What is Choose the Best Keywords for your Website (Keyword Research)
July 4th, 2010 by
Keyword research is one of the most important phases in you website promotion / search engine optimization (SEO) process. This is the first & a very important phase where your decide what keyword you will work around while SEOing your site. If you fail to identify the right key phrases, your SEO campaign is bound to fail.
Identifying the right keyword phrases.
A common misconception among the newbies is that if you target & rank for one word keyword or generic search terms your online business will flourish. No. The idea here is to identify keywords for which you can get maximum ROI. A person searching for marketing is not himself sure about the kind of product or service he is looking for! If you decide to target this keyword you cannot expect as many conversions as a keyword like “website marketing” or “internet marketing” will get you. The bottom line is, if you start ranking for generic keywords you can expect more visitors on your site but they may not be willing to convert because they were probably looking for something else. Additionally, it is difficult to get ranked for generic keywords in the first place!
The first step is to outline keywords that you think your target visitors might search. Not a big deal because you know what product or service you offer? No. If you just focus on your site you will probably end up with a list that is mostly filled with all kinds of jargons specify to your business & people actually looking for your kind of site may not necessarily search for such technical words. Think from layman’s point of view. Talk to your friends & collegues. They may provide some useful feedback. Check out what your competitors are targeting. How? You may have to check their title & meta tags or even check their website content. This keywords list should include singular & plural forms, hyphenated & non-hyphenated forms & even misspelled words.
Depending on how competitive your industry is and how established your website is you must revisit this list of keywords. If your website is already established with good page rank & has quality inbound links you may consider some of the keywords that are a bit more competitive. Otherwise the keywords that you select shouldn’t be very competitive. You must verify if all the keywords you have listed are actually searched for & also see how competitive those keywords are. There are free & paid keywords selection tools that allow you to see how many people are actually searching for your keywords. You may also find keywords using these tools that you might not have striked your during your initial research.
Free keyword Research tools. Please note :- The order in which these keyword tools are listed is not at all important. I am not inclined towards or against any of these tools!
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com (free version)
http://www.inventory.overture.com
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Once you have checked the competition for your keywords you must cut down your list to target keywords that are not very competitive. A lot depends on your marketing budget while selecting keywords. If you are willing to spend more on buying links from quality websites you can even select some important keywords!
Now what are you going to these keywords. You want to rank for these keywords so make sure that you properly spread all your keywords throughout your website. Targeting more than 3-5 keywords per page is a wise decision. All these keywords must be targeted in your link title (anchor text) during link development.
Keyword Research
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