SMX London Recap

This technique relates to the concept of an editorial calendar which is used in the publishing industry. This is basically a time line of editorial stories planned out for upcoming issues of a magazine / newspaper – used to attract advertising.

The same concept can be applied to keyword research. You can use it to plan which keywords you will be targeting with all the stories scheduled for the future (ie you need to start with a content). Look for forthcoming events, seasonal trends, launches / publication dates etc.

A key point is you can be doing the keyword research ahead of time (tools she mentions are Adwords KW tool, Insights and Yahoo Buzz) on topical events and start writing content / producing videos / planning ahead of time. Example (US-specific) – Renaissance Festival (RenFest) which features a fans dressing up in medieval garments etc.

  • Use kw research tools
  • Both free and paid tools
  • Use analytics – very important
  • Find keywords that actually convert

First Tip is Google Suggest. It’s a great way of finding long tail KW opportunities. But it would take all day to go through all your keywords and what Google suggests, and it would take years. Enter the magic that is Mozenda. Take an excel spreadsheet of your keyword list, upload it to Mozenda and stick in the Google suggest XML output. It is unclear how to get this XML output from Google Suggest but this tip sounds great.

The second tip is using Mozenda to trawl through user generated tags (ie folksonomies, what people use for bookmarking) like Delicious and Hulu (in the example of a TV show like ‘Glee’). Again, it is not clear how to set this up (There’s an RSS feed you can get to, but another great one to look into).

The third tip is ‘the Popularity Contest’ – essentially look at other sites (incl competitors) which produce lists of the ‘top pages’ or even ‘top searches’ and then use Mozenda to go forth and gather data using these lists. This combines keyword research with competitive analysis.

Other Tips and How To Use Them:

  • Xenu Link Sleuth – crawl entire websites and look at the URLs (assumes kw focused URLs)
  • Microsoft IIS – like Xenu on crack – use to crawl entire sites and not break your computer / server – also check out SEO Toolkit
  • Mechanical Turk. No time to go through results, no problem. 24/7 workforce for hire
  • 80 Legs – similar to Mozenda but more user friendly? Sam himself needs to check this one out more (me too)