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How to do Keyword Research
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.
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. Some of these website include keyworddiscovery.com,
wordtracker.com, nichebot.com, wordze.com, and keywordspy.com. 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 at statcounter.com. 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 www.goldenwebs.biz 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.
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. Get researching and get writing!
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About the Author. Bill Golden, founder of Golden Web Design Services,
has grown up with technology since the early 1980s. As the first
“PC Guru” for a US Midwest Fortune 500 company, he directed a variety of
corporate development initiatives over a 17 year period. Bill then
managed a technical training company before starting his own consulting
practice in 2001, specializing in website development, marketing, and
search engine optimization. If you are interested in learning more
about how Bill can help improve your website rankings, you can reach him
at http://www.goldenwebs.biz.
Check out one of our recent web design projects, Infinity Fitness!
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