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How to do Keyword Research

Written by: Bill Golden

Article Overview: So, you have a website (or are working on it), and you kind of know what keywords are, but you don’t know where to start. This article will give you some great tips for coming up with the best keywords for your website through keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research

Let’s say, for example, that you have a small landscaping company and you would like people to find your website on the Internet. You start by writing content about what you do, the services you offer, your company history, and maybe you will have a web form or two for prospective clients to fill out. Once you have completed all of this textual composing work, do you have the best keywords you need for your website? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t.

To develop an excellent source of relevant website keywords, start by creating a list of words that describe your landscaping company. Our short list can be landscape design, landscape installation, landscaping services, and landscape design/build. That last one is more of an industry term than it is one that your future client might know. The important thing is to come up with as long of a list as possible, because you do not know what keywords people will be entering.

If you offer these services, you would want to include, lawn mowing, pruning, stone walls, brick patios, tree planting, and on and on. As you develop more content you will want to integrate your relevant keywords into your new content.

It is far more difficult to achieve a “page one” search result for just the phrase, “landscape company,” that it is if you use “landscape company centerburg ohio” so you need to develop a variety of keyword phrases people might use when looking for a company offering your services.

Another source for keywords is your family and friends. After all, it is people like them who are sitting at their computer, trying to come up with search terms that will help them find you. The words you use might be totally different from the words they will use. Your friend might enter “install patio” or “plant maple tree” and you may not have come up with either of those keyword phrases.

You can also use a variety of external tools to help you develop keyword phrases. There are services who track actual keyword searches and can tell you how many people used a particular keyword phrase at a point in time. To find these tools, try a web search for one of these keywords: "keyworddiscovery" "wordtracker" "nichebot" "wordze" "keywordspy". Some of these services are free while others are available on a subscription basis. Typically, these tools report on the more common search terms and may have nothing to report on lesser used terms that still may be valuable to your website. At the very least, using keyword research tools will help you brainstorm for more keywords than you would otherwise come up with.

If you offer a service that is tied to a geographical region, you can add your locale, such as “centerburg” or “centerburg ohio.” This will give you a better feel for how you will ultimately rank on a web page because savvy searchers figure out pretty early that they need to add their locale if they are searching for something like a landscape company.

A great after-the-fact online keyword tool is called "statcounter" and you can easily find this via a search engine. This service is free up to the most recent 500 page visits on your website and let’s you know not only what keywords people have used to find your site, but which search engine they used with those keywords as well. This is a very handy product for determining where you may want to place additional emphasis. You may even be surprised, at times, to learn just what people enter in their web search that lands them on your website.

Now that you have a giant-sized list of keywords (maybe 100 or more), what do you do with them? First, you should prioritize them by importance and maybe even by category. Your most important keyword phrases may belong on separate web pages where you can expand the concepts. If you are selling suet woodpecker feeders, for example, you will want to have a page that just talks about suet. You want to only use a particular keyword about 3% to 5% on a given web page. We have a tool at our website that will tell you the percentage a variety of words are used on a web page you specify.

Now, take these keywords and go back to the web content you have already written. Check to see if you are using these keywords in your content. You may be surprised to see that you are not using as many of them as you thought. Remember, that keyword stuffing, unnaturally using a keyword reprtitively on a web page, is a no-no. Make sure your keywords naturally flow within the content of your message.

There are a variety of important locations for your keywords on your web page (we discuss these in other articles), but the most important place for your keywords is right there in your web page content. In fact, search engines try to analyze a page just like a person would, asking the question, “What is this page about?” If the search engine “bot” can’t figure it out or if the page seems to be about a lot of little things and not about any one specific thing, they will not give that page high marks at all and your ranking will most likely suffer.

So, as you can see, if you do good up-front keyword research, you will end up with more relevant content that will be valuable to both your website visitors and search engines. It's time to get researching and get writing!

Related Articles
  Understanding Article Marketing Research
  The Basics of Article Marketing Research
  Best Keyword Research Training
  Keyword Research is the Pulse of all Online Marketing
  How many keywords per Ad Group?

Article Tags: keywords, page, research, search engine, web, website



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Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Feb 18, 2011 - Hi Evan, Thank you for a great list as usual, I haven't had the chance until now to read them as I spent all yesterday helping my father to re-build half of his house (or it seemed that way,LOL) I will make a start reading them today and I particularly like the look of Keyword Research in Google Webmaster Tools, thanks again, Mal.
Most Useful SEO Tools For Webmasters - Hi, My name is Jeff, I work for WebBizIdeas.com and we are developing an article called "50 Most Useful SEO Tools for Webmasters." We have ranked & listed our top 30 SEO Tools but want to get your opinion on what SEO Tools are most useful to you; as Internet Business Owners. Google Webmaster Tools Google Analytics Google Alerts Yahoo Site Explorer SEOBook.com Keyword Research SEOBOOK.com SEO For Firefox Tool SEOBOOK.com Search Engine Rank Checker SEOBOOK.com Back Link Analyzer SEOChat.com Keyword Difficulty Compete.com Quantcast.com Alexa.com Archive.org Stompernet Site Seer Technorati.com PRWEB.com ADDTHIS.com SHARETHIS.com EzineArticles.com Scribd.com Squidoo.com YouTube.com StumbleUpon.com Reddit.com Digg.com Del.icio.us Wikipedia.org Flickr.com NewsVine.com Yahoo Answers NOTE: When you list your answers please include a description on what the site is, why it is important to you, and your experience please....we may include it in our article. Jeff
Re: Keyword Selection - Hi All, Very interesting topic of discussion! Website success mainly depends upon the target keywords so the keywords should be relevant to website theme. Long tail keywords often rank easily in SERP. You can also use Ad word Keyword tool for keyword selection. Keyword having less competition and high monthly search volume are easy to rank.
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategies - I'd disagree with the first point. Keyword research is important, but it should not be the complete focus when doing niche research. A niche is typically made up of thousands of keywords, and researching them all is very difficult, because the keyword tools won't tell you what most of them are. Plus a niche is not a bunch of keywords, it is a demographic interested in a particular topic. You need to learn about the people in this demographic. Keyword research tells you their search habits and gives clues to competitiveness and potential profit, but you are looking at through a very narrow window of a much bigger picture.
Re: New SEO Tool from WordStream - Looks like a new one. Need to explore for its intuitiveness. I use IBP and Keyword elite. Thanks Robert


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