New UK Search Marketing Association

Last month you may recall I mentioned that we were involved in bringing the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organisation (SEMPO) to the UK. During our initial meeting in London with some of the most influential search marketing businesses in the UK, including NETsposure naturally, we all decided that SEMPO was not the right model for the UK. Adding to this that, for one reason or another, there is a growing groundswell of criticism being directed towards SEMPO and what its real goals are, it was felt that the best route forwards would be to create a completely new organisation specifically designed for the UK so this is what we did.

The Search Marketing Association UK (SMA-UK) was officially launched on October 21st amid much interest from the leading Search Industry reporting organisations. The news of its launch has certainly been very warmly received by many people both in the UK and further a field and at the time of writing this, the mailing list already has 126 companies subscribed. This is excellent news for the UK Search Market as it will provide an effective organisation to promote Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to the 2nd largest Search market and provide great support and assistance to all SEM companies.

Read the press release for this at Network Marketing Communications or Search Engine Watch

Within 72 hours, we also announced our support for the new Search Marketing Association Europe (SMA-EU) the EU tag was seen as the most general way to cover the other markets in Europe initially. Since this announcement 32 companies have subscribed to this mailing list (at the time of writing). The timing for this could not have been better with the Stockholm Search Engine Strategies conference starting tomorrow it is anticipated that these two new organisations will be the topic of many discussions during the seminars, and in the bar afterwards.

As well as being a key member of the working group for the two organisations, NETsposure have also taken on the development and maintenance of the two website which in time will grow to be an invaluable resource to the membership.

Two forum topics were quickly started discussing these events, where you can read and add comments on this news:

Search Engine Watch Forums - New trade association for Search Marketers
High Rankings.com Forums - UK Search Marketers form SEMPO alternative

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Keywords and Key Phrase Selection

In this issue I want to discuss the importance of selecting your keywords and key phrases when planning to promote your own website. but first of all, let me clarify what I mean by keywords and key phrases, often just referred to as keywords.

Keywords are the words, or more often phrases, that you would like your website to be found for and selecting the right ones is fundamental to a successful promotion campaign. When choosing what you want to be found for, you in fact identifying what your potential market are looking for and this requires some element of research, and there are some tools that can help with this which I mention later.

When conducting keyword research you should not only consider what your market is looking for, but also how competitive those terms are. With the billions of web pages now indexed by the main search engines most phrase will have some pages competing for the top spot so what you need to do is find that popular search phrases for your market that are the least competitive on the website.

Keyword Research Tools

There are many tools to help with your keyword research, and some of the most useful are those provided by search engines like Google, and Pay-per-Click engines like Overture. These tools are provided as part of their paid placement (or pay-per-click) advertising programmes they have, and you can use these to estimate how popular your keywords are, and how much traffic you may get if your found at the top of the lists or how many searches were conducted using those keywords. This information can be used to great effect when planning your website content and keywords. There is also one other tool that is extremely useful for this, and this is Word Tracker. This is specifically designed for conducting keyword research and if used properly can help you identify some very lucrative niche markets (i.e. popular search terms that are relatively uncompetitive). These three tools, plus one other which is quite useful, can be found here:

Word Tracker
The ultimate keyword research tool. This product give a valuable insight into what people are actually searching for, and how much traffic you could gain by ranking highly for those terms. It also helps you analyse how hard it will be to get a good ranking by providing some information on the number of competing websites also vying for a good ranking on the chosen search term.

Google AdWords
Although not an official keyword research tool in as much as it doesn't provide numbers of searches, this tool can be useful when looking for what unique search terms. Primarily used when planning your Search Engine Marketing campaign, this does help show what people look for and could help find that niche key phrase.

Overture Keyword Assist
This tool is primarily aimed at the Search Engine Marketing market, however it is great for finding new search terms you hadn't thought of, and it also gives you the number of searches using that term over the past month which is very handy.

Good Keywords
This product is similar to Word Tracker, it gives another source for valuable information into the habits of the on-line searcher, what they are looking for and how they look for it.

Keyword Competition

Identifying how competitive your selected keywords are can help you understand how much work you're going to need to spend getting to the top of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). In essence this can be done in a number of ways, for example Word Tracker will find this our for you, but you can also do it yourself just by searching on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. and look at how many pages it finds, however when doing this, make sure you search for the exact phrase by putting your search phrase within quotes.

Now, it's fair to say that not all pages found will be competitors, and remembering last months issue of Great Rankings when we discussed the importance of the Page Title to search engines you can refine your research further by specifying that the the phrase should appear both in the page content (as normal) but must also appear in the page title, and here's how you do this on the three main search engines:

In the examples below we'll use 'blue polo shirts' as the selected search phrase:

Google: "blue polo shirts" intitle:"blue polo shirts"

Yahoo: "blue polo shirts" intitle:"blue polo shirts"

MSN: Go to http://search.msn.com/advanced.aspx and select 'Words in Title' from the Find drop down option.

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Your Questions Answered

Undoubtedly, as you learn more about Website Promotion, you will have a number of questions in your quest for great rankings and in this section I'll post answers to some of your questions. If you have any concerns about anything to do with Search Engines and Website Promotion just drop me an email to simon@greatrankings.co.uk, you never know it may make the next issue of Great Rankings!

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We've Moved

We've finally made the move to our new offices, so please update your records to note our new address which is below. We haven't sent out any change of address notices yet as we are also soon to be renaming the business - but more of that later...

Empire House
Beauchamp Avenue
Kidderminster
Worcestershire
DY11 7AQ

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