CHOOSE YOUR KEYWORDS WISELY

Keywords are the exact words or phrases that search engine users enter to find what they are looking for. If you are optimizing your website for search engines, exact Keywords that people search should be targeted to gain rankings for. The Keywords that you choose can make or break the success of any SEO campaign, so selecting these needs to be the first step. No matter what Keywords you choose to optimize your website for it will typically take a few months to gain rankings for those terms, so you can not afford to waste time working on the wrong ones.

To choose the Keywords to target for your SEO campaign, there 3 primary factors that you must weigh:

Relevance- This may seem very obvious, but the Keywords that you select must be highly relevant to the subject matter of your website. Ultimately, when people do find your website through searches, you want to be attracting visitors that are likely to be interested in what your site offers and further more take action such as making a purchase, requesting more information, subscribing to a newsletter, etc. If the terms you are ranking for are not properly focused on your target audience, your site may get some traffic but those visitors will likely not convert to customers.

Search Volume- This may also seem overly obvious, but you need to select Keywords that receive the highest number of searches possible. The more searches people perform on a Keyword, the more traffic your site is likely to receive once it is ranking for that term and the more likely you are to get traffic and results. You can get an idea of how many times a keyword is searched each month by using this tool: www.impact-direct.com

Level of Competition- Given the huge returns that can be gained from ranking highly on the search engines, Keywords are highly competitive commodities so this is a critical factor that needs to be evaluated. Typically, the more relevant and highly searched a Keyword is, the more competition there is likely to be for that term from other websites. This means it will be hard for your website to gain rankings for that Keyword if you are just starting the SEO process for your site. Typically, the simpler a Keyword is the more competition there is for that term, for Example the term Mortgage is exponentially more competitive that the term Mortgage Broker Philadelphia. To get an idea of how competitive a Keyword is, you can review this week’s Featured SEO Tool: www.impact-direct.com The level of competition that you can compete at is determined by a number of metrics about your website, age, Google Page Rank, number of inbound links to the site among others.

Most of the time you will not find Keywords that are highly relevant, highly searched and have little competition, so you need to find terms that have a good balance. Relevance should never be sacrificed, so it is best to make the trade offs with volume and competition and these should be decided based on what your site is offering.

For a website that is just starting the optimization process, it is usually better to go after terms with lower competition, so that rankings can be achieved faster and with less effort and resources. This may mean that you need you target phrases that are more complex, containing 3 or 4 words, that are less searched. While these may receive a lower volume of searches, these complex terms will likely be highly relevant and increase the chance of converting the visitors to the site to leads or customers. With each Keyword that is chosen, optimization efforts need to be made on the website and off the site through link building targeting these phrases, so it is best to only work on a few at a time. As rankings are achieved for these less competitive Keywords through effective optimization, additional keywords can then be targeted and the website will be better able to compete for more challenging terms.

To maximize the results of your SEO campaign be sure to take the time to do your homework and pick the best keywords for your site.



CHOOSE YOUR KEYWORDS WISELY - To learn more about this author, visit James Keough's Website.

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