The first step in any successful SEO campaign is to discover the top of your highest vertical market. Many SEOs or aspiring webmasters get caught up in “the valley”. They just look at the smallest area that they “think” their market resides.
By zooming all the way to the peak of the mountain and taking a top down view of your entire market you will easily be able to spot areas of opportunity that you may have missed or never even considered.
Whenever you tackle a new market all of your market research must begin at the top of the highest peak. If you fail to do this then you will be missing important keywords and important consumer psychology that is important for sales and vital to your organic search engine rankings, especially on Google.
If you fail to look at the entire market then you will also experience lower rankings due to the fact that you have missed important topics and keywords that the search engines (especially Google) consider related or have co-occurrence within the theme that you are trying to rank for.
For example if you want to rank for the phrase “dog training” most webmasters focus only on the word “dog training” and any variants thereof. They miss important words that occur in the top 20 websites for the word dog training because they ignored the top of the market… DOG.
Google uses the co-occurrence index as well as a variant of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) technology to uncover the “theme” of a website and web page when calculating how a page should rank in its index. LSI and the co-occurrence matrix are able to accurately predict the “theme” of a page and the “relevance” of a page by comparing your content to the content of other “trusted” sites. If you don’t meet the mark because you are caught up in the dark ages of SEO then you are in trouble.
If you ignore the co-occurrence index then you may as well pack your bags and go home. Ranking in the search engines is no longer about “keyword density” on a web page. It is about “theme density”.
The website that wins the ranking war is the website that is able to discuss their “theme” in more ways than their competitors. 99.9% of SEOs or aspiring webmasters fail to understand this simple truth.
Highly competitive keywords are much easier to rank for with much fewer back links when your site is “theme dense”. Coming up with the keywords that strengthen the themes that you are attempting to rank for is a matter of market driven keyword research.
Market driven keyword research cannot be done using conventional keyword research tools. To date there is only one tool that conducts market driven keyword research. It is a tool called Theme Zoom. This research can also be done manually. The bottom line is the fact that it must be done to one degree or another. The site that does it better wins.
In upcoming articles I will discuss theme density, market driven keyword research and the co-occurrence matrix in more detail.
Until next time,
Digg 
