Chapter Five : Finding the right SEO keywords

Let's get into the details : Keyword SEO

First, what is a keyword? Really all keywords are are popular words or phrases that are repeated frequently on a page and are also searched for by internet users.

What keyword SEO will do for you:

Help search engines understand what your site is about. Search engines “read” the pages on your site to see which keywords are most repeated. The engine then makes a determination regarding the topic of your site.
Help searchers find your site. Search engines match keywords from user searches to sites with similar keywords on their pages.
Help you focus your SEO strategy and target the ideal customer. As you can only use a limited number of related keywords on a single page with any success, your use of keyword SEO makes you stop and think. Will these keywords really attract the type of traffic I want?
Help you enhance / further leverage the other elements of your SEO strategy. Keywords are not only important to the content on the page, but the other elements of the page as well. Keyword SEO can help enhance images, graphs, links and other structural elements to ensure search engines really understand what the page is about.
Help guide the creation of web based content. If you are like me, you often get stuck trying to figure out what content to create. Starting with keywords can help answer this question. By writing your content around keywords, it gives you are starting point while also focusing your efforts on optimization.

Time to discover the right SEO keywords to drive your SEO strategy

So if it is all about the right keywords, and keywords will impact so much of your strategy, how do you find the right keywords?

Two things to consider when selecting SEO keywords:

Popularity / Relevance. You must balance the total searches associated with the keywords / phrase and their relevance to your site or content. In other words, it does no good to select keywords that are popular but have nothing to do with your site or what you sell. Therefore, be extremely critical when examining your SEO keywords and eliminate any that are irrelevant. Search engines look for a keywords relation to the content on the page when ranking a site. Also, eliminate any where total volume is under 1000 recorded searches per year (unless you are in an extremely niche market with a very small potential customer base).

Competition. This is a big one. You need to know how many other people are using a given keyword or phrase to optimize their site or content. The more competition or the greater the strength of that competition (a measure that almost all keyword research tools provide) the less it is worth pursuing. Highly competed for keywords and phrases will mean longer wait times to appear in searches. And in many cases, using multiple keywords or keyword combinations that are less popular will add up to the same or greater search volume as some, if not most of the more popular terms. Competition can also be assessed by entering a word or phrase into Google and seeing how many pages show up. If it says 'results 1-10 of 1,000,000' the competition is pretty steep. Note: Popular keywords are not always the most competed for, therefore, pay close attention to balancing both factors.

Further Identifying SEO Keywords

Now you know about popularity, relevance and competition. However, all things being equal, any keyword you select must directly relate to your business. Look at it this way, if you are a wine retailer would ranking in search results for coffee do you any good?

And while relevance is a common mistake, another common mistake many people make when selecting SEO keywords is assuming that all people use common keywords to search. As a result, an insurance broker might assume that “insurance” is the best keyword for his business. What he doesn't realize is that he sells only a specific type of insurance, to a specific type of client in a specific state. Therefore “individual health insurance nj” might be more appropriate.

SEO Keyword Research

When researching keywords, there are several avenues to pursue. However, to avoid complexity we will focus on the one that gives the best results.

First, recognize that single words are never best. They are entirely too vague, difficult to optimize for and face significant competition. You need to be specific.

Here's another example – yes, I like examples. Let's assume your objective is to provide information related to or that leads to the sale of Panasonic Flat Screen Televisions. “Televisions” alone as a keyword would not work, “flat screen televisions” is closer but not optimal, “Panasonic Flat Screen TV” is closer yet. Getting more specific, if you are providing information on selecting the right model of Panasonic Flat Screen Television, than a better phrase might be “Buying a Panasonic Flat Screen TV”.

SEO Keyword Research : Creating a keyword list

Its time to brainstorm. I suggest creating a list of at least thirty double to triple word combinations or phrases.

Once you have this list, put the combinations into your keyword research tool (a few research tools are listed on the next page). Record the popularity (search volume) of each phrase and the top ten most popular related phrases with the least competition (many if not all tools will make alternate keyword or phrase suggestions).

Write all phrases down in a table or preferably a spreadsheet in the following format – we will again return to the Panasonic example.

Word / Phrase	Total Yearly Searches	Volume Rank	Competition (total page results)	Competition Rank	Keyword Score (searches / results)	Rank
Panasonic Flat Screen TV	108,000	1	767,000	2	.14	2
Buying a Panasonic Flat Screen TV	2,520	2	8,670	1	.29	1

While “Panasonic Flat Screen TV” holds a higher volume rank, taking our analysis a level deeper reveals something different. “Buying a Panasonic Flat Screen TV” is a better choice when viewed in the context of relevance (we are assuming the information provider sells Panasonic flat screen TVs) and competition vs. number of searches. Therefore, despite the fact that “Panasonic Flat Screen TV” is more popular, when viewed across all elements it is not the right choice.

Note: As a rule of thumb, I would not consider phrases with a Keyword Score under 0.2. If you have many options similar in value, use the Total Yearly searches rank to narrow it down.

A few tools you can use for SEO keyword research

To cover this topic briefly, there are two options. Free or paid. In the paid arena, which provides much higher quality results and suggestions, there is www.wordtracker.com and www.keyworddiscovery.com . When it comes to free options, there are quite a few, greatly varying in quality. A few examples include:

A Few Additional Keyword SEO Tips....

As you search for the right keywords, here are a few additional tips to keep in mind:

Remember that popularity is not the be all end all. Its more about relevance and competition. The fact of the matter is that popular keywords are often expensive, highly competed for and “owned” by large, established companies with deep pockets. You need to find a relevant keyword niche.

Single words are not ideal. Phrases are best. 65% of all searches are for phrases, not single words. Further, phrases are much more specific and therefore allow you to target with greater precision.

Be selective. Not every keyword is the right keyword. The fewer you select, the better. On any given page, it is near impossible to optimize for more than three to four.

Consider investing in education. Run a limited pay per click campaign for a few weeks to see which keywords pull. Test and measure. This will save you the time of jumping through the necessary SEO hoops to optimize for the wrong keywords.

Being a bad speller can pay off. In fact, sometimes more searches occur for a misspelled word than a properly spelled word. Dgo vs. Dog.

Keyword SEO : Local vs. global keywords

The final piece to consider when researching and selecting keywords for SEO is the idea of local vs. global. In essence its a questions of “emergency plumber” vs. “emergency plumber evanston il”. Do you have a defined geographic area you serve or do you serve everyone, everywhere?

If you serve everyone, everywhere, then there is no need to even consider the idea of local keywords. However, if you are a business that primarily serves a limited geographic area, then you should certainly consider adding local words to your keywords.

What this means for the local business is that you should use more generic search terms, plumber for example, coupled with likely local search terms including:

region or state
city or town
local phrases such as “lincoln park” a Chicago neighborhood but not a city or town
other geographically specific phrases including landmarks nearby, airports, etc.

For the local business, this allows you to attract only customers you can serve. After all, what good does a customer do if they are half way across the country and you can only sell to people in your own town.

Other Ways To Discover SEO Keywords

Before we move on, I want to leave you with two other ways I have used to discover the right keywords, beyond the methods already described. And it is not that you need to use these to be successful, it is just a way to get more bang for your buck.

Competitor sites. Looking at competitor sites will allow you to see what keywords your competitors are using to achieve success. And it is not that you want to use the same keywords in the same way, however they just might give you a good idea or a place to start. They will also help you understand what ratio and combination of keywords or phrases works. A free tool like this can help : www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/keyword-density

Semantics. Semantic optimization in my book is an under utilized tool. Latent semantic indexing (semantics for our purposes) is the process by which search engines associate words with other related words – as we discussed a few chapters back. The concept is that instead of stuffing your content or structural elements with the same three words over and over, you can instead use other related words. Not only does this open more doors, it also makes for more readable content. By using semantically associated words, you can therefore increase your page rank, the number of words for which you rank and capture some of the long tail traffic you might otherwise miss. For example, Google associates a highly coveted keyword, “optimization”, with analysis, optimize, positioning, performance, placement, submission, and speed. And while you would still need to use the word “optimization” somewhere strategic on the page, you could augment it with a sentence like this : “To optimize your website, you should first conduct a keyword analysis, determine your positioning for each keyword and how keyword placement is affecting your performance.” To discover semantically related keywords, you simply need to put a tilde (~) in front of your search term in Google. ~Keywords as an example. The Google results returned will bold those words that are semantically related.