SEO: Keyword research tips
Fri, 30th April, 2010 - Posted by
The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses: Part 3. Guest post by Nichola Stott.
In this third part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at keyword research. Keyword research is possibly one of the most important (if not the most important) foundation of an optimised website. You may also wish to read the other posts in this series, which are the introduction to SEO and technical SEO factors.
Keyword Targetting
Search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! use crawlers to retrieve information about all the information on the web. Complex weighted algorithms are then applied to determine which websites are relevant matches to a keyword search. Although these algorithms are sophisticated, and the crawlers are numerous and frequent; they are still not human, so we need to be clear and concise when constructing web pages so that the words people would use when searching for the products and services we offer appear in content, meta data, title and image tags.
To help you with keyword targeting there are a number of tools you can use. The important things to think about are:
- Are these keywords really relevant to my product/service
- How much “interest” (search volume) is there on these keywords
- How much competition?*
Depending how much volume and competition there is on a keyword, you may prefer to choose a less competitive term. If a term is less competitive, then you will stand a better chance of ranking for that term, possibly in a shorter time too.
As an example if I offer a “virtual assistant” service, the term is highly competitive according to Google External Keyword Tool. It may make sense for me to also target “virtual assistant UK”, which is less competitive.
Free Tools for Keyword Research
Wordtracker (offers free trial)
In part four, we’re going to take a look at where and how to apply your keywords in site content, in site meta data and in your HTML tags (such as title and image tags.)
About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin or twitter.
Related Posts:
-
Connect with us
-
-
-
