What is keyword research?
Keyword research is one of if not the most important activities
in you can do to drive traffic to your website. By doing your
homework when it comes to keywords you can learn a lot about
phrases and words your target market search for which in turn can
help you create content they are more likely to find and ultimately
generate more interest in your business.
Identifying Relevant Keywords
You can use the free keyword research tools mentioned later in
this post to search for keywords, but how do you know what keywords
are relevant? Ask yourself these questions when trying to identify
keywords and phrases:
- How relevant is the term to your product, service or
content?
- How likely is it someone searching for the term will perform
the desired action when they get to your site i.e. buy a
product?
- Will people searching for this term leave your website having
not found what they are looking for?
Competitor Analysis
It is worth looking at your competitors website's to see what
keywords they are targeting and niches they may not be targeting.
Google Adwords and SEOmoz's Term
Extractor lets you enter in a website URL and suggests keywords
based on it, this can be very useful for competitor analysis.
Free Keyword Research Tools
Although this tool is aimed at AdWords it is an excellent way to
visualise how many people have searched for a keyword or phrase
over the last year. You can throw multiple keywords at Google
AdWords at once and compare them to see what keywords may be best
to target.
This allows you to compare multiple search terms against each
other to see how popular each search term is over time and by
country. This gives you the chance to see how the different seasons
can affect your search results.
I have identified the keywords now what?
Once you have identified your keywords you want to integrate
them into your websites content. This includes headings (h1,
h2, h3 HTML tags), the title tag (look in the top left corner of
the browser to see the title tag for a given page), link text,
image alt text and normal page content.
Try to have a page per keyword/phrase instead of trying to fit
all the keywords into one page, remember to write your content for
people not search engines.
External links (links linking to your website) are an important
factor to getting a good Google rank and those links should contain
your keywords. It is not easy getting people to link to you, you
can be sneaky about it and pay people to link to you (amount other
things) but Google doesn't look well on sneaky people, if it
doesn't feel right it probably isn't. The best way of getting
traffic to your site is to provide content that people find useful
and will want to link to.
Hopefully this has given you a little insight into how to make
keywords work for you to get you a better search engine rank.