Thursday 1 March 2012

Choosing The Correct Keywords To Ensure Optimal Success

Who knows more about your project and website than you do? That’s right; nobody. So today we are going to get started to find all sorts of keywords related to your project.

Before we get started, are you clear what keywords are? Keywords are simply the words or phrases that best describe your product or service AND the words people actually use to find the products/services you will be offering.

Go ahead and open up Word or Pages (for you Mac users), or go old school and use pencil & paper, turn on your “thinking cap” and write down all the words and phrases you would use if you were searching for products and services similar to yours.

As an example, lets imagine you want to build a website to sell dining room tables. A hypothetical list of keywords you might have come up with include (these come from my little “thinking cap”, so they are all just guesses):

  Modern dining room tables 
  Glass dining room tables 
  Black tables 
  Bamboo kitchen tables 
  Affordable tables 
  Antique dining room tables 
  Wood tables

Those are just the keywords I came up with and you probably came up with your own set of words you would use. That is perfect; we are aiming to build a list of wide variety of keywords that we can use later to find the optimal ones to use. Again, at this point it’s all about brainstorming your ideas. Don’t limit your thoughts or ideas, simply write them all down.

Professional insight - Always aim for multi-word keywords!

Did you notice that none of my suggested keywords were single word keywords? Here’s why:

Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A search for "tables" or "dining room" in any search engine will probably generate hundreds of thousands or millions of pages.

Secondly, because of the sheer number of pages that single word searches can throw up, most search engine users have realized that they can get more relevant pages if they search for multi-word phrases rather than individual words.

Thirdly, single word keywords won't get you targeted traffic--which is what you want! When people search for just "tables", they are not necessarily looking for dining room tables to buy - they may be interested in selling tables too or learning the history about an antique table they own.

Next week we'll take your keywords phrases and use free tools find the highest traffic keywords with acceptable amounts of competition.

The keywords we have at the end of the research will be used on your website and also as the anchor text for links pointing back to your site.

See you next week for Post 2: Find the Most Searched Keywords for Your Site – With As Little Competition As Possible

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