Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Turkey! (that's a fun username for this weekend for us folks in the USA!)

I saw this question a couple of days ago and just noticed that no one has responded so I'm jumping in. I am just going to first answer each question one at a time:

1.) Should I be considering the homepage url anchor text as a branded link anchor?

Yes, definitely.

2.) Should the brand % just be 'pure brand' anchor text?

Not necessarily. That is going to depend on how you handle your organization based on these next questions.

3.) Should it contain partial brand + KWD data?

Yes, definitely.

4.) Should it comprise of all of the above elements?

Yes, definitely.

5.) Should I divvy up / segment partial brand, pure brand, brand + kwd, citations etc into new sub categories....

Your last question I would take on a case by case basis depending on the depth and breadth of the brand itself, the size of the website, number of SKUs (if e-commerce), etc. If you have a brand like "Chevrolet," for example, of course you are going to have categorized subrands like "Corvette" etc. On the other hand if your brand is a smaller family-run business, maybe doing business in a particular location, you might be able to consolidate all of your "branded" terms to simply be anything that includes the brand name + anything else (including the URL). This will also depend on your resources. Obviously if you have a smaller company with limited resources, breaking all your branded terms into subcategories may just be too much to manage. Again that will be a decision dependent on your business size and business model.

I hope that helps get the discussion started! Good luch,

Dana

Hi Marko,

I want to start by saying I realize how frustrated you must be to have your sites suffering due to one of several algorithms updates. Everything I am about to say is strictly my opinion and is based, of course, on not knowing all the specifics about these three websites.

This move you are suggesting, to me, doesn't address the real root of the problem. I think the EMD algorithm change was intended to effect EMDs that weren't providing great value to users/visitors. If you've already decided that this is absolutely the best course, I would encourage to continue to ask yourself: "How is consolidating these three domains into one providing improved value, content and experience for my users?"

IMHO, if you consolidate all your content into one domain, it may not necessarily have the panacea effect that you desire.Also, even if it does work, I would be prepared to ride out a big dip in rankings and traffic until Google gets it all sorted out. The domain to which you are moving everything to may suffer because it will immediately be getting a big change in its link profile. I know from experience that this can cause Google to sandbox a site (not de-indexed or even a manual penalty - just suffering from a bit in the algorithm that looks at link profile and history).

It just seems that you are making a pretty bold drastic move in order to get bold and drastic (better) results. I just want to be the voice of caution in that this move, and all of the work involved in moving content and writing redirects may not produce any positive results at all.

I'm sure you've probably already considered that possibility and most likely you've decided that the potential rewards outweigh the risks. I certainly hope it goes well and that your sites recover and flourish going forward.

Best of luck to you Marko,

Dana

You are very welcome Boris.

Interesting question Boris. There is a blogging tool out there called "Storify" (http://www.storify.com) that uses this concept to help bloggers write posts. I think the reason it works is that it makes it easy to pull things from sources all over the Web and weave them together into a unique story.

I think if you draw from other sites, it's perfectly okay, especially if you give citations to your sources and weave them together in a unique way. For example, if you are the only person who has put together a database on artists like the one you are subscribing, you are effectively compiling existing content in a new and unique way that could be very valuable to users.

I always like to include stories of my own experience. I have a small site I built that has a blog. One of the very first blog posts I wrote was simply a "Top 20 You Tube Videos" for music that was closely related to the overall topic of the Website. Although it includes 20 YouTube videos that I didn't make, this page gets the highest traffic and has the highest page authority of any of my internal pages. I

I think there's a big difference between copying other content and trying to pass it off as your own, versus compiling information, citing your sources and putting it all in one place in a way that your users find useful and interesting.

My only advice on top of that would be to spend some effort at weaving these things together in a way that is uniquely your own.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Navinan, unfortunately, even the best SEO in the world can't give you a definite answer to this question. If they do they aren't being honest. That being said, I can only relate my own experience. Now, keep in mind, mine is an entirely different website. It is a niche e-commerce site in the USA. The number one term for which we would like to be on page 1 Google is fairly competitive term. We launched in January 2013. We are still not on page one. We have ranged between pages 2 and 3. It's actually for very good reason. We are competing against some old, well-established sites with pretty good SEO and lots and lots of links. For us, it could be another year or two (maybe even three) before we make it to page one.

On the other hand, I launched a similar site in the same niche 4 years ago with an EMD which made it to page one Google within 8 months and is still on page 1 today. The difference, IMHO, in this particular case was simply about product offering (particularly since both sites had the same SEO, me). One site has a product offering that speaks better to the highly competitive term, and the other doesn't (yet). This has nothing to do with SEO. It is about business model, domain age, product selection and merchandising. Those things are having more to do with the ranking of these two similar sites, than anything else right now.

In your case, if you are a unique business (in the case a University) in an area where there is very little competition, your road to page 1 Google might be easier or shorter. But, there are no guarantees, and, like I said, no one can give you a real answer as to how long it's going to take.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

You are welcome. Yes, you know the same is true when evaluating site performance in Google Analytics. We were recently researching what day of the week and time of day would be best for email sends. If we'd just chosen the day and time with the most revenue, it would have been totally skewed by one $5,000 sale that came in on an normally slow day at an even slower time. You have to mix your analysis with common sense. An algorithmic "Conversion Optimizer" isn't capable of inserting the "common sense" part of the equation...at least not yet!

Hi kynduvme,

I think the Conversion Optimizer is something that maybe works well for some and not at all for others. I have tried it several times on e-commerce sites, both large and small. I never got as good results when it was enabled as when I just optimized the campaigns myself. In fact, across the board when I used it my cost per conversion went up and my conversion rates went down. This is just my own personal experience. I think it's something worth testing on one campaign to see how it goes in your individual situation. Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Rafqual,

3 years ago I might have answered differently. Article marketing, as a whole, just doesn't work any more for SEO. However, there may be isolated instances where it makes sense to submit an article about your brand or niche product to various article receptacles. I'd be very, very wary. Research the articles to which you are considering submitting. Ask Yourself these questions:

1. How old is the articles directpry?
2. What is its PR?
3. How many Inbound links does it have?
4. How many of those links are from .org or .edu sites?
5. What's their DR or PR?

God luck and happy holidays. I hope this helps!

Dana

"read more" just makes sense to me. That's what you want people to do isn't it?

If it makes sense for your users AND search engines "get' it....then by all means yes, do it.

Ciao bluekite!

Dana

Hii bluekite,

You need to make that read more link in your blog a "do follow." This is only going to bolster your internal linking structure, which is a VERY good thing. In your case especially this is perfectly relevant and helpful to your readers. I hope that helps!

Dana

Again my gut instinct is to have them select a password. But, that may not be the best for our customers. Case in point, I don't think that's the way SEOMoz Pro works. I think they email a password, and I still joined. Go figure.

Hi bluekite! Welcome to SEOMoz. This is an awesome community. I would strongly suggest that the only way to find out the answer to your question is to test it. You can test it simply and inexpensively with tools like http://www,optimizely.com

What works for someone else may not work for you at all. Just because someone says "best practices" doesn't mean those "best practices" apply to your customers.

Also, listen to your customers and your instinct. If you know your customers really well, and your hypothesis is that a checkout form without a shipping address would perform better, set up one page with the form and one without in optimizely (which you can try free for 30 days)  and find out which one wins.

Don't trust what everyone else does. Trust your testing and your gut.

Hope that helps! Happy Holidays!

Dana

You are very welcome. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks Ryan. I love storytelling so branding is something that comes naturally to me and I absolutely love it when a brand hits it out of the park. This was a great example.

Excellent and thorough answer Matt.

Yes! It was the Kotex campaign they did on Pinterest. Here's a link to the video: http://youtu.be/UVCoM4ao2Tw  Enjoy!

Hi Keith,

I'm sorry, I should have clarified. The rel=canonical tags would be on your Web pages, not the PDF (they are irrelevant in a PDF document). Then Google will attribute your Web page as the original source of the content and will understand that the PDF just contains bits of content from those pages. In this instance I would include a rel=canonical tag on every page of your site, just to cover your bases. Hope that helps!

Dana

As long as you have rel=canonical tags properly in place, you don't need to worry about the PDF causing duplicate content problems. That way, any original content should be picked up and any duplicate can be attributed to your existing Web pages. Hope that's helpful!

Dana

Hi Andy,

I believe the problem is that your title tag is too long. Google can only display about 70 characters maximum for a title and yours is 79 characters long. Count includes spaces and punctuation too. Make a title that fits within that limitation and Google should display it.

Dana

Hi Abe,

Thanks for your response. Before I go down the road of setting up new campaigns (ugh!), I have a couple of follow up questions to make sure I am doing the right thing(s).

I have not set a preferred domain in GWT for one of my sites.Before setting up my new campaign in SEOMOZ Pro, should I set my preferred domain as www.MyDomain.com  ? I did just set up the non "www" version of my site in GWT just now. I have not, however, set a preference.

Also, right now the Google Analytics account linked to my SEOMoz campaign is set up with "http://MyDomain.com" as both the Property Name and the Default URL. - It is linked to the http://www.MyDomain.com site tracking in GWT.  It seems to me that I need to get everything aligned for the www.MyDomain.com version of my URL because otherwise my SEOMOz stats won't be as accurate.

I initially considered setting "MyDomain.com" as my prefered domain in GWT, but then I checked that version against www.MyDomain.com in OSE and that's definitely a no-go. All my authority and links are tied to the "www." version of the URL.

Quelle Salade! (Pardon my French)

If I change my Google Property Name and Default URL, am I going to break my Google Analytics code? Or will it just continue from that day on tracking via those updated URLs?

I really appreciate your help on this one. I know it's a mess! I've attached some screenshots with my specfic problem/question areas marked.

Dana

62EW3.jpg ee6wth.jpg 18aKc.jpg Z1Zqph.jpg

Hi Kyle, I will preface my answer by saying I am not a developer. I think the 301-redirect to a 404 page is completely unecessary. It also introduces some additional latency that wouldn't be there without the redirect.

I am interested to hear the take from some of the developers here. Interesting question Kyle.

I currently have two Pro campaigns set up. They are both tracking the root domains of two different e-commerce sites. I also am tracking three competitors for each company, in each campaign. I have those set up by subdomains, like so www.Competitor.com.

So in my Historical link analysis I am getting MyRootDomain.com, compared to www.competitor1.com, www.competitor2.com and www.competitor3.com

Is this a problem?

Would it be better for me to switch my company campaigns to track subdomains too, or to switch my competitor tracking to root domains.

This is probably pretty rudimentary, but it never even occurred to me until just now.

I realize that if I switch to subdomains for my own company tracking this would necessitate setting up a completely new campaign. This would be a problem because I am maxed out on my 1,000 keywords.

Last but not least, does the fact that I have been tracking my own site root domains compared to competitors subdomains mean all of my competitive domain and link analysis is, well, garbage?...because I haven't really been comparing the same things?

Thanks Dr. Pete. I know this is pushing the boundaries of normal Q&A. I appreciate your answer. Yes, one thing at a time I think is a good way to go. I suggested that we try the mod_pagespeed rewrite on the dev site as a first step. I think it would probably be more efficient for us to hire a developer proficient in SEO to handle some of the more technical items. Thanks again!

I agree with Matt. 2013 is going to be all about 4 things (IMHO):

• Google+ and authorship
• Optimizing for the Knowledge Graph
• Structured data
• Mobile

And we'll all be peddling as fast as we can to get on top of these when, without a doubt, something completely new will come along that we haven't imagined yet ....That's what makes SEO endlessly fascinating!

Dr. Pete, Our IT manager responded to my request. Can you point me in the right direction to research these things (I am copying and poasting directly from his message): "A few items that I noticed just skimming the forums that we will
need to look at a little closer are:

1. Java script that is self referencing, as both tab control and the slide show are self referencing
2. Alias domains which we have a number of
3. HTTPS pages, which for us, is all pages depending on
        when a person logs in."

I found info in the GW forum about the mod_pagespeed rewrite module and sent that to him.

He responded "We are currently using mod_rewrite to handle a number of things including 301 redirection. My experience with mod_rewrite does have me very cautious, because it is very easy to “blow up” the site. I would want to run this on the dev site for some time with a concerted testing effort to make sure we do not have issues."

Any references you can recommend would be great. Thank you so much!

That's very cool to know Joseph.I didn't know they had any kind of training. Hey, I also just noticed that Rhea Drysdale added a sortable spreadsheet to Jon Cooper's original post. Awesome! Here's that link too: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AmnEScnb8EtAdElPYml6YW55VURiaENpTFlESTl5LVE

Here's what I consider to be the mother of all Link Earning strategy lists:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies   -  One of the most fascinating suggestions on this super long list is http://www.tynt.com/

Enjoy!

Dana

Great question. Yes, it would be much better to put the text on the page via the CMS with CSS to achieve the same look as you have right now. The reason is that a SE spider cannot crawl text that is embedded in an image. All the spider will "see" is that it is an image containing whatever is described by your "alt" attributes. If you want search engines to be able to "read" that content, I would recommend going the route of making it actual text styled in conjunction with the image you want via CSS as you propose.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Thanks very much Chad. Yes, I kinda thought the same thing, but it's good to hear from someone else. I think it's a perfect example of using common sense and "know-how" at the same time as using tools, and not to blindly trust all of the results the tools feed us. If something looks fishy, it probably is!

Sorry it took me so long to respond and mark this one as answered. I appreciate it!

Dana

Agreed. I worked at another company that had a 19-year-old kid split out the JS. I submitted the request. I'll let you know what happens. Thanks again!

Thanks Dr. Pete. The marketing team has been complaining about how far the meta tags, etc. are pushed down in our code for years. Unfortunately, there hasn't been enough evidence that this is doing us any harm so it's never been a priority to fix. I believe moving those lines of JS to an external file would, if nothing else, improve our page speed wouldn't it? If our pages load faster it could impact our SEO in a positive way

Thanks again very much for your suggestions

Thanks Dr. Pete. Here's the scoop, and I'm happy to provide the actual URLs so you can have a real view of the source code, etc.

The meta refresh was on this URL:

http://www.ccisolutions.com

it redirected to this URL:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain

We removed the meta refresh, and put "<rel="canonical" href="<a class=" external"="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.ccisolutions.com/" /> to the head of both URLs</rel="canonical">

Our IT Manager couldn't get a 301 redirect to work from http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain  to http://www.ccisolutions.com, but in another Q&A thread Streamline Metrics mentioned that this really shouldn't matter as long as the canonical tag is properly set up, which I think it is.

What do you think? (and thanks very much!)

Yes Paul. I agree. I have seen wild fluctuations on other sites that went through big changes. I believe this is probably an example of a time when we have to hang in there and ride through "The Dip."

"Time, Patience and Intelligent Work" is my mantra....but I also have to convince my CEO that the $1,000 we just spent fixing the meta refresh was actually a good thing. Rankings sinking like this aren't helping me make my case.

If an when I hear anything from Google I'll let you and Bryan know.

I'm sure we aren't the only ones who've fixed something technical that fixed a fragmented link profile. It sure would make me feel better to hear someone say "Yes, similar thing happened to me and now we're ricking it!" LOL - well, you can't blame a girl for dreaming!

Thanks Bryan. Yes, I took your advice and filed a reconsideration request just now. I spelled out exactly what happened with the whole meta refresh fix. This site has so many technical SEO problems that I am just hoping that it's not a completely different problem being caused by something else. I'll let you know what/if I hear anything.

I'd sure love to hear from any other SEOs out there who've ever been in similar situations!

Thanks  again.

Thanks Bryan. Yes, I checked the link profile last night. Everything looks totally normal. Interestingly, nearly all of the added links to the new link total were Internal, not External, so I don't think the quality of the links is the issue, maybe moreso the quantity.

I don't think a reconsideration request would be appropriate in this instance because we have not been de-indexed. We are just being hit hard by the algo I think.

If that is the case, I would hope that over the next few weeks, as Google sees our internal links not changing so dramatically, things will settle down.

Any additional thoughts?

Crazy in a bad way!I am hoping that perhaps some of you have experienced this scenario before and can shed some light on what might be happening.Here is what happened:We recently fixed a meta refresh that was on our site's homepage. It was completely fragmenting our link profile. All of our external links were being counted towards one URL, and our internal links were counting for the other URL. In addition to that, our most authoritative URL, because it was subject to a meta refresh, was not passing any of its authority to our other pages.Here is what happened to our link profile:Total External Links:  Before -  2,757     After -  **4,311  **Total Internal Links:   Befpre -  125        After -  3,221
Total Links:               Before  -  2,882     After -  7,532Yeah....huge change. Great right? Well, I have been tracking a set of keywords that were ranking from spots 10-30 in Google. There are about 66 keywords in the set. I started tracking them because at MozCon last July Fabio Riccotta suggested that targeting keywords showing up on page 2 or 3 of the results might be easier to improve than terms that were on the bottom of page 1. So, take a look at this. The first column shows where a particular keyword ranked on 11/8 and the second column shows where it is ranking today and the third column shows the change. For obvious reasons I haven't included the keywords.11/8   11/14   Change****10        44       -34
10        26       -16
10        28       -18
10        34       -24
10        25       -15
15        29       -14
16        33       -17
16        32       -16
17        24       -7
17        53       -36
17        41       -24
18        27       -9
19        42       -23
19        35       -16
19        -         Not in top 200
19        30       -11
19        25       -6
19        43       -24
20        33       -13
20        41       -21
20        34       -14
21        46       -25
21         -        Not in top 200
21        33       -12
21        40       -19
21        61       -40
22        46       -24
22        35       -13
22        46       -24
23        51       -28
23        49       -26
24        43       -19
24        47       -23
24        45       -21
24        39       -15
25        45       -20
25        50       -25
26        39       -13
26        118     - 92
26        30       -4
26        139     -113
26        57       -31
27        48       -21
27        47       -20
27        47       -20
27        45       -18
27        48       -21
27        59       -32
27        55       -28
27        40       -13
27        48       -21
27        51       -24
27        43       -16
28        66       -38
28        49       -21
28        51       -23
28        58       -30
29        58       -29
29        43       -14
29        41       -12
29        49       -20
29        60       -31
30        42       -12
31        -          Not in top 200
31        59       -28
31        68       -37
31        53       -22Needless to say, this is exactly the opposite of what I expected to see after fixing the meta refresh problem. I wouldn't think anything of normal fluctuation, but every single one of these keywords moved down, almost consistently 20-25 spots. The further down a keyword was to begin with, it seems the further it dropped.What do you make of this?  Could Google be penalizing us because our link profile changed so dramatically in a short period of time? I should say that we have never taken part in spammy link-building schemes, nor have we ever been contacted by Google with any kind of suspicious link warnings. We've been online since 1996 and are an e-commerce site doing #RCS. Thanks all!

Thanks again Keri. It feels so good to finally have this particular issue resolved. The company has been struggling with it for more than 5 years, but until I came along (lucky them, lol!) - they had no idea what was wrong or where to even begin fixing it. I do have a follow up question I am going to post regarding how Google views this sudden massic increase in links....

Hi Jamie and Ryan,

Jamies, you said "Our link profile is small" - How small is small? If it's small and your only links  are somewhat questionable, then, okay maybe I can understand. However, my gut says that's not it.

Ryan, you say that you can find out if you were manually penalized by Google by submitting a reconsideration request. My experience with Google does not play that out. If you haven't been de-indexed then you really can't file a re-inclusion request because you haven't technically been "excluded."

Okay, all that being said, and we are in the same spot as James. We have been in business for over 40 years, do #RCS and our Website has been online since 1996.  Last week we had a number of keywords we had ranking between pages 2 and 3 of Google (We had many more on page one but I'm not going to talk about those).

Following up on a suggestion that was made by Fabio Riccota at MozCon2012, I decided it would be a good idea to isoiate keywords ranking on Page 2 and target those for improvement to get to page 1. I decided, before embarking on any campaigns, I'd check the current rank of those 30-40 keywords prior to trying to optimize the site and move them up toe page one.

What happened next shocked me.

I loaded them in my Firefox RankChecker tool only to discover that all but 4-5 of 50 keywords had dropped out of the top 200 SERPS.

What's even more discouraging is that this is after we fixed a big problem with a meta refresh on our home page, addressed all of our 404 errors and also worked through every single duplicate content issues identified in GWT.

James, I am with you. It looks like we have both dotted our i's and crossed out t's...what are we supposed to do now? What is it we haven't done????

Dana

You are so welcome, and believe me, I understand how hard it can be to convince a client to either not do something or do something differently, because from their perspective all they see is whether the page works or doesn't work. It cost us $1,000 to get a developer to fix our meta refresh and I would never have been able to convince the company to spend the money if SEOMoz had provided some support and validation to the plan.

Good luck!

Hi J, Depending on how popular the keywords are that you want to research, you might try Google Trends (a part of Google labs). This is a great place to see if a particular term is in a downward or upward trend. The tool is located here : http://www.google.com/trends  and has some nice sorting/limiting features too. Hope that helps a little!

Dana

Having just gone through the pain of fixing a meta refresh on a large e-commerce site, I would highly recommend fixing the meta refresh and making it a 301-redirect instead.

I would strongly recommend against telling Google to de-index the vanity URL because, chances are, that's the URL people are going to remember and use if they want to link back to your client's site. Chances are, the link profile is already fragmented. All the external links linking to the vanity profile are giving clout to that URL, but it's not passing on to the flagship site. Have you put both URLs in OSE to compare the linking profiles of each? Definitely do this before you make any big changes. (You may have already considered all of this, I'm not sure). But I can tell you from experience, fixing the meta refresh and putting in a proper 301-redirect will have a significant impact.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Woohoo! Thumbs up! Great job, I love it!  I am jealous because I wish I could build something as cool. Nice job.

This is also a great suggestion. Haven't yet made the leap for paid Majestic SEO tools, but I am oh so close!

Hi Radhey,

I honestly would take this report with a grain of salt. When you ask if the links here are included: sidebar/comments/related posts  without seeing directly, my initial answer is "yes" they are counted.  There are times when a large page with a lot of outbound links (more than 105) are good for the end user. You know, if it makes sense for your business and your customers, then I would take this report with a grain f salt.

Here's an example. We are a large e-commerce site. We are authorized resellers of numerous brands. We want our users to be able to see that and access their favorite brands easily, so we have this page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/shop-by-brand

That page has a ton of links, but it's the best way (right now) for our customers to see and find their favorite brands.

I wouldn't worry about this report too much, honestly, unless you've spammed a page with 100's of links, which it definitely sounds like you did not do. Hope that helps!

Dana

Great suggestion Joel!

Great question and YIPPEE! Thanks for answering Jenn

Personally I would select the 4-5 keywords that best describe the website, products or business and just stick with those. I don't think inserting a whole bunch of keywords is going to be beneficial, and honestly, the keywords probably don't matter at all. However, I understand that some directories will make keywords a required field so you may have to put something there. I would proceed with caution and just approach it with a "less is more" attitude.

Also, another word about directories, make sure you research them very carefully before you decide to submit. Answer these questions:

How long has the directory existed?

What is the directory's Alexa ranking?

What is its PageRank?

How many inbound links does the directory have?

How many of those inbound links are .edu and .gov links?

Is the directory even in Google's index any more?

Does the directory have real human editors? [try emailing them to see if you get a human answer0

Does the directory just include every site that pays them? If so, reconsider your submission.

Does the directory properly categorize the sites it lists?

If you answer those questions about each one, you'll get a better idea if a particular directory is worth pursuing or not.  Also, make sure that this is part of a much larger, broader link-earning strategy.

Dana

Hi Hardley,

OSE updates only about once a month. The last update happened a few days ago and the next one is scheduled for December 6th. Here's a link to the update calendat: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

I'd check again after the next update to see if your backlinks are showing up at that point. If not then it's possible that the directories with which you've submitted may no longer be indexed by Google. This has become a more and more common issue as Google is trying to clear its index of directories that have no editorial discretion and just include links to any site that pays them for a link.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

Try http://www.ahrefs.com  They have a free and paid version and are pretty good about showing new backlinks every day. You might also try the software plug-in at http://www.screamingfrog.com  - Also an excellent resource, not only for backlinks, but many other things too (i.e. crawl errors, etc).

Good luck!

Dana

Yes, there's definitely an awesome way to do this in SEOMoz. You need to set up a campaign, and then associate keywords with that campaign. If you have several different categories of keywords you can separate them with tags to group like words together. I would highly recommend also putting in as many competitors as possible so you can see where they rank for the same terms. Once you've put in your keywords, SEOMoz will crawl once a week and track the rankings over time. You will also be able to export complete history for keywords over time. THis is extremely helpful in determining if you are going up or down for your most important terms. Every site is a little different, so the best thing to do is just get in there and play with it and you'll soon find what works best for you.

Hope that helps! Being able to track keywords like this, together with compeitors' rankings is what make SEOMoz Pro worth every penny (IMHO).

Dana