I have published a post, How to build traffic to your blog and among the recomendations were to use WebCEO, a free SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool which comes with free tutorials on SEO (there is also a paid version) and Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool for keywords suggestions and research. WebCEO also have a WebCEO “University” which you can join to gain knowledge of SEO (Seach Engine Optimization), all for free (minus the frills). You will have to pay if you want the extras.
I will outline here how I try to use the above mentioned tools to do some elementary SEO for a post regarding stroke and a first hand account from a brain scientist, Bolte Jill Taylor about what she observed as she suffered through the stroke and her subsequent recovery: Stroke Rehabilitation: A brain scientist stroke victim and survivor advice to stroke victims and caregivers. More can be done than what I am going to do, but with the limited time I have, I would rather focus more on content than SEO which can be a time consuming activity. If you want to do SEO in greater details, it will be good for you to go through the lessons (free for most of it) at WebCEO University (close new window/tab to get back to this page).
OVERTURE
The post will be above stroke. The very first step is to try to get some other keyword suggestion for the post I want to write which can be incorporated into the post. I first go to Overture and type in the word stroke to see what keyword it generates and the number of times the term was searched for. This was the result:
Searches done in November 2006
COUNT SEARCH TERM
69645 stroke
11696 stroke symptom
1635 stroke treatment
1327 cause of stroke
1242 stroke recovery
1166 stroke rehabilitation
443 stroke victim
382 stroke rehab
348 stroke survivor
25 bolte jill taylor
14822 caregiver
127 brain scientist
No suggestions neuroanatomist
The last four was not from the first search, but was from other searches using different search terms because I anticipate that I have to incorporate them into the post. Anyway, since I will be referring to brain scientist/neuroanatomist in the post, that helped me decide to give greater weight to brain scientist (the KEI for both is < 0.001 (explained below). Among other things, it tells me that more people search for “stroke recovery” than for “stroke rehabilitation” and more for “brain scientist” than for “neuroanatomist”. Howver, Overture does not indicate the number of sites competiting for attention for these terms. For that, we will have to go to WebCEO.
WEBCEO
I then opened WebCEO, clicked “Find Keywords” (see screenshot below)
WebCEO Graphic User Interface
This will open the Project Selector, and if you have not done a project yet, you should click “New Site” (circled in red) and name your project. In my case, I have already done a project named “Natural Remedies” and therefore double-clicked on “Natural Remedies” (circled in red) (see screenshot below):
WebCEO Project GUI (graphic user interface)
A new window for Keyword Research will open, where I typed in the keywords I obtained from Overture. The tool gives me alternative keywords/phrases, daily world searches done for the search terms, number of competing sites, and the KEI (Keyword Effective Index) which is calculated as follows:
KEI = (DS^2/C) = (DS/C * DS), where DS is the number of daily world searches and C is the competition (number of search results) and have the following significance:
< 0.001 = Poor keyword 0.001-0.010 = Good Keyword 0.010-0.100+ = Excellent Keyword The higher the KEI ratio, the more popular your keywords are (more people are searching with those keywords), and the less competition they have (fewer websites come up as relevant results in search engine results pages). The results I obtained was as follows:
keyword/phrase Daily
world
search Competition KEI
stroke symtoms 95 71500 0.126
stroke 1,749 66900000 0.046
stroke rehabilitation 134 1430000 0.013
caregivers 410 14100000 0.012
stroke recovery 129 1680000 0.010
stroke victims 99 1180000 0.008
stroke treatment 129 5150000 0.003
cause of stroke 166 9930000 0.003
stroke victim < 10 0 < 0.001
stroke survivor < 10 0 < 0.001
stroke rehabilitation advice < 10 0 < 0.001
stroke recovery advice < 10 0 < 0.001
jill bolte taylor < 10 0 < 0.001
brain stroke < 10 0 < 0.001
brain scientist < 10 0 < 0.001
neuroanatomist < 10 0 < 0.001
Thus WebCEO tells me that although more people search for “stroke recovery” than for “stroke rehabilitation”, there are less sites competing for “stroke rehabilitation”, etc. I thus gave more attention to “stroke rehabilitation”, but included “stroke recovery” somewhere in my post as there are many people searching for it.
In my post, I will try to concentrate on the better keywords/phrases but not to the extend of making the post appear unnatural. In SEO, what one have to do is to try to include in the URL keywords/phrases. As the individual post page URL (permalink) is partly taken from the title of the post, I will therefore have to try to incorporate the better keywords/phrases into the title. I decided to make the title of the post “Stroke rehabilitation: Brain scientist stroke victim advice to stroke victims and caregivers”. However, only a part of this long title will be incorporated into the URL. I therefore have to try to include the more important keywords into the headings in the posts and make some bold or as headings (
). I decided that the post will start with a heading “Stroke and symtoms” with a description of what they are. This will be followed by another section “Stroke suffered by a brain scientist and her experience” and “Brain Scientist stroke victim and survivor advice to stroke victims and caregivers”.
The other secondary keywords will be scattered aroung the post. There are more to that for a real professional SEO. For that, you will have to read WebCEO University course and do all it recommend. In the meantime, check the post at Stroke Rehabilitation: A Brain Scientist advice to stroke victims and caretakers. UPDATE 12 January 2007: I seldom check the statistics in my hit counter, but today I found some time to look through it and found a hit to Stroke Rehabilitation: A Brain Scientist advice to stroke victims and caretakers via Google search engine. The hit came from this search page (see screenshot. Click to enlarge):
Google search result page for ‘recovering stroke victim’
Google search result page for ‘recovering stroke victim’ Well, not bad, considering that the analysis showed that competition will be stiff and I didn’t go all the way for really professional SEO. Update 24 February 2007: Earnings from AdSense normally outperform that from Amazon, perhaps because I put Amazon ads in less visible places compared with AdSense. Today, I checked the Amazon report for this month, and I saw half of the books bought are connected with stroke. Just wondering if this better performance has anything to do with this less than professional SEO I did for that post on stroke mentioned in this post. If true, just wondering how much better it will be if I have the time to do a more professional job.