unsavvy web user (my mom is available) and have him or her do the same. If something’s just not right, it should be obvious. And most importantly, talk to the site owner/programmer about fixing the problems. This person may be completely unaware that anything isn’t as it should be.

I know that when I programmed something, I could MAKE it work because I knew the intricacies of it. Things made perfect logical sense to me but then again I was the creator of the software. When I’d send it to testing, the test team would sometimes immediately run over to tell me they’d found a bug. I’m sure you’ve heard it said that someone else needs to proofread what you write because you can’t see your own errors. You apparently also cannot tell when you smell bad or when you’re really boring.

To close this I’d like to mention the top 10 site problems that really annoy me…feel free to add to the list.
1. No home button or link on every page
2. Prices that are marked as sale prices but still match what is listed as the original price (I’ve only fallen for this once!)
3. Navigation that varies from page to page
4. Blurry images that were obviously enlarged from a poor quality smaller one
5. Shopping cart system that doesn’t tell you shipping costs until you’ve purchased the item (sounds too horrible to be true)
6. Any site that doesn’t send you a confirmation email when your order has been placed
7. The exact same description for more than one product when they seem quite different
8. Internal search functionality that doesn’t work on partials of a term or is only available for product codes
9. Frames (I don’t mean the band either)
10. Product or service listed in the meta tags but nowhere on the page

****Update****

Here are a few places you might want to go to get more information on SEO and usability. These were the three pieces that I thought were the most informative when doing a little research on the subject.

http://www.cre8pc.com/blog/index.php
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/seo-usability.shtml
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/increased-usability

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I don’t know quite when it happened. I do remember the early days – the days of AltaVista and the instant movement when you changed your website code. I remember the trouble getting in to Yahoo!, the importance of being on DMOZ (I might still have a few editor IDs hanging out on there), WebFerret and Dogpile and I remember the revolution that was Google.

After that it is a bit of a fog of searches, search engines and a splash of colour. Somewhere between 2002 and now I seem to have become addicted to Google. It’s my searching buddy and gets opened along with HBX, Yahoo! and AdWords every morning after I turn on my computer.

It’s not just that I use Google for my searches – oh no. I have collected a plethora of that freebie Google gear you get at Google University. I also managed to score a Google mirror, nail file and water bottle from Girl Geek dinners (where I regrettably did not score as well on the lip balm… damnit!). Recently, my ad gal in Dublin sent me a Google t-shirt all the guys love (due to the tight, white nature of it) and a Google hat.

Looking at my Google-festooned workspace and home, I realised I had become addicted and realised I had to kick the habit – and hard. Danny’s article on Google-free Fridays seemed like the perfect opportunity to start quitting – much as the smokers here in the UK will on July 1^st. I already had Yahoo! open all day, I thought to myself, so it was just one more click to use it for search instead.

Forget Friday – I thought – I’m a girl geek! I’ll just do it now! So, intrepidly I stepped out in to the vast howling wilderness beyond the Google dominant market and typed my first query in to Yahoo. I’ll do something easy, I thought. The Chocolate Society – I want some good chocolate. WOOHOO! Score! But what is this – what kind of title… ooooohhhh… directory description. Still… I got news and email with my weather just before searching and I also seemed to have chat and… wow… kinda like a personalised home page and… must… not… go… to… Google… NYARGH!

Shuddering a little with the withdrawal and still needing to do more searching, I soldiered on. More and more searches whizzed past my fingers. ‘Go little search page, go!’ I thought to myself as I stepped boldly out of my comfort zone in to a brave new world of search. Gone was my underdog Ask whose t-shirt also graces me with less curviness at the gym. Gone was my Google page – my constant companion… my pet search engine. Here I was striding out in to Yahoo and I wasn’t getting hopelessly lost. WAHEY!

While as a SEM/SEO/SMO I cannot ever abandon Google completely, I think it is a great idea to give up our pets for a day – Google, Facebook, Neopet or otherwise (but not our cats… cats aren’t pets, they’re furry people). Like a good detox, getting away from Google for a bit is good for you but ultimately I’ll never give Google up.

Why not try it for a day yourself? Close that browser tab/window and leave Google behind for a day. Check out Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN/Live and see if another search engine won’t help you just as much. Yahoo is a fantastic portal and I do use it daily. Ask has a brand new interface all swishy and funky. MSN/Live may seem like it is struggling but it does power Miss Dewey – the perfect Friday afternoon companion.

Yahoo!
Ask
MSN/Live
Miss Dewey

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In case anyone out there is looking for someone to market their new line of “zebra-striped man thong” underwear, please contact me immediately since I now have experience ranking for this horrific item. However, if you need me to market the plural of the aforementioned item, that’s extra.

SEO Chicks currently ranks 1 and 2 in Google for this phrase after a short post on negative keywords (and a comment from evilgreenmonkey.) This post was just written a few days ago…pretty fast results. I am also very, very pleased to report that there were only 314 results returned in Google (with 543 for the plural since of course you wouldn’t just want the ONE zebra-striped man thong would you? That would be stupid.)

Zebra-striped man thong (how many times can I type that without gagging? OK three) is what we call a long-tailed keyword (and no that is not a Freudian pun you sicksters.) A long-tailed keyword is a 3+ keyword phrase that’s pretty specific and usually really good at getting the most out of a PPC campaign since odds are if someone’s typing it in, he or she is in the mood to convert. Spending tons of time optimizing a site for a long list of long-tailed keywords is extremely time-consuming and may not be worth it, but you can slap all those phrases into your paid ads and quickly ascertain whether or not they’re worth anything.

You can probably rank well for long-tailed keywords in the organic listings, so if you do happen to want to sell a lot of (pardon me while I find a new phrase that won’t make me sit in the corner, swatting at imaginary flies for another hour) “XXL t-shirts with cool bits of BASIC code on them, in mint green” you should definitely do some optimization with this particular phrase in mind. Ranking for “shirts” is going to be quite difficult most likely, and you have to consider the fact that people typing in “shirts” are usually not looking for “XXL t-shirts with cool bits of BASIC code on them, in mint green” (because they’re probably wanting one in a buttery yellow.)

Another great thing about long-tailed keywords is that you don’t always have to specifically optimize for them. As I mentioned, our SEO Chicks post ranked from that ugly phrase being used two times in the post and once in a comment about the post. Plus I cloaked the ever-living heck out of it. OK no I didn’t. Anyway, my goal, if you can believe it, was not actually to rank for that phrase, but I got spots 1 and 2 in Google within 3 days. It’s worthless because we don’t sell that item (we only sell those in leopard-print right now, because that’s a good bit classier.)

You’re probably getting traffic from long-tailed keywords anyway, even if you aren’t paying enough attention to notice it. If you’re concentrating on a major phrase and watching your keyword density (and speaking of keyword density, I found a fine quick piece about it, that happens to also mention long-tailed keywords, at SEOSlap so check that out) you may be very surprised when you review your logs and see the phrases from which you’ve accidentally benefitted.

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I’m one of those rare creatures – an In-House SEM who is allowed to blog, speak at conferences, write articles and play with other companies websites. It was while engaging in one of these activities that I came across someone’s attempt at keyword research.

Now, I’ve been around online since high school and since I’m in the 30+ crowd, that means I was one of those freakish early adopters/geeky developers. Yes, I was a programmer but I escaped and am now living out my life in a former-programmer protection program.

My early years online and involvement ever since also means I’m am aware that I am _not_ a typical web user and so when confronted with doing SEM for any site, I do my research. Research includes keyword research which includes researching the competition and looking at keyword research result tools.

The other day I was given some preliminary work which I am sure must have taken the person ages to complete. They had obviously seen my conference talk and gone hell-for-leather in to getting their keyword research done. I can’t help but think that they were snoozing during the tools section though. The research done basically gave derivations of on-page words and nothing from any competitive analysis or any keyword tools.

Had this gung-ho person done even one keyword search using a free tool (any free tool), they would have seen they were targeting the wrong phrase. That cascaded through a complex set of combinations based on this original phrase and continued through other poorly targeted phrases.

The point here is that keyword research is about THEM and not YOU. That means you do your research for what people are _actually_ searching for and not what you think they should be looking for. Optimise your page for searchers and how they search – not your internal company jargon.

Do your research on who your competition is, what they optimise for and then start using those free keyword tools (maybe even buy one) and get that research going. Identify what makes your page unique and target those phrases.

Keyword optimisation is different for each page because each page (should be) is different. Don’t cannibalise your keywords across various pages – make each page focused and on topic and do your research for that page. Don’t dilute the power of those keywords by stuffing them on every page – make them stronger by keeping them on the relevant pages.

Search engines aren’t fooled by keyword stuffing anymore. Gone are the days when a change was seen instantly on AltaVista. These days search engines are savvy and combine over 200 factors including related terms on page, links in, header, footer, density, and more to determine rank.

Keyword research is the first step in optimisation. Get it done right and the rest will follow. Get it wrong and you’ll languish in the also-rans of the SERPs.

Some free keyword tools:

- SEO Book keyword suggestion tool
- Wordtracker free trial
- Google keyword tool

These keyword tools require payment:

- Trellian Keyword Discovery
- Wordtracker Keywords
- SoloSEO (includes keyword section)

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A big welcome to Judith Lewis

Judith is a SEO & SEM specialist who has been working in the online world since 1996 (bloody hell). She currently works for Centaur Communications Limited, as a Specialist Search Engine Marketer. Judith has been a speaker at several SEO/M conferences including mad.co.uk’s Search Engine Marketing conference where she was the top rated speaker. This girl has attitude and knowledge, expect some great posts =)

Oh, and yeah a lot of you will know Judith as deCabbit from the blogosphere

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Types of Matches in AdWords
There are 4 types of matches that you can use in Google AdWords: Broad Match, Exact Match, Phrase Match, and Negative Keyword. I can tell you that from my own experience, I have (many times) simply set up ads without bothering to change my options (Broad Match is the default.) However, let me share a bit with you about how this kind of backfired on me.

Another of My Tedious Examples
I had a client who sold large equipment. They had a good PPC campaign, with lots of conversions on top keywords and their brand name. I had a meeting with them to talk about how we could improve the paid campaign–immediately, the client starts to type in things like “worst x equipment dealers ever” and “x equipment that will kill and maim your family and neighbors” and asking why their site showed up. I was somewhat at a loss, since those weren’t phrases I would normally have thought to exclude using the Negative Keyword option.

As I mentioned, the entire campaign was set to Broad Match so the client was showing up for any phrase that was even remotely related to their keywords. While I was able to determine that, many times, they received conversions from keyword phrases that I would have never thought to add to the campaign (and that’s how I justified using the Broad Match), I did reconsider the Negative Keyword option. Obviously there is no way I could have excluded every possible permutation of their keywords that would be negative, but you get the point. There’s a place for this option, especially if you take notes on what searches your crazy client performed so that they wouldn’t be able to repeat this in the future and humiliate you further.

Zebra-Striped Man Thong
If you aren’t selling a particular item and can exclude it on paid ads, do so. It’s worth taking the time to set this up because otherwise you’re going to waste your money when a user clicks and then doesn’t find what he or she is looking for. The flipside argument to this is that, in doing this, you may lose a potential buyer who might not find the zebra-striped man thong but will then find the leopard-print man thong. I must pause a minute to shudder before continuing…ok. I’m not saying that you should spend all your time figuring out which keywords to mark as negative. However, it makes a lot of sense in many cases.

Tiny Satin Shorts for Really Obese People
Do some research and see what keywords people are using to find your site. If you can track the path from a user typing in a certain phrase, clicking through a paid ad, and not buying ANYTHING, consider this as a Negative Keyword match, particularly if it happens more than once. If you get lots of people coming through your paid ads by using the phrase “tiny satin shorts for really obese people” and you don’t sell that item (and thanks for that AND I am happy to report that when I typed that into Google, I saw zero paid ads for it) but you do sell shorts, please consider putting “tiny satin shorts for really obese people” on your list of Negative Keywords. Please. I beg you.

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