Tools and Tactics for Expanding Your Keyword List

1. Competitors sites can be a great source of inspiration and ideas for discovering keywords that are highly relevant to your site that you're not already targeting. There are a few ways you can harvest ideas from a competitor's site:
• Use the Google Keyword Tool: Most SEOs use the Google Keyword Tool to get keyword suggestions for a site for the initial keyword targeting list. But what many don't know is you can also add a competitor's domain to the tool (in the "website" field) and generate a list of recurring keywords extracted from that competitor's site.
• Explore a competitor's site: Take 15 minutes and click around a competitor site. Look closely at pages where keyword opportunities may hide, like resource sections, solutions sections, glossary sections, HTML site maps, footer links with exact match anchors (tell-tale sign they're doing SEO and targeting those keywords). Looking at title tags of products and services pages is also effective too.
2. Google related searches is another great way to uncover new keyword ideas and modifiers that you may not be targeting. AJ Kohn had a fantastic write up on using related searches for keyword research and expansion.
3. Synonym SERP prospecting using the tilde (~), which is the Google search operator for finding synonyms, allows you to exhume phrases and terms that are similar to the seed keywords on your original list, which can be particularly helpful if you're trying to familiarize yourself with a brand new niche.
4. Targeting semantically related keywords is another way to augment your initial keyword research with terms and phrases that are conceptually related to your original list of target keywords since all search engines perform semantic analysis, a subject David Harry has been championing for years. A couple of my favorite tools to discover semantic themes are:
• SenseBot
• Visual Thesaurus
5. Keyword Tools, both free and paid, are used to fuel your initial keyword research, but you should also be leveraging them for ongoing keyword expansion opportunities. Besides the Google Keyword Tool, I also like to play around with some of the tools-less-traveled to get a fresh take on keyword discovery, using tolls such as:
• Ubersuggest
• Scrapebox for conducting radical keyword discovery
• WordStream's Keyword Tool
Since those tools don't use have Google's estimated search data (which is really the only data I have confidence in), plug any new keyword opportunities into the Google Keyword Tool to gather monthly exact match search data.
6. Exploring Wikipedia for topics that are either directly related or tangentially related is a really fruitful keyword discovery exercise. Pull up Wikipedia pages on topics/keywords you're already targeting and examine those pages, paying particular attention to inline text links and the "see also" section at the end of each page, since those are prime places where you'll often find a bounty of new and relevant keyword ideas you can add to your list.
7. Mining your analytics is a high value strategy because this is proprietary data on keywords that are proven to drive traffic and conversions for your site. When mining analytics (be it for a client site or our own sites), I often find keywords and new keyword modifiers that site's are getting traffic for but not really targeting at all or not as effectively as they could be, which presents a valuable, "low-hanging fruit" opportunity to improve existing content or roll out entirely new, dedicated landing pages.

Google Penguin Crashes Wedding Site's Shady Link Building Strategy

After any Google update, be it Panda, Penguin, or any other one, you can fit in one of the following category profiles:

Positive Impact

• You played by Google's rules and your rankings increased.
• You did some shady link building and got away with it.

Negative Impact

• You played by Google rules and you still got hit … “collateral damage”.
• You did some shady link building.
• You had no idea what link building strategies were used because you outsourced it.
• You are confused by how Google might treat SEO or you might have received bad advice and thought you were playing by Google’s rules … but you weren't.

No Impact

• Your rankings weren't affected.

For those who have been negatively impacted, what follows are details about one site that has been hit by the Google Penguin update. This site was guilty of doing some shady link building and had no idea what link building strategies were used due to outsourcing.
I won’t disclose the name of this high profile site in the wedding niche. Also, I'm not affiliated with this site in any way. The data was tracked and benchmarked through cognitiveSEO (disclaimer: I work for cognitiveSEO) to present the case, as a demo, to show how their link building tactics affected their rankings.

A Short Timeline of Events

It all began with their shady link building campaign – one which resulted in:

• Around 60 percent of their links coming from a set of “link networks” and a high range of low quality articles.
• Over optimized “money keywords” anchor text distribution.
• Big discrepancy in “link profile” comparison among all the major competitors in the same niche.

Eventually, a tweak to Google's algorithm caught them:

• March 25, 2012: Their rankings dipped. (This is prior to the official Google Penguin date … but, in my point of view, Google had been working on this algorithm update since the beginning of this year. You can read on the Google Webmaster Forums a lot of people that complain about the unnatural links warning and rankings dip from the beginning of 2012.)
• April 25, 2012: Their rankings took another dip. (Corresponding with the official “Penguin” update release.)

As of this writing, the website in question isn't receiving much organic traffic from Google.

Link Building Tactic Dissection

This wedding website used a set of link networks, where low quality content posts were added. The majority of the posts contained one or two links with “money keywords” pointing to their site only. No other external links were found in these articles. These posts were added gradually with a rather normal link velocity.
The second type of low quality and unnatural links were found in weak content articles posted on all kind of sites. They respect the same pattern as the link network blog posts presented before.
The major identifiable pattern is the type of written articles/blog posts and money keywords used. All anchor text was "unnatural" with the sole purpose of driving link juice to the main site and rank it higher. The link building strategy was SEO focused rather than human focused. You can clearly see this in their anchor text distribution:

We can see a totally unnatural brand anchor text distribution. Almost no brand keywords, mistypes navigational keywords, mix of brand and money keywords. It is all optimized for the money keywords.
By the way, this site had a pretty high ratio of the “wedding rings” keyword on its main page that might look like the keyword was over stuffed. The rest of the pages on the site had a pretty natural keyword distribution.
A natural anchor text profile will normally look like this.

When comparing the link profile of this wedding site to their major competitors (major players in the same niche that weren't affected by the Penguin update) this site had a major discrepancy in their link profile. They were the only one with ~60 percent links coming from low quality blogs. The rest had a similar distribution of links by the site type profiling.

How easy it is to Google to find these kind of anomalies in link profiles? Rather easy it seems, compared to other things they do, that are way more complicated to implement.

Penguin Recovery Methodology

What should this website do to recover?
To begin, they should remove all those “link network” backlinks and low quality article links. While doing this, they should start developing and implementing a creative viral campaign (infographics, videos, etc.) to attract natural links to the site.
Forget traditional SEO for a while. Don't focus on any “money SEO” at this point – just do it for the sake of visibility and increasing site authority. After building back the lost site authority is when they can focus on the “money keywords” and more traditional SEO.
Removing the majority of their link profile is going to be a really tough task, unless they have direct control over the link networks or can communicate with the owners of the link networks to ask them to remove the links.
Google's Penguin update was a real hit for thousands of shady SEOs, because removing a link can be even harder than acquiring that link in the first place. It is a concept that could be called “link demolition.”
At least one Penguin recovery has been reported, at the time Penguin 1.1 rolled out late last month. The only difference is that the presented site apparently played by Google rules and still got hit as “collateral damage”. A big piece of their recovery came from removing unnatural links.

Conclusions

Identify Penguin

To do this, you first need to find the anomalies in your link profile compared to your still ranking competitors. After you did this you need to identify low quality links that might have caused the unnatural link update trigger. If you were able to find all these than you have the “cause”. Now you need to find the “recovery method”.

Penguin Recovery

The main recovery methodology (not exactly 100 percent proven yet) is to remove the “unnatural links” and rebuild your authority by building “quality links” (you could go the viral link building way for example – infographics, etc.). After all Penguin might be just an “authority slap”. Rebuild that and remove the links that drag that authority down might be the way to recovery.
If too many “unnatural links” or impossible to remove them … start with a totally new domain and re-build everything. That is the worst case scenario. Either way, it's going to be a tough job. Even Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said that a domain could be totally dipped by Penguin and a recovery could not be possible in certain situations.

Tell Google About it

Ask (and pray) for a site review from Google, after your unnatural link removal is done. You might even have to wait for the next Penguin update to come in effect to see any improvements.

Future Link Building Strategies

If you're seeking a medium- to long-term “relationship with Google”, start to think more creatively and forget about the old link building tricks that worked for years. Google is smarter than that. If they still work, it will likely only be for a limited period of time.
Google’s classification algorithms will catch the majority of these tricks. Still, there are some major gaps in their algorithms that can be exploited (you can see some of the most spammed keywords still contain spam pages in the top 10 results).

These pages got here by using the oldest tricks in the SEO industry (just applied with a different flavor):

• Cloaking
• Google bombs (but with a distributed link velocity, and a distribution of low quality links combined with high authority links)
• Hacked sites
• Advanced link networks (that are harder to spot by Google at this point in time … their owners just need to be paranoid enough so that they don't leave any traces around)
• And other tricks …

On Page SEO Techniques

After some recent search engine updates (Panda, Penguin) the process of optimizing your newly created pages is crucial! That is why it is essential to follow some rules whenever you are creating a new article for your web site. First of all, remember – every inner page of your web site is very important in the eyes of the search engines. The bots will crawl your page and will try to figure out whether the page is important for the users. Before you even sit down and start to write a particular article it is very important to make some research.
Go to Google Keyword Tools (but first log in into your Gmail account to get more accurate results) and type your keyword – see whether the competition is Low or Medium and see how many people are searching for this exact therm! In the Match Type option on the left don’t forget to choose [Exact], not Broad or “Phrase” – thus you will see how many people exactly are searching for your desired key-phrase. If you have a lot of people searching for this word and the competition is Low or Medium then GO and write this article!

Don’t try be sneaky and “Copy-Paste” some article from a different source! It won’t work! The search engines are trying to find 100% unique content. Make your research, find some materials and write an article (at least 550 words). Find some images related to it – users love visual information. After you have written your article it is time for the On page SEO!

How to optimize your page in 10 steps:

1. Create good title for your article with 1 or 2 keywords in it. For example if you are writing and article about on page SEO your article’s title can be: “How to optimize your article and content – crucial on page seo tutorial“
2. If you are using WordPress CMS make sure that in the Settings >> Permalinks you have put “Custom Structure” – something like category/%postname%.html. Do not leave it as it is! The ?p=123 (or similar) structure is REALLY BAD for your future and present SEO efforts! If your CMS is Joomla install sh404sef component for the same reason!
3. Create nice and simple Title and Description Meta Tag. Most search engines use a maximum of 60 chars for the Title and a maximum of 160 chars for the Description Meta Tag. Add some tags related to your article – but don’t put more than five. And what about the keywords? Personally I do not use them, neither do the search engines.
4. Now about the article. It MUST be unique and related to your site’s topic and niche. If your site is about web design don’t write articles about gambling! This will confuse the searching bots and will lower your web site’s reputation and SERPs!
5. Use h1, h2, h3, and h4 elements for your article(s). Put your keywords there. This will help the bots find out the main idea of your article. You know what the game chess right? There are many characters there – the King, the Queen, etc. and every character has it’s own power. Imagine that your article is a chess board! h1 is the King – use it to tell the bots what is your article about. h2 is the Queen and so on…
6. Use “strong”, “i” and “u” tags for your article. Put your keywords in them to emphasize their importance!
7. Don’t be lazy when it comes to images! Go and find some! Add them in your article and add your keywords in the “alt” tag. This will bring more attention to your visitors and will help with your SEO!
8. At the end you may put some links to some other inner pages of your web site. Usually I use 3 article related to my article and interlink them. This will bring more diversity and the user will find reliable and related to the article additional information. Something very important! If you are linking to another page – make sure to use rel=”nofollow” and target=”_blank” inside the link. This way you will not pass link juice and the visitor will stay on your page!
9. Here is one trick (although it might be optional). You can use your main keyword as an anchor text and link it to the same page you are on. Here is an example. Let’s say you are writing about Euro 2012 and your main keyword is “euro 2012 results”. Let’s say your URL is http://yoursite.com/the-results-of-euro-2012.html. You have written one interesting article about the results of this football event. Somewhere in the article put the keyword “euro 2012 results” and link it to the http://yoursite.com/the-results-of-euro-2012.html (your site). As a result you will have the keyword pointing to your site itself!
10. After the hard work is done you must reveal your creation to the the internet world! This is a whole new world called Off Page SEO and we will discuss it later on!