Selecting Website Keywords
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David
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February 20th, 2012
Selecting website keywords is an important part of search engine optimization. You'll need to research the keywords related to your website to ensure that people are actually searching for those words.
On the other hand, you'll also use keyword research to ensure that the market isn't too competitive. I feel that one of my strong points is keyword research so I'll cover the topics that I feel are important. I apologize ahead of time if this page is a bit longer than usual but keyword research is an extremely important topic and I can't cut corners on it.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of determining the ideal keywords for your website. This includes making sure that there is enough demand along with making sure that it isn't too competitive.
Keyword research also encompasses the discovery of keywords that you didn't consider or niche markets that may be easier to receive to search engine results on.
The importance of keyword research can't be stressed enough. If you select the wrong keywords, meaning there is little demand for those keywords or if you're going after an extremely competitive market, you could be doing a bunch of work for nothing.
Keyword Research Software
There are many types of services and software out there to assist with your keyword research. I'm going to cover the most popular paid option along with a less effective free option.
The free keyword research tool that I recommend is the Wordtracker Free Keyword Estimator. This will give you some of the basic information that you need to make decisions regarding keywords.
The paid version of Wordtracker is what I truly recommend. It'll give you access to the full set of tools such as differentiating between plural and singular. It will give you access to the KEI tool which is a measurement of exactly how competitive a keyword is.
Researching Your Competition
The very first thing that I do is go a search on Google for my ideal keywords. That is going to tell you who your true competition is at the moment.
What I'll do then is do some in depth research on the competition. I'll view their meta tags by right clicking somewhere on their page and I'll choose 'view source. I do this to see what keywords that your competition feels are important.
This is when I'll jump into Wordtracker and start looking at possible niche markets for my ideal keywords to see if it's worth it to optimize for the niche keywords or not. After doing this for majority of the top 10 sites I generally have a good idea of what I'd like to do.
Targeted Keywords
Targeted keywords is best explained as narrowing down your ideal keywords into more of a targeted search. The best way to explain this is the use of cell phones. Research shows that when people use vague keywords such as 'cell phones' they are looking for information rather than shopping.
When you become more specific with your keywords you're more likely to find customers that are ready to purchase which in turn increases your conversion ratio. Using the cell phone example, if someone were to search for 'nokia cell phones' they have done a bit of research but still aren't set on a phone.
If someone searches for 'nokia e61 cell phone' they are pretty sure about what they want and are more likely to convert into a sale if you're pricing is competitive and your website is user friendly.
Another benefit to this is that it's easier to achieve top rankings when you can target your keywords a bit more because you're competing with less websites than if you were optimizing for very vague keywords.
Keywords In Your Domain Name
Keywords in your domain name give you a relevancy 'bonus' so you should definitely consider doing your keyword research before registering a domain name.
Adding hyphens or numbers to a domain name just so that you can get a domain name with your keywords is ok but it makes it difficult for visitors to return to your site.
Take a look at this example and think about what would be easier to remember if you decided to wait a week or so to revisit a website.
Would it be easier to remember Chrome-Wheel-World.com or ChromeWheelWorld.com? With this in mind it'd also be easier to remember ChromeWheel.com rather than 4ChromeWheels.com.
The thing to consider is that it's difficult to get premium domain names these days so you'll need to consider alternatives while still keeping your keywords in your domain name.
www.SiteToad.com offers a tool called 'smart search' which will give you suggestions if the domain name that you search for is already taken. Try a couple of searches below and see what you come up with.
Keyword Competition
Another method of researching your keyword competition is to do a keyword search in Google and see the number of pages that it comes up with. This is a good indicator of your competition as well.
There's a trick to this though, if you search for 'mustang chrome wheels', without the quotes you'll receive a number based on the number of websites that contain any of those keywords. Even if the site is related to a mustang in the sense of a horse, it'll be counted in the results.
The way to clear this up is by searching with quotation marks such as "mustang chrome wheels". This is telling the search engine that you want to know the number of sites with those exact keywords in that specific order.
This is going to give you the number of websites that are competing for the keywords 'mustang chrome wheels'. The lower the number, the easier it'll be to achieve an ideal search engine ranking.
Practice Makes Perfect
As you perform more keyword research you'll learn how to identify good keywords and which keywords to avoid. With that said, you'll always to do your due diligence as it may uncover a market that you hadn't considered.
You'll also find markets that you're competition hadn't considered which opens up great opportunities to take advantage of those keywords.
Webmaster Forum
I invite you to visit my webmaster forum, it's a great place to discuss websites and ask questions to fellow webmasters regarding topics that you may still have questions on.