New Keyword Trends

1/16/2007 - iData's continuing research into search engine optimization keyword selection has recently shown interesting trends and possibilities in two areas: international keyword optimization and keyword encoding.

The idea behind international keyword optimization is simple: as more US sites become increasingly optimized, the search engine marketing game becomes harder for everyone engaged in web site promotion. At the same time, most sites in other markets seem to be somewhat behind where US marketing organization are in terms of organic search optimization of their content, search engine friendly site design (including adoption of search engine friendly content management or "SEO-CMS" technologies) and even pay per click marketing. At the same time, Internet users in these markets seem to be, if anything, more avid users of Google, MSN, Yahoo and also regional engines than US internet users. This is true of non-English speaking markets (particularly Germany and Scandinavia), but also seems to be true of the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

This mismatch between search optimization efforts on the one hand and the level of search engine use on the other hand seems to have created a huge level of opportunity for organizations that market a product or service that can be sold globally. This means that if you are a US-based company that sells something that does not depend on physical proximity (e.g. software), you should consider working translations of your most important keywords into your site. The most effective way to do this, is of course, to translate your complete site into the languages of your target market, but for some companies this will be unrealistic. An alternative then, is to work these search engine keywords into your site in other ways. For example, iData produces software for search engine friendly content management, opt-in email and event registrations. Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) research shows that most keywords related to content management and search optimization are pretty highly competitive. However, translations of certain keywords --- "suchmaschinenoptimierung für content management systeme", which is German for "search engine optimization for content management systems", actually has more searches per day (117) than directly competing sites (97), which suggests that there could be an opportunity for working this keyword either into the text of a page (as we have done here) or into an image alt tag, a meta keyword tag or a URL. A similar opportunity exists for "suchmaschinenoptimiertes content management system" ("search engine optimized content management system").

The other trend we have noted in the past weeks has been the practice of optimizing content for search terms as they would be shown in a URL. This is similar to the tried and true practice of optimizing for misspellings (e.g. "entreprise content management", "web desing and hosting" ), but seems to be an attempt to exploit some technical characteristic of search engines' algorithms. For example, a small but growing number of sites seem to be be optimizing for phrases like "web%20site%20promotion%20software" --- which is how the phrase "web site promotion software" is rendered in a URL. It is not yet clear under what, if any circumstances this strategy will pay off and whether it is in some way exploiting a technical facet of some search engine crawler's algorithm, but it is intriguing. We will keep you posted