Nailing down keywords
Keywords are a part of what help the search engines to find the pages within your site. You may choose to have a different set of keywords on each page so that different search terms direct visitors to all parts of your website.
There are a couple of tools you can use that will help guide you with respect to keyword popularity and competitiveness but before you go ahead with them think about what your potential customer would enter into the search engine to find you. For example, if someone is looking for shoes they would get several million responses if they were to Google ’shoes’. If they knew that they wanted ‘red faux alligator leather shoes’, that would return far fewer responses but they would be exactly what the visitor is looking for. (This is called ‘the long tail’) And if someone is that specific about what they want, they are ready to buy and NEED to find you. It is nearly impossible to rank high for a generic term, but you have a much greater chance of getting to #1 with a more specific, targeted term.
Once you’ve got a list of potential keywords and phrases, try running them through either www.spacky.com or Google’s keyword suggestion tool. These reports will give you an idea of how often those terms have been searched in the last month. These reports will also give you some ideas of what other terms might work for your site. Focus on one or two keywords or phrases per page, but make them different for each page for maximum coverage.
Be cautious of ‘keyword stuffing’ which is essentially putting keywords too many times on the page. The search engines don’t favour this so it doesn’t help your ranking. Try and incorporate your keyword in important locations such as your URL, page titles, headings, anchor text, meta description tags and alt tags. A good rule of thumb is to incorporate the keyword or phrase in the first 25 words of the copy. And make sure that the content is well-written, marketing-driven content that is interesting and relevant for the reader.
There are a couple of tools you can use that will help guide you with respect to keyword popularity and competitiveness but before you go ahead with them think about what your potential customer would enter into the search engine to find you. For example, if someone is looking for shoes they would get several million responses if they were to Google ’shoes’. If they knew that they wanted ‘red faux alligator leather shoes’, that would return far fewer responses but they would be exactly what the visitor is looking for. (This is called ‘the long tail’) And if someone is that specific about what they want, they are ready to buy and NEED to find you. It is nearly impossible to rank high for a generic term, but you have a much greater chance of getting to #1 with a more specific, targeted term.
Once you’ve got a list of potential keywords and phrases, try running them through either www.spacky.com or Google’s keyword suggestion tool. These reports will give you an idea of how often those terms have been searched in the last month. These reports will also give you some ideas of what other terms might work for your site. Focus on one or two keywords or phrases per page, but make them different for each page for maximum coverage.
Be cautious of ‘keyword stuffing’ which is essentially putting keywords too many times on the page. The search engines don’t favour this so it doesn’t help your ranking. Try and incorporate your keyword in important locations such as your URL, page titles, headings, anchor text, meta description tags and alt tags. A good rule of thumb is to incorporate the keyword or phrase in the first 25 words of the copy. And make sure that the content is well-written, marketing-driven content that is interesting and relevant for the reader.