Selecting Website Keywords
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Search Engine Optimization > Selecting Website Keywords
Selecting website keywords is an important part of search
engine optimization. You'll need to research the keywords related to
your website to ensure that people are actually searching for those
words.
On the other hand, you'll also use keyword research to ensure that
the market isn't too competitive. I feel that one of my strong
points is keyword research so I'll cover the topics that I feel are
important. I apologize ahead of time if this page is a bit longer
than usual but keyword research is an extremely important topic and
I can't cut corners on it.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of determining the ideal keywords
for your website. This includes making sure that there is enough
demand along with making sure that it isn't too competitive.
Keyword research also encompasses the discovery of keywords that you
didn't consider or niche markets that may be easier to receive to
search engine results on.
The importance of keyword research can't be stressed enough. If
you select the wrong keywords, meaning there is little demand for
those keywords or if you're going after an extremely competitive
market, you could be doing a bunch of work for nothing.
Keyword Research Software
There are many types of services and software out there to assist
with your keyword research. I'm going to cover the most popular paid
option along with a less effective free option.
The free keyword research tool that I recommend is the
Wordtracker Free Keyword Estimator. This will give you some of
the basic information that you need to make decisions regarding
keywords.
The paid version of
Wordtracker is
what I truly recommend. It'll give you access to the full set of
tools such as differentiating between plural and singular. It will
give you access to the KEI tool which is a measurement of exactly
how competitive a keyword is.
Researching Your Competition
The very first thing that I do is go a search on Google for my ideal
keywords. That is going to tell you who your true competition is at
the moment.What I'll do then is do some in depth research on the
competition. I'll view their
meta tags by right clicking somewhere on their page and I'll
choose 'view source. I do this to see what keywords that your
competition feels are important.
This is when I'll jump into Wordtracker and start looking at
possible niche markets for my ideal keywords to see if it's worth it
to optimize for the niche keywords or not. After doing this for
majority of the top 10 sites I generally have a good idea of what
I'd like to do.
Targeted Keywords
Targeted keywords is best explained as narrowing down your ideal
keywords into more of a targeted search. The best way to explain
this is the use of cell phones. Research shows that when people use
vague keywords such as 'cell phones' they are looking for
information rather than shopping.
When you become more specific with your keywords you're more likely
to find customers that are ready to purchase which in turn increases
your conversion ratio. Using the cell phone example, if someone were
to search for 'nokia cell phones' they have done a bit of research
but still aren't set on a phone.
If someone searches for 'nokia e61 cell phone' they are pretty
sure about what they want and are more likely to convert into a sale
if you're pricing is competitive and your website is user friendly.
Another benefit to this is that it's easier to achieve top
rankings when you can target your keywords a bit more because you're
competing with less websites than if you were optimizing for very
vague keywords.
Keywords In Your Domain Name
Keywords in your domain name give you a relevancy 'bonus' so you
should definitely consider doing your keyword research before
registering a domain name.
Adding hypens or numbers to a domain name just so that you can get a
domain name with your keywords is ok but it makes it difficult for
visitors to return to your site.
Take a look at this example and think about what would be easier
to remember if you decided to wait a week or so to revisit a
website.
Would it be easier to remember Chrome-Wheel-World.com or
ChromeWheelWorld.com? With this in mind it'd also be easier to
remember ChromeWheel.com rather than 4ChromeWheels.com.
The thing to consider is that it's difficult to get premium
domain names these days so you'll need to consider alternatives
while still keeping your keywords in your domain name.
WebsiteSpot.com
offers a tool called 'smart search' which will give you suggestions
if the domain name that you search for is already taken. Try a
couple of searches below and see what you come up with.
Keyword Competition
Another method of researching your keyword competition is to do a
keyword search in Google and see the number of pages that it comes
up with. This is a good indicator of your competition as well.
There's a trick to this though, if you search for 'mustang chrome
wheels', without
the quotes you'll receive a number based on the number of websites
that contain any of those keywords. Even if the site is related to a
mustang in the sense of a horse, it'll be counted in the results.
The way to clear this up is by searching with quotation marks
such as "mustang chrome wheels". This is telling the search engine
that you want to know the number of sites with those exact keywords
in that specific order.
This is going to give you the number of websites that are
competing for the keywords 'mustang chrome wheels'. The lower the
number, the easier it'll be to achieve an ideal search engine
ranking.
Practice Makes Perfect
As you perform more keyword research you'll learn how to identify
good keywords and which keywords to avoid. With that said, you'll
always to do your due diligence as it may uncover a market that you
hadn't considered.
You'll also find markets that you're competition hadn't considered
which opens up great opportunities to take advantage of those
keywords.
Webmaster Forum
I invite you to visit my
webmaster forum,
it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow
webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on. |
