Two tools for tracking search keyword placement

I've been working over the past few months on better search-engine results for several key phrases related to KidPub. There are two tools that I'm using to help track them:

• SheerSEO
• SEOBook Rank Checker

SheerSEO
This site monitors weekly changes in placement of search results on Google and Yahoo. It's currently free to sign up. You can track a large number of search phrases, and the results are shown in an easy to understand table. You can also export the results to a Excel file. Here's a snip of a recent report:




You can see that 'kids stories' is moving up nicely, from 37th spot to 24th. You can also see that 'publish my story' doesn't point to KidPub's home page, which I need to fix.

SheerSEO's service runs once per week and sends an email to you when new results are ready. You can add or remove search terms at any time.

You can see a position chart for each phrase on either Yahoo or Google:



I think that this is really useful information, and it saves me the trouble of having to track and chart a spreadsheet full of keywords. I can measure the effect of changes I make on KidPub, both positive and negative, and know when I can stop tweaking.

SEOBook Rank Checker
For spot checks I like to use SEOBook's Rank Checker, which is an add-on for Firefox. You can grab it from the SEOBook site. Even though it does offer historical information, I tend to use it when I want to know how a particular keyword is standing on Google or Yahoo (it also does Live Search). There's a scheduling option that will run the checker periodically for you in the background.

The results are typically identical to SheerSEO's.

Both tools give you a great bit of intel on how your SEO work is progressing, and you can quickly see if something has either gone wrong (fix it!) or is working well (duplicate it!). This level of detail might seem overwhelming, but remember, half to three-quarters of your site's traffic is probably coming from Google and Yahoo, so it make sense to pay attention to search reult positioning!

Closing in on 100K!

Back in August, KidPub was ranked around 400,000 by both Compete and Quantcast. We targeted the 100,000 mark back in November when we started doing serious work on building traffic, mainly through SEO and grass-roots marketing. I just looked at today's Quantcast number...119,146. Last week was 127K or so. We're getting closer!

Once we hit the 100K mark the hard work begins...gettting KidPub into the top 50K web sites. I know there are ways to 'spoof' Alexa to get a high ranking, but Quantcast numbers don't lie, since they are directly measured.

We're not getting many conversions yet from the Facebook ads, but the exposure is helping a bit, I think. It's only been three or four days since the FB campaigns started...it needs more time before I can really analyze the results. We're still watching click-through rates on several ads to figure out which are the best performers.

Meta Description and SEO: Your Big Marketing Voice

I seem to be stuck on marketing with Google search results. With good reason, though...if your web site is like most, the majority of your traffic comes from Google.

In a previous post I discusses the importance of the title tag and how Google uses it in its display of search results. Heat maps show that most of the time spent looking at the search results page is on the upper-left part of the page, which tends to be the top three to five results.

The title tag, if you have one, is used for the link to your web site. Directly below is about 25 words of text that can come from the page being indexed, or from the meta description tag, if it exists.

If the title tag becomes your billboard, the description becomes your call to action. This is your 25-word chance to give readers (who spend just a second or two looking at the result) a compelling reason to visit your web site. Use action words here, and give the reader a reason to click. For KidPub we use the words 'visit', 'play', and 'read', and 'write' as well as 'safe' and 'fun' since our target is not only children but their parents.

The description goes into the meta description= tag. Take advantage of essentially free marketing by paying attention to how Google sees your pages, especially the title and meta description tags!

How important is the page title?

KidPub is built on the Drupal platform. I hadn't given a lot of thought to page titles and how they are used in marketing, but I now think that they are incredibly important.

The text in the title tag of a page are what shows up at the top of your Google search result. Drupal out-of-the-box doesn't do a very good job of filling this in, especially if you are using the default naming convention for posts. Heat maps of the Google search results pages show that the eye gravitates to the upper left of the page, and concentrates on the top line of each result. The title of your page may be the only thing that a potential visitor sees on Google.

Let me repeat that: The title of your page may be the only thing that a potential visitor sees on Google.

What you don't want here is some random text that Drupal or Wordpress or your staff web designer has inserted into the title tag. The title should tell the Google search user, in seven or eight words, what the site is about. When I took a hard look at the way KidPub was showing up in search results, I found everything on that first line from 'I hate Twilight' to 'Advice on avoiding homework' to 'Welcome!'. Not very marketing-friendly.

I created a ten-word description of what KidPub is and used the Drupal Nodewords module to insert this phrase into all title tags. What you see now in a Google search result is:

KidPub : Publisher of Stories, Books, Poetry For Kids, By Kids

This tells the reader exactly what we do, and it includes keywords that generate significant Google search traffic. KidPub is the first result returned for a search on 'kids publisher', for example, and also for 'stories by kids'. There's no 'and' between Books and Poetry because it causes the phrase to exceed the character limit used by Google, which means the phrase ends abruptly with a ...

Take some time to look at your page the way the Google web crawler sees it. Your title tags are a significant marketing tool and shouldn't be ignored.

Keywords and Google organic placement

I did an interesting analysis of the meta keywords and description used on kidpub.com and how they relate to marketing with Google search.

About half of the traffic on KidPub comes from Google, but until recently I really hadn't done much in the way of marketing; mainly I'd monitored search results for a set of keywords related to the site and simply tracked their position. Much of my interest was prompted by a Drupal module called Search Referers that produces reports on the search phrases that are used to bring traffic to the site. I started to notice that the keywords I'd used in my meta tags were not the ones that were being frequently searched on.

I have about ten keywords in use at the site. Since I'd used Google AdWords in the past, I had a few old ad campaigns sitting around, and I used AdWords' traffic estimator to see what kind of monthly traffic each keyword generated on Google search. For example, one of my keywords was 'poetry'. Using the keyword tool, I found that the word 'poetry' generates about 3.3M searches each month. Great!

BUT, when I checked 'poems', I saw that the word generates about 9M searches per month! Simply by changing my keyword from 'poetry' to 'poems' I can tap an extra 6M monthly searches.

And so on for the rest of my keywords. Nearly all of the keywords I'd originally implemented had synonyms with higher potential search traffic. 'Stories' generates 16M, 'Story' generates 25M. 'Kids books' 25K, 'childrens books' 1M.

Google does serve up search results using synonyms, and the keyword tool will give you some insight into what they are, but tweaking keywords in the meta tags and title tag of the site just makes a lot of sense.