Finding the right keywords for your business is one of the most important aspects of getting business online.
Since people search online mainly through using keywords, a relationship between you and keywords can be best described as your sales channels.
Yet, most SEO services make YOU choose the keywords – before you spend your hard earned money on SEO and ads with some keywords you happen to guess or find (which I’ve done before…), I do recommend checking out this quick guide below:
Just a word of caution…
When you’re designing your site, usability should come first, keywords next – not the other way around. In other words, design your site for human users, not for search engines (And Google is smart enough to know the difference)!!
Since understanding how keywords and SEO work can be complex (and sometimes boring), I can best summarize the key points you should know in learning your keywords, and I can give you the best tools I know for each of these topics.
- Monitor How People Search Online
- Understand How to Work Your Keywords Into Your Content
- Understand How Search Engines See Your Site
- Checking and Analyzing Competitors
1. Monitor How People Search Online
By learning online search behavior, keyword relevancy, search trends, search volume, you can make an educated conclusion about what keywords are popular and how they can be tied into your website and marketing.
These are the free keyword tools I use on a daily basis:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
2. Understand How to Work Your Keywords Into Your Content
You’d want to create a unique content that nobody has published before – never copy someone else’s content, or randomly create a content just for the sake of creating contents. Google actually penalizes duplicate contents. Most often than not, Google will eventually catch you if you use a software that generates multiple variations of an article by “spinning” words.
Make sure that your article, post, and etc are original and include your target keywords (a good rule of thumb: one KW every 3-4 paragraphs) and modifiers (modifications of your keywords – example: business wordpress themes, free premium wordpress themes).
3. Understand How Search Engines See Your Site
A simplified way to understand is this:
Search engines read the tripped version (actual HTML codes) of the page from top to bottom. And there’s a certain way that your site should be coded in order to make your site more search engine friendly.
To be more specific, I’m talking about internal link structure, code-to-text ratio, and etc that’s a bit too technical here, but please let me know if you’d like to know about it.
4. Checking and Analyzing Competitors
Knowing which keywords you can rank high for more easily than others can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
Your best tool for this is actually… Google.com
You can type in your target keywords in Google and see how many pages are competing and see how many sites actually have the exact phrase you typed in their title and the sentence below (those are intentionally going after the keywords).
The other tool that is actually very useful is:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
A couple of important things to look for are:
- Scale – Check how many pages are indexed because a size of the site does matter.
- Inbound links – Check how many links the site is getting from other sites. Search engines look at each link your site get as a “vote” and they do give you a strong credit for that. Also pay attention to where your site is getting links from.
If you are a fitness instructor, getting a link from a popular fitness magazine site will obviously help your ranking more than getting one from a phone book directory (keyword relevancy).
- PageRank – Install Google Toolbar and compare your PageRank with your competitors.
There you have it. If you follow the information above, you should have:
- A list of 1 to 8 primary keywords and probably 10-30+ other 2ndary keywords you want to focus.
- Keyword optimized pages (URLs) paired with an anchor text link(s) you’ll use in your link building.
- Analysis on keyword trends and use in your market as well as which keywords your competitors are after and where they are getting links from (using those keywords).
Let’s GO get your keywords! Let me know if I could answer any questions in the comment section below, as writing is not my stronger skills.
To your success,
Shingo
Thanks, this info is very helpful.
I have a question regarding keywords. My site is the runwithjill blog on marathon training. Both of these words come up very high on search volume: “running” “training”
So, in my blog posts I use those two words along with marathon training?
Thanks,
Jill
Hi Jill, Great finding! If I were you, I’d narrow down those keywords a little using phrases. So, keywords such as “marathon running program”, “marathon running guide”, “marathon running tips” still have a high search volume while they are easier to rank high for and they are more focused and specific for your site (and business).
And once you know your target Kws, yes – you’d want to include them in your title as well as in your post. Also, there should be a place for you to specify a title/description/as list of keywords you want to use at the bottom of the page when you are editing your post.