Picking the Right Keywords for Search Engine Optimization

The search engines want to give visitors what they are looking for – the right information. They have techniques for identification and classifying pages according to the most relevant pages.

The main way the search engines choose the relevancy of your page is the actual words on your page. But you don’t want to be relevant for just any old word. You want to be relevant for the right words.

For many years my site was at the top of Google for “Denver copywriting,” which looked impressive, but there were no people searching on this term and I never had people calling me about this. It wasn’t relevant.

There are tools online that you can use to find the relevant keywords. They can tell you how many people are searching for certain terms, as well as how many other web sites are competing for the phrase. Through the research you can find the keywords that have high traffic and low competition so you can show up high on the search engines and get traffic to your site. Having good key words and phrases is foundational to have good optimization.

The search engines see each page on your site as if it’s an individual web site. So the secret to good search engine optimization is to build a theme to each page that revolves around two or three keyword phrases. I’ve been doing this for seven years on my web site and I now average over 3,500 visits a month from the search engines.

Our company does email marketing and in my research I saw there were a lot of searches on the term “email blast”. Most non-spamming email marketing firms don’t use this phrase because it conjures up the idea of spammers, but the normal public doesn’t necessarily think this. So I focused on this on my email marketing page and ended up #6 on Google for the whole world, and we get a couple leads a month for email marketing.

There are several services that can give you a good idea of what people are searching for and what you should focus on:

Keyword Discovery (Trellian)

This service costs about $80 a month but I think it gives best results. We have been using for it for a couple years now for our many clients. We create projects for individual pages on our clients’ sites so we know which phrases to concentrate on. What I normally do is put in a general phrase and it gives me a whole list of search phrases that includes the general phrase or synonyms. The list I get is the number of searches for the phrases and how many other sites are competing for that phrase. (www.keyworddiscovery.com)

Wordtracker

This is a service that pulls results from several web sites and then does some predictions upon their research to be able to tell you an extrapolated figure on estimated traffic for certain phrase. With this paid service you can subscribe for a week ($30), month ($60) or a year ($299). It’s a great investment to subscribe for a week if you only have one site and can do all your research in a few days. (www.wordtracker.com)

Overture Keyword Suggestion

This service has been around a long and it’s free. It only gives results for Yahoo Search so it’s not totally accurate. But it can give you general comparisons between various phrases. They are decent for comparisons but not super accurate for number of total searches. (inventory.overture.com)

So, get cracking on doing your keyword research. And then start doing some research on the Internet on how to best implement those keywords into your web site. If done correctly, you could be able to start seeing visitors coming to your site. You have to be aware that just because you set up your site correctly and you’ve chosen the best keywords, you still may not show up high on the rankings. There might be too much competition for the phrase you’re going after. But you should try – you might be surprised.

Dave Carlson is the owner of Green Chair Marketing Group, a boutique marketing firm specializing in developing comprehensive marketing plans focusing on Internet strategies to help businesses succeed. He can be reached at 720-922-3124. See his Web site at www.GreenChair.net.

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