The UK-based online keyword research company Wordtracker has been playing a Keyword Challenge with delegates at the Internet World exhibition in London this week.
They reckon that most web site owners simply guess what their most important keywords are, and the game aims to show that’s just not good enough.
Playing in London now, and at previous conferences in New York, Las Vegas, and Chicago, the Keyword Challenge game asks people to guess which of two randomly chosen keywords is the most popular for a specific market sector.
From over 2,000 players, many who claimed to be experienced search engine optimisers, the success rate was just 54.9%.
Broken down into industry sectors, the best scores were for web-related keywords, with 59.1% correct, but the worst were in fashion (49.1%) and family (50.6%) related keywords.
“This might be fine in a game, but if you relied on such guesses in your online business, youd be losing substantial amounts of sales,” claimed Andy Mindel, CEO of Wordtracker.
Though it’s not clear what kinds of web sites those who played the game are used to optimising, as bloggers we have daily opportunity to improve our position in the search engines. Every post we write can be laden (not stuffed, of course) with keywords that draw readers in.
“The key… is to use the best keywords in your web site copy,” Mindel concluded.
Of course, I’m sure he’d love everyone to use Wordtracker’s services to achieve that. A cheaper way is to continually hone your writing, learn about your niche, and write in a way that engages your target audience, using their own language.
As bloggers, we’re not stuck with a few static pages. Our web sites continually evolve and, hopefully, become a growing, keyword rich archive of information that the search engines lap up. It’s that long tail again.
How do you get relevant keywords into your writing?
For interest, the full results of the Keyword Challenge game were as follows (percentage denotes correct guess of most popular keyword):
Web (59.1%)
Food (59.0%)
Gift (58.8%)
Computers (58.2%)
Travel (57.0%)
Sport (56.9%)
Music (54.9%)
Offices (54.5%)
Health (54.4%)
Finance (53.9%)
Home (53.6%)
Kids (53.5%)
Smallbiz (51.5%)
Family (50.6%)
Fashion (49.0%)
