If you’ve spent any time learning about or doing search engine optimisation on your website, you will know keyword research is an integral part of the process. Infact, it’s the first and possibly the most important part. Unless you are optimising your webpage for the right keyword, how can you ever hope to compete and get ranked in google.
Well, the answer is, you can’t. In today’s video Shimon Sandler talks about keyword analysis and how to do it right. It’s worth explaining the process because, sometimes, it seems more complicated than it really is. There are a few important steps. Get these right, and you will see results in the search engines. Start your research by looking at your webpage. What are your important keyword phrases? What words are in the navigation?
Once you have your ‘root’ keywords, such as ‘ipod, ipod nano, iphone’, then you need a keyword tool to generate lots of variations. Shimon recommends keyword discovery or wordtracker. I don’t have any experience with keyword discovery, but I have used wordtracker, and it’s an excellent tool. It’s web-based, easy to use, can be purchased for a single month for £28, and will generate 1000’s of keywords for you. Once you have 100-200 keywords, export them to a spreadsheet and sort then by volume. Choose the best keywords you want your web page to rank for.
By starting with 100+ keywords you can narrow your search for the best ones. If you have access to website analytics tools (you should be analysing your website statistics) check to see which keyword phrases people are using in the search engines to find you. When you have a list of the top keywords, type them into google and study the top 10 websites in the results. How old are they? How many inbound links do they have? Are they authority sites? Example authority sites are about, ehow, wikipedia, yahoo answers. You are unlikely to beat authority websites.
You should now have a shortlist of just a few keywords you stand a reasonable chance of ranking on google.
