Review Journey and Article

Keyword Research just reached a top rank…

Keyword and Keyword phrases are most important aspect of any Search Engine Optimization initiative. You may have put many efforts on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines yet it become not enough if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. It is just like unable to reach to proper destination after best efforts because of selecting wrong path. You can help visitors to find your site using Keyword Phrase Research process of selecting the most “optimum performance” keyword phrases.

Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the most significant step for Search Engine Optimization is identifying your target audience and keyword phrase researching.

For any marketing strategy success, it is very difficult to know its audience and means to reach them. It is necessary to focus on specific location, region specific or country specific; it could be business, trade, service, product specific, since we are talking specific audience. Focus on region would help to get targeted visitors, not just wasted traffic.

Start doing Keyword Research invariably, means going by the facts. ‘Facts are sacred’ in website optimization as they provide the exact data of what people are actually searching. Targeting the wrong key phrases might get you a good ranking for keywords that have few or no search requests or just get you irrelevant junk traffic.

Therefore the question arise that how to get the facts about a particular search term? There are many online keyword research tools that offer data related to your search term. The keyword search tools help you to get hold on target audience.

Keyword Research Process

Keywords and key phrases are the principal mechanisms by which the search engine will select your site, so it is essential that the correct keywords are used and that they are located to best advantage. Keyword Research process involves the following four important steps as follows:

Discovering Keywords: It is focus on finding more and more possible keywords related to your website and target audience.

Make an effort to cover each aspect of your services while selecting your key phrases. Use different keyword on each pages related to page content. It is important to cover all keywords of page contents. You should place unique and relevant key phrases on each page.

Analyzing Keywords: It involves addition of information of existing competition; i.e. how many pages are indexed in a search engine like Google, Yahoo. This gives you an idea of how many pages are competing for the top position. While most of the time, the optimized sites are ranking high, very often un- Optimized sites show up highly ranked due to the complex nature of the search engine algorithms. It is therefore wise to be conscious of the extent of competition.

Potential of high ranking based on page rank method. The potential for ranking with a particular keyword depends on many factors. The on-page factors address your optimization efforts while the off-page factors like Page Rank affect ranking in a major way. Your site’s Page Rank is an important parameter in keyword analysis. Thumb rule is that the higher your site’s Page Rank, the better the chance of ranking with highly competitive keywords. Choose your keywords keeping your site’s Page Rank in mind.

Selecting Keywords: It involves objective measurement based short listing of keywords keeping the site focus and target audience within the limited scrutinized.

Selection of keyword phrases pertains to finding the most valuable keyword phrases that most accurately describe specific qualities of your website. Though generic keywords are generally searched more, ranking with generic key phrases often brings high return on Traffic.

Focused key phrases not only give your site a better chance to rank, it gets highly targeted traffic resulting in higher traffic to sales conversion ratios. Amongst the 100 odd keywords you have short-listed, keep your eyes on the ones that have a tight focus on what your site’s offering within the parameters of ranking possibilities and competitiveness.

Make final selection of 15-20 most relevant keywords as follows:

Eliminate the keywords, which are difficult to rank with considering Page Ranking vs. Competition. Eliminate very low popularity Keywords where the search traffic for the terms is very low. Out of the balance keywords that qualify for ranking with your site’s current Page Ranking, select the most popular keywords, which have the right focus for your site.

It is important to include both the singular and plural versions of your keywords as most search engines return different sets of results for plural and singular forms of the same word.

Major search engines like Google are not case sensitive. Therefore, headlines and sub-headings can be written in upper or lower case or a combination of both, as it makes no difference in your search engine rankings.

Spelling variations of the same word is another thing you should look out for. Try to include all different forms of the same word that can be spelled differently or commonly misspell. For e.g. mould, mold etc.

Deploying Keywords: It is about making best possible use of your selected keywords in your website content, HTML code and tags.

It is very important to use most relevant and important keyword in different part of website. It is not advisable to use all your keywords on all the pages. A good way to use the selected keywords on your site is to divide them into 5-7 groups of keywords. Each group should have closely related keyword-forming themes. Identify various sections/ parts of your website that closely match with the keyword group themes and optimize your pages using these themes. Keywords can be used in several portions/ codes of your web pages.

Search engines give higher relevance to certain words and phrases within HTML documents so it’s essential that you put your keyword phrases in the correct places. The more confident a search engine is about the subject of your website, the higher your web pages will be in the search rankings.

Some of the best places to put important keyword phrases are:

Page title In headings As links In bold text In the first 25 words on the page In the file name (i.e. the URL) META tags Body Text , Tag Alt text / Alt Tag Title Attributes Anchor Text Table Summary Another important note is that search engines like Google read your website from top left to right bottom so try and ensure your keyword is used in the upper left hand corner and the bottom right hand side of your page.

The whole idea behind the Keyword Research exercise is traffic optimization, not traffic maximization. A good Keyword Research helps in bringing qualified traffic to your site that leads to high sales conversions, by being focused and targeting specific search terms.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by winning top ranking on the major search engines for selected keyword phrases.