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A good position doesn't depend only on your choice
of keywords. It also depends on how well do you position those keywords in your
web page, and how many quality external pages link to you. However, choosing the
wrong keywords can throw off your entire search engine optimization strategy, so
you need to invest a few hours and make sure you do it right.
Let's start with your homepage. Look at it
carefully and write down the words and phrases that best define your site. Try
to form two or three word phrases, since competition for one-word keyphrases is
fierce, and it is virtually impossible to get a top position for them. That is
why, from now on, we will talk about key phrases, not keywords.
Once you have developed your list of potential
key phrases you are ready for the next step: to analyze the demand and supply
for those key phrases, and choose the best ones (those with good demand and not
enough supply).
We will first check the demand for your
selected key phrases. For this, we will go to Overture's Search Term Suggestion
Tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Overture is a popular pay-per-click search
engine (as we know, pay-per-click search engines are the only ones that disclose
keyword popularity for free). You will then type each of the key phrases you
selected, and see how many people search for those terms. This tool will show
you only those searches conducted in Overture (and only in one month time).
However, the relative popularity of each search term will be very similar in
other search engines as well.
In addition to telling you if your selected key
phrases are popular, this tool will show you other key phrases that you may not
have thought about, which may even be more relevant to your site. For example,
if your first key phrase was "Italian Restaurant", the Search Term Suggestion
Tool will also display other popular search terms, like: "Gourmet Italian
Restaurant", "Northern Italian Restaurant", "Italian Restaurant Pizzeria",
"Italian Restaurant Miami", etc. You may also try other key phrases, for
example: "Italian Cuisine", and come up with more specific key phrases, like:
"Fine Italian Cuisine", "Italian Cuisine Miami", "Northern Italian Cuisine",
"Italian Cuisine Fine Dining", "Gourmet Italian Cuisine", etc.
What you have done is to validate and enlarge
your pool of popular, in-demand, potential key phrases for your web page.
The next step is to check the supply, or, in
other words, to see how much competition there is for your selected keywords.
Naturally, you want to focus on key phrases where competition is less fierce.
For example, choosing "Italian Restaurant" alone will certainly hurt you. There
are so many of them that your chances of showing up in an advantageous position
within the search results are pretty slim.
Having said that, get your list of key phrases,
go to Google (
http://www.google.com ) and type-in each of them in the search box. Enter
your key phrases within quotation marks (to filter-out less relevant results),
and see how many results each individual query produces, making a note of those
with a relatively small number of results (less competition). You will stick
with the key phrase that:
- Best describes the topic and content of your
page.
- Is a popular search term according to
Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool.
- Generates a relatively small number of results
after performing the Google search.
If "Gourmet Italian Restaurant" is the key
phrase that best meets these three criteria, it will become your primary key
phrase. To get even better results, you can choose a second key phrase to make
your page more relevant to an even more specific niche. For example, if your
restaurant is in Miami, you can consider "Miami" a second key phrase.
Once you have chosen the key phrases for you
homepage, do the same for the other pages on your site.
You will then take your selected key phrases
and optimize your pages heavily for them. This involves placing them in
strategic locations in the title, headings and body of each page.
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