The first thing to state up front is that keywords can be grouped into 2 categories, Head keywords and Long tail keywords. Well what’s the difference? Well firstly head keywords are 1-2 words, for example, Plumbers, Electricians, Joiners. If you were to try and generate a marketing base on individual keywords, you would have the difference between around 15 million pages of competition to 50 million plus pages of competition. And to try and go after a one keyword phrase and expect to be at the top of Google you have to be willing to put a long term investment in of time and energy to get that to the top of Google.

Long term keywords however are more specific, more identifiable simply because the combination of words are more unique. So for example 'Joiners in Cheltenham', 'How to use Twitter for Marketing', 'Where to find a good Dentist'. In this case we have got a combination of words and because we’ve got an order to the words, Google has an algorithm that can pull these out of its own repository of words and quickly be able to identify what somebody’s looking for because it’s more specific.

So what is Keyword Relevance and how would we define it? Keyword relevance consists of the specific relations of words on a page to the same words being searched on. So for example if we were to take a keyword example of ‘Good Gloucester plumbers’ and we were to enter that into Google. Google would go away and look for any structures within pages, titles, headings, H1’s or H2’s and body content. It would look for anything that says ‘Good Gloucester Plumbers’ simply because it is relevant. "Good Gloucester plumbers" would therefore be more relevant than somebody who might have in their title ‘Looking for good plumber in Gloucester’ simply because this is less specific.

‘Good plumbers Gloucester’, we have the keywords but now we’ve got it broken up because of another word in there, ‘In’. We are looking for that which is less relevant. If we take that a step further you can see that ‘Looking for good plumbers in Gloucester’ is more relevant than ‘need a good plumber within the Gloucester area’. Why, well again this is a bit closer to our to our original keyword search than this, this is all broken up, we’ve got one word that is the same, this words missing an S, and we’ve got a different word here, the words are in the sentence but they’re not as specific.

Now how do we get around this, it’s a case of re-jigging your words, and making sure that they follow what you think or what the marketing would indicate is a good keyword to work on. So if you were to simply rearrange your sentences in your body text, change your titles so that this keyword is in there, it doesn’t matter if it’s in part of a sentence, in fact that is even better. ‘ Good Gloucester Plumbers in your area’, would still satisfy Google’s search criteria and it would still be specific enough to be found. So simply by reorganising your content and making sure those keywords are consistent with your titles, your headers, your heading tags, will give you a better chance of being found.

Here is an example now to show you this in action. If you were to type in any Long tail Keywords into Google you would see this time and time again. I’ve typed in ‘good Plumbers in Gloucester’, and the very top one is plumbers in Gloucester and you can see they’ve used the same Long tail keyword in their paragraph ‘Plumbers in Gloucester’. All the way down the bottom, ‘plumbers in Gloucester’, {this is even a bit more specific|this is a lot more specific, ‘good plumber in Gloucester’, although it loses it because there is an ‘s’ missing so ‘plumbers in Gloucester’ would be more relevant than’ good plumber in Gloucester’.

Getting your keywords right and relevant is not going to guarantee you’ll be top of Google because there are so many considerations and some of those were mentioned in the previous article. There are other considerations like age, time and how long the website has been around. Page ranking will have a significant effect and we’ll talk about that in our next article. But I have seen page ranked zero websites that have beat page ranked 2,3,4 websites simply because it had more relevant keywords.

Try and remember that long tail keywords will always give you better chance of being found in Google. Lots of people get this wrong from the outset but if you take care of this as part of your ongoing strategy you will be to the top of Google in no time. All you need to do to get this keyword found in your content and for your content to rank is to simply twist the keywords around to match what people are typing in. So I hope you are able to take something from this and in our next article we will be talking about ranking which will really build on this.

Now theirs hundreds of ways to rank in Google and theirs lots of little things you can do, but to me its like using Microsoft Excel in that there’s lots of features but we don’t often use them all; we can do the majority of our work with a few of them.

If all you do is apply these principles to your content marketing, you will see immediate results. Let’s start with "Supply vs Demand" and afterwards I will go through some real world examples. Now the first thing I should mention is that various groups of people depend too much on the Google keywords tool and although its usefula lot of the information from it can be skewed because Google uses every resource possible to obtain that data, whether it be robots, spiders, crawlers or just the terms people put into the browser, Google will take those and apply it to their competition rate and sometimes its not the most accurate. So I like to use a combination, Word Tracker is particularly relevant because this uses human key words and is more realistic, there is a slight cost but if you’re serious about getting the right key words you do need to consider paying for a tool like Word Tracker, it’s been around for a long time, it’s very established and will be crucial to your marketing strategy.

There are some other great tools that few people know about. One of these is Googles own wonder wheel, which is especially useful for getting started. You can access the wonder wheel page by clicking on the options link on the left hand side of your Google search page. In my example I have started my search with “plumbers” which is a bit generic for a starting search but we can narrow things down by simply clicking on the search terms immediately around our initial keyword. To really get to a useful point we need to be more specific and if we live in “Gloucestershire” that's a good place to start. As you click around you’ll notice that Google will display the pages of competition associated with the primary keyword in your wheel. What your looking for is to find the lowest possible number of competing pages and this is much easier with this tool. Take for example the keyword “Plumbers Tewkesbury”, there’s only 200,000 pages of competition, now that is not literally 200,000 pages of competition, like I said before, Google will skew a lot of that data so you can’t really take that literally but it’s a great starting point. We recommend to all of our clients to try and keep the keyword they are going to use for their strategies below 500,000. The smaller the competition the quicker and the easier it’s going to be to get your pages to the top of Google so I would recommend using this just as a starting point.

Now if you want something a bit more visual there is another tool I like called keyword eye, it’s free and its more useful because it shows your keyword value in relation to hundreds of other synonyms. If I type in “Plumbers Gloucester” it will represents the importance of keywords by the size and the competition so ideally to start with you will be looking for green words and then you would be looking for the words to be bigger to give you an idea of how much competition there is so we don’t have many green words here, these are actual companies and you can see that the competition would be low. You can keep trying different key words, the ideal would be a big green key word. The next one is plumbing supplies and even though it’s got middle competition you can see its got 60,000 competition for this key word so again you can see the supply versus demand and how the supply here is quite high and the competition isn’t so high or its middle of the road. So there is a little tool to get you started.

So what is supply versus demand in Google ranking, well supply is just the competition between the pages for the key word phrases that you want to use to get noticed and the demand is really the number of searches being executed for that specific key word. So what we’re saying is if you have a thousand in demand it means there are going to be a thousand people looking for that keyword. If you have 10,000 in competition and supply then that means there are 10,000 pages out there that you are going to have to compete with to get to the front page of Google.

So let’s talk about this from a practical standpoint, what if we put in the term plumbers “Gloucestershire” you will see we have a competition of 4 million pages. 4 million pages we have to compete with whereas if we narrow our search down just slightly and put in “Plumbers Gloucester city” we drop to 369,000 pages of competition. It’s a significant drop just by tweaking our keyword. Again all of this came from some of the tools we discussed above.

If we take this a little further we can see that just by changing it to be a bit more specific and change it from “Gloucester” to “Quedgeley” it drops to 35,800 pages of competition which means we have a greater chance of getting to the top of Google. So the question you need ask yourself is, would I rather rank number 1 in Google and have only 35,800 other pages to compete against or would I rather have 4 million pages of competition with a more popular keyword and have fewer people find you. Or looking at this differently would you be happy being at the top of Google if it meant that you could have a potential opportunity of 1300 hits a month. We could say that if a third or quarter of those meant you were getting 200 hits a week being at the top of Google. So if you can look at the key words and say to yourself, if I can get 200 -300 enquiries a week by being at the top of Google and that would satisfy my business requirements then that’s the decision that would really make our supply versus demand question easier to define.

So really what does this mean in terms of a range and what’s a good guide in being able to get the right key word. If you’re going to be using word tracker then try and keep your competition under a thousand and if you’re going to be using the Google key words tool try and keep your competition under 500,000 like what we mentioned previously. It just means that you’re going to be able to get to the top of Google quicker simply because you have a lot less competition and even though it means you might not get as many hits as some of the bigger popular key words you have to decide if those enquiries or people who are going to be contacting your business are going to give you leads to make it worthwhile then you just need to stick to that strategy.

So for example if it meant you can get 200 direct enquiries a week simply by using a less common key word and because it has less competition you get to the top of Google then that’s the decision that really should drive your strategy in terms of SEO. Now the reason I’ve created this article first is simply because if you get this wrong it doesn’t really matter what you do for key word relevance, it doesn’t really matter what you do for page rank authority, all that will be irrelevant if you don’t get this right. I cannot overstate the importance of using those tools that I’ve shown you to be able to find you the right keyword, keep it underneath the threshold and you will have no problems getting this your site to the top of Google. Make sure you check out our related article on keyword relevance.

To get started I have used the original sub headings from the wiki article (in bold) and expanded upon it undernearth. Happy reading!

There are several reason why a company might consider leasing or renting a website instead of buying.

Leasing often requires only a small monthly fee instead of a large fee upfront when buying. Startups looking to make a dent on the marketing opportunities of the web understand that a full blown design treatment along with all of the issues of maintenance and SEO on a shoe string budget just isn't realistic. I've seen some bad decisions made in this area because some companies either didn't have all of the available options at hand or didn't really know what they wanted in the first place.

New small business owners can benefit by saving capital.

This is a fundamental issue for new startups that need a buffer to cushion them against a lot of often unforseeable business expenses. I worked for a company that had a client that spent £14,000 for a well designed website without any good SEO. In effect they ran out of the money they should have used to improve their page rankings and were left with a fantastic looking site with no one to see it. Clients don't always understand this and suppliers in my opinion should inform their clients of this.


If a website is only needed for a short amount of time.

This has often been the case for clients I have worked with that need to run mini campaigns or 'sell by date' type brochure sites. In these cases quick turnaround is the key and having a pre-designed template that can be leased for the duration of the campaign makes good sense. After all why spend all that money if you only need the site around for a few months.

If one is unsure their business needs a website leasing is a way to test without paying for a full price site.

This is great for those 'proof of concept' or 'market testing' scenarios in which you want to test the waters without breaking the bank. I spoke with a friend today about a business idea he had. He had already invested some money to get a developer to build a database, purchase the domain name and setup hosting. After speaking to him about his idea it was clear to me that what he really needed was a place to showcase his ideas, generate a social networking group to field test this and go from there before spending any more time and money on the idea.

The owner is responsible for the technical aspects and upkeep of the site.

I was recently sat in a meeting with a client that wanted a good looking website and told me that he wanted it to be high up on the rankings in Google. He was uncomfortable with my explanation that to do this organically he would need to invest some time to keep the content current. After talking this through with him I learned that they used a very clunky FTP based method of updating content. It
was time consuming and prone to breaking their existing pages which to some degree explained some his reluctance in relation to keeping his site updated. I was able to explain that a good CMS can take care of this without the worry of breaking a page. The more reputable site leasing companies provide these. At DriveMySite we provide our customers with Umbraco an open source CMS that has recently been endorsed by Microsoft but more importantly has been used by many of the clients I have with worked with and to good effect.

Changes and updates are often included in the monthly fee.

This has to be one of the primary benefits of leasing. Like leasing a TV or a Car you pass it back and get a newer model without the hassle of selling it first and losing money in between. A lot of clients I have worked with would often come to me asking for a feature or technology they had seen on a competitors site but
because the technology itself had been superceded, it wouldn't be possible with a complete rewrite of the site and its underlying technology.

There are also tax benefits of leasing a website.

This goes without saying. Although most CEO's will completely endorse and understand the benefits of leasing when dealing with tangible assets many still don't consider digital assets in the same way. Changing the mindset of the boss is often the biggest challenge here.

Some companies that offer a website leasing or rental service also give the option for the user to buy the full rights to the site either after a certain amount of time (leasing) or at any time (rental).

This is a real win/win if the website leasing company are prepared to do this as it gives the customer the assurance that the site they have been renting for the duration of the lease already has a proven ROI.

Website leasing and rental companies may also offer Search engine optimization services as part of the leasing or rental package.

This is almost an expectation these days. To me it would be like going into a car showroom and having a salesman show me a car without wheels. SEO enabling technologies need to be baked into the content management system in order to be able to compete in this area. Umbraco takes care of most of this for us, i.e. it allows good naming conventions of URLs, provides Sitemaps for your robots
file and allows custom text injection of meta data on a page by page basis.

In summary, leasing your website should be as viable an option to your company as leasing any other asset. If the figures stack up and the SEO investment is their then you could do a lot worse with a lot more money at stake. On the other hand if you make a poor choice with website rental you can always pull out early with the minimal loss.