Keyword Research Techniques and Methods
Steps to getting started with your keyword research.
If you’ve read anything about Search Engine Optimization, you’ll already be aware of some of the basic steps to take and what to change, but what is frequently overlooked is the most important factor: keywords.
This article will teach you what keywords are, what keyword phrases are, where to find them, what they can do for your website, and how to analyze them.
What Are Keywords?
In layman’s terms, Keywords are words and phrases that people enter into search engines to find similar products or services to yours. I’ll use Google as an example; these keywords and phrases are saved in Google’s database, and they make an assessment of the webpage and what it’s about.
Google highlights specific terms and expressions that paint a picture of what your web page is about, these are ideally your keywords for this page. When someone searches for these terms in Google, your website will appear in the results.
Finally, how well you rank in search results is a direct result of many different factors, but I will not go over many of these in this article, only keyword research.
Why Do I Need Keywords?
You’ve probably heard a lot about keywords and how important they are to the SEO process. To summarize, keywords are the lifeblood of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Without the right keywords, you could change all of the correct elements on your website (title, description, alt tags, meta tags, H1’s, etc.) and have little or no effect on how your website ranks on search engine results pages (SERP’s).
It is critical to change all of the appropriate elements on your website with relevant keywords. This is what SEO is all about: matching the right search terms (keywords) with the right web pages.
You may have read some SEO references or you may simply believe that keywords are overrated and are not as important to SEO as experts claim. You may even believe that you are familiar with all of the words and phrases that people use to find products or services similar to the ones you provide; however, I can assure you that you are not and that you do not need to research keywords.
Many people try to optimize their websites by inventing their keywords based on what they “think” are the right keywords, but 99.99% of the time these efforts fail — how can you know what are the most searched keywords in the World for a specific topic unless you do some research?
By now, you should realize that keywords are every bit as important as they have been made out to be and that poor keyword selection or research will result in an incorrectly search-optimized website, potentially causing it to drop in rankings.
How Do I Choose Keywords?
Choosing the right keywords for your website is a complicated process, but I’ll break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks to avoid confusing you. There is a method to properly research keywords.
We must examine our entire website. What is the website’s overall theme? What are the primary products or services we offer? How many pages are there? The website is then divided into web pages. We optimize an entire website by optimizing each of its web pages.
It is critical that we understand the overall theme of the website but also examine its web page content in greater detail to effectively optimize for it. Make a list of the key terms that describe your website and its products or services.
I like to have two browser windows and a spreadsheet open when I do the following tasks. Some of the websites listed below may require a login, but they are well-known and reputable.
We should now identify the website for which we will be optimizing keywords and write down the main terms that are relevant to this website. If you are just starting out, I recommend that you do some of your interior web pages before you do your front page, as this will help you get used to the process of optimizing. So start with one of your main product pages.
What To Do
Open the “overture inventory” website in your browser window.
Enter your product or service using your written notes and click the submit button.
Copy these results to a spreadsheet program and label them Overture.
Next Step:
Open “WordTracker” in your browser window and log in to the system with either the free trial account or a regular account.
Now, using the WordTracker wizard tool, enter the same product or service that you did in the previous step.
Copy the WordTracker results to the spreadsheet and label them as WordTracker.
Next Step:
Launch “Google Adwords” in your browser.
Log in and go to tools->keyword tool, then type in the same product/service that we entered in the previous two steps. Make sure the “Use Synonyms” checkbox is checked.
After that, copy all of the resulting words to the keywords you’ve chosen and click the “estimate search traffic” button.
Copy all of the results into the spreadsheet now.
Next Step:
Now, look at the spreadsheet you created and you should see three columns of data: Overture, WordTracker, and Adwords. In this step, we want to get rid of any items that are completely unrelated or irrelevant, so delete them.
Next Step:
Sort the three lists in descending order by the search volume. On each of the three lists, we will bold the most searched for and relevant phrases from the top down.
Copy the bold items from each list to a fourth space in the spreadsheet; these will form our more comprehensive list of top phrases and keywords.
We now have a comprehensive list of keywords and phrases to use on our web page. All of the preceding steps should be repeated to identify and record relevant keywords.
Conclusion
Using the keywords you’ve identified, you can now start incorporating them into your web pages and website as a whole. There are numerous articles available that explain how and what elements to optimize on your pages.
Try searching Google for “Introduction to SEO Strategies and Techniques” and implementing the most fundamental on-page SEO techniques. Hope this helps.
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