SEO Guide on Keyword Research and Selection
A Website Marketing Guide to Keyword Research and Selection
6. Watch the broad search terms.
Companies make a mistake in this area more than any other place. The keyword landscape is more inviting than a one-hour toy store shopping spree for a child. So many one-word search terms. So much time. The excitement forces people to ignore reality.
Who can blame them? Wouldn't it be great to be #1 on Google for "food," "cars," "software" and other products or services? Can you imagine the value of those search engine positions?
Yes, single words can help drive sales. But they're difficult to achieve, as we mentioned earlier in this guide. Link popularity, web site content, site structure and other considerations will impact your website promotion and rankings.
Just because thousands of people search for "transportation" doesn't mean they want what you offer, or even what the Top 10 companies sell. Searchers quickly realize the error of their broad searches and try something else. One business executive insisted that he must rank in the Top 10 for "e-commerce" for his website promotion program. One of our team members asked him, "'E-commerce' and then what?" Such a client should at least consider a more-specific keyword phrase such as "e-commerce consultants."
Tip: Don't spend a lot of money and an inordinate amount of time with single keywords that you've already strived to position, unsuccessfully.
7. Be careful with narrow search terms.
If you want to be found for "modern rubber testing facilities in the United States," please be aware of the probability that very few people will ever enter that specific a phrase. "Rubber testing" or "rubber testing equipment" may be better choices for a website promotion strategy.
Tip: Specificity does help, but still keep the strategic phrase on the shorter side of things-two to three word terms are best.
8. Check Google competing pages.
Each week, we show clients search terms that have an abundance of competing pages on major search engines, such as Google. Yes - we have Top 10 rankings for words up against 2 million, 10 million, and even 40 million pages! But every search term can't be in the Top 10 on Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo! Define your website promotion expectations with diversity, much like a mixed investment portfolio. Sure, you should try to land high positions for a few "money" words. Ranking #3 on Google for a term that has 900,000 competing pages isn't too shabby as long as people are searching for the phrase.
Tip: Google competing pages can be deceiving. It's not that 1.2 million pages mention "culinary degree" (that would be overkill for the subject matter). What "competing pages" actually means is that those two words appear on at least 1.2 million pages, but not necessarily together. They appear on the same page, but perhaps in different paragraphs, etc.
9. Watch the quotation marks.
You may be interested in researching keywords with website promotion services like WordTracker by defining the keywords with quotes. We included some in this report for emphasis. But skip the quotes. That way, you'll get data that more closely resembles the way most people search - without quotes and usually without capitalization (even for words with grammar rules calling for capital letters).
10. Analyze Log files.
Often overlooked and easily underplayed when performing website promotion services, web site log files reveal much about the way people search. You can generate many keyword and search phrase ideas just by examining the data with an intuitive sense.
You can subjectively calculate the success of your website promotion and keyword strategy by discovering the many permutations of your primary search terms. For example, if no one appeared to be searching for "electrical components," but three months later your log files revealed 10 searches for "automotive electrical components," you might be able to say your strategy paid off, especially if you made the effort to include "electrical components" in your page title, META data and visible text (and anchor link) strategy.
Tip: When you first examine your log files, don't assume that you should optimize your web site for the most popular searches. In other words, don't think that if you do website promotion for your site and you optimize the phrase, you may double or triple the traffic generated by the search term.
With some of the keywords, yes, website promotion may make a difference. But your most popular searches tracked by your log data (don't worry about variations of your company name) often aren't the most ideal search terms for your company, services or product lines. They're simply popular because those are the terms your page title (if you actually have keywords in the title "meta" tag) and visible text support with very little help from you. As you perform website promotion for your sites and optimize for appropriate search terms, the popularity roster in your logs will change.
For example, one of our consumer products clients had only 10 reasonable search terms out of the Top 75 most used search phrases when we began their website promotion program (most terms were variations on the corporate name and Web site address). Six months later, 30 of the Top 75 most-used were keywords and phrases that had been approved for website promotion and optimization.
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