SEO Keyword Research & Optimisation

WHAT ARE KEYWORDS?

Keywords are the words or search terms that people type into search engines that can relate to your services or products. For example, if you have a drainage website for the York region then your keywords may be “York Drain Unblocking”, “Drain Services York” and “Blocked Drains York” – as this is what a person trying to find a site relating to this might type into Google. Keyword research is fundamental to any SEO campaign.

A large part of search engine optimisation is making your website optimised for the search engine algorithms to scan your content, titles, META tags, image alts and links to see if the keyword the user has typed into its search query is related to your webpage.

When undertaking an SEO campaign, or even just trying to have some focused SEO on your site, you need to make a list of keywords and then implement them onto your webpage. This is a vital step in SEO, as the 2 most weighted factors by search engines are keyword rich (unique) content and incoming links to a webpage (again keyword targeted in the anchor text).

You see, the keywords relate directly to what the (potential) customer is typing into a search engine, i.e. Google. This makes this step vital for anyone wanting to understand their customers and their competition. The “competition” are sites that are high on a search engine results page for your websites particular keywords.

A great way to begin SEO is to analyse your competition and find what keywords they are utilising. Simply use a freeMETA Tag analyser on the top websites you are competing against. If you are unsure of the competition then enter a keyword you are wanting to optimise for and the first page results are the ones you want to analyse.

STEP 1 – RESEARCH

Research is paramount to keyword optimisation. You need to research 2 things:

1. What would a user type into a search engine to find my site, product or service.
2. How competitive are those keywords and do I stand a chance against the competition?

1. Think about whet you are selling or offering on your website’s particular page (remember keywords are specific to each page). What would you type into Google, Yahoo or Bing to find the thing you are offering. Try and think how a potential customer would search for these and also if they would specify it per location, e.g. “Web Design Leeds” or “Washington Web Design”. Come up with a good list of at least 3 keywords per webpage on your website.

• PAGE SNOOP – This is not illegal (freedom of the internet) and is a well known way of checking out your competition. If you know your competition is doing well or if you just want to see what keywords they are optimising for then use a free keyword density checker and a free META tag analyser on a webpage on your competitors site. The results should show you the page content keyword density and also the meta and title tags keywords.
• Now you should be getting a feel of what people are typing in Google to find your kind of product or service, you should have a feel of you competition and also an idea of the keywords you shall be using on each page.

STEP 2 – IMPLEMENTING THE KEYWORDS

On-Site Keyword Implementation

• First have your URL to include the keyword if possible. This helps with search engine indexing. E.g. if my keyword was “SEO Explained” then I might have “www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained”
• Use the keywords in the header tags on the page. Header 1 should have a keyword in it that represents the content on the webpage as a whole. Header 2 is more of a section header and should still be based around at least one keyword. This way you form a good structural hierarchy on your website.
• Write your pages content naturally, without forcing keywords in all over the place. Make your pages content unique, personalised and interesting to the viewer. Since the content you are writing is to do with the keyword for the page then the keywords should naturally appear whilst writing it. Use a META checker and keyword density checker to check what the search engines will see as the focus of the page!

Title & META tags to be edited (in the “head” section of the code of the webpage).

• Put the keywords in your “META Keyword” tag for each page- this sets the page for these keywords. Search engines don’t use this tag much any more, but it helps when using the free checkers on the page to see how well you have optimised the content.
• Write your “Title” tag (unique for each page) in the to include the keyword with a one line header title of the page. This will appear in the search engine results pages, at the top of your browser (or browser tab) and is used a lot for keyword identification by the search engines.
• Write the “META Description” for each page based on the keywords and the page content. This will be shown in the search engine results pages and will only show 150 characters so don’t go overboard on the text.

Images and internal links

• Your images on your webpages have a tag that can be used with them calles the “alt” tag (alternative). This was designed to be used as a description of what the image is, just in case your web browser throws a wobbly and cannot show images. This tag can be used to put your keywords on the page, but remember this is not an acceptable keyword stuffing technique (there are non) – the tag should still be descriptive and meant for the user. NOTE. Although the “Alt” tag is important, the image “title” tag is not really used by search engines but is still a user bonus (when you hover your mouse over an image the descriptive text that pops up is the image title tag).
• Internal links tell the search engines what the page the link is going to is about. Really the keyword should be what the page is about so the link should have the keyword in it (e.g. “Car Insurance FAQ”, “Car Insurance Quotes”, “Car Insurance Enquiries”.