XML Keyword SEO Market

Research title: The best keywords to work with in relation to the search term ‘XML’ Out come: Select the best keywords to bid on and/or write articles about to increase the PageRank on Google and develop relevancy of content Data source: SEMRush.com Tags: XML, keywords, SEO, search terms, statistical analysis

Attachment: List of 2,683 keywords related to ‘xml’ with average searching volume, number of results and dilution (XLS file)

Summary: Search volume isn’t everything! Content’s competition isn’t everything! By applying the dilution formula we can list the keyphrases that have the biggest search volumes and less competition. Sometimes we can think: ‘xml parser’ is a great keyword because more than 5,400 searches are made on Google every month! Although that is true, there are more than 13 million results available on this search. This means you have 0.04 dilution index and therefore there are more than 2500 pages available for every search, investing on this keyword will be a headache. See bellow the analysis I’ve done in details for the most broad search word available on the XML subject: xml. Researched numbers:

Average search volume for ‘xml’: 60,500 times per month

Competition: 409,000,000 results

Average AdWords bid price: US$1.34

Dilution index: 0.015% (very low)

Main organic results: Wikipedia.org, W3Schools.com, W3.org, XML.com and XML.org Data analysis: According to SEMRush.com the search term ‘xml’ is typed in Google an average of 60,500 times per month and the main organic results are so solid in the ranking system (whatever it is) that competing for a place among the first 10 would be suicide for most SEO projects. To sponsor a link on Google for this keyword isn’t very expensive but we must realise that the more specific a term is, the more chances we’ve got on converting a click. Just ‘xml’ doesn’t tell us much of what the reader wants and that might not mean ‘business’. Lets analyse the related words (words and phrases that the people searching for ‘xml’ also typed into Google’s search). I have deliberately ignore some terms unrelated directly to XML so we can think of the relevance of the articles and the content we can create around it:

6 Best monthly search volume keywords: 1. x m l (with spaces; 60,500 searches) 2. xml editor (18,100) 3. msxml (9,900) 4. xml tutorial (6,600) 5. extensible markup language (6,600) 6. index xml (5,400)6 Lowest competition keywords (with more than 10 searches per day): 1. xml declaration…external entity (25,800 results for 390 searches per month) 2. msxml4 0 sp2 (66,800 results for 320 searches) 3. msxml parser (77,800 results for 720 searches) 4. xml whitespace (1,200,000 results for 320 searches) 5. xml parse (1,360,000 results for 320 searches) 6. xml tutorial download (1,540,000 results for 320 searches)6 Best dilutions to compete against: 1. xml declaration…external entity (1.51% dilution – very good!) 2. msxml parser (0.76% – good) 3. xml version 1.0 encoding utf 8 standalone yes (0.4% – good) 4. xml notepad (0.38% – above average) 5. xml spy (0.24% – above average) 6. xml tutorial (0.13 – average – but still worth investing)

Conclusion: Building a list of words, phrases and sentences to plan your SEM is essencial for it’s success. There are many books and tutorial available but none of them presents the Dilution Index Formula (SEO-DIF) that allows you to have a good, ‘clean’, list of search terms with maximum possibility of getting a good position on search engines.

Extra: I have my own plan for XML. It’s a project not yet published here but is based on the keyword ‘php xml parser’ and as a PHP developer I will offer a web tool for bloggers and web publishers to parser RSS/Atom/RDF feeds to place on their pages. Lets see the results of that!