1. Choosing Keywords
One of the first steps of any SEO campaign is choosing the keywords you want for your target audience. In other words, discovering the search terms or words that potential customers are using to find products or services like yours, and then build your Web content around those words. What complicates this process is that countless other websites are trying to do the same thing!
Understanding the competitive ratio: Generally speaking, the more popular the search term, the more websites compete to rank high for that search term. Of course you want to rank high for popular terms but if you don’t have limitless resources, it is wise to aim for search terms in which you have a realistic chance at a high ranking on the search engine results page (SERP)
The best keywords to use are ones that are being search and search, but are words or phrases that are being overlooked by other websites.
There are a number of ways to find search terms. One way to do this is to calculate the ratio of the number of pages a search returns to the popularity of the search term.
Do the math: First, create a list of the keywords, or better yet, keyword phrases – a potential client may plausibly search if he or she were looking for your product (A toy retailer, for example, might start with variations of toy, toys, action figures, stuffed animals; a specialty shop might also try collectible toys, antique toys)
Then see how often users search for these terms by entering them into keyword tracking tools such as Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) , Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com) or Google AdWord’s Keyword Tool (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). The Google AdWords tool is free, and the website SEOBook.com offers a free, though not as powerful, version of Wordtracker. Besides showing how many times these phrases are search on average in a day or month, these tools will suggest other relevant terms.
After you have researched your words, you are going to want to enter them into Google. The more websites that are returned for a keyword or keyword phrase, the more competition you will have with that phrase. You should realize that you will have a better chance for a keyword or keyword phrase if the results that shown on the search engine results page (SERP) are less than one-million (1,000,000)
Finally, you will want to divide the number of indexed pages by the number of daily searches. The lower the result, the more promising the term. Try to aim for a ration of 500 to 1 or less.
Narrow your keywords: If your ratio is higher than 500 to 1, you will probably want to revise your keywords and use choose more narrower or more specific keywords. If you do most of your business locally, you would benefit from using a geographic term to each keyword used on top level pages. (antique toy shop becomes antique toy shop Tampa) These searches are less popular, but the competition to win it is less populated, and will likely generate a lower ratio.
There is absolutely no need to generate an exhaustive list of phrases. In other words, you don’t need any more than a dozen or so keyword and key phrase combinations. Because each web page has a different focus or objective, you should use keywords that are tailored to each page, rather than to the whole site. When your keywords are broken down to a page by page criteria the chances of being found on search engines are greater.
This was Part 1 of 3 for “Back to the Basics of SEO” – Part 2 will cover “Placing Keywords Strategically” and Part 3 will cover “Building a Better Website”
So please subscribe to my Feed and you will see Part 2 “Placing Keywords Strategically” within the next day or two.
My schedule has been really hectic with website design and search engine optimization. I am still available for hire though. Thank you.
Read: Part 2 of 3
