Keywords are the words, or terms, that are associated with your business or product or service on the web. They are the words that people would use to search for whatever it is that you are trying to sell or promote online.  First of all, when we say ‘keywords‘, we mean words or groups of words.

Here’ a step by step approach to using Keywords to optimise your site for search engines (SEO). 

1. Identify Keywords

The first task in any online marketing strategy should be to identify your keywords. You  can do this by thinking about what you would put into Google’s search box to try to find what you’re promoting. Make a list of all the words and terms that you think might possibly be used. Make a list of all the products or services that your website promotes and try to think of alternatives ways of saying them. There will probably be other words that people (people not like you) will use to try to find the same thing, so this is just a starting position.

2.  Use tools to generate more keywords

Once you have a list together, use a tool like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to generate more keywords. The tool is free and gives you 2 options:

1) type in your keywords and see the other keywords that it suggests.

2) type in the URL  of your site and it will return a list of keywords based on the content of your site.

The latter is useful when you come to optimise the content of your pages for your chosen keywords.

3. Extract the existing keywords on your site

Try to get an idea of the existing keywords on your site as they may appear to search engines. Google Webmaster Tool offer a facility to see the keywords that it sees. But more useful may be the Term Extractor Tool available on seomoz.org. Again, this tool is free to use.

If one of the keywords returned is ‘homepage‘ then you’ve got some work ahead of you!

4. Choose your keywords

Distill the list of keywords into ones you are going to use and then decide which pages you are going to optimise for each of them. The general rule of thumb is to optimise a page for up to 2 -3 keywords.

5. Optimise your site for your keywords

The next step is to optimise your site for your selected keywords and spread the fairy dust!

Part 2 of this guide (out tomorrow) will show you where, and how, to place your keywords on your site.

Before that though, let’s take a quick look at a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and how the keywords are reflected in the results:

This is a screenshot of a Bing SERP for the search term ‘junior school’ (not the exact term but the 2 words in any order).

You can see that the search term is in bold and the words can be in any order or on their own. For the exact expression ‘junior school’, use ” junior school”.

CBC Junior School is returned in position 1. Note how the term is in the domain name, which means it is also in the title. The words also pop up in the description displayed by the search engine.

No related posts.