The Importance of Keyword Research
Keyword research in an integral part of your website promotion strategy. If you want traffic that converts into sales and commissions, you have to plan a website promotion strategy and you will have to stick with it until you see the expected results. It is important that you set milestones and achieve them on time. Web promotion is a time taking process and often you will have to wait for a long time to see results. This post is about keyword research and its importance in search engine optimization. I will also discuss free/paid keyword tools and how to use these tools to select the right keywords.
A keyword (or a keyphrase) is a single word or collection of words that provides information about a document. Keywords provide information about something in a nutshell and give the reader a rough idea on what the document is about. It is a common practice to specify keywords in research journals. And since the Internet was initially designed to aid scientists and researchers, keywords are an integral part of the very fabric of the world wide web and the way search engines work. Most search engines work by analyzing keywords and the number of backlinks.
For a website to be successful, you need to develop quality content. People search the Internet for information and if your website provides quality information, it will automatically get more number of visitors. You might have observed that certain information sites like About.com are very popular. They gets lots of traffic and make good profits-all because they provide high quality information. You can also draw a large number of visitors to your site by providing quality information. While writing the content for your website, you should always target specific keywords. If you write content without taking specific keywords into consideration, your pages may not perform well in the search engines and even if you top for certain keywords you may not get good traffic because people may not be searching for these keywords.
Keyword research is a difficult job. You will have to brainstorm and think about keywords that people may be searching for. As an illustration, people often search for a [main keyword] + [location/area]. For example, “dedicated webhosting New York”. I wouldn’t recommend doing keyword research manually as it is time consuming and you will have to make blind guesses. There are many tools available that will help you in doing your homework. The best thing is some of them are absolutely free!
Overture Keyword Selection Tool: [ http://inventory.overture.com/ ]This is the grand daddy of all keyword research tools. It was based on the data obtained from Yahoo. And it WAS free! I used the word WAS because this tool is not working properly anymore. As of this writing it isn’t even loading in my browser! It seems Yahoo has completely discontinued it and replaced it with a better tool which is available only to Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) customers. However, there are other tools that you can use as a substitute for the Overture keyword selection tool.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool: [ https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ] This is based on data obtained from Google. Since Google is the leading search engine right now, we can safely assume that this tool is very accurate. However, on the minus side, this tool doesn’t provide absolute numbers. It only provides search volume in the form of graphs.
Wordtracker: [ www.wordtracker.com ] Wordtracker is based on data obtained from Dogpile and Metacrawler. It is fairly accurate and provides absolutely numbers. While we cannot be sure about the accuracy of these numbers, we can still get an idea about which keywords are popular and which are not. A Wordtracker subscription costs $329/year. However, they also provide a free version [ http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com ].
Keyword Discovery: [ www.keyworddiscovery.com ] This is based on data from a number of search engines. The paid version costs $69.95/month. They also offer a free version [ www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html ].
You can use any of the tools above or a combination of these while choosing keywords. Always select keywords that are moderately popular. If you choose highly popular keywords, you will have to compete against a large of other websites and it will be a long time before you see results. On the other hand, if you choose less popular keywords, the resulting traffic may not be worth the effort.
Once you are done with the keyword research, develop content taking the keywords into consideration. Use the keyword (and its derivatives) liberally and see that it gets repeated a few times in each paragraph. Also use the keyword at the beginning of the article and at the end. Use the keyword in the url of the webpage. For example, if I choose the keyword “computer repair technician”, I will name the webpage “computer-repair-technician.html”. If you use subfolders to store your webpages on the server, you can also name them after your chosen keywords.
You should also include your keywords in the title tag and in the meta tags. If you are attempting to optimize a page for more than one keyword, add both the keywords to the title tag. Some search engine optimization experts recommend using “|” to separate the keywords. I used this and I had good results, so I recommend the same. Meta tags are not so important anymore. In fact, search engine like Google don’t even use them in their ranking criteria. However, there is no loss in using them and so you should use them. Just include your keywords in the description and keywords tags.
Once you are done with the in page elements, you should concentrate on off page factors. Try to get more number of backlinks to your site with the chosen keywords in the anchor text. You can get links through directory submissions, article marketing and link exchanges. Get as many links as you can and don’t stop until you start seeing results in the form of targeted search traffic. If you follow the steps I mentioned above, you will definitely start seeing results in a few weeks time. There is no doubt about it.
