How to do Keyword Research
 |
Free Download - The Art of Search Engine Submission By Bill Golden |
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!
How to do Keyword Research - To learn more about this author, visit Bill Golden's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
| Article Tags: |
 | |
 |
No article feedback found. |
| |
Leave Your Feedback |
 | |
| |||
John AlexanderJohn has taught keyword research and SEO skills to small groups of business owners and Webmasters from over 80 different countries world wide since 2002. John is also the Director of Search Engine Academy ; Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses at SEO Training Online and the SEO Workshop Resource Center. I look forward to hearing from you! - Visit John Alexander's Website |
|||
|
To learn more about the Evan Elite Author Program please contact us. | |||
 | |
|  |
Subscribe to Bill's articles
 |
|
Technical Support - Golden Web Design Services offers a variety of ways to reach us, should you have a question or need some type of technical support. We work some crazy hours, so if you need to chat and see that we are online, give us a yell!
|
|
 |
 | |
|
| |
 | |||||||
|
 | ||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
| ||
 |
| Have you written articles that would be of value to entrepreneurs? Become an expert on our site by publishing them! Expose yourself to a wide audience, drive more traffic to your website and get more sales! Click Here for details. |
|
|
 |
| Modeling the Masters: Learn the true secrets behind Walt Disney's business success factors & grow your company! Video produced by Phanta Media |
|
|
 |
|
Get advice & tips from famous business owners, new articles by entrepreneur experts, my latest website updates, & special sneak peaks at what's to come!
|
|
|
 Make $ From Your Invention Marketing ScoreCard 25 Facebook & Twitter Tips Organized in 10 mins Competetive Advantage Article |
|
 | ||
 |
Top 50 Blogs For Startups
Top Blogs To Watch In 2009 | |
 |
The Top 10 GTD Times Posts
Best Posts for Productivity | |
| ||
 | ||||
| ||||
|
 | ||||
| ||||
|
|
 | ||||
| ||||
|
 | ||||
| ||||
|
|
|
||||||
 |
|
|
|
