SEOnotes

After the Philippine SEMCON 2007, it has become more pronounced that Web 2.0 is all about relevancy. As Aaron Wall puts it in his keynote address, relevancy has been the name of the game in today’s search engine marketing game. This is proven true by the various blogs, Technorati pages, and forum posts that crawl up the search listings for the hottest key phrases. This is the reason why CMS (or blog-software-like templates), social media marketing, and all forms of buzz marketing have been playing essential roles in marketing online. The challenge is to build relevancy.

But how does one become relevant?

1. Specify the target audience and conquer the space where they actually read. SEO practitioners are well-bombarded by all sorts of social networks and bookmarking sites that they forget the essence of it all - to connect with your audience. So be picky in joining groups and registering in sites. Have a feel of the people participating in a particular social media site before creating yet another account.

2. Build interest for your product or service. Don’t just sell on what you’ve got. Don’t forget that people visit a particular site not because of a product, but primarily because of an interest. Capitalize on that by having blogs or bloggers write about what’s interesting in your product/service or topic to offer.

3. Meet the right people offline. Yes, socialize offline. Shake hands with the right people. It will always be necessary to be in personal contact with people who are interested in your subject. That way, you truly build relevancy.

Aaron Wall is right in saying that search engines follow what people follow. It is not easy to rank for trophy keywords, but it is easier to build relevancy by catering more to the “human” side of search engine optimization.

The long-tail of search theory has helped a lot of small websites in making it big. Long-tail keywords may not be a trophy keyword if the basis is brevity or the level of competition in order to hit the ranks for it. But if all know that a successful online campaign boils down to relevant traffic that leads to conversion, long-tail keywords are definitely your most prized bombs in the battlefield.

Long-tail key phrases are unpopular, never-been-seen-before, and easy to target keywords. Disclosed from the human mind, long-tail keywords cater to a larger demand balloon as an economic theory.

If long-tail keywords are easy to target, the only challenge is how to find them. Here’s how:

Look up queries that lead to your site
Server logs can show which key phrases and real human queries that got you found by the visitor. From this data, you can actually see the types of searches your target audience is looking for in a given period. If your business is highly dependent on seasonality, you can notice the changes in the key phrases people use in finding you.

Google Webmaster Tools: Relevant Keywords
Just like your server logs, Google Webmaster Tools show the most number of queries that brought people to your site. The list may contain both short and long-tail keywords. The main point is, you will know the variations of phrases that are more likely effective in bringing traffic to your website. Plus the main key terms that Google recognizes from your site: check out the “what Google sees” tab.

Most popular searches
Hitwise can always come up with a list, but one cannot ignore the highly-populated social media sites like technorati, delicious, and whatever site that caters to people interested in your niche. These sites where social participation is involved will help you analyze what people are looking for. Some portals also have this option of showing a list of the most recent searches done in their website.

Competition Check
After getting a harvest of long-tails from these sources, it’s now time to check the battlefield. Check the competition for each individual word in your long-tail phrase, and analyze which combinations will help you find your niche. It’s always nice to have a blend of high traffic keywords combined with not-so-popular queries. It’s like hitting two birds in one stone.

Test and Analyze
This can sound too safe and can be dubbed as a last resort, but it won’t hurt to sit down and write down the natural flow of words when one is to make a search in the search engines. Think how your audience thinks. Then compare how this set of long tail keywords fared in the previous months/years. Analyze market trends, in other words.