Choosing good keywords

choosing the correct keywords for your page

The very heart of good SEO is to have the right keywords to bring traffic to your site.  Without those key phrases, your site has little chance of competing effectively against sites that use SEO aggressively.  Choosing those words is perhaps the biggest mystery and the most difficult task of SEO.  We’ll offer you some tips to help make that task less daunting, as well as giving a little insight into how it all works.

Two totally separate aspects of internet searches combine to make a keyword phrase effective.  One of those happens when a human types a search query into a search engine.  That query can be considered a keyword, and the search engines will display results based on how well that term matches the index contained in the search engine database.  The second keyword occurrence happens when search engines crawl your site, and examine the web pages for words that are frequently used.  The most frequently repeated words on your site are identified by a search engine as keywords.  In SEO, those phrases are carefully considered and used not only in the page contents, but also in the page title, it’s meta tags, and even the filename under which the page is saved on the server.

Carefully consider the focus of your website.  Make a list of short phrases, two to four words in length, which best describe your site.  Spend the time to make a complete list of possible search terms, from the perspective of someone who might be using a search engine to find what your site offers.  Once you’ve completed the list, go to google.com, and perform a search on each of those terms.  For each search, make a
note of the number of results Google has for the term.  The more results that google finds, the higher your competition for those words will be, and the inverse is that the lower the number of search results, the less popular those terms are going to be with people performing searches.

In addition to noting the number of search results, take the time to look through at least the first page of results for each term.  Are your competitors showing up on specific terms?  If so, you have identified what the competition deems effective.  Continue your search analysis of each term, until you have exhausted your carefully chosen list.  Ideally, your keywords will fall somewhere in the middle between high search results,
and popular searches, but give extra credit to keywords used by competitor sites, as these have already been established to work, and should be given closer consideration than most.

A second method is to cut straight to the chase, and load your competitor sites in your browser.  Once loaded, you can click on on View >> Page Source (in the browser menu bar) and view the actual HTML code of the site.  Note which words appear in the title, meta tags, and are repeated throughout the body of the page.  Repeat this for several competitors.  Compare the results of this research to the terms you had already
chosen as likely keywords, and find out which ones match the most closely.  Directly competing with competitors is not SEO, but it is good marketing strategy.

Many SEO professionals will advise to subscribe to Overture, or to purchase a particular software package, and these are options that provide benefits in finding the best keywords, but they are methods that amount to paying someone else to have your work done for you.  If you want to do this, it might be in your best interest to simply hire an SEO firm from the start, saving yourself additional time by allowing the work to
be done by others, but the best advice is to learn for yourself which keywords work, and which ones do not, as that is the only method that you can be certain will still be available to you next month, or next year, or 5 years from now.  Businesses, such as Overture (recently acquired by Yahoo), are bought out, and software packages become outdated, but learning to do a task will stick with you for as long as you have need of the skill.  Choosing the keywords to represent your website is a vital ingredient to the success of your site, so consider your options well, and make the choices that best fit your needs and budget.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com