We're starting a new series discussing the "Ten Tips for SEO". Each day will bring a different point that you should review if you are interested in optimizing your site for the search engines. Today's topic is keyword selection.
Search engine optimization is not rocket science. It's also not some secret, mysterious art only known to the "masters." Search engine optimization takes a lot of ongoing work but it's pretty easy work overall, as long as you know the basics. At Translucent Media, we encourage you to learn as much as you can about SEO so you can make informed decisions about your website. If you want help with your SEO efforts, please contact us and we'll handle all the details for you.
1.) Keyword Research
The first step in a successful SEO campaign is to determine the keywords that you will optimize for on your site. Your goal is to choose keywords that a large number of people are searching for. You want to choose keywords that are more specific, or take advantage of "the long tail" of search.
Some people think that the goal is to just generate as much traffic as possible. This is not true... you cannot reach your goals with your website with generic visitors. What you want is TARGETED traffic from visitors who are actively looking for what you are selling.
Let's pretend we are optimizing pages for an online shoe store that specializes in women's dress shoes. In our example, "red shoes" is not a good keyword phrase. "Red shoes" could be anything -- women's shoes, men's shoes, kids' shoes, the possibilities are endless. The traffic that you could get based on "red shoes" would not be as valuable as more targeted search terms. You could use "red Steve Madden women's heels" which would give you more targeted traffic. Steve Madden is a brand name, and you could easily optimize a page showing women's red heels by Steve Madden. In this example, "red shoes" would give you virtually useless traffic. The traffic from "red Steve Madden women's heels" is much more valuable, because the searcher knows specifically what she is looking for. She's closer to buying than the searcher who is looking for "red shoes".
To find keywords and determine their potential for traffic to your site, you can use any number of paid tools (including Wordtracker, the industry standard) but if you're on a budget, the free keyword tool from Google Adwords is excellent. Just run a Google search for "Google keyword tool" and you should get to it. Run a few searches on the keyword tool, based on the words that you think your visitors would search for, and look at the related terms that the tool suggests. You are looking for a few terms with a large number of searches, and a low amount of competition.
It's a good idea to "map out" your content at this point. If you already have a website put together this is easy. You need to keep track of the names of the pages and a list of the keywords you want to optimize each page for. We use a spreadsheet to keep track of pages and keywords. Usually targeting more than 3-4 keyword phrases per page is nearly impossible to do well. It's better to focus on fewer keywords and do them well, than to be mediocre at optimizing for a larger number of keywords. Remember that the majority of your traffic will NOT come in through your home page, it will come in through your carefully optimized secondary pages in your site. Each page should be designed with this in mind, and should have navigation that is easy to use.
In our next post, we'll discuss domain name optimization... stay tuned!
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