An eHow Article SEO Case Study

This is a case study on the keyword situation on a friend’s eHow article titled How to Make a Scrapbook in Photoshop:

Looking at one of your most recent articles titled: How to Make a Scrapbook in Photoshop, I see that it basically has two keywords (keyword phrases) in it:

• Scrapbook (2.2 million searches @ $1.07 CPC) &
• Photo shop (37.2 million searches @ $1.03 CPC)

Both of these keywords bring in millions of searches per month globally at fair CPC rates unfortunately the terms are too broad to have much chance getting to the front of Google.

If you used "digital scrapbook" as your keyword-phrase you would have a more manageable 110,000 searches @ $2.00 CPC or "digital scrapbook pages" with 3,600 searches @ $3.26 CPC. Both of these are more focused and more likely to reach page one of Google.

Now this isn't a tutorial on eHow SEO; it's just the way I think about it at this moment in time. My thoughts and philosophies are libel to change but I feel that articles will make more money if they get onto Google's front page in search results rather than if they get more searches but fall many pages below the first page in Google. You're more likely to hit the first page with longer keyword phrases that still get thousands of searches per month.

If you search for your keyword phrase in quotations you'll see how many pages turn in that exact group of words. Searching for "digital scrapbook pages" in quotes finds 45,900 possible results in Google. If you can keep this under 50,000-100,000 you'll be doing pretty good. For comparison’s sake the term “scrapbook” gets 2.5 million possible results and “photo shop” gets 2.9 million results; neither of which seem to indicate you can hit page one very easily. The further down this number gets the more likely you'll be on the first page. This is sometimes hard to get low without completely eroding your searches-per-month statistic, which is why the threshold of 50-100k is appropriate even though it still seems somewhat high. It’s also why I like having 2-3 different keyword phrases in each of my articles on eHow, more chances to get to the first page.

For your article you're on the first page of search results for the term: "how to make a scrapbook in photo shop" (not enough people search for this phrase for keyword tools to pick it up). You're on the first page for "make a scrapbook in photo shop" (again not enough searches to register). You're on the first page for "a scrapbook in photo shop" (28 searches monthly for this term). You are on the second page of Google for "scrapbook in photo shop" (this search has 320 monthly searchers at $0.05 CPC). Writing a similar article with the keyword phrase “digital scrapbook pages” would likely be more financially rewarding from an analyst’s perspective.

This analysis was meant to teach better optimization of articles. I was told it helped my friend and I thought it might help casual readers of this blog. In future posts I’ll do similar analyses of my own specific posts and articles and possibly of others’. Thanks for reading.