I’d like to reference and paraphrase an article I wrote on another blog that I have:
More About SEO Keyword Research (www.webstix.com)
Basically, what you’re doing is trying to match up specific, niche keywords on your site with the terms that people are searching on. Search traffic is targeted traffic because people are looking for something specific. Your goal is that they end up at your website instead of your competition. So it’s all about keyword research.
- Research using the Google Keyword Tool. This is a tool that Google provides for their AdWords (pay per click ad) customers so that they know what keywords to bid on. The cool thing is, those are the same keywords we want to try to optimize because these are keywords that people are using. Type in your keyword (and the CAPTCHA word if you’re asked) and you see some results. Below is a screen shot showing you what fields you should look at (adjust this using the “Choose columns to display:” pulldown) and then also set the “Match Type:” to “Exact”.
- Next, what you want to look for is high search volume and low competition. You’ll most likely find this with what are called “long tail keywords” which simply means the keywords are long with anywhere from 3-5 or more words in them.
- You keep doing research until you found keywords that had low competition. There are a number of tools you can use to help speed up this research but that’s the process. It takes a while, yes, but digging for gold always does.
After all your research, you’ll have a list of maybe 5 or more good keywords which will become your main keywords. You’ll then go back to your website and:
- Use your keywords in your URL – so in the domain name (best) or in the page name (ok).
- Use your keywords in the title of your pages.
- Use your keywords in the meta keywords of your pages.
- Use your keywords in the meta description of your pages.
- Use your keywords in your copy.
- Link those keywords to their appropriate target / landing pages.
You want to set up keyword #1 to be one page by itself or convert an existing page to use that keyword (but why not just start a new page?). Keyword #2 would be another landing page and so on. Make internal links to the appropriate pages.
So the research is a bit of work – for sure. Think of it as creating blueprints. Once you have your blueprints, you know exactly what you’re going to build and you can just go and do it.
-Tony
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