Importance of Keywords in the Website
Keywords are what drives search engines. The idea is that a search engine wants to return a page in a search about something that the searcher is looking for. It’s doing this by looking at what was entered into the search box (the keywords) and then trying to match those keywords with pages in its database.
What is Key Phrase?
A Key Phrase is just a few keywords together. Researchers tell us that very few people just use one word to search any more and are getting more sophisticated.
Imagine you are a potential visitor to your site. What keywords or phrases will you type in to find it? Take a blank piece of paper. Now, on your piece of paper, write down as many words or
phrases as you can that you as a potential visitor would search for to find a site like yours in a search engine.
Here’s an example. For a site about baby names you might have:
• Baby names
• Popular baby names
• Most popular baby names
Notice how I didn’t use “baby”. People that are searching on that term might be looking for who knows. At this point, we don’t want to be too general.
Try to write 20 to 30 keywords or phrases on your piece of paper. If you’re having trouble coming up with keywords, ask your partner, friends or family members which keywords they would use to find your site. At this point, you should have a list of no less than 20 keywords or phrases at your disposal.
Right, now we need to do some research. We need to find out how many people are searching for our keywords and phrases. What we need now is a tool to tell us this information. The big gun here is something called Wordtracker. It costs just under $10 for a 3-day subscription, but the information it gives is worth it. If your site depends on traffic, then I recommend this tool.
Two other free tools work also, but just don’t give the detail.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
https://www.wordtracker.com/
I use these almost on a daily basis. It allows you to find out which keywords people are using in their searches, which as I’m sure you will agree is very valuable information!
The digitalpoint tool actually includes data from Overture, so if you are only going to use one tool, use that one. Start at the top of your keyword list that you wrote earlier and
enter each one into the text box. As you can see, the term suggestion tool returns a list of keywords and how many times they were searched for during the last day. As you type each of
your keywords into the text box and see the number of searches, write that number down next to your keyword on the page.
As you are doing this, you’ll also come across key phrases that people are searching on that you didn’t think of. Include them too. You should now have a list of keywords with the number of
searches for that keyword from last month on your page. To get the 5 most popular keywords, simply take the 5 keywords with the highest number of searches. Write them down in order of most to least popular. You should now have your list of 5 popular
keywords, maybe something like this:
778231 baby name
68325 baby girl name
63222 baby boy name
38285 odd baby name
33583 top 100 baby name
Next we need to get an idea of the competition. Go to Google and enter in your first key phrase in quotes. Like this..
“baby name”
Looking at the right of the Google search, you’ll see what the
competition is:
Not bad, only 3.2 million sites we have to beat. Well, you didn’t think this would be easy did you?
Take your search terms and for the ones you have narrowed down to find out your competition and add that as a 3rd column. Make sure you remember to search in quotes, that looks for these word as a phase rather than just anywhere. These keywords are going to form the basis for all of your site optimization strategies.