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SEO Keyword Selection & Research TipsSEO Keyword Research is one of the the most important projects you will need to undertake in any Search Engine Optimisation and website promotion initiative. The purpose of keywords is to identify to the search engines what your site is about and also help your past, present and future customers find you through the search engines using keywords and keyword phrases that directly relate to your business. - these are real SEO skills. Keyword research is the process of selecting the most “optimum performance” keywords and keyword phrases. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for better placement in the major search engines SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), yet it will all amount to a big fat nothing if the right keywords and phrases are not chosen for your website. Even if you do achieve high positions in the major SERPS, you may find that there is little traffic passing through your website due to the wrong selection of keywords. Therefore, your goal is to identify your target audience and research what keyword phrases they might be using to find your type of offerings on the major search engines. A Word of Warning!In the keyword phrase selection process it is very common for people to choose phrases that they believe to be those that are used for search purposes, when in fact they are wrong! An example of this would be using 'Trade Phrases' what I mean by that is what you may refer to as one thing 'in the trade', a customer may use a more standard or basic phrase. However, if your target audience is TRADE CUSTOMERS, then using that phrase would be the correct thing to do. As you can see from the above, it is imperative that you know your TARGET AUDIENCE. Keyword Research ProcessBroken down into four stages the research process is as follows:
Step 1. Find the Keywords - Brain storming with your work colleagues, friends and family is the initial step to finding keywords. This is a great way to learn what phrases people are likely to use to find your product / services, and most likely the most relevant keyword phrases. It is important that you carry out this brain storming becuase you may have searched using one phrase only to find that most other people use something totally different to you. Try and aim for 50 keyword phrases or more, but don't worry too much about the quantity at this stage of the game. I would suggest you look for two word and three word phrases and as I will cover later, we may add what is called MODIFIERS to the selected keywords. Once you have completed your brain storming session, now its time to use a couple of popular keyword research and analysis tools that are available. These tools will be used to enahnce your own findings. The first is Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a keyword research tool that analyzes end user behavior by querying a database of 350 million searches conducted over a recent 60 day time period. In other words, Wordtracker will help you expand your keyword phrase list, give a number of searches for a particlular keyword phrase, thus enabling you to see whether selecting a particular keyword phrase will result in traffic to your site should you effectively optimse your website and will give you a Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) score. Try out Wordtracker here. A KEI score is Wordtracker's suggestion of which keywords would be the most effective to deploy on your website. However, I would not be too concerned with that score as I believe every site can gain excellent rankings for their selected keyword phrases if they put effort into developing good content, a good linking strategy and invests time in the continual development of their site - just as it is in business offline, it takes time to create brand awareness, a good name and trust. Another tool is Overture. Similar to Wordtracker, you place a keyword phrase in the search box and Overture will churn out the number of searches for that particular keyword phrase and alternatives. The disadvantage to using Overture is that it makes no distinction between singular and plural keyword phrases. My advice is to use both to compile your keyword phrase list. Don't be too specific at the startYou need to be looking for a broad range of keyword phrases. For example, if you sell 'pressure washers' you need to be looking for the alternative phrases that may be used to search for that product, such as power washers' or 'high pressure cleaners' and so on. However in the early days of your site development, these keyword phrases may be quite hard to attain good rankings for initialy as there maybe another 500,000+ sites also competing for the same keyword phrase. See my Keyword Tools section for futher tools such as Googles and Espottings keyword suggestion tools and software keyword suggestion tools. Step 2. Analyse the Keywords - The second step is analysing your keyword phrases. This involves analysing the competition for the search terms, i.e. how many pages are indexed in a search engine like Google. This gives you an idea of how many pages are competing for the top spot. Using the keyword phrase of 'pressure washers' enter the phrase into the search engine and click on search. I have used Google for this example. |
