Keywords ? Key For All Doors
|
|
Keyword research is certainly the most important phase in Search Engine Optimization process. Whether you hire a SEO company to do the job or you are doing the SEO process in-house, take your time during this process. You should not be a spectator, but you should be an active part of the decision making process.
Try to think as a customer
Before to start the keywords analysis & research process, be sure that you know how you should perform this process. Try to think about your keywords as a customer. How would you search for your product or service? Which keyword or key phrase would you use? Think about which words or phrases describe best your product or service.
Generic keywords vs. highly targeted key phrases
Surprisingly many companies still believe that increased traffic will necessary lead to increased sales. Unfortunately this is very far from the truth. If traffic is not well targeted, visitors will not found what they are looking for, and they won't order anything.
Many companies still make the mistake to attempt to get ranked for generic keywords. This is often costly mistake. You will simply loose your time, money and resources to get ranked for generic keyword. Chances are that if you are in competitive industry you won't succeed to achieve top ranking. In many cases, even if you succeed to get high ranking for generic keyword you won't benefit much from that. Let's elaborate this with an example.
Key phrase "shoes manufacturers" will return worldwide results, and your competition will be very strong. Even if you manage to rank high, "conversion to sales rate" will be fairly low. Some of the people would actually search for "shoes manufacturers" which are located in Asia. They might enter on your site, and they will leave without to order anything. You will get more traffic, and you want increase your sales or establish new business contacts. None of your goals will be achieved.
That is because your product or service is not exactly what the people are searching for. Key phrases like "UK shoes manufacturers" or "EU shoes manufacturers" will have better conversion and you will get high ranking faster. Why? It's easier to get ranked for these key phrases because of smaller number of competitors. From the other side, because of better targeting your conversion rate would be higher, because your traffic is better targeted.
Best approach to do find right keywords and key phrases is to get your generic keyword, and add a specific word to it. Using this approach you will be able to find yours most important key phrases, and target your traffic much better. Key phrases are usually two to five words long.
Think global
In different countries people use different terminology for same product or service. Be sure that you check your terminology for your main keywords. Different terminology for your keyword might be used in Canada, or in Australia. Follow your site statistic, and if some country is missing, something might be wrong with your terminology.
How many keywords do you need
Number of the key phrases for which you will optimize your pages will depend from your budget of course. But be sure to create long list to select from. Initial keyword research should end with at least 70 -100 keywords or key phrases.
Your first thought here might be how you will find so many keywords. Creativity and well knowing your industry will do half of the work. The tools will do the other half. Wordtracker has free trial which will tell you how many times the key phrase was searched for last month. Full version (you can pay for one day only if you want to use this tool once) is much more powerful tool of course. Overture has also free tool for keyword research which will give you useful suggestions. These tools will give you suggestions which you might not come to your mind, and tell you how many competitors you have for every keyword.
Next phase should be customizing some of these suggestions and make the re-check after that. After establishing the main list, start the elimination. Have in mind that your chances are bigger if you select bigger number of keywords. It is always best strategy to optimize each page for one primary and one secondary keyword. Optimize your main page for your most important key phrase.
Final selection will depend from your budget. You can always optimize more pages later, so keep the initial keyword list. Best option is to start to optimize your pages for less competitive key phrases first. When you achieve high ranking for these key phrases, then go after more competitive key phrases.
About The Author
Zoran Makrevski
Search Engine Positioning Firm
|
|
|
Created & Maintained by Empower! CMS Web Sites
Host2Sell Web Hosting | Emarketing Workshops | Site SEO Review | FREE NewsletterBlogging, Spamming, And Blog Spam
Email marketing once proved to be immensely effective, but the greedy and idiotic polluted the well by spamming the planet with everything from weight-loss products to sexual enhancement drugs and beyond. Because of the stench, fil...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Should You Buy Text Links?
You can rank number one (Or at least in the top ten) for just about any search phrase by just buying text link ads, even if the web site isn't related to the search phrase in anyway, it can still rank in the top ten of the search results. Some web site owners see this as the only true way to the top ten. So, should you buy your way to the top? Or should you play it safe?Some say it's better to be safe than sorry. While others say if you play it safe and never make it to the top ten of the search results, your losing anyway. So, it must be much better not to play by the rules and get a top ten ranking and make a little money before you get banned from the search engines. Well, it's not that easy and you can see the cons and pros in both ways.First let's look at the pros of pl...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Getting Honest With The Search Engines
Getting Honest With The Search EnginesI spend a lot of time reading newsletters and forum postings about Search Engine Marketing. More often than not, people are asking about methods used to improve Search Engine rankings: what works, what doesn't, and what will get you in trouble.Search Engine*:A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list o...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Get Personal With Google
Anyone who's been on the net any time at all knows that Google has been the search engine of choice for many for a while now. Whether that continues remains to be seen, but for now, with MSN still in development and Yahoo going through some growing pains, many still feel that Google is the leader. As such, it's worth dropping in to the Google Labs every now and then to see what's going on there.For example, Google's Personalized search offers a fun and useful way for searchers to interact with part of the mysterious and closely-guarded Google search algorithm. You can set a search profile that's stored as a cookie on your computer. The easy-to-use Google profile interface allows you to pick specific topics that interest you. Once chosen and saved, you c...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Whats All This Hype About Links?
What's all the talk about links we hear about? Reciprocal links? Non-reciprocal links? Targeted links? Link Popularity? I need links. You should have links. What about the dead links? I don't have enough links! Ever since I joined the link farm, I dropped out of the search engines! Well, you musn't fret; we're going to shed the light on all theses different links. You'll learn the different types, how to get them, how to keep them and how to keep them current.Over the next few issues, we will investigate the ABCs of linking, look into some helpful software and a take a close look at how Technet has solved this time consuming, but necessary issue for several top sites.Let's start with some definitions.Reciprocal Link (Two-way link): When you link to a web site and that web si...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Top 5 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes
There are a lot of ways to promote your website and, unfortunately, a lot of these methods are mistakes. Here is a list of some of the more common mistakes (often referred to as Black Hat SEO) that you should steer well clear of.1. Bad NeighbourhoodsThese sites are also known as free for all (FFA) pages and link farms. They serve no other purpose other than to list tens of thousands of unrelated websites. Not only will these sites not provide your site with any traffic, certain sear...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Part I : Getting Free Hits Using These Simple Tips & Tricks
Search Engine OptimizationSearch engines still remain the #1 tool to generate free targeted traffic to any website, so make sure that your site is indexed in every major search engine. Do a through check of all the meta tags and make sure you are not missing any one. The most important meta tag is the "Title" tag which should be kept short and sweet. Then there comes the "Description" and the "Keywords" tags, please make sure that you are not dumping keywords on this tag which do not belong to your website. e.g. don't include keywords for selling perfumes when you are selling books. Make sure tha...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Analyzing Googles Backlinks Is Close To Worthless
...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
Finding The True Pr Of A Page?
I had an email "conversation" this last week which I feel others may benefit from "listening in" on. Here it is in summary:"AndyWhy is it that xxxxxxx ranks so well on Google for the phrase xxxxxx xxxxxx when it has a PR of 0. The other top results have PRs of 5 and 6. Is Page Rank becoming less important?Graham"My answer to Graham was to go back and read a previous newsletter where I discussed just this. In issue 48 I discussed anomalies in PR and backlinks. You can read it online...(related: Search Engine Optimization)
site-map - Copyright © 2006 Empower! Web Design | All Rights Reserved. | Search Engine Optimization