Search engine optimisation is a complex subject but anyone should be able to learn the art by simply dedicating enough time and research. This post will try and take you through a step by step process of choosing your keywords for SEO.
Keyword Research
The first part of any SEO campaign should be the careful choosing and targeting of your keywords and keyword phrases. Many a website has failed by not implementing this fundamental part of SEO.
Keywords are the most important part of your SEO and will ultimately determine your success, choosing the wrong keywords for your site will lead to many hours of wasted time and generate little to no qualified traffic. Put simply targeted traffic = sales.
When starting your keyword research it helps to write a list of the main products or services, also try to imagine what keyword phrases a potential customers may use to find your website and make note of them.
Let your competitor’s websites help you with your keyword research by looking to see what keywords they are targeting. Pay particular attention to what they place in their <title></title> meta desc H1, H2...H6 <b><i><strong> and their anchor text. add them to your list.
When you have created a list that you feel covers your products and services adequately enter them into a keyword suggestion tool like
wordtracker or
overture’s keyword suggestion tool. Put your keywords into the tool and take note of the number of impressions (searches made) and the alternative keyword suggestions.
Try to choose keywords that are not generic and are specific to your business. There is no point targeting keywords that have multiple reasons for people searching on them. For example a company that designs website banners:
The search phrase “banner” has 6250 impressions per month on overture
The search phrase “banner design” has 353 impressions per month on overture
The search phrase “web banner” has 205 impressions per month on overture
The search phrase “web site banner” has 171 impressions per month on overture
The keyword “banner” is very generic and applies to many different industries so anyone typing in this search query may not be specifically looking for your services. In my opinion targeting the smaller more specific searches would offer a higher return on investment. In this case you could target all of the specific searches above by choosing “web site banner design” for your keywords. This would also target the keyword “banner” but would bring more targeted traffic than only targeting the keyword “banner”. Buy using this method you are now targeting a total of 6979 searches and 729 highly targeted searches.
Verifying your keywords conversion potential
So you have got a good list of keywords but are they good enough? To find out if they are worth targeting in terms of conversions I use pay per click engines like overture to see how much people are bidding for each keyword/search phrase. The general rule here is the more someone is willing to bid on a search phrase usually equals a higher conversion rate which in tern equals higher ROI. The basic rule is in order for someone to bid on any given phrase it must offer a good enough return on investment (ROI) to cover the cost of the click.
Proper keyword research will result in more targeted traffic which equals more sales.
Should hopefully help out some of us newbies
