Keywords are the search terms that web users type into the search boxes of Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. The results that the Search Engine presents the user with depend upon how accurately the site relates to the search term. For example if you are looking for a butcher in Birmingham you will not be interested in a site for a hairdresser in Hemel Hempstead. Equally getting ranked highly for a search term that gets a lot of searches but has nothing to do with your site is no use either. Users may visit your site but will soon leave it when they realise that the content is not what they are looking for. What we need to do is find the search terms (keywords or phrases) that potential visitors to your site are likely to use.
Choose your keywords wisely, they could make or break your site. It will not matter if you have the most beautifully designed site, the quickest e-commerce software and the lowest prices for your product anywhere in the world if people cannot find your website. By choosing the right keywords you can help drive not just traffic but the right kind of traffic to your site.
The first thing to do is to think of the words and phrases that you think visitors are likely to use, after all you are the expert in your field and so you should have knowledge of any terminology that is relevant to your websites purpose. Now make a list of all these words and phrases.
Next go and look at all your competitors, particularly the ones who rank highly for the words on your list. Take a look at the language that they use on their pages and if you see keywords and phrases that you have not included put them on your list.
If you ever fill out a crossword in a daily paper you will realise that the newspaper changes the compiler of the crossword every two or three months. As you fill in a crossword regularly you start to understand the way that the compiler thinks and over time you get better and faster at completing the puzzle. Then the newspaper changes the compiler and suddenly you find that you have filled in barely half the clues, but over time you improve until the compiler is once again changed. Now you may be the expert in your field but that does not mean that everybody thinks the same way that you do. You need to try to figure out how other people think and what search terms they are likely to use. One of the best ways to do this is to use a Thesaurus. There are a number of them online, just search Google and you will find plenty.
Your next step is to use a keyword tool to help you make your decisions. For me the best tool to use is Google’s Adword Keyword Tool, search on Google for it. The real advantage of this is that not only will it give you alternatives that you may not have thought about using before but it will tell you how often each term has been searched for in the last year. Now how useful is that? You may well find that there are terms that you had never even considered that are actually getting searched for more often than all the terms you thought would be popular.
You should now have an extensive list of keywords and how often they have been searched for. From this list we are going to whittle them down to just 10 words and phrases, some will be single words e.g. website while others will be phrases e.g. search engine optimisation. Those longer phrases are what are termed long-tail phrases.
In my next search engine optimisation article I will give you tips on how to deploy the keywords that you have chosen on your page to help get your page as a high a ranking as possible.