Keyword Research - a great Foundation for a profitable Online Business.
Keyword Research stands for the
identification and proper use of appropriate and relevant and targeted words in your web-pages. A very thorough Keyword Research Effort is imperative for the success
of your Search Engine Optimization effort.
Keyword Research has become an integral part of starting up your own business too.
You also need to be good at keyword research to be able to grow your business exponentially
by way of the Internet. Search engine marketing is here to stay for the long term,
so you might as well get started now, if you have been putting it off.
A few years back, all you needed was to enter the description of your business in
the title tag and you were done with optimizing your web-site. The search engines
would eventually find you and you would be very happy. Even if
you did not get the top ranking you really didn't care very much.
Alas, its not the same any more. You are either in the top 10 ranking for your
targeted keywords and doing well in the search engines or you are nowhere.
Not showing up in the top 10 just doesn't cut it any more.
The field of Search Engine optimization has become so specialized, complicated,
arcane and confusing that for most startups there is no easy way to do this. Of
course, now there are companies who do nothing but Search Engine Optimization. It
looks like the acronym SEO is bound for immortality by becoming a byword in business.
Is it any wonder that someone is even trying to patent the term 'SEO'?
Here are some questions I will try to answer in this article.
- Are SEO and keywords the same thing?
- Why should I worry about my keywords?
-
What keywords are best for my business?
- Where should I be using them?
- Should I use one word per page or a hundred? A
- Are phrases better than individual
words?
- How do I determine the best keywords for my pay-per-click/adsense campaign?
Aren't Keyword Research and Search Engine Optimization the same? How does Search
Engine Optimization(SEO) relate to keywords?
SEO is the process of increasing the number of visitors to your web-page
by the careful and deliberate use of
targeted keywords and their specific placements
designed to get the page show up on the top listing for such keywords. (SEO also
includes other strategies such as using inbound and outbound links, link sharing
with other sites, etc. But all that is beyond the purpose of this article.)
Now, lets divvy this up and see what it really means.
1) Its the process of increasing the number
of visitors to your web-page. The question is :What kind of visitors?
We need only visitors who are actually looking to buy something that we are selling.
So, I need visitors who have typed into the search engine
the exact sequence of targeted keywords you have mentioned on your page.
2) Careful and deliberate use of targeted keywords: Search Engines
determine your ranking by a number of factors. Keywords in all the important places
are very important for a search engine to find your page and also determine its
meaning as well as its position in the list displayed to the customer.
A search engine uses a spider(a piece of software code) executing against your page.
It goes through the text in your page and tries to determine what the page is about.
It also tries to determine the relevance of your material in terms of what the user
has typed into the search engine.
About every month, the spider crawls
through the world wide web and updates the search engine Index. When the user types
in a phrase in the search engine text box, the search engine looks in its database
for web pages matching those words and display the results.
Why should I take the time to do keyword research?
If you are like me, there will a 100 other things to do before you can get a moment
to sit down and think about researching your keyword lists. But remember, if you
spend some time upfront, you can make a lot of money you would have not known about.
If your customer is searching to buy a ‘widget’, and you happen to be selling it,
you want the customer to come to your web-site so that you can make him an offer.
If you take the trouble to work on your keywords list and properly indicate that
on your pages, your website appears in the top on the search page when the customer
enters "widgets".
And since you provided an appropriate description of your widgets and the nature
of your service in the meta tags, the customer clicks on the link against your business
name and lands on your web-page.
How do I find the best keywords that are right for me?
Here goes. The seven simple steps to
keyword mastery.
Step 1) Start with the most common words you use to describe your
business(or your niche, if you operate in one). These should definitely be a major
part of the keyword list. Now,if you are in the automobile service business, you
may have the following: Automobile Repair , Body Shop, Car Repair, New tires with
car repair, Wax and Shine etc. If you actually have a niche business such as Jaguar
Service And Repairs, then it becomes even more easier.
Step 2) Call your friend. Ask him how he would try to find you
on a search engine if he lost your phone number and he wanted to look you up on
the Internet. What if he forgot the name of your establishment? What if ....
Your perception of how people see you may be different from your customers' perception
of you. Add these new words to the list. Repeat this as many times as you can.
Step 3) Find other words related to your original list.
such as names of the brands. Lexus Repair, Lexus spare-parts, Honda kit, etc. Mix
and match keywords with your original list to find even more keywords.
Step 4) Go to google and run a search for your widget.
See what keywords bring up your competition and what words do not. You definitely
need to add them to your list too.
Step 5) Add plurals and common mis-spellings too. We are trying
to catch common usages. Add acronyms, geographical specifications etc..
Step 6) Now, you have to figure out as to how often people
search using each of the phrases you have identified in your list.
You use the Google Adwords tool for this purpose.
We use google because google is the titan in the search field. The 600 pound gorilla,
if you will. This tool is pretty intuitive and after some playing around, you will
get an idea of how it works.
Step 7) Make sure your keywords are placed in the following
locations on you web page:
- Page Title
- Meta Keywords
- Meta Description
- Header Tags
- Alternate Description for images
- First Paragraph on the page
- Strong Tags
- Em tags
- Ordered lists and unordered lists
- Anchor Tags
- File names
- Folder Names
- Footer Tags
- Any URLs and links in your pages.
Should I use multiple keywords in the same page?
The answer is YES!
Use as many keywords as it makes sense. Don't overdo it. If your content becomes
just a keyword trash-bin, the users will start skipping over it and the search engines
will catch on pretty fast. It is called keyword-stuffing.
Avoid using too many keywords where it do not make sense. Also, it's best if you
have multiple pages offering up different keywords. One caveat. You need to be aware
of ‘Keyword density’. Sometimes, if your usage of keywords is too high, and it looks
like you have placed too many keywords, the search engine may not give you the best
ranking. “Sprinkling” is the key-word when it comes to using them on each page.
Are phrases better than individual words?
Depends! If your customer is searching for self-cleaning widget, then you should
use self-cleaning widget
.
If your customer is searching for just "widget", or "auto clean", you should use
these words separately. The next question deals with this in more detail.
What are long-tail keywords? How do I use them?
A few years back, there were very few sites in each criteria. No matter what you
were searching for, chances were you could get it pretty soon.
But now, you have 100s of thousands of web-pages with the same keyword. The other
day, I decided to reward myself with a new fishing pole. (The old one was still
showing the marks of an epic struggle with a monstrous fish last summer.)
If I enter "fishing", I may have to wade through a site to find exactly what I need.
Hence I entered "fishing pole".
When I searched for fishing pole, Google returned 2,550,000 pages. And that is only
the number of pages in English. Imagine you being one of them. The chances of your
page being found among the 2 Million pages is negligible at best. Not a chance of
my becoming your customer.
On the other hand, when I typed in "Arcanite Fishing Pole", I got the exact thing
I was looking for. And there were only 166,000 odd pages. But you see, if you had
used the longer specific keyword phrase, your competition just got whittled down
by nearly 100,000 pages.
Users have begun to search for more specific keyword phrases too.
Experts have calculated that even though many people still type in single word phrases,
since it is divided among so many competitors, it is more profitable for you to
be found by people searching using longer keywords.
Moreover, with long tailed keywords, you can catch your customer in the right
spot on the sales cycle. If he says "buy Arcanite Fishing Pole" on
the search engine text box, you know he is calling out for you, don't you?
How often do I have to check my keywords?
As often as you can. Your customers react to various influences around them and
search for different terms at different times. To be able to remain on top with
a good ranking you need to keep on top of your keywords.
Sometimes they react to an offer made by a competition and start searching for similar
offers. I know. You are saying:”But I don’t have that much time to devote to just
keyword research.” That brings us to the next question.
Do I have to do it all by myself?
I have had many websites in the past few years. In the beginning I did everything
manually the old fashioned way. Lately I’ve found that using a few tools to help
make life easier for me. Even though you can do it all by yourselves if you had
the time and the tenacity(which I sorely lack), I suggest you find yourselves a
tool to do the work for you.
Here are a few I have found helpful in the
past and you should definitely consider! Some of these I still use with great results.