Hi Everyone,
Thanks to Colm Butterly of Search Domination Challenge for Judging. I'm glad I didnt have to enter or judge this one.
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"To be fair to everyone involved, I researched every single keyword or phrase that was entered. One thing about keywords is that you just can't judge them on looking or sounding right. There are a few criteria that have to be applied in each case:
1. Are the keywords relevant to the market the product is aimed at? Are they targeted?
2. Are they being searched for? Are real users typing them into search engines?
3. Are they saturated keywords? Are too many existing sites competing for the same phrase?
Wordtracker offers a tool that applies a score to these items to produce a Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) and I can see that some of the entrants were familiar with this tool. They spotted that "eBay" and "eBay.com" have a very good KEI score and included them in their list with one or two other words as variants.
The research was well done, but the wordtracker tool is not going to be accurate for such a highly branded keyword. "EBay" is a very highly searched for keyword, but only in combination with other words. It's when you put it into the wordtracker engine with those other words that you see more accurate results. Another test you can try is actually do a search for "eBay" on Google. The results are all eBay properties except for a WikiPedia entry. This also points up the importance of having your main keyword as your domain name.
However, having "eBay" as part of your keyword phrase was the right way to go. It covers the first 2 criteria nicely. It is "relevant" and "searched for". Saturation is where our researchers went a bit adrift. Despite "eBay" having a KEI score of about 125, the combinations they offered with one other word as a variant dropped drastically down to 0.001.
Bear in mind that a keyword is best in the plural. "Widgets" will be returned in results of a search for both "widget" and "widgets"; "widget" will most likely only be returned when searching for the singular "widget".
Another item to be considered today with keyword phrases is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This means that Google offers results that are from words in context. They try to serve results that supply answers to users. Because of this, we can get very good rankings on fairly competitive terms by framing our keyword phrases to match.
The 2 best results came from a single entrant and that determined the winner. The KEI scores are not very high, but that reflects the competitiveness of the eBay market in search terms.
"Avoid eBay Listing Fees" and "How To Avoid Paying eBay Listing Fees" are almost the same search and get a KEI score of 2.25.
Check them out in Google.
"Avoid eBay Listing Fees" has blog links as 5 of the 10 results on the front page. This also makes it very suitable for round 4 of the competition as it is attainable!
"How To Avoid Paying eBay Listing Fees" has 6 blog results.
Another one from the same entry was "How to Save Money On eBay". This scored small in KEI at just under 1, but the results how it as an easy target. On Google it has 4 blogs, 2 articles, 1 video, and 1 Digg.
Optimise for the main keyword and also for the others as secondary keywords and you should be able to pick a lot of what SEO people refer to as "low hanging fruit".
Congratulations to the owner of Entry 2"
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Well done Colin, and thanks again to Colm for a great article - I've printed this one out to keep in my files.
Thanks
Keith
P.S. The term to aim at in 4b will now be "Avoid eBay Listing Fees"
Free-Listings-Report.com
Monday, 22 October 2007
Free Listings Report Competition Challenge 1 Results
Posted by Keith Purkiss at 00:15
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3 comments:
Hey Keith. Thanks for letting me compete in this competition, even though Colin did TROUNCE ME! This SEO stuff is pretty perplexing sometimes, as is trading on eBay. Speaking of, I like the updated version of Free Listings Report...improved on an already great product! I posted about it on my blog and squidoo ... http://freelistingsreport.blogspot.com/
Hi John,
I have a feeling you will make a strong comeback in the next three challenges,
Thanks
Keith
Hi Keith,
Thanks for organising the competition (I really enjoy them).
Thanks to Colm for judging the competition.John:I guess I just got lucky!
The way I came up with the keywords was,I tried to put myself in the position of someone searching for ways to save money on ebay listings and those were the keywords that came up! Nothing fancy and they seemed to make sense to me!
Onward to the next round!
Colin
How To Make Fast Easy Money Online
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