WHAT ARE KEYWORDS?
Keywords are the words or group or words that will relate to the searches typed into a search engine by users. 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 and then utilise your keywords. This is a vital step in SEO, as the 2 most weighted factors by search engines are incoming links and keyword rich (unique) content.
- 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 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:
- What would a user type into a search engine to find my site, product or service.
- 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 user would 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 5 keywords per webpage on your site.
- 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. NOTE – Type in a keyword into Google – your competition are all the 10 sites listed on the first results page.
- 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 would have “www.spottedpanda.com/seo-explained”
- Use the keywords in the header tags on the page. Header 1 should definitely have a keyword in it. Header 2 is more of a section header and should still be based around at least one keyword.
- Write your pages content around the keywords. Make your pages content unique, personalised and interesting to the viewer. Get the keywords in the content and make the page text about the keywords – search engines love this!
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.
- Write your “Title” tag in the background to include the keyword with a one line header title of the page. This will appear in the search engine results pages and is used a lot for keyword search 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.
