Importance of Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimization
Keyword Research is by far the most important aspect in any Search Engine Optimization
initiative. This article shall discuss the important aspects- of keyword
research process.
Keyword Phrase Research is a process of selecting the most “optimum
performance” keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may
have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking
with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the
right keyword phrases are not targeted. It’s like not being able to reach your
destination even after running your best race because you started out on the
wrong road. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get
relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the foremost step
in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what
keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site
like yours.
For any marketing strategy to succeed, it is critical to know your audience
and the means to reach them. A certain focus is required which could be
location specific, region specific or country specific; it could be business,
trade, service, product specific, since we are talking specific audience. For
instance, a dentist practicing in a particular town would most likely target
people living in the same region, instead of targeting the entire country. Just
as a patient searching for a dentist would search for one in his own area.
Focus on region would help her get targeted visitors, not just wasted traffic.
A common pitfall is to start the website optimization exercise with a set of
“gut-feel” keyword phrases. Site owners often come up with ‘common sense
looking’ key phrases, which though look obvious, may not match with the ones
your buyers are using as their search term. Very often, being from within the
trade narrows the vision and you tend to assume that trade- specific terms are
easily understood and popularly used. Not so. You need to think out of the box.
Doing Keyword Research invariably means departing from one’s gut-feel and
going by the facts. ‘Facts are sacred’ in website optimization as they provide
the exact data of what people are actually searching for, thus saving you from
starting on a wild goose chase. As mentioned earlier, targeting the wrong key
phrases might get you a good ranking for keywords that have few or no search
requests or just get you irrelevant junk traffic. So, how does one get the
facts and the data regarding a particular search term? There are several online
keyword research tools like Wordtracker and Overture, which offer data
pertaining to your search term. Relying on search tools to analyze keyword
phrase data helps you to get a grip on your target audience.
Keyword Research process involves the following important steps. These steps
can be described as:
The Discovering phase should focus on identifying as many keywords as
possible that are related to your website and target audience.
The Analysis phase involves adding information about existing competition;
PageRank based limitations and potential for ranking.
The Selection process involves objective measurement based shortlisting of
keywords keeping the site focus and target audience within the limitations
analyzed.
The Deploying phase is about making optimum use of your selected keywords on
your website copy , HTML code and tags.
Starting out Keywords
The nature of keyword research tools that help you identify various keywords
is such that they need initial starting out keywords. It is important that you
identify good 15 starting out keywords, tightly focused on your business. You
can brainstorm with your colleagues and clients to identify search phrases that
are most likely to get qualified traffic to your site. This brainstorming
session is intended at discussing the most relevant keyword phrases to the
product or service you offer. An initial list of 15-20 keywords can be compiled
at this stage, which can be generic in nature. For wider keyword coverage, you
will get better results if you have one or two keywords rather than longer
phrases.
Using Wordtracker
, Overture
to Collect a Corpus of Keywords
Keyword Research tools like Wordtracker and Overture can be used to expand
on your initial list of starting out keywords. These tools allow you to find
the number of searches being made on a particular term and also look for all
related terms that include your search term. Wordtracker and Overture are the
two most widely used services that give you the ability to research and find
out what people are actually searching for on the major search engines along
with information on how popular a search term was in the last 30 or 60 days.
Wordtracker is a fee-based service that allows you to look up popular keyword
phrases. Wordtracker is most popular in SEO industry, as it offers a good
search term database and makes searching for keyword related information easy.
The database is constantly updated, with the oldest data being removed and
replaced with the latest information every week. As of writing this article,
Wordtracker offers access to a database size of 324 million entries.
Although Wordtracker is a paid service for regular use, it offers the
benefit of one-day free trial, which can be used to complete your keyword
research if you are fairly organized.
Competition Search can also be made at Wordtracker for your short-listed
terms. Competition Search allows you to ascertain how many web pages exist for
these search terms on different search engines. This helps you determine your
chances of ranking with a particular search engine for your search term.
Ideally, lesser number of pages with a search engine means a better ranking
chance for your search term.
Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, although intended to offer keyword
popularity information to the PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisers, works fairly
well to carry out your keyword research. Enter your main search terms and in
response Overture lists out all other popular search terms that contain that
particular term or phrase along with the popularity count. Overture lists the
search terms in order of their popularity, giving numerical count of past one
month.
Being a free tool, Overture is quite useful. However, it has a few downsides
and its results cannot be totally relied upon. They are good to be used as a
guideline. Some of the drawbacks of Overture are listed below:
Search engines like Google offer some keyword recommendation tools, which
can be used as a guide. However, Google does not indicate the popularity count
of each search phrase.
While selecting your key phrases, make an effort to cover each aspect of
your service or product that could be searched on stand-alone basis by the
users. Each page on your website could be dealing with a different topic
(product or service), therefore; the keywords for each page would be different
too, depending on which you should try and place unique and relevant key
phrases on each page.
For instance, it would not suffice to optimize a dentist’s site only for the
terms ‘dentist’ or ‘dental surgeon’, as people are likely to make specific
searches on related terms like cosmetic surgery, root canal treatment or RCT,
dental crowns, tooth extractions, cavities etc. Hence, it is important that all
these keywords are covered.
The second step is analyzing your keyword phrases. This involves analyzing
the competition for the search terms, i.e. how many pages are indexed in a
search engine like Google. This gives you an idea of how many pages are
competing for the top spot. While most of the time, the optimized sites are
ranking high, very often un- Optimized sites show up highly ranked due to the
complex nature of the search engine algorithms. It is therefore wise to be
conscious of the extent of competition.
The potential for ranking with a particular keyword depends on several
factors. The on-page factors address your optimization efforts while the
off-page factors like PageRank affect ranking in a major way. While it is
beyond the scope of this article to discuss the affect and weight of all the
factors, your site’s PageRank is an important parameter in keyword analysis.
Thumb rule is that the higher your site’s PageRank, the better the chance of
ranking with highly competitive keywords. Choose your keywords keeping your
site’s PageRank in mind. For more information, read our detailed article on Google
PageRank Algorithm .
Adding Information and Measuring Competition for Keywords
After you have made your search on Wordtracker or Overture, and short-
listed your key phrases, you need to collect information about their
competition as described above. Wordtracker offers an in-built tool to find the
number of pages for your keywords indexed in Google. Alternately, you can check
the competition for your keywords at:
http://www.seorank.com/search-engine-keyword-competition.php
Based on our experience with search engines, the table below suggests a
guideline for choosing keyword based on the competition of pages indexed in
search engines. For instance, if your site has a PR value of 7/10 on Google
Toolbar, you can expect to beat four million existing web pages and rank well
for your search term, whereas, with a PR value of 3, you can expect to top upto
five hundred thousand web pages for the same search term.
PageRank (PR) Good for Competition (Number of web pages
on Google)
PR0 Upto 30,000 web pages on Google
PR1 Upto 1,00,000 web pages on Google
PR2 Upto 3,50,000 web pages on Google
PR3 Upto 5,00,000 web pages on Google
PR4 Upto 7,00,000 web pages on Google
PR5 Upto 1,000,000 web pages on Google
PR6 Upto 2,000,000 web pages on Google
PR7 Upto 4,000,000 web pages on Google
While the above table is not a hard rule as we have seen large variation in
several cases. The numbers assure that you would do a fairly good job of your
site optimization.
Note:An alternative to the above table is
to manually check the PageRank of the first few sites appearing in the SERP of
Google for your selected Keyword Phrases. If the first few sites have PR
rankings from PR5- PR6, then it is safe to assume that your site/web pages need
at least this PR value to compete for the Keyword Phrase selection.
In order to make this task more organized, we recommend making use of Excel
Sheets to feed in all the data you have compiled. This will allow you to make
comparisons between various search terms and at the same time, do away with all
the unrelated junk terms that are irrelevant to your site and also the ones
that exceed your site’s PR requirement.
Step 3: Selection
of Keyword Phrases
If you have followed the above process of Discovering and Analyzing
keywords, you probably have between 50-100 keyword phrases that qualify as
“high-yield” given your site’s current PR range. Sorting out which keywords
you’re going to gun for, out of the corpus of keywords you have identified is a
crucial task. Selection of keyword phrases pertains to finding the most
valuable keyword phrases that most accurately describe specific qualities of
your website. Though generic keywords are generally searched more, ranking with
generic key phrases often brings mediocre Return on Traffic.
Focused Key Phrases
As you may have realized by now the focused key phrases not only give your
site a better chance to rank, it gets highly targeted traffic resulting in higher
traffic to sales conversion ratios. Since you have used a process, which
ensures that you are working with popular keywords, ranking with any of the
short listed keywords assures you of incoming traffic. Amongst the 100 odd
keywords you have short-listed, keep your eyes on the ones that have a tight
focus on what your site’s offering within the parameters of ranking
possibilities and competitiveness.
Final Selection of Keyword Phrases For making your
final selection of 15-20 most relevant keywords, we recommend working in the
following method:
Step 4: Deploying
Keyword Phrases
After you have made a final selection of 15-20 of your most relevant and
important keywords, you need to use them on different parts of your website.
It is not advisable to use all your keywords on all the pages. A good way to
use the selected keywords on your site is to divide them into 5-7 groups of
keywords. Each group should have closely related keyword-forming themes.
Identify various sections/ parts of your website that closely match with the
keyword group themes and optimize your pages using these themes.
Keywords can be used in several portions/ codes of your web pages. The
important aspects are listed below:
1. Keywords Per Page
We recommend using your keywords 2-4 times per page. Over-repetition of
keywords on a page might be interpreted as spam by the search engines. Make
sure you don’t put all your keywords on one page.
2. Where to use the Keywords?
Your important keywords can be used in the following:
Title Tag: A Title Tag of about 90 characters, inclusive of your most
important keywords is good enough. For instance, the Title Tag of this article
would be written as “Keyword Research : Techniques for keyword research,
keyword analysis & keyword optimization”. Read our detailed article on Title Tag Optimization
Meta Description Tag: You should write a Meta Description Tag of
about 250 characters with your important keywords. Be careful about over-
repetition. For instance, the Description tag of this article would be written
as: “Keyword research described: Learn all about keyword research, keyword
analysis, keyword optimization and marketing keyword research.” Read our
detailed article on Meta Description Tag Optimization.
Headlines: Keyword rich headlines and sub-headings placed in H1 and
H2 tags, not only give a brief preview of what follows in the body copy, but
also pass the most relevant information on the page or the subsequent
paragraph. For instance, heading of this article reads: Keyword Research for
Search Engine Optimization; followed by a sub-heading: Importance of Keyword
Research for Search Engine Optimization
Body Text: Headlines in H1 and H2 Tags followed by keyword rich body
text can improve your ranking chances.
Alt text / Alt Tag: Important keywords can be used in the text that
appears when you bring your mouse over an image on a web page.
Title Attributes: The title attributes, are short descriptions for
the hyperlinks telling the users about the content of the landing page. Make
use of your important keywords here.
Anchor Text: The words that appear within the hyperlinked portion of
the text are called Anchor Text. Keywords appearing in the Anchor Text have a
high relevance weight in Search Engines. Read our detailed article on Anchor Text Optimization.
File Name: your page’s file name or URL also makes use of the most
important keyword. For example, file name for this article reads:
http://www.seorank.com/keyword-research-article.htm
Table Summary: The table summary in HTML code describes the content
of each HTML table in your code. Though not visible to a user, it is important
for people with disabilities and text to speech applications. It is an
important place to use your keyword phrases.
3. Copy Changes
Given below are a few tips for writing keyword rich copy. For detailed
information, refer to our article on Search Engine Copywriting Keeping your keyword
phrases in mind, you might need to make certain changes in the copy of your web
page. Therefore, instead of just writing (taking the Dentist example) ‘This
procedure involves…’ one should try and include their keywords by writing ‘
Root Canal Treatment involves…’
It is important to include both the singular and plural versions of your
keywords as most search engines return different sets of results for plural and
singular forms of the same word.
Major search engines like Google are not case sensitive. Therefore,
headlines and sub-headings can be written in upper or lower case or a
combination of both, as it makes no difference in your search engine rankings.
Spelling variations of the same word is another thing you should look out
for. Try to include all different forms of the same word that can be spelled
differently or commonly mis-spelt. For instance, you can write, ‘ Abscessed
Tooth, (commonly written as Absessed tooth) is …’, thus smartly covering the
mis-spelling without giving the user a feeling that the site owner does not
know the correct spellings.
4. Avoiding Pitfalls
Don’t get swayed by the Keyword Density formula many SEO experts profess,
it’s just over hyped. Though you may find a number of articles written on the
importance of keyword density, we don’t think it is mission critical. Write
your language naturally while leveraging higher use of the keywords in places
where it can be used, like substituting keywords in places of articles like
‘it’, ‘this’, etc.
The Title or the Description of your web page should not read like a
thesaurus or a collection of keywords, but should be descriptive and enticing
enough to make a user click on it and read further. It is important to note
that our findings on user behavior have proved that sometimes a site ranking
number 5th in Search Engines has drawn more clicks than a poorly titled site
ranking number 1 in SERP. For instance, instead of simply writing ‘wisdom tooth
extraction’, a title that reads ‘painless wisdom tooth extraction’ which is
inclusive of your USP would result in enticing more users to click on your
entry. Place your keywords throughout the page, rather than just at the top,
but be very very careful about over-repetition, as search engines would
consider that as Spamming.
The whole idea behind the Keyword Research exercise is traffic optimization,
not traffic maximization. In a nutshell, a good Keyword Research helps in
bringing qualified traffic to your site that leads to high sales conversions,
by being focused and targeting specific search terms.
Article last updated: 10th February 2004
About the Author: Harjot Kaleka is an SEO Copywriter at SEORank,
a leading Search
Engine Optimization Services Company. She has a Masters degree in
Mass Communications and Copywriting.
© Copyright 2004 Harjot Kaleka, SEORank
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