idaconcpts » Keyword Search

SEO question: Soccer or Football?

Damian Davila — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:40:10 +0000

There are some good SEO questions:

Apple or Mac?

IE8 or Internet Explorer 8?

E-mail or email?

For online marketers and SEO experts, this World Cup 2010 the greatest question of all is:

Should I optimize my English language sports website or blog with soccer or football?

The answer is: it all depends.

Depends on what?

Here are some insights into this critical question for the period June 11 – July 11, 2010.

Soccer or Football Search Trends through Google Trends

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. The graph above shows the searches from the terms “soccer” and “football” from 2004 to 2010, ranked by “football”.

When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular search term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. Currently, there are 6 news that generated a spike in news stories (marked as A, B, C, D, E and F).

The 2 key years to observe are 2006 and 2010 because those are the years when the World Cup 2010 was held (2006: Germany and 2010: South Africa). However, this graph only provides 2 clear insights:

On years when the World Cup is celebrated, the number of searches of “soccer” and “football” on Google tends to be closer in number that in non-World Cup years.
The “soccer” news references volume is higher in 2010 that it was 2006.

Who is Searching for Football

The blue indicates the volume of “football” searches, while the red indicates the volume of “soccer” searches.

The U.K. clearly dominates the search of “football” in Google with 8 of the top 10 cities in the world searching for this term.

Who is Searching for Soccer

Football purists might jump to say the United States, however the actual results are surprising.

The host country of the 2010 edition of the World Cup lead the pack in the search of “soccer” at Google. Surprisingly, the Canadians, Australians, and Irish are searching for “soccer” at Google more often than the Americans.

Despite its 5th position on the top countries looking for “soccer” at Google, still the U.S. has 5 out of the top 10 cities in the world.

What about Demand?

LinkWorth, a Dallas, Texas based company that specializes in search engine marketing, reports for the term “football” the following keywords that are currently (as of 06/18/2010) being bid for in their system:

football equipment

football memorabilia

football tickets

fantasy football

football odds

football jerseys

On the “soccer” side, there are only bids for: soccer goal.

While there is no guarantee that the presented football terms are strictly related to the FIFA sport and not to the NFL sport, it does appear that there is more SEO demand for football keywords than for soccer keywords.

Recommendations

So what is a SEO expert to do: soccer or football?

Here are some rules of thumb:

If you are optimizing your website for SEO and SEM within the United States, you must clearly optimize for “soccer”. Also, if you’re planning to purchase some keywords through Google Adwords, take a look at the prices in the following cities: Washington, D.C.; Richardson, TX; Seattle, WA; Dallas, TX and Chicago, IL. These are cities generating most searches for soccer in Google for the United States.
If you are optimizing your website for SEO and SEM for any other country in the world (except Canada and South Africa), you should optimize for “football”. If you’re planning to purchase some keywords through Google Adwords, take a look at the British market because it offers the lion’s share of the search engine market looking for “football”. However, be aware that you will need a considerable budget in order to efficiently compete in Google Adwords for this region.
In Canada, you need to optimize for both “soccer” and “football”.
No matter whether you optimize for “soccer” or “football’, the term “soccer goal” is a keyword to always keep in mind. Owners of YouTube channels featuring highlight reels of goals, pay close attention to all the possible variations of this keyword when selecting the tags for your videos.

How to Calculate Keyword Density

Damian Davila — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:20:49 +0000

I am back from a very nice trip to the beautiful island of Kauai here in Hawaii and I highly recommend visiting this beautiful island for some great sights that will blow you away. The Kauai island offers great hiking, kayaking, eating, sunbathing options. If you are interested in visiting an island that keeps that country feeling, then you should definitely visit Kauai.

Here are two samples:

Poipu Sunset - Kauai Island

Wailua Waterfall - Kaui Island

Beautiful! Just like today’s topic in the series of the 5 key factors that determine that your website is a returned match on a search engine query. The first posting was about Google AdWords, the second one about Keyword Prominence and Link Popularity.

Calculating your Keyword Density, that is the percentage that your selected keyword is out of the total number of words in a selected number of web pages, takes 4 easy steps.

Step 1: Write the text of your web page on any text editor of your choice (e.g. MS Word). Or just copy/paste the selected text(s) from your website(s) into the word editor.

Step 2: Find out the total word count of your text using the Word Count tool of your text editor.

Step 3: Using your Find tool, find out how many times your keyword appears on the text. Write down that number.

Step 4: Divide the number that your keyword appeared by the total word count. Multiply the result by 100. This is the keyword density of your keyword.

Let’s do an example!

Let’s use the opening paragraph of this post and find the keyword density of island.

Step 1: I copy/paste this text into MS Word.

I am back from a very nice trip to the beautiful island of Kauai here in Hawaii and I highly recommend visiting this beautiful island for some great sights that will blow you away. The Kauai island offers great hiking, kayaking, eating, sunbathing options. If you are interested in visiting an island that keeps that country feeling, then you should definitely visit Kauai.

Step 2: From the menu bar, select Tools, then Word Count. Total word count is 63.

Step 3 : From the menu bar, select Edit, then Find. The keyword “island” appears a total of 4 times.

Step 4: 4 / 63 * 100 = 6.34%

Easy, isn’t it?

Yes, but there are some important points to consider.

Major search engines have their own “skip words”. These skip words may or not may not set by the user. Usually words with three or less letters are skipped (e.g. and, or, I, etc.) and not included in the total word count.
Partial matches may or not be included (e.g. island versus islands).
Tags may or many not be included.

Therefore, when using online Keyword Density calculators, make sure that you look for these three points. I recommend Google Rankings Keyword Density Calculator (not affiliated with Google).

According to Brian Clifton in his How Search Engine Optimisation Works whitepaper, SEO companies usually aim for a Keyword Density between 5 – 10 %. Our previously calculated Keyword Density in the example above meets that criteria. Not too bad.

See you next time!

Hiking at Kauai Island

More on Google Ad(key)Words

Damian Davila — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:32:46 +0000

This post will be short and sweet because I need to take a drive road test today because I am buying a brand new car!

Yesterday on my way home, I was reviewing a SEO whitepaper by Brian Clifton and Nikki Rae from Omega Digital Media tittled “How Search Engine Optimisation Works”. This 20-page document explains how search engines work and how search engine optimisation (SEO) can help you achieve high search engine visibility.

According to Clifton and Rae, web sites appearance on search engine results depends on 5 key factors (p. 8):

Which Keywords the user entered
Your web page Keyword Density for these keywords
Your web page Keyword Prominence (page location) for these keywords
Your Link Popularity – the number of other sites that link to you
Your link and keyword Relevancy

These 5 factors are essential for SEO and I promise that the next 5 posts are going to be on these topics. In the meantime, let’s take a look at idaconcpts WordPress Blog Stats regarding keywords that that returned matches with www.idaconcpts.com:

As it becomes obvious the term that returned the most matches to idaconcpts is google analytics flickr. This makes sense because as of right now, 08/21/2008, my post that has an analysis of Flickr using Google Analytics is the most viewed page of this blog (30 views). The term flickr was included in 7 out of 20 of the search engine queries that matched idaconcpts. The term google had the same outcome.

Therefore, the terms google and flickr are golden ones to consider for my personal Google AdWords campaign. However, the important part is to be able to combine with appropriate terms (remember quality over quantity! I want my readers to remain in the blog, not leave right after they click on it!). Possible keywords are google analytics and the different mispellings of analytics (e.g. analytic, analystics, analytis)! Believe or not, including this misspelled words, inflates my search engine keyword result matching. Cheating? Clifton and Rae don’t believe so!

(p. 9) Don’t forgit misspelled keywhords! (p. 10) The Google Trends tool is an excellent free resource for checking mispellings, relative keyword popularities (e.g. product X versus product Y) and regional variation (e.g. cell phones versus mobile phone).

What do you think?