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Research the keywords that will attract high value visitors

May 13, 2008

Keywords are the search terms that people key in to the search engines. The goal is to discover those terms and to embed them into the right places in the right quantity on your web pages.

An important point to remember here is that the copy on your pages should always be written for your visitors first and the search engines second. There is no point being found by the search engines only for your visitors to immediately go elsewhere because your pages do not read well. The objective is to convey your message in a natural and engaging way and include your required keywords without distorting that message.

Seed list

The first step is to compile a seed list of all the general terms that describe your business. These will almost certainly be too wide ranging to to give your site a high ranking. There will simply be too much competition and most visitors searching on general terms would not be relevant.

Refine

The seed list is used as a prompt for phrases that more accurately describe your business. These phrases, whilst being no more than three or four words, should contain modifiers that are relevant to your market, location, services, products, skills, style, etc.

Alternatives

Now consider variations such as plurals, abbreviations, acronyms, alternative spellings, merged words, hyphenated words, common misspellings, etc.

Blending

By blending these keyword phrases into meaningful combinations, it is possible to come up with additional keyword phrases.

The competition

Look for ideas on competitor sites, especially those that are ranking highly for your search terms. Look at page titles, headings and links.

Analyse

The resulting list may contain tens or even hundreds of keyword phrases. But are they relevant? Are people actually entering those terms into search engines? Which search engines? How many competitor sites are there?

The goal is to find the keyword phrases that are popular with searchers and return low numbers on the results pages. There are two market leading tools that provide just such analysis – Wordtracker external link and Keyword Discovery . They will calculate the effectiveness of a particular keyword phrase (the Keyword Effectiveness Indicator ) and suggest a wealth of alternative keywords.