On the Market Samurai forum William H asked the following question:

“assuming I could become ranked #1 for “camping sleeping bags”, I would have $1,716.15 worth of “money” coming to my website each month. Is that correct?”

He’s given me permission to quote him and to write this blog post. “Sleeping bags” is a keyword that he noticed was used as an example in one of Noble Samurai’s videos.

Here are some Market Samurai figures for camping sleeping bags:

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My answer:

Not quite, but nearly:  if you were ranked #1 for broad match then the potential income you could get if you did everything possible to get the traffic and conversions and to maximize your site’s income would be $1,716.15 per month.

SEOV is an indicator of the value of a keyword market, per month, to the website that sits at #1 for that keyword.

We don’t automatically get that $ just because we’re at #1.

Why not?

Suppose we’re at #1 and don’t have any products for sale at or via our site, and no adverts.  Our income would probably be zero.

If we just had Adsense on our site our income would likely not be great.

If we just had Amazon (affiliate) books our income would likely not be great.

So being at #1 for broad match is just one marker we’re aiming for.

Then William asked:

• “That “money” could then be sent to affiliate products or Adsense links. For example, I could sell sleeping bags from Amazon, or I could have a google ad(s) on the page.”

The “money” is the potential monthly value, but it’s not the traffic itself.  Once we’re at #1 we have to look at ways to maximize our site’s income so that we can achieve the potential SEOV of $1,716.

We want to be looking at either affiliate products that are both popular and bring in a good income per unit, or at selling our own product.  And test, test, test.  Having a SEOV of  $1,716 doesn’t guarantee that we’ll get that income.  But it’s the best guide.

And we also have to work at staying at #1.  If we find that a keyword does prove to be a good one (financially), then we might want to start making it an authoritative site, giving great value in the blog posts and in our emails to our site’s mailing list, and perhaps planning to create a membership and forum.

• “Looking at the SEO Competiton for “camping sleeping bags” shows 5 of the top 10 do not have a Page Rank above 0. The #1 has a PR of zero.”

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Above is the SEOC matrix for “camping sleeping bags”.  Market Samurai gives us dashes instead of a page rank for five of the top 10 webpages.  So we can’t be certain that those page ranks are 0.  I don’t know why those PRs come out as dashes – it might be that Google is currently updating PR (tho we believe that isn’t the case at the moment) or that Google is having a hissy fit, or that Market Samurai can’t bring those PRs for some other reason.

We can see that the #1 does have a PR of 0.  Which is interesting.

Let’s look further.

Let’s look at the domain age (DA).

We see that the DA of the #1 site is 13.  That’s higher than any other site in the top ten.  #7 is only 2 years old.  And #10 is represented by a dash, which again might or might not mean 0.

As a quick aside, let’s take a look at #10, and click on the webpage url – it’s campingsleepingbags.org.

It’s a blog, and we see that in fact the oldest post is dated July this year.

So we have verified that in this case it is a new blog – a blog just two months old that has got into the top 10.  This looks promising perhaps?

But we have the top 5 urls all with domain ages of 5 or higher.  That doesn’t look quite so good.

Let’s look further still.

The page backlinks (BLPs) are all very low.  The highest is #3 with only 97 backlinks.  This looks great – we can easily create many more backlinks than 97.

Four of the top ten are in both directories (DMOZ & Yahoo!), and two further sites are in one directory.  Not so great – we can pay to go into the Yahoo! directory (if we want to) but not the DMOZ.

But now we notice something very significant:  three of the top ten results are Y for all of YAH, Title, URL, Desc and Head.

And suddenly we remember Brent Hodgson’s latest post on the Noble Samurai website: he tells us about a very useful free ebook from Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton of Commission Blueprint: “Generating Affiliate Profits From Free Google Traffic”, and some recommendations from that ebook:

“The first thing to look for is whether more than one competitor has a ‘Y’ (a Yes) in ALL the YAH, Title, URL, Desc & Head columns. If there is more than one site, we should pass on this keyword and move into the next one.”

Hot d*mn!

Here is the link to Brent’s post

and here is Noble Samurai’s private referrer link to the ebook – you have to go on to the Commission Blueprint v.2.0 mailing list to get the ebook, but if you end up deciding to get CB v.2.0 you’ll “help fund the development of more Market Samurai goodies”.

And the ebook is first class quality content.

Isha

P.S.  If you don’t have Market Samurai yet – you’ll do me a favour if you get it through my Market Samurai link – here it is – thank you!

Technorati Tags: google search engine optimization, high search engine ranking, keyword research, market samurai, market samurai resources, market samurai tips, noble samurai, search engine optimization software, search engine optimization tips, search engine rank, search engine ranking, SEO Analysis, seo competition analysis, seo competitor analysis, top search engine placement

I’ve made some additions to the post 5 Tips For Using Market Samurai’s Generate Keywords Screen

Tip 3: the 3rd paragraph and the screenshot below it are new.

And a short extra tip added at the end of the post.

Isha

PS Please use my affiliate link when signing up to the Market Samurai free trial, won’t you?
 

Technorati Tags: generate keywords screen, keyword research, negative keywords, negative keywords box, phrase length, remove keywords

You’ll have noticed lots of very useful features in Market Samurai, and sometimes trying to get to grips with them can seem overwhelming. It’s easy to get sided into just using the features that you know best, but you really want to learn to use this software to your best advantage.

I’ve been using Market Samurai since last August, and have found a fair number of ways to speed up and improve my use of it. I wanted to share them with you, so here’s my first of a series of tips about using Market Samurai.

This post is about using the first screen that you see after you’ve clicked on the words “Keyword Research”.

1. Using the “Add Permutations” Button

If you’re going to generate keywords, then you want to use the Add Permutations button after you’ve generated the keywords, not before.

The “permutations” of a keyword phrase are all the possible orders of the words in the keyword phrase.

For example, there are six permutations of “bluebell scented soap”. They are:
bluebell scented soap, bluebell soap scented, scented bluebell soap, scented soap bluebell, soap bluebell scented, soap scented bluebell.

A 2-word phrase has 1×2 = 2 permutations,
a 3-word phrase has 1x2x3 = 6 permutations,
a 4-word phrase has 1x2x3x4 = 24 permutations, and so on.

The “Add Permutations” button will add the permutations of the main keyword of your current tab, and the permutations will appear at the bottom of your keyword list:

So if your tab’s main keyword is bluebell scented soap, then clicking on the button will add all the permutations of bluebell scented soap to the bottom of your keyword list.

It won’t add permutations of the other keywords in your list. For example, it won’t add permutations of “scented essential oils”. So if you want to analyze the various word orders of “scented essential oils”, you open a new tab for it. Just click on the key symbol to the left of the phrase “scented essential oils”, and that will open the new tab for you:

Remember, if you’re going to generate keywords in your current tab, then you want to use the button after you have generated the keywords, and not before. Otherwise, the newly generated keywords will over-write the permutations.

2. Using the “Add Keywords” Box and Button and the “Import” Keywords Button under the main Keyword list

If you’re going to generate keywords, then only use the Add Keywords button after you’ve generated the keywords, not before. The same applies to the Import button under the Keyword list window: use it after generating keywords, not before. They work in a similar way to the Add Permutations button above.

You can paste or type additional keywords into the Add Keywords box beforehand, but if you click on the Add Keywords button before you generate keywords, the generated keywords will over-write the ones you just added.

Suppose you have a list of words in a .txt file that you want to analyze: then you can either copy and paste them into the Add Keywords box above, or you can click on the Import button circled in yellow above and navigate to your .txt file.

If you’re going to use both buttons, then the order in which you use them doesn’t matter. But if you’re going to generate keywords, remember to do the generating first.

3. Using the Positive and Negative Keyword Boxes and their Update Buttons

Only click the Positive Keywords Update button if you want every keyword in your keyword list to contain a word from the Positive Keywords box. Only click the Negative Keywords Update button if you want none of the keywords in your keyword list to contain any of the words from the Negative Keywords box.

When you type or paste words into the Positive Keywords box and click Update, Market Samurai removes every keyword from your Keyword list that doesn’t contain any of those words. For example, if you just put the word “soap” into the Positive Keywords box and click Update, then Market Samurai will remove all keywords from the list on the right that don’t contain the word “soap”:

Another way to remove all keywords that don’t contain the word “soap” is to click the word “soap” anywhere in your keyword list and then click the check (tick) mark to the right of it:

When you type or paste words into the Negative Keywords box and click Update, Market Samurai removes every keyword from your Keyword list that contains any of those words. So if you want to remove from the list any keywords that contain, say, “olive” or “soy” or “goat”, then you can either type those three words into the Negative Keywords box, or you can click each of those words anywhere in the keyword list and then click the cross to the right of them. If you do it this second way then you only need to click each of the words once.

4. Using the “Export” and “Clear” Buttons

When in doubt, export. And especially: export before you click on Clear. Which brings me to this mantra: when in doubt, steer clear of the Clear button.

The Export buttons create .txt files of the list of words above the buttons, which you save onto your computer. By exporting the words, you avoid the frustrations of having to recreate a list.

The Clear button under the main keyword list does exactly what it says: it clears everything out of the keyword list box.

The Clear button under the Negative Keywords box clears everything from the box and puts all your negative keywords back into your main keyword list.

The Clear button under the Positive keywords box puts everything back into the main keyword box.

These are all great reasons to export.

5. Before Deleting Individual Generated Keywords

Instead of spending time going though the generated keywords to delete them, click on the Analyze Keywords button and first get search or traffic numbers using the minimum searches filter.

This way, you get rid of a lot of unwanted keywords immediately. Then get the SEO Comp (SEOC) with a maximum filter. Then if you want you can start deleting some keywords. You’ll see that in the example above that won’t be necessary – we can go straight on to check all the other boxes that we’re interested in.

This can save you a lot of time. Market Samurai is a lot faster now than it ever was, so let the software do the sifting for you.

6. Using the “min” and “max” Phrase Length Features

If you change your minimum and maximum phrase length, there’s no need to regenerate your keywords – your keyword list will automatically change:

A little bit of Market Samurai magic…

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Technorati Tags: add keywords, add permutations, clear buttons, export buttons, generate keywords screen, import keywords, keyword research, negative keywords, phrase length, positive keywords, update button