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March 6th, 2010 by Susie
One of the most important things to get right, keywords and keyword phrases are a strong determinant of just how well it is possible to optimise any website. Keyword research is one of the most important pieces in the SEO puzzle. It’s well worth your time to look into it in detail, especially when starting a new site from scratch.
The first item under the microscope is the business plan. What is on sale? Do people want it? Is it unique or are a lot of people already selling it? If the latter, what’s going to set your website apart? Come up with a list of words and phrases you would like to lead people to your website. They should be terms you would put into a search engine, let’s say Google, if you happened to be looking for the particular products or services that will be available on your website. Make it a long list, it can always be narrowed down later as your search engine optimisation gets more focused.
Let’s take the example of a shop selling SCUBA diving equipment. Some items from the basket of keywords might be scuba, scuba diving, scuba gear, diving gear, diving equipment, scuba equipment, diving, scuba tanks, wetsuits, fins, snorkels, dive masks, and dive computers. Ignore plurals, punctuation, and capitals- wetsuit and wetsuits are treated as the same item for most purposes, and so are SCUBA and scuba, but think about synonyms. Where one searcher might use scuba tank, another might use dive tank or oxygen tank. Alternative spellings from British or American English are worth adding to the list, and even popular misspellings.
Your keyword basket should cover the whole website, not just the main page. Each page should have some primary keywords. At the top level entry page, the keywords to concentrate on are the focus of the business. In this case, maybe scuba diving and scuba equipment. From there, create links to a second level that has pages about snorkels, pages about fins, and one with a combination of keywords from the scuba tanks, dive tanks, oxygen tanks group.
There are SEO tools available to help you assess keywords. They can tell you how many searches with those terms happen (in relative terms, not in real numbers, and with varying degrees of accuracy) and also suggest similar or nearby keywords that might be worth adding to your list. This is a great way to research what internet shoppers are looking for.
There is a potential pitfall here. The strongest keywords are also most likely to be the ones other websites target. There are likely to be a large number of websites with scuba diving as a primary keyword. This means a lot of competition, probably from some fairly serious established players who use very good search engine optimisation in combination with social media campaigns and other methods themselves. It will be harder to rank well and keyword based advertising will cost a lot more. You might be better off choosing keywords from the ‘long tail’ of the distribution of search terms. These are the less common but less contested terms. For example, the diving gear site might go for rescue diving equipment as a keyword phrase, or nox tanks rather than oxygen tanks.
The other advantage to choosing keywords from the long tail is that the people searching on very specific terms are more likely to be looking for something pretty exact, and know pretty well what they want. As customers, they’re more likely to be closer to making a purchase.
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Keyword research is very important. It involves a lot of trial and error even with advanced tools. Thus, it can be quite overwhelming. A good keyword software will make things easier. It also facilitates if the niche you are exploring is one that you are fanatic about.