Keyword Selection process simplified

You might have the most amazing website, with terrific graphics and excellent text; but beware if you have invested all your time and energy in just designing the website. Because you might have overlooked the crucial part of, optimizing your website!!
SEO or Search Engine Optimization as it is known is crucial for every website/ blog seeking to attract visitors to views its product/content. SEO can be overwhelming to a novice and the broad picture of SEO is quite vast.

However once broken down into smaller components, SEO can be easily tackled. Keyword is one of the most crucial component of the broad SEO picture. So let’s understand what is the concept of Keywords and how can it be implemented for your website/blog.

( image courtsey tricks machine)

What is Keyword?

Keywords are the words that people are using to search for your product or service. These are the words/ phrases that people actually type in Search Engines to find your website/ blog/ your offerings. Your potential customers are using these words to search for your offerings, and hence these words are what defines your ‘business’ online. This makes these words very crucial for every business online; and hence these words are termed as ‘Keywords’ to convey their importance.


How to find Keyword for your website/blog?



Every owner feels that he/she knows what’s best for their own website/blog. However while self-confidence is good; it doesn't harm to get a more detailed insight into consumer psyche, to better understand what your customer wants/ looking for. Keywords are the nuggets your customers are using to find you, while you might have a fair idea of what keywords your customers are using, doing a cross check won’t harm. Review what the data says and conduct thorough keyword research from the start, so you don’t waste cycles focusing on and optimizing for keywords that people aren't actually using to find your business online.

Here are six simple steps to selecting your keywords & making them work for you.

1. Start with ‘You’

If you own a business, the 1st stop in keyword selection is your own ‘Business Details’. List down all details of your business:

• Business name
• Brand name
• Brand specific product name
• Name of each member of your management team

Now go to a Search Engine and check up, where you rank for each of these items. You should have good rank for each of these keywords, and 1st rank for your own brand name at-least. If this is not the case, then attack this list as your first priority. In case of dire situation of your competitor ranking on Page 1 for your brand, you immediate goal will be to flush out the competitor from this page, and gain control over it yourself.

2. Ask your customers

Your customers/ readers know best what words they are using to find your business. Ask the customers to know what really works for them.

3. Check out your competitors

Your competitor is best source of knowledge for you. Check out your competitor’s website, and analyze it for keywords. List down all the keywords competitor has used. Ensure these keywords are already covered in your website. If not get them in order.

4. Expand your Keyword list

Start with the ‘Keyword’ and expand it to make it broader ‘Keyword Phrases’ e.g This expansion will help in ensuring that you do not miss out on some relevant and highly potential ‘Keywords/ phrases’. The expansion works like your address in reverse order. Your address goes in the order of

                 Keep adding details, to your keyword to make it key phrases. Expansion done, it’s time to check out these keywords based on few parameters so as to narrow down the list to make the list more realistic and manageable.

5. Narrow Down Your Keyword List

Unless you have paid software’s which provide more intensive data, here’s what we can do for free. Go to Google Insights for Search. This fabulous tool from Google will help you gain insights into the search’s being conducted across the globe, via Google. This will help you in determining which keywords have best relevancy for you, and might throw up few new keywords you didn't think of.

• Using the various filters offered, you can narrow down your search to particular Geographical Area, Time frame, area of interest etc. Compare your resulting keyword list by relevancy, search volume and current status. The goal is finally to pick up a set of 10 keywords for our initial SEO campaign.
• Be sure to check your website rank for each of the selected ‘keyword’. For some keywords your website might already be ranking high, so you can skip those words and pick up other ‘keywords’ for your website.
• Focus on relevant keyword phrases. Keywords have intense competition. Taking our previous example trying to achieve 1st rank for the ‘Keyword – SEO’ is a uphill task, because keyword being just one word has immense competition. Trying to beat this monumental competition will take lot of efforts and resources. Compare this against the ‘Keyword phrase – Search Engine optimization India’. This keyword phrase will have lesser competition, and is a better bet to start with; for your initial SEO campaign.

For getting more insightful keyword information, you can look up at 'Google Adwords tool' to get a probable set of keywords and their competition and search details. Now finally you have a list of ‘Keywords’ you want to work with.

6. Let’s put the ‘Keyword’ to Work

Keywords are in place, now let’s put these to work; and reap the benefits from them for your website/ blog.

• Pick up each keyword/ Keyword phrase and allocate a page on your website/ post on your blog to it
• Design content on the allocated page around the Keyword. When a Search Engine checks out a page for indexing, there are certain hotspots it definitely visits, and uses as markers to decipher what the page is all about. Be sure to cover all hotspots, i.e Mention your keyword in all the hotspots
• These hotspots are the page title, the page description and the page heading. By incorporating your keyword phrase into these hotspots you are telling the search engine what your page is all about.
• Do not forget the actual page/ post content. Be sure to write great content; and mention your keyword/ keyword phrase a couple of times in the content. Ensure the keywords are Incorporated seamlessly into the content.

                Now these keywords are all set to reap benefit for you and bring copious amount of traffic for your website/blog. Monitor the keywords over time by tracking the trends of ranks and by measuring what kind of traffic you’re getting from them.

Summary:

            Keywords are the basic building block of any SEO campaign. By selecting right keywords and implementing them on your website/blog you can achieve tremendous benefit. So get going and bring your website/blog to the forefront, where it will attract maximum traffic.