What every web designer should know about SEO, part 3

Keywords

Keyword Research
The root of all success in search engine optimization begins with keywords. Get them wrong and virtually everything about your online endeavor will fail; it’s just that critical. We have seen more than a few people waste their money because they did not optimize for the correct keywords for their business.

After all, what good is a high ranking for a particular keyword if no one searches for the keyword, or if the people who do are not looking for the products and services that you provide?

Your web site content should be built around your keywords, so hold off building, or even designing, your site until AFTER you have done your keyword homework. Since you will need to include on your pages the keywords that visitors could use to find you in the search engines, you will want to wait on any page construction until after you have researched these key words.

For example, if your site is about providing eco-tours in New Zealand you may want to include key-phrases such as:

Mountain biking tours
New Zealand kayaking

Actually, you will not know the best keywords to keep until you have done some keyword research. To start, brainstorm a list of every possible search word or phrase (key phrase) that your potential customers might use to look for your information, products, or services. Remember that keywords are terms that SEARCHERS use, not necessarily the ones you use in the office. Forget about the language you use inside the company.

Ask customers, potential customers, co-workers, and friends what terms or phrases they would enter in a search engine to find similar products, services, or information, and add these to your growing list of potential key-phrases. Take your time. Try to be as inclusive as possible. Next, I will show you how to use more analytic and systematic techniques to winnow down this list.

Using Analytics and Keyword Search Tools

Brainstorming, together with surveying co-workers and clients, is a great place to start building a potential keyword list. But you will also want to use more analytical tools to help in your keyword research.

Take a quick look at your site logs by using the web analytics software used by your particular host. Most host providers have them, or you can use Google’s terrific FREE Analytics program to help you analyze your server logs

Sign up for a free Google Analytics account at:

http://www.google.com/analytics

Among many other things, these analysis programs capture the actual search keywords that were used to FIND your pages. Take a look at your Google keyword data, and add these words and phrases to your keywords list. Of course analytic tools like these only show how a site is reacting to search engines now. A poorly optimized site will display few keywords in the logs.

There are also tools designed to help you find out which terms are used most often and can provide accurate statistics on the popularity of one keyword versus another. SEO pros use these tools to find out which keywords are more popular and to remove unpopular words and phrases from their lists.

WordTracker 
WordTracker takes a statistical approach to the problem of finding your best keywords. It provides direction to the potentially confusing task of choosing the best keywords for your site through the use of an interactive system that will coach you through this process the very first time, and without any guessing.

Wordtracker has access to data from several large meta-crawlers. Meta-crawlers are tools that search multiple search engines for you. Dogpile is an example of a meta-crawler (www.dogpile.com). If you type a word into DogPile’s search box, it will search Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and many other search systems for you.

WordTracker collects information on over 150 million searches per month from these search systems and from other meta-crawlers as well. It stores two months of searches in its databases, organizes them, and provides this information in an easy to use format to its customers for a fee.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com 
Many of the keyword research tools will try to extract money from you, but one terrific keyword tool is Google’s AdWords keyword page. This tool is primarily designed to help Google’s PAID search advertisers, but the price is right, its database deep, and it's easy to use. This tool should definitely be a part of your regular keyword research regimen.

Type in a term such as “Adventure Travel” and Google provides a list of related terms together with advertiser competition, which is the number of advertisers bidding on this term. Of the most use to us here however, is the search volume for these terms in the Google search engine for the past month and the past year.

Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Tool (www.trellian.com)
Unlike Google Adwords, which only provides results on Google's own search engine, Trellian collects search data from a variety of search engines and tells you the actual numbers of searches conducted on a term. At the time of this writing, the free version provided only the top five results. The paid version provides more comprehensive results.

Analyzing the competition for keywords

Now let’s add to your keyword list by analyzing your competitors’ pages. You can easily check on your competitors by typing your top keywords in a search engine and seeing which sites come up near the top of the rankings. For each of your competitors in the top three positions of the search results, make a note of their domain names and page titles. Look at their source code and find the meta-tags containing page descriptions and keywords.

After entering your top keywords and researching the competition in this way, refine your list by running each term through the keyword research tools described above. Remove, terms that are unpopular, too broad, or too ambiguous. Also remove terms that are too popular and thus over-competitive.

Read on to the next section for additional tips on refining your keyword list.

Refining your Keywords

Once you have generated a list of potential keywords by brainstorming, asking clients and co-workers, researching the competition, analyzing server logs with Google Analytics, and comparing the relative popularity of terms using keyword search tools like WordTracker and others, you now need to refine your list.

Add spelling mistakes
Scan through your list and add obvious spelling mistakes. Some spelling mistakes COULD be very important, with as much as 25% of all searches consisting of misspelled words. If the traffic from a misspelling is significant, you may want to create a page on your site that takes full advantage of this misspelling. Many sites, including Google, contain “Did You Mean...” pages.

Include plural words
Also, include singular and plural examples of the keywords. For example I include both "geek manual" and "geek manuals" in my keyword work, and even register both domain names in anticipation that a percentage of visitors will use one or the other.

On the other hand, there is no need to worry about upper versus lower-case letters. Search engines are not case sensitive. For example, “Used Books,” “used books,” and “used Books” are all equivalent.

Favor keyword phrases over single words
You probably noticed that I am using a lot of phrases instead of single words in my initial list. There is a deliberate reason I did this. Multi-word key-phrases are generally more effective than one-word keywords. The reason is, web users are getting savvier. They have discovered they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words.

Research has shown that most people are now searching
for two- or three-word key-phrases, rather than for single words.

Secondly, one- or two-word keywords are usually extremely competitive. A search for "tourism" or "bike tours" in any search engine will probably generate hundreds of thousands of pages. While it’s possible that you may get your page in the top 10 for such a single-word keyword, it is quite unlikely.

The last reason to focus your efforts on multi-word key-phrases is that they are much more likely to get you targeted traffic. When people search for "bike tours," they are not necessarily looking for bike tours in New Zealand - they may be interested in upgrading their touring equipment.

Even if you did get your site into the top 10 for “mountain bike tours,” you gain nothing from such visitors. However, someone searching for "New Zealand mountain bike tours" is much more likely to book a tour from your New Zealand bike touring company. Your time would be much better spent trying to get a top ranking for this key-phrase.

Be as specific as possible in  your choice of key-phrases

 The idea to take from these examples is this; when thinking up your potential keywords, try to be as specific as possible in your choice of key-phrases. Be specific about the location of your business, e.g., “Las Vegas airport shuttle.” Be specific about the services you provide, or specific about the type of information you have, e.g., “free online Photoshop CS4 tutorials.”

Next - Part 4