Convert or Die Blog by Darwin Hall

I think every SEM/SEO believes they have the best process for choosing the right keyword. To be honest it’s a continuous process of improvement. The two things that will totally cripple a site are broken navigation and having the wrong keyword structure. Company speak and Internet speak aren’t always the same. Especially if the company is not a web based entity. It’s been my experience that if you allow a company to simpliy choose the words to drive traffic for, you would probably be way off your target audience.

The Web Is A Cybernetic Entity

To some this will sound totally ridiculous, but the Web is alive. It has a nervous system, a pulse, a brain and body. A Web Marketer is nothing more than a witch doctor or wizard. If you look at Web traffic as an energy source, in relation to customercentric social networks you will be able to see how it’s part human an part machine. AKA cybernetic. It’s a mass consciousness of human thought with machine structure.

I’ve read articles about how to pick keywords. Yes, you should use Wordtracker.com. It’s an invaluable tool. But understand it’s just a tool, just like a hammer or a screw driver. It won’t and can’t make your campaigns work by themself. That goes for any tool.

The thing that true web marketers have in common are pain and failure. I would even go as far to say that most successful web marketers came from the darkside of failure. (That’s what I hear anyway) And on the darkside of life people try many strange things.

The key to picking the right keyword is history. You need to match the historical volume of a keyword with the competitiion strength of the keyword and the amount of time, effort and money of your client or employer.

Have you ever needed some sort of quality rating on a business as part of your research before you actually paid them a visit? Well then you need to give a “YELP”. Yelp is a site that allows people to blog about their opinion of restaurants, shopping malls, night life or anything where you could possibly be a customer. If you have ever been interested in which restaurant has good food, or when to bring a stomach pump then there is help for you at Yelp.com

My friend Tonya is a Yelp reviewer and has helped save others money and time by giving her opinion of some on the places her and her husband Joe have visited. Visit Yelp restaurant& night life reviews.

My friend and colleague Tonya sent me a great article by Guy Kawasaki on the best ways to use LinkedIn. Your daytime makes your nights clear.

They are ….

1. Increase your visibility
2. Improve your conectability
3. Improve your Google PageRank
4. Enhance your search engine results
5. Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks
6. Increase the relevancy of your job search
7. Make your interview go smoother
8. Gauge the health of a company
9. Gauge the health of an industry
10. Track startups
11. Ask for advice

I couldn’t agree more. These are some pretty good uses.  I never would have thought of gauging the health of a company or industry, but it makes sense.

If you would like to be linked to me go here!

My email is darwinhall (at) convertordie (dot) com

Guide to Search Engine Theme Pyramids

This is the first step to my 8 step series on The Secrets of Success in Search Engine Marketing. The term SEO is thrown around an awful lot. And I hear it being used incorrectly most of the time. In my opinion, there are two main groups I run across. The first group are those who talk about SEO in terms of keywords, titles, and meta. You can call this the novice group. The second group are those who talk about measurement and web analysis. This would be your more advanced group of people. The reason I mention this is because you may run across website owners who fall into the novice group. They will hire you thinking you are going to give them a magical list of keywords you found in google, then “Waala” they are getting millions of “hits”.

W hen you tell those with a first group mindset that their directory structure is broken they will immediately become retarded. This is because the first group are normally made of up of those who don’t know, what the don’t know. Much like Columbus trying to convice someone the world is not flat, but round.

There is actually a thing called “Search Engine Compliance“. This is what most people are talking about when they say SEO. I like the definition provided by Wikipedia.org.

Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. SEO can also target specialized searches such as image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site.

So when you understand:
1. How and why search technology does what it does.
2. How and why objects on a web server is percieved by the search technology.
3. How to measure the interactions between the search technology and the objects on a web server indefinitely.

Then you’ll be ready.

The the first step is understanding theme pyramids. If you are attempting to drive traffic in a variety of different arenas or categories it’s absolutely nessasary especially if you desire highly targeted traffic to use keyword themes.

These days you don’t hear alot about keyword theme pyramids. Anyone who is serious about driving organic traffic use keyword themes. So if the concept is new to you then please read on.

What is a keyword theme pyramid
Keyword theme pyramids are groups of words that have hierarchy and cybernetic conceptual relationships. Or you can say that keyword theme pyramids are matrixes of word groups whose relationship are human in conception and machine in scheme.

Latent Semantic Indexing - Latent semantic indexing is a critical component to document indexing process. How AI records and examine words and document wholistically is the essence of all search technology. It’s the capacity of LSI to group and cluster words semantically that gives the web it’s “breath of life”.

Text Mining - Keyword themes are part of a much larger scope of concepts and sciences. This may seem a bit heady, but once you understand the basic of LSI, you will realize the ocean just got much larger. Learning about LSI will give a solid foundation in search technology. This can also be related to word vectoring.

More LSI- This is a paper on the subject of LSI.

Taxonomy - Frequent hierarchical structure and classification
The concept of taxonomy is simple enough to understand. The term applies to relational schemes other than parent-child hierarchies, such as network structures. It can also represent usage winthin knowledge mangement for simple organization of objects into groups and list. Taxonomies and keyword themes are similiar in structure but not process. Learn the difference so you won’t make the mistake that so many make everyday.

In my 8 step process in The Secrets of Success in Search Engine Marketing, keyword themes are the first step. The second step is very strong stuff that I like to call “Solomon’s Temple”. Stay tuned …