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Guest Columnist
Rob Laporte: “Step by Step Efficient Keyword Targeting”

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Intro:
Rob Laporte is founder and CEO of DISC, a firm that has been doing all facets of search marketing since 1997.

Visit his company’s web site here:
↗ www.2disc.com …

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During the last few weeks, my firm has been experimenting with using Google’s and Overture’s term suggestion tools to arrive at a master list that we then run through WordTracker (WT). While obviously not perfect, this process helps in arriving at actually searched variations of core concept phrases. We then use WT only as one of several guides for final selection of terms to weave into text and code during SEO. I would be curious what you all think of this process. Below I copy a rather un-edited, internal procedures document that explains this process in more detail:

1. Collect words from client pages, from client, from competitor tags, as usual. Alphabetize. This is where creative lateral search for synonyms takes place. Serious brain work. Much of the following automated steps for gathering good phrases depends on the conceptually related breadth of terms produced in this step. Save this list as “Initial List.doc”

2. From this initial list, select a sublist of two-, maybe some three-, word phrases that cover all the relevant categories related to the client web site. Put this list below the initial list with space separating the two lists; we will call this second list the “concept list.” This concept list will be fed into thesaurus functions at Overture and Google, which will generate actually searched variations of the concept phrases fed into them.

3. → Overture Keyword Selector Tool
Make a copy of the “Initial List” doc, and name it “Overture-Adwords.doc” Run each concept list phrase through this tool, cutting and pasting the table for each into this Overture-Adwords.doc, so that one table for each word is stacked below the next word’s. After each paste, delete items around 50 searches and below, though look for borderline cases that may have promise in relevance. Remember to save the number of monthly searches, so that we can refer to this doc later if needed.

4. → Google AdWords Keyword-Tool
Cut and past into this tool the concept list. Cut, paste the left results list below the last Overture table in the Overture-Adwords.doc file. Save.

5. Copy Overture-Adwords.doc and rename the copy “initial long list.doc.” Mess with the lists in initial long list.doc to strip all formatting and have one long list of all the words. Then alphabetize the list. Then manually look through the list, deleting duplicates and irrelevant or faintly relevant items. Note that often Overture mixes word order, so that you should rearrange as needed. Save. Place a space after every two pages worth of words, so that later we can feed less than maximum 100 at a time into WT’s popularity search in step 2. This is the master list to feed into WT.

6. Import this master list into WT.

7. Skip WT’s “related Keywords” first step, and just use this imported list to do predict and KEI, as covered in out other procedures documents.

© Copyright 2005 by Rob Laporte, CEO, DISC.
All Rights Reserved

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