Picking the right keywords

Thu, Nov 5, 2009

Conversion Optimization, Traffic

   Written by: Eric Gerds

Picking the right keywords
In last week’s article I went over the basic concepts behind keywords. Now, how does one go about picking good keywords?
No website should rely on a single keyword; there is normally a group of keywords which attract people to any website. Think about it being like the different ways to find a book in a library or on Amazon. There’s the title, the author’s name, the publisher, date of publication, the subject, etc…  If you rely on only one of these, only the people who use that keyword will find your site. However, if you give them the other options, more people will find your site.
Unlike listing a book, companies have to discover what keywords work for their website, since very few people look for websites based on what company hosts the HTML code (the publisher) or the date the site went ‘live’ (publication date).
The most obvious keywords are your company name and the names of your products and services. If the person sitting at the computer is going to try to find you and not just someone with your specialty, they will either type in the business name or the name of one of the products.
But what about the people who do not know about your company or your products yet?  Trying to figure out what words these people are typing in gets trickier, and this is where a little bit more knowledge and research comes in.
Approaching this challenge from several different angles can help.
You can start with website statistics. Google Analytics and other software track what words people have used to find your website in the past. The longer you’ve been capturing your website statistics, the more keywords you will find listed.
Beyond analytics you’ll also want to take the human approach: talk to people – customers, prospects, your sales and customer support teams. Ask them what words they think of when they think of your company or products. This method often captures words that insiders don’t normally associate with their company or products.
The third place to check is your competitors’ websites. It always a good to see what other people have on their websites and after checking out a few one can often see some of the same words repeated again and again. You can also check what keywords your competitors are using by looking at the web page source. You’ll find keywords in page titles, descriptions and the keyword list.
By using these three methods as starting points it is possible to build up a good list of words to start thinking about. Why think about these words?  Why not use them all? That has to do with the fact that not all of them might be useful to building up website success.
You’ll need to research your list more to determine which words are gold and which are fool’s gold. What I mean by “fool’s gold” is that some words are totally useless. They may be too popular and common. Or they may be words that few people actually search for.
Even if all your words are really gold, it’s possible to simply have too many words. A website of limited size can only be optimizer for a limited number of keywords.
You can discover your best keywords by using software like Word Tracker or even Google’s free Keyword Tool to see the history of the words on your list. These are just two of the easiest tools to help you weed out the less than optimum keywords
Next week: Why not just throw every keyword possible on your page?
Technorati Tags: keywords, seo, website, traffic

This article was first published February 17, 2009 on the Tatum Marketing blog

In last week’s article I went over the basic concepts behind keywords. Now, how does one go about picking good keywords?

No website should rely on a single keyword; there is normally a group of keywords which attract people to any website. Think about it being like the different ways to find a book in a library or on Amazon. There’s the title, the author’s name, the publisher, date of publication, the subject, etc…  If you rely on only one of these, only the people who use that keyword will find your site. However, if you give them the other options, more people will find your site.

Unlike listing a book, companies have to discover what keywords work for their website, since very few people look for websites based on what company hosts the HTML code (the publisher) or the date the site went ‘live’ (publication date).

The most obvious keywords are your company name and the names of your products and services. If the person sitting at the computer is going to try to find you and not just someone with your specialty, they will either type in the business name or the name of one of the products.

But what about the people who do not know about your company or your products yet?  Trying to figure out what words these people are typing in gets trickier, and this is where a little bit more knowledge and research comes in.

Approaching this challenge from several different angles can help.

You can start with website statistics. Google Analytics and other software track what words people have used to find your website in the past. The longer you’ve been capturing your website statistics, the more keywords you will find listed.

Beyond analytics you’ll also want to take the human approach: talk to people – customers, prospects, your sales and customer support teams. Ask them what words they think of when they think of your company or products. This method often captures words that insiders don’t normally associate with their company or products.

The third place to check is your competitors’ websites. It always a good to see what other people have on their websites and after checking out a few one can often see some of the same words repeated again and again. You can also check what keywords your competitors are using by looking at the web page source. You’ll find keywords in page titles, descriptions and the keyword list.

By using these three methods as starting points it is possible to build up a good list of words to start thinking about. Why think about these words?  Why not use them all? That has to do with the fact that not all of them might be useful to building up website success.

You’ll need to research your list more to determine which words are gold and which are fool’s gold. What I mean by “fool’s gold” is that some words are totally useless. They may be too popular and common. Or they may be words that few people actually search for.

Even if all your words are really gold, it’s possible to simply have too many words. A website of limited size can only be optimizer for a limited number of keywords.

You can discover your best keywords by using software like Word Tracker or even Google’s free Keyword Tool to see the history of the words on your list. These are just two of the easiest tools to help you weed out the less than optimum keywords

Next week: Why not just throw every keyword possible on your page?

, , ,
Subscribe via email

Comments are closed.