Choosing Your Keywords

Unless you have a large advertising budget and can drive enough visitors to your site with paid advertising, the success of your site is largely determined by how well it ranks in the natural search engine results.

Traffic is the lifeblood of your website. Without it, there is little point to the whole exercise.

Success in the search engines starts with keyword research. The great majority of commercial websites fail to do this, which is why most simply FAIL.

Good search engine rankings rarely happen by accident. They require research, planning and testing. In fact, a whole new industry has sprung up known as SEO - Search Engine Optimisation.

By the way, quick sidebar for my friends in the US; I'm an Aussie. Most words that you spell with a "z" we spell with an "s". Not an error, just how we do it down here!

SEO companies can charge far more than the cost for the original design of your site - fine if you've got the budget and choose a reputable company who back up their claims - but if you're a small business owner with limited resources then you CAN achieve good rankings by following the basic rules of SEO. And why not get it right BEFORE you build your site? No errors to correct later!

The first thing you need to do is ensure you choose the RIGHT keywords to target. This step is VITAL. It's no good optimising your site for keywords that no-one searches for, or for keywords that have so much competition you will never win.

What Are Keywords?

Simply the words that a surfer will enter into a search engine (like Google) to find what they are looking for.

How do you choose those keywords?

There are two factors you need to consider:

1. The number of websites already indexed by the search engines which match your keywords. We'll call this "supply".

2. The number of times your keywords are searched for. We'll call this "demand".

The trick is to target keywords which have a low supply/high demand ratio. How do you do that? Finding the supply is easy. Just go to Google and do a search for your keywords. The number of page matches is a good general indicator of the supply for your keywords.

Keep in mind though that many of these sites will not be optimised and out-ranking them will not be too difficult. It is the sites which fill the first 3 pages of results that we are most concerned with.

To get an indication of demand, go to Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool:

Enter your keywords and click on the “Hit Me” button. This will give you a list of up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume. Although these figures aren't absolute, they are a good general indicator of demand. Compare demand to supply and you will know which keywords to target.

By using this method you should be able to build up a list of keywords to optimise your site for. More on how to optimise your site later.

Try to avoid broad single-word keywords like "travel". There is just too much competition, no matter how often it is searched for. Even if you did manage to rank well for "travel" (extremely difficult) you would receive a lot of untargeted traffic. Far better to target "self drive holidays New Zealand" for example. In the search world, this is known as “the long tail”. In other words the longer the search query the more targeted your visitor will be, and the easier it will be to rank well for that expression.

For local businesses and service providers, the process is remarkably simple. If your potential customer is looking for a service provider in their locality they will usually include keywords to match that locality in their search. For example:

• landscape gardener Richmond
• piano tuner Newcastle
• tax accountant Pasadena

The more "local" the search, the easier it will be to match those searches and pull in super-targeted visitors. If a potential customer searches for "auto detailer Arlington" and finds your site at the top of the list, do think there is high probability of them contacting you?

Damn straight there is!

Use Wordtracker to target the low supply/high demand "winnable" keywords, or the service + locality keywords. In other words, target keywords which are being searched for but don't have a high number of competing sites, or which are geo-specific and will deliver you super-targeted visitors.

Once you have your list of keywords you can build a site where each page is dedicated to achieving high rankings for each particular keyword phrase on your list.

Advanced Keyword Analysis Research Tools

Although using the free resources I've mentioned above is far, far better than doing no keyword research at all, you will quickly find that the process can be VERY time consuming. Luckily, there are a number of products and services available which automate the whole process for you. I've tested many of these products and believe me they are worth their weight in gold! They will save you countless hours of laborious research.

Of course you could skip this step and do what most other intending website owners do and jump right in and start building your site. Like them, you'll spend hours worrying about the design, layout, colours, graphics and features your website will have, only to discover that when it's finished no-one visits it.

Or, you could do what the other 5% do and find out how many people are actually searching for information related to your products or services, and how many other optimised sites are already targeting those keywords. These are the people who build websites that get lots of targeted traffic. And targeted traffic = sales!

I can't over-emphasise the importance of keyword analysis research. Most websites fail to do this, which is why most small business websites FAIL to get significant traffic.

Which Keyword Tools?

There are two which I use constantly and in my opinion stand above the rest. The first, Keywords Analyzer, is software which runs on your computer.

Simply punch a keyword into Keywords Analyzer and it gives you a list of search queries which include those keywords and the number of searches, search results, search/results ratio, Google AdWords campaigns, Yahoo! and Miva campaigns. This tool is not only great for general search engine optimisation but also for reducing costs for pay-per-click advertising with Google and Yahoo.

Keywords Analyzer also does something else which is rather unique. And that is, display Google AdWord bids for your keywords. If you are planning on using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site, or generate income using Google AdSense, this is enormously useful. This feature will help you choose low-cost keywords for advertising, or high-cost keywords for generating income.

The other tool I regularly use is Wordtracker’s full subscription service (as opposed to the free keyword tool).

Rather than a software application, Wordtracker is actually an online service. You can buy a subscription for a week, month, or do what I do and buy an annual subscription. Well worth the cost. There’s also a free trial available. Wordtracker has a big advantage in that it can draw on its own database of keywords as well as using Yahoo's database.

This can give you a much better picture of "real" search activity because of limitations in the way Yahoo presents its results e.g. while Yahoo groups singular and plural searches together, Wordtracker does not.

Wordtracker is also extremely useful for finding related search terms i.e. not just searches which contain the keywords you are researching. For example, using Wordtracker's Keyword Universe tool for the keywords "home theatre" returned these words:

• receivers
• surround sound
• control
• wireless
• DTS
• THX
• Prologic

plus around 300 other words. You can use this tool to find hundreds of related keywords you might never have considered.

Special Note: If you have an existing website, or will be designing your site using your own tools (XSitePro, FrontPage, Dreamweaver etc) then Keywords Analyzer and Wordtracker are investments that will pay for themselves many times over. But, don't buy these tools if you are considering building a site with my recommended online DIY website builder - Site Build It

Why? Site Build It has built-in, comprehensive keyword analysis tools. It is the foundation on which SBI works.

If you're hiring a website designer, developer or copywriter be sure to ask them what keyword analysis tools they use when constructing your site!

Keyword research is CRUCIAL to the success of your website.

Next – Writing Your Content

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