Manor Quarry Blog

Keywords

To continue the series on web site optimisation, and in particular SEO, we are going to look into the importance of keywords within your web site.

Keywords are vital to the success of SEO. Selecting keywords though is not simply a matter of picking some words and hoping for the best. You need to know your target audience and the best way to reach them. Your SEO campaign must use the correct keywords for your product/service. Use the wrong ones and you could have great search engine rankings, but with no one searching your keywords.

Keyword Selection

The best way to start the process of selecting your keywords is by having a brainstorming session, to determine which words/phrases are most relevant to you and which words/phrases are most likely to be searched by your target market when looking for your product. You want to compile a list of between 5 and 10 words which you believe would find your site when typed into a search engine. It may also be beneficial to search your competitor’s sites to see which keywords they are using.

A very useful tool to see which words are actually being typed into Google is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). This enables you to see if the keywords that you may select are being searched enough times for them to be successful to you. For example, you don’t want to pick a phrase that is only searched on average 5 times per month. However, you also have to think realistically, if your keyword is being searched hundreds of thousands of times a month, the chances of you getting a high enough ranking are slim as such high volume keywords are saturated by competitors.

The tool also allows you to see synonyms of your keyword that you may not have thought of, and other popular phrases that are searched. You may not want to stop at 5-10 keywords, so you could add some of these synonyms to your list.

When choosing your final keywords/phrases, there are a few points to consider.

• Are the keywords relevant to your product/service?
• Can you use these keywords to target specific pages?
• How many of your competitors are using the same keywords?

This entry was posted on June 11, 2009 at 8:56 am and is filed under Web Site Optimisation. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: competitor, Google, Google AdWords Keyword Tool, keyword selection, Keywords, product, ranking, search engine, search engine rankings, SEO, service, target audience, web site, Web Site Optimisation