Rauru.com

Posted on November, 2 2008, under SEO by Ikki | 4 comment(s)

Keyword Research & SEO is a two-part series on selecting the right keywords for your site to improve your SERP rankings and drive more traffic into it. Part I covers the basics of Keyword Research and SEO; what are Keywords and its importance. Part II covers the best practices on Keyword Research and a few examples.

You can optimize your pages for search engines, get the most outstanding layout for your site and write all these greats contents for your readers but without the right keywords your SEO efforts will be lost.

Finding the right Keywords

Finding the right keywords for your site is one of the most tedious task for a blogger. You can probably come up with some search terms and build a pretty decent list - however, it doesn’t guarantee that your picks are the actual words people are entering into search engines to find what they need. You may be selecting keywords that are too broad or poorly related to your contents. That’s when Keyword Research tools come in. We’ll discuss on that later.

Our first step, as I mentioned before, should be building our initial keyword list. To do so, we need to see things from our visitor’s perspective. let’s imagine that our site is about SEO - if you were a visitor, what kind of information would you be looking for? The best way to find out is formulating questions.

Basically, we can enumerate four different types of questions our visitors might ask:

1. Research questions: we want to know what is it, how does it work
2. Analysis questions: we want to find motives - why is it good / bad?
3. Evaluation questions: how much will it cost? shall I hire someone for this?
4. Selection question: we know what we need - we’re asking for options

You might come up with the following ones:

• What is SEO? (Research)
• Why should I SEO my sites? (Analysis)
• Which SEO techniques are the most appropriated ones for my kind of business? (Evaluation)
• What SEO tools can I use to optimize my sites? (Selection)

From these, we can develop our initial keywords:

• What is SEO?
  • SEO
  • Definition of SEO
  • On Page SEO
  • etc.
• Why Should I SEO my Sites?
  • Importance of SEO
  • Why SEO works / doesn’t work?
  • How to SEO
  • etc.
• Which SEO techniques are the most appropriated ones for my kind of business?
  • SEO techniques
  • SEO for business
  • SEO techniques for online business
  • etc.
• What SEO tools can I use to optimize my sites?
  • SEO tools
  • SEO online tools
  • Site optimization with SEO
  • etc.

Once we have built our initial keyword list, it’s time to check them using any Keyword Research Tools of our preference. I personally like the Google Keyword Tool due to its simplicity (and also because it’s free :p).

Let’s use the search term “SEO” to find a few keyword suggestions. These were my results:

There are a few long-tail keywords highlighted. You might be wondering why I highlighted them. Me too … just kidding! I selected these because while they get a decent search volume, they’re not so common (specially the last three) so we can take advantage of this and use them for our purpose… and maybe even develop some new ones from these.

Ok, now we have got a few more keywords. Our mail goal is to narrow them as much as possible. You can call this process Wash, Rinse and Repeat - we’re going to get rid of what we don’t need and keep the good stuff.

Simple keywords should be the first ones being filtered out - long tail keywords usually perform better. Then, we need to remove duplicated terms and those that we find irrelevant to our site. Repeat all steps if necessary.

After all this, we should end up with a small list of 10 keywords or so - if you have more than that, then you need to do some more cleaning to optimize it.

I must add that this is not the ultimate method to get the best keywords - I know there must be a better, less tiring way to do this (Keyword research ninjas, I summon thee!). This is, however, a way to start you up on keyword research and SEO. I hope this little guide can get you started

Share your experiences, people!

BONUS:

Today I had the chance to talk to a very good friend of mine, Swastik Agrawal from Syzel Media, who is a SEO / SEM expert and we discussed about this matter. Here’s part of that interview:

Me: I’m starting a site from scratch, what should be the first step towards building my keywords list?

SA: I’d tell what I do first - extensive research on keywords. Though different people have different styles of working, I believe that a solid foundation can do wonders. You shouldn’t just go and select those keywords which are highly searched. A good balance between no. of searches and competition is required from your side. In other words, act smart. You should use some keyword tools and spend some time on researching what would be good for you - that is a good balance between no. of searches and competition.

Try checking your competitors keywords list. Use tools such as Google Adwords keywords tool, SEOBook keyword tool etc.

Me: Is it advisable to repeat keywords to cover both singular and plural forms (eg. keyword, keywords, etc.)?

SA: Yes you should. Despite Google and / or other search engines boast of showing different results on both keywords (take an example, people search for apple and apples, in the first case you’re more likely to see apple & its products, in the next case you’ll more likely see information about the fruit), I believe it’s good to optimize for both. Again, act smart and if the singular/ plural form of a particular keyword is not worthy to be there, don’t use it. (Read the answer to the first question to know what I mean by ‘worthy’).

Me: How can I tell if my keyword research is turning out well?

SA: Well, there is no perfect way to tell that. See an example, you have a web hosting website, web hosting, website hosting would be good keywords to optimize for, but you might not get desired SERP’s because the competition is extremely tough. But then, as I said in the first answer - do an good research before finalizing the keywords. Sometimes, the highest searched aren’t the best to go after. So, if you’re getting good SERP placements for keywords you’re optimizing, then you know that somewhere it’s going down well. Again, there is no perfect way for telling that.

Me: My SERP ranking has dramatically dropped, does this mean that my keywords are obsolete now?

SA: Where’s the relation? If your site’s SERP have dropped, that means someone is doing better. Before calling your keywords obselete, you may want to check out the searches and the competition. If you try a bit harder, maybe you can get the rankings back.

Me: Is there any way to monitor how are my keywords doing in a certain month?

SA: Yeah. Though I won’t shuffle with keywords every month or so, you can, infact you should check the performance and analyze the traffic it is sending with respect to your placements. If you’ve put some work in keyword research, you’d most probably find heaps of traffic coming your way if you’re able to get good rankings. You could search for your placements on a particular keyword from http://www.seoutility.com/en/Google_Ranking_Check.htm and then compare it with the traffic it is sending to you through Google analytics, awstats etc. Spend some time on that as well, because it will considerably help you increase SE rankings.

Me: Mind sharing a tip with us?

SA: SEO is a learning process which doesn’t end. Your rankings will go up and down, you have to be patient.

At last and not the least, don’t go over board with too much things. Stick to your basics, there is a HELL LOT of misleading information over the internet.