Keyword Research and how I Achieve it
The keywords that are chosen in this initial stage can be the make or break for your SEO campaign. Single word search-terms are very rarely used in any search engine as they are too vague and will lead to millions of results. This is why when researching a site we look for common phrases that might get a user to this site. From this about 5-10 will be selected for optimising the pages with. For example Car would bring back too many results, 44million to be exact, so you need to be more specific and type in a relevant phrase such as Ford Focus, which brings back around 3 million results. This may seem like a lot, but 3 million specific results are better than 44million non-specific results. If we were to rank highly in the key term, which brought back 44million results, we would no doubt see an increase in click through rates.
Phrases with 2 or more words should suffice, no more than 4 really unless it is required. The keywords you choose should be checked in a tool such as Overtures Keyword Assistant to see if the Searches per month are high. If there is not many searches on any particular term, that at discretion, the keyword can be dropped. I would not leave out the search terms that have low searches. These infrequently searched terms can give a much higher conversion rate.
There are numerous amounts of tools around that can aid you in keyword research some of which I have listed below
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Obviously many others are available.
I mainly favour a Yahoo search marketing tool, for reasons that you will see furthered in this article what you do is look at the website you are analysing and think to yourself “If I came to this site what might I have typed in the Search Engine to help me arrive at this destination”, if the website offers a particular type of holiday, target the keywords based toward that type of holiday, just the word ‘holiday’ will return too many results and be heavily competitive. Also who expects to find their perfect holiday just from typing the word holiday?
As a guide we will produce about no more than 15 - 20 keywords of which we will show the Search traffic using the Yahoo Search Marketing tool will gain us the number of Yahoo searches. As we know the current SE Market shares we can do some sums to work out the estimated searches in Google and MSN.
Market Shares Feb 2006 Google - 74.67% Yahoo – 9.30% MSN – 5.46% AOL – 4.21% Ask– 2.28%
The Sum = ( Yahoo Search Marketing Searches ÷ Yahoo Market Share ) × Selected SE Market Share
The ones with the highest search traffic will normally also produce more conversions as there are more people seeing your product. This now brings us onto another topic. Traffic Predictions…
About the Author
Shane Jones has been a proffesional SEO for 6 months and has had 6 years web designing experience.
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