Selecting keywords for Search Engine Optimization

Posted by: Mike Baron on April 24, 2009

One of the big buzzwords in the online world right now is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you are familiar with the term, good for you. This article is intended for beginners and small business owners looking to improve their site a little bit without bleeding out the wallet. If you are not familiar with SEO, the gist is that you want people to find your website on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. If you sell puppy chow, when someone types “I want to buy puppy chow” in Google, you want to be one of the first results listed.

The process of SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website involves altering the content so that it does well in these organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. The obvious idea is that if you are near the top of the most likely searches for your products, the more likely it is that people will visit your site, and therefore actually buy your product. One important concept here is that the more people who visit your website the better, but the important visitors are the ones who are going to buy your products. Anyone can put the words “nude coed cheerleaders” as a page title. Doing so will probably provide a jolt to your search hits, but you will most likely not see an increase in sales or whatever else you’re going for.

SEO is becoming big business, but there are a few key concepts that small businesses can use on their own to improve search rankings and increase traffic. There are all sorts of techniques employed in SEO including the following:

Good linking strategy – who you link to and who links to you affects how Search Engines view the quality of your site
Good infrastructure – sites should not have broken links or invalid HTML. Follow W3C recommendations for HTML document structure
Use text navigation on your site
Build a text site map, and link to it from every page of your site
Friendly URLS – your URL should be a good indicator of what each page is about
Limit use of Flash – flash content is typically unreadable by crawlers
Avoid frames, javascript, etc
Establish your site by submitting to the major directories, The Open Directory and the Yahoo! Directory, then build your link popularity by submitting to web directories, search engines, and requesting links from related websites.
Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign
and finally Keywords

There are other key concepts as well but the ones listed above should provide a good start. I put keywords last because I believe that is the most important item on the list. More than anything else keywords tell the search engine, and your visitors, what your site is about. Keywords are located everywhere on your page. I’ll talk about this more later, but search engines look harder for keywords in some places over others. I will try to keep this to one article for now, our focus will be on how to select and place keywords in your site using 5 steps:

Brainstorm
Get Help!
Examine your competition
Analyze your words
Keyword placement

1. Brainstorm

The ideal keyword is highly relevant (targeted), highly popular (lots of search volume) but not very competitive (fewer sites using that keyword, and those sites not well optimized for it). – Richard Goulde

The idea is that you want to use words that are obviously relevant, that people will actually use, but you don’t want to use the same words as everyone else. Take Home Base for example. If you type in “Home Base Web Solutions” in Google, this site will be the #1 result. That is a HIGHLY relevant term. It is also not competative at all… but if I want a custom built web application, would I search for that? uh. Hell to the No! Terms like “Custom Web Application” or “Columbus, Ohio web development” are words that I should probably focus more on.

It is good practice to develop an elevator statement or elevator pitch, namely a short, sharp summary of your business that could be delivered in the time it takes to go a couple of floors in an elevator. This pitch can be a good starting point for keyword development. Think about a couple different phrases that other people might search for when trying to find your products or services online. Go ahead, ask a buddy for help. In fact, your mom might call what you do something totally differnent than what you call it. It’s important to think in terms of your clients. Will your clients likely search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?

Now that you have a few words and phrases, group them into themes. You don’t want to saturate every page with keywords. Too many will confuse these magical crawlers as to what your page is actually about. Think about the theme of each major landing page on your site and group your keywords accordingly. Each page on your site should have 2-3 different keywords targeted.

2. Get Help!

You should have a decent list of words that describe your business at this point. As I mentioned, you’re not the target of your campaign though! There are a couple of tools out there that can help you expand your list. Below are a few options:

One of the better ones I’ve found is Google Adwords Keyword tool. Try it out at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Simply enter a keyword or type in your URL and see the keywords that Google is finding on your site. Google will then show related keywords and their search volumes. Remember you want heavy volume, but not competative terms, so be careful what you add to your list.
Trellian Keyword Suggestion Tool: http://keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. Same rules apply here.
Finally, if you are interested in a souped up SEO campaign, sign up for wordtracker at http://www.wordtracker.com/. It can get expensive, but as with everything in life, you do get what you pay for.

3. Examine Your Competition

This item is fairly self explanatory, however, I’ll provide a little bit of guidance here because I like to write really, really, really long articles. You will have two types of competition and they often overlap.

Business competition – You already know these guys. These are the companies that sell or provide the same service as you.
Keyword competition – betcha didn’t think of this one! Go to Google and pretend like you’re searching for your company. You should get a few results that are unrelated to what you sell, but still show up pretty high on the search engine results page (SERP).

Pay close attention to what keywords your competition uses in their pages. WordTracker’s KEI (keyword effectiveness index) also allows it’s users to analyze their chosen search phrases to determine the level of competition for that phrase. You can do the same thing in Google, but it requires a little bit of work (sorry). Enter each of your prized keywords in Google surrounded by quotation marks (e.g. “puppy chow”). Once you search, Google will then display the results for all pages that target that phrase exactly as entered. In the top right, you should see how many results matched your search. This number tells you the competitiveness of each of your search phrases.

4. Analyze your words

I hope by now it’s all starting to come together. If you’re clever, you should be able to take everything I wrote so far and skip this section. Remember the keys: Highly relevant, Highly popular, not very competitive. So you should have highly relevant search terms grouped to fit each of the pages on your site. Your best terms within these groupings should be the ones that show heavy volume in the Google Adwords Keyword tool, but have the lowest number of SERP results in the top right corner of a Google search. Note, I’m obsessed with Google and it’s a good idea to try these techniques on other search engines too. If I mentioned them all I’d bore you to death.

Another good tool to use at this point is MSN’s tool for detecting online commercial intent: http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx. This tool estimates how likely it is a person using a particular search phrase means to buy, versus just looking for information. High commercial value means conversion is more likely.

At this point you should be able to “trim the fat.” If you have a hand full of similar keywords for a particular page, or even a few different spellings of the same keywords (singular, plural, etc), put them in excel and examine them based on the results given by the tools above. Choose the top 3 for each page and go to town!

5. Keyword Placement

So now we have a bunch of great keywords for your site. Where the heck do we put them?

Title tag (<title>): All SEO experts agree the title tag is the most important tag on the page. It’s the first word or words the spider encounters and it’s the title of your page’s listing in the SERPs.
Major headings and terms in bold and italics: Words in major heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) and words in bold and italics will also influence your ranking. These tags tell the user the highlighted terms are important to the page, and the spider sees them the same way. Make sure the emphasized words are keyword rich.
Body of the text: Don’t forget to ensure your keywords are in the text. If you have trouble doing this, you might have chosen the wrong keywords.
Hyperlinks: If you link to your own page, use the hot words for a link to describe the link with the keywords. Don’t use the URL as the hot link.

The first 200 words and the most emphasized words on your page should contain your keywords repeated several times. Don’t over do it, because it may be considered spam.

So that was easy, right? Selecting and placing good keywords for Search Engine Optimization can be tedious labor… and that’s why SEO experts get paid the big bucks. If you are interested in SEO, you know what’s coming, we do that. If you’re more of the Do It Yourself kind of person. Below are a few great links to get you started:

How Search Engines See Keywords

Q&A: A Few Things You Need to Know About Keyword Usage

Google SEO basics for beginners

SEOmoz – Beginners Guide to SEO

Search Engine Optimization basics

SEO Research – Step by step guide

Metrics that Matter