Optimize My Search

Keywords Analysis & Research

Keyword research is certainly one of the most important phases in search engine optimization process. There are many different reasons for owning a web site but if you are looking to get visitors using search engines, the right keywords or keyword phrase can make all the difference. Good Keywords is a free program that I use that can help you with keyword research and also has a variety of other tools that are extremely useful in helping get rankings. Just enter in a keyword or phrase and it will show you how many searches a month there is for that word.

There are obvious advantages to having the right keywords
from the beginning but if your site has grown stale in the search engines, take a hard look at your keywords and see if the may need some over hauling. Of course this will take a little time for the search engines to adjust but hopefully, with the right adjustments, you will see some growth again. Also look how much competition there is for the keyword you are trying to rank in. I will go into that deeper later in the article. Before starting the keywords analysis/research process, we need to have a starting point, an idea of what we are looking to accomplish. The easiest way is try to think of keyword ideas is put yourself in the visitors shoes, How would you search for your web site? Which keyword or key phrase
would you use? Brainstorm on this and come up with as many possible words and phrases as you can think of. You will not use them all, but you never know when putting two words together can make a great keyword phrase. Be specific.

What do I mean by be specific? Let’s start with this, true or false: Increased traffic will directly lead to increase sales? The answer is false. If the traffic you are getting is not well targeted, visitors will likely not find what they are looking for. There is another drawback to getting ranked with non specific, generic keywords and that is competition. For most generic terms the competition is high and trying to get high rankings in those words can mean time and money. General speaking, the benefits will not be so great in return. Let me give you a simple example. Lets say you site is about computer tech books. You started this site because you liked learning all the new technology about computers and wanted to have a site that visitors could interact and share ideas and possibly sale a book or two in the process. You decide to optimize for the word “book”. You spend lots of money, work hard and finally crack the top ten in Google for the term “book”. Traffic is coming in fast and furious but no sales, why? It is due to your site not being exactly what the majority people are searching for when they type in “book”.

If you targeted a more specific keyword phrase like: “computer books” or even better “computer technical books”, your over all traffic may decrease but your targeted traffic would increase.Key phrases like “computer books” or “computer technical books” will have better conversion and you will get high ranking faster. Why higher rankings, less competition. Where there may be billions of sites with the word “book” as a keyword, your more specific keyword will have substantially less, thus ranking higher in that keyword. (If you whole site is up to par) I good approach would be to find the right generic keywords and key phrases and add a specific word to it that relates to your site. Key phrases are usually two to five words long. Now we have researched and I have this list, how many keywords do I use? That is a good question and a topic that has many answers out there. I will give you what I think and do. In a beginning site, use 3-5 keyword phrases. Why phrases? They are more specific. If you have a word that describes your site and is very specific, use it also. These will be you top 5 that you found and go on you main page. Obviously you will have some keywords/phrases left over. Some will be very good ones, keep them and as your site expands, optimize different pages for different words.

I would also like to leave you with this thought. It is better if you try to rank well in a little less competitive keyword at first and then when you get ranked high and have a visitor base, start revamping to go after more competitive phrases. Here is an example as of this writing:

1- 1,005,477 searches a month for the term “notebook computer”

50 - 14,985 searches a month for the term “used computer”

As a new site I would go after ranking well with “used computer” and then if notebooks is a goal, start adding that as a keyword after you rank high with used computer and have trust with from Google.

Popularity: 3%

Wednesday ~ January 01, 2007 by OMS Posted in Keywords |

 

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